Interviews

When ENSLAVED‘s Grutle Kjellsson and Cato Bekkevold go fishing they don’t fuck around. It’s really not like going down the pond chasing blue gills or Tommy cats; in Norway, even the trout are built super-hench. You might have caught some footage of them catching alligator gar in Texas a few years ago, but you’ll definitely…

It’s only fitting that on the eve of Metal Blade—the home of metal legends like Cannibal Corpse, King Diamond and Gwar—stepping out of its comfort zone to release the new Astra record, we’ll now go consecutive weeks mentioning Mahavishnu Orchestra. You see, to celebrate the upcoming release of the San Diego quintet’s sophomore effort (which…

** Fear Factory’s The Industrialist is out June 5, 2012 on Candlelight Records. We spoke to frontman Burton C. Bell about the record’s storyline. “I am a being… My existence has value… My purpose right now is to relate my witness, without any bitterness or partiality, the motives of my present reality.” We can only…

http://vimeo.com/37255948 Andrew Bonazelli is one of those shitheads who in school would do his homework on Friday so he had his weekend free while you were happy to sweat it out until 1st Period Monday. But that sort of ridiculous work ethic is how the man can be Decibel‘s managing editor, blog guru, social media…

There could have been no better producer for We Are Knuckle Dragger‘s debut album than Steve Albini

On Friday we brought you the minutes from an interview we were lucky enough to conduct with Triptykon frontman, Celtic Frost/HellHammer mainman Tom G. Warrior while he was on tour with Cannibal Corpse, Enslaved and Job for a Cowboy. Warrior seemed pretty ecstatic just to have the opportunity to play music, and that’s something that…

Tom G. Warrior was opting out of the press circuit while haring through the UK on last week’s Defenders of the Faith tour with Cannibal Corpse, Enslaved and Job for a Cowboy, but the Triptykon mainman granted the Deciblog an audience. Of all the times we’ve been in the company of Warrior since the Celtic…

If you read Shane Mehling’s review in our March issue, you’ll know that we—along with most of the interwebs—hold Pallbearer’s recent debut in rather high regard. While it’s way too early to say whether Sorrow and Extinction will go on to be talked about in the same breath as a Calculating Infinity or Remission, the…

Dr. Vivek Venkatesh’s office at Concordia University in Montreal is almost certainly unique in the world of academia. There probably aren’t many professors out there, for instance, who mix and match All Pigs Must Die prints and Latin salsa posters or keep vinyl collections as close at hand as research materials. And if any Decibel…

In terms of being recognized as a major force in the world of extreme music, Finland can often be overshadowed by its Scandanavian neighbors Norway and Sweden. Although the Land of a Thousand Lakes has its fair share of metal stalwarts both past and present—Sentenced, Children of Bodom and Finntroll, to name a few—it’s fair…

“When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you,” Nietzsche promised in Beyond Good and Evil, but Mr. Philosophize with a Hammer never did recommend any appropriate mood music for making goo-goo eyes at the infernal regions. Which is why it is such a great thing for we lovers of darkness…

OK, so there is a cynical body of thought that might consider black metal as a live performance artform and argue that the genre is best served by careful cellaring. Like it’s a take-home experience, one to be kept in the studio/bedroom, only ever to be enjoyed on record. Of course when we say “enjoyed”…

To celebrate Tuesday’s release of Utilitarian (the fourteenth (!) Napalm Death full-length), we asked longtime bassist Shane Embury to a pick a non-ND record that related in some way to each of the fourteen full-length ND records (including a covers album) that he’s played on over the last 24+ years. Last week, Shane’s entries took…

Recently Anthropic Records — purveyors of excellence and, in their own apt formulation, “heart-breaking, chest-crushing noise and doomed psychic soundscapes” — unleashed Anthrosphere III, yet another fantastic (and free!) compilation of the latest gnashing and wailing coming out of the Philadelphia metal underground. To mark the occasion we invited Anthropic proprietress Shannon Marie to share…

Before getting round to talking about the imminent reissue of Napalm Death’s now 25-year-old [iconic/seminal/etc.] debut Scum, the Deciblog is engaging Mick Harris in a discussion about his favorite fish—the barbel. You see, Napalm Death’s drummer from the years between ’85 and ’91 has long since put his sticks down, and—in his words—has dropped out…

