Mr eel

Kickrush, Kickrush, Kickrush - I Love Metal

Spanning everything from slow, doom, sludge to high-speed thrash, Heavy Metal covers a lot of ground. If you like some heavy tunes, you’re guaranteed to find something you love. Even if you don’t there is still bound to be something that you can dig.

My non-scientific, incomplete list of favorites:

Mastodon

These guys often get tagged as progressive. I think that’s because they use… you know melodies and stuff. For a time metal was dominated by death, thrash and variants — loud and fast was the name of the game. Now minds seem to be opening up again. I absolutely love Mastodon. This is the thinking man’s metal. Good solid grooves, plenty of energy and some top guitar work. They also love a bit of conceptualising, which gives the music an interesting flavour — for example the album Leviathan is about Moby Dick. Highly recommended. These guys are fuckin’ awesome.

Chimaira

Yes the misspelling of the name is intentional, don’t look at me. Straight up fast and violent. This stuff is just plain capital-H Heavy. I recommend their self-titled album as a starting point. Previous to that release they had a slight nu-metal influence — that horrible metal/rap cross over rubbish — but Chimaira - Chimaira is almost a return to the roots of metal. If you dig Pantera and Slayer, check em out.

The Dillinger Escape Plan

Dear sweet Darwin, I can’t tell you how much I love this band, but I’m gonna try. Math-metal — they make heavy use of odd time signatures, mid-song signature changes and stop/start dynamics. They’re also flat out fuckin’ brutal. The LP Miss Machine gets heavy play from me. More energy and technical-chops than most. Thank you DEP for being totally awesome.

ISIS

Ahhh, sludgy. ISIS sit at the slower end of the metal spectrum. Most of ISIS’ music is built around a slow and steady build-up to a heavy wall of sound. It’s a dynamic they use repeatedly, but it never gets old. I recommend the album Panopticon in particular.

Other notables

Here is a few other albums that I’ve been thrashing lately:

• Year of No Light - Nord
• Behold… the Arctopus - Skullgrid
• The End - Transfer Trachea Reverberations from Point
• Neurosis - Through Silver in Blood
• Soilwork - Sworn to a Great Divide

Posted on December 17th, 2007 | There are 3 comments

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