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It’s nice to have friends introduce us to new music, but in this age of ever flowing information and ubiquitous quick links, we often rely on bands’ personnel connections to lead us to our next aural awakening. Dude in our favorite death metal band also plays on this grind record or in that prog collective,…

Obviously, War On Music’s Charley Justice works a lot faster than I do. When his original retail location at 38-44 Albert Street in downtown Winnipeg went up in flames back on April 19th, he ramped up his usual whirlwind of internalised kinetic energy and went to work at opening another location as quickly as possible….

The past week or so has brought lots of Caspian news, which we were thrilled about given that aside from some shows here and there, it’s been a while since we’d heard from the instrumental post-rockers. According to their Facebook page, the Massholes spent much of April through June not playing, but rebounded nicely by…

If this sounds like the rambling of an old fart, so be it: kids have it too easy these days when it comes to underground music. If you have a laptop and spare time you have unfettered access to pretty much every rare treasure recorded during the past four decades of metal and punk. That…

Silje interviewed as part of our most excellent Women in Metal issue [dB #94]. How will Disclosure differ from The West Pole? Silje Wergeland: it’s fresher, braver, more confident and honest, deeper, newer. Now that the lineup’s had a few years to synch what’s it’s like working together? Silje Wergeland: It’s great and inspiring! We…

Melvins Lite w/Retox, Club 9One9, Victoria, BC, July 16Who can really keep up with just exactly what the Melvins are up to at any given moment? There are new releases like clockwork. They have always been a prolific band and we suspect they always will be. If nothing else, they’ll have a discography that stretches…

On 21 September, Scotland’s most enthusiastical audio bloodletters Black Sun will reimagine Shakespeare’s most brutal play as a theatrical work of avant-garde metal. The Glaswegian industrial/doom trio, operating under their extra-war-and-extra-percussion Black Sun Drums Korps handle, will take the Bard’s text, cut it up and adapt it to their own aesthetic. Given how carnal, martial…

What the squawk is up? Happy Jason Voorhees Day.

Last year, Italian mostly-instrumental quartet Orbe created one of those albums that I listened to with half an ear and then didn’t get back to for a while.  Sometimes that’s an indicator of an album without a whole lot of immediacy, and sometimes it simply indicates the laziness of the audience.  In the case of…

For the love of speed trials: another dose of Dive Bombs and Dive Bars – heavy metal venue reviews from everywhere across this blasted country. In this installment, Jonah Livingston, Ramming Speed’s blastbeat stopwatch, takes us to Boston, for a review of a venue in his home town. Great Scott Venue Allston, MA I must…

…Gaza fucking rule. The Salt Lake City ragers have a new album, entitled No Absolutes in Human Suffering, in the starting blocks and set to explode all over your faces on July 31st, courtesy Black Market Activities. Having just returned home last week from the opening slot on the Corrosion of Conformity/Torche/Black Cobra tour, the…

We spend a lot of time talking to artists—whether in blog posts or in each month’s issue—and rightfully so. After all, they put their blood, sweat and tears into making the music that brings us together. We haven’t necessarily dedicated a lot of space to the people actually putting out those releases, however, so we…

The Dutch hardcore band Vitamin X has been at it for fifteen years. While that might not seem like a huge stretch compared to, say, Sick Of It All it’s still a nice run in a time of short lived bands and one-man projects started in your neighbor’s basement. Their fifth album About To Crack…

Grave. Twenty-four years young today. What keeps Swedish death metal bands alive—when by all rights they should be, uh, dead—for so long? Is it the bone-cold water? Dunno, but we’ve used the phrase before to cliched ends of sanity. Is it the clean crisp Scandinavian air? Yeah, used that cliche too. Maybe it’s the fetid…

We knew there would be some Decibel dissenters when we bagged on 10 albums that we wouldn’t be celebrating the 30th anniversary of in 2012.

