Chris Dick

Name one British thrash metal act from the Golden Age of Thrash that kicks ass and makes newcomers Evile look like prepubescent chipmunks. Do it. Xentrix? Cerebral Fix? Hellbastard? No, no, and no. OK, we’re way off. The Brits had their share of awesome. Sabbat, Onslaught, Lawnmower Deth, Sacrilege, Seventh Angel, and Acid Reign were…

The consensus seems to be “Amorphis is back.” Was process to create Circle any different from previous albums? The energy is palatable.Tomi Koivusaari: We started to think before recording this album that maybe we should change the process of making album this time, as the last four albums we did at same studio with almost…

If you were to ask us what the acronym S.O.D.O.M. means, we’d have to be honest with you. We don’t know. Storm of Death of Metal? If Sodom were Czech, it might work. Sacrifice of Dead on Mars? Maybe Giorgio Tsoukalos were involved in the song’s conception, then we’d give it a 86.5% match. Or,…

I’m trying to put a finger on The Formulas of Death, but I can’t. Was the intention to make an album that’s hard to fit into one easy category?Adam Zaars: No, that wasn’t the intention, but I’m not surprised to hear the question. The intention was just to create flowing music. It would have been…

We’re certainly entering strange space when a band like Purson is beloved by metalheads of sundry stripes and sick permutations. Self-described as “Vaudeville Carny Psych,” Purson—if lines between music styles, genres, and eras mean anything—could be the missing link between Mellow Candle and Black Sabbath. Or, Fairport Convention mixed with iconoclasts Coven. However, you want…

5. Carcass – Carcass has had a few logos over their storied and infamous career, but none of them evinces the manic, electric quality of the group’s music quite like this iteration. Its angular, slightly italicized letters, the long stems of the two “c”s and “r,” and the near interlocking of the double “s” imparts…

Back in April 2010, Decibel pitted Finntroll against Norway’s Troll in a brutal troll-off. The segment, brilliantly titled Under the Bridge, can be found here in dB #66 if you’re at all curious as to who won the bridge battle. Then, in the winter of the Year of Our (Dark) Lord, the festive Finns in…

Brilliant things happen in the age of the Internet. Like former Pestilence drummer Marco Foddis Googling himself and finding our “in search of Marco Foddis post” so we could induct Pestilence’s storied Consuming Impulse album into the Hall of Fame. The issue in which Foddis features is available HERE for the doubters out there. Now,…

First of all, are you crazy? A double album in 2013?Dirk Verbeuren: [Laughs] We kind of thought that at first, too. Speed [Strid] had come up with that idea. That’s something he had wanted to do. In his head he’s like, “I wanna do a double album.” When he first told us he wanted to…

The Negator monikor sounds like a Decepticon from Transformers, but musically the Hamburg-based black metal quintet are as vicious as they are obscure. Go on, tell us you’re a fan. Anyway, across three well-received traditional full-lengths, Negator has earned a small yet ardent following. Led by frontman Nachtgarm—who also served time in Dark Funeral following…

All things being fair, death metal was a morbid accident. Tape traders, zines, dudes who formed record labels and hordes of disenfranchised, rock ‘n’ roll-fed youth were all willing to risk societal abandonment and future professional pursuits to make the music they adored a reality.

When drummer Martin Lopez bowed out of Opeth at the group’s high water mark, people thought he was nuts. Turns out he just wanted to find himself, and aiding him on that journey is new (well, not so new if you’re European) “heavy” progressive act, Soen. Formed by Lopez and guitarist Kim Platbarzdis about six…

Whoever came up with the name “Freedom Fries,” or “Bars with Stars,” or “American Love Sticks” should be marched over to France and hanged off one of those fancy Rococo buildings they like to put on postcards. French fries aren’t even French. They’re Belgian. That’s how the origin story goes, but history has a way…

Immolation’s been kicking the death metal coffin for longer than most of you—they formed in 1988—have been alive. Go back a few more years when the Yonkers troupe were Rigor Mortis (not to be confused with the Texas-based Hall of Famers Rigor Mortis) and before that Defcon, well, it’s fair to say the surviving members…

5. Loudblast – Sublime Dementia 1993 (Semetary) Appearing with three tracks on Century Media’s cool In The Eyes of Death compilation in 1991, Loudblast were virtually unknown outside the four corners of France even though they’d released two full-lengths and a string of demos prior to Sublime Dementia. Loudblast twisted Schuldiner’s brutal/melodic idiosyncrasies (from Human)…

