Jonathan Horsley

“RICHIE HAWTIN is someone that I got exposed to when I was maybe seventeen or eighteen, at an age when I was most into the metal scene, and something just clicked with me. He had these records that were so trancey but trance in the sense of trance-inducing not trance dance music. You just get…

When Horror Pain Gore Death’s commander-in-chief sent through IMPALERS‘ debut LP Power Behind the Throne it really looked like the email concerned some band called Impalas. Swear to God. And how cool a band name would that be? Okay, when they’re leaping around the savanna Impalas come across too cutesy for old-school thrash metal, but…

Live Evil Festival 2013 will take place on October 18th-20th at the Highbury Garage, London, with two UK exclusive shows from reformed NWOBHM elders SATAN and Ohio slayers MIDNIGHT already confirmed. With bands picked on the condition that they’ve featured in Fenriz of Darkthrone’s Band of the Week blog, Live Evil is resolutely, 100% fundamentally…

Courtesy of the good people of Horror Pain Gore Death Productions, the Deciblog is honored to roll up with this exclusive album stream of Floridian doom quartet DRUID LORD‘s debut LP, Hymns for the Wicked. Hymns originally dropped on Hallowe’en, 2010, sold out on CD and vinyl, and is now up for reissue tomorrow (February…

Plugging a radio show in this day and age seems kinda quaint when you consider that music can be streamed all over the Internet but, with upcoming guest DJs Bill Taylor from Immolation and Esa Linden of Demigod, Metalenema is a special case. Their show’s remit—death and black metal, both classic and contemporary, with “some…

Stepping into a recording studio can be intimidating for the inexperienced musician. Sure it’s always intimidating for the experienced musicians. Of course it is. That’s precisely because bands that have been over the course know that it’ll be costing them money and lots of it. For the green band cutting their first demo, that debut…

A lot of people were digging Vex’s 2010 debut album, Thanatopsis but even though there was a buzz in the underground surrounding the Texan’s weird genre-splicing take on death metal Memorious still has the capacity to surprise. Looking at the bare facts is misleading; Horror Pain Gore Death Productions are writing the checks, Vex are…

When the Deciblog caught up with GOJIRA frontman/guitarist Joe Duplantier last week, he was clocking up the road miles across Canada on in a tour that’ll see the French progressive/death-ish metal quartet take in the west coast of America before snaking along the south and terminating in New York. Supporting their fifth album, L’Enfant Sauvage,…

Even though VON have been kicking around since ’87, are pretty much responsible for Watain’s existence (their name, at least), they only managed to get their shit together and release debut LP, Satanic Blood, in October of last year. There are mitigating circumstances and all, what with the band splitting and going into what appeared…

Gorehounds, gut-sifters, and comic book ghouls will no doubt be aware that Bay Area death metal titans Autopsy have been immortalized in in Feast for a Funeral, a band-authorised comic by E-Comix. As you’d expect from Autopsy’s generously gruesome back catalogue, and gather from the promotional video trailer for the comic [below], Feast for a…

Anthrax main-man Scott Ian isn’t about to quit metal and hit the after-dinner speaking circuit or anything, at least not just yet. But following a successful one-off spoken word show in London last November he has booked a 16-date spoken word tour of the UK. He’s calling it Speaking Words, because a spoken word tour…

First thing’s first: Before reading further, anyone who’s got their TiVo box or whatever all loaded up in preparation for some marathon catch-up TV over the holiday season, be warned that this is a spoiler-heavy review of TV drama in 2012. OK, so with the disclaimers out of the way, let’s get down to business…

Fight Amp’s Birth Control is the sort of super-cool genre non-specific releases that sounds like it was written in a week tops and thrashed out and tracked in a day. It sounds 100 per cent jam room live, heaping catchy riffs on top of awkward and dissonant hardcore punk and noise-rock. If it sounds unruly,…

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…

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…

Incantation need no introduction, surely, so let’s keep this brief and to the point. The Pennsylvanian death metal kingpins release their ninth album, Vanquish in Vengeance, on November 27th through Listenable Records. This is Incantation’s first LP since 2006’s sulfurous Primordial Domination, and considering death metal’s new wave of old-schoolers have grown evermore reliant on…

On November 16th, Savannah sludge/metal/psych/punk/other band Kylesa will release From the Vaults Vol. 1 through Season of Mist. It’s been two years since the release of Spiral Shadow, and given you’ll will have to wait until the spring for a follow-up, those of you jonesing for a fix of heavy-and-trippy should check out this out….

