Canada's Fuck the Facts are often pigeonholed as grindcore, but last year's Disgorge Mexico showed the trio blowing up genre conventions and exploring sounds all their own. At their show last night in Baltimore, their setlist drew mainly from that album, bringing much-needed freshness to a show which to that point had been dominated by [...]

Bloody Panda and Salome brought deafening volume levels to The Red and the Black's tiny performance space last Thursday night. Bloody Panda (pictured above) is a six-piece from New York City, signed to the brilliant Profound Lore Records, whose recorded output is an intriguingly unconventional mix of glacial riffs and ethereal vocals. Their live show [...]

The husband/wife duo of Amber Valentine and D.C. native Edgar Livengood, aka Jucifer, don't really tour so much as they live their lives on the road. Of the many bands out there that seem to tour constantly, Jucifer probably has them all beat. So it makes sense that their live show is a completely different [...]

Last Friday night, Jaxx may have been the best place to find the highest concentration of absurdly talented musicians in the D.C. area. Florida legends Atheist, featuring a brand-new guitarist who made his debut at Maryland Deathfest, headlined a show full of technical metal bands and enough fast riffage, blast beats and time changes to [...]

Just when you thought Baltimore was safe from metalheads again, the folks behind Maryland Deathfest have gone and made some initial lineup announcements for the next installment of the festival, set for May 28-30, 2010. This is no tentative first step, either; a whopping 18 bands were announced today as performers at next year's event:
Entombed [...]

Alright, that's it for this year. Saturday might have been the big draw at Maryland Deathfest 2009, but Sunday was no disappointment either, unless you were a Pestilence fan. Pestilence cancelled due to visa issues and were replaced by a second set of Bolt Thrower, who played the same set as Saturday in a different [...]

So this belongs pretty clearly in the Better Late Than Never department, but those of us who attended Maryland Deathfest this year are already looking forward to next year's installment, so consider this, uh, a preview of MDF VIII. Yeah.
Between photography and sheer metal overload, I saw a number of bands about which I couldn't [...]

I'm going to hazard a guess that during yesterday's music-packed evening in D.C., the only show that could rival Peter Brötzmann's trio in intensity was The Dillinger Escape Plan at Rock & Roll Hotel. If you've seen DEP before or you read my writeup of their Baltimore show this past Feburary, you know the [...]

If this week's Opeth and Enslaved bill at the 9:30 Club was an inspired pairing, the combination of Isis and Pelican tomorrow at the Black Cat is almost too obvious. Imagine post-rock played with heavy metal riffs and you've got the right idea for both these groups. Isis are touring in support of [...]

Sweden's Opeth and Norway's Enslaved played to a reverent near-capacity crowd at the 9:30 Club last night. Putting these two bands together was an inspired idea, as both currently play a kind of heavy progressive metal with melodic passages and clean vocals mixed into the downtuned riffs and growls. However, the bands' backgrounds are different [...]