heavy metal
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In a week packed with releases from music industry veterans including Neil Diamond, Chris De Burgh and Status Quo, it’s actually the new one from Slipknot that’s the most interesting. .5: The Gray Chapter is the mask-wearing Iowan metallers’ first album in six years, and their first since the 2010 death of founding member and bassist Paul Gray from an accidental overdose. As its title suggests, much of this album is a tribute to friend and colleague – and, as the genre suggests, it’s one that is brutal, honest and raw.Musical tributes to absent friends are not rare – “Silver Bridge”, from Read more ...
caspar.gomez
PrologueOn Thursday 26 June I arrive at a cloudy but warm Glastonbury Festival, set up camp, eat sausages, chase after DJ Richie Hawtin for an interview that never happens, then acclimatise, settle, let this hedonist Mecca do its work on me…Friday 27 JuneIt starts as spotting. Then it lets go. The sound of droplets pattering against the outer skin of the brown four-person tent becomes a regular tattoo. I lie within, waiting out the mind-fuzz of yesterday’s cider, whisky and chemicals, munching on a breakfast of Morrisons Cheese Savouries (which are, incidentally, addictive). I wonder if 2014 Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Jon Lord may have tickled his last ivory in 2012, but last night his spirit lived defiantly on. The great and the good from both heavy and contemporary music gathered in his memory. It was for a serious purpose - to raise funds for pancreatic cancer care. But, boy, what a time we had doing it. A revolving door of stars brought us wild solos, screaming vocals and thundering rhythms. But before all the classic rock, culminating in a set from Deep Purple, came something a little more classical.The first hour was devoted to Lord’s orchestral compositions. Our host was “whispering” Bob Harris, who Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Read anything about rock music in the Seventies - about British hard rock music in particular - and three bands are pushed forward as titans: Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. However, while both Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin have gone on to receive widespread critical acclaim and massive sales since their glory days, Deep Purple have assumed the position of a guilty pleasure – at best. How is it that the band who produced songs such as “Black Night”, “Highway Star” and “Smoke on the Water” have not been subject to a whole Friday night’s coverage on BBC Four?The line-up fronted by Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In their new, semi-fantastical concert movie Metallica: Through the Never, the gas-masked marauder who hunts the band’s fictional roadie, Trip, through a nightmare landscape, pictured below, is less cinematically memorable than Metallica themselves. Director Nimrod Antal gets his cameras up amongst them on-stage, as their muscles and eyes bulge and mouths gape, revving up the fans with how much they get off on this music, too.Metallica have been metal’s most important and respected band for much of their 32 years. Debut Kill ‘Em All (1983) combined speeding guitar athleticism and pummelling Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There is no guarantee of success in any area of rock and pop but those who wish to succeed through sheer graft might look to metal as their main chance. While multiple bands in other genres have fleeting, unpredictable moments in the sun, a decent metal act ticking the right boxes with the fans and initially willing to slog the circuit for 350 nights of every year, especially in the endless wilds of Middle America, can build and build and build. Look at Iron Maiden, possibly the biggest band of their vintage in the world. They do what they do with thundering, enjoyable efficiency, are beloved Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I write as a listener and concerned citizen. It's 2013, the legends of dad rock are facing the death squad: no liquids, no solids, no chance, baby. There's something dead in the water and a new breed is feeding on the remains. Welcome to Deathcore, Screamo, Metalcore, whatever.Asking Alexandria come from Yorkshire. They're on their third album, on the Sumerian label (got to love the name), and the lynchpins are guitarist Ben Bruce and singer Danny Worsnop. They rock like men on three legs – crunching, stop-start, arhythmic, stuttering guitar riffs that sound as if they sprouted out of the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The original Black Sabbath were a feat of engineering on a par with a classic Land Rover or an AK47. Everything about them was basic, brutal, unadorned and brilliantly functional – and as such achieved a very real, if rather grim, kind of beauty. So it's very nice indeed to see Tony Iommi's churning detuned guitar, Ozzy Osbourne's desolate howl (one of the most inhuman voices in popular music this side of Kraftwerk, in fact) and Geezer Butler's basslines and lyrics of alienation reunited, 35 years after they last recorded together.There are issues here. Sadly original drummer Bill Ward is Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In its day Alice in Chains’ so-called “sludge metal” – something a bit like the sound of industrial machinery pulled through treacle – was some of most darkly brilliant music to come out of Seattle. Much of this was down to Layne Staley’s drug-soaked lyrics which eventually proved prescient: in 2002 he succumbed to an overdose. Seven years later, when guitarist Jerry Cantrell resurrected the band, many wondered how long the new line-up could keep it up.On the strength of this new album they can do it as long as they like. The droning guitars, sledgehammer drums and bitter melodies on The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Continuing its voyage through Scandinavia’s music, theartsdesk opens the latest chapter in Norway with Still Life With Eggplant, the 16th album from Trondheim’s prolific, long-lived, occasionally challenging and always vital Motorpsycho.Their last album, 2012’s The Death Defying Unicorn, was an orchestrated collaboration with jazz composer and musician Ståle Storløkken which was performed at Oslo’s opera house. The one before that, 2010’s Heavy Metal Fruit, included the 20-minute “Gullible's Travails” and was almost as musically elaborate as …Unicorn. Their new album, the magnificent Still Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Blue Öyster Cult: The Columbia Albums CollectionBlue Öyster Cult were about more than the music. They seemingly arrived fully formed with a ready-made mythos and mystery. Their first two albums had no pictures of the band and weird, Escher-esque art. Their symbol, an inverted hybrid question mark and cross, suggested they were in thrall to a shadowy cult. Song titles like “Cities on Flame With Rock ‘n’ Roll”, “7 Screaming Diz-Busters” and “Career of Evil” fostered the impression they were zeal-filled revolutionaries. Their third album, issued in 1974, included a track called “ME 262” and Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Back in the early Eighties, Saxon made the heavy metal equivalent of home-cooked roast beef and Yorkshire pud. Axe-grinding albums like Denim and Leather and a work-ethic straight from the Barnsley pits made Biff Byford and the lads a loveable bunch. Their meat-and-potatoes approach, however, meant they have always struggled to compete commercially with the likes of Iron Maiden and Def Leppard. The band never seemed to care. Sacrifice sees them complete their 20th album in 34 years. Just. In true Spinal Tap fashion it has arrived two weeks late due to “manufacturing problems”.That’s not the Read more ...