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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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Last month at the 2014 Inferno Music Conference (which runs concurrently to the much louder Inferno Metal Festival), I was lucky enough to squeeze into a short presentation led by filmmaker Christian Falch. He was there to introduce his latest project, and from the looks of things, it’ll be a doozy. ‘Blackhearts’ follows three black…

“[Splinters] is taking everything from The Fragile King and pushed it to the extremes in every direction,” says Vallenfyre’s Gregor Mackintosh. “There are songs that are more doom oriented, like funeral doom. There are really fast songs, too. We had paid homage to our influences on the last record. This one has a lot of…

Who would’ve thought that, 24 years after it was first released, Sacred Reich’s classic thrash tune about the dissolution of the American dream would still be just as (if not even more) relevant? Cynical people, certainly, and also Canadian death metal evergreens Kataklysm. They included a cover of said song on the special edition of last…