(TheBRHM.com) Most people slap a label on this band and walk away satisfied. Funk rock. Two words, case closed. That tag has followed them since the mid eighties, and it flattens something that deserves a much closer listen. What they built over four decades refuses to sit still inside any ...

(TheBRHM.com) Go through the metal albums that actually stuck around and you keep bumping into the same thing. Somewhere on the track list sits a cut that has no business being there, and half the time that misfit is exactly why the whole record still lands. Distortion does a funny ...

(TheBRHM.com) They kept showing up. That’s the whole story once you strip it down. The obituaries kept coming. Radio moved on to whatever felt safer that season. And the people who built this music just kept plugging in anyway. There was no parade. Not one apology offered. Just another van, ...

(TheBRHM.com) The needle hit the wax, maybe three seconds of a riff rolled by, and you already knew whose record was turning. No vocals required. That counted for something back then. It meant you were paying attention when paying attention was the whole point. A buddy would flip a cassette ...

(TheBRHM.com) Something shifted once the calendar rolled past 1999. A wave of younger bands came up doing the one thing a good chunk of longtime listeners could not stomach. They cracked themselves open. The old guard roared about war, about demons, about the joy of burning everything to the ground. ...

(TheBRHM.com) Few acts in rock history have blurred the border between musicianship and merchandising as completely as the four New Yorkers who turned greasepaint into a fortune. Here’s the thing nobody wants to say at the cookout. The legend got built on lunchboxes. Now hold on before you fire off ...

(TheBRHM.com) The claim that heavy music died the moment Seattle arrived came from writers who only counted what a television screen was willing to show them. Rock magazines printed the obituary around 1992 and not one editor at those desks bothered checking for a pulse first. Critics who spent a ...

(TheBRHM.com) Few acts in popular music have completed a more total reversal of identity than the London blues outfit that spent the sixties positioning itself as a threat to decent society and now operates as one of the most efficient revenue machines in live entertainment. That reversal deserves an honest ...

(TheBRHM.com) Genre labels tend to outlive the accuracy that earned them, and no American act has lived more comfortably inside an incomplete label, or profited from it more handsomely, than Van Halen. Ask a room full of purists and half of them will swear those four dudes out of Pasadena ...

(TheBRHM.com) Certain records demand to be reconsidered, and the four acts I want to lay out here have waited long enough for their due. Growing up, I was the one kid on the block whose speakers didn’t fit the profile. Folks expected one thing rolling out of my window and ...