FOR THE LOVE OF METAL
The concept of the covers album is a risky one. Nothing wrong with slapping one on as a B-side or extra track. But to propose a whole album of covers often begs the question, “What? Have they run out of their own material already?” When you decide to make the cover album an ongoing series, you run the risk of self-parody; Six Feet Under are getting dangerously close to that point with Graveyard Classics III.
Symbol of Salvation will always go down as Armored Saint’s definitive album, but you’d be hard pressed to find a record more concise, focused, and flat-out fun than La Raza.
Absolutely one of the best death metal albums this year, Majesty and Decay has set the standard to beat.
You’ve been asking us by email, twitter, even a few people have called me on the phone to find out who won our big year end contest . Well, here is the information you’ve all been waiting for.
It’s a given D.R.I. will draw a crowd in their adopted city. Add that this was D.R.I’s first show here in six years since guitarist Spike Cassidy was diagnosed and then beat colon cancer and you have a sold out crowd where getting to the bathroom was a 15-minute undertaking. The band’s performance was far from a history lesson; it was a bunch of grizzled veterans showing the kids how to take care of business.
Justin M. Norton recaps D.R.I.’s recent return to Slim’s in San Francisco, CA.
Let’s get 2010 underway with a bang! What better way to get your year off to a good start than with a contest. To help celebrate the end of 2009 and the beginning of both a new year and a new decade, we’ve asked some of our favourite labels to help us welcome 2010 and what a bang it is!
There’s never much to a Cannibal Corpse show, just five guys who never leave their marks, long, sweaty hair obscuring their faces, churning out that distinct death metal sound they’ve been doing for more than two decades. No frills whatsoever, just pure brutality, and it never fails to floor audiences.
Adrien Begrand recaps the recent Saskatoon stop of the current Hatebreed/Cannibal Corpse co-headline tour that is underway now in North America.
Trivium has talent up the wazoo. That’s never been in doubt. The problem with the Florida band is that Matt Heafy and his mates often try far too hard to impress, the perfect example being the bloated 2008 album Shogun, which threw everything at the wall, from thrash riffs, to hooky choruses, to tempo changes, to epic song structures, with very little sticking in the end. With this fall tour being one last go-round before the band takes a break to write and record their fifth album next year, it was interesting to see Trivium downplay the Shogun record as well as 2006’s The Crusade, instead focusing primarily on the breakthrough Ascendancy, as if they were openly conceding that it’s the best album.
When it was announced that GWAR would be doing an in-store at London ON’s ZEUS CD Plus record store I asked my son Kieran if he’d like to go and get his photo taken with the band. I thought it would make for a neat little feature here on Hellbound.ca. Some photos of the event can be seen within.
Gaza’s He Is Never Coming Back is a tumultuous collection of powerful, almost too emotional songs that are heavy – not for simply being dudes from Salt Lake City who want to show who has the biggest balls on the block, but simply because they have something very powerful to day.