Annnnnnnd we’re back…. Or something. After a “small” bit of time off we’ve decided, and I have been granted the kind privilege, to get back into the swing of things with what’s been going on in the punk universe. This time out I’m going to take a stab at a…
Heavy Blog is Heavy is ten years old. When Jimmy Rowe first started this blog, I doubt he imagined that it would become what it is today; I doubt anybody around back then imagined it. It was special for music journalism; right at the cusp of the mass migration of…
Oh, shoegaze. Does anyone have one of those genres that is, on paper, a perfect storm of everything they want to hear, but rarely seems to come together in the way they are dreaming of? That is shoegaze for me. That delectable blend of heavy soundscapes and lush melodies, dreamy…
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 Playlist Update typically covering numerous genres and sometimes a…
If depression had an official soundtrack, there’s no question it’d be exclusively comprised of songs from post-punk’s family tree. The genre’s swirl of reverb, haunting bass lines and drab, lifeless vocals capture the essence of endlessly staring out the window of a dimly lit room on a rainy day, every…
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 Playlist Update typically covering numerous genres and sometimes a different style in each square. While we have occasionally covered non-metal topics in past blog posts, we decided that a dedicated column was warranted in order to more completely recommend all of the music that we have been listening to. Unmetal Monday is a weekly column which covers noteworthy tracks and albums from outside the metal universe, and we encourage you all to share your favorite non-metal picks from the week in the comments. This week, we’ll be highlighting a few albums and tracks that struck our fancy over the past few weeks. Head past the jump to dial down the distortion.
Art is less concerned with clear borders or delimitation. In fact, it thrives where uncertainty flourishes, giving us a wordless dictionary to help us understand, empathize, and connect with phenomena too nebulous for a direct approach. The artist (and this is no original thought, as reading any number of countless thinkers on aesthetics will show you) is more of a mediator than an explainer, someone who is able to speak both the odd un-language of art and the odd language of our daily lives. Ulver have always understood this. From their black metal roots, channeling the wild indifference of nature, and through their by-now countless transformations, they have served as a unique trumpet for the unintelligible and yet impossible to ignore intonations that flash ceaselessly across the skies of our culture.
Angry “post”punks from Bristol, IDLES’ new album Brutalism starts with someone being called a bastard before laucnhing headlong into a pulsing drumbeat and sinewy guitar line. Then that voice. Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten, Crass. Rarely do we get a band that actually lives up to the praise and connotation of being linked to the actual classic lineage of punk but then there’s these guys. Fuck and you.
When I originally launched Kvlt Kolvmn back in 2015, my intention was to create an HLT-style outlet for all of the noteworthy releases I find while digging around for underground black metal. But as you can tell by the singular installment linked above…that didn’t end up happening. I never stopped my constant conquest for new BM, though, and I figured a new year would be a great opportunity to compile all of my findings in one place and jot down why I think they’re absolutely worth our readership’s time and attention. So here we are with Kvlt Kolvmn, Take Two – a monthly round-up of my top 10 favorite BM releases from the past 30 days. There’s a fair amount of variety here in terms of where these bands/one-man projects are from and the music they’re churning out, and my hope is you’ll find at least one of these albums worth your time (and, potentially, support). And while this might be self-explanatory, please comment with any releases I’ve missed out on but are definitely worth a spin.
With Heavy Blog having changed the kind of content we publish and how we publish it, we’ve decided to retire our recurring Unmetal Monday column in favor of more ongoing/mercurial coverage of unmetal genres like indie rock, alternative, EDM, and more. One of the side effects of this is that we no longer had a central place to write about new music and albums from these kinds of artists/bands in a more informal way – things we might want to talk about but not necessarily in long-form. In light of that and our tradition of combining certain metal releases into groups to form “Rapidfire Reviews,” we’ve established this semi-regular column to take three recent or upcoming releases from the world of “indie” in the pejorative sense and offer some quick takes on them. In our latest Indie Rapidfire Roundup, contributor Mike McMahan and editors Nick Cusworth and Scott Murphy offer their thoughts on three very different, yet all well-anticipated albums: La Sera’s Queens, Nicolas Jaar’s Sirens and Preoccupations self-titled debut.