According to those gentle, God-fearin’ souls at Studylight.org, Maveth—transliterated from Old Testament Hebrew and translated into English—is defined as: “death, dying, Death (personified), realm of the dead; death; death by violence (as a penalty); state of death, place of death” . . . And my, how that is apt, because Finland’s Maveth are pretty much…

Bands always make such a big deal about playing the Roundhouse because of who played here in the past. It’s a former railway engine room, with a lot of rock ‘n’ roll history. But any similarities between the 1960s Roundhouse and today’s venue begin and end with the building’s foundations and unalterable architecture. It’s hard…

If you mention “gallery” and “death metal” in the same sentence we’re probably going to think Gallery of Suicide. Maybe this is a sign of the yawning chasm that exists between extreme metal and art/gallery culture, or maybe it’s just a deeply concerning hardwired word association. But, if you think about it, aside from the…

UK underground champs Dead Beyond Buried are giving their new album, The Dark Era, and that’s pretty cool, right? Everyone likes free stuff. That’s a given. And especially free music. Eight out 10 features with bands at some point touch upon the music industry’s perilous position right over yon great fiscal abyss, into which it’s…

The concept of faith might be diametrically opposed to Marduk’s pitch-black worldview but the Swedish fundamentalists are worthy of yours. Of all the Second Wave black metal bands who still consider their iconoclastic craft a full-time concern, Marduk are the ones who always deliver. They could be accused of lacking a sense of adventure when…

Decibel usually maintains a safe distance from the film and TV business because, well, it looks totally fucked up and confusing and the printed word is a tough enough mistress to keep. But when anthropologist, award-winning film-maker and metal fan Sam Dunn came calling looking for funding and support for an extreme metal episode of…

“Epic’s in my nature,” says Mark “the Shark” Shelton. “That’s all there is to it. It’s all about the telling of a good story.” He’s talking about his writing style and ethos for Manilla Road and new side-project with Manilla Road bassist Ernie Cunningham Hellwell, but such a declaration applies equally to Shelton’s expansive conversation…

What else could New Mexico nerve-shredders Noisear have named their forthcoming album? Turbulent Resurgence kinda sums everything up nicely; in the year since the release of the near free-jazz grind lunacy of Subvert the Dominant Paradigm, the band have shed some serious personnel and had to regroup and re-focus. But despite the changing of the…

Yeah, it seems kind of corny to talk of a “dream team” existing in doom’s dark, colorless realm but, shit, just consider Serpentine Path’s personnel. You’ve got Tim Bagshaw, guitarist for saturnine UK doom crew Ramesses and a founding member of Electric Wizard, jamming with entire crew of the now (sadly) defunct Unearthly Trance, Jay…

We’ve only had the pleasure of hearing Neurosis’ forthcoming album, Honor Found in Decay, once. All the lights were out save for two candles and the peak meters on the mixing desk. And while the darkness made for a totally immersive listening experience, it reduced note-taking to scoring crude approximations of words onto the one-sheet,…

Seeing as Florida’s output of death metal has slowed to a trickle as scene veterans spend more time on the road, less time in the studio, or just sweat it out in semi-retirement, you could do worse than check in on Finland’s Gorephilia. Gorephilia’s long-awaited debut LP Embodiment of Death is old-school all right, and…

Noisear’s debut Subvert the Dominant Paradigm was one of the finest grind albums to scar the planet last year. It was remarkable: not only was it a nerve-shredding compendium of white-hot dissonance, skronky grind and blast that recalled by-gone genre royality Discordance Axis, but it was written and recorded in little over a day. Maybe…

All right, so metal has always elicited a strong emotional response but rarely (shit, never) has it inspired the abandonment of a sedentary lifestyle in favor of 20 push-ups and a 10km run.It’s like, disco has long had an association with that whole workout gym culture; Lycra, protein shakes, glutes, quads and aerobic dance for…