Release Day Roundup – 10/2/20
Editor’s Note: Longtime reader Remi VL is a regular guest contributor to our Release Day Roundup posts! He submitted several of the albums listed below. Join his Facebook group for more recommen... Read More...
Unmetal Monday // 6/1/2020
There’s a lot happening in the music world, and we here at Heavy Blog try our very best to keep up with it! Like the vast majority of heavy music fans, our tastes are incredibly vast, with our 3X3s in each Pla... Read More...
Half-Life: Crashdïet
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 ... Read More...
Heavy Issues: Which Track Taints an Otherwise Outstanding Album?
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 Iss... Read More...
What Heavy Blog Is Really Listening To // Playlist Swap – 5/17/18
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 ou... Read More...
Half-Life – Parkway Drive
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... Read More...
Scream Bloody Gore – Metal and Unintelligible Aesthetics
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... Read More...
Bro Country is NOT the new Hair Metal
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?
Best Of – Power Ballads
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!
Deathcore’s Not Dead (Yet!)
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.