You know, with all the hoopla over Scion, an imprint of Toyota (gasp!), sponsoring music festivals, funding and pressing free CDs, and generally giving workaday bands (like Immolation, Wormrot, Enslaved) a chance to stick their head out of the boiling financial cauldron that is the music industry, it’s a wonder this commercial for Park Auto Mall exists.

Of course, there are precious few spokespeople in the greater Tampa Bay area more suited to speak for Fred and Park Auto Mall than Six Feet Under, ex-Cannibal Corpse throat-monger Chris Barnes. That’s right folks. Barnes beat out the multitudes — Hulk Hogan, Dick Vitale, Bubba Sparxxx, Bubba the Love Sponge, Derek Jeter — of Tampa Bay suckitude to star…er, growl his way through this commercial.

PS. Wouldn’t it be extra sauce awesome if the samba briza music that kicks in around :08 was by the Elements-era Atheist lineup?

Veteran death metal guitarist James Murphy (Death, Obituary, Cancer, Disincarnate, Testament) has found that the brain tumor he defeated in 2001 has unexpectedly returned. Although the tumor is benign and is currently being treated pharmacologically — chemotherapy remains an option — Murphy needs our help.

The medication Murphy has been prescribed has crippling side effects, which force him to abandon his work as a producer at his own SafeHouse Production while he undergoes treatment. There are other more expensive medications on the market, but at $1,000 per month his options for more effective treatments are limited.

“A spike in the hormone indicator for the tumor, as discovered by a blood test that was followed up by an MRI to confirm, showed that the tumor was again active, and had grown a bit,” said a statement prepared for Murphy. “Luckily not enough to require surgery, but radiation treatment was still on the table. The decision was made to defer the radiation treatment for 6 months, during which time the tumor would be attacked pharmacologically, increasing the dose of the drug used to hinder its growth to a level which leaves James wiped out, overly fatigued, nauseous, and unable to work to earn his living at full capacity. A better drug, one that has less side-effects, and would require a much smaller dosage is available, but considerable vastly more expensive.”

If you would like to donate to Murphy, he’s set up a PayPal account where you can help him.

Donate through PayPal.

Or if you are unable to donate, but would like to wish him well during his recovery, you can do so by visiting his Facebook page.

We here at Decibel Magazine wish Murphy a blastbeated and arpeggiated return to full health.

Here’s the set-up: We’re in Seattle for a long weekend and we’re thirsty. So, of course we have to visit the recent the subject of our Brewtal Truth column, Matt Bonney, director of operations at Brouwer’s Cafe. As you may remember from our interview with Bonney in Decibel, Brouwer’s specializes in what he calls “the more esoteric, kind of special [beers].” What we didn’t know was that the dude is chummy with brewers across the states (and probably in Europe, too), so he frequently gets beers that no other pub in Seattle has (or will have).

A longtime Decibel subscriber, Bonney admitted he was more stoked about being featured in our humble mag than any other he’s been interviewed for and featured in. And before we could even get a glance at the 64 beers Brouwer’s has on tap, we had a glass of Stone Brewing’s brand new Vertical Epic Release 11.11.11, which we were, in fact, drinking on that very date. A discussion of the importance of Spinal Tap, of course, ensued.

The latest Stone Vertical Epic was a big, darkish beer with a lot of spice and dark fruits on the nose, but the complexity the aromas seemed to be promising didn’t necessarily materialize on the palate. However, since this brew is meant to ideally be cellared until 2012 and consumed in a vertical “epic” (i.e. all ten years in a row, from ’02 to ’12), a little time may do it some good.

Our first beer wasn’t even finished before Bonney handed us round two: Firestone Walker XV anniversary ale. This black-as-night brew was served in a deep snifter to capture its unbelievable complexity. It is a blended beer that consists of eight different Firestone Walker offerings. It is, according to their website: “76% Barley Wine style beers, 19% Stout and 5% Imperial IPA.” We were not going to be leaving this one unfinished. Bonney assured us that no other bar in Seattle had XV on tap and we nursed this barrel-aged, 12.5% delight quite happily for the next we-have-no-idea-how-long.

