Jason Roche

A live heavy metal show can be one of the most visceral experiences a music fan can experience. Our top five L.A. metal shows of 2012 have made it really fucking hard to go back to watching some dude strumming an acoustic guitar while sitting on a bar stool. See......

Twenty twelve was another strong year for Los Angeles metal bands. What's especially cool is that we're not just kicking ass in one kind of metal -- L.A.'s got it going on in just about every metal sub-genre. Without further ado, then, here are our top ten Los Angeles metal......

Los Angeles hardcore group Touche Amore is sharing their tour diary from their recent trip to Southeast Asian. Yesterday vocalist Jeremy Bolm described their wild times in Singapore and Malaysia, and for part two today he talks on their time in Indonesia. See also: Touche Amore's Southeast Asia Tour Diary,......

Full of emotion and earnestness, Touche Amore's 2009 full-length debut ...To The Beat Of A Dead Horse was a walloping punch to the gut of the hardcore scene. Their 2011 follow-up Parting The Sea Between Brightness And Me kept the jabs coming. See also: Touche Amore's Southeast Asian Tour Diary......

Sun, Dec 9 Gravehill, Behold! The Monolith Cheetah's On December 9th the spiked leather armband crowd and the bearded denim vest crowd will gather together...at a go-go club. Orange County's Gravehill plays to the former with uncompromising, blackened thrash metal with a bludgeoning focus on brutality over musicianship. L.A.'s Behold!......

In 1982 Brian Slagel was a teenage heavy-metal fan preparing to enter college and working as a buyer for Oz Records, a shop in Woodland Hills. While curating obscure heavy-metal albums for the store and operating a fanzine called The New Heavy Metal Revue, he became frustrated over the lack......

In July at the Troubadour, alternative metal rockers Deftones debuted two songs off their newest album Koi No Yokan. The work was not released until one week ago, but thanks to performances of "Poltergeist" and "Rosemary" posted to YouTube, fans were already familiar with them. It's a sign of how......

When the then-teenage members of Scottish metal group Alestorm formed in 2004, they wanted to distance themselves from the saturation of European metal groups singing about things like Vikings and dragons. So instead, they decided to seek inspiration for their brand of power metal from pirates. Why pirates?......

Fri, Nov 9 Von The Black Castle On November 9 San Francisco's Von celebrates the release of their debut album Satanic Blood by headlining the Ritual of The Black Mass festival. The group was one of the earliest American bands to adopt a black metal sound in the early '90s......

The Melvins are in the midst of an ambitious tour, performing in all 50 states (plus Washington, D.C.) in only 51 days. Pretty impressive, considering the legendary band soon will be entering their fourth decade. One of the pioneers of the 1980s Seattle scene that later birthed Nirvana and Soundgarden,......