Month: May 2014
STREAMING: Publicist UK “Never Gone To School”
May 30, 2014 Chris Dick
What happens when members of Revocation, Municipal Waste, Goes Cube and Freshkills get in a digital room together, run through a few ideas over craft beer (presumably picked and curated by none other than Dave Witte), realize they have less time than they ever had before but decide to form a new music project? That…
Premiere: New Grave Digger lyric video
May 30, 2014 Justin Norton
The metal institution known as Grave Digger has been around almost as long as the genre of heavy metal. They will release their seventeenth album (yes, that’s correct) called Return Of The Reaper on July 11. Your friends at Decibel got a chance to premiere the lyric video of the track “Season Of The Witch.”…
Dweller In The Valley New Release: Younger Dryas
May 30, 2014 Daniel Lake
Semi-rural, semi-suburban Maryland is hardly an obvious spawning ground for gritty black metal. With Washington D.C. and Baltimore hogging all the attention, and Frederick area bars almost exclusively hosting good-time cover bands of dubious quality, the area’s heavy music scene is pretty damn subdued. Dweller in the Valley drummer/vocalist Dane Olds is a current Frederick,…
The Great Sabatini Premiere New Album, Don’t Drown Despite What it Looks Like
May 29, 2014 Kevin Stewart-Panko
Montreal’s kings of noise rock diversity and awesome promo photos, The Great Sabatini (who we have mentioned on this blog previously), have a new album in the starting gate. It’s called Dog Years and you can listen to the whole damn thing below while you read guitarist/vocalist Sean Sabatini discuss the record’s nuts ‘n’ bolts…
Decibrity Playlist: Archspire
May 29, 2014 Zach Smith
When Oli Peters takes his songs about “lucid dreaming, a monster made out of teeth, a king who creates duplicates of himself who then overthrow him, and a guy who feeds himself to his backyard pig” on the road (my favorite part of KSP’s recent profile), he and his Archspire brethren tend to keep the…
My Kit: Rae Amitay’s Meditations On Drumming
May 28, 2014 Justin Norton
Rae Amitay is the vocalist and drummer for Immortal Bird and drums for Thrawsunblat. Follow her on Twitter. I run my fingers along the drum key nestled in my pocket and look out at my band from behind my kit. A quick glance at my ride cymbal notifies me of an impending threat to its…
DECIBEL announces TWO 10th Anniversary Shows in NYC this October!
May 28, 2014 Andrew Bonazelli
America’s only monthly extreme music magazine is turning 10, and we’re too pumped up to settle for just one birthday party. On October 18, Decibel is taking Manhattan (and Brooklyn) with two exclusive, blowout concerts. First up at Best Buy Theater in Times Square: the globally renowned axework of Amon Amarth, Sabaton and Vallenfyre (the…
Sucker For Punishment: WeloveEyehategod
May 28, 2014 Adrien Begrand
I remember chatting on the phone with Mike Williams about Eyehategod’s follow-up to 2000’s Confederacy of Ruined Lives, how it was going slowly as he was dealing with his incarceration issues, his health, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the difficulty of getting all five members in the same room together. There was no firm…
My Scion Rockfest 2014 Experience in Shitty iPhone Photos
May 27, 2014 Jeff Treppel
While everyone else is reporting from that East Coast festival this week, we here at Decibel’s Los Angeles Bureau are lazy and don’t like to go further than 43.5 miles from our home base. Fortunately, on May 17, Scion held their annual Rockfest in Pomona, which is exactly that distance. Sweet! I was there, and…
