The Blast Beat: How the Double-Kick Conquered Metal

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000

There is a sound at the far end of loud music that stops feeling like drumming and starts feeling like weather. Kick, snare and cymbal fire together at a speed the human ear cannot separate into individual hits, and the whole thing becomes a wall of grey static with a pulse buried in it. That is the blast beat, and once you know how it is built you cannot un-hear it — in the pit it is the difference between a fast song and a genuinely overwhelming one.

Corpse Paint: A Short History of the Painted Face

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 09:00:00 +0000

White greasepaint over the whole face, black sunk into the eye sockets and streaked down from the mouth, the living man rearranged into a skull. You have seen it a thousand times on a T-shirt and it has stopped meaning anything, which is exactly the problem worth unpicking. The painted face is one of the oldest tricks in loud music and one of the few that still land a punch when the lights drop.

Metal History on vo.rs

The Blast Beat: How the Double-Kick Conquered Metal

Corpse Paint: A Short History of the Painted Face