Last week I came across an article on a site called Ryan’s Rock Show! in which the site asked Fuck the Facts founder Topon Das (above) to write about “five albums that changed his life”. His answers read like a sketch of a personal musical journey, one that began with Metallica’s …And Justice For All. As I read through his list, I couldn’t help but start thinking about what albums had a similar impact on my own musical journey. And then I thought, wouldn’t this be a nice subject for an NCS post! Everyone who is serious about metal must have their own personal list of life-changing albums, so why not ask what they are?

Five is an arbitrary number, of course, but it’s a manageable number. In my case, making lists tends to confound me. I think I take list-making too seriously. I usually start thinking too hard about it, partly out of fear that I’ll embarrass myself if I just shoot from the hip and partly because I have difficulty making choices even under the best of circumstances, unless I go with my first impulses. When I think too long and too hard, my brain tends to lock up like an engine that’s been victimized by a gaping oil leak.

So this time I thought for all of about 10 minutes. If I’d thought longer and harder, I have no doubt I would have hit a wall, and there would have been no list. But there’s also something to be said for going with the albums that leap to mind immediately. That means they made a lasting impression, right? You, of course, may choose to be more deliberate in your thinking, but however long it takes, I hope you’ll feel like adding a comment to this post and sharing the five albums that changed your life. But try to focus, as Topon Das did and as I’ve done, on the albums that led you into heavy music (Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony may have also changed your life, but this is a more focused kind of list). Continue reading »

photo by Tim Flach

(Andy Synn delivers the second part in a series that appears on no regular schedule and could disappear at any moment. Part 1 of this series can be located via this link.  Your humble editor picked the images that accompany this post.  Eventually Andy will learn to pick his own.)

I’ve been having some trouble getting myself together to write for the site recently. I’ve been busy with both bands, busy with work, busy with home-life… just generally busy. On top of that I just haven’t felt the inspiration to throw myself into reviewing properly. It’s no comment on the albums I have lined up – I have a couple of absolute stunners in the back pocket that have been on the back-burner for what seems like forever now – but just a lack of inspiration for the physical act of sitting down and just writing.

So, to try and break the cycle a bit, I decided to pen another column on the very act of reviewing itself. If I can’t write something, then by god I’ll write about writing something instead!

So, something of an unspoken fact of reviewing is that any review produced is, to an extent, simply an opinion. The thing is, I think this is something that does, now and then, need to be spoken about and discussed. I think not doing that has led to some misconceptions and mistaken assumptions about what reviews are, what they mean, and where they come from. Continue reading »

(Hungarian student of the Finnish language Andrea Balogh, with Wintersun.)

I don’t know about you, but I usually enjoy reading about metal in mainstream publications, sometimes for the humor in seeing writers (who may not know what they’re talking about) trying to describe metal to the masses, and sometimes simply from the experience of seeing our world through the eyes of outsiders. The latest example came this morning in — of all places — The Wall Street Journal, that rightward-leaning, well-written, journalistic bastion of American corporate capitalism. But the article is worth reading not only for the usual reasons described above, but also because it describes a phenomenon that seems to be more widespread than I knew.

The subject of the article is a trend — well, “trend” may be an exaggeration — of people outside Scandinavia being drawn by metal to learn Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish. It begins with a story about an American international relations major at the University of Washington here in Seattle named Michael Brown. His career aspirations are in the foreign service, and he’s studying the Finnish language — but not necessarily because it will be a useful language in his projected profession:

“It was heavy metal, unmistakably,” Mr. Brown said when asked what inspired him to pursue a language spoken by a nation that has fewer people, at 5.4 million, than Washington state. Finnish bands perform with a “dark woodsy resonance” that he has come to love, he says, and “the poetic and obscure nature of the Finnish tongue really gave it a unique wave.”

Dark woodsy resonance? Okay. Continue reading »

Okay, let’s talk fashion.

WAIT!  DON’T LEAVE!  Fercrissakes, when I say “fashion” I just mean “band shirts”. Sheesh!

In the straight world there was a time (eons ago) when fashion designers decided it would be an edgy new thing to produce fashions in monochrome black, giving rise to “black is the new white” proclamations. That’s ancient history, but not as ancient as black clothing in metal.

Wearing black has been the fashion choice of metalheads since, well, forever. Black band shirts, black jeans or shorts, black boots and shoes, more recently black hoodies — you wear black or you get the fuck out. When people try to make the point that supposedly anarchic metal culture is really more conformist and rule-based than you might think, the black uniform is usually marked as Exhibit A.

But lately I’ve been noticing more white band shirts for sale. I’m not talking about hardcore and straight-edge bands — white shirts in those scenes go way back. I’m talking about that new Autopsy shirt up there (being sold here). Or this new one at The Vault of Dried Bones for Mitochondrion, featuring Jeremy Hannigan’s killer art: Continue reading »