After two double-digit bruisers—and it was barely 7 pm—there was no way we were going to stay vertical at this rate. Since we both had other plans for the rest of the evening, Bonney said adios and left me with one more special beer: Duchesse de Bourgogne, a gorgeous oak-aged sour red ale—served in a red wine glass, no less—from the Flanders region of Belgium. It was the perfect way to cut through the heavy, boozy flavors left on our palate from the previous two monsters.

Thirst for great beer quenched, we stumbled onward, sad to leave Brouwer’s behind, but happily anticipating the great beers we’ll drink there the next time we find ourselves in Seattle.

Yep. It’s that time of year again when everyone starts bitching about department stores replacing the Katy Perry jams on the overhead sound system with whatever yuletide shit is forcing Burl Ives to roll over in his grave this year. Determined not to be outdone by Zakk Wylde — who is apparently following up his American Idol stint with a Black Label Society acoustic Christmas EP — Century Media records recently unveiled its official holiday collection, which includes such cheeky metalli-presents as the “Black Metal Face Ornament” and “Pentagram Christmas Stocking (Black)”.

Whether the label is deliberately attempting to get a rise out of Varg or just nudging Napalm Death towards recording A Very Grindcore Christmas is not quite clear, but if we’re trying to bring modern Christmas evil stateside again we’d do well to take a gander at two recent imports that sing the darkest noel right — the Dutch film Sint and last year’s Finnish release Rare Exports.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m pleased to see Century Media offer friends and family of Slipknot fans a gift giving option that doesn’t require they visit a Spencer’s. At the same time, it isn’t exactly the sort of thing that will get the scolds up in arms, a la Siskel and Ebert bitching about Silent Night, Deadly Night circa ’84, is it? Which means, alas, we’re probably destined to have the same predictable conversations about the Muzak as last year. What else is there to do, save crank the Marduk?

Dragged into Sunlight are one of the most exciting things to happen to the UK underground metal scene since Anaal Nathrakh started experimenting with black metal’s forbidden fruits and spitting the pips through a particle accelerator. Mixing elements of doom, black and death metal with a horrible, uncodified ritualistic live/visual aesthetic, Dragged into Sunlight genuinely possess the power to discomfit and horrify. Their video for “Buried under Leeches”, available to download from their site here, didn’t meet with YouTube’s Ts&Cs, with the washed out noir footage of some guy getting tortured and destroyed in some sort of rite clearly ill-fitting in the social networking site’s complement of funny animal videos and fat kids doing karaoke rapping. Seriously though, it’s 100 per cent NSFW, and fits Dragged into Sunlight’s sound perfectly.

This interview’s quotes are unattributed to any individual, as is the band’s wont, but it was conducted with the singer just before their performance at Damnation. Their debut LP Hatred for Mankind is not to be slept on. Their single-track 40-minute Widowmaker will be released shortly through Mordgrimm, which will just have to tide you over in lieu of a new album

You’re all sworn to anonymity; is it a question of the whole being greater than the individual? You’re very protective over the chemistry of the band.
If we didn’t have the same group of people we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing. If one person goes missing, we don’t know what we’re doing. Our head falls off. We all bring our individual aspect to it and if one of us was replaced by a different member I don’t know what we’d do. The chances are it wouldn’t work. There’s something about the same group, the same collective all intertwined in the same thing, in different projects, but when combined in Dragged into Sunlight it turns into a hideous sound that I couldn’t recreate with any other band. We’ve all been in other bands where we’ve been the hardest working members and really broke our balls for nine or 10 years, left the scene, left playing music, and left playing shows really bitter and pissed off. If you took those five members and put them in one band, a group of hideously angry people, then they’re going to do something hideously angry, which is what we’ve done. We don’t see each other for seven months at a time and by the time we get together to play a show we’re at breaking point—we don’t play that much.

Anal Cunt, otherwise known to jittery magazine editors and PC fucks the world over as AxCx, rarely failed to mash the fuck button like 5-year kids hopped up on donuts and Mt. Dew. Not solely because of the group’s name either. Fronted by Seth Putnam, the Massholes from Newton pushed every possible boundary and penetrated — sans rubber, natch — every possible orifice over the course of their active, noise-making cycles.

