Generally Impressed With Riffs
[Album artwork by THEE Travis Smith] If you manage to get old(er)—and I sincerely hope you do—and you also happen to be music-obsessed and surrounded by like-minded chums, you will likely notice that at some point a number of people …
[Artwork by Petri Ala-Maunus] There’s nothing quite like that sense that you get as a listener that you’ve fully connected with an artist through their music. There’s about a million ways it can happen, from simple appreciation of the music …
[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 …
Originally written by Chris Redar Ah, Drug Honkey– two of my least favorite things, combining to play my least favorite musical style. Stoner sludge and bad names seem to go together like the volume on …
Many moons ago, a friend of mine convinced me to give a strange blend of juice from an eclectic little grocery store in a weird little neighborhood near my work a month-long try for supposed …
Dutch act Distillator comes about as close to a thrash jack-of-all-trades as one could imagine. From the Bay Area to New York, Germany and Norway and back, just about every thrash region/scene can be heard …
The first part of this two-piece primer covered King’s X’s golden era, the ten years between their debut and the loss of their major label deal. Of the six records they released during that decade, …
Generally speaking, artists are the sum of their influences. Narrow the scope of the influences and you narrow the scope of the art, and the artist will have a harder time separating his or her …
In a scene as overcrowded as black metal, it’s tough to nail down exactly what gives a band the It Factor. This is particularly true when at least 85 percent of the bands sound 85 …
God Dethroned is a Dutch death metal band with a career that spans over a quarter century, and a catalog of 10 studio albums, including its latest, The World Ablaze, and aside from the last, …
Look, I get it: there are a lot of death metal bands out there. You get up in the morning, there’s a death metal band already on the toilet. No room on the 7:15am train …
