(TheBRHM.com) Picture a basement somewhere in the East Bay around 1982, tape decks humming, kids dubbing demos onto cassettes and mailing them across the country like contraband. That was the cradle. Thrash grew up poor, loud, and proud of having nothing, built as a fist swung at the hairspray crowd ...

(TheBRHM.com) There’s a band out of Florida that half the metal faithful will swear got robbed by history. Savatage. A pair of brothers from the Tampa Bay area cooked up a sound few American metal bands had the nerve to chase, part Sabbath doom and part Broadway theater. Yet the ...

(TheBRHM.com) A few bands get the arena. Others get the magazine cover, the platinum plaque, the festival billing in letters you can read from the parking lot. Then there is the outfit that earned the respect of every musician in the room and somehow missed the party anyway. That is ...

(TheBRHM.com) Word reached the Legions on October 1st, and the floor shifted under everyone who ever worshipped at the altar of distortion. Conrad Lant, the Newcastle force the planet knew as Cronos, was gone at 63. No cause has been named. His son Nathan spoke for family and faithful at ...

(TheBRHM.com) Forty autumns back, a chrome skull with its eyes bolted shut and its ears clamped tight stood before the United Nations, hoisting a For Sale sign over the whole rotten transaction. Vic Rattlehead, the Megadeth mascot grinning through welded metal, put a face on an argument most people in 1986 ...

(TheBRHM.com) Most folks meet Fleetwood Mac inside a golden California haze, all mirror ball harmonies and “Dreams” pouring from a car radio on some lazy afternoon. Wind the clock back nearly a decade before that, though, and you land somewhere dirtier and louder, way closer to the swampy roots that ...

(TheBRHM.com) Walk into any argument about the titans of heavy music and someone always reaches for a sales figure. Platinum plaques, chart peaks, stadium gates, the full scorecard of commerce. That scorecard lies far more often than it tells the truth. A handful of the most vital names in this ...

(TheBRHM.com) Crack open almost any history of the genre and the plot runs identical. Birmingham birthed Black Sabbath. Judas Priest sharpened the blades, then a swarm of leather kids calling themselves the New Wave of British Heavy Metal hauled the whole thing into the 1980s. Maiden. Saxon. Diamond Head. Tidy ...

(TheBRHM.com) Somewhere between the endless hunt for the next big thing and the tired grumble that nothing good gets made anymore, two groups from different corners of America have been doing something quietly radical. They stopped chasing. Sumerlands out of Philadelphia and Eternal Champion out of Austin looked at the ...

(TheBRHM.com) Somebody always ends up holding the short straw. In every gang of legends there’s the name spoken last, with a touch less reverence, the one folks nod at politely before circling right back to the heavy hitters. For the better part of forty years that role landed on five ...