Friday's Playlist: Thrash, Death and Black Metal Classics

Let's get brutal, shall we?

Thrash Metal was a mostly American school of Metal that fused the violence and velocity of Punk and Hardcore with the epic heaviness of British Metal. Out of that first wave of early eighties Thrash, Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax were considered The Big Four. Metallica of course went on to become the Heavy Rock behemoth we know today. In their wake, bands like Exodus, Flotsam and Jetsam, Testament almost made it out of the underground. Overseas, bands like Kreator in Germany or Sepultura in Brazil would also carve a nice career out of frantic riffs, implacable drums.

Friday's Playlist: Great Live Performances (pt. 2)

We miss concerts. Our last one was six months ago (Tenacious D at le Zénith) so this playlist is the next best thing to actually gathering in a concert hall and rock out to your favorite band.

Over seven months ago we shared the first instalment in our Great Live Performances playlist series (it can be found HERE). Today we are back with an epic, gigantic, overblown, mammoth seven-hour  monster playlist. There is no real theme to it, but we've kept it mostly to the Rock idiom. Sure, some is Blues-Rock, some is Pop-Rock, some is Prog-Rock and some is Hard-Rock... But it all rocks.

Friday's Playlist - Awesome Guitar Solos (pt. 3)

Jimi Hendrix' Gibson Flying V - Play It Loud @ the Met

This Friday's Playlist is a new instalment in our ongoing "Awesome Guitar Solos" series. You can find part one HERE and part two HERE.

Friday's Monday's Playlist - Mixing Desk Hero: Martin Birch

With the sad news that legendary producer Martin Birch passed away at the age of 71, we scrambled our usual schedule and  decided to publish this playlist that pays tribute to the man's immense contribution to rock music, as an engineer and as a producer.

Friday's Playlist: Songs About Real People

 

This Friday's Playlist compiles songs about real people. As usual, there are some rules I've adhered to: I've tried to avoid presenting the same artists twice. I've also excluded any diss songs, which means there are no ex-bandmates feud songs like John Lennon's How Do You Sleep? or Guns N' Roses' Sorry. As usual, I've made an exception to that rule by including Pink Floyd's elegy for their former leader Syd Barrett.