Featured

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 for students of extreme metal that you may not have ever heard of.  Stuff that we’re too lazy to track down the band members to do a Hall Of Fame for. Last…

March 22nd is the due date for Woods IV: The Green Album, the Woods of Ypres’ reissue that is more akin to a tectonic plate shift than a record release. And we now have a clip for one of the band’s heart-trampling creations. A combination of piano balladry and unyielding doom, the track has us…

By Ashmedi (Melechesh) The first column for 2011. And it’s number 16. For a person who used to hate writing I find this quite the accomplishment.  2010 was very productive year. It is the year The Epigenesis was recorded and not long ago released, so I felt a sense of accomplishment and relief. We are…

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. Well, every Wednesday morning, a Decibel staffer or special guest will take to the Deciblog to bitch and moan at length as to why everybody’s full of shit and said dud is, in fact, The…

DOGS:For Sly FaFara and Lord Bacchus FaFara “Ya like DOGS?” Brad Pitt asked in the movie Snatch. Dogs . Yes! I love ‘em. I’m a loner. Don’t do well in crowd. Don’t do the backstage thing. Humans just make me uncomfortable. They all want something from you. But Dogs!?!? When I’m home, it’s me and…

First off, let me introduce myself: my name is Oscar Dronjak, and I play guitar in the Swedish heavy metal band HammerFall. But that’s not what this blog is going to be about. I’ve been asked to write a weekly column on my number one favorite passions outside of music: MMA in general and the…

Every Friday (or, um, Monday), Waldo the African Grey Parrot, frontbird of thrash-grind immortals Hatebeak, will get you caught up on the week’s latest “extreme” releases. What’s up beak geeks? The new year brings a lot of things, and one of those things is Ulcerate’s The Destroyers of All. These kiwis really know how to…

To date, Swedish progressive metallers Evergrey haven’t had much Decibel ‘presence’. Maybe a review here, a review there over the course of our six now-infamous years on this silly planet. Will that change? Only Pontificator-in-Chief Albert Mudrian knows for certain. But that hasn’t stopped Evergrey from infiltrating the Deciblog, where, like dreams, all things are…

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. Well, every Wednesday morning, a Decibel staffer or special guest will take to the Deciblog to bitch and moan at length as to why everybody’s full of shit and said dud is, in fact, The…

When Charles [Elliott; vocals/guitar] contacted me the only lyrics that was written was Leveling the Plane of Existence. It makes reference to us crawling out from the primordial ooze and is basically about wiping us from the planet so that everything starts from zero again.

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 for students of extreme metal that you may not have ever heard of.  Stuff that we’re too lazy to track down the band members to do a Hall Of Fame for.  First…

How did you get past the personal and professional challenges that faced you while writing and recording Black Rivers Flow?Alex Lackner: With everything that was being thrown at us during the process of making this record many would seem to fail. We didn’t even allow that to be an option. To start with, the whole…

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. Well, every Wednesday morning, a Decibel staffer or special guest will take to the Deciblog to bitch and moan at length as to why everybody’s full of shit and said dud is, in fact, The…

Violent, dynamic, and, as always, controversial, Austrian death/black metal machine have aspired to greatness on new album Blood Magick Necromance. So much so, in fact, we’ve been allowed early access to Belphegor’s ninth album and the gap between the group’s early black metal work is sort of like comparing Abominations of Desolation to Covenant. Belphegor…

Fallen, the eighth album from Burzum, will be released in North America on April 5.  The album is the second to be released via Varg Vikernes’ imprint Byelobog Productions (via Candlelight for the territory).  The album features seven new compositions by the controversial Norwegian musician; each adding another storied journey to the celebrated Burzum legacy….

