(TheBRHM.com) Every origin story wants a clean starting line, and the one heavy metal tells on itself usually points to Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut, unleashed in February 1970 with Tony Iommi’s ominous tritone announcing that something darker had arrived. Tidy tale. Also missing a chapter. Because a solid five years ...
(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) Bring up Hendrix and folks reach for the tie-dye first. The scarves. That burning guitar at Monterey. Flowers in the hair, incense curling through some California afternoon in 1967. That picture stuck, and it flattened him. What got buried underneath all the soft-focus mythology was the pure menace in ...
(TheBRHM.com) Somewhere along the way a lot of critics decided who Bruce Springsteen was and quit paying attention. They handed the man a uniform. Blue collar poet. Bard of the assembly line. The voice of some guy clocking out at the plant with grease under his fingernails and a mortgage ...
(TheBRHM.com) Few acts in popular music have completed a more total reversal of identity than the London blues outfit that spent the sixties positioning itself as a threat to decent society and now operates as one of the most efficient revenue machines in live entertainment. That reversal deserves an honest ...
(TheBRHM.com) Genre labels tend to outlive the accuracy that earned them, and no American act has lived more comfortably inside an incomplete label, or profited from it more handsomely, than Van Halen. Ask a room full of purists and half of them will swear those four dudes out of Pasadena ...
(TheBRHM.com) Aerosmith engineered one of the strangest comebacks in American music, and hardly anybody frames it as a cautionary tale. Eleven years separate Permanent Vacation from the moment this band finally scored a number one single, and across that stretch an outfit the industry had written off became a permanent ...
(TheBRHM.com) There is a persistent myth in music writing that says loud guitars were dying in 1987 and five degenerates from Hollywood arrived to resuscitate them, which is a nice story that happens to be false in almost every detail. Guitars were doing just fine. You could not escape them. ...
(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) Every genre keeps a canon. This one guards its like a family heirloom, maybe tighter. Ask somebody where the music came from and you’ll get six names, tops, said in the lowered voice folks save for church. Fine. But notice who never makes that list and something starts to ...