Australia’s Vauxdvihl (or, for a short time, Vaudeville) came quickly, evolved swiftly, and left behind a beautiful corpus of 19 documented songs. We have stood in awe for three decades of this short but impressive discography, and episode 123 of our weird little podcast is...
In this .5 episode (the longest point-5 we’ve done to date), we offer up 6 subjects of previous Radical Research episodes and take a look at their activities since we last put our spotlight on them. (As we explain at the beginning, the sound quality...
Switzerland’s deadliest export, Coroner, which sliced and sawed its way through the metal landscape of the ‘80s and early ‘90s, has finally found its way under the Radical Research microscope. From the savage thrashing mayhem of R.I.P. to the reclined elegance of its final missives,...
Is there an album more representative of this podcast's main focus? Not outside of Norway, there isn’t. Montréal’s DBC (Dead Brain Cells) released ‘Universe’ in 1989, a tech-y cosmic opus of 37:26 that manages to cover the big bang, the evolution of life, the fall...
Operating outside of the metal infrastructure, but heralding its glory and complexity more so than most “true” metal bands, The Fucking Champs, in their 1994-2007 rampage, cobbled together elements of Trouble, Confessor, Don Caballero, and Kraftwerk and reshaped the geometric possibilities of math metal, all...
The one-long-song album is a rare event in the metal genre, and a tough assignment to tackle and get right. We hold up these five albums as the finest examples of the approach. While it’s difficult to convey their scope in snippet form, we tried...
In this brief episode, we spotlight the two metal bands brave enough to tackle the middle part of King Crimson's innovative and highly influential 1969 classic, "21st Century Schizoid Man." Note I: The Radical Research Patreon page is now set up and ready for your patronage....
When it comes to a difficult-to-define concept like psychedelia in music, it's subjective. It’s not all hippies with sitars and lava lamps and bongs…but that’s not wrong either. With a little help from author Michael Hicks and his parameters for what makes music psychedelic, we...
For its 112th episode, Radical Research travels to balmy Greece to investigate the cryptic evildoing of Hail Spirit Noir, whose hellbroth of black metal, prog, psychedelia, and witchery strikes a special chord with your hosts. We take a deep look at the band’s first four...
Sigh is unquestionably one of the weirdest bands in the metal realm. And since Radical Research skews weird, and since we are both fans of Sigh since the mid ‘90s, it seemed obvious that we would eventually do an episode featuring some of the very...
For a podcast that traffics in all things wild and mind-expanding, the subject of our 107th episode makes everything else feel stone-cold sober by comparison. The fifth album by Sweden's Tiamat, A Deeper Kind of Slumber, luxuriates in the wan, reclined possibilities of Leary biscuits...
Time to stop messing with the time machine and live in the present. Herein, we delve into the greatness that is Ontological Mysterium (Horrendous), In But Not Of (Afterbirth), Andermans Mijne (Laster), and The Deepening (Vemod). Metal lives? Metal lives!!! ...
We cover Diskord's three albums and one EP over 11 tasty snippets. Want obscure mindless death metal art? Here we go...
2023 marks the 40th anniversary of Voivod, a band that are at the very heart of everything we do at Radical Research and everything we listen to as incorrigible music obsessives. In celebration, we pay tribute by offering our longest and most in-depth episode yet,...
Radical Research has called on two of its most stalwart allies, the estimable Thomas Nul and Brian Grebenz. Over the course of almost two hours, this veritable Roman Senate chews on the hard-hitting issues that occupy the minds of all right-thinking citizens of the Research...
“Experimental extreme metal band The Meads of Asphodel believe in all peoples’ right to live in peace, free from the shackles of inflicted dogma and servitude.” ...
Our fellow freak, Fallow Heart (aka Forrest Pitts), offers what we feel is the definitive Paul Masvidal interview. We're honored he has granted Radical Research exclusivity on this tremendous insight into one of metal's most important artists. ...
Is heaviness a quantifiable aspect of music? Can a piece of music display such weight, such heft, that the listener can only accept its heaviness as fact? Radical Research says “Yes,” and we are here to offer evidence....
The Southeastern United States, from whence Radical Research is broadcast, has long prided itself on its sundry wrestling traditions. From the bare-chested hectoring of the SoCon to the gator-tangling of Central Florida, southerners approach wrestling with a sense of birthright authority. But today we face...
Over the course of its previous 93 episodes, Radical Research has banged, thrashed, and decapitated but never before has it waltzed. That ends now. Formed as Aslan in 1985, San Diego's Psychotic Waltz released four full-length albums in the ‘90s, each of which challenges all...
When a member of a fringe Swedish death metal band makes a request, Radical Research heeds the call. To that end, RR episode 93 is a response to Philip Von Segebaden’s (Afflicted) appeal for a song-by-song analysis of Swallowed in Black by California’s preeminent thrash...
