Sound Barrier came up out of Los Angeles in 1980. Bernie K. on vocals. Spacey T. tearing up the guitar. Stanley E. holding down bass. Dave “Skavido” Brown behind the kit. Bernie K. and Spacey T. first crossed paths grinding in an R&B funk outfit, then decided they wanted something heavier, louder, meaner. So they chased it. Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Thin Lizzy, even a little Rush in the DNA when it came to musicianship. This was real metal, dual leads and all, not some watered down crossover thing cooked up in a boardroom.

Picture the Sunset Strip back then. Hairspray for days. Marshall stacks stacked to the ceiling. Spandex and bad attitudes everywhere you looked. Sound Barrier walked into that circus with chops most of those Aqua Net bands couldn’t touch, and they looked sharp doing it. They had the sound. They had the stage presence. Spacey T. could flat out play, fluid and nasty in the same breath, the kind of guitarist other guitarists nodded at from the side of the stage.

Then came the part that should have changed their lives. MCA signed them in 1982. A major. Real money, real distribution, real machinery behind the music. Sound Barrier became widely credited as the first all-African-American metal band to land a major-label deal, which in 1982 was no small thing. Their debut, Total Control, dropped in 1983. Nine tracks, melodic where it needed to be, blistering where it counted. By every measure that mattered on paper, these brothers had arrived.

So what happened? The record moved around twelve thousand copies and MCA dropped them. Twelve thousand. For a band with that kind of talent and that kind of shot, that number doesn’t tell a story about the music. It tells a story about everything wrapped around the music.

Here’s where it gets real. A radio programmer in 1983 gets a press photo across his desk. Four Black faces. What does he assume before he even drops the needle? R&B. Funk. Soul. Anything but a band that worships Priest. So the record never sniffs the rock format that would have loved it, and it sure isn’t getting spun on the urban stations either, because it’s loud guitar music that doesn’t fit their lane. No home anywhere. Caught in the gap nobody built a bridge across.

And the label? Marketing a metal band means a specific playbook. Get them in the rock rags. Get the video in rotation. Push the single to album rock radio. Now imagine the promo guy whose whole job is selling to programmers he knows are biased, who maybe carries some of that same baggage himself. Does he fight that fight, or does he let the record die quiet and move on to the next sure thing? Sound Barrier got the deal. What they didn’t get was anybody swinging for them.

You want to talk MTV while we’re here. In those early years, MTV kept a nearly all-white playlist and gave very little space to Black artists. We all know the stories. It took muscle from a major label and a guitar solo from a white rock god before “Beat It” helped crack that wall wide open. A young Black metal band with a modest budget and no leverage? Forget it. The one place a wild looking, hard charging act could have caught fire visually was a door bolted shut from the inside. So the look that should have been an asset never reached the eyeballs that needed to see it.

Genre boxes did the rest of the damage. The industry loves a tidy shelf. Put the artist in a category, hand the category to the right department, collect the check. A Black act gets filed under urban almost on reflex, no matter what’s actually coming out of the speakers. Sound Barrier made heavy metal, full stop, but the system kept trying to read them as something they weren’t. When the box doesn’t fit the music, it’s always the artist who bleeds, never the box.

They didn’t fold up and quit, though. That part I love. After MCA cut them loose, they put out the Born to Rock EP in 1984 on their own Pit Bull imprint. Do it yourself before do it yourself had a name. Then Metal Blade came calling and they cut Speed of Light in 1986, even flipping a Thin Lizzy tune in the process, which felt like a wink to anybody paying attention to where their hearts lived. By then, the original all-Black lineup had already shifted after Stanley E. left and Emil Lech joined on bass. By 1987, the band itself had broken apart, and the music world barely noticed a thing.

Now watch the timing, because it stings. A year or so later, Living Colour walks through a door Sound Barrier spent the decade pushing against. Vernon Reid had the Black Rock Coalition behind him, a movement built specifically to drag this exact conversation into the light, plus a co-sign from a producer with a household name. “Cult of Personality” hits, the Grammy comes, and suddenly the mainstream acts surprised that Black folks play rock, as if Chuck Berry didn’t invent half the vocabulary. Sound Barrier had been saying the same thing years earlier into a room that wasn’t ready to hear it yet. Right message. Too soon. That’s the cruelest spot to stand in, knocking before anybody decides to answer.

The talent never went anywhere, by the way. Spacey T. kept eating. He joined Mother’s Finest and helped make a record literally titled Black Radio Won’t Play This Record, which might be the most honest album name in the history of the format wars. Later he ran with Fishbone for years, touring and recording, putting that fluid menace to work for a whole new crowd. The man’s fingerprints are all over the alternative and funk metal lineage, even when the casual listener never connected the dots back to where it started.

The story gets a little redemption, too, which I needed. In 2017 a reunited Sound Barrier played the Whisky a Go Go under a banner that read Metal Has No Color, and the room was thick with believers. Tom Morello showed up and produced their new single. Corey Glover from Living Colour was there. dUg Pinnick from King’s X stood in the building. A generation of Black rock musicians who came after, paying respect to the cats who took the early shots and ate the early losses. That night the truth finally got said out loud to a crowd that already knew it in their bones.

So why does any of this matter now? Because the thing that buried Sound Barrier was never the riffs and never the songs. It was a machine that couldn’t read a photograph without flinching. The sound was there. The look was there. The chops were undeniable and the major-label shot was real. What failed was an industry that built its shelves before it built any imagination, and a country that kept acting shocked at something it had been told a hundred times already.

I want you to go find Total Control. Put it on loud. Sit with the fact that this was sitting right there in 1983, waiting for somebody brave enough to push it the way it deserved, and nobody did. Then think about every other name we lost the same way, the ones who didn’t get a reunion night or a Morello cameo, the ones who just faded because the gatekeepers couldn’t see past a press photo.

Sound Barrier wasn’t ahead of the music. They were dead even with it. The world was just running late, and four bad brothers from LA paid the bill for everybody else’s lag. Crank it up. Say their names. They earned that much and a whole lot more.

Staff Writer; Bobby Jackson

This brother is dedicated to covering heavy metal and rock music with depth, respect, and cultural awareness. His writing highlights Black heavy metal and rock artists while also celebrating the genre’s broader legacy, influence, and artistic power.

