Sometime way back in 2015, Mirror released their self-titled debut long player on Metal Blade Records. Despite being put out by one of the biggest and most consistent and reputable labels in the biz, it flew under the radar. Featuring former Electric Wizard and Satan’s Wrath bassist Tas Danazoglou and…
The anxiety of waiting for a sophomore album from a band that put out a great debut is unlike anything else on the planet. There is no other cocktail that blends excitement and trepidation in quite the same measures, and the more one loves that first taste, the more potent…
A Gift to Artwork, taken from the Caligula’s Horse song “A Gift to Afterthought”, breaks down and analyzes your favourite album artwork. The first time an album’s name appears, it will link to a large and (where possible) high-resolution image of the cover so that you can take a closer…
Writing about a new Abbath album without mentioning Immortal would be tantamount to writing about Bruce Dickinson’s solo albums (The Chemical Wedding still holds up!) without mentioning Iron Maiden. It’s simply not done. It’s uncouth. Almost a quarter century after co-founding Immortal, Abbath struck out on his own in 2015 to assemble a…
It’s weird that heavy metal is known for being repetitive; it’s a master of classification I believe. When you narrow “heavy metal” down to the very specific style of it made from the mid-70’s to the mid-80’s, specifically centered around NWOBHM and the American response which it triggered, you certainly…
There are some bands out there for which cataloging is a futile effort. You think you have it down, that this riff or that or that vocal line or this drum fill places them squarely within a certain genre. But then the next track goes and does something completely different or, in the more devious case we have before us today, the entire thing is just slightly off from what you’d expect from the whatever genre you had decided upon. With Hammers of Misfortune, the knee-jerk reaction is to put them together with the rest of the traditional heavy metal revival and specifically within the slew of bands paying homage to New Wave of British Heavy Metal.
Metal, like any current history, is a neverending story — a songbook perpetually revising its denouement in the storm of new releases shattering our ears and expectations by the month. But as exciting as it is to experience the history unfolding before us, that work is already done by listeners and blogs like this one on a daily basis. Vitally important and critically overlooked, I think, is the history of metal — the first chapters yellowing in the forty-odd years since they were bound in black and leather. This post, then, will serve as a continuation of this article detailing the early days of metal, and particularly the incredible importance of Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast to the fledgling genre.
I came across Dawnwatcher while trolling the unsounded depths of The Metal Archives, twelve tabs deep and decades in the past as part of my research for (yet another) article on metal history. Dawnwatcher had one measly review to their name — an impressively poor 7% attributed to one of…
Every so often, I’ll stumble across an album that makes me question every time I’ve listened to the first two songs of an album and decided it wasn’t worth my time. I’ve listened to enough metal to gauge if I’ll like something fairly quickly, and I’ve learned to trust that…
Spawning from the bay area, the band Cormorant broke forth into the metal scene by creating two unique releases titled The Last Tree (an EP) and Metazoa. With a fusion of talent, diverse influences, minds, and immense passion the band Cormorant have gained love and fans across oceans without ever…
