Year: 2011

By Oscar Ramirez (bass) To me these albums take me back to when I was in my high school days. Walking home with my headphones in, people looking at me weird because I’m trying to mimic the brutal vocals, just overall crushing in-your-face music. I got the privilege to see most of these bands, except…

Let us first just throw out a few numbers at you, just to give you an idea as to what the competition is like at the Great American Beer Festival, held by the Brewers Association every September in Denver. • 526 breweries from 48 states plus Puerto Rico, submitted beers • 3,930 beers vied for…

Mike Muir releases the damn near schizophrenic funk-folk-metal-punk hodgepodge The Mad Mad Muir Musical Tour under the Cyco Miko moniker today, and to mark the occasion Decibel conducted a wide-ranging interview with the iconic Suicidal Tendencies/Infectious Grooves frontman. Topics include the recent “Big 4” shows, his longtime bandmate Robert Trujillo’s insane success as an extra…

Roll up, folks: it’s competition time! Courtesy of the good folks at Century Media we have one strictly limited edition boxset of Insomnium‘s new album, One for Sorrow and a t-shirt too (see below… It’s reassuringly black so won’t clash with downcast expressions and your sense of metal self). One for Sorrow is the Finnish…

Hello all! Kevill here, writing the first blog I’ve ever done for, well, anything. I’m not much of a blogger/record keeper kinda guy, I never take photos of anything or write in a journal, any of that. But here I get to report all the happenings on our first ever USA headlining tour with Lazarus…

Every other Friday, Waldo the African Grey Parrot, frontbird of thrash-grind immortals Hatebeak, will get you caught up on the week’s latest “extreme” releases. What’s up? Your boy Waldo is back from the humdrum void of “real” work. As the year starts to wind down, so do the releases. Not that there’s not plenty coming…

If Godflesh’s supremo of beats ‘n’ riffs, Justin K. Broadrick, is having trouble getting an unbroken night’s sleep, it’s not the attendant stress of having resurrected the industrial metal project for near-monthly live excursions after a near-ten-year hiatus. It’s not their forthcoming appearance at UK metal-fest Damnation that’s worrying him either, because he and Ben…

As I sit and write this from sunny Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, it’s Election Day here in my home province. Today, Ontarians are being asked to go to the polls to elect the Premier of Ontario. I know to a lot of you FOX-watching ass-hats, the word/title of ‘Premier’ sounds suspiciously Soviet-like in its pronunciation, but…

There was a time when we divined the future out of tea leaves and coffee grounds (tasseomancy), a time when we ritualistically porked one another to achieve a greater sense of being (sex magick), a time when we stacked sticks and let them fall to try to find the right path (Rhabdomancy), and there was…

In the current issue of Decibel, Master Chef contestant Derrick Prince dishes on his recent experience as a finalist on the Fox cooking competition. So, what was it like going before that judge’s panel? “Gordon Ramsay is like one of those angry football coaches you see on TV – they’re rough and they scream at…

Ha! I’ve finally received a heavy metal tattoo for critical analysis! This week’s installment of Flesh Parade comes from Josh over at the LunchMeat VHS fanzine. Josh says that he got this tattoo after a night of heavy drinking. Drunk points? Check. Josh continues, “It was decided that my buddy, who was the piercer of…

The haunting, evil, beautifully fucked music of Bloody Panda is the exact kind of experimental doom that lends itself to multiple interpretations. Do an orchestral version or piano jazz take on their debut, and if done well the same sort of tar black feelings will likely bubble up. That’s why the remix of Summon, titled…

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. Well, once in a while, on 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…

5. Praia Boa Viagem Praia da Boa Viagem is the beach located in the most fashionable district of Recife, capital of the state of Pernanbuco, situated in the Northeastern coast of Brazil. The beaches there are beautiful and the weather is always nice and warm, inviting swimmers and surfers to get in the water—but don’t…

Being the senior member (in age, that is) of the Decibel contribs, any time anything “old school” comes around, it frequently gets kicked our way. And we’re totally OK with that. Especially when we get to shine a little light on a burgeoning metal fest in Baltimore that’s all about celebrating old-school metal. Defenders of…

