Greetings unto thee, heaviest of Heavy Bloggers! Welcome to the end of Q1 for Riff Lords, Inc. I am Pete, here as always with your monthly presentation of doom economics. 2019 has slowly been ramping up the releases, but now we’re in the midst of what could possibly be on…
Doom metal can sometimes become a catch-all term. Bands just get that label because they don’t clearly fit into something else. If it’s not fast-paced or evil enough, then you can’t give it the death or thrash or black label. But you have to give it something. If it sounds…
January didn’t have an edition of Grind My Gears because yours truly was up to his nuts in boring, boring life bullshit. There’s little point in fixating on it – that wouldn’t be very grindcore, after all – so we’re slamming back into reality with a journey through the halls…
Hello, and welcome to the final post we will have about 2018! Yes, it’s late January. And yes, this is coming out much later than in previous years. After several years of completely burning myself out assembling these industry lists, I made the decision early on in planning out our…
Those of us music lovers who purchase and collect physical media understand the thrill of the hunt. Be it digging through crates, scoring a deal on that grail on Discogs, or getting in on the pre-order before the limited edition variant sells out, the rush of broadening the collection is one of the most fulfilling things about consuming music for much of the Heavy Blog staff. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is also a huge driving force due to the limited nature of many releases, and collectively, we tend to spend way too much money for the sake of getting in while the getting’s good. However, funds are not always in supply, and we often spend our free time adding out-of-press releases to our Discogs wantlist or staring longingly at /r/vinyl and /r/heavyvinyl in hopes of catching a contact buzz.
New albums from Virginian grindcore legends Pig Destroyer are increasingly few and far between, so each new release is a genuine momentous occasion. This time around, in the six years since Book Burner (which was itself five years removed from Phantom Limb), the stakes grew higher for the band in maintaining their spot on grindcore’s pedestal; or the first time ever, the band have invited a bassist into the fold in John Jarvis, further expanding their lineup after additions of drummer Adam Jarvis replaced Brian Harvey prior to Book Burner and sampler/electronics guy Blake Harrison on Phantom Limb. Such a change in dynamic, both sonically and interpersonally, is bound to have an affect on the output, and when taking into account six years of artistic development and fan anticipation, the group’s latest effort Head Cage was bound to be heavily scrutinized.
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 treasure…
Telepathy have recently released live footage of “Celebration of Decay” from one of these said festivals, Dunk!Festival. You might recognize the name from our seemingly endless coverage of bands which operate in the sphere of Dunk!’s influence, seeing as they are one of the lodestones of post-rock and metal today. Their presence immediately sparked our fascination and once again pointed to their rising popularity, drawing us towards the performance and how it was received. It also helps that this is one of the best tracks on Tempest and that the performance is top notch. Put all of these things together and you get this post, which, beyond including the clip from the performance itself, also has a brief chat with Richard Powley of the band about this show, the future of the band, what comes next and how they feel about what’s happened for them so far. Read on below for excellent post metal and an interesting peek into its European scene!
At this point, it might seem like I’m trying to alienate readers with these truly awful titles for Grind My Gears features. But by the greater grace of grind, the summer months have been wildly busy for extreme music. For the most part, I’ve ignored the bigger releases and instead…
Sometimes, writing introduction paragraphs is a silly exercise; this is one of those times. Surely no one needs me to introduce Pig Destroyer, arguably one of the more influential bands of our times. Nor does anyone need the name of JR Hayes embellished; he’s one of the founders of the seminal…
