The Musical Almanac is an ongoing series highlighting musical styles or genres from around the world. Today, we focus on this unique style from Japan: City-Pop. Sometimes the barrier of language can be so high as to render history muted. Most people now have the luxury of being able to decipher what exactly J-Pop is […]
Synth-heavy bass chords, each ending abruptly and eerily, open Chelsea Wolfe’s 2015 album Abyss. You’d almost think you were listening to some resurfaced soundtrack for 1997’s cult sci-fi epic Event Horizon if it weren’t for the eventual build-up of industrial doom metal and Wolfe’s haunting voice crooning like some kind of space siren. Maybe this […]
Editor’s note: Victor Baker is no longer working on D’Angelico’s Master Builder guitars, but we’ve kept this interview up because it serves as a look into the intricate craftsmanship that goes into these guitars. It’s a New Yorker made by the hands of a New Yorker in New York. To clarify, that’s a D’Angelico New Yorker archtop […]
2015 has been quite the ride so far for bassist/guitarist/songwriter Marc Walloch. With a career that includes stints playing guitar for Juliette Lewis, and several years rising through the alt-rock ranks as a founding member of Company of Thieves — the Chicago band that launched powerhouse vocalist Genevieve’s career — Walloch is currently on the […]
They say the enemy of good art is the absence of limitations. We’ve heard this in the past, with artists like Tangerine Dream and Manuel Göttsching, who by necessity, used workarounds to real life technological limitations as ways to create their own brand of music. How? By taking simple techniques and applying it to the musical tools they […]
With Isis/Old Man Gloom frontman and Hydra Head Records founder/owner Aaron Turner at the helm, Sumac has its roots dug deep into the metal underground. In the wake of Isis disbanding and Hydra Head closing down, Turner spent some time with various side projects like Old Man Gloom and the black metal studio band Twilight, […]
Formed in 2003, Chicago’s Sweet Cobra have been hammering out hard hitting post-hardcore for over a decade. Their first full-length in five years, Earth was recorded and produced by Matt Talbot of Hum and Kurt Ballou of Converge. Listening to the record, the elements of both bands are clearly present. While the label post-hardcore definitely […]
Employing electric guitars to build minimalist, single-note movements into towering walls of sound, post-rock musicians are no strangers to using their instruments and effects as a focal point in a genre often devoid of vocals. Pioneered by bands such as Tortoise and Slint, post-rock has been thrust into the mainstream in recent years by acts […]
A haze of gloom and fuzzy feedback emanates from stacks of amplifiers. The buzzing drone builds into a wall of slow, churning riffs that rise and swell, inspiring a feeling of ominous dread that wells up inside of you -— the sound of doom metal. Like so much of modern metal music, the doom sub-genre […]