| Metal Music |
|---|
| Jean-Philippe Morin |
I suppose you'll want to see this page if you are just starting listening to metal. Mr. Morin is a great fan of Iron Maiden, Metallica and other "classic" bands, and decided to stay away from extremes of metal, such as death, doom and black metal. Most of the information is presented in the form of reviews, which usually turn out to be rants about how great this or that band is. There really is only one background on these pages, and it is quite nice. The Iron Maiden page looks just like all the other ones, that is until the background finishes loading. I will just assume that it looks even worse in 256 colours. Unless you are looking for very dated information and album overviews of classic bands, you will be wasting your time here.
| Ryan's Chamber |
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| ryan.mccue@dolphin-bbs.com |
It is unlikely GeoCities will ever come up with a normal scheme to deal out their free pages. One GeoCities URL ends up looking just like any other URL. The graphics are small and dispersed throughout the pages, giving them a very disjoined look. It's the "oh, we need a graphic here" approach. They're nice though. One of the most useful features in Ryan's Chamber is a set of pages for Defiled Records, where such names as Altar, Bal Sagoth and Satyricon are hosted. No on-line ordering capabilities, just a snail mail address to send your orders to. A list of zipped sound clips, band pages and metal pages completes the site. Some of the band pages reside right in the Chamber, but they're nothing to get excited about. And prepare to clear your history file a lot, because as soon as a link is clicked on, it will blend into the background. Looks like the default colour scheme to me.
| Seven Keys |
|---|
| cloudz@glas.apc.org |
This is one of very few metal pages that is not displayed on a black or very dark background. In fact this page could not get any brighter if it tried. True to its Speed Metal Encyclopedia designation, Seven Keys presents speed metal band information. Each band page has sections for general information and history, line-up, band pages and contact (usually absent) and a discography complete with a rating. Most of the information is grabbed from other places, but it is nice to have all related stuff in one place. Starting with the a's the band list did not look very promising. It gets even worse as you go down the list to w-z. Many bands are missing, many band names have no links attached to them, and some links don't work at all. The actual amount of information is rather small, and barely gives you a feel for a band, much less any real insight. Seems like about half a dozen people worked on this page, but it just doesn't show. With some work Seven Keys could be the speed metal encyclopedia it aims to be, and hopefully, given time, it will.
| Vinyl Tap Records |
|---|
| sales@vinyltap.demon.co.uk |
It is a bit hard to review this site... there is so much to it. I should probably start by saying that there's gotta be a better way to organize the main menu. The clickable bullets are nice and all, but they barely fit on one high-res page. Aside from this minor detail, this is a very nice site. Music of all kinds is available, mostly non-mainstream, and is so big, the only way to access it is via a search engine. It is good if you know what you are looking for, but otherwise it is very awkward to find anything you might like. True, you can show all a's or all t's, but how descriptive is a band or artist name? Probably the best way to get around this is to select a specific genre, and go wild with the alphabetical listing. Getting stuff at random is cool! If you are into collecting CD's, there is some useful information on-line, including a handy glossary of record industry terms. Unfortunatelly, the search engine is not connected to the on-line order form, so keep a notepad window open or a piece of paper nearby.
| Grinder Magazine |
|---|
| Andrés Padilla |
This is not a zine, where zine implies an on-line magazine. This is just an invitation to send in 7 bucks to subscribe to the real thing. By the covers of past issues displayed on the page, it looks like a fairly thorough magazine, and is described as "an underground magazine that covers all kinds of heavy music, like death, black, doom, thrash, gothic, hardcore and some new styles for our readers like avantgarde, noise, and ambient." Hmm... I like the 'noise' category...
| Ilbasha |
|---|
| Wes Rhodes |
Similar concept to that of the Grinder Magazine, except you are required to send in $2. We are also given a snail mail address and know that the genres covered are underground death, black, and thrash metal. Published quarterly.
| Isten |
|---|
| ccmimat@tpu.fi |
This is one weird page. There does not seem to be any discernible destination or content, yet everything seems to imply depression and dark moods. It's a small page, visit it and see what you think.
| The Koffin |
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| TheKoffin@aol.com |
I really can't see why the authors of this page see it as a very important starting point to hard music on the net bacause there is no on-line content. It is distributed either by e-mail only, or is on a password protected page. The underlined, bolded and italicized "online" that appears all over that page is very misleadsing. What a shame too... Starting Point supposedly thought at one point that this page was useful.