Unfortunately, the world lost Putnam last summer at the tender age of 43. As a fitting (super-gay) close to his reign of PC terror, Relapse has compiled a bunch of barely listenable, always offensive EPs, 7″‘s, one-off tunes, and other audio anomalies known as “music” for Anal Cunt fans to posthumously enjoy like salami lollipops and tuna fish sandwich bubble gum.

Long song: “1st Demo”
Anal Cunt – 1st Demo by Decibel Magazine

Short song: “Riverbottom Nightmare Band”
Anal Cunt – Riverbottom Nightmare Band by Decibel Magazine

Anal Cunt’s The Old Testament is out November 22nd, 2011 on Relapse Records. What better Black Friday gift could there be for grandma and grandpa. God knows they have enough doilies and ties to last them 14 lifetimes. Get them the gift that keeps on giving. Order NOW.

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 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 week, we go back before the dawn of recorded time (1980) to cover the JPT Scare Band’s prehistoric jams on Sleeping Sickness (Monster).

So, here’s the thing about Sleeping Sickness: it actually came out in 2000.  However, if these songs were actually recorded in this millennium, they wouldn’t be nearly so notable.  Still awesome, don’t get me wrong; just not as notable.  This is actually a compilation of tunes recorded between 1973 and 1976.  Much like Pentagram, the Kansas City power trio of Jeff Littrell, Paul Grigsby, and Terry Swope (see how they got the name?) never managed to secure a record deal during their initial run.  They did, however, record their legacy on to some reel to reel tapes in someone’s basement, which were later dug up and issued on several LPs in the 90s.  Those versions were edited, though.  This CD release contains the full insanity.

These guys weren’t really metal, per se.  Possibly proto-metal.  The band themselves have said that they don’t consider themselves metal, but would take any attention that they can get.  Besides, who else is going to listen to this stuff in this day and age besides metalheads (and acid casualties)?  They drew heavily from Cream and Jimi Hendrix, with some Blue Cheer thrown in, but then they took it to the extreme via endless jams.  Heavy, fuzzed-out grooves stretch into eternity, Terry Swope’s non-Euclidean guitar work threatening to skid off the rails and into a whole new dimension.  Don’t expect song structure; these are improvisations, the sound of three friends enjoying each other’s company and the interplay of their instruments.

That isn’t to say that these aren’t distinct tunes, though.  “It’s Too Late” is probably the closest thing to a single here, with its touches of Blue Oyster Cult and Grand Funk Railroad.  “Acid Acetate Excursion” fits its title perfectly, with loads of wah-wah pedal and distortion-soaked spirit journeying.  The one where they really take off into the cosmos has to be “I’ve Been Waiting,” which starts off like a low-key Led Zeppelin live cut and briefly pauses for a flute solo before Swope lights a fire under his guitar and it traces through the air like a firework.

The JPT Scare Band predated Earthless and pretty much the rest of the Teepee roster by a few decades.  Hell, if that label had been around in the mid-70s, these guys probably would have found a happy home there.  Alas, they never had their moment in the sun back when they would have been hailed as the innovators that they were.  They’ve been pretty active this decade, though, putting out a series of releases cataloging other basement recordings in addition to new material.  So check out Sleeping Sickness; it’s a long, strange trip, but it’s an immensely satisfying one.

Official site

Buy it here!

UK thrashers Evile were plucked from the womband signed to Earache in 2006, offered before the world as not only the saviors of UK thrash, heir apparent to Sabbat, but the more frenzied quarters of society were proffering them to be the next Metallica. Like, yeah, let’s not burden four kids form Huddersfield, a reasonably drab, ordinary pocket of northern England, with too much expectation. So when they first gamboled onto the stage and fired through the debut album Enter the Grave they were already being cross-examined, dissected. That must have been weird. Back then, they were just caning it, taking it for what it was worth. But it got serious. The death of bassist Mike Alexander was the sort of horrible tragedy that put everything into perspective. From there on, guitarist Ol Drake, his brother and Evile frontman/guitarist Matt, and drummer Ben Carter had to decide whether this was it or whether they should push on.

