Upon its release, Don't Break the Oath charted fifth on the official British heavy metal album list and was supported by a two month long sold-out American tour in early 1985. The band's controversial stage appearance with burning crosses, a microphone stand formed as a cross made of two human leg bones, as well as other blasphemous rituals attracted the attention of the then newly formed PRMC (Parental Resource Music Center) committee, ironically reassuring the band its position on the charts. But though the album was hugely popular in the anglophone metal scene, it was conceived in peripheral Denmark. This book discusses the relationship between center and periphery. It juxtaposes the Anglophone reticent of heavy metal with the rather marginalized location of Copenhagen, and examines Mercyful Fate's relation to the Nordic region more generally. It also takes a close look at the methods involved in the production of King Diamond's vocals, and emphasizes the role of the vocalist as just as an important part of the over-all soundscape as the instrumental contributions.

Here is the most comprehensive history yet of this fascinating offshoot of extreme heavy metal.

Learn to cook a range of brutally tasty yet simple plant-based dishes, accompanied by heavy metal and punk lyrics, art, and ethos. This vegan cookbook is jam packed with recipes for stews, soups, sauces, noodle & bean dishes, baked entrees, and desserts, interspersed with illustrations of adorable armed animals, meditations on suicide, a crossword puzzle, and instructions for DIY tattoo guns. Expand your cooking repertoire with recipes from around the world, including Grizzly Bear Gnocchi, Taco Thrash-erole, Misery Wot, Gotterdamerung Dopple-Chocolate Cookies, and Hair of an Angel Knotted by the Persistance of a Mortal. Each recipe is paired with a metal song to listen to while you cook. Based on a series of long-obscure 1990s zines, this underground classic is now in its third edition, bringing you practical, animal-free cooking skills that will soothe your justified despair at the bloodthirstiness and futility of human nature.

The result of an extensive poll asking heavy metal fans to list their favourite high-octane albums, this compendium combines those survey results with Popoff's original interviews with world famous rockers who reveal recording session secrets in addition to their own heavy classics and ear-splitting faves. When all of this is melded with Popoff's unique and celebrated insights into the metal of yesterday and today, an essential resource becomes a rock-writing standard. From AC/DC to ZZ Top and from Black Sabbath to Pantera, both headbanging chart-toppers and lesser-known gems are catalogued and critically appraised. With reviews of early metal albums of the 1960s, as well as the latest hits, The Top 500 Heavy Metal Albums of All Time blends praise with criticism to produce an honest assessment of the most influential and important heavy metal recordings. Also featured are photos and appendices that revel in mountains of metal minutiae. "Martin Popoff has no doubt supplied the raw material for all manner of intense debates among the former denizens of basement bedrooms everywhere." 'The Toronto Sun.

Headbangers rejoice, because this fantastically illustrated encyclopedia includes all things Metal, from influential bands such as Led Zeppelin, Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly, Kiss, and Queen, to M�tley Crue, Black Sabbath (before Ozzy became a family sitcom star), Deep Purple, Twisted Sister, and Aerosmith, right up to Jane's Addiction, Las Cruces, Limp Bizkit, and today's most extreme death metal bands. Not a single sub-genre or band goes uncovered. Well-researched and fact-filled, the witty text befits the raucous bands that push musical-and all other-boundaries. From obscure groups like Armored Saint and Norway's Mayhem to pioneers Grand Funk Railroad and Iron Maiden to megastars like Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, Lita Ford, Van Halen, Joan Jett, and Marilyn Manson, each entry contains vital statistics: a description of the band's history and sound; an essential discography; the most current, comprehensive, popular compilations; and much more. Special features cover such important details as "Metal Fashion" and the various metal genres. Def Leppard, Faith No More, Guns n' Roses, Judas Priest, Metallica, AC/DC, Nine-Inch Nails, Poison, Rage Against the Machine, and Japan's Loudness: all of the favorite (and not so favorite) adrenaline-pumped, bizarre bands that make heavy metal the unique form it is appear in all their glory.

This important book weaves together trauma, black metal theory and disability into a story of both pain and freedom. Drawing on her many years as a black metal guitarist, Jasmine Hazel Shadrack uses autoethnography to explore her own experiences of gender-based violence, misogyny and the healing power of performance.

CMJ New Music Report is the primary source for exclusive charts of non-commercial and college radio airplay and independent and trend-forward retail sales. CMJ's trade publication, compiles playlists for college and non-commercial stations; often a prelude to larger success.

“Funny and smart” (The New Yorker) criticism of why we turn to art—specifically to poetry and popular music—and how it serves as an essential tool to understanding life. How can art help us make sense—or nonsense—of the world? If wrong life cannot be lived rightly, as Theodor Adorno had it, what weapons and strategies for living wrongly can art provide? With the same intelligence that animates his poetry, Michael Robbins addresses this weighty question while contemplating the idea of how strange it is that we need art at all. Ranging from Prince to Def Leppard, Lucille Clifton to Frederick Seidel, Robbins’s mastery of poetry and popular music shines in Equipment for Living. He has a singular ability to illustrate points with seemingly disparate examples (Friedrich Kittler and Taylor Swift, to W.B. Yeats and Anna Kendrick’s “Cups”). Robbins weaves a discussion on poet Juliana Spahr with the different subsets of Scandinavian black metal music, illuminating subjects in ways that few scholars can achieve. As Dwight Garner said in The New York Times about Robbins: “This man can write.” Equipment for Living is a “freakishly original” (Elle) look at how works of art, specifically poetry and popular music, can help us understand our own lives.

The second edition of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music provides an updated, state-of-the-art analysis of the most important themes and concepts in the field, combining research in religious studies, theology, critical musicology, cultural analysis, and sociology. It comprises 30 updated essays and six new chapters covering the following areas: · Popular Music, Religion, and Performance · Musicological Perspectives · Popular Music and Religious Syncretism · Atheism and Popular Music · Industrial Music and Noise · K-pop The Handbook continues to provide a guide to methodology, key genres and popular music subcultures, as well as an extensive updated bibliography. It remains the essential tool for anyone with an interest in popular culture generally and religion and popular music in particular.

The 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists is a controversial and much-needed guide to the world of metal guitar, featuring the most accomplished performers from the vast legions of metal. As well as celebrating the classic metal musicians who have defined the scene since the 1970s, author Joel McIver delves deep into the modern thrash metal, death metal, black metal, doom metal, power metal and battle metal movements to unearth those players for whom no tremolo divebomb is too high and no tuning is too low.This book is no mere list for geeks, though. McIver's objective in writing this book is to recognise the incredible skills that these players possess. Moreover, although they're all masters of sweep picking, fretboard tapping and the other tricks of the modern shredder, these players are far from simple speed freaks: The 100 Greatest... makes a point of featuring players whose feel and instinct for the values of metal outweigh mere technical mastery. If you've ever wielded a tennis rack in anger in front of a bedroom mirror, or even if you're a metal musician yourself, you need this book: the world of the overdriven guitar will never look the same again.