Sucker For Punishment

Like many other metal fans, I’m a longtime admirer of the crew at Banger Films, who in the past decade have raised the bar when it comes to documenting the metal scene with the seriousness of anthropologists and the artistry of filmmakers. From Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, to Global Metal, to Iron Maiden: Flight 666,…

Ever since I saw them play twice at Roadburn 2013, I’ve been spouting a lot of praise about power trio Satan’s Satyrs, whose idiosyncratic blend of proto-metal and Nuggets-era garage rock scratches an indescribable itch for yours truly. Equal parts boogie, psychedelia, and cheeseball horror, it’s ferocious, catchy, and enormously fun. Sure, it’s all reminiscent…

I don’t issue perfect scores to new albums very often. As Craig Hayes so eloquently wrote a couple weeks ago, positivity and over-praise is a plague in metal criticism, so much so that some publications so constantly hover in the 7 to 10-out-of-10 that a 6 is a negative rating. Ratings, to be honest, are…

Late last year I finally came around to Portland (by way of Rhode Island) duo The Body, whose album Christs, Redeemers won me over. Yes, it followed the same direction as the lauded All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, but it felt more refined, more powerful. However, the prolific duo of Chip…

Remember when rock stars could act like total dicks and no one would even bat an eye? Imagine the lawsuits, the social media backlash if someone famous whipped a smashed guitar 30 feet into a festival crowd. Today’s rockers are pussycats compared to Ritchie Blackmore circa 1974. If you don’t know the story of Deep…

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…

One of the best ideas the music industry has had in the last couple years is the mini box set. Either consisting of a band’s entire discography or a certain era in its history, these reasonably priced little collections of CDs in replica vinyl sleeves, usually housed in either a clamshell box, cardboard sleeve, or…

What stuck out to me immediately upon hearing Conan’s album Monnos two years ago was not only how dense, how pulverizing the Liverpool trio’s brand of doom is, but how blunt it is. It’s the metal equivalent of Lothar of the Hill People. The term “caveman doom” has been bandied about in attempts to describe the…

Three new albums stand out above the rest this week, and what makes it particularly fun is just how completely different from each other they all are. From happy Germans, to grim Swedes, to avant-garde Brooklynites, this week’s Sucker For Punishment has got you covered. Power metal is the one metal subgenre that’s the most…

This week’s a funny one, with one hugely, hugely obvious Album of the Week pick, one that’s most likely destined for my personal best metal of 2014 list. But after some real digging, I’ve found a couple other albums well worth checking out, too: a long lost reissue from a forgotten Metal Massacre band, some…

Just as much as metal needs its forward thinkers, it also needs its defenders of the faith. Traditionalism in heavy metal is equally as important as progression, and in this day and age where young bands foolishly mistake “extreme” one-upmanship as being the most important tenet of the genre – sorry kids, power is paramount…

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…

It’s strange how the pieces have finally fallen into place for Behemoth. A decade after putting themselves on the extreme metal map with the revelatory Demigod, the Poles are poised for a different kind of breakthrough altogether, via extraordinary circumstances no one could possibly have written. Behemoth’s star has always been on the rise, but…

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…

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…

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…

(photo by Alex Hardie) Year-end lists are done with, folders of digital promos are archived (or in some particularly terrible albums, deleted), and now it’s time to focus on a fresh year of new music. Here’s hoping the expected big albums deliver, and that even more great new releases await discovery. I try to be…

It’s become fashionable on social media to complain about the sheer volume of year-end music lists that appear every December, and certainly more and more seem to surface every year, but to be honest I love year-end lists, and I try to read every one I come across. The excitement of discovering great new music…

I’m not going to apologize for liking Nightwish. I might be only a small handful of Decibel writers willing to endorse the garish symphonic strains of the Finnish band (hi, Jeff Treppel), but I remain steadfast. Besides, for all the emphasis on extreme metal, isn’t Nightwish’s use of operatic melodies extreme? I’d even say that…

If you haven’t noticed yet, the beginning of December has given way to the annual deluge of year-end lists, publication after publication, writer after writer offering their choices of the best albums of 2013. It’s completely overdone, but still something I relish to this day, as that perpetual desire to discover great new music never…

It’s that time of year again, what my American buds call Thanksgiving, what we Canadians call the other Thanksgiving, and what the rest of the world calls The Weekend Where The Internet Suddenly Feels Abandoned. Seeing that the whole Black Friday gimmick is always the unofficial start of the holiday consumer frenzy in America, it’s…

This past Saturday I attended a Lamb of God show, quite frankly because they put on a good show and Testament was also playing. But what was particularly interesting at this show was that the venerable Bay Area thrash heroes of Testament were stuck opening this show for Lamb of God and Killswitch Engage. If…

This past week I was lucky enough to have young Baltimore thrash phenoms Noisem roll through my part of the world, and while I was already an admirer of the band – Agony Defined is the best thrash album of the year – I was curious to see how their intense yet riffy brand of…

Pardon me if I’m a little distracted this morning, I just saw Slayer last night, and say what you will about Kerry and Tom heading out with a pair of hired ringers in Gary Holt and Paul Bostaph, but their all-oldies setlist warmed the cockles of this 43 year-old’s heart. No fewer than six Metal…

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…

Despite a pair of albums that will be on my personal year-end list, this week is on the light side, which admittedly is a welcome breather, because it’s a mere ripple compared to the tsunami of new stuff coming out in a week’s time. Seriously, next week looms over me like Ivan Drago. But first…

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…

When I took over the Headbang blog at MSN Music in August 2011, I was thinking of ways I could set it apart from the rest of the metal blogs out there. Everyone seems to only list the new releases every week, so why don’t I review as many as I can? It seemed easy…