J. Bennett

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…

When word arrived that the Darkness would be rolling through L.A. again on their way to meet up with Lady Gaga in South America, we told J. Bennett to grease up his tits for a pre-show rematch with frontman Justin Hawkins. The following conversation took place on Tuesday, October 23, the night before the band’s…

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. This time, Comrade Bennett accepts the editor-in-chief’s challenge to resurrect Cave In’s post-Jupiter oeuvre from beyond hypothermia.

When I heard Jani Lane of Warrant passed away last Thursday night, I immediately texted my attorney Juan Perez and recent Decibel cover artist Tom Neely, both of whom—like myself—are avid cock rock enthusiasts. Neely’s cogent response? “Too much cherry pie!” The details of Lane’s death hadn’t been revealed yet, but Tom was right, of…

In 1993, Burzum mastermind and sole member Varg “Count Grishnackh” Vikernes both embodied Norwegian black metal’s violent strain of pagan nihilism and sought to defy the genre’s increasingly stultifying conventions.

You know that always-entertaining column at the front of the magazine called Cry Now, Cry Later? The one written by that incredibly tall, incredibly handsome genius who also wrote this month’s Pentagram cover story?  Fuuuuck, that dude rules so hard it’s amazing that he can even walk down the street without being mobbed by the…

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. Well, every 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 is, in fact, The…

Yesterday we gave away a totally sweet double-vinyl version of Lightning Swords Of Death‘s The Extra-Dimensional Wound provided by the fine folks at Canonical Hours.  Well, we sort of gave it away. The dude or lady who won has yet to claim his or her prize (Terzijdehorde, where fuck are you?).  Nevertheless, we’re soldiering ahead…

Remember grade school?  Those were the days, eh? Cap’n Crunch in the breakfast bowl and the world at your feet. Sure, there was some reading, writing and arithmetic in there somewhere, but mostly it was  just waiting for the bell to ring so you could go home and watch Def Leppard videos. In our case,…

It would be completely accurate to say that Melissa is the greatest album ever named after an errant human skull, but it would also be a ridiculously short sell.

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

Shortly after our trip to the Slave Pit to bring you this month’s GWAR cover story, we sent foul-mouthed front-cretin Oderus Urungus a few follow-up questions via email. Here’s what he told us between long, suffocating hits from his trusty crack pipe: GWAR has been threatening to exterminate the human race for 25 years now,…

If you’ve been following us here on the Deciblog for the last few months, you know that exactly every two weeks we post a flyer for something called Heavy Tuesday. We’re still not really sure what it is, but J. Bennett keeps insisting that it’s occasionally awesome. As far as we can tell, it’s this…

Steele (who was still working for the NYC Parks Department), guitarist Kenny Hickey, drummer Sal Abruscato and producer/keyboardist Josh Silver descended upon Systems Two in Brooklyn to record the album that would propel them into the bright lights and big titties of international rock stardom.

As convoluted back-stories go, it doesn’t get much more tangled than the one behind Pentagram’s Relentless.

Saint Vitus were a living, breathing anachronism in every possible way.

Many will cry sacrilege, but we’re gonna say it anyway: …And Justice for All is Metallica’s finest hour.

Rolling from Los Angeles into the parched sandbox of the Mojave, anyone familiar with Welcome to Sky Valley will see almost all the relevant landmarks along the 10 East freeway.

If there’s just one person in the world who’ll never forget the exact date NOLA came out, it’s Eyehategod guitarist/Down drummer Jimmy Bower.

Call it the face that launched a thousand metalcore graphic designers (into a rat-race of feverish mimicry).

In 1995, Norwegian corpsepaint legends Immortal were on top of the world: With Mayhem’s Hellhammer sitting in on drums, vocalist/bassist Abbath and guitarist/lyricist Demonaz were high on the icy grimness of their own Battles in the North and opening for Morbid Angel on the European leg of the Domination tour.

Cave In have had many musical identities since their inception in Methuen, MA, in 1995, but the one that first established them as underground heroes was the dizzying, face-ripping metal blowout now known the world over as Until Your Heart Stops.

Of all the classic albums thus far inducted into Decibel’s Hall of Fame, none has had a greater influence on the death metal and black metal that succeeded it than Celtic Frost’s Morbid Tales.

They were the best band you never heard of. Unless you lived in the greater Boston area between 1989 and 1995, worked at Century Media, or happened to catch them on your local college radio station (or on their 1993 European tour with the Cro-Mags), Only Living Witness were virtual unknowns.

After Nirvana’s Nevermind tore the “alternative rock market” a seven-figure asshole, every major label with easy access to a couple of guitar-wielding longhairs was vying to shove its swollen corporate phallus into the proverbial money-ring of brown fire.

Drugs, disease, crime, abuse, poverty, paranoia, drugs, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol: Such are the cornerstones of Eyehategod’s time-honored New Orleans aesthetic.

The sweltering heat and merciless humidity of mid- to late-‘80s Florida proved a fertile breeding ground for a burgeoning genre that would announce itself to the world as death metal.

The words “stoner epic” don’t even come close to describing the extreme riff-hypnosis that Jerusalem visited upon the red-eyed legions of heshers, grass pirates, and acid casualties who genuflected at the altar of the legendary San Jose power-trio known as Sleep.

In 1989, while the extreme metal underground was bingeing on the high-speed savagery of death metal and grindcore, ex-Napalm Death vocalist Lee Dorrian and Carcass roadie Mark “Griff” Griffiths were getting ripped on British cider, brown weed, and the down-tuned Sabbathian histrionics of Trouble, St. Vitus, and Witchfinder General.

In the Norwegian summer of 1993, the second wave of black metal was still in its ultra-violent infancy, and only a handful of bands were actively exploring the parameters of what was then an obscure and distinctly Scandinavian art form.