So I wrote a few reviews of internet mixtapes some of which after they weren’t available for download anymore. Who knows why I do things? Well, here is a massive multi-volume offering that as of this writing you can actually hear for yourself.

I argue this project is actually more essential than the one that inspired it: Kangnave’s Reference of Female Fronted Punk. (Also amazingly still available, but get on it quick if you haven’t.) Punk is hardly gender-balanced performer-wise, but much more so than Metal, and besides, there’s nothing conceptually about Punk to exclude women, where Metal is commonly seen as realm of the Manly Man and/or the Womanly Man. Often the female voice, when present, is in the form of a backup singer who isn’t even in the band. Recently, we’ve seen Female-led Metal bands like Arch Enemy become hugely successful (in Europe), but it’s important to remember they’ve existed almost since the birth of the genre.

Over a period of a few years (2010-13) the Female Fronted Heavy Metal blogspot added volume after volume to the series, reaching 15 in all. It seems safe to say the project is complete. I’m not sure if it’s fully exhausted every single example because I’m not prepared to do dig further than guy has (it was a guy), but looking for full albums by some of these bands I really like will be work enough for me.

I’m tempted to run down all my favorites but I’ll be here all night. And what’s the point? You’ll find a lot to like yourself, if what you like is Metal. I’m mostly interested in the Japanese bands, I think none of which I had heard of before. Guy’s crawling all-Japanese message boards to find these. There’s even a Korean band. (Only a handful of the American bands were familiar to me: Leather, Bitch, Crisis, 45 Grave, Warlock/Doro, Girlschool, and of course, Heart.) I have mostly gone for stuff from the 90s and later in my general Metal listening (except for the big obvious bands), but the genre gets murky or extreme (if you go for the latter, highly recommend the Hymns to the Dead Goddess podcast). A lot of this old stuff is pretty good. If you’re a fan of the Fenriz mixes, or you’re just…old, you know there’s a lot of good, obscure stuff from the era. (There may even be some overlap.) But some of these bands are really forgotten. Some of the people in these bands probably forgot. This is a public service right here.

The sound quality is decent until disc 8. It’s not all lo-fi after that, but there’s some deep, deep cuts. Vinyl and cassette rips, some warped, some live bootlegs of bands probably formerly only rumored to have existed. Rehearsal tapes? There really should be a book.

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