I grew up in Ohio and even have the state outline tattooed on my miserable excuse for a bicep (with a skull and crossbones inside — YOU FIERCE, BOY!). So it gives me great pleasure to announce — two fucking days after April Fool’s, no less — that sanity has prevailed and the first date…

We don’t even begin to understand modern pop music. It confuses and alienates us with its nonstop techno beats, auto-tuned vocals and constant onslaught of similar-looking and sounding “artists.” And why does every song “feature” another performer? Does it really take the addition of Pitbull to a track to somehow push it into guaranteed hit…

Trevor de Brauw is a busy man. Besides his gig as a member of the mighty Pelican, the guitarist is also a publicist, prolific tweeter (@trevordebrauw) and party to several side projects (Chord, Let’s Pet, Bee Control). And, lest we forget to mention, he’s also got the “solo artist” thing going, as evidenced by the…

Sure, doom is a solitary magpie affair that doesn’t ordinarily deal in good news stories. But c’mon, even the joyless industry beancounters will be left catatonic with optimism after Electric Wizard‘s first magic trick of the night: filling a theatre. It’s the measure of doom metal’s stock that it can pack the heathens cheek by…

How would you separate [id] from Eclipse as a musical statement? Cut from the same cloth or something else entirely?Marc Okubo: I feel that Eclipse is our strongest release to date. We have matured with our songwriting and our performing. Periphery’s Misha Mansoor helped write and produce the album and I couldn’t be more excited…

Rust in Peace, as you will learn, wasn’t written in a day. It wasn’t even written in the studio—well, Dave Ellefson’s “Dawn Patrol” was birthed there—over many months, like so many records of the day were.

Welcome to The Lazarus Pit, a biweekly look at should-be classic metal records that don’t get nearly enough love; stuff that’s essential listening that you’ve probably never heard of; stuff that we’re too lazy to track down the band members to do a Hall Of Fame for.  This week, we discharge the extreme noise terror…

The last time we saw photographic evidence of what Hickory, NC doom troupe Hour of 13 get up to when taking care of official band business—heavy metal, viz. doom in the vein of St.Vitus et al—they were hanging out in a forest with a naked girl squatting in the foreground. Since then they’ve went off-radar….

Rot of any description isn’t the sort of thing that comes to mind when you think of Cancun. But even dudes living life by the beach, surrounded by fluorescent coloured drinks, bronzed locals and tourist eye candy aren’t immune from becoming obsessed with death metal and grindcore, dedicating one’s life to the noise and kicking…

Sure, Meshuggah releasing its seventh full-length on Tuesday was an event in and of itself. But what has gotten somewhat lost amidst the furor is that, for the quintet, this year marks a quarter century of polyrhythms, polymeters and, of course, polytours. To celebrate both achievements, we enlisted the help of some of the many…