Next Friday the 15th, the inaugural Don’t Call it a Fest slams into the Motor City with all the impact of a severely downgraded credit rating and an avalanche of housing foreclosures. Even during the best of times, Detroit has always had a negative air surrounding it; some of that civic black eye has been…

Given how well our last and only playlist from a Louisville native turned out courtesy of Coliseum’s Ryan Patterson, we had high hopes for one from his brother and fellow Derby City dweller Evan. While the former focused solely on Killing Joke and caused me to listen to “Total Invasion” on repeat for months, the…

Howard Stern Show regular, Charred Walls of the Damned drummer, Halloween enthusiast, and Decibel contributor Richard Christy sure does get around. A few months ago I saw him sit in with Stryper for “Sing Along Song” at Terminal 5 in New York City — clad in a sweet vintage To Hell With the Devil shirt,…

Long before he took up residence in a pair of New Jersey record stores Krieg frontman Neill Jameson (aka Imperial) was a kid looking to make a buck during the long, hot East Coast summers. He found a job as a professional ghoul at a boardwalk haunted house in Wildwood, New Jersey. The Deciblog convinced…

No need to fuck around too much here: Triptykon’s Melana Chasmata is an absolute beast of an album — a churning cauldron of clever invention and legit representation that expands the boundaries of a genre in pretty desperate need of boundary expansion. It is that rare release to which — whether one eventually loves or…

Happy Godsmack Day to all you Boston readers. You must be so darn proud. Anyway, on with the show: Alestorm, Sunset on the Golden Age (Napalm): What grades did the pirate get in school? HIGH SEAS!!! Belphegor, Conjuring the Dead (Nuclear Blast): A merciless return to simple, blasphemous black metal, the Austrian veterans keep it quick…

Although Freak Kitchen don’t have much of a presence in the US yet, apparently they’re popular enough to be able to raise $140,000 on Kickstarter for an animated video, not to mention consistently selling out guitar clinics. SOMEONE must like them. That someone might even be you. If you’re into progressive metal with a really…

Hot on the shambling undead heels of the uber-sick 2013 full-length The Barrens, Denver’s masters of smart, dark n’ dirty death metal Crypticus are set to return with Chains for Devils, the second in the band’s Horror Grind Mixtape series — i.e. “an original Death Metal mini-anthology designed to confound, horrify, & delight.” This morning,…

A six-year gap separates underground gem Animosity from its unlikely successor, Blind. True, the Technocracy EP—with Simon Bob on vocals—acts as a bridge, but few, not even Corrosion of Conformity themselves, could’ve predicted Blind.

Sometimes, the unhipness of a sound is a pretty good measure of a band’s dedication to their craft.  While some bands chase trends and recording perfection as if precise alignment will translate directly into merch sales and Facebook likes, other artists burrow their own tunnels, regardless of what they think will be hot this afternoon….