| MetalCurse |
|---|
| Ray Miller |
Another hard copy only zine... requires you to pay between $3-6 depending on where you live. With worldwide circulation of over 2000 and 600 reviews in the latest issue, it looks like a good deal. The magazine was originally started in 1988 to help bands promote themselves. I guess it has grown a bit since then.
| Mosh Zine |
|---|
| Chris Milkins |
Well, it's obviously a home-made, personal sort of a zine. You will see a fair number of reviews, some current gossip and new releases list, and interviews with some well known personalities. A very strong fuck-you attitude throughout the zine. Go see it anyways.
| Rocka Rolla |
|---|
| Trond Sand |
Created by a bunch of people in Kongsvinger, Norway, who produce a weekly one hour radio program that is all about metal. You will find the reviews, interviews and playlists that were featured on the air.
| Blood Servant |
|---|
| Alex Shterenberg |
This music zine is dedicated to extreme metal, or more to the point, its creator's goal is to save the extreme metal scene in North America. The philosophy is that even just one more outlet for the music will be beneficial and maybe even critical in the long run. In the first issue we have four categories: news, interviews, reviews and scene reports. The last ones are created by various people to describe the state and future of local scenes, as well as local gigs. The idea behind the reviews is to give an objective review, so you will find no ratings of any kind attached to the two dozen reviews. My favourite section must be News; this is the kind of stuff you will not hear about from your friends or media, industry gossip and band news. The Interviews section is not lacking content either. Half a dozen reviews in the first issue is not too bad. Needless to say, I highly recommend you have a look at Blood Servant.
| Sigh |
|---|
| Mirai Kawashima |
This just about proves it. Metal is made eveywhere. Even in Japan. Bands such as Abigail, Sabbat and Drill are some of the better ones. Not that anyone would know. And this is the goal of this page. While presenting information about their own band, Sigh, the authors try to make visitors aware that there is a scene in Japan, and as unorganized as it is, it produces music. Seems like it is mostly black metal and thrash, but there probably is lots of other ones too. Graphics are very sparse, non-existant save for the title banners, and follow the basic design of the pages. And if you have the Japanese font, you can look at the native versions.
| Van Richter Records |
|---|
| vrichter@netcom.com |
I have no idea what resolution the frames page was designed for. At least the non-frames page does not have the very annoying looping graphic. It is one of those old push/pull schemes that just keeps on sending stuff down your phone line. Can you say animated GIF? The selection of graphics is rather poor in general on this site. The menu frame links are not even consistent... some go into a separate frame, others open a new window. The good news is that you can order music on-line, though in a round-about and convoluted way. The label features 6 Aggro-Industrial bands with the reviews, interviews and sound/video samples for them. There is a ton of reviews for every band, I guess they are fairly well known in their genre. Just to see what aggro-industrial sounds like, I am downloading one of their 2MB sound clips.
| Metal Links |
|---|
| Andrew Berry |
In the quest to complete reviewing sites for ToC I see bad pages and good pages. This would be one of the better ones. The title graphic is nice, can't really say if that is supposed to be a metal texture or what. The web server this site is running of off is not exactly reliable. I got plenty of server error messages while clicking around. On the content side there is a list of metal links, as the page title would suggest. No use counting the links... there are many. They have been split into Labels, Bands A-N, Bands M-Z, and other. Under the other section you will find some of the more common zines and resource pages. The bands are numerous. Each link leads to a page with general band information and links to their pages. Scanning the list a few times I noticed that a lot of the newer bands I listen to are not mentioned at all. Either they don't have their own pages yet, or the author does not have the time to go out and look for links. You can of course submit your own links, but I'd stay away from the form and use the direct mailto: link. If you do insist on using the form, don't put down any special or fancy characters, just plain alphanumerics. Could this be yet another problem with the server?
| The South African Metal Epidemic |
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Just like Japan, South Africa has managed to produce some metal bands despite the geographical and political isolation. Links to several band pages let you have a look at the members and their music.
| Heksheim |
|---|
| Henry Leirvoll |
The site caters to black metal and related music. All content has been created by or under direction of various bands, so it is safe to assume that any information here is accurate and fairly up to date. The bands are Norwegian and Swedish - most black metal originates from this area. Each band's page has band, ordering and contact information.