They chose the latter, recruiting Joel Graham on bass and jetting off to hit clubs and dives across the States for the best part of a year, before returning to the Parlour studios to record album number three, Five Serpent’s Teeth with Russ Russell, and get on with being a band again. The Deciblog caught up with Ol Drake just before Damnation festival to talk awkward grammar and why being the next Metallica is totally redundant, and kinda unrealistic for anybody.

You’re on holiday, for like a week, but you’ve been on the road for ages.
OD: Yeah, we kinda know what we want to play now; we know the songs that get everybody moving and the ones which have everyone standing.

What’s going with the grammar—Five Serpent’s Teeth? You’re making life difficult here.
OD: No, it is right! Plus it’s a literary reference—if it’s wrong, blame the author of the book. It’s the Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, and I’m not sure because I’ve not read it, I’m not sure what it means, but I know it’s not about serpents. I think it’s about bullets, so that when he says “these five serpent’s teeth” he’s talkin’ about bullets. And in the context he says it it’s correct… T apostrophe S, but if you don’t know the context or the meaning it looks like it should be “Serpents’”.

No matter, the title sounds pretty kung-fu, though, I thought you’d gone all Wu-Tang. Is there a concept to the album?
OD: There is—but I don’t even know it! Matt (Drake) won’t even tell us. Especially this time round, he doesn’t want to reveal anything because he hates how everything’s so available, like you can go on Wikipedia, type Evile… blah blah blah and find something out. He just likes the listeners to make their own interpretations. It’s like David Lynch’s films; he’ll never reveal what they’re about and that’s what makes him so intriguing and interesting, and it’ll be an ongoing debate as to the meaning. But as soon as you tell someone what it’s about there won’t be a debate anymore. I think you’ve got to leave it open to what you think it’s about.

It’s been well established that the Maryland Death Fest is the favourite annual gathering for us around here at Decibel HQ as well as for a couple thousand of y’all as well. This shouldn’t be taken to mean that there aren’t other extreme metal pow-wows taking place on American soil worthy of your time, money, ringing ears, aching neck muscles and another opportunity to whip out those offensive-in-any-other-setting band shirts and, for the truly brave, that long-ignored pair of Purulent’s “100% Pedophilia” sweat pants.

Next week starting on Friday the 18th, the Korova in San Antonio, Texas hosts the fifth annual Goregrowlers Ball, a three-day, two-stage extravaganza of bands known throughout the underground to those just still unsigned to those somewhere in between. Check out the digital flyer above and contemplate the next time you’ll score the opportunity to see Singaporean horde Impiety as well as Florida’s Hellwitch play their entire Syzygal Miscreancy debut fromt-to-back. When will you ever witness Vaginal Bear Trap and Blowtorch Sodomy share the same stage? And there’s the little matter of nightly headliners Brutal Truth airing End Time for one of the first times, Exhumed’s always entertaining live performances and Suffocation karate-chopping their way into your hearts.

Being one of the Goregrowlers’ sponsors this year, Decibel will be present and accounted for with a table full of swag-o-la manned by yours truly. So, if you’re in the ‘hood, stop by and give ol’ KSP the one-finger salute and give me shit for that review of Red Chord’s Clients from like six years ago. Ticket info and running order is now up at the fest’s interhole hub: www.goregrowlersballfest.com

Ah! It’s wonderful to get a tattoo up here that’s not on a man’s ass.

Jack, from the valley of the dolls, brings us this fantastic pale slab of Black Flag ink. He clearly had the right idea when he got it.

I don’t think you can fuck up with a Black Flag tat, and Jack scores infinite points for not simply getting the bars.

More points are awarded because the ribs can be harsh, and despite what you’d think, so can the hips.

Then I’m going to have to go ahead and give Jack more points because there are some nice, long, clean runs in there.

Since I do have to do at least one deduction, I will be subtracting points for the stray hairs around the nipple. I don’t like those. He should have airbrushed those out or something.

Then another addition for the quality of the photo. I feel like he has no armpit at all.

As it stands this tattoo gets a 9/10. Very original, highly professional, and significantly badass. Keith Morris would be proud.

And remember! If YOU have a heavy metal tattoo you’d like to share, then you can always shove your email address up your ass.

And I was wrong. You can fuck up a Black Flag tattoo.