The Sammy Hagar outfit encourages manscaping. I thought I’d get a head start on my Halloweening this weekend, so I began looking around the web for costume ideas. That, coupled with pumpkin beers and the Misfits discography, led me to seek out what America thinks qualifies as a heavy metal costume. The Dallas Costume Shop…

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 for students of extreme metal 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 time around,…

Tuesday marked the 25th anniversary of Cliff Burton’s death. Metallica were traveling through Sweden on the Damage Inc. tour in support of Master of Puppets, when the band’s bus crashed just outside Ljungby, killing Burton. He was 24. Sometimes it’s easy—perfectly natural, too—to over-egg it and go nuts when evaluating the dead’s music or art….

According to the calendar hanging on the wall about two feet to the left of my bulbous head, today is Rosh Hashanah. In technical terms, this means today is the first of the high holidays, or Yamin Noraim, celebrated ten days before Yom Kippur and is observed on the first two days of Tishrei, the…

09/23/2011, Terminal 5, NYC Is this exciting, or what? Seeing Queens perform their self-titled was cool, but I never, ever thought I’d get to see Kyuss…or, uh, anything like Kyuss, either. When I found out about the NY date, as Decibel’s self-appointed toke-master general, I felt it was my duty to attend. In addition, I…

I distinctly recall the first time I heard Ministry’s The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste.

I was going to write what I hoped would be the definitive critique of the heart-stopping shit mountain known as Loutallica, but then I got this in my inbox: Korn announced today that they will release their tenth studio album, The Path of Totality on December 6. But this is unlike any Korn record. It’s…

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. This time, Comrade Bennett accepts the editor-in-chief’s challenge to resurrect Cave In’s post-Jupiter oeuvre from beyond hypothermia.

To quote your bio: “SubRosa comprises the deep thrum that makes up the underlying plasma of our invisible surroundings.” What does that mean?Sarah Pendleton: We are attempting to be the sonic interpreters of that which is intangible. The name SubRosa implies mystery. Something hidden. Do you actively try to keep things a bit obscure? Rebecca…

Because of the stature they have attained, much of the metal-loving world puts the Big Four as the sort of holy, uh, quadrinity of thrash metal. These are the bands—all American—that we consider the originators and finest progenitors of the genre. But not so fast. If we’re to look at many of the Big Four’s…