Thursday, June 6, 2013

Lamb of God


The $.25 overview
From: Virginia
Formed: 1990
Genre: Groove Metal / Metalcore
More Info: http://www.lamb-of-god.com/home


What they sound like
Often considered a contemporary (or child of) Pantera, Lamb of God is immensely heavy with savage guitar riffs and ferocious vocals. But don't go thinking that Randy Blythe's voice is merely gravel filled growls; his bark is clearly articulated.

One of my metal friends once described Pantera as something like, "pure sonic testosterone" and I feel like that's really the genre that both these bands belong in.

How I came to love them
For those of you who don't know, I worked at Hot Topic for a very long time. All jokes aside, the job paid the bills and the company treats it's employees well (concert reimbursements, benefits, trips to cool places, etc.) The best part was really my coworkers.

I worked with many members of local bands and thanks to one of the founding members of The Acacia Strain, I became a Lamb of God fan. I have many fond memories of blasting Ashes of the Wake while folding shirts.

But I'll tell you what, before listening to them, it was a hard sell for me. LOG has this terrible stigma of being a "Hot Topic band" (i.e trendy, crappy quality, only loved by inexperienced 12 year olds.) But once i actually heard them, I was hooked.

So if you still haven't embraced them because you think they're some novelty act that lines Hot Topic's pockets, get over yourself and give them a listen.

Songs to check out



Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Mastodon

I've previously gotten myself into trouble (on Google+) with the "metal community" by expressing my snide comments about Mastodon but that's certainly not stopping me from posting them here, as well.

I understand that, technically, the guys from this band are talented, passionate musicians however, when I hear them I can only think, "Yeah - I liked this band better when they were called The Deftones."

Also. They may "rock hard" but they will never fall into the category of "metal" for me.

And far be it from me to say anything about "progressive" metal / rock / whatever (as I love me some early Queensryche) but Mastodon is seriously too proggy for my taste; I don't need 15 minutes of nerdy, musical masturbation in the form of aimless guitar noodling. My thrash metal brain just gets bored and distracted and when I snap out of my trance I keep thinking, "Wait. This song is still going on? Why hasn't it ended? When are we going to get to the end?"

Wanna fight? Don't bother. I don't care, at all, about trolls.