Cerebral Pop Field Guide to: Genre-Bending Metal

The Cerebral Pop Field Guides are an ongoing attempt to help introduce you to our favorite things within a respective category. It strikes at the very heart of what Cerebral Pop has set out to do, and will hopefully help increase awareness of things that are awesome and help define the new and better pop culture.
I'm not a huge fan of metal, but I've dabbled in the genre more than a few times and found bands that I absolutely love. Of course, this is a field guide to "genre-bending metal," which means metal bands that weren't/aren't afraid to put their own unique twists on their music and toss in some other genres for good measure while they're at it. Even if you aren't a long-haired headbanger with metal spikes on your wrists, you'll probably be able to find something to like about these three bands. If not, at least you'll be aware that not every metal band sounds like Slipknot. God, that would be horrible if they did, wouldn't it?

Shuffled: Wonderful Discoveries Edition

Every other Wednesday I hit the shuffle button on my 90 gigabytes of music and post the results. I might have to justify some of the stuff in my library, but hopefully it will help inform you of new music -- Or at least be entertaining.

In this edition of Shuffled we've stumbled upon a bunch of music that I originally stumbled upon in interesting ways, only to be pleasantly surprised. I'm really enjoying this feature now that I've taken to telling personal stories instead of trying to regurgitate random factoids about the band. Are you? Would you like this feature more as a podcast? You know, in case I ever wanted to do that. Let me know, and enjoy the music.

June Music Wrap-Up

The Music Wrap-Up is a monthly summary of my favorite and other notable new releases. The songs are for sampling purposes only. Artists or labels notify me with any complaints and I will remove the song as soon as possible. Please support these musicians as that's the reason I'm featuring them in the first place.

June was chock-full of great music. So much so, that it almost rivals last months April/May dual Wrap-Up. I would have been happy if only Stars and Devo had come out this month, but as usual with these posts, I discovered plenty of great new music in my constant search for more music to feature. That's the reason I love doing these, and I hope why you love reading them.

Unfortunately, as of right now, July is looking kind of slim. I'll cruise around again and see if I'm missing some new releases of note, but I might have to go in another direction for next month's Wrap-Up -- Unless you've got some suggestions you want to leave in the comments. For now, we've got The Villagers, The Chemical Brothers, Ariel Pink, Tokyo Police Club, Blitzen Trapper and much more ahead, so hit that jump and get listening.