By Hunter Cooke…. It’s not often you see an original, good heavy metal band that’s still around today creating new music while not sounding stale. I don’t consider myself a classic heavy metal guy but I have listened to my fair share of it, especially through my childhood. Tygers of Pan Tang are a heavy metal band from England that have been around since 1978 and have now again been active since 1999. Their new self-titled album mixes a classic heavy metal aspect with thrash undertones and plenty of high pitched vocals and solos.  

I think I can estimate that I’ve been enjoying metal as a genre for about nine years now, going on ten sometime next fall. Like so many others, my first bands were Iron Maiden and Metallica, both of which inspired me to pick up bass and to explore heavy metal, power metal, and thrash metal in my early days. Metallica in particular was instrumental in me pursuing heavier music, as their older material helped me find bands in similar styles that only got a progressively resulted me in the taste of music I have today. I do owe Metallica a lot, and yet I owe them an honest review with Hardwired… to Self-Destruct.  

The world of the Harry Potter franchise needs no introduction. You’ve seen it, I’ve seen it, we’ve all seen it, read it, or experienced it at some point. Its inspired several imitators, movie studios to rely heavily on the young adult film market, and captured the imagination of literally millions of people around the world. It’s kind of a big deal. With the core franchise revolving around the titular character having wrapped up in film format back in 2011, many would have thought author J.K. Rowling was putting the franchise to bed and living happily ever after. How wrong we were.  

Literary fans rejoice! Through Cadabra Records, read by Andrew Leman and creepy soundscapes provided by Theologian, the delightfully dark Pickman’s Model by H. P. Lovecraft comes to frightening life!  

  New Jersey isn’t as bad as they say: sure there’s the pollution and unfriendly people, but once you get past the north-eastern part of the state you tend to find a bit of everything. Despite being cramped and filled with a ton of people, New Jersey doesn’t get a lot of the lower-to-mid tier touring bands because of a lack of a suitable venue for their shows. So technically, that’s why see plenty of bands from overseas playing venues in the Manhattan and Brooklyn area. Every now and then, however, you’ll find the brave band from Scandinavia make a venture into New Jersey, in this case Finland’s power metal titans Sonata Arctica, and you just feel inclined to venture there yourself to bear witness... 

Hot off the new releases press, Upon A Burning Body, out of San Antonio, TX, drop a hell of a load in their new album, Straight From The Barrio.  

My favorite part about discovering bands is seeing who has potential to become something big and who is going to fade into obscurity. The latter is the most common, obviously, because there’s only so many metal bands that strike it “big.” There’s a photo somewhere where it says Finland has the most metal bands per 100 people or something like that, yet how many Finnish bands can you name? Only the strong survive, and seeing that grow from a band’s first few releases is truly amazing. I was lucky enough to see that happen with Ghost and Nails as Opus Eponymous and Unsilent Death were being released, and I’m hopefully seeing it again right now.  

By now, Marvel Studios films are known to generate a success. Even as other superhero movies attempt to find their own footing or fail spectacularly, it’s a sure-fire bet that when “Marvel Studios” is attached to a movie, you’re going to get your money’s worth. Enter Doctor Strange, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s biggest leap forward since Guardians of the Galaxy, and arguably what may be considered their “weirdest.” It’s with the introduction of magic, the multiverse, and so much more than the MCU grows in ways that it has not before, and as such it adds layers to the ever-growing film universe.  

It was roughly two years ago that Saor became a landmark band in the underground scene. Blending atmospheric black metal with a heavy amount of orchestrated folk metal, Saor was the topic of discussion after releasing 2014’s Aura. The studio-only project briefly took a turn to playing live, but has since returned to its original status, allowing founder and composer Andy Marshall to focus heavily on songwriting. Thus, we are given Guardians, the project’s third album that builds off of everything that came before it, and delightfully so as it is shaping up to be a bigger album than its two predecessors.  

Is it just me, or is death metal just stupidly great this year? The underground scene for death metal seems to be in full effect this year, and with it bands are bringing this extra degree of darkness to the mix, creating something really awesome atmospheres, pummeling riffs, and quality albums from start to finish. With plenty of music in the genre being released this year, let’s take note of some of the best the genre has offered in the past ten months.  

It’s not very often, but some weeks there’s just too many albums to come out with and they’re so to-the-point that you need to give blunt, direct commentary on each one. Running with a snake theme, Testament, Crowbar, and the new super-group Serpentine Dominion all released albums, and depending on your flavor you might have something worth picking up! Ranging from ballistic death metal to crushing, doomified sludge metal, this past week had more than enough to appease your varied or particular taste.  

I have something of a love-hate relationship with Avenged Sevenfold. Arguably one of the bands that was present in my transition into more extreme metal bands, (City of Evil and their self-titled circa 2008) I did not find myself a fan of Nightmare or Hail to the King upon their release. I still don’t hold a place in my heart for either albums, but at the very least, it was great to see the band grow bigger with each and every release. When people claim there’s never going to be another Metallica or Iron Maiden, look at Avenged Sevenfold and you’ll be proven wrong. That idea, though, is what makes this surprise-release album, The Stage, so interesting.