mixtapes

Morbid Angel Photo by Mark Coatsworth Speaking of slow death metal — Morbid Angel were Southern sludge before the term was invented. I have always liked their murky, half-speed trudges the best. For me, Morbid Angel’s faster moments rarely translate well on record. This is partly due to a wide range of terrible production. Also, […]

Fenriz is the metal friend you wish you had. He’s funny, his band Darkthrone rules sometimes, and he makes great mixtapes. For Vice‘s website, he’s made a thrash mixtape called Trapped Under Vice, Vol. I. It is 79 minutes of banging, polka beaten filth, with Metallica and Slayer nowhere in sight (though some Slayer riffs […]

by Cosmo Lee A final kiss-off to 2008 – my favorite metal songs that year. As I hear these for the umpteenth time, I can’t help but wonder: why can’t albums now be this wall-to-wall awesome? All these bands with all these chops – is it so hard to write a song? One with shape, […]

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt CheapAustralian album cover AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” has taken up literally hours of my life. It’s strange for a single – the breathing sounds on beats 2 and 4, rare singing by Malcolm Young, ridiculous lyrics about being a contract killer. When I tracked down covers of the song, […]

Ministry @ Lollapalooza ’92 Though Ministry aren’t in Chicago anymore, they – or at least head minister Al Jourgensen – still retain ties to the city. Jourgensen is a Blackhawks fanatic and friends with the team owner’s son. He retooled a shelved song in red, white, and black, and gifted it to the team. As […]

I made this mixtape last year for a friend. However, it’s so fun that I couldn’t not share: 5 minutes, 15 songs. It goes by like a blink, albeit a brutal one (see also the world’s shortest music video, Brutal Truth’s “Collateral Damage”). Technically, this probably isn’t the world’s shortest mixtape. But it goes down […]

In this month’s Decibel (#40, Dethklok cover), I’ve written the “Will Consider Trades” column, which constructs a hypothetical mixtape from a chosen year. Reading about a mixtape one can’t hear isn’t much fun, so here is the actual “mixtape,” sequenced and volume-normalized for your enjoyment. (Funny how “mixtape” still has a certain cachet; “mix CD” […]

I probably heard over 10,000 songs this year. These 11 kept me returning to them. As I age, I find myself gravitating towards song over sound, at least when making year-end lists and other notations for posterity. Sounds come and go, but songs stay. Anyway, sound in metal has become basically moot. It’s hard to […]

Speaking of “Orion,” here’s a collection of all the covers I could find of the song. Unlike the massively popular “Raining Blood” mixtape, this one has only five covers, probably because (a) the song is an instrumental and thus less glamorous to recast, and (b) few dare mess with the masterpiece that is Cliff Burton’s […]

Added 14.07.07 – Reggie & The Full Effect cover of “Raining Blood” “Raining Blood” is one of my top three metal tunes of all time. Despite the fact the opening tom patterns always fool me, and I can’t ever figure out exactly when the guitars come in – when they do, it’s air guitar central. […]