Shawn Macomber

Austin’s down n’ dirty noise merchants Total Abuse are gearing up for the November release of their hotly anticipated Deranged Records debut Excluded, but this morning we’ve got an exclusive advance stream of a grimy, feral aural salvo dubbed “Scabs” below.

You just got good at hauling off and hitting someone. I wasn’t born and raised to do this — I’m a guy from Northwest. I went to private school. This really isn’t part of my metabolism. But it became it…

So muses Henry Rollins in an particularly epiphanous scene amidst Scott Crawford and Jim Saah’s relentlessly edifying Salad Days: A Decade of Punk In Washington, DC (1980-90) — a documentary those of us who seemingly never tire of listening to Rollins and Ian MacKaye fondly recall Georgetown Haagan Dazs days and night street fights with punk hating meatheads were going to watch regardless, but which also happily proves to be an epic, smart, admiring-yet-not-uncritical and — above all — fresh exploration of a seminal moments in time packed with insights and anecdotes that will likely surprise even those who know both Dance of Days and Banned in DC chapter-and-verse.

For “Pestilence By Beemahr” — my short story detailing the grotesque comeuppance a mad perfumer-cum-exterminator receives at the tiny, multitudinous feet of a surprisingly sentient army of flesh-eating gypsy moth caterpillars amidst an egg-web festooned apocalypse, which is available today in the Grey Matter Press rock n’ roll-themed horror anthology Savage Beasts — I drew inspiration from the human-body-as-insect-incubator track “Out of the Body” from Pestilence’s towering sophomore album Consuming Impulse:

Though Jonathan Dennison is best known for churning out righteous riffs and leveling breakdowns with a series of highly influential hardcore bands — The Promise, Another Victim, Path of Resistance, Unholy — the songwriter has taken a sharp turn into the macabre with Cadabra Records, the idiosyncratic label he founded to “exhume the works of influential horror genre icons in a spoken word style.” 

With the dual purpose of introducing the Die My Will dark sonic alchemy to new listeners and perhaps — dare we dream! — nudging a reunion into being and/or dragging that unreleased material into the light, we called upon members of Trap Them, Author & Punisher, Backstabbers, Inc, and others to testify to the band’s power and glory in between sick salvos mined from YouTube.

Sure, Jake E. Lee may have served with distinction during his tumultuous five-year tour of duty under General Sharon, summoning forth a mind-boggling cascade of super-solid riffage and shredding through the tears when he got fucked out of lucrative Bark at the Moon (1983) writing credits, but the guitarist nevertheless gets about as much love from the Osbourne camp as a circa-1982 bat.

As Superjoint Ritual prepares to tour for the first time in ten years, Decibel caught up with legendary frontman Philip H. Anselmo — a top five extreme metal vocalist, by our estimation — for a chat about resurrecting dormant bands, the bittersweet upcoming third Housecore Horror Film Festival, the late, great Corey Mitchell, and the state of that long gestating autobiography.

Last week the world lost Sir Christopher Lee, a ridiculous badass on and off screen, who also had a late-late career legit heavy metal detour which Fangoria Editor-in-Chief Chris Alexander aptly describes as “one of the most fascinating 11th hour career turns in pop culture history.” To honor our fallen fellow metal militiaman Decibel convened an all-star horror-metal panel to discuss Lee’s ascent from untouchable horror icon to extreme music frontman…

Freedom
Party Harder Program
dB Rating: 9/10

Decibel recently had the pleasure of chatting with Ramon Martos about his lush, edifying, fascinating, surprising tour de force history of extreme metal album covers, …And Justice For Art. Check it out below:

If you are anywhere in the vicinity of Philadelphia and possess an affinity for plunging into surreal, beguiling, lush alternate universes, do yourself a solid and head over to Arch Enemy Arts for the epic, wondrous exhibit of hometown fine artist and designer Paul Romano — probably best known to extreme music fans for his work with Mastodon, The Red Chord, Hate Eternal, and a raft of others.

The Plague Within
A dark and darkening journey
dB Rating: 9/10

Ex-Corn On Macabre frontman Billups Allen has expanded his wry, off-kilter take on our collective existence from lyrical couplets into a wonderful new novel entitled The League — almost certainly the only tale to combine a deep dive into the amateur sumo wrestling underground and a Hawaii Five-0-esque murder mystery with a bookworm romance and a Black Sabbath motif. 

This afternoon, we continue making our own lives that much more difficult with the ongoing practice of ranking the songs that comprise some of the greatest albums of all time; albums previously inducted into our untouchable Hall of Fame. Today we explore Life of Agony’s classic debut River Runs Red (originally inducted way back in issue #7, which you can buy here).

Hey, you got your Sabbath-y math rock in my Neurosis-esque epic doom-sludge!

Well, you got your Neurosis-esque epic doom-sludge in my Sabbath-y math rock!

Shades of the infamous walkman crash Reeses Peanut Butter Cups commercial of the 1980s, this is how I imagine the first encounter between members of The Ditch and the Delta must have gone down. 

