Almost a year to the day I reviewed Zapruder’s eponymous LP where I gushed about how much I thoroughly enjoyed all of it’s sun-soaked, whisky stained goodness. It was almost written in the stars that today the band would be sharing the brand new video for “Leaving Montreal” with us…
I’m not usually a fan of live videos. It’s not that they bother me, it’s just that there’s often very little added value and so, I end up listening to the studio version of most tracks I love. This is not the case with Mountain Dust’s “Stop Screaming”, off of…
The debut album of The Damned Things, Ironiclast, came seemingly out of left-field in December of 2010. A hard-rock album with a hefty blues influence that included instrumental backing from members of Fall Out Boy (Joe Trohman & Andy Hurley), Anthrax (Scott Ian), ex-Anthrax (Rob Caggiano, currently of Volbeat) and From…
Moon Tooth came swinging out of the gate in 2016 with their debut full-length Chromaparagon. It presents the listener with a variety of different musical styles that are as colorful as the album title itself. One moment you’re rocking out to stoner with mild-psych touches, the next you’re headbanging to…
Like many metalheads, I spent many a year condemning anything verging on pop as simplistic, saccharine drivel manufactured to appeal to the lowest common denominator of music listeners. Over time I’ve softened and come to appreciate that not all pop-infused music can be painted with the same brush. More than…
Hype is a curious thing. It can serve as the catalyst for an up-and-coming band to gain notoriety and exposure, or as a crushing blow to an established act that falls short of the stratospheric expectations attached to their work. It is a simultaneous blessing and bane, building and destroying…
Elephant Tree released their newest self-titled album back in April of 2016 but it recently received a bigger retail release. All the more reason to talk about this tripped-out, fuzzfest. They’re not quite a metal band, but they certainly draw from metal influences. According to their Facebook page, their earlier endeavors were in London’s metal scene and it’s only recently that they’ve switched to their bluesy stoner rock sound. You can hear their metal past in the way they completely overdrive their guitarwork, using their riffs as a foundation for everything else in their songs.
In a mere five years, Nashville’s All Them Witches have the discography of a band well beyond their years – not in terms of output, but by means of musical growth over only four full-length records. “Maturity” is a term that gets thrown around too often when talking about a band’s development, but the four-piece’s latest effort, Sleeping Through the War, seems to warrant such description – especially when reflecting on the relative purity of the group’s first album. The band has come a long way in a short time and have crafted an enigmatic and unpredictable nature, with each release since defying expectations and satisfying with wonderment. That being said, Sleeping Through the War follows suit standing as yet another hallmark for the band, and arguably their most eclectic record to date.
Full disclosure: by a certain metric, this recommendation post is coming in just over a year late. But virtuosic jazz guitarist Julian Lage is one prolific fellow, and has put out not one, not even two, but three releases in the time span between then and now. It’s not hard to see why; the man’s improvisation skills are stunning to behold, tossing out fully realized lead moments left and right with comfortable ease.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous. Got me? Ahem…I mean: welcome back to another (hopefully) enthralling episode of Heavy Vanguard! Apologies for the two-week delay in episodes. For some reason, the WordPress scheduling program doesn’t like this article very much. Today we’ve got what is possibly the…
