Happy Birthday BWIR: 6 years and running!

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On this day in 2011, I made a decision that would change my life forever. Black Women Who Rock was no longer being updated, but I still needed a place to gather together the 5 or 6 black women I knew who either did rock music, or were in rock bands.

I was still convinced that I was an outlier in my interest and love for rock music, and created the Black Women In Rock Tumblr blog (archive) to help fill the gap that was missing for me. The original tagline for the blog was Picking up where Black Women Who Rock left off, as a matter of fact!

6 years later (and a migration to WordPress) later, this blog is still kicking and has catalogued over 100 black women rock musicians. I hope to be here forever, helping to break this completely inaccurate conception that black women can’t sing rock and roll.

— Jaleesa

Review: Tetrarch’s “Freak” LP – Very dark, very heavy.

I finally got my hands on Tetrarch’s new LP Freak, which is a fail on my part because I didn’t realize the whole album was out already! I’ve been waiting for what felt like 84 years for new music from this band, and this thing has been out nearly two full months and I didn’t even realize it.

Freak is a full album, which already makes it wonderful in my eyes. The only thing that sucked about Relentless was that it was too short. Relentless had more of a hard driving, onwards to battle metal sound, but Freak takes a chilled out, nü-metal direction. A couple of songs harken back to Tetrarch’s previous sound (“Oddity” and “Break The Trend”) but most of the album has a KoRn/Slipknot sort of feel to it.

It’s a different sound, and Tetrarch does it well. I highly recommend checking this album out if you’re into metal or hard rock music. The album can be purchased from iTunes and Amazon Music, and can also be streamed on Spotify. Tetrarch is on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, so show them love!