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,…

We’re teaming up with Australian industrial metallers Our Last Enemy this morning to give away a few prize packs featuring an autographed poster and copy of the band’s latest CD Pariah. (U.S. residents only — sorry!) All you have to do is write a line or two in the comments section below explaining why you’d…

Few people have a professional circle that includes Chris Barnes and Alex Webster, sexy pop starlet Terri Nunn and global film star Jim Carrey. One of them is Decibel Hall Of Fame inductee Paul Masvidal (enshrined with his Cynic bandmates for Focus). When Cynic fell apart in the mid-90s, Masvidal relocated to Los Angeles, where…

It’s strange how the pieces have finally fallen into place for Behemoth. A decade after putting themselves on the extreme metal map with the revelatory Demigod, the Poles are poised for a different kind of breakthrough altogether, via extraordinary circumstances no one could possibly have written. Behemoth’s star has always been on the rise, but…

The last time death metal legends Massacre released an album, France was testing its last atomic bomb. Pretty amazing, to think of it. Fast forward a few years, and Rick Rozz (ex-Death), Terry Butler (ex-Death), Mike Mazzonetto (Pain Principle) and Edwin Webb (ex-Diabolic) emerge from the limestone graves of central Florida to release Back from…

I swear that I’m not deliberately scheduling streams this year of bands with names that are either difficult to pronounce or something you wouldn’t want to say out loud, but here we are in February and here I am with a track from a band called Omotai. If you don’t think Kylesa are shouty enough…

In the liner notes to 2010’s Below & Beyond collection, Floor co-founder Anthony Vialon recalled that while his band had played together off and on for 12 years before seemingly dissolving for keeps in 2003, he and his cohorts hadn’t even managed to play a hundred shows.

Omnizide. What a name. Kinda makes you think of a market-leading bug spray. But their sound makes you think of, ooh, kinda old-school Darkthrone, and falls somewhere between the nexus of death metal and physically imposing Swedish black metal, bands such as Naglfar and Watain . . . And Craft. Definitely there’s some Craft. There’s…

Symphonic death has enjoyed a fair bit of popularity over the years—largely in Europe—but Fleshgod Apocalypse might be one of the best bands of the style. Formed in 2007, the Italians have spent the last seven years refining bombast, adding bombast, and making bombast more, well, bombastic. The group’s latest long-player, Labyrinth, featured Fleshgod Apocalypse…

I am not nearly the wordsmith that John Darnielle is, so I will borrow a quote from a post he wrote about the band in question a few years back on his sadly defunct Last Plane to Jakarta blog: INTERLOCUTOR: My grandmother has asked for an excellent new death metal album for her birthday. I…