By Jamie Getz, Gods & Queens

1) Mr. Pogo: Lets face it. Everything awesome comes from Japan. I’m serious. Look at the facts. They have microwaves that make toast. They have Corrupted, G.I.S.M., and Gauze. You can buy beer out of vending machines on the street. Not to mention, how many American idiots do you know that have a stupid koi fish, wind bars, foo dogs, tattooed on their arm? (more…)

5) It’s not a specific moment. All of us who later turned into bands like In Flames, Dark Tranquillity, At the Gates, Ceremonial Oath, and Tiamat. We were just hanging out, listening to heavy metal, starting our little pre-bands. It was just 20-30 people hanging out, going to beaches, drinking beer, starting bonfires, listening to old thrash and death metal albums. (more…)

By Jeff Schneider of Made in Mexico

1. Luis Posada Carriles: “Bambi” is a former CIA operative. In Venezuela this asshole has been convicted in absentia of involvement in various terrorist attacks and plots in the Western hemisphere, including involvement in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed seventy-three people, including a 9 year old girl and a pregnant woman (so make that 74). Posada is happily living in Miami, Florida at this very moment and is a celebrated anti-Castro hero there. (more…)

Decibel receives a lot of discs at the office that aren’t metal, and although it’s all pretty much garbage, it’s not all terrible garbage. This stuff, for example, has no place on Decibel’s Top 40 of 2008, or in the magazine at all mostly, but it’s still some decent 2008 tunage. Here’s a quick top 5 of shit that rolled through the office and just kept spinning, even if it is ambiguous listening.

1. Left Lane Cruiser – Bring Yo’ Ass To The Table. Easily one of the catchiest and heaviest albums of the year, cranked out by two Indiana yokels with a slide guitar, a tiny drum kit and a harmonica. It’s not down-tuned, thunda bass or orange amps; it’s electric country music with heavy fucking riffs. When the drummer laughs, I laugh. And it seems like Mark Evans, who showed em’ to me, is the only other dude on Earth who knows about em’. (more…)

List by Akimbo. Band photo by JM Luneau.

Akimbo has spent a lot of time on the road over the last ten years, but only a fraction of that time has actually been spent playing music. The lion’s share has gone to driving (of course) and finding ways to entertain ourselves before or after shows in the inevitable down time and/or awkward sleep overs with socially inept weirdos. Here is our top five activities we’ve engaged in while on the road that have nothing to do with playing or listening to music. (more…)

By Yannick Desranleau, AIDS Wolf

Montreal is full of weird idiosycracies in terms of its urban environment, but I guess that’s the case with any major second sector economy city in North America that thrived at the turn of the 20th century. I think there is just a general love-hate attitude with the built environment here. I mean, it’s not very remarkable for the most part, but it has really generated extreme attitudes from the population from project to project.

At the same time that a whole part of the downtown core was ripped through by a still unfinished underground superhighway (which left the dwellers completely indiferrent), an adjacent neighbourhood where Victorian houses were facing demolition made the citizens organize and reclaim the district. This action saved a very interesting side of our architectural history from vanishing while creating the first (and one of the biggest) housing co-ops in North America.

It’s weird because most of the bad decisions in terms of urban change were made in the most risky and costly areas, i.e. right in the middle of the Central City, where density and exchange is the most important and and vital. It’s quite a shame, because some of these neighborhoods that got leveled in the ’60s and the ’70s were the first witnesses of industrialization, where the first factories were installed when the city got its first growth boom in the 1880s. These areas were eclectic and dirty, but now all you see is a huge gash between the city core and the residential neighborhoods.

Anyway, this is a top 5 list of buildings that I find interesting in Montreal… It doesn’t follow an order and these choices are not made according to strict aesthetic ideas either. It’s just a list of urban anecdotes, more or less. (more…)

Amon Amarth frontman is no stranger to beer. He lives for it, in fact. Well, he could do without seasonal ales, particularly winter ales, but he’s all too ready to pull out the Viking-styled drinking horn with his current favorites. (more…)

1. Gehenna – “Devils Work”
Norwegian black metallers Gehenna tapped into something real on “Devils Work.” More death metal than previous Gehenna tracks, it still exudes an unmatched evil aura. Like looking through the red stained glass windows and seeing disemboweled humans on black-iron pikes with misshapen things stoking an infernal fire beneath them. (more…)