Lordi, “Screem Writers Guild.” There’s no faulting the commitment of heavy metal shock rockers Lordi. The Finnish band’s 18th album, Screem Writers Guild, has everything it needs for the haunted motif, from the dark lyrics to the spooky key-laden hard rock and undead monster visuals. At the same time, the…

“Eurovision” 2019, courtesy. Eurovision happened this week. It’s unfortunately that time again. For the past few years I’ve insulted the “Eurovision” contestants, finalists, losers, fans and more or less everyone else involved. It’s fun! I mean, it makes Europe (and Australia for some reason) angry at me, but it’s…

Andrew WK gave everyone the permission to party hard. Yes, even to Cat Stevens. This week Spotify rolled out its annual Year in Review app, for subscribers to see what their top songs and artists of 2019 were. This year, since 2020 is right around the corner, they stretched…

Rob Zombie gets festive. We’ve made it! Halloween is less than a week away and after columns about horror punk and horrorcore we’ve finally reached the main event: Metal. Horror metal is a thing, of course, but why limit ourselves to that narrow box? There are so many Halloween-appropriate…

Scandinavia: The countries above the countries that people first think of when they want to go to Europe. After watching Game 3 of the NBA Western Conference Finals it’s tempting to write a column about the Warriors, but I’m not going to be the one to jinx them. So…

I didn’t really notice last week what with all the despair, but music is turning around! After my complaints about the early ’00s, things are getting back to where I like it: Extremely metal. That’s right, 40 percent of this week’s list is face-melting heavy metal. So if you…