Feature Articles

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.” ...

If there is a redheaded stepchild of the creative arts, the music video format is it. Literature, music, theater, even the L’Enfant terrible that is cinema, all have their “respectable” champions and preservationists. Music video, on the other hand, has ...

Mayhem—they’re one of the most recognizable and influential Black Metal bands in history, and one who certainly have a fair amount of controversy surrounding them. If not for a series of events that made the genre infamous in the early ...

Mood music is a phrase that evokes either sounds for some downtown lovin’ or something more in the vein of Jackie Gleason’s’ For Lovers Only. (Believe me, despite the title, there is a HUGE divide between the two categories, unless ...