Heavy Pod Is Heavy Cast! Some good stuff, some not so good stuff. Decide for yourself! Gone In April, Shaped In Dreams, Leprous, Borknagar, Nile, Despised Icon, Jacob Collier, Weeping Sores, Melodicka Bros. Then we do cool people time with It Chapter 2, Hbomberguy’s video about Director’s Cuts, and Don’t Let Go. Enjoy!
Heavy Pod Is Heavy Cast! This week we have some news and announcements. The black metal poser who burned a church, Megadeth frontman Mustaine’s throat cancer, Facebook’s prevention of The Ocean monetizing their climate change-related video, Slipknot and Five Finger Death Punch launching new lines of products, Borknagar and Insomnium having new releases coming up, and Unprocessed. Then, cool people time with Neon Genesis Eva-GET IN THE ROBOT SHINJI, The Terror, and Charles Stross’s Laundry Files series. Enjoy!
It’s really hard to find good power metal these days. I’m not saying it’s not out there but it’s buried deep within layers and layers of bands that don’t seem to understand that imitation only works if you add a layer of your own personality to it. Tanagra, however, understand…
Heavy Pod Is Heavy Cast!This week we have a salty one, where I’m salty and I get Eden salty. This galaxy brain article about the environmental impact of streaming, then new music or whatever from Shokran, Aenimus, Devin Townsend, Dream Theater, Origin, Deviloof, Fountainhead, and Vintersorg leaving Borknagar and that Denzel Curry Rage Against the Machine cover everyone is talking about. Then, cool people time with Eden’s adventures in Berlin with Peter Watts, Observer, Onimusha, and Jeff Noon’s Nyquist Mysteries. Enjoy!
Heavy Pod Is Heavy Cast!
We’re back! And we’re bringing you new old content! The Haarp Machine crowdfunder, the Arch Enemy debacle, Blood Music disbanding, Baard leaving Borknagar (but new album!) and The Most Feared Song in Jazz, by Vox (but sub to Adam Neely instead!), then cool people time with You (the show), Kingdom: Two Crowns, Atomic Blonde, Sundered, and Donut County. Enjoy!
“We’re going back to our roots” is something that a lot of bands say. So often, that the phrase has almost lost its point. It’s more interesting, though, when uttered by a band that aren’t backed into a corner. While many bands say this to reinvigorate interest after a series of releases that meet lukewarm reception or are creatively bankrupt, Vintersorg are clearly not one such band. In fact, they’re pushing along steadily, and frontman Andreas Hedlund also helms Borknagar, so he has a lot of room to explore his writing. Still, he has chosen this direction for his tenth album, making a sequel to their debut. It’s an odd choice, but it works!
Swedish progressive black metal masters Vintersorg are back with their tenth album, which is a direct sequel to their debut from 1998. The brainchild of Andreas Hedlund (Borknagar) and Mattias Marklund, Vintersorg have been forging ahead in their own brand of mellow, beautiful darkness. The prospect of them revisiting their older sound with a new take almost two decades later is quite exciting, and we’re excited to share it with you!
So we’re doing a two-part series on picking the podcast’s official albums of the year 2016. We start with the blog’s list of 400+ albums that are worth consideration this year, whittle it down to 86 albums we care about, and then start cutting them. The objective is to get to a ranked list of 10 items and an overall list of 20 albums. We get down to about 45 this week until the cuts really start to hurt. This was real fun to do, so I hope you all enjoy too! The lists will be posted below.
For those who missed our last installment, We post biweekly updates covering what the staff at Heavy Blog have been spinning. Given the amount of time we spend on the site telling you about music that does not fall neatly into the confines of conventional “metal,” it should come as no surprise that many of us on staff have pretty eclectic tastes that range far outside of metal and heavy things. We can’t post about all of them at length here, but we can at least let you know what we’re actually listening to. For those that would like to participate as well (and please do) can drop a 3X3 in the comments, which can be made with tapmusic.net through your last.fm account, or create it manually with topsters.net. Also, consider these posts open threads to talk about pretty much anything music-related. We love hearing all of your thoughts on this stuff and love being able to nerd out along with all of you.
With cold, treble-tipped tremolo riffs, agonized rasps and Satanic imagery, black metal might seem like the farthest thing from acoustic folk. But despite their distance, acoustic guitar has slowly crept into black metal since its unholy birth, even with the strict cultural norms that once governed the sound and image of black metal. Interestingly, the use and purpose of acoustic guitars in black metal is not random, but traces patterns across the evolution of black metal, from Bathory to Panopticon.
