Book Review - Sound of the Beast : The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal no comments

Sound of the Beast – The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, Ian Christe, Harper Entertainment, 2004.

If you are an avid heavy metal fan, you are new to the music and you didn’t know shit about the history of this blasphemous music, then this is the gospel for you. I got this book somewhere in August 2009 and managed to finish the book a few days later. Captivating would be a perfect word to sum the wonderful deliverance of this book. It’s a fun read.

It was not really the academic type so to speak. Compared to Lords of Chaos, this book is far more light weight, in terms of how the book was authored, content wise though, this book offers more information than anyone could handle thus living up to its title, the complete headbanging history of heavy metal.

The one I got was the revised edition with a newly added chapter discussing the perception and tribulation of heavy metal music in the muslim world. And guess what? Malaysia spearheaded the chapter and even Harian Fucking Metro got a worthy mention.

The content of this book follows the root of heavy metal in the 1970s, the NWOBHM, the thrash metal evolution in the 80s, the rise of death metal and the blasphemy of the Norwegian Black Metal in the 90s each with a chapter of its own.

A few pages in between were dedicated to explain the more major types of heavy metal in the likes of Thrash Metal, Death Metal, Black Metal, Industrial Metal, Grindcore just to name a few, complete with a list of influential bands and albums for each subgenre for easy reference.

This book also closely followed the evolution of Metallica, just so you know.

Tribute - Ronnie James Dio (1942-2010) 1 comments

Ronnie James Dio 1942-2010

A depressing day indeed as we mourn the lost of our brother of metal, Ronnie James Dio.

Rest In Peace Bro.

Rants - Obssessive Compulsive Disorder. no comments

Rants, rants and more rants. While I am writing this, I am feasting my ear holes with Nebiras 1996’s cult EP, Into The Medieval Cults. One of the best and finer Malaysian black metal releases from the 90s in my book. The band gained local notoriety when it was acknowledged by Darkthrone way back in the early 90s when the band was considered to be a brother band to its Norwegian counterpart. Fenriz even dedicated a poem for the band. So sweet of him that Fenriz. I remember dedicating the lyrics of Langsuyr’s Tangisan Embun Pagi to my now ex-girlfriend back in high school. Talking about being unoriginal. Haha.

But all jokes aside, for an unknown Malaysian (back in 1992-93, with the absence of Internet and all, I don’t even think anybody knew where Malaysia was located, so much so if they even knew the existence of the country so to speak) band to get that kind (or somekind maybe) of a blessing from the head quarter up north was enough to give them a right to brag. And brag they did. What ever it is, Nebiras was without a doubt, one of the most prolific band out of the shores of Malaysia. I’ll tip my hat to that.

Well, basically I am not really going to talk about Nebiras. This post is essentially dedicated to my hectic life. Not that I have ceased being hectic, it’s just that I think I have not been able to give this blog the attention that it deserves. It became worse with me knowing the fact that I had started this blog to promote Malaysian local heavy metal scene. I have not been very faithful to that cause I guess.

I hope you will like the new minimalist lay out. I almost wanted to start a new blog just because of the decrease of my fascination with the old template but I figured out that rather than I waste the contents that Ive already written for The Bullet Belt, it would be much easier to adopt a new look. Well, that was just me being me. Obsessive compulsive disorder. No, it’s not a title from an early Carcass song. It’s a symptom of being unable to tolerate and comprehend anything unorganized and out of order.

I chose the simplest template (actually it was one of the default templates in blogger. Minima Lefty if I am not mistaken), used my inferior knowledge of template scripting to edit the HTML settings in order to quash the ugly boarders for the Blog title, fixed the sidebars so that it would align to my right rather then the ugly original left, edit some colors and voila! There you have it. The new simple look for The Bullet belt.

And what has all that got to do with Malaysian metal? Nothing.