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 [...]
So that was fun. Festival organizers estimated that some 2,700 people attended this year's (incredibly well-run) Maryland Deathfest. I missed the first day, but will post more about Saturday and Sunday of MDF VII later. For now, here are a few photos and my thoughts in superlative form, after the jump.
Maryland Deathfest is about to kick off its first day in a couple hours, but better late than never, right? I'll be covering Saturday and Sunday, but for anyone still thinking about heading up to Baltimore (tickets are still available, but not many of them!), here is my absolutely non-comprehensive and subjective preview of [...]
Mastodon have been bringing nerdy extreme metal to the masses since signing with Warner Brothers after their second full-length album, the Moby Dick-based concept album Leviathan. But on the Atlanta band's latest record, Crack the Skye, they drop most of their extreme tendencies in favor of what is basically really heavy prog-rock. Their sold-out show [...]
Less than two weeks out from the festival's kick-off on Friday, May 22, Maryland Deathfest organizers have announced that, in order to accommodate higher than expected ticket sales, the fest will have a stage set up outside Sonar, in addition to the Sonar main stage. As of today, tickets are available again for purchase but [...]
Sweden's The Haunted made me a new fan on Wednesday night at Jaxx. I had long planned on going to this show despite having no familiarity with this band. A few months ago, the lineup included three other metal bands of which I am a big fan: Nachtmystium, Kylesa and Intronaut. Incredibly, all three of [...]
The 9:30 Club hosts the ultimate postmodern concert experience tonight: Brendon Small of Dethklok (of Metalocalypse fame) playing a set backed by the Paul Green School of Rock All-Stars. That’s right, the guy fronting a band covering a cartoon band is now the guy fronting a group of rock students covering a band covering a [...]
Yes, I did drive all the way to Richmond for a nu-metal band. Each of the bands on last Friday's bill at The National—Mudvayne, Nonpoint and In This Moment—are a real blast to photograph, and so for the first time in my concertgoing life I went to a show more for the photography than the [...]
Seems like a lot of interesting metal shows are hitting Baltimore this spring but not D.C. Case in point: The Acacia Strain at the Ottobar last Thursday. Although pigeonholed as metalcore, much to their chagrin, this band plays a brutal, complex brand of death metal that's pretty far from the dumbed-down stuff that "metalcore" often [...]
I don't really have many true "favorites" when it comes to music, simply because there's too much good stuff out there to single out particular bands or albums. That said, Despised Icon is far and away my favorite metalcore band. I'm only slowly coming around to the mixing of extreme metal and hardcore, but DI [...]
