I dig Power Trip and Iron Reagan; I can dig this. (Also, maybe it’s something peculiar about the metal features on Bandcamp Daily, but they tend to get way more than average social media shares and comments, the latter of which are often along the lines of ‘you forgot Band X!’. I want to look at that as a positive sign of the genre’s health; that there are more artists doing things that excite listeners than what will fit in a given article.) #link
Roadburn, which happens this week in the Netherlands, really seems like my kind of festival. As in, club gigs in a small city where I can chill in my hotel room most of the time. #link
###
The Fractured series may have come to a close, but John Mulvaney’s not done with his engaging profiles of bands in their creative milieu — this time across the Irish Sea with British doom metal crew Solstice. #video
It’s one answer to one question in an interview marking the release of the Brooklyn avant death metal band’s excellent new album. But it’s a good answer. #link
Remembering this went down yesterday, the first day at Glasto that no one really cares about ‘cause people are still arriving and putting up their tents and whatnot. So one can note metal’s inclusion after all this time, but it’s still shunted to the sidelines. Which is ridiculous as you can find relatively challenging music in other genres all across the festival. #link
The headline is unfortunate (the problem is hardly unaddressed; it’s a perennial topic of discussion among metalheads) though the article is a good one. Ah, the moral quandary of separating the art from the artist! But seriously, aside from metal's propensity for permitting transgressive ideas without the attendant responsibility, the article points out the blatant hypocrisy that arises when artists use their art as a platform for their political agenda, even if the art doesn’t relate to it directly. How do you feel about your Burzum records now? #link
“I recognize that we're recognized as a metal label. By percentage, we have probably put out more metal than anything else, but there's probably a lot of stuff that people don't realize we've done. Even though I was a teenager at the time, part of the reason I chose the name Relapse was that there are some names that could have sounded more metal. I wanted something that was vague and wouldn't necessarily pigeonhole us.” A noble philosophy, to be sure. But Relapse is undoubtedly a big-time label in the metal ‘underground’, with little patience these days for the more experimental stuff (they dropped Pyrrhon after one record, for shame). #link
"With all the clubs, gigs and activity happening in Dublin, you’d be under the illusion that there’s actually a real, thriving scene here. There’s not. There’s a disparate number of different groups all struggling to do something for their respective audiences. The only thing that really sells is nostalgia." #link