I made a post a while back extolling the magnificence of the skullet, the most metal hairstyle in all of existence. Unfortunately, I missed a few opportunities to post photos of musicians (or audience members) I had seen myself, so I vowed not to make that mistake again. That’s why I have been at work collecting photos of the best metal musician skullets I have seen for your viewing pleasure. I may not be much of a photographer, but even the lousiest comb-over skullet can shine through crappy photography with its undeniable brilliance. Here are the top 7 skullets I’ve had the privilege of seeing live: 7. Terry Butler of Obituary Maybe not a full skullet as of yet, but the legendary death metal bassist’s part seems to get wider every time I see him. Fitting for such a legacy, I eagerly look forward to seeing how it progresses in […]
Bands I Hope Never Get Back Together
With the news that Slayer is getting back together after a whole five years of being broken up, fans are now debating whether this reunion is just a shameless cash grab, whether their initial break up was really a hiatus with a planned return from the beginning, or if their reunion lineup is even the “real” Slayer. I will not be opining on any of those debate topics, but I will be using this as an opportunity to talk about broken up bands that I hope never get back together. Some of these are my favorite bands, some are bands I have never listened to in my entire life, but none are bands I don’t want to reunite simply because I don’t like them. I’m perfectly capable of not attending a concert I don’t think I would enjoy. However, even though many of these are bands I like, not everything […]
Five Bands Who Sound Better Than Their Logos Look
I wrote an article about great albums with awful cover art a while back, but sometimes a band can consistently release great albums and still plaster a lousy logo on every one of them. Not every band needs to have an unreadable logo that looks like this… …but considering all of the below bands have their own unique sounds, they could have at least stood to have more unique logos to match. 5. Ophis Look, I understand the obsession in metal with incorporating inverted crosses and pentagrams into your logo at every chance you get. But couldn’t Ophis have had their graphic designer do more than just that before calling it a day? Okay, I guess they turned the “S” into a snake, added a few spikes, and made sure the letters were a little jagged, but come on. This is just boring. And as someone who takes pride in […]
Every Band That Should be in the Big Four Instead of Anthrax
It’s a question as old as time: “Should X band be in the Big Four instead of Anthrax?” There are a couple popular choices for who should replace the much-maligned little brother of the Big Four, but it seems like every thrash band and their grandmothers have been posited as a more suitable replacement for Anthrax at some point or another. It has reached the extent to where the majority of times I hear the Big Four mentioned are in conjunction with “should X band be in them instead of Anthrax?” or some such variation. Some thrashers stretch this to the point of hilarity by making up their own alternative “big fours:” the Teutonic Big Four, the Canadian Big Four, the Other Big Four, etc. without the slightest trace of irony. Or realizing that their alternative “big fours” are just as made-up as the Big Four itself. Yes, despite the […]
4 Metal Album Covers That Look Like Penises
I’ve talked about good albums with terrible album art before, but I’ve lately noticed several albums covers that, while not bad art, all share the unfortunate quality of looking like a particular part of the male anatomy. By “several,” I mean four, so I can’t even call this a top 5 list, but not for lack of trying; I spent more time than I’d like to admit on the Metal Archives looking for the fifth accidental member to complete my collection, but to no avail. If you find my lack of success surprising, please keep in mind that I only considered unintentional resemblances to manhoods in the album art for this list, so you pornogrind fans can keep your album covers to yourselves, thank you very much. This is a family-friendly blog. Glam fans, the same goes for you. I don’t want your album art and its very intentional allusions […]
10 Halloween Movies for People Who Don’t Like Horror
It’s the best time of the year. The leaves are changing into an arboreal fireworks display, it’s getting a little cooler out, fresh apples are in season, and Halloween is right around the corner! That means trick-or-treating, costume parties, an unhealthy amount of sugar ingestion, carving jack-o’-lanterns, and horror movies! Alright! Let’s watch some axe-wielding psycho chop up teenagers for the nine-hundredth year in a r-what’s that? Whaddaya mean you don’t like horror movies? Don’t like being scared? Uhhhhghghg… Okay, fine. I have some other movies we can watch that don’t match the definition of “horror,” but will still get you primed for the season. I haven’t actually rewatched most of these movies recently, since I’ve been spending any free time I can get watching horror movies like a normal person, so my descriptions are all based off of my memories of whenever I last watched them, IMDB summaries, and […]
Bands With the Most Misleading Names
As a metalhead immerses himself into the chaotic void of despair that is metal, he eventually becomes accustomed to some of the lyrical and artistic themes that define and distinguish the seemingly unending variety of subgenres that populate the genre. Eventually he is able to guess the subgenre of a band by its name alone, even if he has never heard of the band, never heard their music, or even seen their album artwork or band logo. Fleshcrawl? Your “flesh crawls” when you are exposed to something gross, gory, or disgusting. Probably death metal. Bestial Warlust? Well, “bestial black metal” is often used to describe war metal, and this band has both “bestial” and “war” in their name, so they must be war metal. Bongzilla? Oh, come on. However, this is not a foolproof method. For one thing, many of these subgenres are all still metal and unsurprisingly share many […]
Dear Metal Bands: Stop Changing Your Logos
Despite me branding myself as the only real metalhead (which is true, shut up), I am actually pretty open-minded when it comes to metal bands experimenting with their sound. Hell, my favorite band is Katatonia. Not only are they my favorite band, I’ll even go as far as to say they have never released a bad album, even with their continuously changing sound. But just because I grant them permission to change their sound does not mean they can go around changing their logo all willy-nilly! I don’t care that a band’s image should reflect its sound and should change with the sound accordingly. I still want to see the exact same logo that the band had designed when they had barely become legal adults (if that) on every single album, every single t-shirt, every tour poster, and every other piece of band merch until the heat death of the […]
This New Convenience is Rather Inconvenient
I hate flying. I don’t hate flying because I’m afraid of being on a plane. I have a good enough understanding of statistics to know the likelihood of my flight crashing, being hijacked by terrorists, being shot down my a hostile military, or disappearing altogether are next to nothing. My basic understanding of statistics also lets me know that I have an almost guaranteed chance of encountering at least one of the following: I could write an entire essay on how utterly useless and ineffectual the TSA is, but the fact that you can now by a FastPass to skip the line has already done the job for me by proving what we knew all along: that they’re completely full of shit. However, to the TSA’s credit, they’ve actually started to implement a few changes in their security screening process that has made it slightly less of a pain in […]
All Hail the Mighty Skullet!
Metalheads are sometimes labeled as “nonconformists,” but I think that’s a mischaracterization. The way we present ourselves may not conform to the norms of the general population, but within the metalhead community we have our own norms and standards that let us easily identify each other as part of the same subculture (and more importantly, to judge poseurs who aren’t). Maybe those who pioneered the metalhead subculture were nonconformists when they started the trends of battle vests, bullet belts, camo pants, and long hair, but now that those are the established metal uniform the rest of us are just following it to the best of our ability. And some metalheads ardently follow that last part, long hair, and they’re not about to let their inability to grow it stop them. These are the SEAL Team 6 of the metalhead community. The elite of the elite. The ones who are willing […]