Deluxe Metal: Mastodon & Lamb of God

The News Review:

- Deluxe Metal: Mastodon & Lamb of God
- Hail to the Chiefs
- SXSW Review: Metallica at Stubb’s
- Brutal Youth: The Comedy of Brendon Small

Deluxe Metal: Mastodon & Lamb of God
Express from The Washington Post
” While the choruses are sung the tune features the most death-metal-like vocals on the album. “Divinations” is a great single but this song is the album’s best. ” This 13-minute closer is the longest song on the record. There’s a very cool production thing at the 3-minute mark with spacey delay effects added to the heavy guitar riffs letting the struck chords ring and decay into a black hole before being plucked from death with a new smack of the strings.

Hail to the Chiefs
New York Press
” Considering that Spruance’s current band Secret Chiefs 3 originally included former Bungle members Dunn and Danny Heifetz it might be tempting for Spruance’s fans to view SC3 as just the main vehicle by which he continues to indulge his genrebending urges. Like Bungle SC3 makes bedfellows out of various musical styles that rub against one another in a way that initially causes a kind of sonic rug burn. SC3 incorporates various Eastern musical systems—traditional Persian as well as ArabianTurkish and Indian influences—and grafts them to surf rock electronic music jazz and of course death metal. But as irreverent as SC3 may initially come across at times the idea of creating art with some form of conscience has clearly become important to him. To better gauge where Spruance is coming from these days it helps to get his take on Bungle’s motives or lack thereof. “There was no ideological objective” he points out. “We hated punks.
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SXSW Review: Metallica at Stubb’s
LiveDaily.com
“The best-kept secret in rock and roll” Hetfield quipped before he drummer Lars Ulrich guitarist Kirk Hammet and bassist Robert Trujillo dove back into a thrash-heavy setlist primarily comprised of material from the band’s pre-1990 catalog. After strolling onto the darkened stage at around 10 p. accompanied by a recording of the classical composition “The Ecstasy of Gold”–a longstanding Metallica tradition–the group grabbed the crowd by the collar and didn’t let go for the next 90 minutes.

Brutal Youth: The Comedy of Brendon Small
New York Press
” In many respects the artist hasn’t come all that far in the past two decades. Twenty years later he’s still juggling those two passions albeit in the form of a popular animated series on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Small’s Metalocalypse is weird and violent and wonderful animated crossroads of black humor and death metal—in short its just about everything your average red-blooded adolescent American boy is looking for in late night television programming. The weekly 11-minute show revolves around Dethklok the heaviest and most popular metal band. Like Home Movies Small’s previous Adult Swim show he co-writes and produces music for Metalocalype. “Home Movies was for me when I was eight” Small continues describing his first TV show starring a youthful orange-haired filmmaker of the same name. “[Metalocalypse] is for me when I was 14 15 discovering music.