Punk

Waldo goes talon-to-toe with the latest releases from Graves at Sea, Mantar, and Victims.

Kick Me Silly – VC III
Bigger Bang
dB Rating: 8/10

As Ottawa’s trad metal-tinged punk rock underground-superstars-in-the-making ZEX continue to build an increasingly strong head of fist-pumping, sneering, anthemic steam with the upcoming Magic Bullet re-release of the band’s barnburner debut Fight For Yourself, it is Decibel‘s pleasure to bring you the exclusive premiere of the uncensored “Wanderlust” video. Photo credit here. (I think!) Tour…

Old outlaw scumfucs never die. Actually, the virtuous go first and the bad people continue along in almost cockroach fashion. They’re unkillable. Case in point: Merle Allin, brother of the legendary musical outlaw GG. You might hate GG but you certainly know about him. Not only did Merle survive life with one of the craziest…

This is the time of the year to acknowledge the things you’re thankful for. One of the things we’re very thankful for is that we’ve been alive to experience multiple Sick Of It All shows. SOIA has long exported their brands of New York City hardcore to the world – as well as their intensely…

Globalization really has changed everything, not just for business and our sex lives but for music. How else could you explain the fact that dudes in Mumbai are playing expert technical death metal and the crop of black metal bands in Australia? Case in point: the new album from Overcharge. Now, if you listen to…

Pushing boundaries is taken for granted in extreme music. The review pages of Decibel are packed with bands that eschew convention in the hopes of creating something different. In the early 80s, hardcore punk and metal were ruled by dogma. T.S.O.L. was one of the standard bearers: Weathered Statues and Dance With Me were benchmarks…

This is not an April Fool’s joke, except on the politically correct thought police: We have the first new Meatmen track in two decades! When I was a kid I sat in my room and cranked The Meatmen at ridiculous volumes and memorized Tesco Vee’s banter on the classic Meatmen platters. So to say this…

Iron Hand are a crusty d-beat/hardcore band from New Haven, CT, and, courtesy of Safety Meeting Records you can stream their awesome debut 12-inch, Injected Fear right here, right now. Injected Fear is a rugged and lean 18 minutes of the sort of unpolished fury that’s probably best experienced live as it rattles around an…

There’s always been a hardcore softspot in Decibel’s metallic heart for the raw and the punk.  This writer admits to rarely getting stoked for such sounds, often preferring to hear artfully concocted studio recordings and leave the unkempt, wild fury on the stage where it’s most powerful.  But somehow Norway’s Shevils buried into these ears…

Courtesy of Forge Again Records and exclusively for all you Decibangers out there, may this cursed quarter of the Internet be the first to steam in full the debut LP from Detroit punks Old Gods, Stylized Violence. What can you expect? Sheesh . . . Well, it is worth noting that the album artwork features…

Fight Amp’s Birth Control is the sort of super-cool genre non-specific releases that sounds like it was written in a week tops and thrashed out and tracked in a day. It sounds 100 per cent jam room live, heaping catchy riffs on top of awkward and dissonant hardcore punk and noise-rock. If it sounds unruly,…

Fucked Up, Rifflandia Festival, September 14, Victoria, BCRifflandia has one of the coolest names for a music festival. It seemed in past years when it was smaller that it was more about the “riff” than it is in its current iteration, where hip-hop, Americana, indie rock and, well, Fucked Up intermingle. For instance, we preceded…

We’re chuffed to have a dB album of the year award winner take over the shredder’s studio this Wednesday. In this second installment, Tombs guitarist and vocalist Mike Hill tells us about the riffs that led him on a musical path of totality. While you are at it make sure to check out the new…

You may have noticed that Decibel has a bit of a Deciboner for Gaza. Witness the recent Deciblog posts where we premiered a new track and had a fucking parrot review the new album, No Absolutes in Human Suffering. Well, we’re not done yet. No sir. To celebrate the release of the new album today…

Even if you’re not a red-hot Cancer Bats fan you’ve got to admire a spectacular set-piece like this. In part to launch new album Dead Set on Living but totally to rise to a challenge from their booking agent, the Toronto punk-metal road hounds scheduled a one-day tour of London, with six shows routed in…

Ever wondered what the Liverpudlian quartet SSS did when they weren’t thrashing and crossing over? We did, too. We also just wanted to use the word “Liverpudlian.” Weird word obsessions and juvenile humor aside, apparently the folks over at Vice (along with Vans) decided to document 24 hours (more or less) with with the band…

The phone just kept ringing out and going to Tony Foresta’s voicemail. We tried a few times, on each occasion considering leaving a “horny message” at the beep, as requested by the Municipal Waste frontman. It feels now like an opportunity missed. Ach, no matter, it was all cool. Foresta wasn’t dogging the call, obviously,…

As far as back-together-for-the-first-time-since-’85 reunions go, we’ll take a newly reformed English Dogs—one of the UKs prime purveyors of crossover back in the day—over Van Halen any day. And lucky for us here in the U.S., three-fifths of the lineup that brought us the essential-listening thrash classic Forward Into Battle—drummer Andrew “Pinch” Pinching, lead guitarist…

Clocking in at 13 minutes or so, Retox’s debut rager Ugly Animals only just falls into the LP category. But, shit, it packs enough aggression, energy and compositional cordite to compensate anybody who is bummed out from holding out for a longer running time. The San Diego quartet don’t fuck around—at least not with the…

Since we, rather Albert, wrote the book on the absolutely probable history of death metal and grindcore (available here as a shameful but necessary plugadelic), we felt there has been a dearth of grindcore and grindcore-related things on the Deciblog. We know. We’ve got Sailors With Wax Wings, Valient Thorr, Gene Simmons, and fucking Shadowgarden…