Generally Impressed With Riffs
[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 …
[Cover artwork by Subhuman at Desert Dungeon] Let’s talk about our love for quirky metal. Okay, sure, any definable level of ‘quirk’ is obviously subjective, but I’m guessing you know we’re not talking about the guy who loves The Black …
The article was originally written by Rae Amitay. There’s hardly a music journalist around that hasn’t heard of Joel McIver. He’s published twenty books, written for a variety of magazines, and has documented the careers …
[Welcome to the ninth–and final–entry in our 90s Essentials interview series. As can be likely gleaned from the logo perched above this text, Fenriz of Darkthrone is the subject of this final interrogation, and he …
KK’s take: If I wanted to be a dick, I could have simply given The Hunter a pass-fail grade on each song, based it on lasting enjoyability, calculated the mean, and given Mastodon somewhere around …
originally written by Chris McDonald Bands like Fen and Agalloch have won over a lot of people with their focus on emotional sensitivity over brutality and their strong integration of non-metallic components as opposed to …
originally written by Chris McDonald With over four years passing since the release of a new Mithras recording, any new material is a good thing, even if its only in the form of a stop-gap …
Originally written by Erik Thomas So here is the fifth album from The Locust / Cattle Decapitation drummer Dave Astor’s brutal death metal project, and he’s got yet another line up. This time vocalist Jon Huber …
This is almost the end, my friends. Almost the end. We’ve come through eight installments of Last Rites’ 100 Most Essential Albums Of The Nineties, through eighty records, and here we are with ten more: A …
Jordan Campbell’s take: As we reach the final entry in the Devin Townsend Project series, it’s become clear that Devin’s entire work can be broken down into (roughly) four categories: unhinged metal, song-based heavy-pop, sprawling …