Rarely can a rock or metal band be described in terms of open-heartedness, nostalgia, or compassion. But the subject of Radical Research’s 92nd episode defies convention in nearly every way. Madison, Wisconsin’s Last Crack was a band that seemed on the brink of breakout success...
Occasionally, Radical Research dares to tackle the big questions: what is time, and can we have a piece of it? Can a psychic saw perform brain surgery? Can a metal album have a samba track and several bars of Miami bass hip-grind? On episode 91,...
We admit that, in all our geographic music spelunking, we haven’t scaled many of the mountains offered by Russian noisemakers. So, if we say that “Hieronymus Bosch is our favorite Russian band,” it’s true, but it’s also based on a slight bit of ignorance. If...
In anticipation of Destination Onward – The Story of Fates Warning and its publication in July, 2022, the author, Jeff Wagner, and Radical Research co-host, Hunter Ginn, sit down and talk about Fates Warning. It’s far from the first time we’ve discussed Fates Warning together,...
For our 80th episode, Radical Research detaches itself from the icy grips of Norway and takes a sojourn southward to France, a country whose history with death metal gives priority to quality over quantity. From 1990-1994, the chronically-underrated Supuration were busy at work creating their...
We love Enslaved. They are a rare long-running band that, in our estimation, have not released a bad album. Of their 15 full-lengths to date, your Radical Research hosts highly rank their sixth album, 2001’s Monumension: it’s Ginn’s #2 (just behind Eld, 1997) and Wagner’s...
We know and love him as Garm, the frontman in Ulver since that pioneering band’s very beginnings. He has also fronted Norwegian luminaries Arcturus and Borknagar. All this alone would be enough to place him in our hall of infamy, yet he has given so...
At the dawn of the 21st century, strange sounds brewed in the Southeastern corner of Norway -- musical paths cobbled together with the tortured echoes of second wave black metal, the ambitious, borderless miscellanea of progressive rock and metal, and the hostile liberalism that is...
Formed in the Czech Republic in 1987, Master’s Hammer summoned a singular, constantly mutating approach to black metal over two distinct lifetimes (1987-1995, 2009-2020). The band’s debut album, Ritual (1991), is described by Darkthrone’s Fenriz as “the first Norwegian black metal album, because it sounded...
Paul Chain’s Illogical Slow Evolution Radical Research interrogates, with few exceptions, the work of artists who operate in the darkest, most cryptic corners of the rock and metal multiverse. The music of Italy's Paul Chain, however, puts to test the inquiry even of the most rigorous...
Extant since the mid 1990s, Solefald may have been the first Norwegian black metal band to entirely bypass the necro stages of development and arrive fully formed as a "post"/"avant" type mischief-maker on their debut album, The Linear Scaffold (1997). We have watched and listened...
Even in the bizarro wilderness of Radical Research, Alf Svensson’s Oxiplegatz stands out in its peerless freakishness. A founding member of the epochal Swedish death metal band, At the Gates, Svensson used Oxiplegatz as a conduit for his most perverse cosmic fantasies. Built on a...
If the wild, transcendent music we exalt were a cluttered yet beautifully arrayed galaxy, the artists making that music would be planets and Rush would be its sun. So much of what ticks off all the right boxes for us is inherent in the music...
Germany’s Atrocity have been plying their execrable goth-metal wares since 1994’s precipitously tragic Blut, but the band’s first two albums, 1990’s Hallucinations and 1992’s Todessehnsucht (aka Longing for Death), occupy space in the top tier of death metal’s golden age. Wild, technical, psychotic, and destructive,...
Episode 55 of Radical Research features our overview of Hammers of Misfortune, one of the most creative, interesting, original metal bands to emerge in the aughts. Admittedly, we haven't gotten super-excited about a ton of newer bands birthed in this current century, but we find...
It began with suffering and ended with screams (and whispers). St. Louis' radically-progressive Anacrusis never enjoyed the recognition they so deserved, but popular neglect did little to temper their potent vision. A product not only of the ‘80s thrash scene but also of the fertile...
A Skeptic’s Universe is what happens when student becomes master. Spiral Architect’s school years were spent in obscurity, honing their craft, learning their lessons, keeping their noses to the grindstone. In 1998 they began work on their master’s thesis, and in early 2000, upon publication,...
Goodbye clarity, hello obfuscation… Norway’s other post-black metal duo, perhaps dwelling deeper in obscure shadows than Solefald… we hail Fleurety’s dedication to the dark arts and… which craft? All the ones that bring metal to the most precarious of left-field edges. So bizarre that it...
For our 12th installment, your intrepid hosts sift through time and dust in search of Orange County's Mind Over Four. Bridging an unknown gulf between cutting edge alternative rock and hyperkinetic tech/prog metal, Mind Over Four was poised for a breakthrough to the mainstream. But...
Death metal is very weird musick. It’s the rupturing and restructuring of musical tradition. At its best it offers otherworldly, phantasmagoric deliverance. We begin this episode hearing Carbonized in its embryonic stages as an exemplar of the peculiar Swedish death metal substrata, but in short...