Full Album Stream: Jar’d Loose “Turns 13”
May 27, 2014 Justin Norton
If you are one of our regular readers chances are you are sweating out a hangover from the long weekend or recovering from your trip to Maryland Deathfest — probably both. To help as you begin the long and painful transition back to reality we have a full album stream of Jar’d Loose’s new album…
Ruination & Gratitude: Prong’s Tommy Victor Speaks
May 27, 2014 Shawn Macomber
It’s not as if Prong ever completely fell off, really, but 2012’s Carved Into Stone nevertheless felt like a return to form in both energy and attack, and now, two years later, comes Ruining Lives, a ferocious, amped, occasionally pretty damn adventurous album that may very well be the band’s best effort since its nineties…
For Those About to Squawk: Waldo’s Pecks of the Week
May 23, 2014 Andrew Bonazelli
Wow, my beak is stuffed up. Who knew a parrot could get seasonal allergies? Finally we’re getting some traction here… MISERY INDEX are releasing The Killing Gods, their first for Season of Mist, and I gotta say: it’s pecking great. In their amalgam of punk, grind, death, crust and doom lies, well, more of the…
Doom Discovery: Suffer Yourself
May 23, 2014 Daniel Lake
It takes a special band to spend twelve-and-a-half minutes slogging through a freaky-heavy doom bum-out called simply “Darkness,” then decide there’s just more to say on the issue and tuck in for another 14 minutes and call the result “Darkness, Part 2.” It’s like being lost in a menacing forest devoid of all large predators…
Video Premiere: Throne of Vengeance’s “Live Evil”
May 22, 2014 Kevin Stewart-Panko
Calgary’s Throne of Vengeance was one of the bands mentioned in a recent edition of our “Throw Me a Frickin’ Bone,” the magazine’s space for demos and self-releases as curated and delivered by some half-black Canadian nerd face.
Decibrity Playlist: Cormorant
May 22, 2014 Zach Smith
Back in early 2012, Chris Dick sung the praises of Cormorant’s Dwellings. Since the band’s recently released follow-up is yet another quality entry in its still nascent catalog, we asked Nick Cohon to tell us about some of the “darker country music” that he listens to (the guitarist is also rocking a Gov’t Mule Dose…
Sucker For Punishment: When Less Equals Way More
May 21, 2014 Adrien Begrand
The Canadian/American collaboration between singer/bassist Elizabeth Blackwell and guitarist Mat Davis bowled me over three years ago with the shockingly good Blacklands album. It was a big improvement on their 2010 debut In Witch Order, a clever blend of NWOBHM influences and the classic doom sounds of Pentagram. Not unlike Witchfinder General, only highlighted by…
INTERVIEW: Trans Am’s Phil Manley
May 20, 2014 Jeff Treppel
Trans Am have been around since the 90s, and in that time they’ve explored everything from post-rock to electronica and Krautrock. They’ve always had hard rock influences, but never more obviously than on their latest release, Volume X. As soon as we heard the stoner rock and thrash vibes of a few of the songs,…
Vincibility is for Suckers: Exclusive Fucking Invincible Premiere!
May 20, 2014 Shawn Macomber
Providence, Rhode Island-based FUCKING INVINCIBLE — featuring faces that will be familiar to fans of Daughters, Dropdead, Soul Control, Sweet Jesus, etcetera — gave themselves a lot to live up to with their chosen moniker, but, as the exclusive stream of “Ape As Man/Man As Ape” below ably demonstrates, these dudes have good reason to…
Sandrider: Preview of “Dogwater,” Non-T-Shirt Version.
