Heavy Metal

I’ve been listening to so much heavy metal recently, I’ll just throw the list at you (with only the barest parenthetical comments) and see what’ll stick: Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow (melodic hard rock) and Ronnie James Dio (Rainbow’s first lead singer, who went on to take over Ozzy Osbourne’s job in Black Sabbath and then formed his own heavy metal outfit Dio); Alcatrazz (mid-80s virtuoso metal with Yngwie J. Malmsteen and Steve Vai successively on guitar, and with Rainbow’s second lead-singer Graham Bonnet at the helm); Tokyo Blade (now-forgotten footnote to the 80s New Wave of British Heavy Metal); Anvil (the granddaddies of speed metal and practitioners of the “Thumb Hang!”); Queensrÿche (progressive metal, first leaning towards heavy metal like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, but more recently tending to sound like radio-friendly hard rock); Alchemist (Australian psychedelic/progressive thrash/death metal); and Carnage (Mike Amott’s grindcore band before moving on to Carcass and then Arch Enemy). All come highly recommended, but I doubt there’s a single one of you even remotely interested... Heh.