Guitar hero Scott ‘Wino’ Weinrich talks to Decibel about his upcoming solo album for Southern Lord and the Shrinebuilder project for Neurot Recordings. 2009’s gonna be heavy.

Decibel: Tell me about Shrinebuilder.
Scott ‘Wino’ Weinrich: Shrinebuilder involves Dale Crover from the Melvins, Scott Kelly from Neurosis, Al from Om, and me. We’re going to get together and record a record. It’s definitely an art project, ’cause we’ve not had the luxury of having long, drawn-out rehearsals. As a matter of fact, we’ve only got together a handful of times. (more…)

Believer vocalist/guitarist Kurt Bachman answers five questions from Decibel about the group’s as-yet-untitled fourth album for Metal Blade Records. Cue ‘World Exclusive’ theme music, please.

Decibel: This is your first record in 16 years. Are you nervous, excited or a little of both? (more…)

Two weeks before the presidential election, we did a lengthy Q&A on the state of our crumbling nation with Misery Index vocalist/bassist Jason Netherton. In addition to writing the band’s politically-fueled and socially conscious lyrics, Netherton operates the website demockery.org, where he catalogues and comments upon the never-ending corruptions, hypocrisies and failures of the ongoing American experiment. As usual, we ended up with way more material than we could cram into the allotted print real estate—which means the almighty Deciblog reaps yet another bonus feature. Happy Thanksgiving! (more…)

You know it’s metal when the members of Enslaved and director Patric Ullaeus (Dimmu Borgir, In Flames) hold invisible oranges against a chroma key backdrop. Actually, it’s just guitarist Ivar Bjørnson, bassist/vocalist Grutle Kjellson and Ullaeus cupping the almost uncuppable IOs. In fact, from the expression on their faces it looks like those are some damn heavy (metal) IOs. Look at Bjørnson. He can handle weird chords and obtuse compositional turns pretty well, but he’s struggling to keep that IO aloft. (more…)

The Metallica cover story in our current issue was nine pages… and we still had to cut editorial for space. But rather than allow this passionate …And Justice for All testimonial written by Cephalic Carnage guitarist Zac Joe to collect dust in some folder on my desktop, we decided it was good idea to share it with the world. Plus, still I needed to figure out how to post shit on the new site. (more…)

We recently interviewed the always-entertaining Rich Hoak, master blaster for grind gods Brutal Truth and the drummer/vocalist/conceptual architect behind Total Fucking Destruction, for our upcoming 50th issue. Due to the limited real estate available in the mag, we weren’t able to squeeze in Hoak’s explanations for some of the more intriguing song titles on TFD’s new album, Peace, Love, And Total Fucking Destruction. But seeing as how the Interhole offers unlimited space for niche-market minutiae—and that the aforementioned TFD album drops today—we figured a Deciblog post was in order. Here’s what our man had to say… (more…)

We here at Decibel’s Los Angeles Bureau are riddled with bad habits, but the one that annoys our perpetually harried Editor-In-Chief most (okay, second-to-most) is our tendency to turn in cover stories that are about 3,000 words longer than they should be. As such, our exhaustive/exhausting feature on freshly reunited grindgore fiends Carcass had to lose a little weight before the mag went to print—and the fucker is still nine pages long. The following outtake concerns H.R. Giger’s involvement with the band’s 1993 blasterpiece, Heartwork:

The album’s cover represented another huge departure for Carcass, reflecting, perhaps, the almost complete lack of obtuse medical terminology in Jeff Walker’s lyrics this time around (“Carnal Forge” being the glaring exception). While Necroticism had forgone the gore collages of Reek and Symphonies, the pathology elements were still front and center. For Heartwork, however, Carcass managed to get renowned Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, creator of the Alien alien who had previously lent his work to album covers for Celtic Frost (To Mega Therion), Atrocity (Hallucinations), Danzig (How The Gods Kill), and Emerson, Lake & Palmer (Brain Salad Surgery), to let them adopt the new aluminum cast of his “Life Support” sculpture. “I used to have a Swiss girlfriend, and she was a friend of Giger’s girlfriend at the time,” Walker reveals. “So that was one of those lucky coincidences. I don’t think he really liked what we were doing—he was more into jazz. That piece was something he’d done in the ’60s, and we’d approached him to use it. It just so happened that he was remaking it in aluminum, so again, it was a lucky coincidence. And I think he was… I won’t say flattered, but I think he liked that we were interested in something contemporary that he was doing at the moment.”

The October issue, complete with Carcass cover story, doesn’t technically hit the stands until the first week of September, but we’ve got some advance copies available here: https://store.decibelmagazine.com/pc-75-2-048-oct-2008.aspx

The other night we got totally hammered and listened to The Gates Of Slumber’s face-ruling Conqueror album on psychotic repeat mode for about four fucking hours. We basked in the barbaric glory of their Vitusian power-doom and then drunk-dialed vocalist/guitarist Karl Simon at home in Indianapolis. He humored us by sharing his thoughts on liner notes, DJing, and kids these days. (What’s up with them, anyway?)

Usually when you see liner notes in album, it’s a re-release of something old, but you’ve got a little blurb after each song on Conqueror. What was the inspiration for that?
There was a band from Cleveland called Boulder—they’re friends of mine—and on their second record, Ravage And Savage, Jamie [Walters], the singer, does this little comical blurb about every song, but at the end he would sign Ken Hensley’s name. On Uriah Heep albums, Hensley would always write these notes about what key a song was in or what was going on with it, to create a more intimate connection with the listener. I laughed my ass off when I read the stuff that Jamie wrote, so when it came time to do our second record, I started doing it myself. It’s an attempt, on my part, to reach out to the listener and get them more involved in the song. Hopefully they don’t think it’s me being pompous.

It also engages the listener in the album as a whole—reading along as each song comes on.
Yeah. You know, currently, it seems like music is becoming more and more of an optional extra in people’s lives, whereas when I was a kid, music was everything. It wasn’t vinyl for me—I was a tape collector. And there was nothing more awesome than getting a tape on the weekend. I remember getting the first Metal Church record—that was the most awesome cassette of all time. I was sitting there with my mullet, listening to “Gods Of Wrath” and I thought it was the heaviest shit ever. And it’s still one of the greatest. But now people download one song and they don’t get the whole album, and that’s a shame, because I always appreciated that.

The summer before my freshman year of high school, the only album I listened to was Sabotage. “Hole In The Sky” is permanently burned into my brain. I’d take like two- or three-hour walks, with my poofy walkman headphones on—my ears were sunburned around them. It was pretty nerdy, but I loved every minute of it. And I just don’t think the iPod generation has the understanding of how much that really meant, because everything is a click of the button away and they can make their own mixes so easily. But I think a lot of times you need to hear a record as the artist put it together. Not always, but sometimes there’s a definite ebb and flow to a record, even if it’s accidental.

It’s like when you’re at the bar and a song comes on the jukebox from an album you know really well. When the song ends, a song by a different band comes on and it’s jarring, because you expect the next track on the album.
I know exactly what you mean. It’s a very unpleasant thing. When I was a kid, going to high school parties, there was no mixing. You put a record on and it stayed on until the very end. The guy who manages Macabre does a night at a place called the Liar’s Club in Chicago and I was the guest DJ one night when we were recording Suffer No Guilt. It was neat to try and find ways to do that. I could see myself getting into it, but there’s not much call in Indianapolis for a guy who’s gonna mix up “Orion” and Twisted Sister’s “Destroyer.” Dance floors just aren’t ready for that.