Contact him at: BobbyJ@TheBRHM.com.

Black Death. Say the name slow and let it sit. These dudes came together in 1977, so picture it. Disco running the airwaves, everybody out on the floor doing the hustle, and meanwhile down in the Rust Belt you got Greg Hicks, Phil Bullard, and Clayborn Pinkins building something loud and ugly and beautiful with no lane to even drive it in. No name yet. No singer for a stretch. Just three Black men making a racket nobody had given them permission to make. Sit with how bold that is. There was no roadmap. Nobody to copy off of. They were drawing the picture and inventing the colors at the same time.

Then Siki Spacek walked through the door, and the whole thing snapped into focus. Real name Reginald Gamble, but the man renamed himself like a comic villain and backed up every syllable. He turned into the voice, the writer, the lead riff machine, the engine that pulled the whole train. And here’s the part that gets me grinning every single time. The fellas he linked up with didn’t really know what they were getting into. Siki had to teach them. Sat them down with Scorpions songs first. Then he dragged the crew to a Judas Priest concert just so they could feel in their chest what he was already hearing in his head. You understand what kind of belief that takes? You’re chasing a sound nobody around you recognizes, and instead of folding, you school your own people until they can hand it back to you.

So now let me get to why I titled this thing the way I did. Ahead of their time. And I don’t mean by a year or two. I mean these brothers were operating in a future the rest of us hadn’t booked tickets for.

Think about the timeline real careful. When D.R.I. and Suicidal Tendencies and that whole crossover wave finally taught the hardcore kids how to bang their heads, when speed and punk officially shook hands and the magazines acted like somebody had split the atom, Cleveland’s finest had already been smashing those worlds together in sweaty little dive bars for years. The self-titled record didn’t even land until 1984 on Auburn Records, which is its own kind of perfect. But the songs on it were older than that. Road-tested. Beaten into shape on stage long before any tape rolled.

And what does that record actually sound like? It runs. It runs hard. You hear thrash before the word thrash was on everybody’s lips. You hear speed that’s about to trip over its own feet and somehow never does. You hear punk in the snot and the swagger and the way the whole thing refuses to be polite. The production is rough as a gravel road, no budget, no studio gloss, like the tape itself was a little scared of them. And honest to God that’s the magic. That dirt under the fingernails is the point.

Reach for a track called “The Scream of the Iron Messiah” and brace yourself, because that’s the four-piece at full sprint, riffs tumbling over each other with Siki’s voice clawing up out of his usual deep growl into something almost feral. Then you got “Streetwalker,” which is where the lyrics earn their keep. That ain’t dungeons and dragons fantasy fluff. That’s life on the corner, the grind, the hustle, the stuff Siki could see right outside the window. Long before a lot of these subgenres pretended to discover that you could put real street truth inside heavy music, this Ohio crew was already doing it without making a press release about it. “Night of the Living Death” and “Fear No Evil” round it out, and the whole platter holds together like one long fever.

Now I can’t tell this story honest and skip the heartbreak, because there’s a heavy one. Their first bass player, Clayborn Pinkins, got murdered in 1979. Shot dead. The man went to pick up his lady from a chicken spot over where Broadway meets Union, and that was it. Gone, right at the start, before he ever got to watch what they’d become. That kind of loss could have buried the whole project. Folks have quit over a whole lot less. Darrell Harris eventually slid in on bass and locked down the lineup you hear on the album, but you best believe that shadow followed the music.

And here’s a thing that knots my stomach a little. For all that vision, for all that fire, they never really busted out of their hometown. They opened for cats like Rick Derringer, Anvil, and Helix. Real rooms, real crowds. But the bigger stages, the major label money, the world tour, none of it came knocking. They watched other acts who looked a little more familiar, a little more expected, walk right past them and grab the deals. You want to talk about a tax that doesn’t show up on any receipt. Being first and being unfamiliar at the same time can cost a man everything but the satisfaction of having done it.

You’ll catch some debate about whether they were truly the very first all African American crew in the genre. Sound Barrier, another pioneering all-Black heavy metal band, released a full-length record, Total Control, in 1983, one year before Black Death’s 1984 album. Fair enough. But Black Death’s roots go back to 1977, and most heads who know the history still give these Cleveland boys the crown for arriving on the scene first. Siki himself never made the whole thing about color anyway. He’s got this great line about how being all dark skinned wasn’t some plan they cooked up in a back room. To him it was simply how the lineup turned out, and a coloring book stays a coloring book no matter what shades you fill it with. He just wanted to build the ultimate heavy band, the kind that could hit every emotion the way Hendrix and Sabbath and the rest hit theirs. Race was real, he knew the world made it real, but the mission was the music first.

They went quiet around 1988 and stayed mostly silent for two long decades. When the dust finally settled there was even a little family feud over the name, Siki running one camp and Greg another, the way these old stories always seem to fracture. Spacek’s version eventually rolled on as Black Death Resurrected. But the part that warms me is what happened to that lone old album. Hells Headbangers got it reissued, put it back in physical form, and all of a sudden a new generation started catching on. Decibel wrote it up. Kerrang gave it ink. Collectors started chasing the original pressing like buried treasure, because that’s exactly what it is.

So when I say they were ahead of their time, here’s what I really mean. The blend they were brewing in 1977, the way thrash and speed and punk attitude and honest social truth all got thrown in one pot, became the recipe a dozen famous outfits would later get rich and celebrated for. These dudes were the prototype. The proof of concept nobody acknowledged. They showed it could be done, and then the spotlight swung over their heads and landed on the folks who arrived after the door was already open.

And maybe the sweetest part, for somebody like me, is what their whole existence quietly says back to that uncle at the cookout. Brothers absolutely do rock. Brothers helped build the thing. Black men were in the engine room of heavy music from the jump, sweating and bleeding and inventing, whether the history books bothered to write it down or not.

Go put that record on. Crank it loud enough to annoy your neighbors. Then ask yourself how something this raw, this fearless, this far out in front, ever got left in the dark this long. Black Death earned their flowers a long, long time ago. The least we can do is finally hand them over.

