JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month and pays tribute to Living Colour.
Category: metal
New Audio: Chicago’s Pelican Shares Cinematic and Expansive “Cascading Crescent”
Flickering Resonance is the Chicago-based outfit Pelican‘s first full-length album in six years. Slated for a May 16, 2025 release through Run for Cover, the album sees the return of founding guitarist Laurent Schroeder-Lebec, who makes his first appearance on a Pelican album since 2009’s What We All Come To Need. The eight-song album also reportedly taps into the spirit of the band’s formative era when Schroder-Lebec along with Trevor Shelley de Brauw (guitar) and siblings Bryan (bass) and Larry Herweg (drums) played shows during the heyday of Chicago’s all-ages club Fireside Bowl.
Fireside Bowl’s booking would often result in post-hardcore, space rock, indie, metal and emo bands sharing bills, which also unwittingly provided a vast array of influences for the then-young band. “A lot of people didn’t hear it at first,” says Schroeder-Lebec of the band’s roots in a panoply of punk-related subgenres. “I was like, well, I guess the metal world is where we fit. But now we’re more willing to acknowledge all the suits we’re wearing.”
Recorded by longtime collaborator Sanford Parker, Flickering Resonance sees the band’s long-known thick sonic backbone remaining intact, but while demonstrating a more humanistic side for the band.
“When Laurent left and we were able to carry it through, there became a real sense of gratitude for the fact we still have this artistic outlet and a community of people who want to support it,” the band’s Shelley de Brauw says of Schroeder-Lebec’s ten year sabbatical from the group. Fittingly, that feeling o deep, grounded appreciation doesn’t just reside within the band’s members, it’s expressed on every track of the album.
The album’s latest single “Cascading Crescent” is a forceful, cinematic and yet soulful ripper that reminds me a bit of The Sword and others, anchored around some scorching riffage and thunderous drumming.
The members of the Chicago-based band will be embarking on a lengthy touring schedule to support the album that includes a July 20, 2025 stop at The Meadows. Check out the rest of the tour dates below.
Throwback: Happy 64th Birthday, Vince Neil!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Vince Neil’s 64th birthday.
New Audio: Glasgow’s Theodosia’s Revenge Shares a Bruising Ripper
Theodosia’s Revenge is an emerging, Glasgow, Scotland, UK-based metal outfit. Their latest single “Walking with Fire” is a bruising and primal ripper with scorching riffage, raise your beer high-in-the-sky hooks and choruses and thunderous drumming that recalls early Metallica and the RidingEasy Records roster.
Throwback: Happy 57th Birthday, Mike Patton!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Mike Patton’s 57th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 70th Birthday, Eddie Van Halen!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 70th anniversary of Eddie Van Halen’s birth.
Throwback: Happy 55th Birthday, Zack de la Rocha!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Rage Against the Machine frontman’s Zack de la Rocha’s 55th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 81st Birthday, Jimmy Page!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Jimmy Page’s 81st birthday.
Throwback: Happy 72nd Birthday, Malcolm Young!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 72nd anniversary of AC/DC co-founder Malcolm Young’s birth.
Throwback: Happy 79th Birthday, John Paul Jones!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates John Paul Jones’ 79th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 61st Birthday, Lars Ulrich!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Metallica co-founder Lars Ulrich’s 61st birthday.
Throwback: Happy 79th Birthday, Lemmy!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 79th anniversary of Lemmy’s birth.
Throwback: Happy 66th Birthday, Nikki Sixx!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Nikki Sixx’s 66th birthday.
New Video: Inside The Trojan Horse Shares Bruising and Urgent “Stay Alive”
Inside The Trojan Horse — founding members NoOne and NoThing, along with NoBody — can trace their origins back to when its founding members were a member of Loser, an act that featured Motley Crüe‘s John 5. When Loser split up, NoOne and NoThing began honing their writing and recording with a series of projects and on their own.
While on tour with Gemini Syndrome, NoThing crossed paths with NoBody as he and NoOne had started to sow the early seeds of their latest project together, Inside The Trojan Horse. Eventually, the band’s founding duo reached out to NoBody to finalize the band’s lineup.
While drawing from Soundgarden, Audioslave, Tool, Deftones, Underoath, Periphery and Tesseract, the trio have developed a signature sound and aesthetic that sets them apart in a crowded hard rock/nu-metal field. Their fourth single “Stay Alive” is a bruising track anchored around thunderous drumming, rumbling down-tuned bass, howled vocals and some scorching guitar work. “Stay Alive” at its core, is a desperate and urgent desire and need to survive at all cost, while facing omnipresent threats; but it also evokes the zero-sum game of surviving at all costs.
The self-directed video for “Stay Alive” follows the mysterious band, clad in business suits and masks, as they rock out to the song in a nondescript van and mosh and kick around a presumably Californian suburb.
New Audio: Uppsala’s Big Fish Shares Brutal and Forceful “Snö”
Back in 1988, four Uppsala, Sweden-based teens decided to start a band after returning from a trip to West Berlin. Heavily inspired by the avant garde scene there, Big Fish‘s original lineup featured vocals, upright bass, samplers and scrap metal percussion. With the addition of a guitarist in 1990, the newly-minted quintet became part of an emerging local scene that would subsequently birth acts like Watain, Misery Loves Co., Lost Souls, Malaise and Defleshed.
Throughout the better part of the 1990s, the Swedish outfit recorded three studio albums, including 1996’s Micheal Blair-produced Andar i Halsen, which they supported with frequently touring across Scandinavia, playing over 500 shows.
The band broke up in 1997 after its members left Uppsala for work and studies. But their fanbase’s clamoring demand for hearing their material live resulted in the Swedish band playing a handful of reunion shows in 2016.
2022’s surprise fourth album, Kalla döda drömmar was released to critical praise and was supported by extensive touring across their native Sweden. The band spent the next year writing and recording material, including a six planned singles which will appear on the band’s forthcoming fifth album, Frya liter stoft (Four liters of dust) slated for release next year.
Frya liter stoft‘s third and latest single “SNÖ” (Snow) is a brutally forceful and thrashing ripper, anchored around down-tuned and rumbling bass, fuzzy power chords and thunderous syncopated drumming, rousingly anthemic and enormous hook and chorus paired with urgent and punchily delivered vocals singing lyrics in Swedish describing a return from a bleak metaphorical winter of isolation — or perhaps intoxication — and discovering that nothing is left.
“SNÖ” manages to capture the uneasy brutal nature of our bleak, mad, mad existence. All is very dire now, y’all.