It might not be “pungent” stench but plain Stench will do just fine, too. Decibel backed the initial offering from this Swedish death metal trio and we’re streaming their second album Venture, available October 7 in the United States. Venture is the follow up to the debut In Putrescence, but it’s been about four years…

By Mike McGinnis Harsh riffs make for harsh vibes in the studio. Embrace the angst and capture it on 2″ tape. That’s the plan. It’s been around two and a half years since Fight Amp recorded an album. Halfway through the writing of 2012’s Birth Control, we made another drummer switch and immediately hit the…

WOW, there’s FINALLY some releases trickling in. I’m going to start off with a much maligned genre. Get your slam on! INTERNAL BLEEDING release Imperium, and I gotta say, I’m pecking digging it.  This IS slam metal, something they’ve been known for for years, but there’s more to it than just  pure slamz. I mean, don’t…

Cemetery picnickers Encoffination rise again next month with their third full-length album, called III – Hear Me, O’ Death (Sing Thou Wretched Choirs).  Says vocalist/string-scather Ghoat of the forthcoming set of grueling, buzzing doom:  “The concept of this record is the glorification of death: an offering to the embodiment of death’s creation, and to sing the…

So, I was in Winnipeg a couple weeks ago and boy-howdy was it already cold as shit! When I was there in early November last year, there was already a disconcerting and disheartening layer of frost covering the city the morning I rolled into town and I recall snow pelting me one day when I…

Did you guys enjoy the heavily NFL-promoted premiere of Madam Secretary, starring Tea Leoni, as much as I did? Beng Your Pan Last winter, I played a gig in Columbus, OH, at Carabar and struck up a football conversation with the club’s owner, Ron. He’s a HUGE Pittsburgh Steelers fan. I guess a Steelers fan…

“This album is a schizophrenic array of heaviness,” says the Pharaoh dudes from their hometown of Somerville, New Jersey. “Musically and lyrically it gathers from a lot of our separate influences as a band yet each song is its own. We have definitely showcased growth and way more of what we can do as a…

Instead of rambling on about how great the new Winterfylleth album is and coming up with some clever way to introduce what Chris Naughton decided to cover in his playlist (spoiler alert: it’s one of my favorites), we’ll just let the guitarist/vocalist handle the intro himself: “Considering topics that would make for an interesting playlist…

Dark, depressing death metal in the vein of Immolation, Incantation and Deathspell Omega? Yes, please. Montreal-based Phobocosm have been around since 2008 but a full-length album has been elusive, even if they’ve played with Ross Dolan and co. at festivals before. They finally made it to the studio and the resulting music is beyond heavy;…

There were around 60 new metal releases last week, but this week we’re scraping the barrel. This silly industry is weird that way. In my digging I realized that the new Divider album is terrific, well worth investigating, but aside from that, it’s as bleak as it gets. Next week though; hoo, boy. Aside from…