(TheBRHM.com) Kurdt Vanderhoof already knew what he wanted his band to sound like while most everybody else was still fumbling toward it. Metal Church had begun in San Francisco, but after Vanderhoof returned to his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, the lineup that became the classic Metal Church took shape. This ...
(TheBRHM.com) The needle hit the wax, maybe three seconds of a riff rolled by, and you already knew whose record was turning. No vocals required. That counted for something back then. It meant you were paying attention when paying attention was the whole point. A buddy would flip a cassette ...
(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) 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) Every legendary band tends to carry two names, the face crowds scream until their throats give out, and the person quietly keeping the machine from cracking apart. Rarely are they the same. Think about it. You can rattle off frontmen without breaking a sweat. The screamers, the poets, the ...
(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) Sleep Token has spent the past few years steadily rearranging what heaviness is allowed to mean in this corner of music. They did it without publicly attaching their real faces or identities to the music. Strange when you sit with it. Here’s what keeps pulling at me. You’ve got ...
(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) Few acts in rock history have blurred the border between musicianship and merchandising as completely as the four New Yorkers who turned greasepaint into a fortune. Here’s the thing nobody wants to say at the cookout. The legend got built on lunchboxes. Now hold on before you fire off ...