I can’t imagine what it's like to lose a band mate. Riot, a band with five decades of history, has had to deal with this sort of tragedy on three separate occasions. Death may be all that we as human beings can count on, but that doesn’t make it any less shitty when it happens.
Take a look at the Metallica drummer's finest performances. Seriously.
Chances are, most of you are familiar with Excel as the band Dave Mustaine fingered as victims of a Metallica rip-off. Sure, “Enter Sandman” sounds a little like “Tapping into the Emotional Void,” but taking into account the fact that nothing comes from nowhere as well as the number of times Megadeth blatantly picks Diamond Head’s pocket on Rust in Peace and the more obvious point that no one in their right mind should be listening to a fucking word that tumbles out of Mustaine’s yap,
Onkel Tom, despite being a niche project that only drunken Germans and the most hardcore of Sodom fans will have bothered to investigate, has been going on since the mid-90s. From the off, unless you know the lingo, about 99% of H.E.L.D. thematically and topically is going to make no sense; that outstanding 1% is reserved for liver-killers like “Ein bisschen Alkohol,” which doesn’t take a Teutonic engineer with a degree in comparative literature to decode the theme of.
Behind the scenes in the crazy world of metal promotion, hacks around the block were recently email slammed by Bullet Tooth Records and their announcement of the first video to emerge from the third and latest album by Cleveland’s Affiance. Entitled “Fire!”, opening the pertinent email inundated the brave reader with hyperbolic claims of this being a video of epic and untold proportions wherein things that haven’t ever been executed previously before cameras were being embarked upon for the purposes of pimping it and Blackout to the masses.
Bloodsoaked. The name, logo and sound may, at first glance, place the band smack-dab in the ordinary category, but this North Carolina outfit has been kicking it all weird-like since 2006 and never fail to offer up neat little surprises, even whilst playing in one of extreme music’s most restricting sub-genres.
Pord offer their own sumthin’-sumthin’ to the noise rock cannon and have a sense of identity that’s greater than being a bunch of French bands who are ripping off Hammerhead. In the case of Wild, the seven song album does start off on a distinguishing tack as a combination of fuzzy bass and bright, slashing guitars on “Staring into Space” combine to create a thrashy slinkiness.
Despite hailing from the relatively well-off economic hub of Padua, Italy, Children of Technology has created a dystopian air around themselves. Their image is of ‘77 punk crash landing on the set of Mad Max Beyond Thunder Dome.
Many of the ideas and riffs go back as far as Entrails’ early '90s salad days and most of these songs have already appeared on their first two albums, Tales From the Morgue and The Tomb Awaits. That Resurrected From the Grave is appearing so shortly after the release of the critically lauded Raging Death album seems more like Metal Blade flooding the market and keeping a potential meal ticket earning those meals.
This Montréal-based quartet certainly threw down the gauntlet in titling their debut Unrelenting Fucking Hatred. Thankfully, their flensing-knife-scraping-across-black-metal's-open-wound lived up to the labelling.
Since 2002, the French band has been on a prolific seven album scavenger hunt for the most grizzled, colossal and Earth-moving guitar tone. And just when you think their six-string approximation of liquid tar oozing out of a smouldering volcano can’t get any more tectonically sloth-like, they discover new ways of sonically the crushing, killing and destroying.
