Lists

Long-running industrial/crossover mainstays Prong released their twelfth full-length, Zero Days, today. To celebrate, Decibel asked frontman Tommy Victor — who ran sound at CBGB’s in the 80’s — to rank the five most insane sets he worked sound for. What follows were his answers; Victor has clearly witnessed and contributed to some legendary performances. Dark Angel (February 8,…

Last April we announced our partnership with f.y.e. for the Decibel Meter, a monthly collection featured both online and in store to make sure you don’t miss any of those essential headbanging, face-melting titles that make your collection extremely extreme. The issue currently on newsstands, which features Suffocation on the cover, declares 2017 THE YEAR…

There’s nothing cooler than a logo, a mark, an emblem. From extreme music’s inception, artists–thrash metal, grindcore, death metal, doom metal, black metal, etc.–have placed a heavy weight on their logos. Some are immediately recognizable (like Metallica, Death, Morbid Angel, Napalm Death, Cathedral), some aren’t so cleverly designed. Over the years, Decibel has top-listed logos for our most favorite of extremely extreme genres. Today, we dissect and pontificate on the Top 5 Grindcore Logos. Music isn’t considered as part of the findings, as that would unfairly settle the list. So, find out who tops our list. And argue about it.

We brought you the five sets you can’t miss at Chicago Open Air this weekend, and now we’re bringing you the five brews you can’t miss at the fest!

A galactic hunt for the best Star Wars-themed metal albums led us to this list.

Make sure you stop by the Decibel Headbanger’s Bier Hall after checking out these extremely extreme sets at Chicago Open Air next weekend!

Need some new music to get you out of that more-of-the-same rut? f.y.e. has got you covered with this month’s Decibel Meter.

Converge, Godflesh, Neurosis and more have immortalized their Roadburn performances as live albums.

Sacred cows have been slain before. They’ll be slain again. Today, we’re not butchering yet another divine bovine (not in total, we’d be nuts and in poor taste), but rather turning the tables on last week’s Bathory post, where we unsheath our Bathory collection (from 1984’s Bathory to 1988’s Blood Fire Death) listening for Quorthon’s sonic hell-born warts.

Lists polarize. There, we said it. We’re click-baiting just like the big guns. Other websites lede (yes, lede) with must-click, must-share titles like: “Killswitch Engage Caught On Tape Stealing Soilwork Roadmap” or “Burzum’s Varg Launches Role-Playing Game” (well, that actually happened) or “Ozzy’s Six-Decade Sex Addiction — All The Sordid Details Inside!” Here at Decibel, we care enough to bait you with things like The Top 5 Bathory Songs… After Twilight of the Gods.

There’s some great black metal album art. And there is some not-so-great black metal album art. Krieg‘s Neill Jameson focuses on the latter in the second part of this series.

Not all black metal cover art is terrible. But a lot of it is. And Krieg’s Neill Jameson has uncovered the worst of the worst. 

The scumdogs of the universe are ready to corrupt the world in another medium, as the GWAR: Orgasmageddon comic hits shelves. Here are the first issue’s 5 most insane panels.

Psycho Las Vegas is shaping up to have a big year. Check out some can’t miss bands playing, as well as individual day lineups!

As we remember the life of Chris Cornell, here are 10 heavy songs from his career that even extreme metalheads can get into.

In a rave review, Jonathan Horsley describes the sophomore full-length from Artificial Brain, Infrared Horizon, as an album which “envisions an extinct humanity, our place in the universe taken by robots and cyborgs, synthetics who believe they have naturally evolved from mankind, as though the species of Aristotle, Einstein, da Vinci was only ever primordial goo,” adding that vocalist Will Smith’s lyrics “read like Mr. Spock took a word cloud of Skynet’s internet search history and made beat poetry of it.” Combined with the decidedly sci-fi imagery the Long Island quintet employs for both album artwork and tour posters, it seemed apropos to reach out the the band for a list of their literary influences.

Rising metalhead horror author John Boden peppered his recent haunting, lyrical coming-of-age novella Jedi Summer With The Magnetic Kid with a slew of knowing nods to eighties heavy metal and hard rock. And he’s cited such distorted-yet-diverse bands as Masters of Reality and the Pixies as influences on his delightfully demented post-apocalyptic children’s book Dominoes. So it seemed apropos to hit the eloquent Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-based world-builder up for a few recommendations on where those looking to blend their loves of reading n’ riffage.

Throughout rock ‘n’ roll history (we’re talking proto-metal here), J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have influenced heavily. Whether it’s lyrical references or inspiration — such as Led Zeppelin‘s “The Battle of Evermore” and “Ramble On” or Rush‘s “The Necromancer” and Rivendell” or Black Sabbath‘s “The Wizard” — or bands taking Tolkien-named places, things, persons to call their own, rock, metal, and all their relevant sub-genres owe much to Tolkien. Death metal and black metal, of course, are no exception.

A year is just a year. But oh what a year it was: Death, Napalm Death, Mayhem, Bathory, Sodom, Anthrax and more!

The subject header from Albert read: “top 5 idea”. The body read: “The greatest death metal albums marred by terrible production.” He then presents three albums, Reek of Putrefaction,  The Red in the Sky is Ours, and Breeding the Spawn. Immediately, I recognized a gold post idea if there ever was one.

You can read the story behind the #1 entry in Decibel’s Top 100 Metal Tours of All Time Special Issue. For the other 99 tours, you’ll need copy of this limited edition Special Issue. 

Make amends for missing records with the Decibel Meter!

The paradigm-smashing creative churn in hardcore as the eighties gave way to the nineties was an amazing thing to behold. And few label rosters represented that wondrous, multidimensional, beauty and the beast evolution-through-revolution moment than Nemesis Records — a legendary 1988-1993 run which, along with Nemesis founder Big Frank Harrison, at long last receives a fitting tribute via Reaper Records founder Patrick Kitzel’s scrappy, enlightening, no-holds-barred, lovingly assembled The History of Nemesis Records, featuring release-by-release commentary from Harrison as well as reminiscences courtesy such scene luminaries as Mike Hartsfield (Outspoken), Issac Golub (A Chorus Of Disapproval), Andrew Kline (Strife), Ron Martinez (Final Conflict), Jon Bunch (Sense Field), Dave Franklin (Vision), and others.

Bandcamp is donating 100% of their proceeds today to the ACLU in the continued fight for human rights around the world. Here are 5 releases to consider purchasing today. 

Over the course of metal’s storied history there are examples of long careers (Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Cannibal Corpse, Napalm Death, etc.), but there’s also the opposite. Bands, most promising, genre-leaders/benders, who issued a lone album or EP and then vanished for one reason or another. At Decibel, we’re more than pleased to praise the long-comings of bands whose careers have lasted a decade or more, but there’s an important slice of career-cutting bands that we’d like to highlight.

2016: gone. Best albums of 2016: available here.

Celebrate the death of 2016 with Philly-based label/distro Horror Pain Gore Death Productions.

Because New Year countdowns are all the rage and never get boring, count down the songs on Plague Soundscapes with us.  Or against us.

One writer picks five favorite Decibel web articles of 2016.

After the dust settled and forty records were assigned a place on Decibel’s vaunted list, five remained that probably could have swapped places with anything else on the list without causing any greater/lesser irritation than lists like this already stir up.  Why should they get left out?  Here are the five records that tied for #41 on our Top 40 Albums of 2016.