One of the cool things about Italian facerippers the Secret is that they take the humanity and worthiness out of hardcore and replace it with a dark, doomy, occultist vibe. Like, their whole deal is really dark, shredding hardcore, but there’s that malevolence there that’s a product of jamming Darkthrone up loud and a total…

Because I couldn’t get to Wacken, the next best thing was reading the German websites for updates and photos.

Welcome to The Lazarus Pit, a biweekly look at should-be classic metal records that don’t get nearly enough love, stuff that’s essential listening for students of extreme metal that you’ve probably never heard of.  Stuff that we’re too lazy to track down the band members to do a Hall Of Fame for.  This time around,…

Spare a thought for all those hardy underground searchlights who’d been holding their breath waiting for Oakland, CA power-trio Brainoil to follow up the riff ‘n’ tumble of 2003’s superlative self-titled debut. They will have been dead and buried now, asphyxiated, gone purple in the cheek from the eight-year stretch when bassist/vocalist Greg Wilkinson, guitarist/vocalist…

It was only 18 years ago when Rorschach’s second album, Protestant, was released, but man, things were so very different. There was no Internet to help with communication or songwriting; if you wanted to write tunes, a bunch of people had to get face-to-face in a room.

I described them as a band that based their sound on the free-form noise and satanic soliloquy between the backend of “Don’t Burn the Witch” and the “At War With Satan” preview on Venom’s Black Metal.

CTS – Always Favour My Side by Decibel Magazine Alright, here’s another chance to win big. A lot of people go through life and they never win anything. Losers. Some babies are stillborn. The ultimate losers. Here is an opportunity to be better than that, by winning a copy of Catapult The Smoke’s new album…

Tour diaries suck. Here’s one from the future from Great Falls bassist/Decibel tell-it-like-it-isser Shane Mehling (not pictured, thank god). They will cover Sponge songs on request, but only from Rotting Pinata or Wax Ecstatic. Shudder before the insightfulness. Great Falls Future Tour Diary Wed, Aug. 3 – Baltimore, MD Fly in late and get picked…

There’s little more annoying on this planet than the immoral majority telling you how essential, transcendent and (huh-huh) seminal a particular extreme album is, when you know that it’s overrated as fuck. Hence, our new Wednesday morning column, “Disposable Heroes,” in which one brave soul sails against the current to inform all you clones why…

For whatever reason, when people talk about influential metal scenes of yore, the L.A.area  just doesn’t seem to get the credit it’s due. Sure, the whole Hollywood/Sunset Strip glam thing left its mark in the mid-’80s, but some of the world’s biggest and influential, ahem, “real” metal bands arose from the L.A. area much earlier…