Meltasia announced an as to be expected doozy ass line up today (with a few holes left to fill). Mungo Jerry and Midnight on the same weekend? Say no more. I will def try to be there to see Roky’s set and of course mighty Tower, but there is plenty of other juicy radness to go around. Be nice to the goats.
More info BELOW.
Add to My Radar
Seether and Letters From The Fire just rocked Upstate Concert Hall in mid May and our own Catharina Christiana was there to capture some of the energy with her camera. Check the shots out BELOW.
Add to My Radar
Well, seems weird to be posting about music when the GOP just voted to make rape a pre-existing condition, but I guess cheer and motivation in the form of art is always important. I’m drinking tea and listening to “Linchpin” from Fear Factory and hoping everyone out there doesn’t give up the fight.
Anyway, some good news for rock and metal lovers. Mastodon have been added to the already insanely dope Psycho Las Vegas bill this year. King Diamond is doing classic Abigail entirely, Laura from Kylesa is unveiling a set of herself and special guests, you’ve got up and coming heralded as the next generation of top quality acts like Gatecreeper, Oathbreaker, Chelsea Wolfe and Inter Arma, varied styles of experimental metal from USNEA to Dark Castle plus a lot of my personal faves in the scene like Jex Thoth, Conan, Blood Ceremony and even the Cult of Luna collaboration with Julie Christmas!
Then you also have legacy bands like Diamond Head, Melvins, Swans, Carcass, Corrosion Of Conformity, Magma, Cirith Ungol. I mean, Jesus Christ!
Damn, yo. The event is set to take place from August 18th through August 20th, 2017 with a pre-party August 17th at the Hard Rock Hotel And Casino Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Add to My Radar
We are coming to America for the Chicago Open Air Festival! This is Rammstein’s only performance in the U.S. in 2016. We look forward to seeing you in July! –Rammstein
►Tickets HERE.
Oh ye of little faith…of COURSE Facedown Fest will be awesome this year. From Rival Choir’s anticipated slot to My Epic’s sure to be melodic and imaginative set to the return of Impending Doom, there is a lot to be thankful for for fans.
We are super excited to announce that the 2016 Facedown Fest will showcase Impending Doom‘s first live show in 3 years! We also have the exclusive West Coast Seventh Star reunion show as well as For All Eternity‘s first US show!
Join us May 14 at the Glasshouse in Pomona, CA. Tickets are available now at facedownfest.com.
Dates and line up below.
Add to My Radar
Temples Festival have announced grunge godfathers The Melvins as the Saturday night headliner. The fest line up this year is pretty damn forceable, featuring Jucifer, Acid King, All Pigs Must Die and many more great bands.
Statement:
Patrons of Temples Festival,
First and foremost, thank you all for the patience you’ve kindly extended of late.
Without further ado, it’s with great pride with which we finally announce our first Temples 2016 headliner, following on from the likes of Neurosis and Sunn0))) as our Saturday night headliner, please welcome (the) Melvins to Temples Festival 2016.
The Melvins will headline Saturday, June 4th alongside a diverse and tasteful selection of artists – for what’s set to be one of the heaviest & most memorable days in the history of Temples Festival. With over forty bands now announced and many more (including two headliners) still to be unveiled, we’re firmly on course for another monumental weekend.
As ever, we’ll be under-selling the overall capacity of Motion to minimise the strain on each room and ensure we can offer the most comfortable experience possible for each of our Patrons. We have secured a number of tasteful caterers for 2016 which includes an array of vegan and vegetarian options, and once again we’ll be offering a fairly priced Ale and Cider bar for the drinking contingency among us – this time, featuring a bespoke Temples Festival ale.
January 30th, 2016 will mark the official kick off of the first annual Florida Metal Fest! Organized by brothers John and Donald Tardy of death metal legends, Obituary, and set to take place at The Cuban Club, Ybor City in Tampa, the event looks really awesome. The bands are mainly veterans celebrating Florida’s significant contribution to Death Metal, with some friends from around the scene like legends C.O.C. and Madball thrown in for good measure. There are even 2 battle of the bands winners to be involved, which is really good because we need to grow the newer talent. This reflects well on team Tardy.
