Adem Tepedelen

Much of Bobby Liebling’s life seems completely improbable. The Pentagram singer, despite a decades-long battle with drug addiction, is alive today and still performing. And Pentagram’s musical career/trajectory has been even more bizarre. Starting in the early ’70s, the band has experienced tumultuous lineup changes (and break-ups), botched recording deals and enough drama for a…

Two of our most memorable live concert experiences ever happened at Unsane shows in Seattle. This NYC trio originated from the same scene that spawned Helmet, Pussy Galore, Boss Hog and a bunch of other earhole-scraping noise mongers in the early 1990s. Between their Am Rep/Sub Pop label connections and the general loud/heavy/distorted aesthetic, they…

We don’t think we’re going out on a limb here when we say that AC/DC vocalist Brian Johnson wasn’t thinking about buying a nice fruity glass of Sauvignon Blanc for his mates when he wrote “Have a Drink On Me.”

It’s a well-established fact that Satan is responsible for all the best bands. Without His presence in the music—from AC/DC to Zyklon B—it wouldn’t be as dangerous, wicked or br00tal. Every metal band worth a damn has in its own way paid the devil his due. Like Diamond Head, for instance, who wrote a song…

We’re obviously not breaking the news that Riot guitarist, Mark Reale (far L in photo), passed away on January 25 from complications from Crohn’s disease. Nonetheless, we wanted to pay tribute to a musician—and more importantly, a band—that hasn’t gotten his/their due in American metal history. Reale was not only a founding member of Riot,…

Talk about a kick-ass way to start the week. Not only did we put the Big Easy’s finest purveyors of blackened thrash, Goatwhore, on the cover of our current issue, we managed to wrangle a new tune off their upcoming Metal Blade album, Blood For the Master. “When Steel and Bone Meet” is everything we…

As far as back-together-for-the-first-time-since-’85 reunions go, we’ll take a newly reformed English Dogs—one of the UKs prime purveyors of crossover back in the day—over Van Halen any day. And lucky for us here in the U.S., three-fifths of the lineup that brought us the essential-listening thrash classic Forward Into Battle—drummer Andrew “Pinch” Pinching, lead guitarist…

We suckered you in with the giveaway, but in addition to that great offer, you’re gonna get more Anvil than you know what to do with. First, though, we’ll start with the tickets. Five lucky winners will receive a pair (that’s 2) of tickets to to see Canada’s finest old school metal-on-metal purveyors on Tue,…

First we’d like to congratulate Tombs on topping our annual list of the Top 40 Extreme Albums of 2011. It was, of course, well deserved. Not all our readers may agree with it, but then again there’s no satisfying the most extremely extreme readership in all of metaldom. You’re an opinionated lot, and we love…

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…

The end of the year is always a time for reflection. Decibel‘s infuriating “Best of 2011” issue is out, and between angry emails sent to the magazine’s editors excoriating them for “fucking it up once again,” thoughts inevitably turn toward recollections of the past. We’re now 20 years removed from “the year that punk broke”—that…

Sure, ripping the annual Grammy nominations (and then later the inevitable head-scratching winner, see above) is like shooting fish in a barrel, but we must point out that to be so utterly clueless about a major part of the music business (metal) for so long really does take some effort. At this point we can’t…

Now that sales of their actual music have gone in the crapper, bands are continuing to find new and bizarre ways to help fans squander their hard-earned cash. KISS were onto this like three decades ago, but it’s taken awhile for some of their contemporaries (and even newer bands) to cotton on to the fact…

As evidenced by our “Cutest Kitties in Metal” article back in the December 2009 issue, we here at Decibel are staunch friends of the feline. Sure, goats are semi-regularly sacrificed at Decibel HQ whenever we need a little bump in subscription numbers, but no cats are ever harmed in the making of our hallowed mag….

