Last week we covered Radiohead, a group who somehow incorporated dozens of influences into a single band. Today, we’re looking at a group who distilled the essence of a single influence, Black Sabbath, into a hyper-concentrate for their own band, Electric Wizard. Electric Wizard is for people who think Sabbath’s riffs are too fast and […]
This week I re-listened to Radiohead’s first album Pablo Honey, made when singer Thom Yorke and company were 20-year-old babies, and I was surprised how it leapt from the speakers. It’s not an underrated classic, but it’s certainly not the dismissible dreck the band seem to believe it to be. It’s a middle-tier Britpop album. […]
Last weekend, Nic and I went on a band field trip to watch some metal. A loaded bill at the Mission Ballroom saw Converge, Sanguisugabogg, Khemmis, and Suicide Cages opening for The Dillinger Escape Plan, who were reuniting with their original singer, Dimitri Minakakis. “You guys having fun?” Minakakis asked the audience. “Fuck your fun.” […]
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 […]