Converge Retake Their Ground on New Record
If Love Is Not Enough announces anything, it’s a return to the stark architecture and the blunt-force grammar Converge helped codify.
Matthew McEver
Matthew McEver, MFA is Senior Lecturer of English at the University
of North Georgia where he teaches Creative Writing, Composition,
and Multicultural American Literature.
The Howling Harmonies of the Avett Brothers and Mike Patton
For all of AVTT/PTTN‘s shadows and splinters, it features some of the most heart-on-sleeve tunes that the Avett Brothers and Mike Patton have made.
Ozzy Osbourne Was Heavy Metal’s Legendary Shaman
On the passing of Ozzy Osbourne, we trace the feedback loop of a life lived loud and a legacy equal parts chaos, catharsis, and strange, enduring grace.
Deadguy Deliver the Best Type of Hardcore on New Album
Deadguy’s new LP sounds like a demolition derby locked inside a meat locker, and someone wired the walls. The record feels brilliantly averse to compromise.
Swans’ ‘Birthing’ Wants and Demands Transformation
Swans’ Birthing isn’t so much music as a reaction against music—a disavowal of melody, pleasure, and your nervous system’s comfort threshold.
‘Fight Club’ Still Serves as an Odyssey of Alienation and Brotherhood
Fight Club conveyed Gen X men’s frustration, leading to paramilitary militia groups and Promise Keepers. It lends itself to reinterpretation to this day.
The Conceptual Depths of Mastodon’s ‘Leviathan’
Mastodon’s Leviathan is a concept LP inspired by American novelist Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Think of it as sludge metal’s answer to Dark Side of the Moon.
Straight from No Man’s Land: A Conversation with Texas Bluesman Scott H. Biram
To encounter Scott H. Biram live-and-in-person, you’d figure Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister had kin in Caldwell County, a distant cousin steeped in Willie Dixon and Lightnin Hopkins.
Avant-Metal’s Lords of Terror: Fantômas’ Eponymous Debut at 25
Fantômas stand as one of the most audacious music projects of the 1990s. You almost wonder if the quasi-mainstreamish Faith No More held Mike Patton back.
The Menacing, Grimy Weirdness of Melvins’ ‘Houdini’ at 30
Once Houdini dropped, all the agonizing over whether Melvins would debase themselves and compromise their sound petered out before we were halfway into “Hooch”.
Tool’s Undertow, 1990s Culture Wars, and the Rehabilitation of Gen-X
After Tool whapped us upside the head with Undertow, you knew you’d never listen to that hairband boom-bap with a straight face ever again.
Botch’s Mathcore Masterpiece ‘We Are the Romans’ Remains Reflective of Millennial Groupthink
This reissue of a groundbreaking, out-of-print album, Botch’s We Are the Romans holds the emotions of its time, the musical incarnation of millennial anxiety.