This blog specializes in heavy metal music and how it relates to Washington DC and the surrounding area. Featuring info on upcoming metal concerts in Washington DC, Baltimore and Virginia, as well as info on local bands, area concert venues, reviews of live gigs, and lots of give aways.
The blog Heavy Uber Alles is a place for all things heavy. Among news, concert reviews and other heavy topics, every week on Tuesday they put up six songs (that you can stream) as a sort of play list they aptly call the Tuesday Six. Heavy Uber Alles has decided to start letting some guests post their picks on occasion and I was lucky enough to be asked to be the first to do so. The post went live today and you can check out my six picks on Heavy Uber Alles here. It was so hard narrowing down to six songs so I picked a theme, I hope you all enjoy it!
I was asked to write a guest post for one of my favorite metal news websites, MetalUnderground.com, and it went live on the site today. They have a weekly column called Unearthing The Metal Underground where each post explores a different area’s underground metal scene. They asked me to write the one about underground metal in Washington DC and let me pick three bands to go into detail about. I chose to write about Ilsa, Midnight Eye and Borracho for this post, however if the post gets a decent response they said they might let me write another about Northern Virginia or Baltimore or even another DC post. So feel free to leave a comment there or share it with people on Facebook or something if you enjoy it and maybe I’ll get to help expose more of our kick ass local acts to a national audience! You can read the post on Metal Underground here:
And one more thing, and it’s totally unrelated and is really just shameless promotion hardly related to my site, but some good friends of mine have been in a non-metal rock band for years and I have finally convinced them to play a live gig. I got them booked at the Velvet Lounge this Wednesday, the 28th of September and I certainly recommend checking them out. They hit the stage at 9pm, and are playing with the Megaphone Barons and Electric Grandmother (bands I admittedly don’t know much about). Again, they’re not metal but they are a damn good band, and they have three guitar players! You can check out the event’s Facebook page here but even if you can’t go feel free to check out the Garage Hoppers on Facebook here. Ok, I think that’s enough blatant non-metal promotion for one post. Stay metal everyone and support the scene you’re a part of!
Today marks the two year anniversary of the first post on DCHeavyMetal.com and the site has come along further than I could have ever hoped! It’s all thanks to you guys who read the site and go to local metal concerts in the area. I put a lot of work into this website and the fact that so many people appreciate the upcoming concerts calendar as well as my various reviews and recaps of live shows, occasional news updates and free ticket give aways makes all the effort and late nights worth it.
But this isn’t just a post about thanking you guys and patting myself on the back, there’s more stuff coming up too. I’m proud to announce that I will be giving tickets away to some upcoming metal shows at the brand new Fillmore in Silver Spring, Maryland. You can find out more about the venue that is about to open in one of my recent posts here. The first metal shows at the Fillmore that I’ll have ticket contests for will be Bring Me The Horizon, Yngwie Malmsteen and Between The Buried And Me with Animals As Leaders. Assuming they do well I’ll be giving more tickets away to more metal shows there as well so be sure to tell people about the contests when they’re posted. If those bands aren’t your thing though don’t worry as I’ve got some other free ticket give aways coming up for shows like Gwar and Kyuss with The Sword at the 9:30 Club and Cavalera Conspiracy and Karma To Burn at the Rock And Roll Hotel. Stay tuned to the site for more details on all these give aways, there’s a lot coming up in the next few months and if there’s one thing I love doing with my site it’s giving away stuff to readers of my site.
Thanks to everyone who has made this past two years of hard work all worth it. It’s you, the fans of heavy metal music in this area, that make this site what it is. DCHeavyMetal.com has no plans of slowing down any time soon and I look forward to many more years supporting the area’s community around the music I love! Stay brutal everyone.
Since I apparently don’t spend enough of my spare time working on DCHeavyMetal.com I have started writing for another website as well, Scene Trek. My first post, about heavy metal in the middle east, is online and you can read it here. Feedback is welcome so leave a comment there if you’ve got some. And if that isn’t cool enough for you I’ve uploaded a nine song mp3 mix to go along with it that you can download for free here.
The premise behind Scene Trek is something like that of Star Trek, but instead of scouring the universe in search of hot alien babes exotic alien life forms, we’re exploring the diverse worlds of music from every scene we can. This isn’t limited to heavy metal, Scene Trek covers music of every genre, and I’ve signed on as the official metal contributor for the site to make sure the heavier side of music isn’t overlooked. While I love covering the local metal scene and all the metal bands coming through the greater Washington DC area, Scene Trek gives me a chance to write about many of the bands I enjoy from all over the world that might never play here and thus never get to be covered on my blog. It also allows me to talk about bands all together in one scene instead of just the one band from a scene or location that happens to be coming through the area. And because Scene Trek is for all genres of music it also lets me expose some of the bands I really love to people who might not know much about heavy metal at all.
