Don’t worry, this post has nothing to do with Lou Reed or his 1975 two-LP celebration of noise as “music.” Although, given the choice of listening to that album or LuLu, we’d take the former in a heartbeat. But we digress.

We’re actually here to distract you from the ridiculousness of the season with a video that is entirely captivating, and has absolutely nothing to do with the holidays. This is Author & Punisher, “an industrial doom and drone metal, one man band utilizing primarily custom fabricated machines/controllers and speakers,” according to his website. We only use that quote because we were at a loss for any descriptive words of our own after seeing this.

Author & Punisher- 9/5/10 Studio Practice Shoot from Tristan Shone on Vimeo.

The dude behind the heaviness is Tristan Shone, who not only plays/composes the music, he also fabricates his instruments, the “drone/dub” machines. He has released three Author & Punisher albums dating back to 2005, and his next will be out on Seventh Rule in early 2012.

As a side note, we can’t help but imagine what might ensue if he and Tom G. Warrior, er Thomas Gabriel Fischer, were to collaborate.

In the meantime, enjoy the video and for three-plus minutes forget about all the holiday crap you’ve gotta deal with.

Welcome to The Five Days of Deciblog Christmas, in which we corral your favorite extreme heroes into revealing embarrassing and hilarious holiday anecdotes. Consider it free bonus footage as you prepare to give Amazon half your paycheck because you’re too lazy to support local businesses. On day two, after the jump, we bring you “The Relative I Only See During the Holidays Who Hates Me Most.”

“Rumpelstiltskin Grinder, by nature, is a band that goes a little too far and takes things a little over the top,” guitarist/vocalist Matt Moore tells Decibel. “And we are completely in touch with our core values on Ghostmaker.”

The band is currently putting the final touches on the follow-up to 2009’s Living for Death, Destroying the Rest — a two year thrash metal odyssey of writing, demoing and recording that has lifted Rumpelstiltskin Grinder’s game to a new level.

“We’ve always been aware of the fact that a lot of bands start out with a bang and then kind of go downhill from there,” bassist/vocalist Shawn Riley says. “You know when you hear your own voice and say to yourself, ‘Wow I should never talk’? It’s kind of the same thing with recording an album. You have three years to listen to it over and over again and then fix everything you don’t like about it [on the next one]. It’s not like we didn’t like our past albums, but they really gave us an opportunity to make something so much better. Everything is going to really grab you by the balls now and give you nightmares from the cold haunted Netherrealm of Kalyptein.”

And what, dare we ask, transpires once one is held by the balls in Kalyptein?

“Wimps and posers, prepare to fucking die!” Riley enthuses. “Heavy metal maniacs, prepare to transcend into an abomination and hail the destroyer!”

If this exuberance makes Rumeplstiltskin Grinder sound like a band blissfully free of the usual roiling “creative and personal differences” it is because, via Ghostmaker, it has become that band.

“Rumpelstiltskin Grinder is a one-hundred percent democracy,” Moore says. “The four of us have been together since the first recordings we ever made. Coming with the territory of equal say for everyone is the fact that you can get stuck in disagreements that waste time and energy. That did not happen in the creation of this album. We got in touch with something that only happens when you have a group of people that have been playing together for years ending up on the same page. All of our energy has been used for radicalness…a radicalness called Ghostmaker.”

When it comes to further defining that “radicalness,” however, Moore demurs, preferring instead to cite the Ghostmaker mantra — “Nothing boring…nothing fallow…nothing lame…”

“We try to write stuff that is classic on the first listen,” he says. “We would be wasting our time and yours with anything less.”

“Ghostmaker represents everything we have worked toward in the past several years, so you can think of it as not just something we’ve been working on since Living for Death, but what we’ve been striving for since Rumpelstiltskin Grinder’s inception,” Riley adds. “When the album drops it will be obvious that this is something created by four dudes thirsty for blood, eager to silence all the critics and to crush all the lames.”

Just around the corner from the Camden Underworld, the BrewDog bar is exhibiting all the signs that tonight’s show is going to be over-subscribed despite Napalm Death’s much-anticipated and completed new album, Utilitarian, in cold storage until the New Year. The Scottish independent brewery’s own titular tribute to the Dead Kennedys’ anti-fascist anthem, the 7.8% ABV loosener Hops Kill Nazis, is all sold out.

