An Introduction

Welcome to The Forge. 

Formerly the name of two separate internet radio shows broadcast by Fairleigh Dickinson University students, The Forge is now the name of this blog, where I hope to continue the spirit of a project that began back in October 2011. This blog will be an independent outlet for rock and metal album reviews, as well as for editorial articles and general commentary on rock and metal news.  

For those of you who are completely new to The Forge and/or are interested in what background I personally have concerning these genres, I have put together the following "brief" explanation. 

One of the key things to understand about the genres of rock and metal music is their rich tradition of evolution. Name any modern rock or metal band and I guarantee you that the evolution of their sound can eventually be traced all the way back to the blues and jazz artists of the early twentieth century. True, the journey from Antonio Maggio to Marilyn Manson has been a long path with many forks, but the core musical elements have always remained. And whether or not the myriad genres spawned along the way have remained consistently popular, each one exists in their own niche for future generations to explore, and all are important to consider in relation to the continued evolution of the rock and metal genres. 

...Except disco. Fuck disco.

(I kid, I kid...)

As a lifelong rock and metal fan myself, I find parallels in the evolution of my own musical tastes. Many bands have come and gone from my collection of cassettes, CD’s and iPods during the past two decades, but some have remained for that entire timespan, and all were important steps in defining my personal tastes.

For example, the following video is me, at the age of two years old, dancing and singing to the songs “Haze” and “Charlie Brown’s Parents” by the late-90s alternative rock band Dishwalla:  

And this is me, about 18 years later, admitting that the video exists to the band before I went to see them perform for the first time:

I was born on April 10th 1994, in the midst of arguably the most dramatically volatile era of rock since The Beatles. As I was taking my first breaths in southeastern Pennsylvania, over 2000 miles away in Seattle, Washington, preparations were in place for a public memorial service that would be held later that day. That service was for Kurt Cobain, lead singer and guitarist of the acclaimed grunge band Nirvana, who had been found dead in his home two days earlier, his 27-year life ended by the self-inflicted combination of a drug overdose and a gunshot wound.

It has been claimed that the grunge “era” of rock music died with Cobain, and while I don’t feel that there’s any metaphysical or special distinction to my birthdate being the same date of Cobain’s funeral, I have often pointed it out as an odd coincidence that I feel encapsulates the open nature of my musical tastes, as I consider myself equally open to bands from before my birth and after it. And just as there was a grunge “era” of rock, predated by similar “eras” such as glam, punk, and psychedelic, I frequently visualize the evolution of my own musical tastes as being split into eras as well, with several distinct points along the timeline of my life that affected what I chose to listen to.

So let's take it from the top...

Era I: Born to Rock (1994-2005)

Like Kurt Cobain, my parents were both born in 1967, and while their tastes growing up differed in some respects (and still do to this day), my parents can both be definitively labeled as rock fans. My dad grew up listening to a diverse selection of classic 1970s bands such as KISS, Queen, Rush, Cheap Trick, and the Ramones just to name a few. During the glam-heavy 1980s, he opted to seek out less prominent alternative rock bands such as The Replacements and his personal favorite, The Alarm. My mom also shunned glam, spending her formative years listening predominantly to new wave rock bands including The Police, U2, INXS, and The Psychedelic Furs.

My parents were married shortly after graduating college in 1989, as the raw and stripped down energy of grunge was just beginning to leak out of Seattle into the global musical consciousness. Late 80s alt-rock groups like The Pixies, The Lemonheads and Jellyfish were soon joined by the likes of Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Hole. As grunge was starting to die and I was starting to live, the Larimer family music library was further expanded to include the subsequent wave of alternative rock groups like Live, Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, and No Doubt, with a smattering of modern punk bands like Rancid and Green Day.

The best music-related childhood memories I have are centered around riding in the family’s ‘92 Honda Accord with the radio tuned to 100.3 FM, better known to Philadelphia rock fans by its unofficial callsign of Y-100. To this day I have not enjoyed listening to a radio station as much as I enjoyed listening to Y-100 as a child. To this day hearing just a few seconds of songs such as “What I Got” by Sublime, “In the Meantime” by Spacehog,  “When I Come Around” by Green Day, or “Sell Out” by Reel Big Fish never fails to give me a jolt of nostalgia.

Just as often though, my dad would pop in a cassette from a more obscure upcoming band he had stumbled across, such as Then Again, Maybe I Won’t by Johnny Bravo (produced by Ric Ocasek of The Cars, one of my dad’s 80s alt-rock staples). My dad also had (and still has as far as I know) a large collection of cassettes containing assorted songs from the bands he grew up with, the quintessential Ramones compilation Ramones Mania being the one most requested by me.