Honestly, I do wish they’d gotten Origin, Downfall of Gaia, Black Breath or almost any band besides Malevolent Creation, though. I just can’t hang with the racism that I have heard repeated about them often for many years. While the scene needs to learn some measure of forgiveness and to thus encourage people to evolve attitudes, we also have to discuss and adjust these issues because they are not ok. Sweeping them under the rug is not cool. Like, I’m listening to Jarboe’s “Forbid” from Disburden Disciple right now about forbidden interracial love and it seems at odds with sincere racist jokes.
That said, Trouble and Atheist are fucking playing this and many other kick ass bands I fully love.
Said John Tardy of fest: “My brother and I have been so fortunate and thankful to be part of some the best and biggest music festivals in the world. The amount of people, bands and energy these festivals can bring is just awesome. From the first time we played one, it has always been a dream of ours to put together a music festival that is not only fun for the fans, bands and crews, but one that also brings a closeness to all involved. After years and years of talking about it, we finally decided the time is now. We want to put together a first class festival. From the venue to the PA, from the lights to the lineup we are trying our best to make this as memorable event as possible. No festival, anywhere in the world, even with the best possible lineup, would work if the area does not support it. I think that Tampa, and its surrounding cities, is a great music area and one that is ready to make this event come to life.”
More BELOW.
Roadburn 2016 is lookin’ sexy as usual with Black Mountain, Brothers of the Sonic Cloth and other killer acts slated to appear, but many people will be drooling about a full set of Jane Doe from some band called Converge you may have heard of. While that is cool, I think all the emphasis on that record takes away from how many of their other albums are just as awesome (Axe To Fall and You Fail Me in particular). But hey, it’s still rad. But I’m much more keen on the second announcement which finds the band teaming up with some awesome guests to reinterpret some of their weirder tunes.
To celebrate the upcoming 15 year anniversary of their legendary Jane Doe album, CONVERGE will perform the album in its entirety for the first and last time. The album is considered a classic that defined the metallic hardcore genre as we know it today. This special set is exclusive to the Roadburn Festival and will not be played again anywhere, ever.
CONVERGE will play the Jane Doe album live in its entirety at Roadburn 2016 on Thursday, April 14.
CONVERGE “Blood Moon” is a collaboration between members Jacob Bannon, Kurt Ballou, Nate Newton, and Ben Koller and guest musicians Chelsea Wolfe, Ben Chisholm, Stephen Brodsky, and Steve Von Till. Together as a multi-instrumental group they will create renditions of existing CONVERGE material focusing on the band’s slower, more ambitious work within their legendary catalogue.
CONVERGE “Blood Moon” will perform live at Roadburn 2016 on Saturday, April 16.
To find out more about CONVERGE at Roadburn, click HERE
Add to My Radar
Lots of good news to start off the metal weekend. “Wake Up And Smell The…” from Carcass is finally available on vinyl HERE. Monte Pittman retweeted yesterday’s Confrontational interview to his 80k+ twitter followers (thanks, dude!). Mortiis are returning to the USA and have new music coming. Kylesa’s new album is out. I just got the new Skindred promo which is sure to make me jump up and down. Aaaand last but certainly not least, I know some of you have been getting into Tau Cross, right?
TAU CROSS, the veteran punk / metal collective, revolving around Amebix bassist/frontman Rob Miller, Voivod drummer Michel ‘Away’ Langevin, and members of cult crust outfit Misery, will be playing a one off show at Roadburn 2016, along with Neurosis and Amenra, on Saturday, April 16th at the 013 venue in Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Organizers say:
“Having TAU CROSS on the main-stage is causing us joy of unbridled proportions. Miller and Langevin are not only mutual admirers and peers, but their bands have been a huge influence on all things Roadburn. With all of the seminal bands and great musicians taking part on Saturday, it’s guaranteed to be epic.”
To find out more about TAU CROSS at Roadburn, click HERE
Add to My Radar
This exhibition brings Yseult full-circle, having lived in New York City from 1982 – 1991, during which time she co-founded White Zombie while attending Parsons The New School for Design in Manhattan’s West Village, before moving to New Orleans in 1996 with nothing more than a single suitcase, a guitar, a banjo, and a Polaroid Land Camera.
More BELOW.
Add to My Radar
Hard rockers Life Of Agony always put their best foot forward live and the footage from Grasspop 2015 is a great example of how they still bring it hard. Mina and the boys rage through classics to a huge crowd. This band still deserves all the love in the world. Hope they make a new album. Meanwhile, watch the electric concert footage BELOW.
