Melodic death metal is just one of those genres for me. I don’t listen to a lot of it. Not out of any strong dislike for it, but because I get what I want from it from so relatively few albums out of the incredibly overcrowded field of players. Give me a handful of early [...]

A lot of people take every part of the old Mayhem slogan very seriously – no fun, no core, no mosh, no trends. Not me, though. I love fun. And I love me a trend, too. So many bands jump in on a trend that it’s almost impossible you’re not going to get at least [...]

I can never really decide how I want to approach splits. Do I look at it the way I experience it, as a single EP with an often marked change in quality and style roughly halfway through the run time? Do I separate it by the bands and look at it as two very short, [...]

Sweden has its fair share of big representation in most subgenres of heavy metal, but aside from Cult of Luna, sludge metal is a genre for which Swedish bands have traditionally not seen the accolades of their fellow countrymen. I don’t know nearly enough about Sweden to hypothesize why bands of that stripe tend to [...]

There seems to be a bit of a trend among a lot of the mid-to-big progressive metal bands over the last couple of years to give themselves over mostly, or completely, to a retro prog/rock sound with varying degrees of success. Opeth infamously did so with Heritage, opting for a jazzy, prog sound. Pain of [...]