I remember chatting on the phone with Mike Williams about Eyehategod’s follow-up to 2000’s Confederacy of Ruined Lives, how it was going slowly as he was dealing with his incarceration issues, his health, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the difficulty of getting all five members in the same room together. There was no firm…
It takes a special band to spend twelve-and-a-half minutes slogging through a freaky-heavy doom bum-out called simply “Darkness,” then decide there’s just more to say on the issue and tuck in for another 14 minutes and call the result “Darkness, Part 2.” It’s like being lost in a menacing forest devoid of all large predators…
Few bands, metal or otherwise, have built a reputation over the last 15 years as sterling as Agalloch has. Ever since the 2002 landmark The Mantle the Portland band has put a very unique spin on extreme metal, its blend of folk/pagan influences and atmospheric black metal yielding startlingly beautiful music that many didn’t dream…
As we mentioned in a recent interview with Norwegian filmmaker Christian Falch, there’s an awfully interesting new documentary in production that more than a few of you might appreciate. ‘Blackhearts’ is slated for a September 2015 release, and follows three black metal fans & musicians from very dissimilar backgrounds as they chase their dreams and…
To a music journalist, a publicist can either be a trusted source of the tunes and information we need to get our job done, or an annoying omnipresence in our inboxes, constantly sending mass e-mails with hyperbolic language about shit bands that don’t deserve the publicity in the first place. For a band spending its…
About six months ago, a Salt Lake City, UT band called Gravecode Nebula heaved out its first album, Sempiternal Void, despite the fact that the band has been playing together in some form since 2006. Fellow Salt Lake slowniks and Decibel faves SubRosa have mentioned GN a couple times when discussing local bands they enjoy,…
Baton Rouge doom/sludge prolific over-achievers, Thou has returned from an almost unheard of (for them, anyway) two years of silence as far as releases are concerned with their latest and greatest full-length, Heathen. We recently sent guitarist Andy Gibbs and vocalist Bryan Funck a bunch of questions to respond to via email. It would appear…
If you’re anything like me, you’ve welcomed the last five years of Scion’s patronage of metal with a mix of gratitude and suspicion. No doubt, they’ve made it possible for fans to hear new tunes and see lives shows from some of the best bands in extreme music, usually at zero cost to all parties…
Everyone dies. Of course we all know that, we’re aware of it from an early age. Yet in metal the idea of death, actual death, not phony-baloney doom and gloom play-acting, has always been overly romanticized rather than dealt with head-on. The explanation is simple: heavy metal is still a very young subculture. Prior to…
If ever you’ve set up a tour for your band, you know what a logistical nightmare it can be just to make sure your bandmates actually show up to the van, let alone finding venues willing to book you and somehow breaking even each night. Imagine doing that shit. This is the domain of the…
Rather than planting our flag in one fertile corner of the extreme musical universe, Decibel has always enjoyed scrambling back and forth along the continuum, from the dingiest anti-production muckfests (found in our recent Top 100 Black Metal Albums special issue) to the most gorgeous prog explorations (such as Jeff Wagner’s super-mellow Cynic piece in the current…
It’s another fairly light week this week – I doubt many Decibel readers will be salivating over the reissue of Def Leppard’s sorry 1996 album Slang – but most interestingly, there’s a good amount of music I actually like. Is it because I’m still a good six weeks away from my annual spring burnout? The…
In the liner notes to 2010’s Below & Beyond collection, Floor co-founder Anthony Vialon recalled that while his band had played together off and on for 12 years before seemingly dissolving for keeps in 2003, he and his cohorts hadn’t even managed to play a hundred shows.
