(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) 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) Angel Witch never got their due, and that has bothered me for forty years. The London band recorded a debut in 1980 that most metalheads now count among the defining records of the new wave of British heavy metal. Iron Maiden came up in that same wave. So did ...
(TheBRHM.com) In a recent Drumeo clip, Ray Luzier’s drum tech Mark Bennett held up a discontinued Pearl Copper Free Floating snare and let a secret slip. That copper drum, he explained almost offhand, is what Luzier used while tracking the new Korn record. Fourteen albums in and now working on ...
(TheBRHM.com) Drop the needle on “Paranoid” and it’s over before your coffee cools. Black Sabbath said what needed saying in under three, then walked off and left you rattled. That was the deal. You had a point, you landed it, nobody stretched the clock to feel important. Motörhead ran the ...
(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 ...