Generally Impressed With Riffs
[Cover art by Quinn Henderson] You’re familiar with the term, “unc,” right? If not, it generally refers to a washed up older feller whose personality in large part revolves around extravagantly performing confusion and/or displeasure at the mere notion of …
[Artwork by Caroline Harrison] “Nonsense” opens with a slow fade-in of distorted guitars and seismic drums — the chaos before the swarm. It’s a trick of the trade, the extreme metal equivalent of a camera operator calling out “speed” before …
[Cover artwork by Luca “Zeero” Zironi] There was always something uniquely charming about Konquest’s brand of traditional heavy metal—an almost whimsical breeziness that still felt like a near perfect balance of playful and substantive. A long-lost Italian cousin to Sweden’s …
[Cover art by Beyond Art] There are bad musical moods, and then there’s Mylingar. Over the course of the last decade this group of anonymous Swedes has concocted the type of ill-meaning black/death that makes Diocletian seem like a Care …
In the careers of most great bands, there comes an album where all of the cylinders fall into place. For LA’s prog-adelic doomsters Ancestors, it seems to have taken about six years. Their initial works …
Macht. Schnelligkeit. Simplizität. It’s easy to make the parallel between composers and engineers when Germany is involved. For years, mechanics all over the world tried and tried to discover Ferdinand Porsche’s great secrets of automobile …
Philadelphia hardcore act Cop Problem debuts with this eponymous EP, three songs of d-beat-inf(l)ected hardcore dashed with crust and hints of grind. Formed in 2010 around the duo of guitarist Randon Martin and drummer Joshua …
Listening to Six Feet Under, particularly during a year in which Cannibal Corpse has also released a new album, is a bit like making a political statement: It comes down to an intensely personal calculus, …
Originally written by Matt Longo I appreciate the good intentions behind supergroups, but they have such a stigma of “cash-in” or “side project” inevitably tethered along. In my formative years as a music lover, earliest …
The term “breakdown” has been used in music for decades. What constitutes a breakdown varies from genre to genre, but for most popular forms of music, it refers to a section of a song wherein …
In this bimonthly column, staff writer Doug Moore takes a very close look at extreme metal lyrics. Some will be serious, some will be silly, but they’ll all go under the microscope. Carcass is a …
Royal Thunder’s self-titled EP, released late in 2010, was an unassumingly excellent first statement from a young band bristling with potential. The Atlanta, Georgia band’s earnest, soulful take on Southern-inflected rock with a rippling undercurrent …
