(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 ...
(TheBRHM.com) Rock bands are supposed to fall apart. That is more or less built into the job the second real money shows up. One guy develops a habit. Another decides he wrote all the good parts and everybody else is dead weight. A manager skims, a lawyer gets involved, and ...
(TheBRHM.com) Something cracked open in the summer of 1991, and you felt it before you could explain it. “Enter Sandman” came slinking out of car speakers with that heavy, dragging riff, and all of a sudden the guys who used to live on the fringes were sitting right there in ...
(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 ...