Crashdïet have had a hard time since spear-heading the Swedish sleaze rock revival in the early 2000s. With five studio albums, and nearly as many lead singers, under their belt since 2005, it hasn’t been easy for the band to stay atop of the scene they helped define – and…
We here at Heavy Blog like to ponder the big questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Thrash ballads: yay or nay? You know, the big stuff. In order to better address such pressing matters, we bring you Heavy Issues: a now-monthly column by which we plan to get…
Even a cursory glance of our biweekly playlist updates will reveal that there is a great deal of variety among our staff’s musical tastes. Due to this, we brainstormed the idea of Playlist Swap, where two of our contributors pick their favorite track from each of the nine albums in their grid…
Parkway Drive have come a long way since the days of all-ages, community center shows at which I became acquainted with them. For one thing—going by the banner picture above—drummer Ben Gordon is now rocking an impressively luscious set of golden locks, while guitarist Jeff Ling is showing his seniority…
The word “aesthetics” is perhaps one of the most maligned and misused term in the modern age. To wide circles of the population, it has come to mean one of two things. It is either the Internet-popularized term (often presented as “a e s t h e t i c…
Some might say hair metal died in the 90s when Nirvana disrupted the rock industry. Yet, all of hair metal’s celebration of excess and sexism, musical dilution, and market oversaturation is present in today’s mainstream country scene. The factory seems to have just moved from the Sunset Strip to Nashville. It’s massive appeal to young listeners has created a divide in the country music scene not unlike the divide in the metal scene in the 80s. On one side industry titans argue that Bro Country is just the music of the times and that old people are just whining about being left behind. On the other side, more “authentic” artists are rising under the banner of “real country.” This is all quickly acessible on Wikipedia and Saving Country Music in more depth. But is Bro Country really just the second coming of Hair Metal? Or does Hair Metal deserve a little more credit?
Power ballads are in and of their nature sentimental sap-a-thons. They also happen to be one of the staples of metal and hard rock that kept its faint heartbeat alive at a time when the form had gone out of style with the mass public, if it had ever well and truly been “in.” These songs also served as gateways into metal for many a budding metalhead along with the more accessible songs that weren’t quite pop but had those sensibilities of melody and catchiness. This list is by no means definitive but it’s ours spanning a few decades and variants worth of feels. A number of contributors have added their favorites but please do share yours with us in the comments!
Last week, Invisible Oranges made a very good case for the death of deathcore citing the absolute disasters that Suicide Silence and Emmure put out this year, the diminishing commercial success of the genre, and the disappointing follow-ups of some of the genre’s most promising acts. To be clear, there is no defending Suicide Silence and Emmure, but there is more to deathcore’s story to be told in 2017 and beyond.
Even if you don’t believe in evolution on a grand scale, instead putting your faith in a god that designed the Earth intelligently, it’s hard to deny that bands evolve over time, especially when proof such as the new single from Aussie melodic metalcore group Parkway Drive sits in front…
[Snowed in this morning. Bleh. Out of sheer boredom I decided to review an album that recently came out that I haven’t heard and previously had no intention of hearing. Thanks to an advertisement, that album was HIM’s Screamworks. A disclaimer: I’ve never actually heard a whole HIM album until…
