3 Inches of Blood and the Black Dahlia Murder

Check subtlety, pretense, and the past decade at the door: 3 Inches of Blood wants nothing to do with them. Eschewing fads and hipster cred in favor of staying true to their message of metal for its own ridiculous, epic sake, these bandmates go straight for the kill. Their weapons of choice are borrowed from the arsenals of heralded metal warriors such as Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Manowar. Their sound is the clash of crashing swords, the crunch of crushing bones, the pulse and sweep of battle, the eternal struggle against an eternal enemy. As vocalist Jamie Hooper warns on the band's website: "We are forging the steel that we'll use to annihilate the heavy metal posers, and in every town we play, the streets will run red with their blood." The metal gauntlet has been thrown down; who will answer the challenge?

Pressing through the tunnel of bodies hewn by its brothers-in-arms, Detroit hero the Black Dahlia Murder will then mount the stage, channeling the spirit of the Norse gods in its shredding, snarling assault. Unlike many of its black metal brethren, however, Black Dahlia maintains some semblance of melody under all of that crushing weight, like flowers growing on a corpse. Iron flowers growing on a reanimated corpse that's trying to eat your soul, that is.