Jason Roche

The story is as old as time itself: (1) Band gets famous. (2) Band breaks up. (3) Two different incarnations of band start performing. (4) Everyone gets confused.  Take the recent Whisky A Go-Go performance by Jack Russell's Great White. That moniker mouthful is the result of Russell's settlement with......

Friday, February 14 Yidhra, Deathkings The Complex These are two of our favorite on-the-rise L.A. metal groups: Yidhra's 2013 album Hexed is a thunderous concoction of stoner doom that will shake you to your knees. Deathkings are due to release the follow-up to their 2011 debut Destroyer, which was an......

Sunday, January 5 Corrections House Echoplex A collective of members from two of metal's artsiest bands (Neurosis and Yakuza) and one of metal's most nihilistic bands (Eyehategod), Corrections House unleashed a fine piece of industrial-flavored noise terror with last year's Last City Zero. The album engulfs the listener with pure......

Los Angeles is a great town for metal, and continues to produce some of its most vital bands, across any number of subgenres. Below are our picks for the best L.A. metal albums of the year. Some are doing things that have already been done in new and interesting ways,......

Do the people who conceived and designed these metal album covers not give a fuck, or do they give too many fucks? It's not entirely clear, but that's what makes them so awesome. Behold, the 10 most ridiculous metal album covers of the year. See also: The 10 best metal......

This past year had just about everything when it came to metal: Pioneers making monumental comebacks, bands taking huge risks progressing their sound, and groups stripping things down to bare bones. Picking our 10 best metal albums of 2013 -- from anywhere, not just L.A. -- was extremely difficult. Here......

Every winter our mailbox overfloweth with Christmas albums, from exceedingly unlikely sources. But a disc of traditional Christmas songs, on Epitaph, from L.A. punk icons Bad Religion? That's downright bizarre. After all, the group has pointedly critiqued organized religion; vocalist Greg Graffin, an atheist, even wrote a book about it:......

Friday, December 6 Mortem The Stardust For the last 20 years, Peruvian quartet Mortem have made some of the best metal to come out of South America. Their uncompromising approach to brutal death metal is very raw, and their works like 2005's De Natura Daemonum are very powerful. They don't......

Thirty years ago this month, Bad Religion released Into The Unknown, their follow-up to their blistering 1982 debut How Could Hell Be Any Worse? Their first work was pure punk rock, focused on political and social issues. Into The Unknown was...something totally different, a musically-ambitious prog-rock album loaded with synthesizers......

Wednesday, November 6 Scale The Summit Whisky A Go-Go The majority of instrumental metal projects are forgettable upon completion of the first listen. Houston's Scale The Summit, however, rises high above the glut of mediocrity and leaves an impression with the instrumental work on their newest record, The Migration. The......