Don Xml's Grok This

The folks over at IMHOTEP have gathered together THE BEST OF 2006 ACCORDING TO 155 MUSICIANS.  The musicians are mostly metal and hard rock, but there are some real oddballs thrown in there too.  One thing you can gather from that list is that there isn't one or two clear winners this year.  Iron Maiden's A Matter Of Life And Death ...

If you crossed classic Slayer with Deep Purple, well, you got Black Sabbath's Born Again album, but that is a different story.  If you tried it again, with a little more emphasis on Slayer, you would get Finland’s Children of Bodom and their new release, Are You Dead Yet?.  Finland is known in the metal circles as the ...

The Welsh band Bullet For My Valentine is slowly becoming the new must listen to metal band.  I found out about them thru the UK’s Metal Hammer magazine (where’s my UK readers, and why haven’t you told me about these guys?).  Although this is a new metal band, in the mold of Avenged Sevenfold, you can hear the ...

Peter Provost and Steve Pavlina both have mentioned the Pandora Music Service which will allow you to create a customized streaming radio channel based on artists and songs that you enter into the system.  I have to admit that the Pandora user interface is pretty slick, but having to enter in your ...

If you haven’t noticed, screaming vocals (aka Oscar the Grouch) is very much the in thing for metal music.  And to drive this point home even more, there is now an instructional video “for that new breed of vocalist” called “The Zen of Screaming”.  This isn’t something that I would normally run across, ...

Brad Wilson was lamenting over the lack of decent metal bands out there.  He feels a lot like me, loves the metal, but can not stand the recent trend of “Oscar the Grouch” vocals (I also call them Cookie Monster vocals).  Classic thrash metal bands like Slayer and Testament touched upon that trend, way back when, but it was ...

I’ve had a MySpace account for a while, and have a link from there to here, but I never did the inverse.  So here it is.  And I’ll add a link to it on my site.  MySpace has a “friends” list, and if you are a friend, a band I like, or a band that I give a good review, I’ll add you as a ...

If you are old enough to remember the great music scene Jersey had back in the late 80’s, then you probably remember the bands American Angel and Xenon.  Xenon had a few reunion shows over the last couple years, but if you missed them, then you definitely don’t want to miss April 30th, 2005 at Double D’s Entertainment ...

I’ve been in a musical funk for the last couple months, and haven’t been able to really get into any of the new CDs I bought over that time.  Here’s a few of what I bought, and really couldn’t get into (even though some of these are really good CDs): Lit – Lit –  Probably one of the best real ...

It looks like some of the members of Xenon will be getting together for a benefit show on Sunday, October 17th at Crossroads in Garwood. If you missed the reunion show, you will not want to miss this one.  I can't make this show, since I'll be out on business, but I'll be there in spirt.