Interviews

** It’s not secret dBHQ gets excited when we hear Swedes Grand Magus have a new album at the ready. So, when the Stockholm-based trio Grand Magus announced Triumph and Power as their new full-length our Malevolent Creation sweat pants bulged a bit. The following is the full conversation between Decibel and Grand Magus beardman/ass-kicker…

Rather than planting our flag in one fertile corner of the extreme musical universe, Decibel has always enjoyed scrambling back and forth along the continuum, from the dingiest anti-production muckfests (found in our recent Top 100 Black Metal Albums special issue) to the most gorgeous prog explorations (such as Jeff Wagner’s super-mellow Cynic piece in the current…

Norway’s Barren Womb may have a blue plasticine frog as their mascot, they may have just set themselves up for a lifetime of ribbing by titling their debut album The Sun’s Not Yellow, it’s Chicken and a good number of their promo photos may have the general public wondering how serious they should be taken,…

So many bands give the devil all the gloryIt’s hard to understand, we want to change the story We want to rock one way, on and on… Hard to believe nearly thirty years have passed since Stryper frontman Michael Sweet threw down that gauntlet with a crooning roar on the Yellow and Black Attack anthem…

The hard road of Pentagram frontman Bobby Liebling, who has fought the real demons of addiction for decades, was well chronicled in the documentary Last Days Here as well as J. Bennett’s May 2011 cover story. While the film had a happy ending everyone knows that after the credits roll life continues. Hollywood doesn’t like…

Just a quick listen to Cynic would reveal that Paul Masvidal and company probably have pretty eclectic musical tastes. Given that the band dropped its third full-length, Kindly Bent To Free Us, last month, the guitarist/vocalist was kind enough to pass along a medley of recent (and fairly nostalgic) listens. As he explains, “Playlists have…

Towers come from Portland, Oregon, and have this awesome sound that’s a strange brew concocted of low-end bass hum and psych-stoner doom, post-punk and krautrock. There is a lot more in there, too. Putatively, it’s metal all right, but with a center so dark and heavy it can pull in all manner of outré influences…

Melt-Banana‘s last record Fetch earned a place in our top 10 of 2013. Since Kevin Stewart-Panko already asked the now duo of vocalist Yasuko “Yako” Onuki and guitarist Ichiro Agata nearly every question imaginable back in October (most importantly about their Geocities website), we weren’t left with much ground that hadn’t already been covered. Onuki…

**Welcome to the inaugural Deciblog Film Club, where each month we’ll poll someone from the extremely extreme community at large on a handful of films that have had an impact on their lives and their art. Think of it as an opportunity for all of us to lay down the blast beats and death growls…

Michael Klassen has never met Daniel Jansson. OK, you’re thinking, why should he? But given that Jansson is the singer in his band, it is kind of weird. Well, unconventional certainly. Klassen plays guitar, bass and provides other instrumentation in Culted, working out of Winnipeg, Canada, with Kevin Stevenson (Drums), Matthew Freisson (guitar/bass/other) and Erik…

I discovered Brazil’s Hellbenders the old fashioned way: their U.S. publicist pointed me in their direction. However, instead of doing what I normally do and ignoring the histrionic pitch (which, after having the band described as Brazil’s answer to Kyuss/High on Fire/stoner/desert rock, would have been the logical thing to do), I bit. And man,…

Last week, Junius helped celebrate the upcoming release of its excellent new EP, Days of the Fallen Sun, by having half of the band–namely, frontman/guitarist Joseph E. Martinez and bassist Joel Munguia–tell us about eight records that they were listening to back when things started in 2004. Now that everyone has (hopefully) had a chance…

If you don’t live along the east coast of the United States, then maybe you’re having a chest-beating trad metal day, or a beat-on-your-desk black/thrash day, or even a middle-finger-hoisting death metal day.  But if you were in the path of the snow storm that dumped a few lead-heavy white blankets up and down the Eastern Seaboard, then you probably…

Last month, Decibel spent a few chilly Baltimore days taking in A389’s 10th Anniversary Bash.  That exceptional label has been responsible for lots of great releases, including #9 on our list of 2013’s best, Noisem’s Agony Defined.  The 4-show festival that celebrated the label and its friends was overwhelming in the number of bands that…

