This year’s pre-Halloween weekend marked the beginning of (hopefully) a new Baltimore tradition: the Autumn Screams Doom two-day festival. As coordinator/originator Dan Petruccelli tells it, he hopes ASD will “bring old school doom and new school doom together. There’s so much each one brings.” He noted the periodic fluctuation of the audience’s mean age as…

The Slovenly Swiss sludge slatterns better known as Abraham were brought to my attention courtesy their label boss, Robin Staps. You may recognise Robin’s name as he’s the driving engine behind The Ocean and, because he seems to think that the seven or eight hours of sleep he gets each month is a luxury, he…

So far, Decibel has expelled three special collector’s edition one-offs: the Thrash Metal Hall of Fame issue, the Black Metal Hall of Fame issue and the (sold-out) Top 100 Albums of the 2000s issue. Our fourth stab at limited-edition putridity is the best yet–this time, all of the content is 100 percent new and exclusive:…

Two years after the tragic death of Makh Daniels, Early Graves triumphantly returned with a new record this week (Justin M. Norton put it much more eloquently in his review in our December issue). Instead of putting together a typical playlist to celebrate Red Horse, the quintet decided to go all multimedia with its theme:…

“How’s the iPhone pit over there,” Converge vocalist Jacob Bannon says at one point midway through the band’s headlining show last week at Slim’s in San Francisco. Good question. It’s hard to figure out who would want to mind meld with their personal device when a trashcan was lobbed into the pit midway through “Trespasses.”…

In less than one week Dragged Into Sunlight will unleash Widowmaker, and while perhaps not quite powerful enough to actually slay a significant other, it is a churning, seething beast of a record sure to raise the bar in the world of pitch black epic, serpentine metal. Those sky high post-Hatred for Mankind expectations? Widowmaker…

Sometimes in the face of overwhelming shittiness, we need a little something to distract us. We suspect that a pretty large number of our brethren (and sistren, or whatever…) are currently without the ability to log onto the Interhole at the moment thanks to Sandy but for those who are, here’s something that is completely…

Samhain is upon us! It’s better known as All Hallow’s Eve or Halloween these days, but that’s the Christians-supplanting-an-ancient-pagan-ritual-for-conversion-purposes naming convention thing. Ah, they did such dastardly deeds all over Europe, the Near East, Africa, Asia, and so forth. Anyway, it’s time for the leaves to turn a golden brown, the air to have a…

Welcome to The Lazarus Pit, a biweekly look at should-be classic metal records that don’t get nearly enough love; stuff that’s essential listening that you’ve probably never heard of; stuff that we’re too lazy to track down the band members to do a Hall Of Fame for. This week, we have a special treat (or…

Originally, this frickin’ boner was supposed to go out to the tragically unsigned Secrets of the Sky, an Oakland, CA collective who specialize in black-splashed prog-n-doom awesomeness.  Now that Secrets of the Sky are untragically signed to Gravedancer Records, you’re hopefully going to hear a lot more about them in the coming months and years. …