Rae Amitay is the vocalist and drummer for Immortal Bird and drums for Thrawsunblat. Follow her on Twitter. I run my fingers along the drum key nestled in my pocket and look out at my band from behind my kit. A quick glance at my ride cymbal notifies me of an impending threat to its…

America’s only monthly extreme music magazine is turning 10, and we’re too pumped up to settle for just one birthday party. On October 18, Decibel is taking Manhattan (and Brooklyn) with two exclusive, blowout concerts. First up at Best Buy Theater in Times Square: the globally renowned axework of Amon Amarth, Sabaton and Vallenfyre (the…

I remember chatting on the phone with Mike Williams about Eyehategod’s follow-up to 2000’s Confederacy of Ruined Lives, how it was going slowly as he was dealing with his incarceration issues, his health, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the difficulty of getting all five members in the same room together. There was no firm…

While everyone else is reporting from that East Coast festival this week, we here at Decibel’s Los Angeles Bureau are lazy and don’t like to go further than 43.5 miles from our home base. Fortunately, on May 17, Scion held their annual Rockfest in Pomona, which is exactly that distance. Sweet! I was there, and…

If you are one of our regular readers chances are you are sweating out a hangover from the long weekend or recovering from your trip to Maryland Deathfest — probably both. To help as you begin the long and painful transition back to reality we have a full album stream of Jar’d Loose’s new album…

It’s not as if Prong ever completely fell off, really, but 2012’s Carved Into Stone nevertheless felt like a return to form in both energy and attack, and now, two years later, comes Ruining Lives, a ferocious, amped, occasionally pretty damn adventurous album that may very well be the band’s best effort since its nineties…

Wow, my beak is stuffed up. Who knew a parrot could get seasonal allergies? Finally we’re getting some traction here… MISERY INDEX are releasing The Killing Gods, their first for Season of Mist, and I gotta say: it’s pecking great.  In their amalgam of punk, grind, death, crust and doom lies, well, more of the…

It takes a special band to spend twelve-and-a-half minutes slogging through a freaky-heavy doom bum-out called simply “Darkness,” then decide there’s just more to say on the issue and tuck in for another 14 minutes and call the result “Darkness, Part 2.”  It’s like being lost in a menacing forest devoid of all large predators…

Calgary’s Throne of Vengeance was one of the bands mentioned in a recent edition of our “Throw Me a Frickin’ Bone,” the magazine’s space for demos and self-releases as curated and delivered by some half-black Canadian nerd face.

Back in early 2012, Chris Dick sung the praises of Cormorant’s Dwellings. Since the band’s recently released follow-up is yet another quality entry in its still nascent catalog, we asked Nick Cohon to tell us about some of the “darker country music” that he listens to (the guitarist is also rocking a Gov’t Mule Dose…