Author John Skibeat
For any one person to take it solely upon themselves to create music and get it heard is a victory for desire, dedication and sheer bloody-mindedness. Sure, eventually there is the potential for future help from management, a PR or… Continue Reading →
It’s late on a Monday night and The Underworld in Camden is packed to capacity. When they’re not crowdsurfing, cheering or chanting, this sea of metalheads are bouncing about like lunatics. Who cares that they may well have already seen… Continue Reading →
My first experience of Exivious finds me questioning my relationship with metal and my own expectations of metal – at what point does something stop being metal and start being something else? The reason for this self-analysis is due to… Continue Reading →
A quick glance around reveals just how far this modern obsession for all-things retrospective has come. From the re-emergence of the flared trouser or a penchant for all things eyeball-meltingly fluorescent to our longing for the foods we grew up… Continue Reading →
“It’s true, some wines improve with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place.” Abigail van Buren’s quote is especially apt when applied to Ihsahn’s solo career. Having spent his youth blowing us away with metal… Continue Reading →
The PR blurb for London’s Antlered Man describe their new album as “dark” and “weird”. Though they might not be the most complimentary descriptors, they’re not a million miles off with that. You’d certainly have trouble boxing them up into… Continue Reading →
Most debut albums tend to be rough-and-ready and recorded in a day by the lead singer’s dodgy Uncle Frank who happens to own a beat-up old eight-track. Well, perhaps not quite that punk, but they do usually veer towards being… Continue Reading →
The album art, a colourless, out-of-focus shack lost in a barren wasteland, should tip you off to the kind of music that lurks within. Thränenkind are just one of a batch of ambient hardcore bands that seem to be turning… Continue Reading →
Little of it seems to reach our Western senses, but there really is a veritable hotbed of doom and drone down in the remote and impossibly vast country of Russia. Maybe it’s the humidity of the cities or the often… Continue Reading →
At the forefront of the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, lurking between the spasming core of Lamb Of God and the thundering grooves of Machine Head, Chimaira have forged a network of paths, rarely stopping to settle too long… Continue Reading →
Nearly a year has passed since that fateful day when the Baroness tour bus plunged 30ft off a viaduct in Bath, England. Nine folks were transported to hospital that day, all with severe injuries. Some suffered more than others and… Continue Reading →
The Cambridgeshire Fens are certainly an interesting choice of venue for a festival. It’s not going to disturb the neighbours because there aren’t any, but it’s also nigh on impossible to get to other than by bike or car. This… Continue Reading →