(TheBRHM.com) Few stretches expose the widening fault line inside heavy metal as sharply as the middle of the eighties, when the genre put forward two rival answers to a single question: what is all this noise actually for? One arrived drenched in blood and speed, Slayer’s Reign in Blood compressing ...

(TheBRHM.com) You could argue rock got knocked sideways by three guys who never asked for the job. Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic started Nirvana in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1987, and when Dave Grohl joined in 1990, the lineup that would crack the whole thing open was finally in place. The ...

(TheBRHM.com) Iron Maiden stood at the kind of crossroads in the autumn of 1986 that has quietly ended more than a few careers in heavy metal. The World Slavery Tour had ended the previous summer, leaving the band exhausted, and now the five of them faced a hard question. Grow, ...

(TheBRHM.com) Every genre keeps a few official saints, and the loud stuff runs the same way. Iron Maiden gets the theatrical operas about mummies and fighter planes. Judas Priest gets the leather and studs mythology. Sabbath, rightly, gets handled like scripture. Sitting just beneath those household names, though, was a ...

(TheBRHM.com) Forty years is a long time for anything to stay dangerous. Most records that old have softened into nostalgia by now, the kind of thing you nod along to at a cookout while somebody younger asks who these guys even are. Then there’s the heavy metal monster Slayer let ...

(TheBRHM.com) Serious students of heavy music tend to agree on a lineage. Black Sabbath conjured the darkness. Deep Purple supplied the velocity and the roar. Judas Priest bolted on the leather and the twin guitar assault, and Iron Maiden lifted the whole enterprise toward opera. Recite that bloodline in any ...

(TheBRHM.com) Funny how a whole group shrinks down to a single tune. Bring up Thin Lizzy at a cookout and watch it happen, somebody grins, hums the one about the boys strolling back into town, and figures that settles it. Great tune, no argument. Treating a single hit as the ...

(TheBRHM.com) Somewhere past the six minute stretch of Sleep‘s “Dopesmoker,” a track that rolls on for over an hour, the whole idea reveals itself. Almost nothing has shifted. That is the design. A riff loops, sags, bends, and breathes, and if you can settle into that groove without your thumb ...

(TheBRHM.com) Most bands that chase reinvention lose the thread and come out sounding like somebody else entirely. Mastodon spent twenty odd years morphing and never once stopped sounding like Mastodon. Go back to their 2002 arrival with Remission. Nobody hearing that thing would have bet a nickel on where this ...

(TheBRHM.com) Some singers step to a microphone and you believe them. That was the whole trick with Ronnie James Dio, except it wasn’t a trick at all. When he sang about a rider crossing a burning desert, you saw the horse. When he warned you about the thing waiting in ...