Abbath – Outstrider

Tommy Wild
Reviews
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 simpl... Read More...

Hey! Listen to Hammers of Misfortune!

Eden Kupermintz
Listen To This!
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.

The Metal Explosion: 1983 – 1984

Andrew Hatch
Deep Dive
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.