(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 ...

(TheBRHM.com) Every couple of years the same conversation comes back around like a chorus you’re sick of. Somebody asks which young act is destined to become the next Metallica. You hear it at shows, in comment sections, on those podcasts that burn forty minutes arguing over the snare sound on ...

(TheBRHM.com) Some careers burn bright and vanish fast. Two strong records, a couple of tours, then the slow slide into nostalgia bookings and reunion paydays. Mille Petrozza never signed up for that ending, and these days he is still very much on the attack, not resting on a plaque. He ...

(TheBRHM.com) Kurdt Vanderhoof already knew what he wanted his band to sound like while most everybody else was still fumbling toward it. Metal Church had begun in San Francisco, but after Vanderhoof returned to his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, the lineup that became the classic Metal Church took shape. This ...

(TheBRHM.com) Bring up Hendrix and folks reach for the tie-dye first. The scarves. That burning guitar at Monterey. Flowers in the hair, incense curling through some California afternoon in 1967. That picture stuck, and it flattened him. What got buried underneath all the soft-focus mythology was the pure menace in ...