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…

We can’t speak for our fellow Decibloggers, but our own goal for these weekly dispatches is to entertain, inform and occasionally enlighten. Beyond that, anything goes, just as long as it’s within the “extremely extreme” wheelhouse. So, today we’re offering up the premiere of a track from a band that we could hardly argue is…

Our pals over at Metal Sucks have put together a two-day Suckfest of some of our favorite bands, and it’s all happening this weekend, November 4 and 5, at the Gramercy Theatre in Manhattan. Tickets are currently on sale and available from LiveNation. The best part of the inaugural Metal Suckfest is the wide array…

Metal is getting old. We don’t mean boring and tired (well, occasionally that), we mean that it now has quite a history stretching back to a time when many of its current adherents weren’t even born. That decade known as “the Eighties,” when the NWOBHM happened and modern metal as we know it was pretty…

Do we have your attention now? Good. First, we need to address a few things about this photo, which we must admit, we find quite hilarious. #1) No live animals were harmed. These taxidermied critters—a stoat and a squirrel—had previously met their demise before they had bottles of what was, at the time (July 2010),…

Let us first just throw out a few numbers at you, just to give you an idea as to what the competition is like at the Great American Beer Festival, held by the Brewers Association every September in Denver. • 526 breweries from 48 states plus Puerto Rico, submitted beers • 3,930 beers vied for…

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. Well, once in a while, on Wednesday morning, a Decibel staffer or special guest will take to the Deciblog to bitch and moan at length as to why everybody’s full of shit and said dud…

Being the senior member (in age, that is) of the Decibel contribs, any time anything “old school” comes around, it frequently gets kicked our way. And we’re totally OK with that. Especially when we get to shine a little light on a burgeoning metal fest in Baltimore that’s all about celebrating old-school metal. Defenders of…

Because of the stature they have attained, much of the metal-loving world puts the Big Four as the sort of holy, uh, quadrinity of thrash metal. These are the bands—all American—that we consider the originators and finest progenitors of the genre. But not so fast. If we’re to look at many of the Big Four’s…

OK, vinyl nerds, pay attention. What you’re about to witness is a little teaser from the fellas in Skeletonwitch and their label Prosthetic Records. In case you haven’t heard, Skeletonwitch will be releasing their fourth long-player, Forever Abomination, via Prosthetic on October 11 in North America. It’ll be available in three different formats but the…

It’s big news in the metal world when an album (or EP, or whatever) arrives with John Arch’s vocals on it. His Bruce Dickinson-like tenor was a beacon in the mid-’80s U.S. metal scene when he fronted Fates Warning on their now-classic first three albums. After he left the band, however, he basically put music…

Take a listen to our premiere of the new song, “Altar of Lies,” from The Fucking Wrath’s new album, Valley of the Serpent’s Soul. The Fucking Wrath “Altar of Lies” by Decibel Magazine Heavy, huh? Well, this aural onslaught is nothing compared to the brutality one occasionally suffers at the hands of one’s offspring. The…

Victoria, British Columbia, is on an island, and as a result gets skipped by 9 out of 10 touring bands. Other than, say, Anchorage, Alaska, this is probably the most inconvenient city of any size on the West Coast to get to. It’s the capital of BC, but it’s distinctly removed from the rest of…

OK, we apologize for the somewhat misleading headline, but we stand by its essential truth. Ex-Jesus Lizard/Scratch Acid frontman David Yow will be presenting his first solo NYC art exhibit called “Glass Gas Mask” this week at Fuse Gallery (93 2nd Ave, New York City). If you thought his lyrics and onstage antics were out…

We don’t care how many records, CDs, T-shirts or sweat pants a band has sold in its career, it hasn’t officially “made it,” in our estimation, until it gets a beer named after it (or one of its songs). That is winning, no matter how you measure it. Even a little ol’ noise/math band from…

The musical mavericks of Clutch, in our estimation, are the perfect band to represent the spirit of craft beer. The Maryland-based quartet has done its own thing musically and within the business side of the industry, and has been rewarded by a staunch following of diehard fans. They aren’t sexy, they aren’t trendy, but man…