But then it is Black Friday, the last payday before Christmas, when excessive drinking makes Romero-esque flash mobs in plastic ‘n’ felt reindeer antlers a common sight, and emergency calls go up over 25 per cent on your average Friday night. It’s carnage. But then maybe the office parties, the tramp outside the venue who’s ejaculating snot out of his nose onto passers-by, the brutal cold, the sleet, the sirens… Maybe all this is just the perfect environment to showcase Britain’s finest, top pedigree grind band and one of the country’s up-and-coming facerippers, The Atrocity Exhibit; both make a lot of capital out of chaos.

Welcome to The Five Days of Deciblog Christmas, in which we corral your favorite extreme heroes into revealing embarrassing and uproarious holiday anecdotes. Consider it free bonus footage as you prepare to give Amazon half your paycheck because you’re too lazy to support local businesses. After the jump, let’s kick off the week with “The Worst Gift I’ve Ever Gotten.”

What do you get when you cross prime German thrash — Sodom, Kreator, specificially — with the unparalleled gravity of Brazilian thrash, which was influenced by prime German thrash? Norwegian noisemakers Nekromantheon.

Formed in 2005 in the same town (Kolbotn) that birthed the mighty/Deci-approved Darkthrone, this power trio from the North is perhaps one of the most potent post-nu thrash entries since new thrash pre-dated nu thrash by about seven years. And, by new thrash, we’re talking fellow Norwegians Infernö, Swedes Bewitched, Nifelheim, Cranium, Gehennah, and just about any side project signed to Osmose and/or Necropolis.

Imbibe in the furious attack that is Nekromantheon’s “Blood Wisdom”:

Nekromantheon – Blood Wisdom by Decibel Magazine

** Nekromantheon’s new album, Rise, Vulcan Spectre, is out January 2012. Order it HERE, or die by the sword in endless pain by Norse madmen with morbid visions. Got all that?

Wow, the end of a year, huh? New beginnings, resolutions and, well, hopefully some good metal releases coming in the next year. The release schedule is drier than Betty White’s cooch right now, so since I don’t have too much to peck about, I’m basically going to trash Metallica in this column. I know it’s not too topical, but what the fuck, I get paid by the word.

LULU: Have you heard this? James Hetfield is the “table.” This is probably the worst record in the history of music. The riffs are stale and boring, the vocals wander in out in an extremely annoying manner that makes little to no sense. Understandably, the lyrics are based off of a pair of German plays, because it’s a pretty metal topic to write about. TONS of metalheads are lined up at their local production of “Mama Mia” and ‘Tallica wanted to tap into that market. This is proof that the band that changed the face of modern metal has too many “Yes Men” around them. And what was Lou Reed even thinking when he signed up for this? Is this the definition of where to place your angst when your stock portfolio goes down 3%? Although hilarity SHOULD ensue when one listens to this, it kind of just makes me want to vomit in my own beak. This has the stench of some demo material that was lying around that Lou Reed just kind of rants over incoherently. Hetfield—perhaps once the best vocalist in metal—now has the same enunciation as Randy Macho Man Savage .Torbin Ulrich is probably stroking his beard and laughing at his son for this utter piece of shit. This is a catastrophic failure on every beaking level.

BEYOND MAGNETIC: Ever hear bits and pieces on Mission Metallica? Me either. Ever wondered what happened to the extra songs that were written and recorded for Death Magnetic? Me either. The wheat and the chaff aren’t separated much here as this left over material from the DM sessions is equally as wretched as Death Magnetic itself. Stale, bland, boring, predictable and pedantic, Beyond Magnetic is just plain bad. I’m sure these releases sell, but to whom? I mean who can look at themselves in the mirror after listening to this? This is the aural equivalent of AIDS.

Hater gonna hate.

Maybe it’s the straight-to-video action movie genre or the rising popularity of MMA that’s to blame, seeing that both seem to love setting action to metal guitars and electronic beats, but despite metal remix albums almost always sucking they’re not disappearing any time soon.

On February 24th, Morbid Angel will release Illud Divinum Insanus—the Remixes, a double-disc compilation of their most controversial album, the album which put the camp ‘90s industrial goose-step a la Marilyn Manson and weird, bangin’ techno to the Tampa quartet’s formidable dual specialties of riff and blast, and y’know, the typical fare of that once-radical genre death metal. Of course, Morbid Angel have form with the remix album; in ‘94 they released a four-track EP with set standards “Sworn to the Black” and “God of Emptiness” reimagined by seminal Slovenian industrialists Laibach. And hey, that turned out all right.

