(TheBRHM.com) Angel Witch never got their due, and that has bothered me for forty years. The London band recorded a debut in 1980 that most metalheads now count among the defining records of the new wave of British heavy metal. Iron Maiden came up in that same wave. So did ...
(TheBRHM.com) Somewhere between the endless hunt for the next big thing and the tired grumble that nothing good gets made anymore, two groups from different corners of America have been doing something quietly radical. They stopped chasing. Sumerlands out of Philadelphia and Eternal Champion out of Austin looked at the ...
(TheBRHM.com) Most of us shelve AC/DC under hard rock, and the purists have a strong case for keeping them there. Walk into any shop that still sells the physical stuff and you’ll likely find the Youngs tucked into hard rock, exactly where Angus wanted them. He didn’t reach for a ...
(TheBRHM.com) Chart position has never been an honest scorecard for what actually shapes a genre. Ask any serious listener to name the architects of heavy music and the same handful of arena acts get recited on loop. Metallica. Iron Maiden. Sabbath, obviously. Those names deserve their pedestals. But something gets ...
(TheBRHM.com) Most people slap a label on this band and walk away satisfied. Funk rock. Two words, case closed. That tag has followed them since the mid eighties, and it flattens something that deserves a much closer listen. What they built over four decades refuses to sit still inside any ...
(TheBRHM.com) Every couple of years the same conversation comes back around like a chorus you’re sick of. Somebody asks which young act is destined to become the next Metallica. You hear it at shows, in comment sections, on those podcasts that burn forty minutes arguing over the snare sound on ...
(TheBRHM.com) They kept showing up. That’s the whole story once you strip it down. The obituaries kept coming. Radio moved on to whatever felt safer that season. And the people who built this music just kept plugging in anyway. There was no parade. Not one apology offered. Just another van, ...
(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) 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 ...