At Heavy Blog we have such a wide range of tastes and preferences among our staff. A cursory glance over any one week of content can tell you that. It’s not very often a lineup ever contains a full line-up of Blog favourites (mainly mine but shh). Until now. This…
February! What a month; it’s short, so everything seems stronger, more concentrated and condensed. It’s also historically a weird month for releases. January is over and done with so that “shine” of fresh and new wears off somewhat but the year hasn’t started really swinging like it will in late-March/April.…
The passion that drives progressive metal, especially extreme progressive metal, has to be a multicolored and multilayered thing. Otherwise, progressive metal just falls into the trap of “more variation = more good” and that’s easily disprovable; just because you’ve approach a single theme from several different directions that doesn’t necessarily mean that your album will be interesting. Instead, great progressive metal bands focus on getting across several different atmospheres and vibes on one album, changing both the destination and delivery point to create interest. Consider Opeth’s blend of anger and sadness on My Arms, Your Hearse or Howling Sycamore’s excellent and recent foray into both hallucination and internal power. These kind of varied intonations is what Dead Empires went for with Designed to Disappear and they mostly pull it off.
We post a lot of great concert photos here on Heavy Blog from our vastly talented contributors, but it’s rare that we post live concert footage, let alone from one of our own. Consider that changed. We sent videographer Nicolas Cusworth to The End Records’s Brooklyn DIY space The Omega…