Fuck the Facts is a name grind fans and people interested in the mortified reactions of mainstream society have probably heard bandied about for years. Originally a solo project of guitarist Topon Das, FtF has existed in some form since 1998 with countless releases under its sweaty belt. Inarguably, the line-up currently comprising the “fucking” Ottawa-based band (although bassist Marc ...

It's big news in the metal world when an album (or EP, or whatever) arrives with John Arch's vocals on it. His Bruce Dickinson-like tenor was a beacon in the mid-’80s U.S. metal scene when he fronted Fates Warning on their now-classic first three albums. After he left the band, however, he basically put music aside for the better part of the next two decades, and the metal world lost one of its ...

When Bastard Priest dropped the five-track Merciless Insane Death demo through Zombie Ritual Tapes in 2008, the duo left an almighty crater for all crusty death-heads to fall into and over each other. Genre veterans spent days nursing the shell-shock associated when detonating explosive underground death metal finds. It was a bitch, for a week or two it made all your other records seem slow and ...

I think a lot of people assumed Denial Fiend was the work of Kam Lee. Now that Blaine Cook is fronting that assumption is no longer. What was the transition like between Kam and Blaine? Terry Butler: Kam likes to lead people on that Denial Fiend was his band. Truth is Denial Fiend is Sam's baby. Sam started the band and asked him to join. He also didn't hesitate to replace him. Blaine stepped ...

There have been few bands who have had more influence over so many different scenes than Discharge. There was the whole first generation thrash bands, the likes of Metallica, who took time to broadcast their love for Discharge from metal's commercial apex, and despite housetraining and declawing Discharge's furious, rough, on-take urgency, still nonetheless would have turned some folk onto the ...

It took a lot of guitar amplification to put together Pombagira's fourth album, Iconoclast Dream. We're talking some 19, 20 vintage amps and cabs in the arsenal; that's overkill for most bands, even those more mob-handed in personnel would struggle to justify having such an inventory. But with extreme doom, where tempos are slow and every texture crucial, a boutique, deluxe tone is the MacGuffin ...

Randy Rhoads died 10 years before the official guitar tablature for Tribute found its way through my door, subsequently bogarting so many onanistic early-90s teenage years of practising guitar for the edification of no one save for the family spaniel. But the impact of his style—all neoclassical Ritchie Blackmore one minute and kinda like a collegiate Van Halen the next—was still like the ...

Spare a thought for Primordial frontman Alan 'Nemtheanga' Averill who, mid-scream at last week's Bloodstock Festival, Derby, England was robbed of his powers. In comic book terms, this was like grounding Superman and surgically enhancing him the old lead contact lenses. But more remarkable is that he lost it in the first place, like, even when they nail the lid shut on our Alan and lay his body ...

We don't care how many records, CDs, T-shirts or sweat pants a band has sold in its career, it hasn't officially "made it," in our estimation, until it gets a beer named after it (or one of its songs). That is winning, no matter how you measure it. Even a little ol' noise/math band from Montgomery, Alabama—that would be El Chupa Cobras—can attain such greatness, though they may never sell out ...

All of you good people out there whose recreational time is spent zoning out, hunting down and then getting suitably crushed in turn by overly hefty riffs should really be taking notice of New York doom outfit Batillus. Their debut longplayer Furnace has all of the weight required to wind on impact, but is also a complex headswimmer, mixing black metal, industrial, (almost) new wave beats and ...