Welcome to the opening installment of Inside The Shredder's Studio, where we talk to accomplished players and guitar nerds about the riffs that make them warm and fuzzy. It would be easy to call this another "Women In Metal" bonus feature but I'm not going to do that. You see, chances are Elizabeth Schall can play guitar better than you if you are a male or female. I had the distinct pleasure ...

For the past 16 years, German "power" thrashers Perzonal War have wowed thrashers and heshers in their native land. They were discovered by Rock Hard magazine in what is presumed to be a Battle of the Bands/OK Corral-type competition that pitted the hard-hitting Perzonal War against sad kids in Burzum shirts and female-fronted acts with copious amounts of keyboards and velvet. Of course, Perzonal ...

Don't say that we never tried to give you anything. We're not saying that we are definitely going to give each and everyone of you reading this something. But if you play your cards right [see footnote 1] you may at least have a chance for us [see footnote 2] to give you something. Mighty big of us, huh? Well, look, is there anything even slightly more promising in your life than the chance ...

Lord, do we have a bizarrely amazing contest for you all this morning! To celebrate their upcoming Steve Albini-produced 10-inch release on Anthropic Records, Philadelphia's own self-described "down tuned psychedelic outer space beard metal" outfit Ominous Black has agreed not only to allow Decibel to stream one of these monsters of epic eclecticism, but is also offering up an exclusive tattoo ...

Twelve albums in on a 22-year-old career and Swedish black metallers Marduk can still be relied upon 100 per cent to stick to the program and deliver a typically iconoclastic tour de force, touching upon all the genre essentials, anti-hymns to send toes curling in the Vatican and throughout Christendom. Serpent Sermon is pound for pound the most scabrous piece of BM orthodoxy that twelve bucks ...

This piece is a long lost companion section to Decibel #92 cover story Paradise Lost. It explores and debunks the myth of the Peaceville Three---Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride, and Anathema---connecting and riffing off one another in the early to mid-'90s. Think of it as an updated version of fellow Decibel contributor Greg Moffitt's UK doom explorations in the Masters of Misery expose, as ...

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 skinny dipping in the fall dark waters of Decoryah's Wisdom Floats (Witchhunt). Finland!  It's a dark ...

It’s nice to have friends introduce us to new music, but in this age of ever flowing information and ubiquitous quick links, we often rely on bands’ personnel connections to lead us to our next aural awakening. Dude in our favorite death metal band also plays on this grind record or in that prog collective, and pretty soon we’re hopping among musical universes like a frog from lily pad to ...

Obviously, War On Music's Charley Justice works a lot faster than I do. When his original retail location at 38-44 Albert Street in downtown Winnipeg went up in flames back on April 19th, he ramped up his usual whirlwind of internalised kinetic energy and went to work at opening another location as quickly as possible. Within two months, he had a new place at 91 Albert and was back to selling ...

The past week or so has brought lots of Caspian news, which we were thrilled about given that aside from some shows here and there, it's been a while since we'd heard from the instrumental post-rockers. According to their Facebook page, the Massholes spent much of April through June not playing, but rebounded nicely by announcing that they'd signed with Triple Crown Records and would release ...