Heck Records couldn’t let the Prince of Darkness ride off to conquer Hell without an appreciation post. After Lars Ulrich, Ozzy Osbourne is the most important person in this history of metal. I’m kidding. Ozzy is number two, but only next to his Black Sabbath bandmate Tony Iommi. Iommi was the first person to build […]
My buddy Bob Cosmo recently asked me for a list of my favorite albums from last year. He’s a DJ for KGNU and does a good job keeping up on the new-new. I’m less good at that. Partially, it’s because I am an old, in that I don’t subscribe to a streaming service, and, thus, […]
Last week’s careening trip through country music and its various hybrids drew me back to Califone, a sort of ambient roots rock band that has as much experimental noise in their DNA as country. Califone, the brainchild of Tim Rutili, plays, let’s say, corroded folk music. Their albums are full of studio enhancements that make […]
The Mekons were not a country band before they released Fear and Whiskey in 1985. Hell, they were barely a band at all, having gone on hiatus after an initial run of albums at the end of the 1970s. In those early days, when they sprang from the same University of Leeds scene that gave […]
I had so much fun re-listening to the first third of Led Zeppelin’s discography for last week’s column that this week I wanted to finish it up. Here’s a pointlessly numbered list of random thoughts about the great Led Zeppelin: 1.) John Paul Jones is the best swingman in rock & roll. His keyboard and […]
Led Zeppelin are the Steven Spielberg of hard rock and heavy metal, and this, their debut album, is their Jaws. Just as spectacle-driven blockbusters existed before Spielberg, horny white boys made suped-up blues before Zep but never on such a large scale and never to such immense popularity. Consider the Led Zeppelins before Led Zeppelin: […]
The Heck Records column often celebrates loud, distorted guitars. We can’t get enough of Marshall crunch, goopy fuzz, wailing unison bends, hissing feedback, and the total annihilation of a soundwave. But it’s nice to be reminded that before Hendrix and company turned the instrument purely into a conduit for electricity, the electric guitar was simply […]
“Don’t judge a book by its cover.” What if the cover is this? DO NOT CLICK ON THIS LINK. IT’S GROSS AND DISTURBING. Unless you’re a sicko who explicitly ignored my advice to NOT CLICK ON THIS LINK, I’ll do my best to draw you a picture…. Imagine a human jaw that is opened so […]
Like 90% of compelling songwriting is creating tension and then releasing it. A chorus explodes after coming out of a bridge. A DJ annihilates a dance floor with a massive drop. A jazz ensemble instantly lock together for a song’s head after a trading solos. You can think about a song like a rubber band. […]
For the first time since AC/DC released Power Up in 2020, a metal band has reached the top of the Billboard 200 – two actually. Ghost’s Skeletá topped the chart back in March, and Sleep Token’s Even In Arcadia did so earlier this week. Fans of metal, rock, and guitar music hope it’s a return […]