Generally Impressed With Riffs
[Cover art by Mister Curse] Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface. Stack Overflow in…Corpse Pile Interface? “What’s in a name? That which we call a corpse pile, by any other word would smell as putrid” – billy shakes Forgive my …
[Cover art by Jef Whitehead] Cognizance’s In Light, No Shape serves as a useful reminder that when it comes to our musical preferences, our whats are subservient to our whys. If, for example, you are a fan of the early …
[Cover artwork by Michael Cloutier] Prog, of course, is known for technical musicianship and songwriting complexity above all else, a reputation well-earned by the early giants of the genre and happily maintained by their progeny ever since. It’s also true …
[Cover artwork by Timbul Cahyono] In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I’ve always found the concept of the split to be flawed. It works best when there’s a shared theme or the band’s involved cover each …
If I were the type of person who worried about “guilty pleasures” (I am not) or whether some thing I enjoy will set me up for ridicule (I am not), I might have to admit …
As the story goes, former Mercyful Fate guitarists Michael Denner and Hank Shermann got together a few times in the past couple years to record YouTube videos celebrating the thirtieth anniversaries of Mercyful Fate’s first …
I’m about six months behind on writing this one, and at one point, I figured I’d just end up consigning Rising Terror to some kind of “great albums we missed” write-up yet to come, but …
When I was a kid in the late 80s, when heavy metal was still scary to me and to most of the world, I wore out a cassette of Stryper’s Soldiers Under Command. That album …
Interrogate yourself: love and hate are easy, but tepid enjoyment or moderate disappointment? Your book club doesn’t give a shit about that kind of weak sauce. Point being, it’s a hell of a lot simpler …
Nostalgia is big business. In the time it takes you to read this, probably a dozen bands have formed out of nothing other than the desperate urge to make something new. Their songs – and …
Casket Dream Veneration is the fourth full length from one-man Portuguese black metal act Onirik, and if the quality here is any indication of the past, one would hope that sole member Gonius Rex does …
You might think that there’s already an above-ample supply of bands paying proper homage to the noble age of less-thrashy death metal that crept to the surface in the late 80s, but the truth of …
