363: KATATONIA

A couple of months ago, I did a series of 2-part posts detailing bands who’d undergone such a dramatic shift in sound that I could readily write separately about their early and late output. While Katatonia might have seemed an obvious choice for that run of bands, there’s two main reasons they didn’t make the …

353: CELTIC FROST

When Hellhammer broke up in the mid eighties, it gave frontman Tom G. Warrior and bassist Martin Eric Ain the opportunity to form a new band. One that would go on to be pioneers of multiple extreme metal genres as well as avant-garde metal. That band was, of course, the mighty Celtic Frost. In 1985 …

341: 1914

As a Ukrainian black metal band who formed in 2014, the 100th anniversary of the First World War, 1914 take us through the horrors of war via terrifying blackened death metal tales. Only a couple of months ago, 1914 released their third album, ‘Where Fear and Weapons Meet’, which continues this masterful exploration of the …

323: BLOODMOON

Today an album was released titled ‘Bloodmoon: I’. The album is being presented as a Converge album, but is actually a collaborative piece from Converge, Chelsea Wolfe, frequent Wolfe collaborator Ben Chisholm, and Cave In/Old Man Gloom/Mutoid Man/basically everything member Stephen Brodsky. The result is an entirely other beast than Converge, and that’s why I …

322: DOOL

I stumbled across Dool in 2017 via their (at the time newly released) debut, ‘Here Now, There Then’, and it was like nothing I’d heard before. It was a refreshingly progressive mix of goth rock and doom, with a gloomy, passionate atmosphere. I spent that winter utterly enamoured with that album and that band. It …

315: BLACK SABBATH

On any given day, the heavy metal genre might as well be subtitled 'Music Derivative of Black Sabbath'.Lars Ulrich Today’s band, our final Icon, was always going to be Black Sabbath. I’ve known since January. Because today, ten years ago (11/11/11), Black Sabbath reunited, and it was the biggest metal news in years. That’s just …