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 …
Few bands always deliver. To say Napalm Death is among those few bands would be a colossal understatement. To put it bluntly, listening to Napalm Death is pretty much mandatory. The more albums a mandatory …
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. If you’re a …
Hmmmm… What have we here? An album cover that looks straight out of 1983, like a still shot from some Chicago-based cop show I forgot about… If not for the metal-fonted logo, this could be …
Like a number of folks out there, I was first drawn into the world of Rhode Island’s Pilgrim through 2011’s Forsaken Man demo. (Which, incidentally, is still available for Bandcamp downloadage for zero dollars and …
In retrospect, two installments of a column about great metal riffs without featuring a Black Sabbath tune is probably two too many. My bad. Today, I make it right. In this lesson we go back …
In our first session of Pit Therapy, we discussed why Agnostic Front is both the greatest and most important hardcore band that has ever lived. In a sense, they’re a stone bookend that is holding …
originally written by Chris McDonald The last year has surely been an interesting one for Pete Sandoval, to put it mildly. Sitting idly back while Morbid Angel sent shockwaves through the metal community with a …
In my mind, I know that metal needs new ideas to remain a vital genre. I know that many things that seem odd, out of place or downright stupid to me now, will, in time, …
