Books published by Bazillion Points

Sweden is a remote country in the freezing northern Europe, with less than nine million inhabitants and a reputation for Volvos, hockey players, cheap furniture, vodka, and blonde women. Since the late 1980s, however, Sweden has produced over a thousand extreme heavy metal bands, creating one of the most respected regional music scenes in the world. This is the improbable history of how a marginalized teen movement crawled from Sweden's small towns and suburbs, and found a lasting place on the world stage. Daniel Ekeroth captures the epic tale with enlightening detail, beginning with Sweden's violent loss of innocence in the 1980s, through the metal's virtual chokehold on the country during the 1990s into the lasting legacy and influence in the turbulent 2000s of the Sunlight guitar tone, the "Gothenburg Sound," and the countless offshoots of Sweden's most lethal cultural export. This ultimate blow-by-blow account of Sweden's legendary death metal underground is based on exclusive interviews with members of Nihilist/ Entombed, In Flames, At the Gates, Dismember, Grave, Hypocrisy, Opeth, Unleashed, Marduk, Morbid, Mob 47, Deranged, Edge of Sanity, Merciless, Therion, Liers in Wait, Carnage, Carcass, Tiamat/Treblinka, Afflicted, Repugnant, and the Haunted.

Arriving in 1978, hitched to the back of the Sex Pistols'' tour bus, Texas punk rock soon became as mythic as the state''s devotion to football, cattle and prayer. Confrontational renegades like the Huns, the Big Boys, and the Dicks led a defiant new era of blood, sweat and cross-dressing cowboys. Austin son Pat Blashill grabbed a camera and uncovered a story of creative deliverance, set in trailer parks, low-rent shared living and wild, Texas bucket-of-beer bars. Joining over 300 deep black and white photos by Blashill are essays by director Richard Linklater (Slacker / Boyhood), singer David Yow (Scratch Acid / Jesus Lizard), drummer Teresa Taylor (Butthole Surfers) and local luminaries Adriane ''Ash'' Shown and Donna Rich. True mavericks banded together to make a stand and... Texas is the Reason.