Illegible metal band logos

Extreme metal logos have become a genre in themselves, spawning creative and sometimes baffling designs. The bands that adopt them are usually far from mainstream and cover a range of styles: brilliant riffs and technical chops at one end, and a chaotic mass of noise, squeals and pointlessness at the other.

Many base their existence on trying to visually outgross and vocally outgrunt their peers. This attitude continues into logo design as can be seen in the later examples on this page.

The list begins with the the influential and groundbreaking band Death, whose image (more…)

I first discovered Arthur Machen via H.P. Lovecraft. Machen, a lover of the occult and all things supernatural, was a strong influence on Lovecraft’s brooding, claustraphobic horror style. Lovecraft’s short stories are wonderful in their ability to quickly evoke an atmosphere of dread. However, their ornate wording can be dense and a little over the top at times…

And there was something else that I didn’t realize about the author until coming across it in Stephen King’s excellent On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. In a passage on writing dialogue, King noted that:

“H. P. Lovecraft was a genius when it came to tales of the macabre, but a terrible dialogue writer. He seems to have known it, too, because (more…)

Do you have the ‘guts’ to read Chuck Palahniuk?

Most people hear of the author via the modern cult movie Fight Club, which was adapted from his novel of the same name. In the film, a disillusioned Edward Norton attempts to overcome the emasculation and hollowness caused by modern American life by starting a club devoted to violence.

The story spoke volumes to a generation of young adult men who felt empty in the absence of a great cause or struggle. After the success of Fight Club, Palahniuk went on to write other novels and short stories, often making use of disturbing incidents to bypass the reader’s walls and go straight for his innards. The author was often accused of gratuitousness, but as he said in a Guardian interview: (more…)

Ok, this one’s a little tough to classify, and many would argue it is not art at all.

What is art anyway? Is it enough if it is something stranger than the norm? Well decide for yourself after taking a look at Damon Zucconi’s sometimesredsometimesblue. (You may need to hit refresh a few times.) Clearly no one can accuse this artist of false advertising; the site is indeed sometimes red and sometimes blue. Zucconi has a number of such visual projects that challenge the viewer and are open to interpretation.

I’ll take a stab and say the display has something to do with the political tensions currently dividing the US into “red” and “blue” states, and the somewhat random chance that seems to put many Americans in one camp or the other. This is manifested in the generally geographic nature of the color spread across (more…)

Apart from a few albums that come to mind (System of a Down’s Toxicity and Mezmerize, Deftones’s White Pony, A Perfect Circle’s Mer de Noms and Thirteenth Step), there are very few mainstream modern rock albums I’ve listened to where almost every track is good enough to potentially be released as a radio single. As music lovers we are too aware of the pattern: 2 or 3 good songs released to push the sale of a disc which is mostly filler. Luckily, Evanescence delivers the goods, with a bouquet of minor-key anti-filler.

The Sound:
Clearly, much of art is about the juxtaposition of dissimilar things. In this album, the harsh, masculine guitar distortion and soft feminine vocals are so dissimilar that their pairing complements incredibly well, unleashing the maximum artistic (more…)