Feature Articles

Love songs can be some of the worst things on Earth. I’m talking pure grade schmaltz. Solo love in an elevator, which will only end in tears and a possible police arrest. Is that any way to live life? No. ...

Few figures in Western culture possess such knee-jerk, ookie-spooky clout as the Devil. Excuse me. THE Devil! Christian believers get nervous, metalheads get excited, and if you’re that one goblet wielding Dapper Dan from Sam Dunn’s incredible 2005 documentary, Metal: ...

Depression. The ole emotional ebb and flow. Sometimes it’s due to a string of bad luck, personal past trauma, a tricky assortment of chemical imbalances, a mix of all of the above, and something that may even feel hard to ...

Serendipity. It’s defined by Merriam-Webster as, “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.” It’s also a force that takes you through an unexpected back road that leads to some of the best and most ...

Standing underneath the unflinching fluorescent lights in your local grocery store, you start wondering what Lovecraftian entity came up with the idea for a food item called “Uncrustable,” and a song hits your ears. Hits is an understatement, since verbs ...

The art of a primed and ready music compilation is a fine one. It’s akin to building the perfect party guest list. A tricky recipe that could collapse the whole shebang if you invite two or three bores who think ...

Well, as any shiftless, booze-guzzling deviant will know, the Macc Lads finally roared out of an unquiet sonic grave this year and played their first live gigs since 1997, on their The Usual Subjects tour. They are on tour round ...

It’s easy to fear what you don’t understand. History is full of examples of people acting irrationally because of superstitions. The strigoi, for example, has been a target of scorn in Romania since the mid-seventeenth century. Part ghoul, part ghost, ...

Journalist Geoff Barton might not have foreseen the impact he would make when he coined the term NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) in Sounds magazine. The words would become synonymous with a tidal wave of bands that emerged ...

Angels in the musical arts have gotten a bad reputation. Not even bad in a colorful, smoking-in-the-boys-room kind of way, but bad in a cliched and whitewashed way. Simpy, bloodless, with nary an ounce of passion and power. Once portrayed ...