Year: 2012

Well folks, my recent birthday has officially put me more than past the halfway point to the grave. You’ll be rid of me soon (“not soon enough,” I hear some of you screeching). Usually, people in my age bracket (but not tax bracket) pull up the parking brake on their listening habits and start grousing…

Back in October, we provided a glimpse into the making of the new Kowloon Walled City record Container Ships (check out part 1 and part 2). Now, to celebrate both its Tuesday release and the fact that it’s REALLY fucking good, the band was kind enough to send along a tour van mixtape full of…

It’s been a shitty year for literacy in the world of extreme music. First there was Pig Destroyer’s worth-waiting-for Book Burner. Despite the title there were plenty of words to go around with a J.R Hayes story short tucked into special editions. Now, we have the upcoming At A Loss debut from South Carolina-based experimental…

What distinguishes Silverthorn from Poetry?Oliver Palotai: My intention behind Silverthorn was to bring more melodic elements back into our music. Poetry for the Poisoned is a good album, but at certain parts too dark and monotonous. I always ask myself how often I would listen myself to a CD I create or co-create. While Poetry…

Because man can’t survive on metal alone, but indie rock is super boring and autotuned pop makes me want to kill myself, here’s a rundown of some recent/upcoming, Decibel-friendly metal-adjacent releases. Tusmørke – Underjordisk Tusmørke (Termo) A lot of the press releases and reviews of Underjordisk Tusmørke toss out terms like Krautrock and name check…

Toronto rock journalist Brent Jensen’s No Sleep ‘Til Sudbury is a smart, sweet memoir of the joys and travails of growing up metal in tiny Espanola, Ontario — …A Fine Paper Town, as the welcome sign notes — weaving a portrait of youthful discovery/rebellion into a larger macro story of metal’s mid-eighties coming-of-age moment. It’s…

There really is no good reason for anyone to be bummed out about missing out on an ATP weekender when the days following the main event habitually throw up bills as awesome as this. A weekend spent emptying your bank account, taking drugs unknown to the over-30s and known only by weird acronyms, enjoying the…

If you know Decibel, you know we hold chameleonic U.K. doomsayers Paradise Lost in the highest regard. So, it’s an extremely extreme honor that Garden State funeral doom heroes Evoken are taking their maiden voyage in the Decibel Flexi Series by covering PL’s crushing “Rotting Misery,” which initially appeared on their 1990 debut, Lost Paradise….

By Greg Peterson You’re probably wondering which records I bought on the morning that Batillus began recording our second full-length album… some Purcell, some Machault, Schiff playing Schubert impromptus, Debussy/Ravel string quartets, some Hindemith, some Schoenberg, some Strauss, Souzay singing Faure and Schubert, and some late Shostakovich quartets. You see, Willi and I have been…

After 17 years of recording silence, death metal legends Carcass have returned to the studio to track their first new LP since 1996’s Swansong. The record, produced by Colin Richardson, will be released sometime in 2013 through a yet-to-be determined label. Bassist/vocalist Jeff Walker exclusively provides Decibel with a few details. Please tell us the…

When Sarcófago sacrilegiously congealed in a plastic bowl of hate, frustration, rebellion, fermented sugarcane juice and fuck fluid, Phil Collins’ “Sussudio” and Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” were number one hits on the Billboard chart.

Wow, this birdshit is REALLY drying up at the bottom of the cage this time. There’s not a whole lot coming out, but we’ll get through it somehow, my friends. I’ll just pick some stuff here at random, some things your old boy Waldo may not be too familiar with. OK, this is plain silly….

While hordes of old people who still use dial-up are swarming to super-sized retail outlets this season to buy their loved ones’ affection, the more tech-savvy among us simply point and click our money away into the bitwise abyss.  Similarly, while the plebes will rely on radio and opinionated journalists to decide which tunes may…

Sweden’s Khoma is probably best known on this side of the Atlantic – assuming they’re known at all – for being the side project of Cult of Luna’s Johannes Persson and Fredrik Kihlberg. Au contraire. While they may not have been as on the radar of metalnerds as Cult of Luna, Khoma has existed in…

Since it’s getting near the end of the year, I figured I’d mix things up a little bit and fill a couple of these posts with some bands that I’ve been lucky enough to discover over the past 11 months or so. And since this quartet made one of the biggest impressions on me, with…

