Jonathan Horsley

British black/death immolators Craven Idol deliver Decibel‘s album of the week via Forked Tongues.

A Stirring in the Noos
Young gods
dB rating: 8/10

Infrared Horizon
Aye, robot
dB rating: 8/10

Memento Collider
Infectious grooves, alternate realities
dB rating: 9/10

Melodic death metal, crust, d-beat, black metal, doom, post-metal . . . It doesn’t really matter how you label Nux Vomica because it’s pretty much impossible to adequately describe their wayfaring sound in terms of genre alone. Yeah we went for crust in this headline, but that was more of a convenient adjective, headline shorthand,…

Indianapolis’ Coffinworm are essential listening for those who like their extreme metal to open up wide and drown any extant optimism in a genre non-specific swamp of sunken riffs and black metal noise ‘n’ hiss. 2010’s debut LP When All Became None was a loose-limbed doom record that was too anxious and fidgety to plant…

Gravehill rule for a whole bunch of reasons. The Californian alpha-headbangers just have this anything goes attitude to playing gory ol’ school death metal and would just as soon mix in a little hardcore punk and crust feel as they are to bring it down slow and low and meditate upon a doom riff for…

Chicago’s Indian are presently hauling their blackhearted nihilism across the tarmac of the UK and Europe in support of the Decibel-approved From all Purity. It’s a sick record from disturbed men, maybe more noisy, more off-the-chain than anything they’ve cut to record before, and if your record collection exists primarily to harsh your mellow (which,…

We could introduce “The Ascending Fire” but telling you how it is the closing track on Gravehill’s third full-length, Death Curse. We could chime in and offer our ten cents’ on how the track will give you a real taste for a vulgar doozy of an old-school death metal record that’s unafraid to augment its…

English grind trio Human Cull don’t look to reinvent the wheel each and every time they step into the practice space. They are way more interested in trying to split the atom with bass, drums and throat. Originally formed under the name Gran Toucher, they soon got serious in 2011, became Human Cull, and focused…

Towers come from Portland, Oregon, and have this awesome sound that’s a strange brew concocted of low-end bass hum and psych-stoner doom, post-punk and krautrock. There is a lot more in there, too. Putatively, it’s metal all right, but with a center so dark and heavy it can pull in all manner of outré influences…

**Welcome to the inaugural Deciblog Film Club, where each month we’ll poll someone from the extremely extreme community at large on a handful of films that have had an impact on their lives and their art. Think of it as an opportunity for all of us to lay down the blast beats and death growls…

Michael Klassen has never met Daniel Jansson. OK, you’re thinking, why should he? But given that Jansson is the singer in his band, it is kind of weird. Well, unconventional certainly. Klassen plays guitar, bass and provides other instrumentation in Culted, working out of Winnipeg, Canada, with Kevin Stevenson (Drums), Matthew Freisson (guitar/bass/other) and Erik…

It’s time to go back, folks. It’s time to wade way, way back into the primordial ooze and sift out a hallowed blast from the past in this exclusive album stream of GreyHaze Records’ reissue of Mystifier’s Wicca. The Brazilian black metal legends released Wicca in 1992, and although it has been rereleased a handful…

Omnizide. What a name. Kinda makes you think of a market-leading bug spray. But their sound makes you think of, ooh, kinda old-school Darkthrone, and falls somewhere between the nexus of death metal and physically imposing Swedish black metal, bands such as Naglfar and Watain . . . And Craft. Definitely there’s some Craft. There’s…

Iron Hand are a crusty d-beat/hardcore band from New Haven, CT, and, courtesy of Safety Meeting Records you can stream their awesome debut 12-inch, Injected Fear right here, right now. Injected Fear is a rugged and lean 18 minutes of the sort of unpolished fury that’s probably best experienced live as it rattles around an…

Courtesy of FDA Rekotz, the Deciblog is proud to bring you a wee afternoon poke in the eye by way of “Cryostasis”, taken from Morfin’s debut LP, Inoculation. The album drops on Feb 21st. You can pre-order it here. Morfin will be mother’s milk to all those old-school death metal connoisseurs who get their necks…