The site was started by Dawn Reed, an old friend of mine who you may have seen as one of the hosts of the recently canceled music video show Strictly Global on the MHz Network, an international cable TV channel. Dawn isn’t one to just quit what she was doing for the show so she started this blog in order to continue to share her knowledge of music from around the world. She is also an editor for the Deli Magazine’s DC website which covers the local music scene here in Washington DC. She’s really good at keeping her ear on the pulse of music from all over the world and I’m honored she is letting me write for Scene Trek. The site is brand new and at least for now none of us are making any money doing this, we just really love music. So if you enjoy checking out new and exotic music from around the world be sure to give Scene Trek a “like” on Facebook or a follow on Twitter and of course check in to the Scene Trek website’s blog regularly. If you know someone who might like the site or even just a specific post on it help us spread the word and let them know about Scene Trek. We want to make the site grow and there’s lots of ideas being bounced around but it’s going to take the help of music fans everywhere to get to where we want to be. I know that not everyone who reads DCHeavyMetal.com is going to care about what I do on Scene Trek, so I won’t post here every time I make a post on there, but I wanted to say something here to let people know where else I am writing. And don’t worry, DCHeavyMetal.com is still my main priority, think of Scene Trek as my side project band, haha. Thank you for reading the entirety of this shameless self promotion, you people that read this site make all the work worth it!
Borracho is a term for a drunkard in Spanish, but it’s also the name of a kick ass metal band based in Washington DC. They are releasing their new album, Splitting Sky, today and since they’re great guys they’re letting me give away 15 copies of it to the readers of DCHeavyMetal.com! All you’ve got to do to enter in the contest is tell me in the comments below a local band you’d like to see play with Borracho at their CD release show. They’re looking for suggestions so help em out! The contest will end when I have a total of 30 valid entries OR at 6pm EST on Friday 8 July 2011, which ever is first. If the contest doesn’t get 30 entries then less free copies will be given away (I’ll try to keep it so at least half of the entries are winners). Help spread the word so we can get to 30 quickly and more people can get a copy. You can use this short link: http://wp.me/pDCET-Wh When the contest is over I’ll chose, at random from all valid entries, 10 people to get a free digital download of Splitting Sky, and then 4 more to win physical copies of the CD and one grand prize winner to get a physical copy of the CD that is autographed by all four of the members of Borracho as well as a sweet Borracho t-shirt. Be sure to use a valid email address when you make your comments below so I can contact you when you win. The guys gave me an advance copy of their new album and here’s my take on what you can expect from it.
The Splitting Sky album is a heavy mix of stoner rock and doom metal with southwestern influences. Borracho has put a lot of work into getting their songs to sound just right and it shows, from the song writing to the production they’ve done a great job here. There’s lots of crunchy riffs that aren’t just heavy but are also infectiously catchy and memorable. The vocal style is raspy and blue collar, somewhere between Lemmy and James Hetfield, though not over the top so as to detract from the instruments. The rhythm section keeps these songs moving forward even when they slow way down. It’s not all super slow though, for example Concentric Circles picks up the pace quite nicely early on in the album. The album is a very solid 8 tracks long, all but two are longer than 6 minutes which lets the songs really progress well, even when the tempo slows down. The epic 11 minute song Grab The Reins is a great example of this, with a lead in riff that sounds like it would fit nicely on Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality. Borracho is based inside Washington DC and along with bands like Pentagram, King Giant, and (the now defunct) Salome, they’re helping to remind everyone that this area is still a city for excellent heavy stoner and doom. You can download Splitting Sky right now in a variety of ways, iTunes here, Amazon here, or get a physical copy of the album on CD Baby here. If all that isn’t convincing enough to make you a Borracho fan, check out this song below, titled Bloodsucker, which is track three on Splitting Sky.
Ok this is a heavy metal blog so you might be wondering what I’m doing with a post about a new movie coming out. Longtime followers of the site will remember I’ve promoted things like the Baltimore showing of Until The Light Takes Us as well as Heavy Metal Picnic when that premiered in Silver Spring. Hesher isn’t as metal related as those two, but it does seem to have a really metal soundtrack and the font on the poster is obviously taken from Metallica. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who I know from Inception and the tv show Third Rock From The Sun) as well as Natalie Portman (Queen Amidala in the Star Wars prequels, duh) and Rainn Wilson (Dwight from The Office). I could give ya a short bio of the movie but really just check out the trailer at the bottom of this post or look it up on IMDB here.
The movie comes out in Washington DC on Friday the 13th, but I’ve been given 20 pairs of tickets (40 total) to give away to you loyal readers of DCHeavyMetal.com to the sneak preview screening the night before, Thursday the 12th of May 2011. The screening will be at Landmark Theaters E Street Cinema in Washington DC at 7:30pm. They only come in pairs and when they’re gone they’re gone, first come first served. To get your free pair of tickets go to www.gofobo.com/rsvp and enter the promo code YG4D8P15 and then tell everyone how Metal Chris and DCHeavyMetal.com rules. If you’re too late and they’re all gone be sure to check it out next weekend anyways. Now, here’s the trailer:
DCHeavyMetal.com 