Long before there was a Brewtal Truth column in Decibel or Municipal Waste was celebrating the Art of Partying or Three Floyds was making beers for its favorite metal bands, Bill Yurkiewicz and his grindcore band, Exit-13, were not only drinking amazing beers from around the world, they were writing songs about them. Yurkiewicz, who…

I’ve known Nick Sewell, and been aware of his prodigious skill on the bass gee-tar, since the mid-90s. Good Lord! That’s round-and-about 20 real-life years, which is the equivalent of about 2000 musician/band years. In that time, dude has played in some of Toronto’s most notorious metal and hard rockin’ bands, including Tchort, The Illuminati…

A few weeks ago, we premiered a track from Junius’s excellent new EP, Days of the Fallen Sun. This year will not only see the release of new tunes from the quartet (in just a few days, no less), but it also marks a celebratory occasion that typically calls for diamond jewelry. Our budget here…

Tickets for the Miami International Film Festival sure-to-be cacophonous premiere of the documentary International Noise Conference 2013 go on sale this Friday, so it seemed like as good a time as any to check in with director Ronnie Rivera… How did the idea for the doc come about? I have been photographing the noise community…

It was day two of a recent KEN Mode tour across Canada on which I was acting as designated merch slinger and person-who-tries-to-make-sure-nothing-gets-lost-or-forgotten-because-he-doesn’t-drink. After piling into the van that afternoon, bassist Andrew LaCour whipped out a bag of tuna cuts that he and his father had smoked a couple days previously. For the next half-hour,…

Few people have a professional circle that includes Chris Barnes and Alex Webster, sexy pop starlet Terri Nunn and global film star Jim Carrey. One of them is Decibel Hall Of Fame inductee Paul Masvidal (enshrined with his Cynic bandmates for Focus). When Cynic fell apart in the mid-90s, Masvidal relocated to Los Angeles, where…

Because every day another band records another song.  Because 83% of those songs are unlistenable and you can’t be bothered to sift through the dreck.  Because metal is about not giving a shit and waking your own personal storm.  Because music is universal, expression is boundless, and even indie labels (whatever that means these days)…

After dropping the best album of its career earlier this month with From All Purity, the dudes in Indian are in the midst of (hopefully) enjoying some time off before hitting the road at the end of March. Given that guitarist/vocalist Will Lindsay is also probably not all that enthused about stepping out into the…

On Monday, Swedish death metal legends—that’s right, fucking legends—At the Gates announced that they signed to Century Media and planed to record and release their first new studio album since 1995’s landmark Slaughter of the Soul later this year. No biggie, right? Well, Decibel thought it was worth looking into a little further, so frontman…

** We interviewed Alcest frontman Neige for the March 2014 issue of Decibel [HERE]. The magazine interview focuses on Neige’s childhood influences, working with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, and how the sea became central to the Frenchman’s inner and outer calm. The remains of that interview are below. You’re kind of seen as the ex-black metaller….

As a general rule, we would suggest you not listen to instrumental “post” metal.  It certainly has its occasional charms and does an admirable job drawing the aurally cautious into the integrity-crushing arms of extreme metal.  Beyond the realm of intellectual curiosity and compositional hedonism, however, this gravity well of musical talent too often grows…

Those of you who pay rapt attention to the Throw Me a Frickin’ Bone column might already have taken note of Vaporizer and the kind words I’ve bestowed upon their intense irascibility and how I gave their EP a nod as one of the top self-releases of last year. If you haven’t already checked them…

Re-Spect! Vogue! 

The email came in from Ol’ Man Mudrian a few days ago and it went, in part, like this: “Have you ever heard Sam Black Church? People from the New England area like to blow them incessantly, but people like me who “never saw them live” just think they accidentally invented nu metal. Either way,…

On Friday, January 10, Brutal Truth bassist Danny Lilker announced via Facebook that he “will be retiring from being a full time recording and touring musician” on his forthcoming 50th birthday, October 18, 2014. The news flash resonated throughout the entire online extreme community, who, in the process, appears to have disregarded Lilker’s commitment to…

Just as there are many roads that lead to metal (adolescent anger, an ear for complex music, etc.), there are multiple avenues by which a curious mind might encounter Noam Chomsky, one of our era’s great-thinking heavy hitters.  Students of linguistic theory will certainly encounter his work, which in the middle of the last century…