(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 ...

(TheBRHM.com) Some voices you recognize inside two seconds. Three rooms away, dishes running, somebody talking over the stereo, and still that wail cuts clean through and you know exactly who owns it. Ozzy had one of those. Not pretty in the trained sense. Never powerful the way opera measures power. ...

(TheBRHM.com) Something happened in the space of about twelve months that split the story of loud guitars into before and after. Heavy metal did not get invented in 1980. Anybody who tells you that skipped a whole decade. The loud stuff had been rumbling since Sabbath opened 1970 with that ...

(TheBRHM.com) Every origin story wants a clean starting line, and the one heavy metal tells on itself usually points to Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut, unleashed in February 1970 with Tony Iommi’s ominous tritone announcing that something darker had arrived. Tidy tale. Also missing a chapter. Because a solid five years ...

(TheBRHM.com) There is a lazy piece of conventional wisdom that trails heavy metal around like a bad smell, the notion that once a band gets smart it stops being able to hurt you. Add a philosophy reading list, a few sprawling arrangements, some odd meters, and supposedly you have traded ...