Upstart British death metallers Vallenfyre will be new to most, but the group’s membership is as seasoned as they come. Featuring Paradise Lost’s Gregor Mackintosh on vocals/guitar, Paradise Lost drummer Adrian Erlandsson, My Dying Bride’s Hamish Glencross on guitar, and Doom bassist Scoot, Vallenfyre have only issued the Desecration / Iconoclast 7-inch to date. Limited…

This is some pretty hefty call-and-response type shit going on here, so it you’ll thank me in advance for not yammering on with no end in sight about how great Tom G. Warrior is, about how Celtic Frost and Hellhammer‘s collective legacy is responsible for some of the most essential records in metal, a whole…

The Sammy Hagar outfit encourages manscaping. I thought I’d get a head start on my Halloweening this weekend, so I began looking around the web for costume ideas. That, coupled with pumpkin beers and the Misfits discography, led me to seek out what America thinks qualifies as a heavy metal costume. The Dallas Costume Shop…

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’ve probably never heard of; stuff that we’re too lazy to track down the band members to do a Hall Of Fame for.  This time around,…

Tuesday marked the 25th anniversary of Cliff Burton’s death. Metallica were traveling through Sweden on the Damage Inc. tour in support of Master of Puppets, when the band’s bus crashed just outside Ljungby, killing Burton. He was 24. Sometimes it’s easy—perfectly natural, too—to over-egg it and go nuts when evaluating the dead’s music or art….

According to the calendar hanging on the wall about two feet to the left of my bulbous head, today is Rosh Hashanah. In technical terms, this means today is the first of the high holidays, or Yamin Noraim, celebrated ten days before Yom Kippur and is observed on the first two days of Tishrei, the…

09/23/2011, Terminal 5, NYC Is this exciting, or what? Seeing Queens perform their self-titled was cool, but I never, ever thought I’d get to see Kyuss…or, uh, anything like Kyuss, either. When I found out about the NY date, as Decibel’s self-appointed toke-master general, I felt it was my duty to attend. In addition, I…

I distinctly recall the first time I heard Ministry’s The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste.

I was going to write what I hoped would be the definitive critique of the heart-stopping shit mountain known as Loutallica, but then I got this in my inbox: Korn announced today that they will release their tenth studio album, The Path of Totality on December 6. But this is unlike any Korn record. It’s…

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. This time, Comrade Bennett accepts the editor-in-chief’s challenge to resurrect Cave In’s post-Jupiter oeuvre from beyond hypothermia.

To quote your bio: “SubRosa comprises the deep thrum that makes up the underlying plasma of our invisible surroundings.” What does that mean?Sarah Pendleton: We are attempting to be the sonic interpreters of that which is intangible. The name SubRosa implies mystery. Something hidden. Do you actively try to keep things a bit obscure? Rebecca…

Because of the stature they have attained, much of the metal-loving world puts the Big Four as the sort of holy, uh, quadrinity of thrash metal. These are the bands—all American—that we consider the originators and finest progenitors of the genre. But not so fast. If we’re to look at many of the Big Four’s…

Looking to get off that sis river of dreams… …and onto the thrashing, squalling river of rapture? Let Death Angel be your guide! The band is partnering with Jackson Guitars to give away three signed JS32 Rhoads guitars. All you have to do is fill out this online form and then mosey on down to…

One way to make sure your festival doesn’t suck, isn’t polluted by buy-on bands and weird compromises that all but beseech the audience to head to the bar for every third act is to have Darkthrone’s Fenriz choose the line-up. Using our favorite hiking metal punk’s Band of the Week blog to draw upon, the…

Here’s some genius advertising. Imagine you and a friend walk into a movie theater filled with 148 very uncuddly men, and there’s only two seats left. What do you do? Do you muster up the courage to say, “Excuse me, giant, terrifying, tattooed sir,” and politely scooch your way to the seats in the middle…