M. Drew's blog

Sick Puppies are a confident band with a walking, natural swagger that pours out from the stage to their audience.

The Webster Theater in Hartford is not an especially friendly venue. It doesn't boast any particular character or amazing features. Rather, it is just an open space with a stage and some bars, painted over to make it look grander than it is. The walls are decked with signs telling customers in no uncertain terms what they cannot do; no smoking, no moshing, no crowd surfing, no stage diving, etc. Lucky for the Webster Theater, that doesn't prevent the shows inside from being excellent. So, I walked in for Killfest 2010.

Featured below is the new video for Cypress Hill's "Rise Up," which is a remarkably generic name for both the song and the album (it's the title track,) but expectations are running high (no pun intended,) as the album's been in the cooker for three years. Apart from "Rage" guitarist Tom Morello, the album is also set to feature Mike Shinoda, Daron Malakian, Everlast, Cheech and Chong, and a small handful of others. Enjoy!

Even if you've never heard Devil to Pay's 2004 album "Thirty Pieces of Silver," you've probably heard it. It might have been under a different name, or written in a different era, but it will set off alarms of familiarity from first dense note to last.

Every note of dirty, ugly drudgery is like a visit from an old, familiar friend. Each phrase is taken from the textbook of sludge metal, and the distortion is up so high that there aren't notes or chords so much as emotional responses.

I hate it when this happens. You have a band that's at a creative crossroads. They can take their music in one of two directions, and they pick the wrong one.

And so we see Fireball Ministry, I band I have credited with a forgotten classic on these very pages, headed the wrong way on their new, self-titled album. Confronted with the intersection of edgy rock and roll and country-shaded metal, Fireball Ministry took the path of toward mainstream rock and the possibility of commercial appeal.

Sometimes, you go back to what you know. It doesn’t matter if it’s been five days, five months, five years, or five decades. Sometimes, you just need a visit from an old familiar friend.

Enter Jimi Hendrix and “Valleys of Neptune.”

It's been a long and twisted road since "Calculating Infinity," hasn't it?

"Option Paralysis," the newly released work from mathcore veterans and acquired taste The Dillinger Escape Plan, is an attempt to get back some of what the band has lost over time.

The idea behind east coast thrash metallers Arsis is a good one. With “Starve for the Devil” the band has attempted to bridge the gap between European style artistic metal and American-born biting, ugly metal. The end result gets caught in the tug of war between the two ideologies and never really bursts through to meld them creatively.