Best of 1998

Heavy Blog
Best Of, Lists!
Welcome back to our "Best of" column! This isn't the first time we've celebrated twenty year milestones, but this installment is a bit more meaningful for all of us here at Heavy Blog. This list comes a week af... Read More...

Overkill – The Grinding Wheel

Andrew Hatch
Reviews
Overkill is back. And although they haven’t reinvented the (grinding) wheel, the old thrash geezers still have an impressive array of riffs to offer. Although the riffs are generally pretty crushing for a bunch of nearly sexagenarian metalheads, the veteran production job is what really makes this album’s millstones turn. It might sound like a poor compliment to say that an album’s most resounding success is in its production, but it really is that effective. One can hear it as soon as the riffs of “Mean Green Killing Machine” rip through the speakers. The guitar sounds appropriately meaty and aggressive, but it’s the thrum of D.D. Verni’s bass, sonorous and yet foreboding, that sticks out as unusually excellent.

In Defense Of: Nu-Metal

Heavy Blog
News
With the possible exception of crunkcore and whatever you call the music that the neo-goth kids at Hot Topic are listening to, nu-metal is perhaps the most divisive genre in metal (if you even consider it to be metal in the first place). Nowadays, the names Korn, Slipknot, Disturbed, Linkin Park, Godsmack and the dreaded Limp Bizkit are often followed with some sort of insult or derogatory humor in the metal world. Even us at Heavy Blog are guilty of this, to the point that we’ve made Evanescence’s “Bring Me To Life” into a meme in our own circles. Nu-metal is, at best, a joke in the minds of modern “TR00” metal fans.