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Mining Metal: Beyond Grace, Blames God, Centenary, Defacement, Formless Body, Replicant, Succumb, Wraith
Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence writers Joseph Schafer and Langdon Hickman. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts. Metal is eternal. While its popularity ebbs and flows in the macro, its genres in the micro persist. A subgenre might experience a resurgence in popularity long after its progenitors have become elder statesmen — thrash exploded again long after its mid-’80s heyday in the early ’00s, for example. Even minuscule representations of a genre might persist after its innovators metamorphose. For example, Carcass have a new album out this month, one that sounds nothing like the grindcore permutation of the group from their ...
What’s the Deal with Seinfeld’s Bizarre Pilot?
In this age of streaming, serialized television, and full-season orders for everything, the pilot feels like a lost, forgotten art. You see, kids, back when television aired on a handful of networks and you had to watch whatever happened to be on the boob tube at any given moment, network executives would order a test episode, or “pilot,” to see whether a show would work. It’s a pre-natal version of the show you’d come to know and love, often with characters, approaches, or visual tics that were dropped by episode 2. Now, Netflix is bringing Seinfeld, in all its remastered HD glory, to its shores on October 1st, offering audiences new and old the chance to binge their way through all ten seasons of the iconic, game-changing sitcom. But if you truly start at the beginning, with its dee...
A Complete Timeline of Machine Gun Kelly and Slipknot’s Feud
The recent feud between rapper-turned-pop-punker Machine Gun Kelly and Slipknot singer Corey Taylor has seemingly been one of the most unlikely beefs of 2021. Then again, when taking a look at MGK’s career trajectory and impending album release schedule, it actually makes a lot of sense. Back in the early 2010s, MGK first came into the spotlight as an upstart rapper out of Cleveland who caught the attention of Bad Boy Records label head Sean Combs. Despite never becoming a household name, his first three albums landed in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 and were eventually certified Gold. A 2018 feud with hip-hop legend Eminem gave MGK more of a mainstream presence, as they traded diss tracks back-and-forth as part of a high-profile beef that picked back up in 2020. Following a re...
Beyond the Boys’ Club: Emily Armstrong of Dead Sara
Beyond the Boys’ Club is a monthly column from journalist and radio host Anne Erickson, focusing on women in the heavy music genres, as they offer their perspectives on the music industry and discuss their personal experiences. Erickson is also a music artist herself, recently releasing the song “Eternal Way” with Upon Wings. This month’s piece features an interview with Emily Armstrong of Dead Sara. Los Angeles rockers Dead Sara spent much of the lockdown period working on their Warner Records debut (and third album overall), the just-released Ain’t It Tragic. With recording sessions set to take place smack dab in the middle of the pandemic, the new album brought some challenges for the band, but it was nothing they couldn’t face head-on, as demonstrated in their triumphant new single, “H...
Is It Safe to Go to a Show in the Age of COVID
When COVID-19 hit the United States in early 2020, it caused an unprecedented shutdown of the live music industry that continued long after most other sectors of the economy had reopened. As the vaccine rollout gained steam over the first half of 2021, and new cases and hospitalizations trended downward, music lovers began to feel like they could finally make out a smidge of light at the end of a very long, dark tunnel. Tours were booked, venues did away with capacity restrictions as local laws allowed, and a head-spinning number of festival lineups were announced. Many began to believe the worst was behind us. Then the Delta variant made itself known, and it felt like we were sliding back into the pandemic. As the weather turns colder while medical resources are stretched to the limits in...
Businesses Need to Be “Data Driven” for True Digital Transformation says Altron
Image sourced from Planful. Over and above leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud services; it has been widely acknowledged that the key building block for true digital transformation is the need for businesses to become data-driven. Of course, this is a uniquely challenging task for almost every business. Dealing with the Data Challenge At the core of any data strategy lies the need to fully manage and exploit data as a strategic asset throughout its entire life-cycle across the enterprise. This has proven easy for companies born in the cloud, but inherently challenging for organisations that are not. Becoming data-driven requires the will, capacity, resources and discipline to rethink how a business operates from people to processes as well as the technology that glues these e...
