Big Dumb Dick

Milwaukee hard rockers who’ve shared the stage with metal and heavy bands from Saliva to Disturbed to Motley Crue, BIG DUMB DICK was one of the Brew City’s most reliable rock acts through the late 90’s and early Aughts. They would perform regularly at events like Summerfest and Harley Fest as well as touring nationally. Their shows were known for body-passing, moshing, dancing girls, and pyrotechnics, making them one of the city’s best draws. This also garnered them representation from big players like Kid Rock’s management company and serious interest from major record labels. After being at the center of the maelstrom, lead singer and founding member, Travis Mantsch decided to take some time off from BIG DUMB DICK to clear his head and start a family. Three years later, the songs he had created in his home studio took on a familiar tone and now the band is back and releasing a new record, See You In Hell.

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Birth Of Tragedy

In 2003, scientists from the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England, were studying a supermassive black hole located 250 million light years from earth. They discovered that it was producing sound waves.  These sound waves translate into B-flat, 57 octaves below middle C on the common household piano.  This pitch, inaudible to the human ear, is the sound of the slaughter of light.

Addiction is much like a black hole that crushes the light of those enslaved by it.  A local counselor and musician named Cory Divine works to alter the trajectory of youth who have found themselves in the vacuum of addiction by producing his own yawp of sound. 

His band is called Birth of Tragedy and consists of only two members: Divine on guitar and vocals + Ryan Peterson, percussionist.  To call Peterson a percussionist is to call the Sears Tower a building.  Upon experiencing the colossal sound of Birth of Tragedy, one is certain that continental drift progresses significantly with every set.

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Black Label Society

There’s nothing subtle about Zakk Wylde. He’s the guitar demon that laid the sinister soundtrack to Ozzy Osbourne’s No Rest for the Wicked and No More Tears, breathing insanity into “Crazy Babies,” ripping through “Demon Alcohol” and raising hell on earth with “Tattooed Dancer.” He wore his Southern pride on his sleeve with Pride & Glory, enjoying fleeting success with the project, but not completely satisfying his hunger to rock with reckless abandonment. From there he split songwriting time between Osbourne’s Ozzmosis album and Guns N’ Roses, in the process, recording his solo-acoustic Book of Shadows, an album that made for an interesting sidebar for the shredding metal phenom, but only intensified his desire to raise Caine with six-string, Sabbath-inspired salutations.

When writing with GN’R seemed a dead-end road, Wylde had a revelation—he’d sing the songs himself, give them his own voice, and create a band that fulfilled his vision of rock’s most brutal attributes. He dubbed the band Black Label Society

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Black Label Society

Helping create the definition of heavy metal, BLACK LABEL SOCIETY continues to shape redefine themselves and there sound. From acoustic ballads, to shredding solos, to a community of brothers, these guys have become a people’s band. According to Nick Catanese (Guitar), “take Zeppelin and Sabbath and put them in a blender from hell, and you have Black Label.” The famed frontman, Zakk Wylde, and the “Evil Twin”(Cantanese), find themselves in a family that has been rooted with their band.

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Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath, the original four horsemen of the metal apocalypse, charged their reunited forces across foreign soil earlier this year, saving their triumphant return to America for a winter tour kicking off in Phoenix on New Year’s Eve. Working up to the live run, bassist Geezer Butler, guitarist Tony Iommi, fabled frontman Ozzy Osbourne, and drummer Bill Ward issued Reunion, a double live CD that smokes with the haunting Sabbath dirges and staunch, dark music of heavy metal’s most influential outfit. As Butler and Iommi indicated in a late October interview while doing press in New York City, the CD is just the tip of the iceberg.

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bloodsimple

It takes a special kind of band to attract the attention of Mudvayne frontman Chad Gray. That band is bloodsimple.

“People are going to be blindsided by this record, and I can say that with confidence. I think this is my greatest work,” says frontman Tim Williams, who along with guitarist Mike Kennedy, spawned bloodsimple from the ashes of their acclaimed metal-core outfit Vision Of Disorder. While VOD were visionaries on the heavy music front, bloodsimple offered the pair an opportunity to stretch their musical muscles, further expanding their hard-hitting dynamics from sheer aggression and amplified rage, to subtle soundscapes that stress their uninhibited extremes.

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Brainerd

Dan Dieterich, founder of Brainerd, is a man who is not afraid of getting in touch with the darker side of life. If you are aware of Madison, Wisconsin’s musical history, chances are you’ve heard of this band. Recently signed by (Zodiac Killer Records), their third album approaches. Called simply, “The Goat Album,” Dieterich says that Brainerd plays “deathpunk” and has “congealed into a unique sound.” He describes their first album, “There’s No Eye in Pussy” as “an amalgamation of sound that ranges from traditional punk to rockabilly. We came together more on our second album ‘Animal Mother’. That was more grindy. Fans who come out to hear our latest music can be assured that they will receive a hearty dose of high-powered, high-energy rock n roll party music.”

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