Ah, May! What a heady month, as Spring makes itself known in most of our circles. It’s probably my favorite time of the year to listen to music; something about the combination between the weather, the symbology of the period, the days getting longer, and the fact that it’s just…
Each month, we always seem to come to the same conclusion when it comes to our Editors’ Picks column: Friday release days open the floodgates and unleash a seemingly endless stream of quality new music. But while some of our Editors and Contributors sit down gleefully each week to dive into this newly stocked treasure…
Heavy Pod Is Heavy Cast! Eden is finally back, but this time I’m derailing. We talk about new music from Dreadnaught, Inanimate Existence, Babymetal, Warforged, Xenobiotic, Flub, and Destrage. Then we talk about the Threatin lawsuit, Mayhem signing with Century Media, and Demons & Wizards coming back. Also some philosophy, cool people time with Detective Pikachu, Chernobyl, Charles Stross’s Laundry files, Hannu Rajaniemi’s Summerland and Re:publica. Enjoy!
All of us have expectations. Whether it’s for your personal life, professional life, or as simple as going to the movies, you have a certain expectation for any given thing. Sometimes you have very high expectations that generally only lead to your disappointment, like taking out a million-dollar loan for…
Coming to the end of a year that has been bursting at the seams with grindcore releases (many of which can be found on Heavy Blog Is Heavy, just saying), there were always going to be a clutch of records that arrived too late for album of the year consideration.…
Don’t ever try and argue with someone that grindcore is music. It really isn’t. The genre is forever teetering on being one tin can snare from sounding like a washing machine full of cutlery. The “anti-music” logo exists for a reason, after all. Tonality, melody, harmony… all thrown aside for…
Midpoint. Half in, half out. Shadow. A divide. Balance. The semantic milieu surrounding stuff that’s divided 50/50 is incredibly rich; it opens some of the greatest cultural creations of all time (“Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark” – Dante’s The Inferno) and…
With our general list for 2016 out of the way, we can now shift the focus from our aggregate opinion to individual ones. Both outlooks have their own merit; the former provides us with an overview of our year in music. However, the latter shines a light on something we’re extremely proud of and that’s the varied and eclectic nature of our staff these days. We used to have a very certain type of music associated with Heavy Blog and while we still have a long way to go, we feel like we’ve done a good job at expanding our palettes and the representation of different kinds of music and metal in our staff. The lists below reflect that; you’ll find black metal, avant-garde, technical thrash metal, hip hop, rap, noise, ambiance, post metal and rock, melodic death metal and much more throughout these lists.
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.
Leave it to Italy to bring us a band like Destrage. With their music striking an impossibly fine balance between relentless progressive metal and all sorts of silliness, the band blew us away with 2014’s Are You Kidding Me? No, somehow keeping up an almost playful sense through the album while simultaneously…
