(TheBRHM.com) Every few months somebody drags the same argument back out into the daylight, usually in a comment section, usually with a Slayer avatar. Heavy music got soft. Heavy music got sold. And the finger always points at one place. The story goes that metalcore ruined everything. Soft choruses. Screaming ...
(TheBRHM.com) There was a time when heavy metal could be identified the way you identify a voice on the telephone. Not the genre. Not the era. The specific artist, in the space of a few seconds, before a lyric arrived to help you. That was the standard the music set ...
(TheBRHM.com) Spend enough years as the only brother in the pit and you learn the oldest argument in metal never really ends, the one about who plays the hardest. Somebody always brings up odd time signatures like a man pulling out a receipt. Somebody else name drops a conservatory. Every ...
(TheBRHM.com) Metal circles have been repeating something for thirty years without checking it. Pantera invented groove metal, they say. Nah. Anybody who tells you that either was not listening close or was not listening long. Exhorder was down in New Orleans developing that slow, mean, swaggering attack on late eighties ...
(TheBRHM.com) There is a habit in music writing of filing a band away the moment it becomes convenient, and few bands got filed more carelessly than the one Lemmy Kilmister ran for forty years. Say the name in most rooms and you get the same reflex answer. Heavy metal. Loud, ...
(TheBRHM.com) There is a conversation that never seems to die in metal circles, and it comes right back the second anybody says Big Four. For the newcomers, that title means Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax. Four bands, crowned as the faces of American thrash. Should it have been the Big ...
(TheBRHM.com) Drop the needle on Rust in Peace and about ninety seconds in you’ll get everything worth knowing about Megadeth. None of it has a thing to do with Metallica. I figured that out young, back when I was a Black kid falling hard for heavy metal and making it ...
(TheBRHM.com) Few loyalties in music run as deep, or defy logic as boldly, as the bond between a metalhead and the band that raised him. Let me tell you something I figured out standing in a pit at sixteen, one of maybe three brothers in a sea of denim and ...
(TheBRHM.com) It’s not unusual to see bands with a past they tend to not acknowledge or don’t include in their discographies. Part of this is that the band becomes so associated or known with a sound or genre that those early albums or that transitional album has to go into ...
(TheBRHM.com) This music had me before I had the words to explain why, and the band has held my attention long enough that honesty about them feels earned rather than borrowed. So here is the truth of it. A Brother who came up on loud guitars, often the only face ...