As I once wrote in an old issue of Decibel, give one positive review of a Fairyland album, and you’re branded for life. 

As usual, we here at Decibel are ahead of the game; we wrote about this lost proto-metal group back in 2011. Now you can hear the glory for yourself thanks to our stream of the brand-new reissue of their two albums.

There are not many perfect albums in heavy metal history, but Slayer’s Reign in Blood is one of them. In this writer’s opinion, when it comes to the greatest metal album of all time, it’s a toss-up between Reign in Blood, Master of Puppets, Ride the Lightning, and Paranoid. We’re dealing with an untouchable album here. Well, near untouchable, as Decibel’s Andrew Bonazelli had the brilliant/insane idea for a new way for us to argue about our favorite metal records: why not rank the songs on each Decibel Hall of Fame inductee? Sure, why not?

New Noisem.  Now.  What more do you need to know?  NEW NOISEM NOW!

Good. Goddamn.

Detroit noise punkers The Armed completely fucking kill it on the first single from the upcoming Kurt Ballou-helmed Untitled LP. (June 23, No Rest Until Ruin) Check out the fire festooned video for “Forever Scum” after the jump and then go pick up a bunch of free shit over at Bandcamp. 

In this month’s issue, we talked to Black Rainbows’ guitarist/vocalist Gabriele Fiori about the Italian band’s new album, Hawkdope—a gloriously psychedelic romp that pays homage to legends of the riff like Black Sabbath, Rainbow, Hawkwind and Monster Magnet. With that in mind, we asked our man to single out the best song from each of the aforementioned bands…no easy task considering their extensive, decades-spanning catalogs.

Crowhurst
Noise’s loss, metal’s gain
dB Rating: 8/10

Delaware is known as the First State, the Diamond State, or the Blue Hen State. Not sure what any of those things mean–except for First State–in the grand context of things, but it should now be known as the Death Metal State. And upstart death metallers Scorched are leading the charge.

OK, so, like, there’s some stuff coming out and, like, I’m going to talk about it here. So, like, I guess we should just talk about it.

I’d say Korpiklaani need a haircut and a bath, but maybe, like Samson, that’s the source of their powers. Whatever the secret is, you won’t find anything much more fun than their Finnish folk metal, and we have the video premiere to prove it.