You wish your childhood role models were this cool.

For roughly the first decade of my life though, music was more of a background element. Something that was thoroughly enjoyed, but wasn’t something I felt actively engaged in. Eventually though, my journey to enlightenment began, thanks to a 2003 film starring the modern crusader of rock and metal known as Jack Black.
 

Era II: Post-School of Rock (2005-2010)

Sometime in 2005 I saw the Richard Linklater film School of Rock starring Jack Black, Joan Cusack, and Sarah Silverman. For those of you who haven’t seen or heard of this film, it’s well worth a watch for any rock or metal fan. Jack Black stars as a struggling rock musician who, after being kicked out of his own band, lands a job at a prestigious prep school by impersonating his roommate, a substitute teacher. After discovering that several of his students are very talented musicians, he convinces his entire class to form a rock band and enter a Battle of the Bands competition, with the intent of beating his former band.

Apart from giving me a newfound appreciation for some classic rock bands that I had little interest in previously, such as The Beatles, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and The Who, the film inspired me to start playing rock music myself. Not too long after seeing the film both my brother Carrick and I stopped playing piano, and while he converted to guitar, I chose drums.

From my 45-degree toms and a crash cymbal that went perpendicular to the floor when hit, you can tell that I was an immediate pro...

A second major boost to my musical enthusiasm occurred when I attended my first rock concert at the fabled Philadelphia arena known as The Spectrum in January of 2006. The band, a locally famous alt-rock group known as Ike, played on a flatbed truck that was rolled out onto the ice after a Philadelphia Phantoms hockey game. Only a couple hundred people stuck around for the band, but the atmosphere was like nothing I had experienced before.

While writing this article I searched for photos of that concert, and found only a half-dozen or so images from Google. One of them just happens to feature a young individual wearing an orange shirt and waving a foam finger. Based on my memories of the event, and what appears to be a familiar-looking Philadelphia Flyers windbreaker on the individual’s lap, I am about 99% sure that this person is indeed me.

   Right there. ^

 

A third major musical boost came during a six-week family road trip across the United States in the summer of 2006, when I first heard the album that ended up being the first step on my path of independent musical discovery. About a week into the trip, my brother received a copy of Green Day’s Grammy-winning 2004 “punk rock opera” American Idiot and an MP3 player for his ninth birthday. Once the album’s tracks were loaded into his device, I was given custody of the physical CD, and for the next four weeks of long days in the car, I listened to it at least once or twice a day.

I was familiar with Green Day’s earlier “friendlier” work from my early childhood listening to Y100, but this new album was something different. This was far edgier music than anything I heard back in the old days, with nearly every song openly rebuking modern society and the government or covering very dark lyrical topics like drugs and suicide. I was a bit young still to fully comprehend it all, but once I had a taste of it, I wanted more.

The more things change...

For Christmas of 2006, I asked for two albums from bands that have little in common other than me discovering them both through the Internet of my own volition. The first one, Move Along by The All-American Rejects, was an upbeat and catchy indie rock album that appealed to the alt-rock preferences established in my youth by bands like Dishwalla and Spacehog. The second and more resonant album was Linkin Park’s second studio album, Meteora. Linkin Park represents an important period during my musical coming of age, not because their extremely angsty, bordering on petulant lyrical themes appealed to my pubescent sensitivity, but because musically I had never heard anything like them before.

Since about 1999 I had been almost completely out of the modern rock loop, relying on good ol’ Mom and Dad to stumble across bands more in line with their own tastes such as Audioslave or The Killers. I had no idea who bands like Korn or Limp Bizkit were, though perhaps that was ultimately for the best. With their uniquely well-crafted blend of hard rock with hip-hop and electronica influences that most of their nu-metal contemporaries could only dream of matching, Linkin Park quickly became my new favorite band to listen to.

As another important marker on my path to musical independence, Linkin Park was for me what every young music fan should and probably will find at some point: A band that their parents absolutely cannot stand. The combination of screaming vocals and rapping was a clear indicator from the start that Linkin Park would not be welcome on the family car radio.

Even if I removed the band names and album titles, it wouldn't take a genius to guess which one of these wasn't parent-approved.

Along with American Idiot, Move Along and Meteora are also noteworthy due to the fact they were the first albums that I learned to play along to on the drums (or attempted to anyway). Soon enough though, Move Along dropped out of regular rotation in my CD player, and after Linkin Park’s mediocre third album Minutes to Midnight was released in May of 2007, I quickly became anxious to find something new and more exciting to listen to.

