The man behind the art: Shane Mehling has a chat with Bruno Guerreiro, Decibel Art Director and metal illustrator responsible for album covers, gig posters, and shirt designs.  

Just in time for fall:  doom over the world… now available in ones and zeros. 

A year or two ago, I did a ‘Black Label Debutante Ball’ profile on Poland’s EveryDayHate Records.  A couple weeks ago, a massive package of vinyl and CDs showed up at the house and I’ve decided to focus this week’s blog post on all the goodies emerging from EveryDayHate’s Krakow offices.

Eddie Gobbo is back with his first installment of ENCROTCHMENT, your weekly guide through the 2015 NFL FOOTBALL Season. 

An exclusive TASR interview with the two CEOs of Nashville’s Graceless Recordings on their six new tape releases, plus their thoughts on some other tapes currently vying for your hard-earned dinero.

The second coming of Lycia wouldn’t have been possible if main songwriter Mike VanPortfleet didn’t possess the same spark that kicked things off in 1988. Older, wiser, yet still wandering the same lonely plane as all those years ago, VanPortfleet (along with vocalist Tara Vanflower and collaborator David Galas) has released a vibrantly glum album in A Line That Connects. The title is literal, actually. Musically, it’s a nod to all things past Lycia, including the groundbreaking and influential effort, Cold. Read on as the Cold lineup, reunited for posterity, discuss A Line That Connects.

You just got good at hauling off and hitting someone. I wasn’t born and raised to do this — I’m a guy from Northwest. I went to private school. This really isn’t part of my metabolism. But it became it…

So muses Henry Rollins in an particularly epiphanous scene amidst Scott Crawford and Jim Saah’s relentlessly edifying Salad Days: A Decade of Punk In Washington, DC (1980-90) — a documentary those of us who seemingly never tire of listening to Rollins and Ian MacKaye fondly recall Georgetown Haagan Dazs days and night street fights with punk hating meatheads were going to watch regardless, but which also happily proves to be an epic, smart, admiring-yet-not-uncritical and — above all — fresh exploration of a seminal moments in time packed with insights and anecdotes that will likely surprise even those who know both Dance of Days and Banned in DC chapter-and-verse.

Every so often, we take a little time on Mondays to pay tribute to the Muthas! That is, reprinting the adorable metal/maternal Q&As that run in the magazine. Today, enjoy Jeanne Fury’s chat with Michelle Innis, mother of Derek Boyer (Suffocation/Decrepit Birth).

For over 25 years now Brazil’s Krisiun has waged war on death metal for death metal by death metal. To mistake the trio as anything but death metal–and their dedication to the craft–deserves the severest of punishments. Now stronger than ever, the Brothers in Death have a new album out called, Forged in Furty. Still fast as fucking lightning with a cattle prod up its ass yet memorable as a gruesome car crash, Forged in Fury sets alight pretenders and posers with great intensity. Read on as we question Hell’s most notable percussionist, Max Kolesne.

An exclusive stream of the heretofore extinct album Hope Finally Died… plus an interview with bassist/vocalist Harry Armstrong. 

All the bands ripped and insisted that we do the same. We’re not the type of band to deny the whims of our hosts.

There had never been a band like Unbroken before. How they sounded, how they looked and what they said all came from a place that baffled a lot of hardcore kids back in the 90s.

But Justin Pearson got it.

Here you are kids: the full, slightly abridged, version of the Publicist UK interview that appears in the Upfront section of the latest issue.

It should come as no surprise that the new Skepticism album, Ordeal, is a monolithic slab of incredible. The group’s status purveyors of the ultra-slow motion (aka funeral doom) isn’t for everybody—even the mustached, carabiner-on-belt-loop crowd—but that doesn’t matter. The magic of stomach-churnin’ heaviness, death rite fervor, and mind-numbing repetition is best when observed, commented on, absorbed, and enjoyed by the few.

Every so often, we take a little time on Mondays to pay tribute to the Muthas! That is, reprinting the adorable metal/maternal Q&As that run in the magazine. Today, enjoy Justin Norton’s chat with Colleen Letchford, mutha of Scale the Summit’s Chris Letchford.

