It’s another fairly light week this week – I doubt many Decibel readers will be salivating over the reissue of Def Leppard’s sorry 1996 album Slang – but most interestingly, there’s a good amount of music I actually like. Is it because I’m still a good six weeks away from my annual spring burnout? The…

Tickets for the Miami International Film Festival sure-to-be cacophonous premiere of the documentary International Noise Conference 2013 go on sale this Friday, so it seemed like as good a time as any to check in with director Ronnie Rivera… How did the idea for the doc come about? I have been photographing the noise community…

The latest video from Mantar has something for everyone: shirtless dudes, screaming, wolves, epilepsy-triggering editing. It’s also in black and white, just to give it that extra bit of artsy. Musically, they have some Motor-sludge lovin’ blackness going for them as the dynamic duo as they smash through post-metal, doom, and even some screamo. In…

It’s time to go back, folks. It’s time to wade way, way back into the primordial ooze and sift out a hallowed blast from the past in this exclusive album stream of GreyHaze Records’ reissue of Mystifier’s Wicca. The Brazilian black metal legends released Wicca in 1992, and although it has been rereleased a handful…

With pseudonyms like Hand of Doom, Black String and Command, Sweden’s Vampire immediately evoke early ’80s heavy metal and early mid-’90s black metal. A non-coincidence, really. Vampire’s eponymous debut is the nexus of heavy metal and black metal, where Destruction and Motörhead meets Unanimated and Bewitched. Vampire, however, make the cross-generational/genre melange unique, menacing in…

Monday night. Hours after a severe weather incident. In most cases, a metal show in Philadelphia on such a weeknight after such a crippling storm would’ve kept longhairs and horn throwers home. A venue vacant, save its sadluck staff. Tonight, however, Philadelphians surprised. They came out in droves not just for the headliner, Amon Amarth,…

You know you’re in for some serious black metal destruction when the waveform is a solid block. Entartung have an unpronounceable name and a penchant for German efficiency, one that they put towards killing your eardrums. They’ve built a pretty impressive temple of evil in Peccata Mortalia, their second album. Most of you are snowed…

Athens, GA heavy hitters Woccon are relative newcomers to the metal scene, but they’ve already made an impressive splash with the material they’ve recorded thus far.  Existing at some perfectly logical intersection of prog-friendly melodicism and aggressive doom, Woccon released an EP last year – The Wither Fields – that perked up our ears and gave…

We had tons of juniper bushes in the area we grew up in Colorado, so the smell of gin was familiar to us long before we ever drank it. We used to squish the berries between our fingers and smell their pungent, spicy odor. Sure, not all gin is heavy on the juniper, but it…

It was day two of a recent KEN Mode tour across Canada on which I was acting as designated merch slinger and person-who-tries-to-make-sure-nothing-gets-lost-or-forgotten-because-he-doesn’t-drink. After piling into the van that afternoon, bassist Andrew LaCour whipped out a bag of tuna cuts that he and his father had smoked a couple days previously. For the next half-hour,…