As I progress through this weird journey that is metal fandom, I’ve increasingly found my enthusiasm for lengthy records fading. Sure, every once in a while a two hour behemoth of an album will keep me enthralled from start to finish (go listen to Paysage d’Hiver’s latest revelation for a…
I don’t know exactly why, but metal is so ripe for parody sometimes. Maybe it’s because it’s pretty easy to make fun of metal at times, and there’s such a uniform style that it’s just easy to ape. It can also be so chaotic that the bands themselves are just…
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…
Editor’s Note: I’m glad to welcome longtime reader Remi VL as a regular guest contributor to our Release Day Roundup posts! He submitted several of the albums listed below. Join his Facebook group for more recommendations. -Scott Murphy Each month, we always seem to come to the same conclusion when it comes to…
During last week’s review of the latest Toxic Holocaust record, I got to thinking a lot about the newest wave of thrash bands that came out around the same time. They all share some characteristics. There’s a heavy emphasis on feeling and no fear about getting a little silly with…
Following our mailbag post last week, Pete and I thought we’d get further antiquated with a good old-fashioned Heavy Blog is Heavy playlist swap. We each put together a list of the songs that we thought best defined our personal thrash metal tastes and where we think the genre is…
Hello fellow pit-sters! This month, I thought we could do something a little different. You all know I’ve been playing fast and loose with the schedule of this column, and August will be no different! Fellow thrash Josh Bulleid and I thought we’d introduce ourselves to you all a little…
I may have bemoaned the decline of thrash in previous columns. If you have been keeping up with me, you would think that there’s really no such thing as modern thrash. “Huh, that’s too bad. It must’ve died in 1993 or something.” Well, sorta? It would be tough to find…
Can there ever be enough theme bands? We run into them every day. There’s the marijuana-themed death metal Cannabis Corpse. Power metal is rife with theme bands on topics like magic, Vikings, knights, or any number of epic tales. There are a number of bands who use science fiction motifs,…
Angelus Apatrida have been one of the most consistently impressive thrash bands of the modern era. They’ve managed to establish a strong cult following, but the Spanish quartet have hardly received the kind of exposure given to American acts like Havok, Warbringer or Municipal Waste. Nevertheless, last May saw the…