In 2010, one-man black metal outfit Xasthur released its final album, Portal of Sorrow. That it would be Xasthur’s swansong was announced in advance by its creator, Scott Conner, who abandoned his longtime alias “Malefic” and used his real name in the credits for the first time in a career that spanned 15 years and…

Fall has been kind to the mighty Incantation. They released their boss new album Vanquish In Vengeance (read more about the creation of the album in our new issue). And they charted like a Britney Spears single in our top 100 death metal albums of all time. One of the reasons they are shredding so…

Rock and metal’s history is filled with super-success stories. The likes of which have landed Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, KISS, and countless more into the memory banks and culture stream of headbobbers and normal joes everywhere. But there’s an opposite side to mountains of cocaine, private jets, and endless pyro fountains. “Un-success” is…

We don’t talk about love a whole lot here at Decibel, and we don’t cover a lot of bands that take influence from Duran Duran. But if you’re tuned into the singularly unique world of Sacramento’s Deftones, you’ll understand that songs of love will be surrealistic, open to interpretation, and tempered with an undercurrent of…

Sorry for the tease, but this post isn’t exactly about Motorhead’s Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers compilation. Bear with us, though, because it does have some relevance to the topic at hand. You may or may not remember a regular part of the Deciblog rotation a couple years ago was a little thing we called…

The Foo Fighters may be on a hiatus important enough to be noted by the nation’s newspaper of record, but Dave Grohl remains busy, putting the finishing touches on his debut directorial effort Sound City, a documentary about “the truth, the craft and the integrity of Rock and Roll.” And as part of the buzz-building…

In the latest issue of Decibel (#99), I interviewed J.D. Cronise of the Sword about the band’s new album, Apocryphon. All was going in a predictable manner until, toward the end of our chat, Cronise began discussing his distaste for mosh pits and moshing, and how he prefers people to keep their shit together and…

On January 19th, Decibel will celebrate a century of extremely extreme issues at Philadelphia Union Transfer in exalted company: four-time cover stars Converge; swine-ablating grindhogs Pig Destroyer; crossover champs Municipal Waste; Repulsion (be still, beating heart); 2011’s AOTY artists Tombs; and funerealy epic doom titans Evoken. It’s the perfect Decibel storm, a line-up of bands…

We at Decibel get a lot of chances at firsts. We were the first metal magazine to put flexi discs in the Common Era. We were the first magazine to introduce the Hall of Fame. 95 and counting, to be awesomely sure. We were also the first magazine to premiere new Evocation album—in its entirety—Illusions…

Thirteen is generally considered an unlucky number, which is why we’re foisting it upon you, dear reader! Giving is (occasionally) better than receiving, particularly for sadists, i.e., your holly jolly hellraising homeboys at Decibel. So, today only, sign up for a 12-month or 24-month subscription to Decibel and receive one extra issue for FREE. That’s…

Opinions are like assholes: everyone IS one. We’ve noticed that Hollywood tends to spend a lot of time chortling while you spend perfectly good alcohol/meth/falafel money on the anal fissures of their “imagination.” Justin Smith of cinema-grind moguls Graf Orlock occasionally plumbs those depths in Graf Orlock Steadicam Reviews. It seems obvious, yet oft unacknowledged,…

Since the Decibel faithful are about to enter a restful trance of their own thanks to pounds of turkey, pumpkin pie and stuffing (or tofurkey for all our vegan readers) we thought it was the right time to introduce a new track from Bastard Sapling’s Dragged From Our Restless Trance. Streaming below is “Cold Winds…

There’s some indication that nuevo thrash gods Municipal Waste are, to put it mildly, a tad nutty. Case in point, the Richmondians’ near-takeover of the Deciblog. Search for Municipal Waste in our handy dandy search mechanism and not one but FIVE pages turn up. Inside those five pages you’ll find the Waste with long dong…

For 14 years, extreme hate-thunder has rained down from the blighted Czech sky every July, under the Obscene Extreme banner.  In 2013, the organizers are seriously upping the ante, and we here at Decibel get to formally welcome Obscene Extreme America!  It’s in Mexico!  (Yeah, against the protestations of xenophobes all over the United States,…

Before we get to all the details of this amazing giveaway—a free guitar!—from the generous folks at Roadrunner Records and Epiphone, we want to wish Machine Head mainman Robb Flynn a very speedy recovery from his recent hernia surgery. We know he’s anxious to get back out on the road and resume the tour with…