Over the next couple of years I filled a succession of cheap two-gigabyte MP3 players with a mix of the bands I grew up with, as well as the more contemporary bands I was getting into at the time, the most prominent of which were Breaking Benjamin, Papa Roach, Saliva and Three Days Grace. My musical tastes once again began to stagnate though, as expanding my collection of songs was limited by the small capacity of the cheap MP3 players I was buying. In the early summer of 2010, after a successful first year at community college I decided to reward myself with an expensive purchase, but one that I felt I needed to continue my musical search. I purchased an eight-gigabyte iPod Touch, and nothing would ever be the same again.

Era III: Post-iPod (2010-2012)

As soon as I got that iPod, I got to work on filling it up. The summer of 2010 would afterwards be remembered as the summer when I discovered the power of heavy metal. Metallica, Megadeth, and Disturbed were my gateway bands. Disturbed in particular had enough in common with the nu-metal sound on their debut album The Sickness to pique my initial interest, but thankfully had shed that style on their subsequent albums in favor of a more classic metal sound with a slight modern edge. On the advice of some metalhead friends I initially chose to restrict my exploration of Metallica and Megadeth to the earliest four or five albums from each band, which worked out quite well as I immediately locked onto the punk rock influence that was audible in thrash metal.

During that following year I started regularly listening to rock radio for the first time in years, latching onto what would ultimately turn out to be the last year of classic rock programming from Philadelphia station 94.1 WYSP. “Classic rock” in this case meant bands from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, so the station simultaneously rekindled my interest in bands from the Y100 days like Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins, as well as encouraging me to check out groups from the 70s and 80s like Cheap Trick and Guns ‘N Roses. The two biggest 90s bands I had just gotten into around this time were Rage Against The Machine and Nirvana, but despite the presence of the latter on my musical radar, my full obsession with grunge would not commence for another full year or so.

During the fall of 2011, my friend James Louderback began attending Fairleigh Dickinson University, a school that coincidentally happened to be high on my list of potential colleges at the time. James quickly set up a heavy metal program on the college’s internet streaming radio station with fellow student Brett Deutsch. I tuned in to the unnamed show’s very first live broadcast on October 1st, 2011, and it was barely over before I was messaging back and forth with James, asking how I could get involved. The first thing the show needed was a name. It wasn’t very hard coming up with a bunch of potential names for a heavy metal show broadcast from the campus of a university whose mascot is a devil, on a station named “Hell Radio”...

After about an hour of back and forth brainstorming, I made what would turn out to be my final suggestion, “The Forge”, which I felt was a perfect description for a program where various styles of rock and metal would be combined to form something awesome. Within a day I had a logo ready, and by the time the following week’s show aired I had put together an intro and outro for the show, along with a Facebook page, which I updated live during all subsequent broadcasts. During the show’s run from October 2011 to May 2012, I was exposed to just about every variety of heavy metal in existence, some of which I liked, a lot of which I didn’t. 

James was, and still is, a bit of a metal hipster with little tolerance for modern mainstream metal. I have a longtime joke about James, regarding the likelihood that he could make a top ten list of his favorite Argentinian death metal bands, the implication being that he knows of and enjoys more than ten in the first place. Any clashes over programming were tongue in cheek though, and the show was a fun education on the broader world of metal. I had my first meaningful encounters with classic metal bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Dio, but also was introduced to more obscure groups such as White Wizzard and Hirax. 

The peak of the show occurred in April 2012, when Hirax frontman and California thrash scene veteran Katon W. De Pena gave a live interview that lasted over two hours, covering topics ranging from the state of modern metal, to criticism of music censorship, to stories of hanging out with his metalhead friends in high school, who included James Hetfield of Metallica and Dave Mustaine of Megadeth. As the summer of 2012 approached, James and I were excited for the future of the show. Brett had unofficially relinquished his co-hosting duties by the beginning of the show’s second season, and I was fully prepared and ready to join James in the studio once I started attending FDU that following August, and convert the previously metal-centric show into a full-fledged rock and metal cornucopia.

Era IV: Post-Forge (2012-Present)

Partially to prepare for the next season of The Forge, and partially because I was running out of space on my 8-gig iPod, I upgraded to a larger fourth-generation 32-gig iPod Touch at the beginning of the summer of 2012, which allowed me even greater freedom to add new music to my collection. I remember very little of that summer, probably because many of my daylight hours were spent editing the feature film I had shot with my friends the previous summer, while my nighttime hours were often spent awake until dawn, downloading the complete discographies of whatever bands I had just recently discovered. 