The Unlikely Renewal of Billy Strings
Billy Strings is smoking a bowl in the back of his tour bus, parked in Spokane, Washington, where he’s performing the next night. “I don’t know how the fuck I ended up here,” Strings tells SPIN, with a humble intake of breath. We both know he’s not talking about Spokane. Strings is a 28-year-old Grammy-winning bluegrass virtuoso. Few people in music today can pluck strings like Strings; his fingers are like cheetahs sprinting up and down the neck of his guitar with the appetite of a forest fire. If you listen to any of Strings’ music, hints of his past are even more evident with understanding his demons. And for someone who once spent their days lonesomely walking the streets, his third record Home won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album last year. Renewal is Strings’ fourth record, and wa...
Ask Dr. Mike: The Big Four Steps to Improving Mental Health
Spinning off from the Going There with Dr. Mike podcast, our monthly “Ask Dr. Mike” column is back to answer listeners’ questions about their mental health. This past month’s episodes focused on Suicide Prevention Month, with guests like Phantogram and Jesse Leach discussing how they cope with the “beast” of their own mental health. Today, Dr. Mike provides some simple steps to help us tackle these daily stresses on our wellness journeys. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, and it provides an excellent opportunity not only to check in on our own mental health, but also to find ways to improve our emotional well-being. One of the most daunting aspects of our mental health journey is that there are often harmful and complex issues that we face in our lives that could hinder our w...
Nile Rodgers on His Enduring Production Philosophy: “You Want to Touch a Person’s Soul”
Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards released their first album as Chic, arguably disco’s greatest band, in 1977. In the decades since, Rodgers has charted a remarkable path as a producer and songwriter, with chart-topping songs by David Bowie, Madonna, and Diana Ross, among others. He also continued to lead Chic after Edwards’s death in 1996, releasing the band’s comeback album It’s About Time in 2018, and extending his run of hits with Daft Punk’s 2013 smash “Get Lucky.” Now, the busy superproducer has a hand in yet another new venture; on Monday (September 27th), Fender is launching a global campaign called Player Plus Studio Sessions, for which Rodgers will serve on a panel and judge submissions from aspiring musicians. Advertisement Related Video Winners will be awarded with Fender instru...
Hold Up, Wait A Minute…
Waiting sucks. It makes kids go ballistic, it frenzies animals, plants probably aren’t into it, and without the rare ability to experience satisfaction just by anticipating it, you too probably think waiting blows. One of the worst waits is a call center telephone hold: a customer service line, a federal government office, the damn phone company itself. A 10-tier automated menu system leading to a twenty-minute queue, talking to a person, getting transferred then seemingly abandoned. You can stand, walk or sit on hold, inside or in a park, you can do anything to fill that wasted life. But no matter how you wait, the only way to know you’re still connected, the last hope your call has, is hold music. Universal interludes Hold music was “discovered” in 1962 by Alfred Levy, an American factor...
Song of the Week: King Princess Offers a Faithful Velvet Underground Tribute With “There She Goes Again”
Song of the Week breaks down and talks about the song we just can’t get out of our head each week. Find these songs and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist. For our favorite new songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, King Princess provides a standout track off the new tribute album for The Velvet Underground and Nico. King Princess goes vintage this week with a cover of The Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again,” part of a new tribute album out today (September 24th). The collection includes quite a few beloved names offering their own homages to the seminal band — Sharon Van Etten, Courtney Barnett, and Iggy Pop are among them — and King Princess’ moment truly stuck the landing. Effectively capturing the 1960s spirit of the origina...
Rap Song of the Week: Lil Wayne Tag Teams with Run the Jewels on “ooh la la” Remix
Rap Song of the Week breaks down the essential rap and hip-hop tracks you need to hear every week. Check out the full playlist here. This week, Lil Wayne hops on Run the Jewels’ remix of “ooh la la.” Mixing the cutting edge sensibilities of Run the Jewels with their love for Golden Era hip-hop thanks to contributions from the legendary Greg Nice and DJ Premier, “ooh la la” instantly became a standout entry in their catalog when it was released in 2020. For the remix, El-P and Killer Mike recruited Lil Wayne, another veteran MC who has nothing to prove this deep into his career but continues to go toe-to-toe with the best rappers of any generation. Only getting better with age as he turns 39 years old this September, Wayne has been on a hot streak this year, popping up on tracks alongside r...
