It’s been 43 years since Sabbath has had a British Number One album. 13 is the band’s first chart-topping album since 1970′s Paranoid. With a gap spanning more than four decades Black Sabbath has set a new record for longest gap between number one albums on the British charts.

So here’s how it works: Beginning June 24 Samsung Galaxy Smartphone users can download an app granting them access to Magna Carta Holy Grail for free. But users must move quickly – the free copy of Jay-Z’s new record will only be made available to the first one million users.

“Despite my apparent confidence, inside I am actually a very small, trembling shell of a person, who is not only intimidated, but completely mortified and horrified by the ramifications of this challenge,” he said. “When I signed up for it, I was like ‘Alright, 24 hours of drumming!’ and then it started to set in: 24 hours of drumming. Just drumming for an hour — just drumming for 24 seconds — can be quite intense … I can’t even play one of my own songs on the drums all the way through without my arms burning. So let it be said, I’m not taking this lightly,” he continued. “I think it will push me to the very lengths of my strengths.”

With Northlane, there’s a method to their madness. While they fall under metalcore, their music breaks the boundaries of the genre. Their sound is gravity defying, an experimental measure of beats per second and blood running guitar riffs that twist and bend around each other. The result is something even non-metalcore fans can feel in their bones. Northlane are, first and foremost, incredible musicians. Their focus and attention is on the complexity of the notes, entangling the instrumentation and the vocals, the chaos and the calm.

Like many bands, Northlane has been through a few incarnations since they formed in 2009. Currently, they are: Jon Deiley on guitar, Adrian Fitipaldes on lead vocals, Alex Milovic on bass guitar, Josh smith on guitar, and Nic Petterson rounding the band out on drums. Since the release of their first album, Discoveries, Northlane has made their way to becoming one of the biggest metalcore bands in Australia. Now with their second album having been released, we can expect that they will conquer the rest of the world.

In physics, a singularity is the odd occurence where space and time collapse into the infinite. And while you may not actually be crossing over the event horizon and falling into a black hole never to get out, when listening to “Singularity” you sure as hell feel like you are. And that’s pretty damn awesome.

7 Questions with Josh Smith of Northlane

Talk about the title of the new record, Singularity. Where does it come from and how do you feel it encapsulates the music of this album.

The term “singularity” refers to a future point in human consciousness evolution where there will be an explosion of intelligence. It’s hard to describe briefly in an understandable manner, but we thought this name really encapsulated what we were trying to do with our record, what it meant for us and what ideas it brought up within the music.

Tell me one thing you did while making Singularity that you’ve never done before in the recording process.

We made pancakes at 2am almost every day and survived a hurricane. That’s two things but there were a lot of new things we tried actually relevant to the recording process. The most interesting was the way the bass was tracked, we split the signal into partially midi for some of the really low stuff to fill out the quieter sections.

How did you guys celebrate once you finished the new album?

We were going to have a classic aussie piss-up but because we were all struggling for money we all had an early night! Well at least I did, might be because I have the alcohol tolerance of a 16yr-old girl.

You’re currently touring in support of the new record. How do you guys spend your days off?

We love to go to places of natural beauty, and there’s plenty around in Australia. One of our pet joys is jumping off tall things into water, like waterfalls and cliffs.

A lot of bands name their tour van. Does Northlane have a name for theirs?

We recently retired our van. He was a Toyota that we named “Franklin”. Franky served us very well for a number of years and will always hold a special place in our hearts.

There’s a lot of good music in Australia. Is there a lot of camaraderie between the bands?

Absolutely, we are all mates and almost everyone gets along. It’s really inspiring to see your long time mates doing well too. For example, we’ve been friends with In Hearts Wake for a number of years and we are so proud of the success that they are having right now, same goes for Thy Art is Murder.

Who is the one person that if you found out they were a fan of your music would validate you more than anyone else?

Probably any of the dudes from Linkin Park. They are our biggest idols.

The Sounds of Northlane

Which brings me to the tribute band. Tribute bands are a lot like art forgeries that people already know are copies. What makes a tribute band good is their ability to sound like the real deal and yet not be that. This is especially so of the all female-tribute to the great all male acts of rock n’roll. Hearing Lez Zepplin is like entering an alternative universe, familiar to yet wholly dissimilar from the one you’ve just left. You’re convinced you’re listening to Led Zepplin until Shannon Conley’s vocals kick in. That’s when you feel like you’ve gone down the rabbit hole.

Like the great art forgers, the great tribute bands are dedicated and wildly talented in their own right. It may then seem odd that such musicianship should be wasted on imitating some other band’s riffs and relics. But rock music has long been the provenance of men. Women get routinely written out of the history of music, their skills and talents regarded as somehow less complex, less original, and less authentic than their male counterparts. So what’s a girl to do? In the case of Lez Zepplin, the rebellion is in the imitation. After all, if you can play guitar exactly like Robert Plant down to the quarter beat, well then you can really play the guitar can’t you?

Formed in 2005 by guitarist Steph Paynes, Lez Zepplin rocketed to notoriety after Chuck Klosterman wrote a piece about them for SPIN magazine. Since that time they have had a devoted and manic following. They have recorded two albums. The line-up, like most bands, has changed since their inception, with Steph Paynes being the consistant cornerstone of the group. Now the band consists of Paynes on guitar and theremin, Leesa Harrington-Squyres on drums, Megan Thomas on bass, mandolin, and keyboard, and Shannon Conley doing vocals and harmonica. Looking at that list, you realize that not only have these women had to master the instruments Led Zepplin was known for but the way they were played. A doubly impressive accomplishment in my estimation.

Detractors may accuse them of mere imitation, of capitalizing on the already existing creative output of the late and the great. But fact is most bands are in the business of imitating someone. It’s just that the tribute bands is honest about it. “This,” they say, “is a copy.” But it is a good copy. The kind of copy you can sale for $2 million to an art museum. The kind of copy that fools the experts, the slavering fans, the devoted minions who regard Plant and Page as gods. Lez Zepplin audience is that audience, too, their playing justifying the adoration the audience is perfectly willing to give them. They may not be Plant and Page, but in some ways they are better than a mere substitute. They are a like a mirror image that has stepped out of the glass an on to the stage. And that is something to see.

In his Beacon Moment Grant recounts the musical baptism he experienced at a Face To Face concert.

The Beacon Moment is an experience or series of events that changes the course of a person’s life – toward a life devoted to music. Each week a different artist tells the story of their Beacon Moment, allowing them to connect with their fans by opening up and sharing one of the most important moments in their life.

As many elderly gentleman before him have done, Robert Plant has made rumblings about getting the band back together. Unfortunately, the kibosh has been put on this plan by Jones, who is too busy writing an opera in the next year or two to even consider the possibility. Jones’ opera is based on Swedish playwright, Johan August Strindberg’s “The Ghost Sonata,” a play even stranger than all of Led Zeppelin’s references to Mordor, if you can imagine that. The ghosts in “The Ghost Sonata” are literal and there is–I kid you not–a mummy. We here at Beacon think this sounds rather promising and since Plant has complained that he’s “got nothing to do in 2014″ perhaps he should consider assisting Jones in one of the weirder musical projects of the decade. After all, who cares about black dogs when there’s the possibility of mummies?