Like, Evile, Toxic Holocaust and Early Man, Warbringer is one of those neo-thrash bands that still believes it's 1988, Anthrax has just released Among the Living, Metallica are writing ...And Justice For All and grunge and nu-metal never happened.
Now, let's take a look inside Warbringer guitarist John Laux's iPod and see if he's really living in the past.... Well, yes and no. Some of the artists on his Random Shuffle -- including Angel Witch, Coroner and Rigor Mortis -- exist solely in another place on the space/time continuum, but Laux also seems to enjoy newer acts like Circa Survive and Ensiferum, and there's a lot of stuff here that's not even loud, such as Jeff Buckley, Slowdive and Cocteau Twins. We can hardly argue with his inclusion of Thin Lizzy and he earns an extra star for having Sigh on here, but the omission of anything by Exodus, let along the big thrash four makes us wonder if he has lapsed on this year's dues to the Metal Militia. On a scale of 100 we give Laux's iPod list an 80 for listenability. Click "more" to see the full list and watch a video by one of the bands. Read more...
Sigh at B.B. Kings in New York, photos by Jon Wiederhorn
Mirai Kawashima, the frontman for Japanese experimental black-metal band Sigh, is pissed. He's not mad that the band's first New York date in years is on a Tuesday night and the venue is only half full. He's not upset that he's got a catalog of original material to draw from and certain members of the crowd keep yelling for songs by Venom, whose material Sigh cover on their new EP A Tribute to Venom. He's not even angry that Sigh's last full album, Hangman's Hymn: Musikalische Exequien, was one of the scariest, most inventive offerings of 2007, yet was but a flicker on the radar compared to a waterfall of uninspiring metalcore releases. No, Kawashima's rage has more to do with his generalized disgust for the values and beliefs of modern man.
"I hate 99 percent of the people on this earth," he says in a soft voice. "I hate weak people who have to cling to fairy tales like religion, and I hate greedy people that have nothing more than making money in their head. I just want all of them to die." Read more...
"Gravedigger's Tune," "Fratricide," "Ghost Dance," "To the Cemetery," "The Song of Burial," "Cemetery at Dawn," "Call from the Dead."
Are these the names of tracks by some evil black metal band?
No, they all are works by an Austrian Romantic-era classical music composer, Franz Peter Schubert.
People may think that classical music is elegant and graceful. Well, some is, but obviously some is not! Read more...