We Deserve Our Failures

Glass All Empty

dB Rating: 8/10

Today we interrupt your busy air-guitar-wailing/eBay-foraging schedule to bring you news of a new Crepusculo Negro/Black Twilight Circle compilation featuring all new material from Volahn, Shataan, Arizmenda and Kalathon.

I could have done this forever. This is maybe the fifth band photo I’ve reviewed, and looking back they are not getting any less dumb. But this is my final review because, honestly, most people dealing with band photos are damned from the beginning.

It’s taken UK apocalyptic funeral-black metallers Lychgate two years to follow-up lauded debut Lychgate. In the years between the Brits have delved into the darkest recesses of funeral doom and black metal’s psyche, employing church organs in full effect to turn what is traditionally a Christian instrument against itself. Furthermore, Lychgate have gotten stranger, more decadent. The progressive underpinnings of Lychgate recall vintage Genesis, but don’t let the reference sway you in any direction. This is evil, uncompromising and uncomfortable music, the likes of which normally emanate in strange waves from Norway. This time it’s from the bowels of historic London. To make matters worse (or better) Esoteric’s Greg Chandler is on vocals.

“When you grow up Middle East, war is not another fantasy movie – but a reality,” says Hammercult to Decibel. “A reality driven by greed, economical, and political agendas, powered by a religious leaders to blind the masses. It doesn’t matter in which country you live in – your government wants you to fear, obey, follow blindly and swallow their lies – so that they could collect the Spoils Of War while you remain blind, deaf and dumb. Fight it back! Let’s take back our spoils of war. Our rights! Our freedom! This is the only war worth fighting for!”

To celebrate/wallow in the misery of our exclusive, not-on-any-album My Dying Bride flexi track, as well as their new album Feel the Misery, we would like to revisit a Decibrity playlist from their despair-mongering vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe.

Though Jonathan Dennison is best known for churning out righteous riffs and leveling breakdowns with a series of highly influential hardcore bands — The Promise, Another Victim, Path of Resistance, Unholy — the songwriter has taken a sharp turn into the macabre with Cadabra Records, the idiosyncratic label he founded to “exhume the works of influential horror genre icons in a spoken word style.” 

Four demos from four new bands to satisfy your itch for something strange. 

Okay, so get this — I had already decided to review this photo, right there sitting in the queue, and then I see him — I see former Queensryche/current be-haircutted frontman of Operation: Mindcrime Geoff Tate crossing the street in downtown Seattle. 

Of thrash’s three faces–sociopolitico, violent, comical–Atlanta’s Sadistic Ritual embody the aggro. They aren’t singing about saving whales and the injustice of corporate profits. Nor are they singing about keg parties and barf consistency in DayGlo Bermuda shorts. No, Sadistic Ritual, as the name implies, is about riots of violence, the realities of getting bombed–as in the thermobaric kind–and showing no mercy.

With the dual purpose of introducing the Die My Will dark sonic alchemy to new listeners and perhaps — dare we dream! — nudging a reunion into being and/or dragging that unreleased material into the light, we called upon members of Trap Them, Author & Punisher, Backstabbers, Inc, and others to testify to the band’s power and glory in between sick salvos mined from YouTube.

Sure, Jake E. Lee may have served with distinction during his tumultuous five-year tour of duty under General Sharon, summoning forth a mind-boggling cascade of super-solid riffage and shredding through the tears when he got fucked out of lucrative Bark at the Moon (1983) writing credits, but the guitarist nevertheless gets about as much love from the Osbourne camp as a circa-1982 bat.

In the July 2013 Decibel, Justin Norton interviewed Patricia Rosa, mother of Joe and Mario Duplantier of Gojira for our recurring “Metal Muthas” column. Patricia passed away two days ago, so to honor her, we’re reprinting that interview. Our condolences to the Duplantiers.

There are some diverse affectations in this photo; let’s talk about them. 

It’s nice to know the Author & Punisher mastermind has a sense of humor, and it’s on full display in this extremely fucking weird, occasionally hilarious video.