Staff Writer; Bobby Jackson

This brother is dedicated to covering heavy metal and rock music with depth, respect, and cultural awareness. His writing highlights Black heavy metal and rock artists while also celebrating the genre’s broader legacy, influence, and artistic power.

Contact him at: BobbyJ@TheBRHM.com.

Which is the whole point, when you boil it down. They would not tidy it up.

Most bands from that era have settled into a comfortable little routine by now. Tour the hits, smile for the cameras, move the box set, hand some streaming service a tidy playlist your aunt can put on at a cookout. There is nothing wrong with getting old. We all do it. But there is a difference between aging and getting embalmed, and a lot of these classic acts chose the second option a long time ago. Museum pieces, basically. Folks file past behind the glass, nod respectfully, grab a shirt in the gift shop, and head home feeling like they witnessed history instead of feeling like they survived something.

Guns N’ Roses never let you leave feeling safe.

Think about what they actually were when they hit. A pack of broke, strung out, beautiful disasters from the Sunset Strip who sounded like a knife fight set to music. Axl could not stop running his mouth. Slash looked like he crawled out of a back alley and tuned a guitar in his sleep. Duff and Izzy and Steven held the bottom together while the whole thing threatened to fly apart at any second. And that tension, that feeling that the wheels could come off mid song, was not an accident. It was the product. Nobody put these guys on to relax. The whole pull was wanting to feel like anything could happen.

And anything usually did.

Riots. Actual riots. Shows that started two hours late or never started at all. Band members storming off, suing each other, disappearing for years. A frontman who would walk off stage if the vibe was wrong and let an entire stadium turn on him. People love to talk about that stuff like it was a flaw, like it was the part you have to apologize for now. I see it different. That mess was the proof. It was proof that there was a real human pulse underneath, not a corporate machine that had already decided exactly how the night was going to go before anybody bought a ticket.

Compare that to how a lot of legacy bands run their show now. Everything scripted down to the second. Pyro on cue. The between song banter rehearsed so many times it has lost its pulse. Same setlist for fifteen years because some algorithm decided the fans want comfort more than they want a heartbeat. And look, comfort is a fine thing to sell. But it is the flat opposite of what dragged me toward this music as a kid in the first place. Rock was supposed to make my mama nervous when it came through the wall. It was supposed to feel a little out of pocket. The minute it got predictable, it stopped being a threat and started being furniture you could fall asleep in front of.

Then there is Chinese Democracy, which I will go to bat for against anybody who wants to snicker. Dude spent more than a decade chasing one record, and nearly two decades passed between the last original Guns album and Chinese Democracy. Burned through musicians, money, whole producers, patience nobody had to spare. By every rulebook on how a career is supposed to go, it was a wreck. And yet. The man was willing to set fire to his own legend chasing some impossible noise stuck in his skull, and that is more rock to me than any focus grouped comeback could dream of being. Unreasonable. Difficult. Probably a nightmare in the studio. That is just the bill that comes due when you care about the thing more than you care about looking cool in front of it, and most folks fold long before that bill arrives.

Here is where the Black rock fan in me leans all the way in. The truth is I have always heard Guns through a longer story, a music that was never supposed to mind its manners. Blues came up dirty in juke joints nobody respectable wanted to be caught near. Jazz had grown men clutching their pearls. And hip hop, Lord, hip hop scared this entire country so bad they tried to write laws against it. Notice the pattern. Every single thing this culture has birthed got its real power at the exact moment it was too wild to keep on a leash. So when I catch folks wishing Guns would grow up and act right, I already know that tune. It is the same old hand reaching to sand the danger off everything we ever made. Nah. Keep the danger. The danger is the point.

That is why the reunion hit different too. When Slash and Duff finally came back around and the classic core got back on a stage together, it was not some clean fairy tale ending. There was real history in that room. Decades of beef, ego, addiction, money, betrayal, all of it standing right there in plain sight. And you could feel it. That was not nostalgia. Nostalgia is smooth. This was lumpy and tense and electric because everybody knew how badly it could have gone, and the fact that it held together at all felt like a small miracle instead of a guaranteed payday.

People still care because the stakes never disappeared. With most reunions the outcome is locked in before the lights even drop, which means the ticket is really just paying to relive a memory. With Guns there is always a tiny voice in the back of your head wondering if tonight is the night it all blows up again. That uncertainty keeps the whole thing alive. It keeps it human. Nobody can put it behind glass because it will not sit still long enough to be framed.

I think about young heads finding this band for the first time, kids who were not even a thought when Appetite dropped. My nephew put it on in my car last summer, no warning, and watched my face. What he stumbled into was not some polished, sanitized legacy act ready for the hall of fame plaque. It was the wreckage and the brilliance sitting right next to each other, the two hour late starts and the nights that became legend, a guitar tone that still sounds like somebody pulled a blade halfway out. He felt it without me explaining a thing. The whole mess reads honest precisely because nobody ever bothered to fix it. And in a moment where everything we touch gets smoothed and optimized and sculpted to never bruise a single feeling, that kind of honesty is worth more than ever.

So no, I am not here to write you a soft little tribute about the good old days. I do not want the good old days. I want the band that could not be trusted, the one your favorite radio station was a little afraid to book, the one that meant every reckless thing it said and lived to regret about half of it. That version of Guns N’ Roses is the one that still matters, and it matters because they never figured out how to be respectable, never wanted to, and never owed anybody an apology for it.

Some things are supposed to stay sharp. Nobody hands a blade to a museum and asks it to behave. You respect it for what it is and keep your fingers clear. Guns earned that respect the hard way, by being too loud and too flawed and too unpredictable to ever calm down into something safe.

They were never built to age gracefully. Thank God for that. The graceful ones get forgotten. The wild ones get remembered. And as long as there is still a little smoke coming off the wreckage, people like me are going to keep showing up to feel the heat.

Staff Writer; Terry Poole

This brother brings sharp ears, deep respect, and real passion to every heavy metal riff, rock record, and overlooked gem he covers for TheBRHM… He writes for fans who still believe loud music should have soul, history, and meaning…

One may contact him at TerryP@TheBRHM.com.

