Feature Articles

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 ...

“An artist is forced by others to paint out his own free will.”  —Willem de Kooning “Censorship=Artistic Death” —Skinny Puppy The art of fear is both a potent weapon and a mighty revealer when placed in the right hands and minds. ...

Since their formation in 1992, Carpathian Forest have established themselves as one of the more unique black metal bands to emerge from Norway. Lead by hedonistic frontman Roger “Nattefrost” Rasmussen, the group has been unapologetic with the themes they’ve incorporated ...

The Phoenix rising from the ashes—it’s one of the most celebrated stories in mythology, and one of the best ways to illustrate rebirth. (Albeit it’s an analogy that sometimes gets overused.) In the case of Mayhem, there’s no better way ...

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.” ...