The definitive account of Toronto’s heavy metal scene, 1980 – 1989. Over 300 large format pages crammed full of photos, anecdotes, flyers, commentary, and more, lavishly produced and designed. An essential grip for anyone interested in metal, underground music, subculture, and Toronto’s unwritten history!Our take: Back in 2018, Toronto’s UXB Press released the book Tomorrow Is Too Late, a beautifully designed, phone-booked-sized tome documenting the 80s hardcore punk scene in that city. Now they’re back with the companion piece, Eve of Darkness, which does the same thing for the 80s Toronto metal scene. As before, the book is large and thick, packed with photographs, scans of paper ephemera, and detailed text about the scene. About half of Eve of Darkness provides capsule histories of each band, proceeding in chronological order based on when the groups started, and alternating between oral history-style sections and more traditional band biographies, with the more popular and better documented bands getting several pages to tell their story with text and images. I can’t imagine any Toronto metal or hard rock band you wanted to read about isn’t represented here, from the biggest names like Anvil to well known underground bands like Sacrifice and Slaughter right down to dozens of bands who only played a handful of gigs or managed a demo session or a photo shoot. While the band histories are informative and entertaining, I like the other sections of the book even more. These sections address topics like key clubs, promoters, and important gigs. Eve of Darkness is a rich sociological account of this subculture, with a level of detail that allows the reader to feel immersed in the world of 80s metal. Since so much of the book is about how the local Toronto scene intersected with the national and international metal scenes, the book is fascinating for anyone interested in metal’s history, particularly how that history played out at the street level. If you’re looking for what the typical music book gives you—some cool stories and a list of new bands to check out—Eve of Darkness delivers, but it’s so much more than that… a real cut above as far as these kinds of books go.
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