It’s so interesting how we can find beauty in metallic ugliness. Metal is a genre that prides itself on being dirty and underground. Some people believe the point is to be inaccessible. We have to keep out those normies, after all. We can’t have them coming in here and trying…
Music is meant to move you. Its intended purpose is to make you feel and experience the sensation of emotion. Some music achieves this by providing matching music to a cathartic scene. Other music gets you there via the sheer sound created by a series of notes carefully chosen to…
Few subgenres in metal have as many abilities to express music like doom. How many different combinations of “doom ___” can you think of? How many different variations on the sound have there been? I can think of quite a few, and I know for a fact that the sound can be quite expansive. It takes creative musicians to do it, but doom seems to have that in spades. Chalk up another entry with Burning Vow and their self-titled debut.
A dark and foreboding greeting to you, heaviest of Heavy Bloggers! Yes, I’m afraid it’s that time again. The death of the year 2018 demands a review, and we would be quite foolish not to oblige. It’s been another very solid year for doom metal. Personal favorites and genre darlings alike have returned with huge releases, up and comers have made themselves known, and a certain giant of the scene made a comeback after a far too long hiatus. What’s not to like about DOOM 2018?
Doom? Check. Death? I’m in. Stoner doom? Hell yes, gimme that. Psychedelic stoner death doom? Wait, wha? Such is the nature of metal bands sometimes. So frequently, we want bands to fit into boxes and check off things on our lists. Sure, it helps us writers explain to others what…
Greetings, heaviest of Heavy Bloggers! It’s that time of the month once again where we delve into the deepest of fuzzy riffs and slowest of bangers. I have to admit, I both love and hate this time of year when it comes to music. Everyone rushes to get their records…
As I mentioned a few days ago, one of the best things to come from the traditional metal revival, at least for me, is the resurgence of what’s often called “proto-doom”, that kind of slow, thick heavy metal that ruled supreme in the days before the doom genre fully crystallized.…
It’s that time of year. Yes, ‘tis the season for pumpkin spiced everything’s, knitted scarves and socks from your grandmother, and gorging on avian flesh in the name of antiquated traditions. To be perfectly honest, I’m not above the bullshit holiday thing. I just like spending time with my loved…
So it goes with doom and doom-adjacent artists, the suffocating wear-you-down nature leads to a common endgame. The physicality of gargantuan riffs and laborious rhythms take a toll, eroding one’s sunshiny disposition to a hopeless and dread-bogged torpor. Despite (or because of) this, we love it. We live to feel…
If High on Fire’s newest—Electric Messiah—was, in fact, inspired by a dream Matt Pike had about Lemmy, then opener “Spewn from the Earth” is a statement of purpose. Pike has always reminded me of Lemmy as a vocalist and High on Fire always incorporated a bit more thrash than some…
