(TheBRHM.com) Something shifted once the calendar rolled past 1999. A wave of younger bands came up doing the one thing a good chunk of longtime listeners could not stomach. They cracked themselves open. The old guard roared about war, about demons, about the joy of burning everything to the ground. ...
(TheBRHM.com) Ask most folks to name the architects of heavy music and you get the same short list on repeat. Sabbath. Zeppelin. Purple. Maybe Priest, if the person did a little homework. Those legends earned their thrones, no argument here. Yet a thought gnaws at me whenever that roll call ...
(TheBRHM.com) Longevity behind the microphone in rock and metal owes far less to a lucky throat than to what a singer actually does to guard it over the long haul. And plenty of them guarded nothing at all. Here is the cruel part. Every other part of the show has ...
(TheBRHM.com) Every genre keeps a canon, and heavy metal guards its own with near religious fervor. Iron Maiden gets the arenas. Judas Priest owns the leather and the reverence. Accept earned credit for welding precision onto aggression before half the world caught up. And then there is a name that ...
(TheBRHM.com) Ronnie James Dio brought something to heavy metal that most singers never touch. Call it authority, or imagination, or plain conviction. His voice could turn a microphone into a doorway, and behind it sat somewhere older and bigger than the room you stood in. Think about that. Here was ...
(TheBRHM.com) When Loudwire handed Rob Halford its inaugural Lemmy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, it honored a performer whose fingerprints sit on the very shape of an entire genre, which makes any single award feel small next to what he built. And yeah, I said it. The folks handing him ...
(TheBRHM.com) Germany earned its fearsome reputation long before the wider world bothered to clock it, and a couple of acts handled most of the early construction. Nobody drew them a map. Ask any lifer who came up on thrash, power, or speed where the German story actually kicks off, and ...
(TheBRHM.com) For decades much of heavy music aimed its rage at whatever sat outside the self. Then five dudes from Bakersfield came along and flipped the aim, turning it around on the guy at the mic. Go back and remember what all this sounded like before ’94. Slayer stacked bodies ...
(TheBRHM.com) Metallica’s stretch of records between 1991 and 1997 deserves a fairer hearing than the betrayal story still told in dive bars and comment sections across the internet. Look, I came up loving this music from a spot most folks don’t picture when they imagine a headbanger. Down South where ...
(TheBRHM.com) The claim that heavy music died the moment Seattle arrived came from writers who only counted what a television screen was willing to show them. Rock magazines printed the obituary around 1992 and not one editor at those desks bothered checking for a pulse first. Critics who spent a ...