It’s nice to have friends introduce us to new music, but in this age of ever flowing information and ubiquitous quick links, we often rely on bands’ personnel connections to lead us to our next aural awakening. Dude in our favorite death metal band also plays on this grind record or in that prog collective,…

Obviously, War On Music’s Charley Justice works a lot faster than I do. When his original retail location at 38-44 Albert Street in downtown Winnipeg went up in flames back on April 19th, he ramped up his usual whirlwind of internalised kinetic energy and went to work at opening another location as quickly as possible….

The past week or so has brought lots of Caspian news, which we were thrilled about given that aside from some shows here and there, it’s been a while since we’d heard from the instrumental post-rockers. According to their Facebook page, the Massholes spent much of April through June not playing, but rebounded nicely by…

If this sounds like the rambling of an old fart, so be it: kids have it too easy these days when it comes to underground music. If you have a laptop and spare time you have unfettered access to pretty much every rare treasure recorded during the past four decades of metal and punk. That…

Silje interviewed as part of our most excellent Women in Metal issue [dB #94]. How will Disclosure differ from The West Pole? Silje Wergeland: it’s fresher, braver, more confident and honest, deeper, newer. Now that the lineup’s had a few years to synch what’s it’s like working together? Silje Wergeland: It’s great and inspiring! We…

Melvins Lite w/Retox, Club 9One9, Victoria, BC, July 16Who can really keep up with just exactly what the Melvins are up to at any given moment? There are new releases like clockwork. They have always been a prolific band and we suspect they always will be. If nothing else, they’ll have a discography that stretches…

On 21 September, Scotland’s most enthusiastical audio bloodletters Black Sun will reimagine Shakespeare’s most brutal play as a theatrical work of avant-garde metal. The Glaswegian industrial/doom trio, operating under their extra-war-and-extra-percussion Black Sun Drums Korps handle, will take the Bard’s text, cut it up and adapt it to their own aesthetic. Given how carnal, martial…

5. Promise And The Monster – Wither Discovered when Myspace mattered to music, Promise And The Monster’s dark, sparse yet wildly imaginative goth-folk—yeah, terrible genre concatenation, but I concede defeat—was an instant hit in my not-so-thick music book. “Wither” has this fairytale quality to it. A little girl in the woods meets a terrifying creature….

What the squawk is up? Happy Jason Voorhees Day.

Last year, Italian mostly-instrumental quartet Orbe created one of those albums that I listened to with half an ear and then didn’t get back to for a while.  Sometimes that’s an indicator of an album without a whole lot of immediacy, and sometimes it simply indicates the laziness of the audience.  In the case of…