Broken Hope lyrics always seemed like mini-synopses of potential horror sagas, so perhaps guitarist/wordsmith Jeremy Wagner’s the burgeoning second career as a dark fiction author should not come as a huge surprise. In his debut novel The Armageddon Chord — ably reviewed in the current issue of Decibel by Lucas Hardison — Wagner intertwines the…

It took a lot of guitar amplification to put together Pombagira’s fourth album, Iconoclast Dream. We’re talking some 19, 20 vintage amps and cabs in the arsenal; that’s overkill for most bands, even those more mob-handed in personnel would struggle to justify having such an inventory. But with extreme doom, where tempos are slow and…

We’re just a few weeks away from the return of the NFL, thank god. So, as usual, we contacted some of our favorite extreme musicians to pump up the underachieving fuck-ups they call their favorite teams. To kick the week off, Hate Eternal kingpin Erik Rutan can’t wait for Ron Mexico and the Rape Stands…

Mazzy the kitten as Britney Spears, complete with fake albino python. The epic shit-show of the year happened last night. MTV is a pathetic punchline at this point in history, but there’s one thing the VMAs were good for: an animal reenactment photoshoot, starring Mazzy, Muncie, and Mona the kittens and Moxie and Sugar the…

Every other Friday, Waldo the African Grey Parrot, frontbird of thrash-grind immortals Hatebeak, will get you caught up on the week’s latest “extreme” releases. What up? Talk about beak, I mean bleak—these upcoming releases are about as barren as the Jundland Wastes on Tatooine… What can be said about KITTIE that hasn’t been said before?…

Randy Rhoads died 10 years before the official guitar tablature for Tribute found its way through my door, subsequently bogarting so many onanistic early-90s teenage years of practising guitar for the edification of no one save for the family spaniel. But the impact of his style—all neoclassical Ritchie Blackmore one minute and kinda like a…

I’ve done a lot for metal over the years. In an attempt to sport the longhair uniform, despite genetics handing my follicles a bum deal, I walked around looking like a frizzed out crackhead throughout most of the 80s. Rooms in my house are filled with records, CDs, magazines and not much else to varying…

We all have plenty of loud, noisy music to worship the goat with – never enough, in fact. But when it’s time to take it easy and still be evil, it’s not so easy, is it? Danzig has made acoustic evil in the past, Ulver did those strange soundtracks, and Burzum’s prison albums weren’t particularly…

The Queensrÿche of today hardly resembles the leather-clad, high energy band of young metallers that burst onto the global underground in 1983.

What Is Moira’s Lake? from Envinity on Vimeo. “The Most Expensive Album You’ll Buy This Year” That is the first thing you read on the promo page for Envinity’s Moira’s Lake. Here’s the second thing: “Even Though It’s Brilliant, That Doesn’t Mean You’ll Like It.” And so begins our quest throughout the worst, most self-important…