Jeff Wagner

Is a live album really ever live? Most are manipulated in some way, either in the mixing stage or the overdubbing of guitar leads or vocal passages. The greatest of them all, KISS seminal Alive!, comes with legendarily conflicting reports of how much it was doctored. But who cares? It rocks harder than any other album in existence, KISS or otherwise.

With total respect to Witchcraft, Deftones and Cattle Decapitation, who recorded albums that list highly on my year-end favorites (especially Witchcraft's mighty Legend), Noisecreep wanted straight-up progressive albums from me, so prog I give...

With the exception of Black Sabbath, early heavy metal was built upon a foundation of two-guitar bands. Whether it was the sturdy rhythm/lead axis of Scorpions' Rudolf Schenker and Uli Jon Roth or Judas Priest's legendary K.K. Downing and Glen Tipton team, metal with two guitars is usually twice is good as metal with just one...

You can tell a story in a song, but that doesn't mean you need words to convey that story. Music is a language all its own, and oh god yes, heavy metal is our favorite language. Where the instrumental metal album was once the domain of six-string shredders like Vinnie Moore and David T...

In his latest installment of his 'Mean Deviation' column, music historian Jeff Wagner tells us why he thinks Metallica is the ultimate heavy metal cover band. Wagner is the author of 'Mean Deviation: Four Decades of Progressive Heavy Metal,' an exhaustive history on the sound and its various offshoots...

eBay.com (2) Metal compilations have been pumped out in extraordinary numbers since around 1980, but few are worth paying for and listening to regularly. K-Tel put out a comp of mainstream metal called Masters of Metal, a pointless collection of stuff you could find at any Kmart store: KISS, Scorpions, Y&T. Th...

In the third installment of his 'Mean Deviation' column, music historian Jeff Wagner tells us what he thinks is the first true progressive metal album. Wagner is the author of 'Mean Deviation: Four Decades of Progressive Heavy Metal,' an exhaustive history on the sound and its various offshoots...

In the second installment of his 'Mean Deviation' column, veteran music journalist Jeff Wagner takes a deep look at the infamous "sophomore slump." Check out the piece as he runs through several metal and hard rock subgenres and examines whether some of our favorite artists' stumbled on their sophomore albums or not...

To say that heavy metal music possesses a flair for the dramatic would be the understatement of the century. From epic battles between God and Satan to musclebound warriors swishing swords and winning over busty babes, the imagery is often theatrical, cinematic, and over-the-top enough to draw equal amounts of ire and praise...

"I don't know what this means. I don't think it means anything" -- Eddie Vedder, accepting a Grammy for Pearl Jam's 'Spin the Black Circle,' 1996 I tend to take the Pearl Jam Attitude toward the Grammys, but it's still fun to sit back and watch people who know nothing about metal try and hand out awards for "Best Performance" every year...