Yearn to Burn: Shred Guitar Insanity What is shred, anyway? It’s a stringed instrument (primarily guitar) playing style that evolved naturally, morphing into it’s own niche. Fast, ostentatious, virtuoso playing, using a variety of techniques, was not invented in the 1980s nor by Eddie Van Halen. That decade and that particular …
Read More »Exmortus – Ride Forth
California’s power shred act Exmortus would have fit right in on Mike Varney‘s Shrapnel Records in the late 1980s, if not for the band’s double bass drum and extreme metal vocal styling. On 2016’s Ride Forth, the band proves there is beauty in all sorts of precision: the hyper-realist creates …
Read More »Exmortus – For the Horde [video / single]
Ah, Exmortus heats up another day in metal-dom! Stark black and white imagery, a dragon, swords, horns, a battle, a horde, scantily-clad women, blood, and fire: these California natives have heavy metal’s best and brightest tropes fenced in and neatly dispatched. The quartet works diligently on their music, and the …
Read More »Exmortus Interview for PlanetMosh, April 2014
Following successful North American back-to-back tours with Dark Tranquillity and Lich King, California’s young “powershred” foursome Exmortus decided to have a wee chat with PlanetMosh. Summarizing Slave to the Sword, these ten tracks have a thrash metal backbone, abrasive or ‘harsh’ vocals, and every song is packed to the hilt …
Read More »Exmortus – Slave to the Sword
Exmortus are a four-piece band from Whittier, CA, the former stomping grounds of Richard Cee’s Wild Rags Records. The band formed in 2002, concocting a battle plan replete with apparent objectives: to spread the shred, pound steel and brew, praise the mighty Crom, and crush the craniums of many. While …
Read More »Raimund Burke – Get It 2.0
German guitarist Raimund Burke‘s latest full-length effort, Get It 2.0, mixes a keyboard-rich AOR type feel with progressive instrumental rock. The lead guitar parts do seem lyrical in spots, but the album doesn’t seem to jump magically from ‘instrumental rock’ to ‘rock and roll that just happens to be without …
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