I’m pretty sure the dudes in Full Blown Chaos are tough as skyscrapers on the surface but soft as teddy bears on the inside. Just look at these guys. They make UFC superstars piss their pants and ask for mumma, but shove a Blue Heeler puppy in their face and chances are they’d go into…

Every Friday, Waldo the African Grey Parrot, frontbird of thrash-grind immortals Hatebeak, will get you caught up on the week’s latest “extreme” releases. Hello, fellow avian supremacists. I’d like to pour one out for my dead homie this week. A friend of the Beak’s has passed away. Basil, one of the singers of the mighty…

Perhaps the expiration date has passed since the Decibel-sponsored Darkness Reborn World Tour has been toe tagged for almost a month now, but semi-deep reflection over the events at Philadelphia’s Electric Factory warrant at least a few digital inkwells be spilled in reverence to one of the three bands supporting headliner/arctic Mad Max lookalikes Dimmu…

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. Well, every Wednesday morning, a Decibel staffer or special guest will take to the Deciblog to bitch and moan at length as to why everybody’s full of shit and said dud is, in fact, The…

All wars must come to an end. For the Deciblog and Sodom, this week is our final week we assault to your sensitive senses in the form of streaming thrash metal madness from our favorite German legacy act. Though Kreator and Destruction get props, too. For week 7, we’re capping off things with a two…

Grindy Syracuse experimentalists Imbroglio are one of our favorite young bands; Shane Mehling and Nick Green have already extolled their many virtues in the reviews section. So, we figured we should share some of the serration: sophomore album Sleep Deprivation‘s “December,” not to mention a suitably downtrodden explanation by guitarist/vocalist D.J. Gilbert. It’s our January…

You write long songs. At what point do you go, “OK, I’m done. The song is complete.”? M. Lehto: A Collapse of Faith and also the previous album The Womb of Primordial Nature have long songs on them, no question about it. It’s something that worked for me naturally as I usually like to make…

Over the past few years, we metallers have seen our special sigil—the goat horn—stripped of its significance (i.e., magical power) by clueless celebrities (Miley Cyrus gets it wrong first then gets it right second) and pop culture junkies looking add ‘edge’ to their persona. That ‘edge’ they seek is, or rather was, ours. True, I’ve…

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. Well, every Wednesday morning, a Decibel staffer or special guest will take to the Deciblog to bitch and moan at length as to why everybody’s full of shit and said dud is, in fact, The…

Is is Week 6 already? Time sure does fly. Between Week 1’s double smartbomb drop in “In War and Pieces”, “Hellfire” and Week 5’s god-blessed existential query in “God Bless You“, Sodom shows that despite its members nearing the nifty Fifties they can out-Thrash just about any young buck nu-thrasher in a bootleg Forbidden shirt…

Back when time was kept on watches and not phones (i.e., the period shortly after the demise of the trilobites) Swede Dan Swanö was producing records by Opeth, Katatonia, 59 Times the Pain, Millencolin, Coercion, and bunch of other “nobodies”. Decibel got a peek at Mr. Swanö’s “studio guestbook” when we inducted Katatonia’s Brave Murder…

For the last five weeks, we’ve slowly peeled Sodom’s In War and Pieces apart by presenting you, our faithful reader and hopeful subscriber (shameful plug), an advanced audial view of what the German legends have in store for 2011. We used war metaphors (terrible ones, really) and tried our best to come up with sensible…

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. Well, every Wednesday morning, a Decibel staffer or special guest will take to the Deciblog to bitch and moan at length as to why everybody’s full of shit and said dud is, in fact, The…

Four weeks ago, dB premiered two tracks, “In War and Pieces” & “Hellfire”, from Sodom’s upcoming full-length In War and Pieces. Streamed by millions (well, not that many, but it was significant), thrashers got to hear legends in what appears to be their prime. Yeah, we said it. Then, “Through Toxic Veins” & “Nothing Counts…

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. Well, every Wednesday morning, a Decibel staffer or special guest will take to the Deciblog to bitch and moan at length as to why everybody’s full of shit and said dud is, in fact, The…