Ladies and germs, courtesy of the good people of Kaotoxin Records, it is our great honor to host this online premiere of Drawer’s self-tilted sophomore album. Drawers are a five-piece outfit from Toulouse, France, who play sludge or a variant thereof; Drawers is really just big-riffed, amp-worshipping metal. This is sludgish metal. Indeed, calling Drawers…

Consider this here, folks, as an unofficial, off-the-cuff (read: poorly researched and impulsive) addendum to Decibel #112’s Top 20 2014 preview. This being the Internet, consider the following dispatch to be largely free of firm facts such as album/song titles, empirical data (release dates), and official words to corroborate our conjecture as to when said…

On November 12th, Norwegian death metal atavists Obliteration finally broke their silence with Black Death Horizon, the long-awaited follow-up to their awesome 2009 LP, Nekrospalms. Where ‘psalms spread the gospel of old-school death metal through riffs redolent of Autopsy et al, Black Death Horizon finds Obliteration visiting a new plane of extreme metal. Death metal,…

What with a holiday season to service and a ten-year anniversary to celebrate, the good people of Seventh Rule Recordings have doubled down on the good cheer and offered you the chance to win their entire vinyl discography in their 10 Year Glitch Prize Package Says a dispatch from Seventh Rule’s Portland HQ: “Seventh Rule…

The late, great Richard Pryor was many things. With his game face on he was the funniest man on the planet; Jerry Seinfeld said he was the Picasso of comedy. Pryor was a proper maverick who offended a whole bunch of squares who needed offended, and fittingly turned up in the weirdest of places, perhaps…

Well folks, it is the holiday season; what with the temperatures falling and nights closing in, and even the walls closing in, too, it’s officially the most miserable time of the year. Respite is in short supply. Hard liquor and pharmaceuticals can only do so much. But, step away from the shotgun, there’s a hefty…

A few months ago we had the pleasure of hosting the online premiere of Craven Idol’s awesome debut LP, Towards Eschaton. And it really was a pleasure, ‘cos this slab of apocalyptica is a total 100 per cent doozy. Released through Dark Descent in October, Towards Eschaton is a record that marks the Londoners’ evolution…

The Internet is the darnest thing. One minute you could be sifting YouTube to harvest bootlegged footage of metal dudes on cooking shows, the next you could be jamming a new track from band whose oeuvre is every bit as esoteric an experience as seeing Marty Friedman on a Japanese cookery show. Maybe there is…

Courtesy of the good people at Willowtip, we’ve got a fierce, frantic and faceripping track premiere from Nausea‘s forthcoming LP, Condemned to the System. While Nausea have been grinding it out live over the past couple of years, showing up and throwing down at such shindigs as MDF and Bloodshed, they’ve hardly been prolific; Condemned…

We’re all listed out after totalling up the scores for the albums of the year and putting together our Top 100 Black Metal Albums of All Time special issue. But author Dayal Patterson, a man in league with unfathomable evil, kindly dipped into his wellspring of arcane ancient darkness to muster the energy to give…

Lycus’ debut was one of the best doom albums to leak long-form misery over 2013. A disconsolate epic, Tempest is an album that was thrown up around the desolate heart of a funeral doom sound so dense that it has its own bleak gravity hauling influences from black and death metal, drone and krautrock into…

Dearest death-heads, please affix your finest gurn of appreciation as we welcome an exclusive stream of “King of All”, a real chunky piece of slo-mo O.S.D.M. chug taken from Demonical’s gnarly forthcoming Metal Blade LP, Darkness Unbound. As you would expect from Demonical, Darkness Unbound is one unsophisticated beast; Demonical, lest we forget, are graduates…

Even though they are just off the red-eye after spending 30 days playing 30 shows across Europe with Black Tusk, there is plenty juice left in Fight Amp. New Jersey/Philly’s undisputed heavyweight noise rock/HC/punk/sludge/OTHER champs have one show left on the calendar, but Mike McGinnis just wants to keep on going. The Deciblog caught up…