(TheBRHM.com) Somebody always ends up holding the short straw. In every gang of legends there’s the name spoken last, with a touch less reverence, the one folks nod at politely before circling right back to the heavy hitters. For the better part of forty years that role landed on five ...
(TheBRHM.com) The 2000s was period that saw a lot of more modern thrash bands put out their early works. You had some that went the extended demo route of releasing several demos and splits in the early 2000s before dropping their debut. Then you had those who ran one or ...
(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) Heavy metal was not dead in 1995. It was becoming more dangerous. The verdict came down hard in 1994 and 1995. Grunge had eaten rock radio alive. Flannel showed up where leather used to hang, and the folks who once handed Headbangers Ball its late-night slot just went quiet ...
(TheBRHM.com) Something cracked open in the summer of 1991, and you felt it before you could explain it. “Enter Sandman” came slinking out of car speakers with that heavy, dragging riff, and all of a sudden the guys who used to live on the fringes were sitting right there 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) Ask anyone raised on thrash which names carry weight and the answer arrives on cue. Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax. Those four names would eventually harden into thrash metal scripture and cling so tightly that whole legacies got graded against a club nobody ever held elections for. Parked just outside ...
(TheBRHM.com) Go through the metal albums that actually stuck around and you keep bumping into the same thing. Somewhere on the track list sits a cut that has no business being there, and half the time that misfit is exactly why the whole record still lands. Distortion does a funny ...