I’m wondering if the purview of these Metal Mondays blurbs have changed. Initially, I think I wanted to share beloved classic albums and make the argument for new classics, but considering how much we’ve focussed on grindcore and metalcore and Nespite (?!), I’m wondering if maybe it isn’t more of a survey of the wonderfully […]
“How the fuck do you learn this shit?” That’s me, trying to wrap my head around John Zorn’s 1990 masterpiece of jazz, no wave, film soundtrack, and grindcore, Naked City. One moment the six-piece is ripping through the “Batman Theme”, the next they’re bebopping through the French Quarter, the next they’re screeching through a blast […]
Demilich’s guitarist/vocalist Antti Boman has a bizarre throat. I don’t mean that he makes weird sounds with it (which he does), I mean that it is physically different than your throat or mine. His singing sounds like a close-mic’d gastrointestinal tract trying to digest an entire Meat Lovers pizza. Boman gurgles, groans, and bellows in […]
Last week we talked about how in the 1980s hardcore punk and metal were kissing cousins and should probably just fuck already. Peanut butter and chocolate, baby! Today we’re talking about more misshapen genre collisions. In the 1970s, the hard rock band Carmen smashed together prog and flamenco. It sounds every bit as weird as […]
Although the metal world has somewhat opened up to newcomers and outsiders over the last decade, for most of its existence, the subculture was gate-kept by self-appointed arbiters of “real metal” and “true fans.” These Comic Book Guys in jean jackets wanted to keep their fandom pure, which usually meant they only wanted to surround […]
One hour. One song. This album had to happen someday and it was probably going to be made by a band whose members regularly smoked a metric shit ton of weed. Sleep’s Dopesmoker probably isn’t the most famous stoner/doom metal album. (That’s probably Electric Wizard’s Dopethrone.) And they didn’t originate the genre. (That would probably […]
Welcome to Metal Mondays, Wagner. This one’s for you because it has a million notes played really fast. According to The Onion, we should just give up on this art thing all together because Megadeth already created Rust in Peace. https://www.theonion.com/humanity-still-producing-new-art-as-though-megadeth-s-1819578062 I won’t go that far, but I do feel that Rust In […]
If you’re into extreme music or movies or artwork, eventually you will ask: how far does it go? Where’s the edge? At what point will the work I’m consuming make me want to barf? You may freeze frame the camera going into Drew Barrymore’s intestines in Scream, you may seek out Martyrs and Faces of […]
Hardcore punk and metal have been kissing cousins since the 1980s, although their provincial fan bases hate each other. Luckily musicians themselves aren’t so close-minded, which is how we’ve got the whole genre of extreme music, which includes the most straight up fusion of the two, metalcore. I think drummers are tuned to love metalcore. […]
Black Sabbath’s self-titled is for doomers. Paranoid is for boomers. Master of Reality is for stoners. Vol. 4 is for all of the above. It’s also a classic Sabbath album that hasn’t been assed out by classic rock radio playing it for fifty years. “Wheels of Confusion/The Straightener” is the type of multipart eight-minute blues […]