Running two vocalists is always an interesting approach. In 3IOB’s case, it was even more interesting when your primary singer (Cam Pipes) had some Painkiller-mode Rob Halford clean vox action going on and the singer handling the chorus and duet stuff (Jamie Hooper) with some modern (for the early 2000s) harsh vox.

This is also one of the things that garnered some opposing views on the band. From what I’ve seen, it’s not the existence of both vocals at the same time, it’s how they intermingle on releases in addition to lyrics that have been viewed as basic fantasy material.

Mind you, I love that low fantasy, sword and sorcery focus and I don’t necessarily need all the lore and intrigues of different nations and treaties when there’s an evil sorcerer or some beast that needs clapping. I’m here for sword-swinging, orc-slaying action and 3 Inches of Blood typically delivered.

Most fans introduction to 3 Inches of Blood was probably through Advance and Vanquish, a very good intro that I enjoyed. It was one of my purchases through the “4 CDs for one cent” schemes we’d occasionally get in the mail or in a magazine.

3 Inches of Blood’s First Adventure: Battlecry Under a Wintersun

Normally, I’d go into side A and side B separately, but the version available on Apple Music features some bonus tracks that piqued my interest. Full disclosure: I listened to the follow-up release Advance and Vanquish way before I got to the debut. Hell, I listened to everything post-Battlecry Under a Wintersun. This is the kind of power metal I dig. It’s as if U.S power metal OGs Omen or Jag Panzer had their Painkiller and just stayed in that mode.

It’s a different kind of power metal than Canadian OG Thor delivered two decades earlier. The debut dropped in 2002 and comes packing a cool album, 11 tracks on the initial release, and comes in at just under 37 minutes. Our longest track here is “Hall of Heroes” at just over four minutes.

For most of the tracks, you’re getting a speedy 3IOB and that’s something I greatly appreciate. Even on tracks where Cam and Jamie are screeching and screaming to the tempo of the strings and percussion, the others are still just blazing through the song giving each tale told some degree of urgency or severity.

Lyrically, it’s a lot of wars, battles, and fantasy themes. You also get what comes with those themes: stories of bravery, anthems, figures to beware of—this album could’ve served as the start of a concept series of albums.

Verdict

As a debut, it’s a decent start for 3 Inches of Blood. My sole gripe would be that Battlecry Under a Wintersun would’ve benefited greatly from the experience, line up, and production value of Advance and Vanquish. I mean greatly. What hurts the debut is the production in regards to the vocals.

Something about how the voices are mixed or layered over each other doesn’t do it for me. It’s certainly not on the band since the song “Destroy the Orcs” makes it from the debut to Advance and Vanquish and sounds great. It’s not uncommon for production of that time or creative direction to hobble an otherwise good album. In the case of Battlecry, it’s just on that specific part.

The band hung up the gear in 2015 but were sharpening their blades again in 2023 with the Fire Up the Blades and Here Awaits Thy Doom era members. From an interview in April 2026, the band acknowledged that the music and distribution industries are very different from 2015 but aimed to start “trickling” out new stuff in 2027.

While I’m looking forward to new music from 3 Inches of Blood, I say give Battlecry Under a Wintersun a remaster. When it was released, this album showed a lot of the potential the band had. With a few years and better production 3 Inches of Blood would be a banger machine.

Every release had songs to slam and they were one of my consistent releases along with 2000s and early 2010s Darkthrone and Stormwarrior. I knew I was at least going to enjoy their album that year. If I had listened to this before Advance and Vanquish, I might not have put them in rotation initially. It’s a cool album but not an essential listen in their discography.

Strongest Tracks: Destroy the Orcs, Lady Deathwish*, Curse of the Lighthouse Keeper, Balls of Ice

Decades later and I still get that same jolt. That’s the part nobody talks about enough. Most things you loved back in those teenage years end up sounding small once you grow up and your ears get older and pickier. These guys went the other direction on me. They got bigger.

Here’s my problem with a lot of what passes for hard music right now. It’s clean. Too clean. Everything’s been run through forty plugins until every rough edge got sanded smooth, every vocal tuned dead center, every drum hit lined up on a grid so tight a robot couldn’t argue with it. And the result is technically impressive and emotionally dead. You can build a perfect machine and still forget to give it a pulse. A whole lot of modern stuff sounds like it was made by people who were scared of being told they made a mistake.

AC/DC was never scared of mistakes. They built a fortune on mistakes that felt right. Listen close to those old cuts and you hear the room. You hear strings buzz. You hear Brian Johnson reaching for a note that’s living a little above his comfort zone, and instead of fixing it in some studio later, they just left the man up there sweating, because the sweat was the whole point.

Dangerous is a word I don’t throw around easy. I grew up around music that meant something, music my pops would nod his head to and music that scared the neighbors, both. So when I say these old heads still sound dangerous, I mean it. Put on Whole Lotta Rosie loud enough and your downstairs neighbor will start praying. There’s a swing in that rhythm section, Phil and Cliff back then, and the later lineups still chasing that same locked in thunder, and it feels like a fist swinging back and forth. It’s not fast. People always make the mistake of thinking heavy means fast. No. The Young brothers understood that the heaviest thing in the world is a groove that won’t quit, played by men who are in absolutely no hurry.

That patience is part of why it lives. Half these new bands play a riff once and then panic, stacking eight more parts on top because they don’t trust one good idea to hold the floor. The Australians would take a single dirty riff and ride it like they were daring you to get bored. You never did. You got hypnotized instead. That’s confidence you can’t fake with software.

And let’s talk about Angus for a second, because the man is a national treasure dressed like a schoolboy. People see the shorts and the duck walk and the tongue out and they think novelty act. Wrong. That’s a blues player at heart, somebody who clearly spent his youth wearing out records by guys who came up in juke joints and Chicago basements. You can trace the whole bloodline if you listen. The early Black guitar players bent notes until they cried, and somewhere across an ocean a skinny Scottish kid in Sydney heard that cry and decided to make it scream instead. That lineage matters to me. It reminds you that this whole loud thing we love came up from somewhere real, from pain and sweat and people who had something to say and a cheap amp to say it through.

The new stuff often forgets where it came from. It studied the surface and missed the soul. You can copy the distortion. You cannot copy the reason.