No need to go overboard on the introduction here: Perdition of the Sublime, the upcoming full-length debut from German tech death metallers Sophicide, slays. Front to back, beginning to end, Perdition is a overflowing platter of nasty, bestial epics from which this morning we proudly serve an exclusive appetizer, “Within Darkness.” “‘Within Darkness’ is a…

Italian doom trio Ufomammut have released a video teaser for forthcoming album Opus Alter, out 18 September through Neurot. Opus Alter is the second half of Ufomammut’s ORO series. Its predecessor, Opus Primum, dropped in April, and was a lush dizzying headtrip of psychedelic guitars, space rock ambience all darkened by the unspoken threat of…

Welcome to The Lazarus Pit, a biweekly look at should-be classic metal records that don’t get nearly enough love; stuff that’s essential listening that you’ve probably never heard of; stuff that we’re too lazy to track down the band members to do a Hall Of Fame for.  In celebration of our nation’s birthday (if you…

In a recent dB article (issue #92), author Jeff Wagner opined that “there are too many death/doom bands out there these days.” Upon reading such a flagrantly deranged statement, I gagged on my mouthful of burrito, my left arm went all limp and tingly, and I blacked out for what might have been hours but…

While this isn’t really new news, as the original annoucement of noisy, melodic, post-everything-core quartet, Planes Mistaken For Stars reuniting for a quick East Coast summer tour was originally made back in May, the kick-off date draws closer, my friends. And seeing how memory retention is on par with attention spans these days, we here…

At the end of March, Agalloch announced that it had completed work on new EP Faustian Echoes. The band had originally planned to release the effort—one 20+ minute song (the longest of its career) recorded live onto two-inch tape—on its upcoming US tour, but on Sunday, roughly a week before its first show, made it…

“Sit back and hold your breath/Just let nature take effect.” So said death metal OG Chris Barnes in his Six Feet Under ode to marijuana “4:20.” In addition to death and murder tales, Barnes has been an unapologetic advocate for legalizing marijuana since the early days of his metal career. Barnes has been riding high…

Since we know that a few of you may be enjoying frosty barley pops and doing your best not to blow a limb off tomorrow while celebrating Independence Day, we figured a Tankard song premiere was in order. Yeah, don’t ask us how we got from Point A to Point B on that one, but…

On today’s edition of Into the Depths we invite Karl Sanders out of the catacombs for a conversation on how a hippie-admiring kid from San Francisco became a visionary force of nature in extreme music destined to single-handedly summon the improbable subgenre of ithyphallic death metal into being. From having to pawn their guitars on…

Benefit shows always have a weird vibe but death metal benefit shows are especially weird. Maybe it’s because the genre is ordinarily used as our portal to antisocial emotional territories, and when there is the attendant poignancy of a good cause it makes everyone feel as if they’ve been given a different script for the…

The last time we featured American heavy metal phenoms Iced Earth on the Deciblog, WordPress wasn’t even cool yet. In fact, evidence of said coverage is lost in some Access database that’s sitting in some office on a tape back-up. So, yeah, we’ve been delinquent in our patriotic (hey, July 4th is two days away)…

Nothing unites the metal community quite like a healthy hit of righteous rage.  War, complacency, ignorance, religion, technology, the opposite sex, government subsidies – if something pisses you off, someone’s encoding your disgust into guitar riff magic. Any good New Ager Rager knows that nature is very, um, fertile soil for dark musical themes.  As…

Orange County’s Seven Sisters of Sleep aren’t big on going out of their way to get in people’s faces. Then again, I’m speaking from a shaking babies and kissing hands perspective. I’ve never seen them live and judging by the rusty heroin needle guitar tone and sociopathic throat abuse that drives their hammering of metallic…

Last week, we brought you Part 1 of our interview with The Day After The Sabbath‘s proprietor Rich. This week not only includes the rest of our interview, but a mini-playlist of five tracks hand-picked by the man himself. And while you’re at it, be sure to check out the latest TDATS compilation (#71), his…

Decibel published its first ever “Women In Metal,” issue this month, which offers an exhaustive look at the enormous contributions women have made to metal music (and the metal industry). If for some inexplicable reason you don’t subscribe then you can snag a copy from our store . If you are wise, you might have…