The two bands that most defined that summer for me were Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, which have remained my two favorite bands since that point. From my dad’s album collection I was already somewhat familiar with Soundgarden’s 1994 album Superunknown and 1996’s Down on the Upside, as well as frontman Chris Cornell’s more recent solo work and three albums with Audioslave. Once I delved further into Soundgarden’s earlier discography though, they quickly shot to my personal number one spot, and it was particularly exciting to learn that after a sixteen-year hiatus, they were releasing a new album in just a few more months. 

Alice in Chains on the other hand was completely new musical ground for me. They were a band whose music I only vaguely remembered hearing every once in a while on the radio during my childhood, as they were the only one of the major grunge bands that my parents never really got into. As far as I was concerned they were the most exciting “new” band I had discovered since Disturbed, with their combination of dark lyrics delivered by the uncanny vocal talents of Layne Staley, and the wicked distorted guitar riffs of Jerry Cantrell.

These two bands set off a bit of a chain reaction as I quickly delved into the complete discographies of familiar grunge and post-grunge bands from my childhood like Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, and Foo Fighters, and then even deeper into their predecessors like Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone. Grunge quickly became my premier genre of choice.

Those Hot Topic smiley face shirts are the bane of my existence.

Other genres were not neglected however, as I soon amassed the complete discographies of classic metal acts including Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Motörhead, and Judas Priest, punk rock groups such as Dropkick Murphys, Rancid, and Bad Religion, and classic rock acts like AC/DC, Jimi Hendrix, and the unparalleled Rush. I also went back into my parents’ album collection, to become reacquainted with bands like Dishwalla, The Alarm, and Live. In hindsight, that final carefree summer before the onset of college and my entry into the adult world wasn’t just a major transition for my musical tastes, but for my life as a whole.

Through an unfortunate combination of circumstances, my first semester at FDU did not go as well as I hoped. Among many other discouraging factors, the poorly administrated (at the time) FDU Radio Club never confirmed a timeslot for “The Forge with James & Colin” until the final week of the semester. Adding to my discouragement was the fact that James was set to start studying abroad in China the following semester, effectively destroying any remaining hope that The Forge would continue. After this and many other setbacks during my first semester I spent much of my winter break in a very dark place psychologically and emotionally.

Then two things happened in quick succession that gave me the boost I needed to press on with renewed confidence and energy. The first was a session with a therapist, and the second was the announcement that both Soundgarden and Alice in Chains were headlining the 2013 MMRBQ, the annual summer music festival hosted by Philly’s primary rock station 93.3 WMMR. Furthermore, Disturbed frontman Dave Draiman’s side project Device and Cheap Trick would be among the openers. 

Encouraged by my therapy and the prospect of the MMRBQ, I dove into my second semester at FDU with gusto and ended up experiencing the best semester overall out of my three years at FDU. The MMRBQ, the largest concert I had attended up to that point, was an amazing experience, and was soon followed by Rush and Black Sabbath shows later that summer. The Rush concert, and the drumming of the legendary Neil Peart in particular, inspired me to get back into playing the drums after I had lost interest for several years, and by the following summer of 2014 I was regularly jamming and writing songs with my guitarist friend Charlie Hudson.

I had also signed up for a radio class for my fall semester, fully intending to finally resurrect The Forge. I pitched the idea to classmate Courtnee Basista, a fellow Alice in Chains fan who I had originally met under very bizarre circumstances during my second semester at FDU, and she agreed to co-host. From that point in time two fantastic seasons of “The Forge on FDU Radio” began, and were only ended by my inevitable graduation in May 2015. Hosting and producing The Forge was the most fun and exciting thing that I did during my entire senior year, and I might even say the most fun and exciting thing I did during all of my time at FDU. By the time I graduated it was just about the only thing that could have made me want to stay in college any longer. 

 

The good ol' days...

The Forge ended up being the latest important step in my journey of musical discovery, and I never got tired of how exciting it was to discuss rock and metal music on-air, and to introduce listeners to bands that I had either grown up with or had recently discovered. By starting this blog, my intent is to keep the spirit of The Forge going and hopefully expand the word of its mission to an even larger audience than that of a humble college radio station.

That mission was, and still is:

1. To give exposure to a wide variety of rock and metal bands, new and old, well known and unknown.

2. To contribute, in whatever small way possible, to keeping these genres alive and well in the public’s musical consciousness.

3. To help rock and metal fans everywhere discover new milestones on their own musical journeys.

We hope you will continue to “tune in”, and rock ON!