May 20, 2014 Kevin Stewart-Panko
We used to love Akimbo around these parts. I say used to, not because they suddenly betrayed their clangy, mathy roots for a combination of slick radio rock and Drake covers, but because they up and broke up. So, I guess in a roundabout way, we still love Akimbo even though the band doesn’t really…
Metal Yoga With André Foisy #2
May 19, 2014 Justin Norton
André Foisy plays guitar in Locrian and is a certified yoga instructor who teaches at Turbodog Yoga in Chicago, IL. You can find his yoga teaching schedule and more information about him on his blog. — You’re on the road and you’re late for your next show because you woke up late after partying too…
STREAMING: God Macabre “Lost”
May 19, 2014 Chris Dick
Back in 2002, Relapse had the hairy balls to reissue a relatively unknown yet cult favorite in God Macabre’s The Winterlong. This was well before labels X, Y, and Z got on the reissue bandwagon of unfurling low visibility releases like they were unmined gold. Anyway, organized with full consent of the band by ex-Relapse…
Instruments of Lord Shiva: Dying Out Flame
May 16, 2014 Shawn Macomber
Kathmandu, Nepal’s Dying Out Flame play Vedic death metal — that is, in the words of the band’s charismatic and eloquent frontman Aabeg Gautam, “Hindu themes derived from ancient Vedic philosophy/mythology and literature, incorporating ancient sanskrit shlokas, and fusing traditional Hindu classical music to brutal death metal.” Sounds pretty esoteric and spacey, right? Well, get…
Sucker For Punishment: Snakes ‘N’ Balls
May 16, 2014 Adrien Begrand
Few bands, metal or otherwise, have built a reputation over the last 15 years as sterling as Agalloch has. Ever since the 2002 landmark The Mantle the Portland band has put a very unique spin on extreme metal, its blend of folk/pagan influences and atmospheric black metal yielding startlingly beautiful music that many didn’t dream…
“We Like to Write No-Brainers from the Heart,” and Other Quotable Gems: Anti Ritual Interviewed
May 15, 2014 Kevin Stewart-Panko
With 17 billion bands, labels and PR people all clamouring for a piece of the attention pie, it sometimes gets to the point where you want to grab a small stack of classics and go stick your head in the proverbial sand of that deserted desert island people claim to be listening to their favourite…
Decibrity Playlist: Eyehategod (Part 2)
May 15, 2014 Zach Smith
In celebration of Eyehategod‘s first full-length studio album in nearly a decade and a half, last week we shared five musical selections that frontman (and soon to be cover star) Mike IX Williams’ listens to on his “stupid iPod in the filthy tour van.” As promised, here are the rest of his eclectic picks which,…
Soul Survivors: Saint Vitus play Born Too Late in its entirety
May 15, 2014 J. Bennett
Saint Vitus @ The Echoplex, Los Angeles, May 13, 2014 “This is a lot different for us than it was in L.A. 35 years ago.” So says Saint Vitus guitarist and mastermind Dave Chandler from the stage at the Echoplex, where several hundred headbangers, burnouts and biker types have gathered to suck on Bud tallboys…
Stream New Nader Sadek Video!
May 15, 2014 Daniel Lake
It’s been three years, almost to the day, since Nader Sadek and an all-star cast of death metal notables released In the Flesh, a just-about-out-of-nowhere titan of an album that exorcised its creator’s disgust with the Western petrol-centric economy and culture and the way it abuses life on Earth, both past and present. Last year, Sadek…
Inside The Shredder’s Studio #11: Eric Cutler of Autopsy
May 14, 2014 Justin Norton
Sometimes we finally get a guest we’ve wanted to host forever. We are extremely lucky today to welcome one of the forefathers of death metal to the studio: Eric Cutler of the mighty Autopsy! Eric is still shredding away — you can check out his new work on Torniquets Hacksaws & Graves. Please welcome Eric…
DAWN OF THE ‘BLACKHEARTS’ – IRANIAN BLACK METAL MASTERMIND SINA SPEAKS
May 14, 2014 Kim Kelly
As we mentioned in a recent interview with Norwegian filmmaker Christian Falch, there’s an awfully interesting new documentary in production that more than a few of you might appreciate. ‘Blackhearts’ is slated for a September 2015 release, and follows three black metal fans & musicians from very dissimilar backgrounds as they chase their dreams and…
VIDEO PREMIERE: Carnifex’s “Die Without Hope”
May 14, 2014 Jeff Treppel
Do you like slow motion? How about fire? Then boy, do we have a video for you. The video for the title track of the latest album from up-and-coming deathcore act Carnifex features more slow-mo and flames than a Michael Bay movie, plus sweet riffs and knuckle-cracking breakdowns on the musical side. You might not…