Morbid Angel “God of Emptiness” — Laibach mix

The merits of Illud… are irrelevant when it comes to the remix. Ha! Yes, you could ask yourself how can it be any worse? But whether or not you dig Illud… or not, 31 dudes have had their hands on the soundfiles and have done their worst. Some of the names will be familiar—Treponem Pal resonate somewhere, though possibly in the narrative of a long-held nightmare—but others may need some introduction. Morbid Angel’s attitude to the whole project is refreshing, in that they just handed over the tracks and let whoever was doing what do whatever. Umm, and though hardcore techno DJ/Producer chump Scott Brown having his hands on a Morbid Angel track better it’s “I Am Morbid” than “Chapel of Ghouls”, right?

“Well it’s interesting, Trey and I chose a group of artists that we would like to see involved,” says Morbid Angel frontman/bassist David Vincent. “ But not all of these were able to do it because everybody’s got time constraints and whatever. The label chose some…. It was actually a very Bohemian effort; we made the tracks available, said ‘Do what you want to do’. We didn’t micro-manage in any way. I haven’t heard all of them yet; I’ve heard a number of them. I’ve heard some stuff that I thought was very interesting. I heard some stuff that would even surprise me a little bit, but again: it’s just art. At least with the folks that we chose—micro-managing, let’s say if you’re working for a video game company, and say, ‘I want something that sounds like this for this fight scene.’ So you’re writing specifically for that fight scene, specifically for something. Or even if you are writing a jingle for a commercial, then something like that has got to be targeted. But generally speaking, with paintings and music, new culinary experiences, I love it when things are unexpected, and I just allow it to be what it wants to be because it adds more spice to life for sure.”

Morbid Angel Illud Divinum Insanus — the remixes

If that trailer/teaser worries or excites you unduly, consider the critically acclaimed but frankly fucking awful Fear Factory Demanufacture remix album. 1997 was a year when Burton and Dino would be talking incessantly about the merits of electronic music, techno and so forth, to any magazine that’d listen, yet at the same time went on and commissioned some of the blandest, most gauche nonsense to effectively vandalize the coolest album they ever made. This came at a time when the Prodigy were championed as bastions of this rock/metal/techno crossover, and relevant, required listening for metal fands when really they just made awful music for idiots who liked to vamp up shitty production model Fords, tint the windows and drive right to the edge of the speed limit in suburban towns—that’s what happened in the UK, at least.

Fear Factory “Remanufacture” — Rhys Fulber mix, from Remanufacture

Melvins’ Chicken Switch was at least an interesting concept, turning over the whole album to producers to remix. But the results were questionable, well, kinda dreadful albeit abstractly inoffensive.
Melvins “Linkshänder” — Matmos mix from Chicken Switch

Out of all of these the Morbid Angel/Laibach project was the most worthy, and maybe Illud… will scrub up OK? Hey, can’t be any worse than this:

Or this:

Sorry: cheap shots, but really does anyone care for remixes? And how come they never sound like Ministry’s Psalm:69?

Wither Lightning Bolt? The Providence bass and drum duo – not that type of bass and drum! – noted for their infectiously catchy and immensely noisy songs as well as their steadfast refusal to play on stages, employ a guitar player, use more than one cymbal and anything less than 2400 watts of bass amplification in even the most cramped of venue situations, seem to have somewhat disappeared off the face of our melting shitbox. After a couple of decent albums in 2005’s Hypermagic Mountain and 2009’s Earthly Delights – “decent” in the sense that they didn’t live up to the unfuckwithableness of 2001’s Ride the Skies, not an easy task for the best of careers – the band toured a ton and have since seemingly gone into long spells of periodic hibernation, only emerging to work on a variety of projects that don’t involve writing a kick ass new Lightning Bolt album.

Someone is needed to take the baton/torch/glass dildo and run with it! This isn’t to say that Portland’s Wizard Rifle is a band who simply fills a void Lightning Bolt has ignored on and off for too long a time by ripping them off titless, but it’s very obvious from whence they take certain amounts of influence. But they also cherry pick from the likes of Big Business, Karp, Torche, Kinghorse, the Melvins and Nomeansno and to these ears, that sort of sonic stew is gooey goodness to the ears. But why not hear what they have to offer for yourself? The advance track offering below, “Tears Won’t Soften Steel” comes from their debut full-length, Speak Loud Say Nothing, scheduled for release on March 13th via the fine folks at Seventh Rule Records. The duo consists of drummer/vocalist Sam Ford and guitarist/vocalist Max Dameron and has been blowing eardrums, and judging by the photo above, offending ocular and fashion sensibilities since 2009 to the tune of an EP from 2009, Kitties and Pie, tours and opening slots for the likes of Arabrot, Thrones, Atriarch, Yob and, yes, Lightning Bolt as well as the forthcoming album.

