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…
Slow news week, so we go on a lot of tangents. There’s still some new music out there though. Green Day side project The Mermaids, Arsis, Thomas Giles, Psycroptic, The Ocean, and The Dali Thundering Concept/The Algorithm. Then we do some cool people time with Venom and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. Enjoy!
Our newest writer Simon Clark is a regular attendee of the annual UK Tech Fest. Below, Simon highlights eight qualities of the festival he’s noticed over the years. Click here for info on bands, venues, tickets and more. … Familiarity The inaugural Tech Fest weekend was held in a small…
Drummer Brann Dailor’s career outside of Mastodon doesn’t particularly exist in this modern day. Aside from performances with technical death metal act Lethargy, as well as Gaylord and Today is the Day prior to Mastodon’s first release just after the turn of the century, Dailor has kept his focus on…
2016 has been a great year for our *prognotes feature, and here we are with yet another mammoth album to explore. Slice the Cake’s Odyssey to the West clocks in at a massive 77 minutes, and that’s without even looking at the 28 minute accompanying EP Odyssey to the Gallows which acts as a prologue. Today we’ll only be looking at the LP, so strap yourselves in because this is going to be a long one, and we’d best be getting started.
Some may claim this to be all-too similar to a previous Soul Curator that I did on writing. And, yes, while the action this playlist is supposed to score is the same, I feel that writing science fiction is something completely different from the standard mode of writing. In a way, you need to make yourself leave Earth. You need to be able to break rules and then glue them back together again. The Albums To Write To Soul Curator included albums that (for me, at least) kept the mind focused and eliminated distraction; this, however, stands on different grounds. The key to writing great science fiction (or any imaginative fiction, for that matter), is to be able to tap into the fantastical parts of your mind. Whether you come up with something that is grounded more in reality or doesn’t adhere to anything this planet has heard of is completely up to you. And these are albums that can help you reach that mode of thinking.
It’s pretty rare to see a Canada only tour, but it means a lot for the all the bands involved when it is their first time in the country, or first time traveling it. Through the windows of a van between cities to small crowds and smaller venues, the whole…
We knew it was coming. April marks the beginning of spring release season, when the number of marquee albums starts going sky high and incredible albums are suddenly dropping left and right. And yet looking back at this past month it’s just utterly astounding how much amazing music came out even from the get-go. April 1 was a humongous day for releases, and it simply did not stop after that. Narrowing down this huge wealth of albums to a select few was nearly impossible, but thankfully we also have our “short”-list to include everything else we completely loved, all of which are included in our Spotify playlist for the month, which is embedded here and on our front page. And with that, let’s get to our editor picks for April!
For those who missed our last installment, We post biweekly updates covering what the staff at Heavy Blog have been spinning. Given the amount of time we spend on the site telling you about music that does not fall neatly into the confines of conventional “metal,” it should come as no surprise that many of us on staff have pretty eclectic tastes that range far outside of metal and heavy things. We can’t post about all of them at length here, but we can at least let you know what we’re actually listening to. For those that would like to participate as well (and please do) can drop a 3X3 in the comments, which can be made with tapmusic.net through your last.fm account, or create it manually with topsters.net. Also, consider these posts open threads to talk about pretty much anything music-related. We love hearing all of your thoughts on this stuff and love being able to nerd out along with all of you.
The fusion of electronic music and metal has been and always will be controversial. This problem stems from an imbalanced focus or a shallow appropriation; you have to do both genres justice, and placing synth arpeggios over breakdowns isn’t how you make compelling music. It takes a well-worn understanding of both genres to execute a worthwhile fusion, and it’s true that few have been able to demonstrate this knowledge and creativity. Of all the acts that have made an attempt to bridge metal and electronica, French musician Remi Gallego’s project The Algorithm may well be the one that makes the best case for the cause.