Now I’m not going to sit here and pretend these guys are saints or geniuses writing symphonies. Half their songs are about the same three subjects and you already know which ones. That’s fine. Better than fine. There’s an honesty in not pretending to be deeper than you are. They knew exactly what they were, a band built to make a sweaty crowd lose its mind on a Friday, and they did that one job better than almost anybody who ever plugged in. Knowing your purpose and nailing it dead on is its own kind of brilliance.

I caught them live years back and I’ll never forget the feeling when that giant bell came down and Brian started swinging. Grown men crying. Old white dudes, young brothers like me, kids who weren’t even born when Bon Scott was still alive, all of us screaming the same words back at the stage like a church that traded in hymns for high voltage. You don’t get that from polished. You get that from raw. From something that sounds like it might break or catch fire at any second. That edge of chaos is exactly what’s been bred out of the genre lately, and standing in that crowd I felt how badly we’ve been missing it.

Bon Scott dying and the band coming back with Brian and Back in Black instead of quitting tells you something about their spine, too. They lost their voice, literally, and answered grief by making the loudest, most alive thing of their entire run. That’s a working class response to tragedy if I ever heard one. You don’t fold. You go back to the job and you hit harder. I respect that more than any amount of studio trickery.

So why does it still have teeth in 2026 when so much else feels toothless. Because it was built true. No grid, no autotune crutch, no committee deciding what would test well. Just five guys, a few chords, and an absolute refusal to be tasteful. Taste is the enemy of this music. The minute you start worrying about being respectable you’ve already lost the thing that made it matter.

I love a lot of heavy bands. I’ve got thrash and doom and the new wave kids all in rotation, and I’ll defend the genre to anybody who calls it dumb. But when I need to remember why I fell for any of it, why a young brother sat frozen on his uncle’s floor, I go back to these grinning old maniacs in their schoolboy outfits. They remind me that the point was never to be smart. The point was to be alive, loud, and a little out of control, to make something that could still scare a quiet room.

That’s not nostalgia talking. Nostalgia is for things that died. These guys are still standing, still swinging that bell, still proving that the old way had something the new way keeps trying and failing to bottle. Turn it up. Let the neighbors worry. Some things were meant to be felt in the chest, not analyzed, and after all these years they’ve still got plenty left in the tank.

Staff Writer; Terry Poole

This brother brings sharp ears, deep respect, and real passion to every heavy metal riff, rock record, and overlooked gem he covers for TheBRHM… He writes for fans who still believe loud music should have soul, history, and meaning…

One may contact him at TerryP@TheBRHM.com.

So this one is personal. I’m not coming at it like some neutral critic with a clipboard. I’m coming at it like a fan who has carried this band’s records across half his life, which means I get to love them and side eye them in the same breath. And the question on the table is a real one. Did the biggest thrash group to ever do it lose a little of its danger once the whole planet started singing along?

Roll it back to 1983. Kill ’Em All drops and it sounds like four broke kids who borrowed gear and recorded in a closet, because that’s basically what happened. There is dirt under every fingernail of that record. Hit the Lights, Whiplash, Seek and Destroy, all of it played like the rent was due and the only currency they had was speed. James Hetfield was barking, not crooning. Kirk Hammett was peeling off solos like he was being chased. You could practically smell the cheap beer and the sweat. Nothing about it was polished, and that was the entire point.

Then came the leap that told you these dudes had bigger plans. Ride the Lightning in 1984 took the raw thrash and added architecture. For Whom the Bell Tolls rolls in heavy as a funeral. Creeping Death stomps. And then Fade to Black showed up, a slow burning piece with actual melody, and the purists clutched their pearls like the boys had gone soft already. Funny how that conversation started so early. But that track wasn’t a surrender. It was a flex. They were showing you an outfit that could be brutal and beautiful without picking just one.

For my money though, the mountaintop is 1986. Master of Puppets is the album where every gamble paid off at once. The title cut is eight minutes of pure controlled chaos. Welcome Home Sanitarium aches. Orion is a wordless instrumental so gorgeous it makes you forget these were the same maniacs screaming about death a few tracks earlier. This record is the argument in a nutshell. Raw enough to scare your mama, smart enough to study. Nobody had married those two ideas that cleanly before, and a whole generation of bands spent the next decade chasing it.

Now I have to slow down and pour one out, because right after that peak the universe took Cliff Burton. The bus flipped over in Sweden in the fall of 1986 and the bassist who anchored all that ambition was gone at twenty four. You cannot tell this story honest without sitting in that grief for a second. The hungriest, most untouchable version of this group died on that road with him. Whatever came next, came after a loss that reshaped the entire project from the inside out.

And Justice for All in 1988 felt like the band processing that pain through sheer density. The songs are long, dry, jagged, almost cold. You can barely hear the new bass in the mix, which became its own legend. One gave them their first real video and a doorway to a wider crowd. The machine was warming up. You could feel something shifting, even if you couldn’t name it yet.

Then 1991 happened and changed the math forever. The self titled joint, the one everybody calls the Black Album, sanded the eight minute epics down into tight radio bullets. Enter Sandman, Sad But True, Nothing Else Matters. Bob Rock cleaned up the production until it gleamed. And it worked beyond anybody’s wildest dream, selling tens of millions and turning a thrash crew from the underground into stadium gods who soundtracked football games and car commercials. Here is where the central tension finally bursts wide open.

Because did that mean they sold out? My honest take is more complicated than a simple yes. Those tunes are built like tanks. Enter Sandman is a perfect piece of writing, and anybody who pretends it isn’t is letting nostalgia lie to them. But something did change in the trade. The danger got smoothed. The records before this one felt like they might leap out the speaker and rob you. This new direction felt like it wanted to be your friend, fill an arena, get the lighters up. Not worse exactly. Tamer though. The fangs were still there, just filed down a touch so they didn’t draw as much blood.

The era that follows is where I get genuinely salty, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Load and Reload in the mid nineties brought the short haircuts, the eyeliner, the bluesy alt rock cosplay. The look screamed that they were chasing whatever was charting instead of leading the charge like they used to. Then the Napster mess landed, and Lars Ulrich became the public face of a lawsuit against the very file-sharing world where many young fans were discovering music. The most rebellious group on earth was now lecturing teenagers about downloading. Read that back slow. The irony was almost too thick to breathe.