On paper it looks like a fairly slow week for new releases, but actually the quality versus quantity ratio is better than average, with no fewer than three albums I heartily recommend. Enjoy and savor, because these kind of weeks don’t come along very often. Astrophobos, Remnants of Forgotten Horrors (Triumvirate): Well, if this isn’t…
The weather may be brutally cold when Amon Amarth, Enslaved and Skeletonwitch roll into Minneapolis on Saturday, February 8, but there will be a special strong beer, brewed specifically for this event by Surly Brewing, waiting for them. Surly is sponsoring the show at Mill City Nights and head brewer Todd Haug decided to provide…
Extreme metal fans complaining about the “lack of darkness” on an album with more than its share of shade have a severely skewed opinion of what constitutes “dark” music. But that’s completely understandable. After all, when you subsist on a diet of nothing but barbecue and someone hands you a salad, you’re going to wonder…
T.S.O.L. vocalist, author and provocateur Jack Grisham has visited the land of the extremely extreme several times in the past year or so. He wrote a moving tribute to Jeff Hanneman in our memorial issue last July. In August, he joined the Deciblog for a career-spanning interview where he talked about the classic Dance With…
I had an interesting conversation with a metal peer over coffee yesterday, and was asked what makes a “traditional” heavy metal album made in 2014 worth spending money on when all I have to do is listen to a Judas Priest album. I had to pause and consider that for a minute. For a writer…
The Unguided’s previous album, Hell Frost, was the product of ex-Sonic Syndicate members Richard and Roger Sjunnesson venturing away from the sway of record companies and their malignant henchmen. Meeting favorable reviews–largely in Europe–The Unguided took off, pulling the sounds of Soilwork, Killswitch Engage, and Scar Symmetry and making them distinct and memorable. Some three…
Ontario’s Biipiigwan is a quizzical beast of a band. From their moniker and line-up’s open-door policy to their sound and members being spread out across this humongous province of ours, questions pertaining to how, why, where and who usually abound when the band is the topic of conversation. The driving force behind this are-they-metal?-are-they-hardcore?-are-they-noise-rock?-are-they-sludge-doom?-just-what-the-hell-are-they? is…
Being a metal fan means having an opinion about whether Slayer is Slayer without Jeff and Dave, or which lineup of Death reigns supreme. You’re used to haggling over the creative impact of band member turnover. What you might not know is that even the most amicable lineup change can involve a host of legal…
As long as Oslo’s Beaten to Death exists, debate will exist as to whether they’re taking grindcore into uncharted waters and making the world a better place because of it, or whether they just plain suck for the same reason. Personally, their first album Xes and Strokes and newest, Dødsfest! are two of the freshest…
As you probably know from the endless stream of obituaries, tributes, and remembrances, Lou Reed died this past Sunday morning. Interestingly, none of the prominent metal blogs have mentioned his passing, save for the odd snarky remark about how we’ll never have a sequel to Lulu now. And it’s understandable, I suppose, because Reed’s music…
Tokyo’s Melt-Banana has been airing their newfound status as a two-piece for the first time in North America for about a week now with about three more weeks to go. It’s been a tumultuous term for vocalist Yasuko “Yako” Onuki and guitarist Ichiro Agata that’s seen them embrace life as a duo (and almost break…
Great American Beer Festival, Denver, ColoradoOct. 10-12, 2013 It would be an overstatement to say that this was the Year of Metal at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, but the handful of extreme music diehards—from TRVE, Surly, Real Ale and Three Floyds pictured above—among the 600-plus breweries present at the festival, definitely made…
Okay, this week was officially insane, with a wealth of good new music to investigate. Isn’t the fall release time the best? This week’s essential albums: Oranssi Pazuzu, Velonielu (20 Buck Spin): The Finnish band who unapologetically loves psychedelia (oranssi, or “orange”, a clear reference to Tangerine Dream) and The Exorcist (“Pazuzu”) has been on…
Back at the end of July, the Canadian government quietly enacted a piece of legislative shit that, essentially overnight, made it exponentially (and in most cases, prohibitively) more expensive for bands to tour our country. Basically, where once a band consisting of anywhere between three and fourteen members would have had to collectively pay $450…
The fact that I know anything about The Golden Grass happened by accident. Last month, I went to see Windhand with every intention of missing both opening bands. Unfortunately, my ability to time arrivals at shows–even when the venue announces set times in advance–is on par with Andy Reid’s clock management skills. So, not surprisingly,…
Tell your average schmoe on the street that you’re doing an interview with Matt Harvey and they’ll probably think the topics of conversation are set to include pitch selection, what it’s like having Andrew Bonazelli as a stalker and season ending surgery. What automatically comes to mind when you mention the name Matt Harvey to…
As some of you may have noticed, there has recently been an explosive, blown-up debate about (the lack of) stage diving on this year’s Summer Slaughter tour between us, Summer Slaughter, and the fans. Apart from all the useless “you better book ‘baby corpse deep throat massacre’ next year, this tour is not metal anymore”…