(TheBRHM.com) A few bands get the arena. Others get the magazine cover, the platinum plaque, the festival billing in letters you can read from the parking lot. Then there is the outfit that earned the respect of every musician in the room and somehow missed the party anyway. That is ...
(TheBRHM.com) Forty autumns back, a chrome skull with its eyes bolted shut and its ears clamped tight stood before the United Nations, hoisting a For Sale sign over the whole rotten transaction. Vic Rattlehead, the Megadeth mascot grinning through welded metal, put a face on an argument most people in 1986 ...
(TheBRHM.com) Few stretches expose the widening fault line inside heavy metal as sharply as the middle of the eighties, when the genre put forward two rival answers to a single question: what is all this noise actually for? One arrived drenched in blood and speed, Slayer’s Reign in Blood compressing ...
(TheBRHM.com) Iron Maiden stood at the kind of crossroads in the autumn of 1986 that has quietly ended more than a few careers in heavy metal. The World Slavery Tour had ended the previous summer, leaving the band exhausted, and now the five of them faced a hard question. Grow, ...
(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) 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) 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) 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 ...