Is there any heavy metal story more heroic and heartening than that of Nader Sadek? Seriously. Here is a serious connoisseur of extreme music and culture — not to mention an extraordinary visual artist — who came up in a time and place — that would be Egypt in the eighties — where his interests…

New Zealand trio Jakob have a strong release history behind them, but they have been largely absent over the past several years due to injuries that have kept them from playing and recording.  All that is done now, and the band unveils the video for “Blind Them With Science”, the lead-off track from their forthcoming…

So there’s a lot of depressing music out there, much of which we cover in this magazine, but very little of it was made by someone who had stage IV melanoma. Nevada Hill did, and along with Ryan Williams, John Teague, and David Saylor, created some pretty fucked up Harvey Milk-style noise rock inspired by…

Last year we excerpted a couple selections from Lewis Dimmick’s excellent book This Music over at the Metalnomicon. He came back not long ago to take us behind the scenes of hardcore megaliths Sheer Terror. Today he returns with another great guest essay on Beyond/Quicksand guitarist Tom Capone’s metal roots and his uber-brutal Mutilator fanzine……

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…