heavy metal

Progressive music walks a fine line for most of its existence, trying to balance the gratification musicians garner from playing difficult and involved compositions with the gratification listeners need to be able to elicit from those same songs. Finding the right mix of challenge for the player and fun for the audience is a bit of a magic trick, not unlike pulling a rabbit out of the hat. There are a few bands who have been able to marry the popular and the insular, but the numbers who manage to do so are few and far between. It's the nature of the beast.

If you are a heavy metal fan, Motörhead’s live show is one of those pinnacle “must-haves.” While Lemmy and his cohorts continue to insist that they are nothing more than a rock and roll band, seeing Motörhead live is watching a living oral history of the genesis of heavy metal.

Every genre, it seems, has its own sense of nostalgia. As the classic bands of every facet of metal continue to chug along, and in many cases find more success than they've had in decades, a new wave of bands is popping up, using the classics as more than merely an inspiration. While there are the bands making waves with their new takes on familiar tropes, there are even more dedicated to replicating what was great about the past, giving fans who weren't old enough at the time a look back into what the scene was like when innovation was everywhere.

In what has been a great year for vintage styled rock can roll, we keep adding to the list of releases taking us back in time to the days when rock and roll still had a raw and youthful energy behind it. In the years that have followed, the genre twisted itself into something different, a corporate-sponsored mash-up of music that usually has about as much attitude behind it as the most generic pop song. Rock and roll is as much an image as it is music, mostly conforming to a neat little box everyone is afraid to step outside of, for fear of alienating fans.