Manilla Road at Myspace
Manilla Road’s latest release, Voyager, is a decent effort, if not quite up to the level of some of the band’s previous work. Mark Shelton’s voice isn’t what it used to be; while his nasal delivery was somewhat hard to get into before, I enjoyed it because it sounded like the Monarch [...]

Manilla Road at Myspace
Manilla Road is one of those bands that’s been around forever, but never managed to break into the mainstream in any way despite releasing some great material. Their first album, Invasion, dates all the way back to 1980. The production is about as rough as one would expect from an album self-released [...]

Blue Cheer are widely regarded as one of the very first metal bands. Vincebus Eruptum was their first album, which was released in 1968, two years before Black Sabbath’s debut. It’s not hard to see why they’re considered to be metal; unlike other bands in the San Francisco psychedelic scene, they used a heavily distorted [...]

Metallica at Myspace
I didn’t have high hopes for the new Metallica album and since you’ve all heard at least the singles from “St Anger” I’m sure you know why. According to producer Bob Rock the reason “St Anger” failed was because it had “no real songs” and one look at the half a hook monstrosity [...]

Dio at Myspace
The trend of bands performing entire albums in concert seems to be pretty popular these days (I have Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung Live” and 2 out of 3 of Dream Theater’s “Official Bootleg” series), and Dio continues it with this 2-disc set where every song from “Holy Diver” is performed.
Dio’s voice has its ups [...]