Back in May, Chapel Hill, NC's Horseback released one of the year's most rewarding albums, Half Blood, which blends ambient black metal with rootsy Americana to chilling and remarkable results. Their…   Read Story »

As genres bleed, implode, breed and keep going, there's a new pack of Stateside metal shape-shifters, a loosely connected group of musicians that includes, among others, Pyramids' R. Loren, the guys…   Read Story »

"Elevations And Depths" is the 10+ minute track that ends adventurous Chicago blackened noisemakers Locrian's The Crystal World, one of my favorite albums of 2010 (and one of two great records they…   Read Story »

There's a reason I bring up Southern dust when discussing Jenks Miller's increasingly ambitious, genre-stretching Horseback, a metal project that notched my No. 9 album of 2010, along with the…   Read Story »

Clichés be damned -- this really was a good year for metal. I had a harder time organizing a Top 10 in 2010 than ever before. Ditto the Top 20. It was such a good year that I went overboard and…   Read Story »