Friday, March 11, 2011: Philadelphia, PA (Kung Fu Necktie) After hastily packaging our new Viking Funeral LPs, meeting up with our most excellent roadie and merch extraordinaire, Jeffrey Hollis, bidding farewell to our friends at The Acheron and The Anchored Inn (best new bar in town! 59 Waterbury Street 11206), and packing all our gear into our seemingly large trailer when empty; we immediately ...

Welcome to The Lazarus Pit, a biweekly look at should-be classic metal records that don't get nearly enough love, stuff that's essential listening for students of extreme metal that you may not have ever heard of.  Stuff that we’re too lazy to track down the band members to do a Hall Of Fame for.  This week, we go to the fjord factories of Norway for Mysticum's In the Streams of Inferno (Full ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CvNR_TlaaI The legendary Pentagram is back in a big fucking way (if you haven't noticed) so it's the perfect time to crank out a dedication. D-beat lovers Hot Graves have actually slowed themselves down to pull off a faithful and killer cover of "Madman" from Pentagram's Day of Reckoning. And they've gone further by releasing a video with clips from Roger ...

There's nothing like regurgitated giblets in the morning. Using tools of the trade (i.e., fork and knife), we consume the gross, the unsightly, and the wrong to get us ready for traffic, silly ridiculous Excel spreadsheets, and reading press releases about odd bands signing to mainstream indie labels (uh, Jungle Rot signed to Victory). It's just who we are. So, when we were offered the chance to ...

Here's some useless hump-day crap: Nicolas Cage has a 20-year-old son named Weston (the chick on the right) who is in a metal band called Eyes of Noctum. Weston got married to the chick on the left. I read about this on a probably not-at-all-reputable site called Hot Momma Gossip. A little googling uncovered the following picture of father and son: I found that picture on a site called ...

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. Well, every Wednesday morning, a Decibel staffer or special guest will take to the Deciblog to bitch and moan at length as to why everybody’s full of shit and said dud is, in fact, The Shit. Today, our resident prog guru Jeff Wagner goes back to black ...

At what point to you feel a song has been completed? I typically ask this question of bands who write long songs to see if there’s a threshold and if there is when to they feel it’s been reached. James Kelly: For us, it is when it has climaxed in terms of the energy we intend to communicate with a particular track. When we are developing a track, the structure is created somewhat ...

Leave Zakk Wylde alone. He’s getting exposure for metal and that’s a good thing. Such was the gist of a surprising number of reader responses to my post last week poking fun at the Black Label Society guitarist for appearing with that metallic theater arts goofball on American Idol. (Alas, these missives remained but a distant second to the perennial favorite, You suck at writing and ...

“Γοργόνειον III”, the front cover painting commissioned by Relapse Records for Horseback’s double album “The Gorgon Tongue” has quite a bit of history behind it. Jenks Miller, a good friend of mine, a fellow seeker and leader of the band, has been following my research of the Gorgon cycle for a couple of years and I believe giving you some background might help understand the ...

I'm not a big proponent of hyping a band based upon how few members they have. What I mean is I don't love descriptors like "power trio" because so what if three guys can make as much noise as four or five. That doesn't make a song inherently better. But with all of that said, listen to the Olde Growth song down below and just try imagine only two people pulling this off. This bass and drum ...