When the first man set foot on the moon, I was crapping my diaper in a cradle set in a small appartment in Zaandam, Netherlands. I lived there with my parents, an older brother and older sister. That older brother would become quite important for my musical taste: he loved Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple very much.

On my seventh birthday I got a mono turntable with an LP by Vader Abraham en de Smurfen (Father Abraham and the Smurfs, a Dutch folk singer who made an album about the Smurfs). From my brother I got a Greatest Hits album by Alice Cooper. So people passing by my bedroom window were able to hear the strange combination of ‘Waar komen jullie toch vandaan’ (Where are you smurfs coming from) with ‘I love the dead before they’re cold, their bluing flesh for me to hold, cadaver eyes upon me see… Nothing!’ Metal appeared to be an important part of my life. From about 1987 I started on a whole new metallic journey: bands who dared to risk everything and started to make a whole new idiom of music. Mekong Delta pulled such a thing off. Celtic Frost with ‘Into the Pandemonium’. And more recently Diablo Swing Orchestra and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. And I discovered Zimmers Hole, a band that mixes different styles of metal in one song.

My wish to be an active music-critic came from my studies in cultural sciences, for which I got my masters degree in 2004. A reasonable portion of those studies are writing papers and reviews about the work of others. My carreer as a reviewer started with the fairly unknown website Rockportaal. Rockportaal has been discovered by KINK FM, and soon the whole content goes to KINK. Because I have my reservations about SBS (the TRUST company KINK belongs to), I decided to quit my activities for rockportaal. About a month later I saw the job offer for reviewer ´different metal´ at Lords of Metal. A piece of cake, so to say!

With a surname like ´Taal´ (translated Language), it´s funny that one of my hobbies is writing. I like to make some music myself, I present the radioshow Zaans Metaal at Zaanradio. I am married, got two daughters and I work at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

This month, Wilmar proudly presents the following items:

reviews:

interviews:

Wilmar's wild ones 2009:

1. The Devin Townsend Project – Ki
2. The Devin Townsend Project – Addicted
3. Rammstein – Liebe ist für alle da
4. Bright Ophidia – Set Your Madness Free
5. Tenet – Sovereign
6. Epochate – Chronicles of a Dying Era
7. Prong – Power of the Damn Mixxxer
8. Believer – Gabriel
9. Ace Frehley - Anomaly
10. Kiss – Sonic Boom