Mazzy the kitten as Britney Spears, complete with fake albino python. The epic shit-show of the year happened last night. MTV is a pathetic punchline at this point in history, but there’s one thing the VMAs were good for: an animal reenactment photoshoot, starring Mazzy, Muncie, and Mona the kittens and Moxie and Sugar the…

Every other Friday, Waldo the African Grey Parrot, frontbird of thrash-grind immortals Hatebeak, will get you caught up on the week’s latest “extreme” releases. What up? Talk about beak, I mean bleak—these upcoming releases are about as barren as the Jundland Wastes on Tatooine… What can be said about KITTIE that hasn’t been said before?…

Randy Rhoads died 10 years before the official guitar tablature for Tribute found its way through my door, subsequently bogarting so many onanistic early-90s teenage years of practising guitar for the edification of no one save for the family spaniel. But the impact of his style—all neoclassical Ritchie Blackmore one minute and kinda like a…

I’ve done a lot for metal over the years. In an attempt to sport the longhair uniform, despite genetics handing my follicles a bum deal, I walked around looking like a frizzed out crackhead throughout most of the 80s. Rooms in my house are filled with records, CDs, magazines and not much else to varying…

We all have plenty of loud, noisy music to worship the goat with – never enough, in fact. But when it’s time to take it easy and still be evil, it’s not so easy, is it? Danzig has made acoustic evil in the past, Ulver did those strange soundtracks, and Burzum’s prison albums weren’t particularly…

The Queensrÿche of today hardly resembles the leather-clad, high energy band of young metallers that burst onto the global underground in 1983.

What Is Moira’s Lake? from Envinity on Vimeo. “The Most Expensive Album You’ll Buy This Year” That is the first thing you read on the promo page for Envinity’s Moira’s Lake. Here’s the second thing: “Even Though It’s Brilliant, That Doesn’t Mean You’ll Like It.” And so begins our quest throughout the worst, most self-important…

There’s little more annoying on this planet than the immoral majority telling you how essential, transcendent and (huh-huh) seminal a particular extreme album is, when you know that it’s overrated as fuck. Hence, our new Wednesday morning column, “Disposable Heroes,” in which one brave soul sails against the current to inform all you clones why…

OK, we apologize for the somewhat misleading headline, but we stand by its essential truth. Ex-Jesus Lizard/Scratch Acid frontman David Yow will be presenting his first solo NYC art exhibit called “Glass Gas Mask” this week at Fuse Gallery (93 2nd Ave, New York City). If you thought his lyrics and onstage antics were out…

“It takes balls to execute an innocent man.” That appalling line (allegedly) uttered by a voter in support of Texas governor and now GOP presidential contender Rick Perry has dragged the infuriating, tragic case of Todd Cameron Willingham — executed in 2004 for a deadly arson he almost certainly did not commit — back into…