Soul Curator – Albums To Write To

Heavy Blog
Listen To This!
Look on Spotify, and you’ll see a billion and a half playlists dedicated for study help and productivity and the like. (Approximately one billion and a half; no more, no less.) And that’s great and all that some people have found music that works for them, but I’ve never been able to focus with classical music or smooth jazz or any of that “calming” stuff. It’s about balance for me, between something too distracting and too calm. I, like many other modern humans, can get diverted to other things pretty easily. But to make something boring to distract one track of your mind while leaving another one to work doesn’t really pan out well. I need something that figuratively tackles that other part of my mind that wants to go and look on Facebook and pins it there. The following list contains a few albums that I like to listen to for this very purpose. And trust me, these have worked; I’ve written an innumerable amount literary analysis just to these albums alone.

Kvlt Kolvmn – September 2018

Heavy Blog
Kvlt Kolvmn, Lists!
September was a damn good month for all things frostbitten and evil. Showcasing the genre’s insane breadth of style and influence more than in any month in recent memory, black metal showed up in a big way as the multi-faceted beast we’ve always known it was. The releases featured here are in majority some of our favorite of the year, and we hope you will share that sentiment. So feast your eyes and ears on the ridiculous bounty that was the month in black metal.

Death’s Door 2017 // Death Metal’s Year in Review

Scott Murphy
Death's Door
Welcome to the final installment of Death’s Door in the Year of Our Nefarious Overlord 2017! Wipe your feet on the mat, remove that stupid holiday-induced smile from your face, and prepare yourself for ultimate year-end audio brutalization. Because, quite frankly, 2017 was one of the best years for death metal in decades. A bold statement indeed, and thankfully one with plenty of data in the form of amazing records to back it up. The overwhelming number of releases in this dirtiest of metal subgenres, coupled with the breadth of quality releases in each of the branches of the death metal tree, all accumulate to create one of the most impressive lists of death metal albums in a given year since the early 1990s. 2017 presented us with exceptional records at such an alarming clip that it was often a full-time task to keep track of them. Death metal this year was in equal measure mind-numbingly technical, socially forward-thinking, compositionally adventurous, and reverent of the past, generating albums that displayed with full clarity all that makes this music the metal behemoth that it is. What a time to be alive. In our final segment of Death’s Door for the year, we will be highlighting the trends and movements within death metal that we found to be the most significant, as well as our own personal top 15 death metal records on the year. Prepare yourself. Madness awaits.

Jazz Club Quarterly // January-March 2017

Heavy Blog
The Jazz Club
Welcome back to Jazz Club! It's been a while since the three of us (Jimmy, Nick and Scott) sat down to dissect the one of our favorite genres, which was most recently a conversation about BADBADNOTGOOD's excellent 2016 album IV. In that discussion, we tossed around the idea of pooling together a list of some of our favorite new jazz releases, something we're excited to finally begin today with our first installment of Jazz Quarterly. This is also offering us an opportunity and excuse to get ourselves back in the habit of listening to new jazz regularly, which, if you're anything like at least a couple of us (namely Nick) has been something we've been meaning to get back into for far too long. There are a few places now that offer some great monthly curated lists like Bandcamp, Stereogum, and more, and you'll likely notice that a bunch of these selections are pulled from there because they provide a valuable resource for even supposed "curators" such as ourselves. As each of us prefers different flavors of the genre, you'll find an eclectic list of recommendations below, ranging from more traditional offerings to experimental blends of jazz with Indian classical music, doom metal sensibilities, electronic music, progressive rock and much more. We'd be genuinely shocked if you can't find at least one release worth your time from this list, so without wasting any more time, feel free to dive in to the best the genre's had to offer so far this year.

Festival Primer 2017

Heavy Blog
News
How to navigate the sheer number of festivals now available for the metal fan? With the aim of helping you sort through this vast variety, we've compiled the following primer. It's by no means extensive; it's simply impossible to write about all of the festivals we would have liked to mention. We focused on those we'll be attending and on those who have the most attractive setlists in our eyes. That being said, do feel free to share more great festivals with us in the comments and please enjoy this, our selection of festivals for 2017.