In the preface to his interview with Napalm Death frontman Barney Greenway in Issue #89, J. Bennett wrote that “[t]here are few bands you can rely upon to deliver the fucking goods on their 14th album. Or to even make it that far in the first place. The number of grind outfits that have accomplished…

Click Here To Watch The Video Who came up with this? Was it a band effort or was there one lone genius amongst you? I don’t remember how it came up, all I know is that it’s been an idea for as long as we’ve been a band. How did you pick the videos? Were…

Each Gehenna album had different sonic attributes. From the eerie black metal of The First Spell through the death metal disposition of Murder and then back to brutal black hybrid on WW. Do you recall wanting each album to be singular, regardless of genre?Dolgar: We always try not to make the same album twice of…

Decibel‘s NYC bureau had a tough decision to make last Thursday. Should we head on up to the west side for a classy evening amongst Lincoln Center elite to catch a special performance by This Will Destroy You? Or leave Manhattan (perish the thought!) for a night of PBRs amongst our metal brethren to get…

For a dude who has built a revered legacy on the back of playing big biker doom riffs and wailing with Saint Vitus, Scott “Wino” Weinrich’s recent output has been super-mellow. There was 2010 acoustic solo record, Adrift, then a Latitudes session recorded in London with German singer/songwriter Conny Ochs, before the pair got together…

Decibel illustrator and layout guru Bruno Guerreiro is curating his first art show in Philadelphia. Huzzah! Held at Kung Fu Necktie, a neighborhood-centric watering hole/club, Guerreiro is aiming for the highest highs, displaying his illustrations to a backdrop of outer space heavy — in the form of local astro rockers Rosetta and Restorations, Brooklyn-based doom…

The phone just kept ringing out and going to Tony Foresta’s voicemail. We tried a few times, on each occasion considering leaving a “horny message” at the beep, as requested by the Municipal Waste frontman. It feels now like an opportunity missed. Ach, no matter, it was all cool. Foresta wasn’t dogging the call, obviously,…

Currently tearing across the States with fellow thrash vets Anthrax and Death Angel, Testament will be releasing their tenth album in spring. Entitled The Dark Roots of Earth, Testament frontman Chuck Billy has intimated that it’ll go atomic in the pit much in the same fashion as 2008’s The Formation of Damnation did. Hmm… Good…

Get ready to put whatever trivial bullshit you were planning to bitch and moan over today on hold: The upcoming documentary Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet is imbued with the kind of uplifting against all odds triumph and spellbinding never-say-die persistence that reorients perspective in a serious way. After making a name for himself in…

The band’s name may not be familiar to the majority of you and their moniker isn’t going to help them stand out from the crowd, but Toronto’s Nephelium is bound to garner interest solely based on the fact that they originally called Dubai home. And not the “new” Dubai where everything seems like it prolapsed…

How does the commentary track thing work? Are you talking over the music in real-time or is the commentary track spliced in after it’s finalized? Fenriz: Lord have mercy! Just listening to Viking’s Do or Die album from ‘87 on vinyl and starting the interview. Well, it works like a commentary track on a movie—I…

What do you make of Second Ring of Power after all these years? It’s getting a second chance at life, so to speak.Jan Kuhanen: All of our albums have been re-released, so Second… is in no way specific. Plus, we have some bonus stuff with all of them except with the first one. Ismo Toivonen:…

As far as back-together-for-the-first-time-since-’85 reunions go, we’ll take a newly reformed English Dogs—one of the UKs prime purveyors of crossover back in the day—over Van Halen any day. And lucky for us here in the U.S., three-fifths of the lineup that brought us the essential-listening thrash classic Forward Into Battle—drummer Andrew “Pinch” Pinching, lead guitarist…

You’ve got to love and admire the optimism of people in the UK. While limited releases are a staple practice in underground music, adding both that exclusivity/collector appeal and some fiscal security, British grind champs The Atrocity Exhibit took it to, uh, extremes and limited the supply of 2011 faceripper Grind Over Matter to a…

According to the wholly democratic, incorruptible and failsafe Decibel End of Year Poll, In Solitude’s superlative The World. The Flesh. The Devil. was officially the fourth-best album of 2011. (Yeah, in reality it was probably like the third best, but that doesn’t matter, not really. The thing is not to sleep on it.) The coltish…