As you might recall, Heavy Blog is ten years old this year. As such, we’re setting off on an adventure, each quarter exploring a different “Year 9”. After looking at ’79, we’re now at ’89, and oh boy was ’89 A Year. It’s the year in which the Soviet Block…
Progressive and technical death metal has been having a real moment over the last couple of years. As with everything, however, there is a dark side to the genre’s current boom. With so many fantastic progressive death metal albums flooding the market, listeners run the risk of becoming disaffected by…
“Good artists borrow; great artists steal.” – Pablo Picasso, maybe This axiom drives metal. It only becomes more true as time’s inevitable march covers more and more ground and an increasing number of sounds are necessarily retread. I’ve written on this before in other reviews, but this holds especially true…
We here at Heavy Blog like to ponder the big questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Thrash ballads: yay or nay? You know, the big stuff. In order to better address such pressing matters, we bring you Heavy Issues: a now-monthly column by which we plan to get…
Well, dear reader, here we are again. It’s been just over two years since the release of Full of Hell’s last full length. In the time since Trumpeting Ecstasy, they’ve released a second collaboration with sludge/noise savants The Body, this time taking a detour into the wild world of power…
When it finally came time for Warforged to announce their long anticipated follow-up to 2014’s Essence of the Land, spirits were high in the Heavy Blog camp. The aforementioned release was a favorite of many on the blog and the long period of silence which followed it was a frustrating…
There aren’t too many of the good early 2000’s melodeath/metalcore bands remaining but, if I’m being ignorant and missing a few good ones, then they should just be releasing better music. The precarious balance between At The Gates-worship and the clinical edges of modern metal was too much for most…
If there’s one thing the world needs more of, it’s blackened thrash. In some ways, it’s the original black metal sound. It’s chaotic and raucous, just like we all love our metal. However, it’s also overtly dark and evil sounding, a constant grind on your senses that still has its…
Some things just get better with age. Wine, whiskey, cheese, and my dad’s jokes all receive a qualitative helping hand by good ol’ father time’s unending march toward oblivion. Yes, it’s a tired maxim, but like the best of them it’s based in a fairly hefty dose of truth. At…
If you know anything about Beaten to Death, the Norwegian grindcore/avantgarde/genre-defying band, you know to shed any expectations when approaching any list written by them. This is especially true when we’re talking about influences; after all, the whole point of B2D is to create a frenetic motley of genres that doesn’t rest…
