Borknagar is selling beard oil

Beard oil.

As part of their buildup to Winter Thrice, Borknagar is releasing a beard oil, thus pushing the boundaries a little further for band merchandise. Now, I tend to give my own beard very simple care (cheap razors, cheap shave cream, occasional scissor trimming to keep the length manageable), so the idea of applying any sort of beard oil is foreign to me, and I’m not exactly persuaded to start by the existence of this product. Those who are should note that Borknagar’s foray into this genre of lifestyle products is enabled by Rædical, a company that sells several different variants of the stuff. Borknagar’s beard oil is admittedly a rebrand of one of Rædical’s previous products, but it also comes with a wooden box and band logos, which are both clearly essential to the beard oil lifestyle.

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Metallica continues San Francisco Giants concert series


In the latest of what are assured to be profitable sporting events, Metallica will perform their 4th “Metallica Night” at AT&T Park on May 6th, 2016, alongside a baseball game featuring the San Francisco Giants and the Colorado Rockies. This ungainly combination of baseball and metal music is sure to make a lot of money. Now, stadium performances are a pretty common choice for bands of Metallica’s commercial stature, but they’re usually not interleaved between innings of baseball like this. Furthermore, the Giants host an enormous amount of special events to liven up their seasons, so maybe their acquisition of Metallica’s services isn’t so out of the ordinary. In the end, an opportunity for those who like both (they of exquisite taste), and the punchline of a joke that’s yet to be written for everyone on DMU.

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Blood Music preparing a expensive Emperor vinyl box set

emperor_the_complete_works1
After two and a half years of preparation, Blood Music is compiling a huge and particularly expensive box set of everything Emperor officially released, and then some. For 700 Euros (currently 744.52 USD or 492.38 pounds sterling), you can get a swathe of material released between 1992 and 2009 – from the band’s earliest demos, to their studio albums, to the occasional post-dissolution live performance document and so on. Now, this is obviously a major financial investment; the people at Blood Music claim it’s due to the cost of press vinyl and creating the lavish packaging. Unless you’re a complete and utter Emperor die hard, it’s a tough sell, and it suffers from the typical box set pitfall of including later and less accomplished works in addition to In The Nightside Eclipse. Blood Music would do well to renege on their promise not to publish albums separately in this form, at least if they want to get in on the ambitious “One Emperor Album Per Child” initiative we could start if we had the funding and global reach we seek.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb6JiKL3d1s

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Metal Hammer to release branded mobile game

Promotional screenshot from Metal Hammer: Roadkill (2015)

The heavy metal and hard rock news site Metal Hammer is releasing a mobile game entitled Metal Hammer: Roadkill. So far, screenshots suggest a fairly basic action game presumably inspired by endless runners such as Canabalt; the gimmick this time is that it incorporates rhythm game elements and a soundtrack of prominent metal musicians. Given popular trends in the mobile gaming industry, this will probably be released for free and earn most of its revenue through in-game microtransactions, but until the game releases, any speculation on the subject is empty at best. Roadkill most likely serves best not as a specific promotion (although it might turn out to be financially lucrative), but more as an example of the distance heavy metal news sites may need to go to secure funding and label attention in the future. We probably won’t be seeing the folks at Metal Hammer write any critical reviews of Nuclear Blast’s roster for quite a while.

The game releases on October 15th for iOS and Android devices; you can read the official story at Metal Hammer’s website.

 

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