Few things are as enjoyable as a debut record. No matter how bad or good the record eventually turns out to be, the excitement that stems forth from that unabashed enthusiasm is invigorating, like a new car smell. This first impression is amplified by the absence of expectations, where every…
Show me a band that fuses melodic riffing with a hard-hitting death metal core and you’ll garner my interest. Show me a band that pulls from Death and Horrendous while throwing in shades of the best fantasy series of all time (Malazan Book of the Fallen, for those curious), and…
While I don’t want to hold it against any particular artist, some subgenres have a tendency to sound a bit stale over time. In order to fit into some kind of description, you have to walk down a fairly narrow and rigid path that doesn’t allow for any kind of…
Sometimes, a lead single can all but guarantee you’ll love an album, which was very much the case after I heard “Far from Where Dreams Unfurl.” As I outlined in my review, Wilderun have crafted my favorite prog metal albums of the year with Veil of Imagination by a wide…
“The passion caused by the great and the sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. … It is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind…
With their last few releases, Fit for an Autopsy have been on a hot streak to say the very least. To count them among some of the top heavy bands operating would be a pretty understandable and wise decision at this point. While it helps that they have a unique…
I often think about how we’re always talking about serious music on Heavy Blog Is Heavy. You want to take metal seriously, but I think we frequently forget that metal is music and music can often just be fun. Anyone who follows my writing on this blog knows of my…
We recently mused on the failures of, and potential remaining hope for, melodic death metal. Briefly, we said that while the genre is on the ropes, there’s still good music to be made within it, either by “owning” the classic tropes of the genre or experimenting with new sounds. That…
Melodic death metal is not exactly the genre to watch these days. It seems the heyday of it came and went rather quickly; if you ask some folks on the Internet, that golden age never came. That seems a bit harsh. The basics of the genre seem solid as they…
Soilwork have long been one the most consistent acts in melodic death metal. Although they’ve rarely received the same amount of critical recognition as formative bands like In Flames, Dark Tranquility or At the Gates, they’ve nevertheless managed to put together a catalogue of records whose overall quality rivals any…