There are times when you just want to forget the world around you and just cut a Persian rug. Great rock records were made without worrying what Tom, Dick, and Harriet Tubman were up to and how they perceived a sound, a scene, a recording technique, or a pair of pants. Sweden’s Spiritual Beggars have…

Now, you might be thinking, “Oy, what’s this Cauldron song doing as a Deciblog premiere?!” We realize Cauldron’s new long-player hit the streets—in the UK and Europe at least—last autumn, but this is the first time the Canucks have Tomorrow’s Lost available to North American hesher fiends without the import price on new Earache venture…

The last time HOD made album-related headlines was with 2009’s Serpent on the Ibex Moon label. Well, denizens of death, destruction, and ophidian-related apocalypse scenarios, San Antonio-based HOD have prepared the The Uncreated Demo, as a stop-gap EP between Serpent and as-yet-label-signed long-player, Book of the Worm. Self-described as “real fucking metal,” HOD—not to be…

5. Thou Art Lord – Thou Art Lord’s first logo was sort of a cross between the Mysticum and Mayhem’s logos. Not sure why they changed it—several times, in fact—to a dumb font or a hand-scrawled atrocity, but the Greek supagroup got it right. Just look at it! It’s Christ’s greatest foe. The symmetry and…

Normally when we do a giveaway in conjunction with streaming media we talk all kinds of rubbish to get you to a link where, inevitably, you’ll email us and then wait an eternity to see if you’re a winner or a loser. Well, since we’re metalheads we’re all winners. Just some get free rad stuff…

It’s no secret, the audio/vision division of Scion, henceforth known as Scion A/V, has given some amazing opportunities to bands with limited means. Arsis, Revocation, Enslaved, Immolation, Meshuggah, and so on have all benefited from the niche-market, passion-fueled benefactors at Scion A/V. Whether it’s a CD or a 12″, a car used as tour support…

If we didn’t know otherwise, Imperium Dekadenz could be some new nu-black’n’djent band from California. The word “imperium” invokes something grandiose or powerful. The, uh, word “dekadenz” recalls band meetings where kids with improbable instrumental skill and unfortunate spelling capabilities meet. But that’s not the case at all. Actually, both cases are incorrect, as Imperium…

If Decibel was worth its weight in ink, paper, and stress—mostly on the shoulders of our beloved EIC Mr. Mudrian—then we’d have some staffers who were there when Thergothon dropped its only long-player Stream from the Heavens like a Cthulhu tentacle on wee Italy-based indie Avantgarde Music. We do have staffers who were there, bought…

February 19th, 2013 is no different from February 18th, 1995. Sure, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 4,003.33—its highest ever up to that point—and the NHL was in a lock-out shortened season. But black metal? Not much has changed. There have been off-shoot genres, more commercialization, DIY “bands” bunkered in limited edition cassette releases,…

If you’re wondering what “Blodsvept” means, it’s Swedish for “Blood Wrapped” or “Enveloped in Blood.” At least that’s what my rudimentary Swedish tells me. But it sounds pretty brutal coming from Finnish folk metal outfit Finntroll, who have heretofore not dabbled in the art of blood titled songs. Unless you count “Det iskalla trollblodet,” “Slaget…

Belgian gore-lords Aborted have been kickin’ corpses and plenty of detal metal ass since the mid-’90s. But they’ve only reached their true potential—that’s a personal opinion—in recent years, where they’ve added more meat, guts, and other musical offal to their boiling cauldron. Although I’m partial to Goremageddon: The Saw and the Carnage Done, I think…

If you’ve had enough Municipal Waste to last a lifetime—hey, those landfills keep getting higher and higher, right?—it’s the right time to bring things to Washington, DC. Iron Reagan, the best new band name if there ever was one, was formed by Municipal Waste throat-ripper Tony Foresta and skin-basher Landphil Hall, with ex-Darkest Hour pacemaker…

5. Dark Suns – Grave Human Genuine 2008 (Sensory)Progressive metal bands don’t make sense. Especially the foreign ones. What the fuck does Grave Human Genuine mean anyway? German outfit Dark Suns paints, expertly on tracks like “Amphibian Halo” and “Free of You,” quite a vista. Similar in parts to Pain of Salvation’s The Perfect Element,…

Everything is cyclical. Especially in music. Go far enough in the future and Crabcore will be the next wave of cool and innovative (god, let’s hope not). For hardcore, it hasn’t been an easy decade since its popular upswing in the mid to late ’90s and eventual zenith in the early ’00s, but that’s about…

Before bastard sons begat cunting daughters, flyswatter stakes were driven through chests and pleasures thought unobtained fully experienced, California thrashers Slayer were hell-bent on leveling not just previous milestones, but any band with an inkling of heaviness.