St. Anger in 2003 is its own strange beast. They tried to sound raw again, ditched the guitar solos on purpose, and recorded a snare that sounds like somebody banging a trash can lid in an empty garage. Bless the effort, because the hunger was finally back in their eyes. The execution just tripped over its own feet. You could hear a crew trying to remember who they were after a decade of being everybody’s favorite radio metal. Watch Some Kind of Monster, the documentary from that stretch, and you see millionaires in therapy trying to locate the fire they once had for free.

To their credit, they kept swinging. Death Magnetic in 2008 reached back toward the thrashy old self with real intention and mostly nailed it. Hardwired to Self Destruct kept that thread going. 72 Seasons in 2023 proved these old heads can still gallop. They never went away, and they never stopped trying to recapture lightning. That matters. A lot of legends would have coasted on the catalog and called it a career.

So let me answer the question I started with as plain as I can. Did winning the whole world soften the edge? Yeah. It did. There is simply no version of this story where a band sells out every stadium on the globe and keeps the exact feral quality of four hungry kids in a closet. Comfort changes you. Money changes you. The threat of being broke and ignored was the fuel, and once that ran out the fire had to burn on something else.

But here is the part the angry purists always skip. Changing the edge is not the same as losing the soul. The hunger of the early days is genuinely irreplaceable, and I will scream that into a microphone. And yet, writing off everything after 1986 is lazy fan behavior dressed up as taste. These men dragged an entire underground genre into the mainstream and made it impossible to ignore. They turned thrash into a global language. Kids in countries that band never even visited learned guitar because of those riffs.

My final word is this. I keep both versions in heavy rotation, and I refuse to choose. I want the broke maniacs who recorded like the rent was due, and I want the grown survivors still trying to outrun their own legend three decades later. The teeth got filed down, sure. The bite never fully disappeared. And honestly, the fact that we are still arguing about it forty years deep is the loudest proof that what they built will outlive every one of us. Now if you’ll excuse me, Battery just kicked in again, and my spine has some straightening to do.

Staff Writer; Terry Poole

This brother brings sharp ears, deep respect, and real passion to every heavy metal riff, rock record, and overlooked gem he covers for TheBRHM… He writes for fans who still believe loud music should have soul, history, and meaning…

One may contact him at TerryP@TheBRHM.com.

Let’s look at the three things that really reignited my interest in metal music in 2006. For context, I started back listening to rock music in 2004 via Fuse TV covering the “Van’s Warped Tour”. That led to me discovering Uranium hosted by Mistress Juliya. Uranium introduced me to a lot of modern metal and metalcore bands but I wasn’t getting that history of the genre.

I was purchasing metal compilations through mail order in 2005 but I was listening to a lot hip-hop and the pop punk bands Fuse had in heavy rotation. When VH1 began pushing “Metal Month”, my interest was piqued and I would be tuning in.

Re-Airing Headbanger’s Ball

While not the biggest factor in me diving into metal, the re-runs of Headbanger’s Ball introduced me to a lot of bands from the 80s that caught my imagination. I remember staying up late and writing down band names even though I had classes to instruct the next morning.

It was in those airings that I first discovered Judas Priest and Dio through the videos for “Breaking the Law” and “Rainbow in the Dark”. Hearing their vocals made me a vocals-first fan since I love storytelling and imagery.

By the next month, I had Metal World ’73-’93 and checked out a bunch of Dio and Black Sabbath albums from the library. So, it was pretty effective in getting me interested.

Heavy: The Story of Metal

I’m a documentary fan and a metal documentary is something I’m going to set time aside for. Narrated by MTV OG and 120 Minutes host Matt Pinfield, Heavy covered the major bits of metal history.  The short of it is a focus on the hard rock influence, a little bit on punk, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the 80s boom period, thrash, glam, and the 90s.

The major bits since it only had four 40+ minute episodes to get it all in. Hell, the 90s episode (the last in the docuseries) focused more on the rise of alternative and grunge before getting into nu metal.

At time, I found it to be an engaging film but I was pretty new to metal, so I learned a lot. Looking at it more recently after listening to a lot of metal over the years and reading biographies, it was more of a decent crash course.

Think of it as a cheese sample at the supermarket. Technically barely a bite but who knows, you might just stick around.

Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey

While Heavy was a sample, Sam Dunn’s Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey was more like a two or three plate run at the buffet. There was still that “this is a good starting place to learn” factor that I get from Heavy years later but there was more of a dive into the history and origins of the genre.

The addition of the metal family tree was very helpful because it introduced bands not shown in the Headbanger’s Ball re-runs or in Heavy. It introduced a couple of subgenres, featured interviews with musicians of varying levels of success and influence, and gave us the filmmaker’s story of his love for metal.

It was an honest documentary that spawned Global Metal which explored more of the international metal scene and history and the series Metal Evolution.

Supergroup

While it didn’t have an impact on me diving into metal and becoming a fan, I guess we can’t end this with discussing Supergroup. I watched it in the first run of the show and  it was…reality TV.  It wasn’t exactly Rock of Love (which probably also aired during “Metal Month”) or Flavor of Love but more like Real World with old rockers.

It featured drama in form of stress over making new music with a band including Sebastian Bach formerly of Skid Row, Jason Bonham son of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham and formerly of UFO and Foreigner, Ted Nugent, Evan Seinfeld of Biohazard, and Scott Ian of Anthrax.

There was also some drama around Bach’s drinking in the show but he came through at end during the band’s debut show. That was the show. It was entertaining at times but it wasn’t worth the watch then or worth a rewatch now. If anything, I checked out Anthrax and early Skid Row while learning about the band members.

Do you remember VH1’s “Metal Month”? What were your favorite or least favorite parts of it? Pick your memory and share in the comments!

Centered around the mythos of Vancouver-based former Mr. USA and Mr. Canada bodybuilding champion Jon Mikl Thor, the eponymous band started out heavily rooted in the love of rock and adventures-with-swords fantasy.

Thor’s music is right up my alley thematically and you might dig them too if you’re into early Manilla Road and Manowar from the U.S, Sweden’s Heavy Load, or early Stormwitch from Germany.

