Toronto rock journalist Brent Jensen’s No Sleep ‘Til Sudbury is a smart, sweet memoir of the joys and travails of growing up metal in tiny Espanola, Ontario — …A Fine Paper Town, as the welcome sign notes — weaving a portrait of youthful discovery/rebellion into a larger macro story of metal’s mid-eighties coming-of-age moment. It’s…

There really is no good reason for anyone to be bummed out about missing out on an ATP weekender when the days following the main event habitually throw up bills as awesome as this. A weekend spent emptying your bank account, taking drugs unknown to the over-30s and known only by weird acronyms, enjoying the…

If you know Decibel, you know we hold chameleonic U.K. doomsayers Paradise Lost in the highest regard. So, it’s an extremely extreme honor that Garden State funeral doom heroes Evoken are taking their maiden voyage in the Decibel Flexi Series by covering PL’s crushing “Rotting Misery,” which initially appeared on their 1990 debut, Lost Paradise….

By Greg Peterson You’re probably wondering which records I bought on the morning that Batillus began recording our second full-length album… some Purcell, some Machault, Schiff playing Schubert impromptus, Debussy/Ravel string quartets, some Hindemith, some Schoenberg, some Strauss, Souzay singing Faure and Schubert, and some late Shostakovich quartets. You see, Willi and I have been…

After 17 years of recording silence, death metal legends Carcass have returned to the studio to track their first new LP since 1996’s Swansong. The record, produced by Colin Richardson, will be released sometime in 2013 through a yet-to-be determined label. Bassist/vocalist Jeff Walker exclusively provides Decibel with a few details. Please tell us the…

When Sarcófago sacrilegiously congealed in a plastic bowl of hate, frustration, rebellion, fermented sugarcane juice and fuck fluid, Phil Collins’ “Sussudio” and Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” were number one hits on the Billboard chart.

Wow, this birdshit is REALLY drying up at the bottom of the cage this time. There’s not a whole lot coming out, but we’ll get through it somehow, my friends. I’ll just pick some stuff here at random, some things your old boy Waldo may not be too familiar with. OK, this is plain silly….

While hordes of old people who still use dial-up are swarming to super-sized retail outlets this season to buy their loved ones’ affection, the more tech-savvy among us simply point and click our money away into the bitwise abyss.  Similarly, while the plebes will rely on radio and opinionated journalists to decide which tunes may…

Sweden’s Khoma is probably best known on this side of the Atlantic – assuming they’re known at all – for being the side project of Cult of Luna’s Johannes Persson and Fredrik Kihlberg. Au contraire. While they may not have been as on the radar of metalnerds as Cult of Luna, Khoma has existed in…

Since it’s getting near the end of the year, I figured I’d mix things up a little bit and fill a couple of these posts with some bands that I’ve been lucky enough to discover over the past 11 months or so. And since this quartet made one of the biggest impressions on me, with…