A new year always brings with it a bevy of renewed personal/cultural expectations. I have historically tended to gravitate mentally toward the hopeful notion that a new trip around the sun brings with it some form of clean slate where possibilities are endless, causing my excitement for what life’s next…
Eternal Storm caught me by surprise and consequently murdered our faces with their absolutely fantastic debut record Come the Tide. A melodeath opus that puts them squarely in the elite camp populated by the likes of Insomnium, Dark Tranquility, and Be’lakor, Come the Tide will populate many a year-end list,…
Other than the blackest, darkest depths of winter, I find that summer’s zenith is when I listen to black metal the most. The genre’s obsession with every manner of the frigid, frostbitten, grim pastoralia one associates with the long Scandinavian cold season is practically a simulation of stepping into a…
It typically takes me a few listens to find out whether or not (or how much) I enjoy a particular piece of music. Many times have I been bitten by the newness bug, only to be let down considerably on repeated listens. My initial reaction to Imperialist’s new track “Advent…
Since the vast majority of Heavy Blog contributors fall on the left side of the map (shocking, we know), focusing on the latter seems like the way to go. Criticizing the other side of the political map is easy enough; taking a hard look at your own camp is where things get tricky. Thus, let us turn our eyes on one of the most typical leftist refusals to engage: the retreat. There are few places in the cultural world where this retreat is more obvious than in music and, more specifically, in metal. Even more specifically, the current throes which are black metal is undergoing are even more lucrative for our needs. There, leftist retreat is alive and happening right now, both because of the virility of the claims on the other side (read: the amount of black metal that’s truly awful) and because the themes of black metal have already been declared by the larger, more abstract “left” as anathema in the past.
There are positive and negative ways to frame a sudden explosion in popularity like the one that’s hit death-doom in the last couple of years. The happier way of looking at it is that the genre is experiencing something of a renaissance, and relative newcomers to the genre like Spectral Voice and Temple…
For the uninitiated, a paroxysm is defined as “a sudden attack or violent expression of a particular emotion or activity,” and such a word is certainly apt to describe the music of Grecian death/thrash metal band Rapture. As of late, the proto-death metal genre these guys traffic in has been hurting…
Grafvitnir exists at the limits of extremity and melody. If one were to plot a simple chart to describe metal, with “Melody” as the X axis, and “Extremity” as the Y, Grafvitnir would be the little dot in the top right corner, with full marks in each category. Yet Grafvitnir doesn’t balance their thirst for convulsing blast beats and throat-shredding vocals and lightning tremolo with their desire for sweet, sweet melodies so much as the two sides battle, warring opposites ripping and clawing and dancing, circling their way around one another, imprisoned in brutal stalemate for the duration of Keys to the Mysteries Beyond. The end result is something that sounds like Storm of the Light’s Bane-era Dissection on amphetamines — and if that sentence sounds appealing, you’d better get listening, bucko.
Welcome to Death’s Door. Wipe your snowy boots on the mat. Which, I mean, is obviously a joke. Because there’s no snow anywhere on this godforsaken rock. It’s a million degrees outside and all of humanity is hurtling toward ecological destruction. How delightful. Pull up a bone chair and get…
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.
