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So over two years ago I asked Stylus Magazine Proprietor Todd Burns what he thought about running a monthly "Metal" column on the site. His response was characteristically terse. "Sure. What do you have in mind?"

I had a lot in mind. It verged on the vertiginous. There were bands I wanted to interview. There were label "magnates" I wanted to interview. And there were records I wanted to raze and others that I wanted to genuflect to. There was one guiding principle: I did not want to diverge from what I grew up on: zines built from the ground up on typewriters; photocopied and held together with staples; manhandled and faded copies of Creem and Circus. The zines were helmed by obsessives. They were Exhibit A in post-adolescent "angst." Fossilized teenage fixation in amber. The glossy mags? They were really no different: they hired fanatics to cover fanatics. They ably dreamed the dream and often even lived it. They made peanuts for exhilaratingly cogent copy. Sometimes these words verged on poetry. Sometimes they verged on "experimental prose." Sometimes these reviews and interviews were as interesting as the art and artists they purported to be about. Lofty goals, indeed. And we never even came close.

We marched out with a moniker lifted from Entombed's album, Left Hand Path. July 24, 2006: together with then Stylus writers Whitney Strub and Cosmo Lee, the first edition of LHP lit upon the electronic page. Artist Justin Bartlett gave the OK on some lender graphics and Burns added some sort of header that I swear was cropped from a Castle Grayskull jpeg. The fist installment? —A slew of reviews. Lots of adjectives, lots of analogues; lots of time spent listening to promos in the car or at home or at work after hours when there wasn't another set of ears present to witness Midnight in its full glory. But it was stiff. It was civil. Some of it was just plain boring.

By its eleventh—and final—edition, we were firing on all cylinders. Todd DePalma had joined the fold. I had ratcheted up my self-lubrication and gotten way over formalism. Cosmo was blanketing the mainstream; I was constantly threatening to light it afire. Critical darling Jesu received a "review," which was nothing but quoted Big Country lyrics. Crimson Moon's record warranted one or two sentences. DePalma shapeshifted from some sort of Native American Word Shaman to the rivet-headed Long Island Rattenhund that he truly is. All three of us combined for 38 reviews; DePalma staple-gunned a label profile onto the mess. Stylus proper was dead five days later.

There was no question about wanting to continue LHP; there were endless questions about how we would actually continue. Enter Chris Alpino. I was a fan of Alpino's blog, the ludicrously titled A Blaze In The New Jersey Sky, and I'd seen a photo of him on the Outlaw Records site: beer gut, sleeveless and ancient Metallica tee, flashing the horns, visibly intoxicated… The bromance was kindled. Alpino euthanized ABITNJS; we immediately entered into a discussion of the possibility of taking LHP from Stylus' sepulcher to the living and breathing, walking and talking. Months later, Alpino the Younger, Warlockean Internetz Wizard Justin, donned the surgical smock, dropped a tube down her troat and took in 18 holes. Patrick "Teeth" Delaney made us some art. DePalma juiced up on instant coffee and fetid Chinese "air" and uploaded every bit of copy we'd wrangled between the two of us. Still Alpino the Younger fought and forged. Abracadabras. HTML. Long, insane e-mails about minutiae's minutiae. In fact, the site is still in progress. And it probably always will be.

Long and short: we're back. We're irreverent. We're cerebral. We're a couple of pasty white dudes writing about Metal. I'd say I hope you enjoy it; but we'd continue on even if you didn't. Up the Irons, and May Darkness Always Prevail.


- Stewart Voegtlin
  Atlanta, 2008
 
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