The Sixth Release of Thor: Triumphant

What we’re looking at is Thor’s 2002 full-length release Triumphant and the tracklisting. When the album released, it featured ten tracks and clocked in at just 58 minutes:

1. Call of the Triumphant
2. Intercessor (from the film The Intercessor: Rock n Roll Nightmare Part 2)
3. Viking’s Funeral
4. Back for Blood
5. Anger
6. Thunderhawk
7. Everybody Needs a Hero
8. Fubar Is a Super Rocker (from the film Fubar: The Movie)
9. Hail Steeve Reeves
10. The Guardian’s Flame – An Opus by Thor I. Thunder on the Tundra, II. Crimson Twilite, III. War Hammer

I remember getting this album in 2007 as part of one of those Columbia House CD-type deals where you could get a selection of CDs for the price of one. Also in that haul was the Judas Priest compilation Metal Works ’73-’93. At the time, I remember the album being alright. I definitely enjoyed “Call of the Triumphant”, loved “Intercessor” and liked “Anger” but it was either the selection of songs or the placement of the songs that didn’t really do it for me.

It was shame because there are Thor albums I liked such as Only the Strong and Thunderstruck where the song placement wasn’t an issue. Remember, it always helps  to have a good amount of fun or great songs on each side. It isn’t unusual to get an album that is too top-heavy with all the bangers in the first half or too bottom-heavy where you have to get through some mid or decent tracks to get to the primo songs.

Look For Those Alternate Versions

I admit that Triumphant might not be the best example of an alternate release. That’s an honor that Judas Priest’s Killing Machine and Hell Bent for Leather would take. Triumphant was picked because the 2003 re-release by Scratch Records featured some slight shuffling of tracks and the addition of a few songs bringing it to 15 tracks and a length of a little over 70 minutes:

1. March to Glory
2. I Am Thor
3. Anger III
4. Call of the Triumphant
5. Intercessor (from the film The Intercessor: Rock n Roll Nightmare Part 2)
6. Slave
7. Viking’s Funeral
8. Back for Blood
9. GraveYard
10. Thunderhawk
11. Throwing Cars at People in Coke with Thor (ft. Full Blown AIDS)
12. The Guardian’s Flame – An Opus by Thor I. Thunder on the Tundra, II. Crimson Twilite, III. War Hammer
13. Fubar Is a Super Rocker (from the film Fubar: The Movie)
14. Everybody Needs a Hero
15. Hail Steeve Reeves

The extra songs were like decent bonus than tunes that gave the album a different sound or made for different listening experience but the slight tracklist shuffling made this a better listen. Sometimes you just want all the bangers in one place or in close proximity to each other. In the case of Triumphant, the songs I enjoyed the most from the original release make up a trifecta of tracks.

Meanwhile, other tracks I wasn’t initially impressed with were viewed more favorably because they were deeper into the album or had better lead-in songs. That isn’t to say that this became the Thor album—that’s either Thunderstruck or Thor Against the World—but this was the album where I first noticed tracklisting and song placement is everything.

What are some albums you believe could’ve benefited from better track placement? Are there some songs from an album you believe would be better used on a different album? Let us know in the comments!

Tim “Ripper” Owens: The Inspiration

For those who have never seen the film, it stars Mark Wahlberg and Jennifer Anniston. It was based in part on the true story of Tim “Ripper” Owens, a singer who has been busy in metal since the late 1980s. He does a variety of styles in the genre, and he hasn’t been in a band that just released mid or poor material regularly.

It’s always interesting (and unfortunate) when you see very talented musicians in bands that seem to be going nowhere or circling the drain. My first question is usually “How did you end up here?” which always follows “This guy is actually good but the rest of the band…”

That isn’t the case with Tim Owens. His voice has range and power which has seen him sing with Iced Earth, Yngwie J. Malmsteen, KK’s Priest, and Judas Priest. It’s with him joining Judas Priest in 1996 and being on the return album Jugulator that we get the inspiration for Rock Star.

A 1997 story in the New York Times about Owens piqued Warner Bros’ interest in doing something based on Owens’ journey. The project had creative hiccups dealing with Judas Priest about the script and had to be redone as more of a music drama that wasn’t heavily on Ripper’s life.

Rock Star: Inspired by True Events

“Music drama” might not even be the best way to describe this as the romance angle is the anchor for the main character of Izzy Cole. At any rate, after a budget running between $38 million and $57 million and bringing in some metal and rock veterans in roles, we get Rock Star in 2001. Taking place in 1985, the film now followed a young musician in a tribute band who ends up replacing the lead singer of metal Steel Dragon, the band his tribute band covered.

Life on the road, recording, and partying caused Izzy to distance himself from his friends and love interest, Emily (played by Jennifer Anniston). At one show in Seattle, a super fan impresses him enough that he brings him on stage to sing with him. Eventually, he hands over the lead singer role to the super fan. I figured that selecting new band members was a bit more involved but apparently that fan went on to continue touring with the band.

Then again, that band had to be regularly in shambles. Kind of like Love Fist in the Grand Theft Auto games. So, a fan becoming the lead singer and actually doing well? Sure, get him his cut of the gate, I say. The film ends with Izzy performing with a new band started by his friend from the tribute act in Seattle several years later. He reconciles with Emily—who walked since he was slamming groupies—and they live happily ever after.

There was some corniness to the film leaning into the obvious E! True Hollywood Story side of rock music but I liked the familiar faces of the cast. I thought most of them did their roles well, and I saw potential with the story. If you haven’t checked my dives on movies and comics on AfroGamers, one conclusion I tend to come to is that something would’ve been better served as a TV show.

I found Rock Star to be a fine film: not bad but not good. Part of it was the feeling that the story had to lean on the 80s rock excess because it’s the main thing that was focused on in TV and documentaries covering that period. Also, they had a little over 100 minutes to work with, so you want the downfall narrative for conflict and redemption.

My thing is that for the early 2000s, the writing wasn’t there to fit all of that into just 100 minutes but I wouldn’t push this movie to MCU run times. I don’t see it being a digestible film until a lot more musical performances were added. However, stretching out the story, slowing the pace down a bit, and introducing actual stories for everyone Izzy encountered (and Izzy himself) could make this good TV show.

