Genres touting the ‘post’ qualification should be regarded with suspicion. These days ‘Post’ has almost become synonymous with ‘meta’. It is after the thing, beyond, transcendent; packed within in this is the assumption that we are done with the original ‘thing’, whatever it may be; rock, metal, modernism. Whatever is flaunting the ‘post’ adornment is... Continue Reading →

Although now considered to be the trendy face of metal, there was a time when stoner doom was a little bit uncool. In the age of grunge, throwbacks to the 1970s were considered out of step with the post-Cold War zeitgeist. This same era was the heyday of extreme metal, which saw the thrash metal... Continue Reading →

Volume I Recently I have become fascinated with how the internet has changed our interactions with music. Not only how technology is shaping consumption, but how it is shaping the music itself. With instant access to a vast pool of music worldwide, how will this shape regional sounds, artistic influence, musical communities? It is probably... Continue Reading →

To the layperson, blackened death metal may look like a tagline too far. But even a casual sampling of artists tasked with playing this style should make one see the light (or the black). Take the ear candy of melodic death metal, the euphoria or Iron Maiden, add a smattering of gothic melodrama to the... Continue Reading →

When I was young I made a new friend called a-load-of-obscure-racket. Whilst knitting this into my adolescent identity, I would've lapped up videos like this without question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNFmiLYjX48 I really wanted to interpret this as music made for and by the misanthrope. ‘Extreme music for Extreme People’ as the saying goes. There was plenty of... Continue Reading →

As well as Celtic Frost and Bathory, it’s a well-documented fact that the black metal movement of the early 1990s took a lot of influence from ambient and darkwave such as Dead Can Dance. It’s also no secret that they listened to a lot of film music, most notably the work of Ennio Morricone and... Continue Reading →

Fair enough, the title is somewhat hyperbolic, but it’s time to take a look at two foundational death metal artists as they were in the middle of their careers. These are selected from the two towers of American death metal: New York and Tampa. By the late 1990s  it’s fair to say death metal was... Continue Reading →

Old days are passing into younger days. In the late 1990s, with the millennium on the horizon, black metal was established enough, and ubiquitous enough, to have a ‘typical’ version of itself. Variations abound. But by this time there was now such a thing as a ‘standard’ black metal riff, usually made up of minor... Continue Reading →

Not half way through December Spotify asked me to do the year end number crunching. I happily obliged, despite my misgivings about excluding stats from late December. Apparently I had listened to over 7000% more minutes of music in 2018 than in 2017. I verified the data. I’m not sure I had Spotify in 2017.... Continue Reading →