Photo Credit: Anton Corbijn As part of the new wave of young heavy metal bands at the start of the ’80s, Sheffield, England’s Def Leppard (whose oldest members at the time were no older than twenty), managed two successful albums mostly through word-of-mouth and touring before releasing Pyromania in 1983, which became not just a massive chart… Read more
Photo Credit: Mikael Eriksson You have to hand it to the Swedes. They have a preternatural ability to craft pop songs, in English, across any genre you could name. This phenomenon began, of course, with Abba who was able to take the disco they heard coming out of the States and turn it into something… Read more
You can’t judge a book by the cover, except when you can. Look at these guys: Photo Credit: Zack Smith You KNOW what these guys sound like before you hear a note. If you’ve spent any time in New Orleans, and I do not mean Mardi Gras Bourbon Street, you know that it is a… Read more
Photo Credit: Paul Rovere Guns N’ Roses formed on the Sunset Strip in 1985, born from splinter factions of two local bands, LA Guns and Hollywood Rose. From their formation, GNR brought darker energy than the other bands on the strip, they sounded like a mashup of punk rock and glam. Dead Boys meets Queen… Read more
Photo Credit: Getty Images Before he passed away on January 20th at age seventy-four, singer Michael Lee Aday had never quite been able to successfully quell the common misconception that his stage moniker, Meat Loaf, was the name of a band (within days of his death, the “People also ask… ” feature on Google revealed… Read more
Photo Credit: Travis Shinn The Atlas Underground Flood follows the same formula as its predecessors, seeing Morello collaborate more or less successfully with well-known artists on songs ranging from hip-hop to folk-rock. Immediately familiar invites this time consists of British punk-rockers IDLES, legendary Rush-frontman Alex Lifeson, Metallica-guitarist Kirk Hammett, and the American indie-group Manchester Orchestra. But… Read more
Photo Credit: Ross Halfin On Dutch hard rock band Volbeat’s fifth studio album Servant of the Mind, far and away the standout track is “Wait a Minute My Girl.” The title alone sounds like something from the early Beach Boys, if not a ’90s boy band, and it certainly sticks out on a tracklisting that includes… Read more
Photo Credit: Travis Shinn Whoever thought it was a good idea to open Tom Morello’s second solo album in the Atlas Underground Fire series with autotuned vocals – and I’m afraid that this was Morello himself – were obviously wrong. I’m not sure if “Harlem Hellfighter” is his take on 100 gecs’ hyper-pop, but a brief check… Read more
Photo Credit: F Scott Schafer There have been rock songs inspired by horror movies going at least back to “Monster Mash”, Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s 1962 classic, while horror imagery and themes have always played a major role in heavy metal, going back to Black Sabbath’s early days (and obviously through artists like Alice Cooper). However,… Read more
Photo Credit: Collages via Billboard Most people will tell you that the only success that translates financially is “success.” In music, certainly, it’s thought to be almost entirely mathematical: the more records an artist has sold, the more “successful” they are (of course, in recent decades the number of downloads and streams would also have… Read more