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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…

We can count the number of times we’ve applied some Deci-clusivity to an unsigned act on the Deciblog. Of course, yammerers and Internet lonely-hearts will cry that we should only spotlight the label-less, the bands fighting for a slice of a slice of a depreciated penny. The problem is this: turn on the demo-powered floodgates…

June 15, Neumos, Seattle, WA. We received the message through the usual channels, but this time the priority was urgent. “We’re coming to Seattle,” said Witte, “and I need to go to Brouwer’s.” As the local beer ambassador to the extremely extreme set, we felt compelled to honor this request, so upon Municipal Waste’s arrival…

Welcome to the first installment of VERSUS, an online segment where we’ll stream exclusive tracks from new records that have piqued our interest, head to head, and let you, dear reader, referee the fight in the comments section. To sweeten the deal, the commenter who makes the most persuasive case for his or her preferred…

Human Cull are a gnarly grindcore trio from the United Kingdom who deal largely in 30-second riff-salvos. Guitarist and vocalist Edd Robinson admits as much that the band’s entire canon will be fast and crusty, but dammit he’s a humanitarian, it’ll be memorable too. Brevity in grindcore song structures was hardwired at the genre’s birth…

** Scribbled by Municipal Waste lead screamer Tony Foresta. Don’t forget to check the stream of the Toxic Waste split 12″ on the venerable Tankcrimes label, as posted by the equally venerable Adem. It’s HERE, we think. Or, the Part One of the tour diary, called Part Waste, ’cause we’re cute. Click HERE. 6/1 –…

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.  This week’s joint proves the superiority of crossbred…

Funeral doom can be a most divisive subgenre.  Whole groups of well-versed metalheads will split on the merits of a type of music that eschews speed, the associated aggression, and most anything that can be considered technical musical achievement.  Of course, this very division might be part of what defines it – a hallmark of…

Vancouver’s Titan’s Eve impressed this hack a couple years back with the streamlined and melodic mixture of thrash and traditional metal of their The Divine Equal self-released debut. I hadn’t heard much from or about the band since the album was made publicly available, probably because I wasn’t paying attention, as usual, but word has…

Scott Seward’s “Filthy 50” list from our September 2007 issue remains one of my favorite reads in these pages, or any magazine for that matter. While the initial excitement of digging up some of those lost treasures may have passed, I still listen to some of them (Groundhogs, Captain Beyond and High Tide to name…