In his equal parts bewitching and harrowing memoir Punk Elegies: True Tales of Death Trip Kids, Wrongful Sex, and Trial by Angel Dust former Slash Magazine mainstay Allan MacDonell delivers a gorgeous, iconoclastic, wonderfully actualized, deliciously literary encapsulation of the 1970s Hollywood punk scene. 

To celebrate the book’s release MacDonell was kind enough to send this exclusive playlist along to Decibel…

On its crazy diverse leveler of a debut EP West of Everything Lies Death Pittsburgh-based Taphos Nomos — a band which counts a mystery Decibel writer amongst its pseudonymous ranks — summons forth a mesmerizing trio of blackened death doom epics full of pummels, shreds and unforeseeable left turns.

It’s true: Shellac covers by Thou and Great Falls are precisely as fucking awesome as you’d imagine — if, you know, you actually had to use your imagination and not just click “play” below. 

Good. Goddamn.

Detroit noise punkers The Armed completely fucking kill it on the first single from the upcoming Kurt Ballou-helmed Untitled LP. (June 23, No Rest Until Ruin) Check out the fire festooned video for “Forever Scum” after the jump and then go pick up a bunch of free shit over at Bandcamp. 

Whether he’s teaching punk rock history at Tufts, lovingly teasing out the deets of the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime, or weaving an equal parts elegant and gritty tale of New Hampshire have-nots attempting to transcend circumstance in his lovely, affecting Swing State, Michael T. Fournier brings the heavy to his work.  The rising novelist/critic took the hardcore…

Oh, man. Brooklyn’s UnWed get shit right, dropping a heartbeat-quickening melodic post-hardcore bomb dead center on the very best of swaggering, churning 90s rock. Hum meets Killing Joke meets Slint featuring members of Hot Water Music, Small Brown Bike, and Gay for Johnny Depp — how the fuck can you beat that? We’ve got the exclusive stream of…

JRR Tolkien meets a seriously eclectic heavy metal melting pot on the upcoming Black Tower full-length debut The Secret Fire (Unspeakable Axe/No Idea, June 2), and we’ve got the exclusive premiere of the video for the track “Death March.” Here’s what drummer/vocalist Dave Williams had to say: “‘Death March’ is the opening battle cry from Black Tower’s inaugural…

Here’s one to send you off into the TGIF abyss… We’ve got an exclusive stream of “Black But Shining,” one of seven gorgeously remastered tracks on the re-release of Sic Lvceat Lvx, the debut album from forward-thinking black metallers Schammasch. Here’s the lowdown from vocalist C.S.R. Six years have passed since me and B.A. (drums)…

Brett Netson. One of the most soulful, inventive, vivifying shredders on the face of the planet.

Bringer of sublime aural sturm und drang via roots-y-alt-rock-meets-psychedelic-doom outfit Caustic Resin. Art rock force multiplier in Built to Spill. Vanquisher of smarmy motherfuckers. And, now, mastermind of a ridiculously killer multidimensional, dark snarling rock trio, Brett Netson & Snakes.

On the occasion of the release of Snakes’ transcendentScavenger Cultit seemed as good a time as any to ask the group’s iconoclastic leader for a playlist of his heavier influences.

We expected eclectic, and Netson did not disappoint…
 

What will the neighbors think? After a bit of recent onstage drama Trey Oswald is out as the vocalist of Reagan Youth — “Please go get help that you so desperately need,” the “members” section of the band’s Facebook page not-so-subtly reads — and former Dead Kennedy’s frontman/punk rock documentarian Jeff Penalty is in. “There’s…

Toward the end of our conversation with Christopher Mazeika — proprietor and high priest of Philadelphia’s badass new temple of all that is extremely extreme, Vinyl Altar — we inquire how closely his life resembles what we saw/read in High Fidelity. It’s kind of an offhand, silly question, but what Mazeika gives us in response…

Long-running UK metallers Hellbastard have two basic planks in their party platform: 1. “Support the underdog & hail the mighty riff.” 2. “Raise hell and rock the fuck out.” Both of these admirable attributes are on display in this double-barrel exclusive premieres (!) of both the band’s trailer for the sure-to-be-sick upcoming album Feral… …and…

Decibel Hall of Famers Sick of it All don’t require much of an introduction, so let’s just say it’s an extremely extreme honor to present the exclusive premiere of the NYHC legends’ video for “Get Bronx” off the recent hardcore scorcher The Last Act of Defiance and get on with the show…

Last week in a rare over-ground win for underground art and authenticity the preconceived notion-smashing At the Gates comeback record At War With Reality won the Swedish Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal Album of 2014. We, of course, would like to believe this is at least in part the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s…

There is a whole motherfucking lot to recommend Berserker II: The insane line-up (see flyer below), a punk rock “swap meat” hosted by Tesco Vee of the Meatmen, a sweet ass T-shirt designed by Decibel‘s own Mark Rudolph, etcetera… We recently reached out to fest organizer/Child Bite vocalist/guitarist Shawn Knight to get the inside scoop…