Twelve years ago, it seemed as if the music world barely noticed the release of The Police’s posthumous double-live album. Clearly, something’s changed since. And though it is encouraging to see such ravenous demand for the reunited Aryan trio, it’s kind of hard to justify plopping down 200 bucks to…
This Portland trio clearly doesn’t want people to know much about its background. Its latest album, Friend and Foe, though visually impressive with its cutout CD booklet and clever use of contrasting colors, contains almost nothing in the way of information about the band. The band also makes a concerted…
Why on Earth would anyone want to see Johnny Cash’s backing band without Johnny Cash? It’s a fair question, perhaps even necessary, given the Man in Black’s hallowed status. Cash’s music meant so much to so many that it would be easy for former bandmates to coast on the demand…
Both of these acts offer a fresh feminine perspective in genres with an overabundance of “masculine” posturing and one-dimensional angst while also refusing to draw attention to their “femaleness” for its own sake. Indeed, Morgan Lander and Candace Kucsulain, frontwomen for Kittie and Walls Of Jericho, respectively, strike a fine…
“I haven’t seen a band with that much intensity in a long time.” That’s what Korn frontman Jonathan Davis had to say last summer about his Family Values tourmates Dir en grey, a versatile quasi-metal Japanese band that has met with baffling success in Europe and, more recently, the United…
The music opens with flowery acoustic guitars double-tracked for a 12-string feel and shimmying with opulent drama, reminiscent of records made in the ’60s by acid-hungry British rockers prowling green country lanes in faux-druidic rituals. After a drawn-out introduction, drum hits recorded backward make way for a chorus of singers…
Apparently, breaking up helped Black Rebel Motorcyle Club more than it hurt. After losing drummer Nick Jago, remaining members Peter Hayes and Robert Been took an abrupt, well-received detour into acoustic-based folk on 2005’s Howl, which soon led to Jago’s return. The time apart must have worked some sort of…
Of all forms of music, you’re most likely to catch two complementary bands on the same bill at a jamband show. In this case, San Francisco four-piece Tea Leaf Green and rural New Jersey sextet Railroad Earth both take the indelible influence of the Band in divergent directions that, when…
Now that extreme metal with an arty edge hardly seems trailblazing anymore, the concept of super-short albums stocked with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bursts of noise is losing its postmodern thrill. Though several acts have worked this angle with fresh results, including Daughters and the Locust, both of which appear with Cattle Decapitation…
Rare is the indie rock band that inserts a bona fide mosh part into the middle of one of its songs. Rarer still is the band that can pull it off. Minneapolis four-piece Tapes ‘n Tapes not only pulls it off (in an epic show-closing number called “Jakov’s Suite”) but…
Lots of artists get touted for being raw and uncompromising, but Texan hellraiser Scott H. Biram truly is. Put in perspective, Biram didn’t “compromise” when he was hit head-on by an 18-wheeler truck and took to the stage in a wheelchair a month later with two broken legs and an…
“For me, religion didn’t have a redemptive quality,” says Celtic Frost bassist and co-founder Martin Ain. “It didn’t help me to have a more positive outlook on life. It was a negative, oppressive kind of thing.” Speaking to New Times from his home in Zurich, Switzerland, Ain is describing his…
The criterion for this list was simple: Only the hardest, heaviest metal albums were considered. Bands that play a hybrid style of metal that is not thrash, speed, death, black metal, hardcore, grindcore, or some amalgamation thereof were not included. What follows is pure effin’ metal. Bang your head off…
Soundtrack CD release
When it made its first crude, unintelligible blast onto the metal landscape, no one could have foreseen that Napalm Death would do anything other than flare out into obscurity as a quickly worn novelty. But the band, now grinding away into its 25th year, would not only go on to…
Last month, two Argentinean children appeared on the popular free video Web site YouTube with their endearing rendition of the classic Sepultura protest song “Refuse/Resist,” live from their living room. Within days, the video became the latest Internet phenomenon. At press time, an estimated four million people had downloaded the…
Here’s a band that should’ve gotten some of the drooling praise that was slathered upon the similarly guitar-drenched music of Longwave. Then again, hype like that is never good for any artist, so let’s keep our fingers crossed that this Los Angeles four-piece can get the credit it deserves without…
Kudos to the members of this Brooklyn hardcore-jazz-tech-metal-hip-hop-spazz-out hybrid for coming back for more after a head-on collision with an 18-wheeler. The aftermath of the crash, which caused critical injuries for some of the band members, is documented on the album cover with photos of the band’s demolished van. It…
