HEAVY METAL MACHINES LORE WINDOWS

While the genre is often carelessly dismissed for lacking nuance, promoting hedonism and celebrating stupidity, in Louder Than Hell metal is redeemed by its own heroes, who prove more often than not to be smart, thoughtful, reflective, generous and insightful. Moreover, by adopting the oral history format, the book gives metalвЂ™s icons as well as its unknowns an opportunity tell their stories in their own words. Wiederhorn and Turman expertly corral metalвЂ™s various strains into a cohesive narrative, knowledgeably differentiating between thrash metal, black metal, death metal, NWOBHM, Christian doom metal and seemingly thousands of other sub- and subsubgenres.

HEAVY METAL MACHINES LORE WINDOWS

Metal was disregarded by mainstream critics during its Spandex heyday and famously upended by introverted alt-rock in the early 1990s, yet this big brick of a book-suitable for breaking windows or bashing the heads of home intruders-proves the scene remains lively and vibrant. The project took up a lot more time and demanded a lot more effort than either of the authors predicted, but the results are impressive: Concise even at 728 pages, Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal is the most generous and informative chronicle of this misbegotten and often misunderstood genre.

вЂњAnd here we are now four years later with 400 interviews!вЂќ Wiederhorn laughs.

When music journalists Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman decided to write an oral history of heavy metal-from its labor contractions in the late 1960s through its midlife crises in the 2010s-they calculated they would need about 18 months and maybe 150 interviews.

Heavy metal machines lore