Happy holidays, fellow moshers! Once again, we find ourselves at the end of the year. A calendar is about to get thrown out just to be replaced by another one with a new number on it. But what a year it was! 2019 has been one of the strongest years…
I often think about how we’re always talking about serious music on Heavy Blog Is Heavy. You want to take metal seriously, but I think we frequently forget that metal is music and music can often just be fun. Anyone who follows my writing on this blog knows of my…
As a band, Xoth represent a specific challenge to review: it feels impossible to concoct the right combination of words that both accurately describes the band and makes them sound as appealing as I’d like. Metal runs into this problem more often than other genres, I think. As sounds become…
What is it about straight genre bands that we love so much? We may all try to stay as objective as possible, but everybody has a favorite. Old school death metal, second wave black metal, grindcore, the list can go on and on. We all love something that we just…
Is there anything better than finding exactly what you’ve been looking for? Not in the “I lost my keys and I need to drop everything to track them down before I totally lose my mind” sense, but rather the fortuitous, dumb luck kind. The kind where the journey isn’t really…
Even if you took a group of the most scholarly sludge punks and fed them a steady diet of Lightning Bolt, Neurosis, and Sonic Youth for years and years, it’s not likely they’d produce anything as unconventional as Wizard Rifle. Their tone and style is the connective tissue that convincingly…
Following our mailbag post last week, Pete and I thought we’d get further antiquated with a good old-fashioned Heavy Blog is Heavy playlist swap. We each put together a list of the songs that we thought best defined our personal thrash metal tastes and where we think the genre is…
There are two things I know about power metal: that all the best power metal bands are Australian, and that all the best power metal is simply thrash metal in disguise. If there’s any doubt concerning either of these axioms, one listen to Fallen Idols—the fifth full-length from Sydney’s Lord—should…
Many bands would like to claim to be wild. There’s something inherently attractive about savageness, especially in metal. But very few bands actually feel unleashed, regardless of the states of mind that might have possessed the members as they were writing/recording the music. Wildness is more than just being experimental…
Bay Area thrash legends Death Angel have returned bringing us Humanicide, an album endeavoring to lay out a portrait of a decaying world in all its forms. The band are one of those veteran groups who once stood hopefully alongside Anthrax, Megadeth, Slayer, and Metallica until circumstances took them in…