yeah, and for discovering some new awesome bands ^^

im too lazy for now to post the urls (later) but the following have good cross section of reviews and interviews with interesting bands :

vibrations of doom

dead like an angel (defunkt and archived)

corridor of cells (defunkt and archived)

markprindle.com (relatively small band selection but most of the seminal stuff covered...and the writing style is freakin awesome)

haha thanks. I always just type "rym" into the firefox address, and I forgot the real url.

I like Discogs when I want to collect every world wide first pressing of a title I like, lets say your favorite album lets say Exodus "Bonded by Blood" develops a flaw ie, skipping, or the cassete tape gets eaten, never fear there is the Music For Nations back-up, and the Banzai Records back-up, untill you can locate a used copy of the Torrid / Combat edition. wikipedia, when I discover a band I like.

When it comes to genres I always find the best publication for that genre. For Metallic mayhem with a emphasis on brutality, none is better than Sounds of Death (GODS) and Voices from the Darkside Germany.
For RIFF metal I like Snakepit France, even though they only cover the first, second and third waves of Power/ Thrash, ie 80's metal 1980-1986.

For Gothic Metal, I have to rely on Sonic Cathedral, even though they cover just metal with only female vocalist. To bad the word "gothic" means something totally different in "Gothic" rock, than in every Gothic Metal webzine. There is no better Industrial Metal magazine/ webzine than Industrialized metal.


For Norwegian black metal, I like Norsksvartmetall.com

For indie rock, I like a publication called Under the Radar.

Classic music is easy, I only trust the series of books by James L. McHard. I do not like 90% of the fluffy/ boring music championed by most classic music publicatons.

For classic albums, I send my favorite contacts (mostly in traditional metal) my favorite top 150 titles, and ask anything missing from this ESSENTIALS list.

I also contact my favorite songwriters, I send a total sycophantic fanatic fan mail (TOTAL TRUST AND RESPECT) and ask them, "hey that was a great album, without revelaing to many songwriting secrets, since your my favorite singer, who is your favorite singers and what are your 25 favorite albums"

Sometimes those websites are helpful, but once in a while you got to go straight directly to the source, the artist.

Back in the good ole' days, before the internet between monthly and every other monthly and those quarterly metal publications (lazy bastards). Vinyl records came with a thank list, and those thank list became a-sort-of mini Encylopedia Metallica * (The bible of heavy Metal) the book from 1982.