Split albums are a must in almost every hardcore band’s catalogue, and every hardcore geek has at least once bought a split 7″ or 12″ just for rare songs of one adored band, and then found the other side to be another casualty of bad pairing. When No Idea released Hot Water Music’s split, no [...]

Martha 3:14 recounts something about the impossibility of love for another unless one understands and accepts an original love, that is, love sent from above through the death and life of God’s son, JC. But if one doesn’t accept the original love, the Bible makes you believe that you’ll never fully have the capacity to [...]

“If you get bitten by a snake, make sure you bring the snake to the medic so they know what kind it is.”
-Second Lt. Svein Arne Henriksen
We’re on a bus transferring us from Oslo Gardemoen to the nearby military airport, seated in the back with about 40 Norwegian and Latvian military dudes. What a shock [...]

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I’m from the jungle — so floating epic hymns emanating from Aryan, Christian Northerners not only make me a bit scared, but also glad to not be Jewish. Think World War II. Under the scrutiny of Austrian-Jewish intellectuals outta the Frankfurt school, any sweeping, transcendentalising musics that attempted to lift emotions, Romanticism of the artist, Wagner, Stravinsky, would [...]

After consuming a kilo of heroin and laxatives that fateful day circa 2004, leaving Bergen on my first ever tour of Norway with a freshly acquired album Riot on an Empty Street playing on headphones, I was fuzzily convinced this album was written for me. Love lost, love forgotten, love-longing for a Norwegian boy, love-longing [...]

Name me one Norwegian nineties superstar or group that hasn’t turned into a zombie. Darkthrone doesn’t count.

This is the bravest Norwegian album I’ve heard all year, and Øystein Sandsdalen has humbled us into knowing that he’s a force to be reckoned with. Rather than be sidelined as Serena Maneesh’s second guitarist, or having taken the route so many bands in the same milieu have, that is, blatantly ripping Serena (which of [...]

The first time I heard Shit City was in my friend’s truck, appropriately, on a rusting tape deck- I remember feeling back in North Carolina, or the place of my birth; Louisville, Kentucky, sitting in a bar watching the house band play. Undoubtedly talented country musicians, doubling old numbers and getting the locals goin’ with [...]

Årabrot, Deathhammer, Benea Reach, Vreid, Troll, Keep of Kalessin, Carpathian Forest @ Inferno.
Oslo, Norway 8th-11th March 2009.
Heavy, extreme, black, dark, piercing, rough, unholy, loud, pounding, distorted. Now that I’ve used up the top ten adjectives used in the average metal review, I’m wondering how the hell I’m gunna describe the plentiful Easter-unfriendly bands at this [...]

Casiokids, Ungdomskulen, The New Wine, Årabrot @ SXSW. Austin, Texas 16th-22th March 2009
I am so hipstered out that I want to drink Guinness in a shady hotel lobby next to a cigar-smoking ex-lounge singer who’s wife left him for some buff cowboy, and listen to bossanova in the background whilst writing these reviews in some [...]