I'm always surprised when these oddball mashups work, but sometimes they just do, like with this Wham! and Slayer one by YouTube mashup guy Bill McClintock called "Careless Whisper in the Abyss."

(reddit) Read the rest

Since everyone's doing posts about their favorite cover of Toto's "Africa," here's my frontrunner, because it's very Norwegian: metal and ironic and funny all at once. Read the rest

At Vintage Cassettes, "you will find the beatiful pictures of sealed compact cassettes."

Cassettes from 1970-1990 are covered the most. Collecting vintage cassettes is a great hobby and brings all good memories back. Cassettes are organized by brands and then the years they were produced. We concentrate on the most important brands. This site try to cover three markets: US, Europe and Japan. We also added the History of Compact Cassettes located to the right.

When I was a kid I wondered if METAL meant that it was specially made for taping, like, Megadeth.

The companion site (with better images) would be The Tape Deck, which posts pictures of the cassettes themselves.

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Erika Rejka creates intertwined metal shapes into sculptures that can be manipulated by the viewer. Read the rest

Cody from Cody's lab had some elemental tin and a new rolling press, so he decided to craft a tin can from actual tin. Read the rest

Musician Rob Scallon thought it would be cool to one-up the vinyl hipsters and record some metal on century-old Edison wax cylinder recording equipment. And he was right! Read the rest

'Fast' Eddie Clarke, guitarist for Motörhead during their best years, has died at 67 while in the hospital with pneumonia. With his death preceded in 2015 by Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor and Lemmy Kilmister, the classic Motörhead lineup is now gone. From Rolling Stone:

It was during Clarke's tenure with the band that Motörhead got the reputation of being one of the loudest bands in rock. "Man, it wasn't our fault," he recalled in the band's biography Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers. "I was forever trying ... to hear myself, so I was forever adding fucking amps over my side, and Lemmy was just adding more and more on his side, and then Phil [Taylor] had bigger monitors. It was ... each one of us, because we never interfered with each other's stuff."

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Jared Dines demonstrates several weird drum setups that not only sound good, but look pretty cool, too. Read the rest

Rolling Stone magazine asked the Prince of Darkness to list his ten favorite metal albums. Here are five of Ozzy's sure-shots:

AC/DC, 'Highway to Hell' (1979)

"I love Brian Johnson but to me my good friend, the late Bon Scott, was the best singer AC/DC ever had. This album was like an addiction to me."

Guns N' Roses, 'Appetite for Destruction' (1987)

"One of the greatest debut albums of all time. There's not a weak song in the bunch. I never get tired of hearing it."

Led Zeppelin, 'Led Zeppelin IV' (1971)

"I've always been a huge Led Zeppelin fan. All of their studio albums are classics but this is one of my all-time favorites."

Metallica, 'Master of Puppets' (1986)

"I took Metallica on tour with me after the release of Master of Puppets. The album was a milestone for the band and for heavy metal."

Motörhead, 'Ace of Spades' (1980)

"The album that put Motörhead over the top. The title track "Ace of Spades" is Motörhead's "Paranoid." It's one of the great metal anthems and, to me, a band hasn't made it until they have their own anthem. This is theirs."

Ozzy Osbourne: My 10 Favorite Metal Albums (Rolling Stone) Read the rest

I believe the track is called "Limerent Death," by The Dillinger Escape Plan. [Thanks, Mr. Raccoon!]

Previously at Chuck E. Cheese's.

Mob-style beating at Chuck E. Cheese's Chuck E. Cheese targets moms with lattes, salad, and more wine and beer Chuck E. Cheese owner agrees to $950 million buyout Chuck E. Cheese Rock-afire robots in MGMT music video Cheese fight at Chuck E Cheese's The Original Fight Read the rest

Somehow I ran across this music, I liked it, and it wasn't recorded 30+ years ago!

I've been enjoying Halestorm's 2015 release Into the Wild Life. Read the rest

Cold welding is the phenomenon of two pieces of metal fusing on contact. It's a big problem in space, but it can even happen on earth at room temperatures with the right metal, as Cody demonstrates. Read the rest

Sad and Useless offers this fantastic collection of Metal album covers. Here are a few that caught my eye. They share many more.

Dr. Rockso, just because.

(Thanks, Tim!) Read the rest

Iain ("an ex-physicist currently working as a data scientist") scraped Dark Lyrics and built a dataset of lyrics to 222,623 songs by 7,364 metal bands, then used traditional natural language processing techniques to analyze them. Read the rest

Joey Muha is a heavy metal drummer of enormous skill and verve and long, beautiful flowing locks who has filled his Youtube channel with dozens and dozens of videos of him drumming along to songs that don't, at first blush, lend themselves to heavy metal percussion. But he proves conclusively that heavy metal drumming makes all music better. Read the rest

Danish photographer Jacob Erhbahn captured metalheads mid-headbang at music festivals around Europe. The result is Headbangers, a full-color book compiling the best of these unrestrained moments of metal bliss.

In this collection Ehrbahn’s camera stops time and captures the surprising and life-affirming moments when the headbangers abandon all semblance of vanity and surrender to the rhythm. Ehrbahn transports us to an intimate world disconnected from time and space—a universe where it’s possible to transcend the frenzy and enter an altered state that brings calm, joy, and relief.

Headbangers by Jacob Erhbahn (Amazon)

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South African photographer Paul Shiakallis produced a series of photos, "Leathered Skins, Unchained Hearts," of the "queens" of Botswana's heavy metal "Marok" scene, mostly in their homes. Read the rest