Generally Impressed With Riffs
[Cover art by Christian Ward] No one has ever accused Dreadnought of being doggedly orthodox in any respect. Their music is a product of the watercolored mishmash of monoculture in which it was and is created, a world of intrusive …
[Album artwork by Maciej Kamuda] I’ve always been fascinated by Japanese culture, but more importantly, I admire its people. That fascination has persisted throughout my life, stemming from childhood when I was just captivated by the beauty and courage of …
It’s been a minute since I’ve committed any significant amount of time to listening to doom. Any doom, really. From anywhere. Of any type. And not because there hasn’t been great doom the past few years. Rather, my attention has …
[Cover Art by Daniel Karlsson] Februus is a one-man project driven by the prodigious and still developing talents of Sweden’s Andreas Karlsson. His latest, Construction of Conflict, delivers 40 minutes of guitar-centric death metal that, despite being packed to the …
It’s not a secret that the role of a record label has changed drastically in the age of the internet. Nowhere is this more true than in the underground, where endeavors are driven by genuine …
Even the cryptic album title Kings Under the Sand can’t throw the listener off the scent of this one. These German jerks are talking about dead pharaohs. I mean, those are the kings buried under …
Sympathetic Resonance is now rightly viewed as a classic of progressive heavy metal. It delivered the promise of the Twist of Fate EP and completed the comeback of one of prog’s most important duos: Fates …
“Album Of The Day” is a Last Rites Facebook feature we started whose purpose is quite straight-forward: highlight one album per day and say a few words about it. Understanding that not everyone chooses to …
The rock ‘n’ roll business is an unforgiving beast. I don’t know the specific statistics, but it’s obvious that the vast majority of bands see very little success. Among those who do, the shelf-life of …
[Artwork: “Death Crowning Innocence” — George Frederic Watts, 1886] Books are wonderful. Actual books that have weight and paper pages with ink that reveal truths and theories to be studied and assimilated, or that build …
Because I’m clearly a paragon of awesomeness, I keep a Page-A-Day calendar on my desk. Tragically, this year, my go-to choices of 365 consecutive Grumpy Cat memes or a year’s supply of terrible Dad Jokes …
Doom (the genre not the game or the [amazing] punk band) is having something of a resurgence in 2019. Perhaps “resurgence” is the wrong word. Doom, of the clean vocal variety, has existed since before …
