So Decibel assumes at this point you’ve got your dozen roses, the perfect card, maybe some wine. All these have been easily attainable and, really, almost unavoidable for the last four to six weeks. Valentine’s Day mood music, on the other hand, has remained maddeningly elusive for those inclined towards the extremely extreme. Until now….

Later this month, Dutch sextet Izah will release their first full-length document of sludgy aggression through the always dependable Nordvis Produktion.  It represents a major step in a very long road for the band, and its four gargantuan tracks make that point crystal clear.  But these aren’t the sprawling teases that some bands employ in…

Finnish Viking metal quintet Ensiferum return with their sixth album One Man Army next week, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait until the February 20 release date to hear the thing. In this day and age, who in the hell has the patience to do such a thing? The band and Metal Blade…

New York City was a creative nexus in the mid-to-late ’80s. Art and fashion swelled up from the underground and converged into an amazingly vibrant and unified expression of culture.

I originally got my hands on Barishi’s self-titled, self-released, full-length album via guitarist Graham Brooks who was filling in for fellow Vermonters, Vaporizer during a tour with Vattnet Viskar. After figuring out who the hell I was, he passed along a copy of the record and Bob’s yer fucking uncle. That was about a year…

Former Caustic Resin guitarist/vocalist and Built To Spill-er Brett Netson went and done got himself a brand new rock quartet — that’d be Brett Netson & Snakes — and Decibel has got the opening single from the band’s ridiculously killer, utterly fucking triumphant Scavenger Cult EP. Here’s the breakdown: The Scavenger Cult EP features three…

“Fear and Fury,” the first taste of new Pallbearer music since our favorite album of 2014, Foundations of Burden, is one of the Little Rock doom quartet’s shortest songs yet, clocking in at just under six minutes. But it’s not wanting for the intense, emotional thunder the band has built their following on. It was recorded specifically…

One of the more pleasant surprises for me so far this year has been Karma to Burn‘s new LP. I’m a big fan of Almost Heathen (especially these two neck snappers), and the reason Arch Stanton–much like 2001 precursor–works is simple: the riffs. Just check out “Twenty-Three” below (yes, all of their song titles are…

Boy, it’s easy to get lost in music videos these days. In the latest black-and-white video for Lay Siege’s “Hollow Hands” the English sludge/hardcore hybrid certainly does their best headbanging. But the camera keeps panning to a guy who looks like a community college English professor who is very pissed off at the book he’s…

A year and a half after making a very strong first impression with the Knights of Darkness EP, Finnish speed metalers Ranger are set to return in 2015, this time with full-length debut Where Evil Dwells under their collective bullet belts. Unlike other bands that profess to creating old-school heavy metal with a more modern…