San Diego’s Wovenwar, along with special guests Secrets, Heartist, Hell or Highwater, and A New Challenger Approaches, will be putting on a special show at Brick By Brick on July 10th. The show takes place during one of the largest comic conventions in the world, San Diego Comic-Con. Those who are in town for the convention July 9-12 might want to take a night off from comics/games/movies to check out a metal show at Brick by Brick! The July 10th show is 21+, doors are at 7:30pm, and the show starts at 8pm. Tickets are $15 in advance and at the door. Tickets are available now through Ticketfly here: http://ticketf.ly/1Qn7ObE. Get there early! The bar is hosted by Sailor Jerry from 7:30PM – 8:30PM.
Add to My Radar
Currently listening to DRCARLSONALBION’s Gold as I write this, stretched out notes rounding the curve of my mind to carry some desert light to the backmost reaches of persona. Hot day crawling to a close and reading a Jack Reacher book from a pile of stuff my dad gave me before he died.Thinking about how anything Dylan Carlson is involved in seems to really resonate on the same frequency as the rugged, underground American spirit of freedom.
Carlson’s band EARTH are a favorite and I’m pleased to announce they have a slew of good events coming up, including Project Pabst Presents in Portland, Oregon on July 18th, a show in Olympia, Washington on the 19th, and a hometown Seattle performance on July 22nd. According to their PR:
EARTH has also confirmed their return to the East Coast, based around their participation in Necronomicon Convention in Providence, Rhode Island on August 22nd, at the upcoming city-wide tribute to H.P. Lovecraft in the famed writer’s hometown. September will see EARTH taking part in this year’s installment of the massive Ellnora Guitar Festival in Urbana, Illinois. Additional live performances will be announced in the weeks ahead.
Dates below and links to get Primitive and Deadly.
Add to My Radar
After what seems like the longest winter in recorded history, summer music festival has finally arrived for those of us in the greater Boston area. Few and far between are the occasions for those of us who are into music with a harder edge to actually cover one of these festivals, as they’re typically awash in a dizzying array of alt-pop and alt-country and neo-folk acts. Thank God, then, for Tenacious D.
Backed by a three-piece band that included none-other than Brooks Wackerman of Bad Religion fame on the drums, the acoustic-metal duo of Jack Black and Kyle Gass, served as headline act on one of the Boston Calling Music Festival’s two stages, essentially serving as direct support for festival headliners (and hometown favorites) the Pixies.
Gass and Black took to the stage in full-on, cocksure strut as they prepared to lay waist to what was, admittedly, a very vocally supportive crowd. There’s a tendency amongst music critics and fans alike to overlook Tenacious D as a gimmicky joke band, a sort of faux-metal Smothers Brothers. To do so, however, is to ignore both the legitimate homage that Black and Gass pay to the metal world, and to the legitimate rock chops that the duo and their backing band bring to the table.
From the opening notes of the band’s now fourteen-year-old debut single, “Tribute,” Black and Gass led the band through a high-powered set that never really provided them the opportunity to remove their collective foot from the gas pedal, save, maybe, for the set’s humorous and well-performed jazz-fusion interlude. By the time Gass and Black had bid the band adieu and closed the set with the hilariously – dare I say – sweet track “Fuck Her Gently,” they had triumphantly won over all but the most callous of doubters. Case in point: yours truly had gathered in main stage’s photo pit alongside forty or fifty other photographers from varied media outlets great and small in the photo pit in anticipation of the Pixies set by the time “Fuck Her Gently” began, and halfway through the song song, ¾ of the pit, and the crowd at-large, were singing along in full-voiced unison.
Check out our photo gallery from the Tenacious D set at Boston Calling below.
Add to My Radar
If you were only allowed to pick one black metal album to hear for the rest of 2019, I would strongly suggest you choose False's Portent. A dizzying leap forward from an already very talented and rightfully well regarded act, it does not take long into ten minute opener "A Victual to Our Dead Selves" for the song to grab your undivided attention and never let go. Dedicated to the memory of several friends, the record is professional, passionate, heartbreaking and exhilarating. "Rime On The Song Of Returning" is an exceptionally poetic ode to natural abandon that seems to question our size in the scope of the march of time. The band have never sounded more precise, empowered and fiery, like there is a fortune teller at band practice urging them to claim destiny's heights. If this album holds significance of metal's future it is one that honors the best of the past while boding very well for the genre's horizons.
