Shawn Macomber

Force of nature. Is there a phrase that better encapsulates the pure transcendent fury actress/frontwoman/fool crusher Jessica Pimentel exudes during a performance by genre bending extreme metallers Alekhine’s Gun? Maybe, maybe not. That sort of charisma and élan is admittedly difficult to bind up in words — as anyone privileged enough to have been on…

No need to ponder the true secret of the ooze any longer: We’ve got an exclusive stream of a ultra sick new track from Chicago thrash mavens Oozing Wound. It’s entitled “Drug Reference” and will, moments from now, commence fucking with your head… “Drug Reference” is an entry in the excellent Adult Swim Singles Program…

Howard Stern Show regular, Charred Walls of the Damned drummer, Halloween enthusiast, and Decibel contributor Richard Christy sure does get around. A few months ago I saw him sit in with Stryper for “Sing Along Song” at Terminal 5 in New York City — clad in a sweet vintage To Hell With the Devil shirt,…

No need to fuck around too much here: Triptykon’s Melana Chasmata is an absolute beast of an album — a churning cauldron of clever invention and legit representation that expands the boundaries of a genre in pretty desperate need of boundary expansion. It is that rare release to which — whether one eventually loves or…

Hot on the shambling undead heels of the uber-sick 2013 full-length The Barrens, Denver’s masters of smart, dark n’ dirty death metal Crypticus are set to return with Chains for Devils, the second in the band’s Horror Grind Mixtape series — i.e. “an original Death Metal mini-anthology designed to confound, horrify, & delight.” This morning,…

Never thought I’d get to meet the devilNever thought I’d meet him face to face Heard he always worked alone, that he seldom wrote or used a phone So I walked right up to meet him at his place Two years before unleashing Carrie on the world in 1976, Brian DePalma concocted the profoundly weird,…

So…here’s one of those times when you actually can go ahead and judge an album by its cover: Friday the 13th obsessives Death Curse play nasty, fuzzy, stripped down death n’ roll and the band isn’t really isn’t inclined to do fuck-all to pretty it up for anyone outside the horror metal cult. We’ve got…

A389 Recordings is the most dangerous record label in America, period. Those who doubt it will have a tough time accounting for the 2014 A389 Digital Mixtape/Sampler, an utter beast of a collection featuring fifty-plus salvos from such sinister extreme music heavyweights such as Integrity, Bloodlet, Ringworm, Weekend Nachos, The Black Dahlia Murder, Iron Reagan,…

Overkill has been on an absolute tear since Ironbound (2010), and the unrelenting down n’ dirty thrash of the band’s latest excellent sneering scream from the gutter White Devil Armory

To paraphrase the demon that once mauled Albert Brooks in his own car on the side of a darkened road back in ’83: Hey, d’ya you want to hear something really scary? Yeah? You sure? Alright, then, Fangoria Musick — the exquisitely eclectic, ceaselessly unsettling new digital download music label from the legendary flagship magazine…

Not a huge fan of live records? Me either. But Twitching Tongues actually kill it on World War LIVE, a venture into the format that serves the band’s roiling, infectious Integrity-meets-old-school-Life-of-Agony sound shockingly well. Here’s the cutesy official explanation… Recorded live in the Van Nuys stadium called THE PIT in front of twenty screaming fans,…

For its tenth birthday Louisville, Kentucky’s rightly celebrated progressive punkers Coliseum may have re-signed with Deathwish, but it’s the rest of us who are getting the gift: A totes beautiful deluxe reissue of the band’s instant classic self-titled debut rager featuring eight bonus tracks, a full remix by Toxic Holocaust’s Joel Grind, extensive liner notes,…

Thanks to Acrania the world shall soon no longer need wonder what it would sound like if George Orwell served as spiritual advisor to a uber-brutal modern death metal band — these London slammers’ kinetic, oppressive, appropriately-titled debut full-length Totalitarian Dystopia will answer that question in fairly definitive fashion at the end of next month….

Welcome to Tales From the Metalnomicon, a column delving into the surprisingly vast world of heavy metal-tinged/inspired literature and metalhead authors… Today the Metalnomicon offers up introductions to two brand new publications with pounding, bleeding heavy metal hearts… All this time we thought we could only listen to, or play instruments, or scream our metal….

The superb Boston/Norway black metal outfit Hekseri will be conjuring its unique brand of “witching metal” opening for Behexen at Martyrdoom this Sunday and to get you ready we’ve got an exclusive stream of “Der Hexenhammer,” a searing, turbulent track off the band’s new CD single Soul’s Prison is Flesh. “‘Der Hexenhammer’ is about the…

Here’s the deal: The legendary Joe Petagno — AKA the creator of the Motorhead “Snaggletooth” mascot, amongst other iconic images — has drawn three custom exclusive skateboard graphics for Beer City Skateboards and Records. Beer City has been around for over twenty-one years making the highest quality skateboard decks as well as putting out all…

Daniel Suffering of Philadelphia heavy electronics act WHORID and the ANNIHILVS label recently received some terrible news: After twenty years in remission, his mother’s cancer has returned…just a few months after she lost her job and on the eve of an attempt to start her own business. To help pay for her necessary treatment and…

Those who enjoy the antics of kaleidoscopic everything-and-the-kitchen-sink chaos metallers Look What I Did may or may not be aware of two things: 1) Zanzibar III: Analog Prison, the band’s long-gestating, much-anticipated rock opera follow-up to the straight-out awesome Atlas Drugged is “perilously close to having a release date” and 2) frontman Barry Donegan is…

Jonesing for some blackout-dark, dynamic-as-fuck, gloriously oppressive, progressive-yet-unabashedly-brutal hardcore reminiscent of Blacklisted and early American Nightmare? What a coincidence! We’ve got an exclusive track off the straight-up awesome upcoming full-length debut from soon-to-be scene levelers My Fictions streaming below. “Stranger Songs is an LP we’ve been working on for over two years,” guitarist/vocalist Ryan Boone…

By the time future preconception-leveling heavy metal siren Kobra Paige hit age fifteen the Calgary, Alberta native had already been studying piano, classical vocal technique, and music theory for eight solid years.

It’s been thirty years since Yngwie Malmsteen unleashed Rising Force on an unsuspecting world, obliterating any and all preconceived notions of what was possible with an electric guitar. Now comes Guitar Gods, a tour featuring the legit insane line-up of Malmsteen headlining over a shred-heavy bill that includes Uli Jon Roth (Scorpions, Electric Sun), Gary…

It’s not as if Prong ever completely fell off, really, but 2012’s Carved Into Stone nevertheless felt like a return to form in both energy and attack, and now, two years later, comes Ruining Lives, a ferocious, amped, occasionally pretty damn adventurous album that may very well be the band’s best effort since its nineties…

Providence, Rhode Island-based FUCKING INVINCIBLE — featuring faces that will be familiar to fans of Daughters, Dropdead, Soul Control, Sweet Jesus, etcetera — gave themselves a lot to live up to with their chosen moniker, but, as the exclusive stream of “Ape As Man/Man As Ape” below ably demonstrates, these dudes have good reason to…

Kathmandu, Nepal’s Dying Out Flame play Vedic death metal — that is, in the words of the band’s charismatic and eloquent frontman Aabeg Gautam, “Hindu themes derived from ancient Vedic philosophy/mythology and literature, incorporating ancient sanskrit shlokas, and fusing traditional Hindu classical music to brutal death metal.” Sounds pretty esoteric and spacey, right? Well, get…

Last year we excerpted a couple selections from Lewis Dimmick’s excellent book This Music over at the Metalnomicon.