(TheBRHM.com) Germany earned its fearsome reputation long before the wider world bothered to clock it, and a couple of acts handled most of the early construction. Nobody drew them a map. Ask any lifer who came up on thrash, power, or speed where the German story actually kicks off, and ...
(TheBRHM.com) For decades much of heavy music aimed its rage at whatever sat outside the self. Then five dudes from Bakersfield came along and flipped the aim, turning it around on the guy at the mic. Go back and remember what all this sounded like before ’94. Slayer stacked bodies ...
(TheBRHM.com) The claim that heavy music died the moment Seattle arrived came from writers who only counted what a television screen was willing to show them. Rock magazines printed the obituary around 1992 and not one editor at those desks bothered checking for a pulse first. Critics who spent a ...
(TheBRHM.com) The history of thrash is usually presented as permanent rebellion, a sound that stayed dangerous while everything around it went soft, yet the record points somewhere less flattering: a movement that wrote its own rulebook almost as fast as it torched the old one. I say that with love, ...
(TheBRHM.com) The origin of heavy music has no single author. Several acts on two continents were shoving toward the same loud, ugly place by the end of the sixties, blowing out speakers and scaring their own engineers. What sets Black Sabbath apart is not arriving first. It was what those ...
(TheBRHM.com) Every genre eventually has to reckon with its own history, but few have let that history calcify quite like heavy metal has. For a style built on rebellion and volume and the refusal to sit still, the modern fanbase has grown strangely comfortable, strangely protective, strangely allergic to anything ...
(TheBRHM.com) There are certain bands whose influence runs far deeper than their record sales ever suggested, and Black Death belongs near the top of that list. Long before the rest of us had the language to describe what they were doing, four young men out of Cleveland were quietly rewriting ...
(TheBRHM.com) Some records you listen to. A few of them hit you. Back in Black did the second thing to me before I even understood what was happening. Somewhere in my teenage years, standing over my uncle’s milk crate of vinyl, flipping through it, and I slid that one out ...
(TheBRHM.com) I often dive into funk, quiet storm, trap and something of the Latin persuasion when I’m not listening to rock and heavy metal. When you take in different genres, it’s not usual to see influences of some act on another or elements from one genre having a home in ...
(TheBRHM.com) What are some of your favorite lyrical themes in metal? I use Encyclopedia Metallum a lot for my reviews as it’s cleaner than Wikipedia when it comes to getting the information I need such as album release dates and track listings. Of course, if I want the history of ...