Normally, lately, when I’m discussing the great music scene that Toronto has going on it’s to talk on and on about the tremendous well-spring of punk music that it has become. As with any scene hitting a creative spike, though, there are great things happening in that town across multiple…
We’re officially past the halfway mark for 2019, and though there is plenty of time left in the year for music to come and shape our view of it, I think there are certainly a few themes taking shape already that we’ll still be talking about come year’s end. First…
Each month, we always seem to come to the same conclusion when it comes to our Editors’ Picks column: Friday release days open the floodgates and unleash a seemingly endless stream of quality new music. But while some of our Editors and Contributors sit down gleefully each week to dive into this newly stocked…
It’s been a long six years. Times have changed greatly since Pelican’s last record. Post-rock – as Nick, Eden and company regularly detail – has wiggled its tendrils into an increasingly diverse pool of influences, blurring things to a point where I’m not even sure where to draw the lines…
The Chicago-based post-metal/djent act HARM LESS is the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist Bryan Kingsley, who released his first album under this moniker, Standing, Still, in 2015. He’s now teaming with Flesh & Bone Records for his sophomore effort Safe’s Pace, and today we are happy to premiere its rousing first single…
Despite the seemingly straightforward nature of drone, the style is a great deal more varied in practice. For drone metal in particular, the idea of drawing out doom to an even more low, slow and meditative state relies on each individual band’s interpretation of the genre they’re extrapolating from. As…
Last week, a few of us at Heavy Blog geeked at the announcement of a new Lo-Pan record. It’s exciting news as we’ve been awaiting a follow up to 2017’s fantastic In Tensions, but this also jogged my memory, leading me to recall Jeff Martin (vocals) and Chris Thompson (guitar)…
It’s strange to think of how much the landscape of post-rock has changed in just past decade. Third wave post-rock took America – then the world – by storm, and while it remains a niche genre in the wider scope of things it unquestionably cultivated a rich soil from which…
I first became acquainted with the Bozeman, MT post-rock band RANGES what seems like ages ago, though somehow it was only 2015. They were a virtually unknown band that had just caught the attention of a small collection of blog writers and diligent genre fans with their 24-minute concept single…
The early passing of artists tends to foster an interesting (and occasionally uncomfortable) combination of reactions, especially in the age of social media. On one hand you will see devoted fans writing their own eulogies, attempting to encapsulate what the artist meant within the prism of their own experiences. You will also unfortunately find your share of naysayers who can’t wait to seize the moment to impart their own self-fashioned wisdom about how overrated the artist in question was, or how superficial people are for mourning celebrities while so many others suffer in anonymity. I recall getting into a heated exchange with an erstwhile friend when he posted something on Facebook disparaging fans of Chris Cornell after the star’s passing, since it was of equal or greater importance to him that normal people die daily with no fanfare. There was a deeper context regarding addiction and the way we view addicts, but there’s no sense dredging that up. The point is that we ended up wrestling over a dead man’s grave, and while to this day I disagree with his sentiments, I could have also just let it go and still mourned a man whose work I had admired since childhood without feeling compelled to get into Facebook fights over it.
