Because New Year countdowns are all the rage and never get boring, count down the songs on Plague Soundscapes with us.  Or against us.

Bethlehem
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning
dB rating: 9/10

One writer picks five favorite Decibel web articles of 2016.

On this week’s Demo:listen, with a little help from some of our friends, we look back on 2016, a year of great demos.

What do the phrase “break the chains,” Kurt Ballou’s production jobs, and ways to die all have in common? They’ve all been themes for Decibel‘s Apple Music playlists, of course.

Legendary Boston extreme music pioneers/provocateurs SIEGE are in the middle of a string of reunion dates — see our recent interview with drummer Robert Williams for the deets here — which arrives at the Red Alert Skateboard Shop for a New Year’s Eve pummeling alongside Sadist, Infernal Diatribe, Crystal Methodist, Guilt, Rejiem, and Nycterent, as well as fast-rising crust-grinders LEASH, a band recently joined by Backstabbers Inc/Northern Curse vocalist/guitarist Matt Serven ahead of the straight-up nasty leveller of an E.P. entitled Dead End Breeders, which Decibel is pleased to exclusively stream in its entirety below. 

If you know anything about Napalm Death you probably know this bit of trivia: the band contains no original members. While they are known for the revolutionary Scum album, not even their oldest current member played on it. So when it comes to people leaving, dying or being fired, when is a band no longer the same band?  

Check out this exclusive track premiere of “Triumph Continuum” off the debut mini-album Quantum Noose of Usurpation from U.S. warlords Ululatum Tollunt.

After the dust settled and forty records were assigned a place on Decibel’s vaunted list, five remained that probably could have swapped places with anything else on the list without causing any greater/lesser irritation than lists like this already stir up.  Why should they get left out?  Here are the five records that tied for #41 on our Top 40 Albums of 2016.

For Saxon’s Wheels of Steel [February 2017, #148] interviews, we were able to gather all five original members. As required by Hall of Fame edict #1. The current and former members of Britain’s heavy metal legends couldn’t have been nicer and more talkative. Graham, Steve, Biff, Pete, and Paul spun all kinds of fun and interesting stories about the events leading up to landmark album Wheels of Steel and what happened shortly thereafter.