Customer Reviews

Rockdetector: A-Z of Black Metal

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I have just recently became obsessed with black metal for some unknown reason. I have listened to death, thrash, and speed metal on top of grindcore for the past 18 years and read the death and thrash metal guides 2 years ago. This book has really helped me discover a great deal of information about black metal and just straight up kicks ass. If you love black metal than this is the book for you.

I hate to be too anal but with a book title like this, you expect it to not only have an encyclopedia-like format, but also better-researched information. Just skimming over a few bands here and there I picked out a massive amount of errors (examples: Gaahl's name is misspelled in the Trelldom and Gorgoroth entries, but not the Gaahlskagg entry, but the Gaahlskagg entry leaves Skagg out of the lineup entirely; the Carpathian Forest entry suggests that Nattefrost and Vrangsinn are the same person; there are numerous misspellings of band names, people names, album titles and so on).

The introduction is vaguely interesting and details what the author sees as the roots of Black Metal. The author undoubtedly tried to include a representative selection of bands, but it comes off as choppy and not very interesting. Some bands have several pages of information about them, some have none at all. Books like this are probably rendered obsolete by the internet; even the much-maligned Wikipedia has better and more complete information on most of these bands these days. There are some black and white photos reproduced here and there, and some of the blurbs are interesting (despite misinformation), and it's possible that improvements were made in the more-recent version (I have the one with the Gorgoroth cover), but overall I can't see this as very informative unless you're new to BM. It's not that I disliked it, but I didn't learn all that much either that I couldn't have found elsewhere.

I hate to see that the price on this book is so low now! I bought this on import many years ago when it first came out. In fact, my version has a picture of Gorgoroth on the cover instead of the picture of the now-departed Astennu of Dimmu Borgir on the cover. I paid like $60.00 back then, only because I was in a black metal frenzy at the time!! I can only reccomend this as a reference guide, if you need to know what songs are on what album. That's what it primarily gives, the little information it gives about the artists is usually mispelled and incorrect! Now that most people have the internet at thier disposal this book is really rendered obsolete. Although, there are a few choice live pictures courtesy of Martin Wickler. Caveat Emptor!!

Any one interested in music would love this book, not only metal heads. It's set up in a way that you can just pick it up and find something you didnt know. There are a few things that are 'wrong' but like i said only a FEW. BUY this book, No buy ALL the A-Z books from this guy, he is a god and a damn good artist to boot!