Miss those summer road trip days? Of course you do. It’s March. Weather’s an unpredictable bitch and the likelihood of something cool happening is pretty much nil. Well, France-based The Socks are an unlikely candidate to warm up your otherwise shitty spring. Now, you’re probably thinking: France + good ‘ol hard rock = yeah right….

Sometimes the ravenous darkness crashes down to feast on your soul, and sometimes it flinches timidly away from all of your grasping. Last Friday, Aborted callously mounted the Deciblog to bring you a terrifying few minutes of violent death metal; today, we showcase the more ethereal side of shadows with new music from Barren Harvest….

Well, I’ve been reading some of my past reviews, and it seems that some of you want me to review some particular releases. I’m open to this idea; just leave your ideas in the comments. Obviously, I can’t review everything — Decibel pays me by the word, and the budget for this column is $4.35…

Belgian brutal deathsters Aborted expect to lay waste to bodies and spirits next month when they drop their 8th studio album in 15 years.  Necrotic Manifesto, due out April 29th on Century Media, tears through more than 40 minutes of churning, brain-berating death metal that alternates between harrowing chaos and deeply bangable grooves.  You can…

Back in the mid ’80s, long before every outdoor structure was skateboard-proofed, a bunch of California skate punks turned the urban landscape into their own skate park. This was the birth of street skating, where everything from concrete walls to empty pools to parking medians were fair game for pulling off some sick move. This…

We love death metal around these parts. We’re also big fans of Evoken. So we were pretty stoked when we heard that Evoken frontman John Paradiso and his cohorts in New Jersey’s Grim Legion were finally set to release their debut full-length. The album doesn’t drop until next week (March 18th via Horror Pain Gore…

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into your favorite online bookseller… DTV — the excellent rock ’em, sock ’em ode to the heyday of 80s larger-than-life action film excess and its absurdist/dehumanizing aftermath from Decibel Managing Editor & novelist Andrew Bonazelli — is back in a brand new edition, complete with…

Old death metal dudes never go away for good. They just do one (or all) of the following: reform; work on a reissue of their out-of-print material; write new songs or join a new Six Feet Under or Malevolent Creation lineup. For Portland death metal OG’s Dead Conspiracy it’s three out of four. They’ll reissue…

What stuck out to me immediately upon hearing Conan’s album Monnos two years ago was not only how dense, how pulverizing the Liverpool trio’s brand of doom is, but how blunt it is. It’s the metal equivalent of Lothar of the Hill People. The term “caveman doom” has been bandied about in attempts to describe the…

You guys realize that we are in a renaissance for doom metal right now, right? So much excellent heaviness out there. Maybe it’s because everything sucks just like it did back in the 70s. I don’t know, I’m not an historian. I do, however,  know quality when I hear it, especially when it’s as attached…