Lars Gotrich

Cian Nugent doesn't know what he wants to be, and that's OK. The Dublin-based guitarist cut his teeth as a 19-year-old pickin' on the acoustic worlds that John Fahey, Jack Rose and Bert Jansch built. But that was five years ago, and since then, Nugent has ...

What do you do when your favorite metal band "goes soft"? Take to the message boards? Subtweet until the mounting "favorites" validate your rage? Or do you open up to the sound? In the new issue of the monthly metal print magazine Decibel (No. 166 — the one ...

New songs by The Jazz June and Sunny Day Real Estate, tours from American Football and Texas Is the Reason — it's a helluva time to be a '90s emo kid. Teased with a new Twitter account and rehearsal studio shots on Instagram, ...

Christie Front Drive, Texas Is the Reason, Knapsack, The Promise Ring, Cap'n Jazz, Gauge, Sunny Day Real Estate, American Football, The Casket Lottery, The Get Up Kids, Braid — no, this isn't a dream Emo Diaries compilation. These are the '90s emo bands that have, in recent years, ...

The Golden Age of Glitter is out now on Tee Pee Records. Sweet Apple features members of Dinosaur Jr. (J Mascis on drums), Cobra Verde and Witch.

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When you name your band after a Mercyful Fate song, you'd better damn well live up to it, especially when that song swears "henceforth to be a faithful servant of his most puissant arch-angel, The Prince Lucifer." Thankfully, The Oath sounds something like the two bad-ass women in ...

Death is never far from The Body's mind. (One of the band's T-shirts, in fact, sports the happy little phrase, "Death to Everything.") The doom-metal duo has been making a boundaryless racket for 15 years now, reaching across the genre aisle to choirs, post-rock and fellow metal bands. ...

When you can count the director of the Wagner Festival and Tom G. Warrior (the mastermind behind metal behemoths Celtic Frost and Triptykon) among your supporters, you must be doing something right. After all, classical music and metal aren't all that different — both can be bombastic, complex ...

Thou has never been about convention. The Baton Rouge metal band has little in common with its NOLA sludge peers, bucking Southern tropes for a world-heavy consciousness that comes from doom, punk, grunge, black metal, blues and drone. (They also love a '90s cover or two.) ...

We're just now starting to recognize early-aughts downloads with the same nostalgic air that we do a lucky score at a record store. Slow modems, improperly tagged files, Sharpie-scrawled CDRs — well, at least some of us think of those times fondly. It's an odd relationship, clicking on a not-so-legal ...

Unlikely collaborations can unnerve and unwind heavy and extreme music in ways we'd never before imagined. There's Painkiller, the guts-spilling grind-jazz band featuring saxophonist John Zorn, bassist Bill Laswell and Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris. Doom-metal duo The Body regularly engages outside its genre, including works ...

Once you cross wires with a modular synthesizer, it's like your bloodstream turns into sine waves. The documentary I Dream of Wires looks at the technological and philosophical genesis of the instrument, all the way to its demise and subsequent resurgence. Make no mistake, this movie is for ...

You know how it is: Fun-loving electronic aliens hit up an island to discover the secrets of the universe and shred the gnar on jet skis for the ultimate chillzone. (Considering the bombogenesis currently snowbombing the East Coast, that sounds pretty good about now.) That's what happens in this ...

Cassettes have been a medium of choice since I bought my first car outfitted with a tape deck in college (RIP Maude). They force a full listening experience, their dimensions inspire designers in ways that a square doesn't and, for the most part, are cheap. Yes, you can find a ...

Let's crunch some not-so-scientific numbers, shall we? Of the ten metal albums featured here, five of them are by bands pushing 15 years of periodic existence or, in most cases, much longer. Three albums are shorter than 30 minutes while one fills the CD's maximum storage capacity (79 minutes). Two ...

For those drawn to doom and gloom, the most affecting music sometimes takes a while to reveal itself. In 2008, the happily named duo Have a Nice Life released Deathconsciousness, a messy yet fascinating double-album fixated on the darker side of life and endowed with a gauzy, shoegaze-drenched underbelly. As ...

Davide Tiso must be some kind of metal mad scientist, perched upon the rolling hills of his home in Padua, Italy, as he concocts gnarled, hydra-Zorn headbangers that sound like what Eraserhead looks like. But with Ephel Duath and its ever-revolving lineup, Tiso has always toyed with the eerily ...

The American Primitive guitar record is the soundtrack to the open road. It breathes in dust and exhales smoke. Blues, country, rock, psych, drone, folk, ragtime, bluegrass — it encompasses all of them and none at all. But ultimately, it's evocative of a landscape that doesn't know its boundaries. That's ...

"Do you know of any good liquor stores in town? Or, better yet, record stores?" Steve Gunn asks me after playing a mesmerizing set at the NPR Music offices. He's a record collector with insatiable taste and a vinyl-packed apartment. His ears perk up when I tell him ...

Windhand is one of those body-rattling bands whose decibels clobber the smoke-filled air. This is especially true in a live setting, in which masses of people are drawn to the riffs like moths. The Richmond stoner-metal band gets close to that desperately heavy live vibe on its second album, Soma, ...