If you’re digging it, check out the links for info on their past and future music and shirts designs that are hopefully a little more understated than their own wardrobe selections.

www.wizardrifle.bandcamp.com
www.seventhrule.com

Wizard Rifle – Tears Won’t Soften Steel by seventhrule
“Tears Won’t Soften Steel” is taken from Speak Loud Say Nothing, due out on Seventh Rule on March 13th, 2012.

This show was at Saint Vitus, a heavy metal bar in Brooklyn. The place has a separate room for the stage, which is nice, or rather, brutal. I’d like to go there when there’s no show, because it was packed. I was there to rock, not to brush my cock against a bunch of bearded dudes wearing black-framed glasses. But I know – it’s unavoidable in Brooklyn. I don’t know what their beer prices were like because at the time it seemed more feasible to buy tallboys from the bodega next door and pound them in an alley. Tallboys of Bud were two bucks, tip included, and the homeless dude named “Croaton” was good company. In retrospect, I suppose I should have thanked him for not robbing me.

Both the openers were from Brooklyn. I missed Bad Dream, but I like their name, and a creepy little girl told me they were really good, so…Elks were next and they definitely sounded good. Standard stoner rock, and the the rhythm section sounded particularly heavy. But it was one of their guitarist’s last show, and they had a little bit of a moment on stage. After that I couldn’t enjoy it anymore. I hate it when dudes show emotions. The guitarist’s shirt was also very tight.

Ramming Speed played next, and I do believe I was feeling the most pounded for their set. Obviously they’re blasting good time live. If you’re not familiar with Brainwreck, then move along I guess, because apparently you’re fucking up. I’m not gonna, like, describe it for you.

I ran into two problems at this concert, and the first was the bunch of stiff folks who didn’t want to get pushed around during this intensely fun set. Their singer was a wildman, he was wearing swim trunks, and he cracked several funny jokes. It took a long time for anyone for lighten up and for some raging to break loose.

When Saviours took the stage, they were just waiting a moment for their bass player to join them. I was shocked when he did – it’s no longer jovial-looking shredxpert Cyrus Comiskey! They had some new guy, who was fetching them beers! His name is Carson Binks, from Parchman Farm. To his credit, I thought it was Cyrus shredding bass on Death’s Procession, but apparently it’s this guy. Impressive. Anyway, look at his pale hairless body. Maybe they should tell him, “Dude, only the singer gets to take his shirt off.”

Of course, Saviours totally delivered. The Death’s Procession tour can’t help but rock, unless they have Mexicans Karaoke it or something. Although, I they only played one song off Crucifire…I could have used more, but whatever.

The second problem I ran into at this show was that during the Saviours set – get this – some idiot was hardcore dancing. Christ, and I’ve seen this before: the displaced hardcore kid. Due to his hard core, he has to act like all shows are hardcore shows. That’s why this helmet was throwing punches and kicks a Saviours show. I’m all about kicking women and beating them unmerciful, whatever, but at a Madball show. C’mon dude, not while I’m trying to headbang. I’m wasted, and I’m smoking a blunt, and you are seriously fucking with my headbanging. And his friend was wearing a backpack in the bar. Did high school just let out? Why can’t he stash his drugs against his penis, like the rest of us?

And thanks to Stephanie Crumley at Brooklyn vegan for taking these pictures.  Does anyone know what’s so vegan about that website? Is it cruelty-free? I don’t care, but sometimes I wonder. I was going to take some pictures, but I felt like a complete fucking douche taking pictures.

Finally – the Beast rolls on! There’s time to catch Ramming Speed, who’re doggin’ it for the rest of December:

17 – Las Cruces, NM – TBA
18 – Austin, TX – Slamalot
19 – Denton, TX – J and J’s Pizza
20 – New Orleans, LA – The Mushroom
21 – Tallahassee, FL – AF House
22 – Tampa, FL – Transitions
23 – Miami, FL – Beelzebubs Cave
24 – Orlando, FL – Wills Pub
25 – Orlando, FL – Hailing Satan and drinking on rollercoasters
26 – Atlanta, GA – 529
27 – Ashville, NC – The Get Down
28 – Richmond, VA – Strange Matter
29 – Philadelphia, PA – International Waters
31 – Allston, MA – WWTAWWTAP