Thinking about it, Rock Star could’ve started being based on Ripper joining Judas Priest and his origins and just had his career follow the story of W.A.S.P’s concept album The Crimson Idol or just scrap the Ripper opening and make a Crimson Idol film.

Have you watched Rock Star? If so, share your take on the film in the comments! Also, what do you think of a Crimson Idol television show?

Also, Dissident Alliance is a release that is best that it isn’t included. It would’ve been better just to drop Chain of Command in 1994. At any rate, we’re looking at the band’s debut Ample Destruction.

Introducing Jag Panzer

Jag Panzer is a band that fans of 80s metal or power metal might be familiar with. Founded in 1981 as Tyrant, the act has featured co-founders bass player John Tetley and guitarist Mark Broidy for the bulk of its first run until 1988 and since the band’s revival in 1993. Their present vocalist is also a co-founder: Harry “The Tyrant” Conklin.

The Tyrant remained with the band until shortly after the release of Ample Destruction then left to record the 1986 release Metal from Hell for fellow Colorado metal act, Satan’s Host. Conklin would make his return to Jag Panzer in 1995 in time to record the band’s other classic, The Fourth Judgment in 1997.

For the early 1980s, the band’s sound reminds me of a mix of Brocas Helm’s performance on their 1984 debut Into Battle and Lizzy Borden’s performance on Love You to Pieces. Jag Panzer is one of those bands I often point to as a great example of 80s U.S power metal or epic heavy metal. They’re capable of dark, moody dungeon-exploring metal and speedier war-ready battle hymns.

We’re going to look at both sides of Ample Destruction, see what stands out on both sides of the album, and go into the opening and closing track. This album in its original form included nine tracks, no instrumentals or spoken word parts, and runs for just over 39 minutes.

While the OG album isn’t on Apple Music, you can check out Decade of the Nailed-Spiked Bat. Released in 2003, it features the tracks from Ample Destruction shuffled and mixed in with tracks from the 1992 Tyrants EP and Chain of Command.

A-Side of Ample Destruction

With five tracks, the A-side of Ample Destruction is one of the stronger album A-sides. On the one hand, this isn’t exactly rare because there are plenty of albums that either A-side-heavy or have good distribution on both sides. Then again, you also have albums that can be an ordeal together because of a boggy A-side with only a smattering of bangers, rippers, or pounders or it’s lop-sided with all the good stuff on the B-side.

The thing with this is the A-side is typically the first album or the early tracks on an album and you don’t want to have to go through a mid or bad A-side just to get to the actual A-side material. A heads up: this album falls into the first category with a strong distribution of bangers on both sides and no skips.

Ample Destruction opens with the banger “License to Kill”, the shortest song on side A and the album overall at just over 3-minutes and it gives the album a strong start and is a nice sample of what you’re getting into with Jag Panzer. I feel it’s a good introduction to Harry Conklin’s singing ability but it isn’t the best example on the album. Following “License to Kill” are “Warfare” and “Symphony of Terror”. “Warfare” is a strong follow-up pounder and “Symphony of Terror” a more of a mid-tempo, building epic. Again, it showcases Conklin’s singing throughout and really lets him do his thing on chorus.

Closing out the A-side are the star tracks “Harder Than Steel”, a tune that picks up the pack just a bit but keeps the pounder approach. I often mention this song as a good example of epic heavy metal or U.S power metal. The guitars have that bite you’ll hear in “License to Kill” and “Warfare” and the dazzle of “Symphony of Terror” but it has a little more umph or speed to it. However, it’s not the speeder of this side.

That honor goes to A-side closer “Generally Hostile”, one of the two speed metal entries of the album. The song gallops, rides, and has a lot of punch to it. It’s also my favorite vocal display for Conklin on the album. I talk a lot about the vocals but the guitars and drums do their job and then some throughout the project. Whatever the theme or story of the song, they lay a great stage in each track for Conklin to paint the picture.

Standout Tracks: Symphony of Terror**, Harder Than Steel**, Generally Hostile**

B-Side

After a heavy A-side, we have “The Watching” which a slower, somewhat grim tune that clocks in at over four minutes. I’d say this song, B-sider “Reign of Tyrants”, “Symphony of Terror” and closing track “The Crucifix” are good introductions to Conklin’s band after Jag Panzer, Satan’s Host. Those are three songs that could easily be on their debut album Metal from Hell. Speaking of “The Crucifix”, it’s longest song on this debut at over seven minutes.

Often when I see lengthier song times, I tend to think “This is going to be a slow affair” and I might give the faster songs another listen to prep me. After doing that, I got into “The Crucifix” and the first three minutes and change seemed to confirm my fears. Then it kicks into the second half of track and the tempo picks up. I was pleased and it went together well enough that I couldn’t say “Just give me the second half of the song.” The entire song is fine but in the mix of the first nine, I don’t see it as a particularly strong closing song. It’s definitely a closer but I don’t know about it on Ample Destruction.

One reason for that is that the version I listened to was a re-issue which featured the bonus “Black Sunday”. I felt that would’ve made a better closer as it’s similar in tempo but brief at under three minutes. Before closing this out, we can’t forget “Cardiac Arrest”. Falling between “The Watching” and “Reign of Tyrants”, “Cardiac Arrest” is the other speed metal offering. While doesn’t have that same gasoline and fire as “Generally Hostile”, it gives the B-side a shot of energy on a mostly mid-tempo, heavy-leaning side.

Standout Tracks: The Watching*, Cardiac Arrest**

Strength of the Debut

I tend not to put grades or scores on these since they’re more retrospectives or quick dives than reviews but this a debut I would’ve given at least four stars or a low-90. It’s a great debut album and while it’s a cult album, it’s a classic of power metal and epic heavy metal. It showcases that early 80s period in U.S power metal and was how I discovered other U.S power metal acts from that period such as Brocas Helm, Manilla Road, Chastain, and Omen.

Admittedly, if I had discovered any of those bands first, I would’ve found Jag Panzer but this album was good enough and hit all those spots that I dig in metal music: strong, piercing vocals, fantasy or warfare lyricism, and guitar work that boosts or blends with the direction of the band and the singer’s abilities.

Ample Destruction is a ridiculously strong debut and highly recommended.