Heavy Metal Gift Guide 2008

The reunion of the Dio-era Black Sabbath has been a huge success. Ronnie James Dio, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Carmen Appice originally got back together to record three new songs for the collection Black Sabbath: The Dio Years. It went so well they embarked on a tour as Heaven And Hell, and are now in the studio working on new material for a 2009 release. The Rules Of Hell is a box set that collects all of the Dio-era Sabbath material. It includes 1980's Heaven And Hell, 1981's Mob Rules, 1982's Live Evil and 1992's Dehumanizer.

The centerpiece of the 3 DVD set is the three hour band history. It starts at the beginning in Buffalo, New York and chronicles their story up to the present day. The number of people interviewed is staggering. From friends and family members that were there at the start to music executives to other bands, and of course the past and present members of Cannibal Corpse themselves, you get many different perspectives on the band's history.

The history part of the book alone makes it well worth buying, but there's also an extensive guide to Swedish death metal bands. It includes a short bio, band members and a discography. It's a great way to discover bands you may not be familiar with. For fans of death metal and the history of metal in general, I highly recommend Swedish Death Metal. The massive amount of information and interesting stories about the rise of death metal in Sweden plus the photos and band guide make it an essential metal book.

Magazine subscriptions are a great gift for metal fans. Metal Maniacs is an excellent choice, and some other recommendations would be Decibel, Metal Hammer, Terrorizer and Unrestrained.

Heavy metal is not spawned from comfort and luxury and happiness. It emerges from struggle and pain and anger. That has never been more apparent than the story of Acrassicauda. They are an Iraqi heavy metal band, and this DVD is their story.

For the wannabe musician this is the perfect video game. It's a lot of fun and very challenging. It's available for several different video game platforms including Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii.

The game has songs from all different types of genres of music. For metalheads, this version of Rock Band includes songs by artists including AC/DC, Dream Theater, Lacuna Coil, Mastodon, Megadeth, Metallica, Judas Priest, Motorhead and Ratt.

The newest addition to the iPod line is the Touch. It uses the same technology as the iPhone with the touchscreen display. It has a 3.5 inch display, perfect for watching your favorite metal videos. It has the coverflow feature that displays the album art from your music collection.

The iPod Touch allows you to use wi-fi to connect to the internet for surfing, watching YouTube videos or downloading songs from the iTunes music store. This device has audio, video, photos and the internet. It is available in 32MB, 16MB and 8MB versions. You don't get as much storage space as you would with a traditional iPod, but the added features are a reasonable tradeoff.

You're not likely to hear much heavy metal on regular radio, so satellite radio is the way to go. Sirius has several channels that play harder-edged music, including Hair Nation, Hard Attack, Octane and Buzzsaw. Sirius and XM have now merged, and the music channels are now the same on both services. The Stiletto is really cool because it's portable. You can even use wi-fi to listen to Sirius via the internet. You can also store up to 10 hours of Sirius programming and purchase individual songs for download.

You can use the cheap ear buds that come with your Stiletto or iPod, but it's well worth your while to spend a few extra bucks for a good pair of headphones. If you want to go really high end, you can't go wrong with Bose, but on the lower end of the scale JVC makes a really nice pair of headphones.

The HANC-100 headphones have excellent sound quality for regular, at home listening. Then, when you go on the road, use the noise-canceling mode to reduce outside noise by 75 percent. It's perfect for travel because the headphones fold down into a smaller size, and the cord retracts into the earpiece. There's even an airplane adapter.

Instead of playing a video game simulating a guitar, why not learn to play the real thing? This Washburn guitar has a great look and sound and is much more likely to attract the opposite sex than a video game.