Demo:listen: Ripped To Shreds
This week’s Demo:listen reveals 埋葬, the debut album from San Jose’s one-man death metal band, Ripped To Shreds.
This week’s Demo:listen reveals 埋葬, the debut album from San Jose’s one-man death metal band, Ripped To Shreds.
Continuing the fun that our Napalm Death special issue started, here we examine and rank the band’s four “wilderness years” albums from worst to best.
Dark, depressing and slow, Pissboiler‘s new album is a powerful release.
Doom-death heshers Druid Lord request eight minutes of your time to crush you immensely with “Last Drop of Blood,” a brand new song from their sophomore album, Grotesque Offerings.
Doom Side of the Moon is a doomed-out interpretation of Pink Floyd’s classic The Dark Side of the Moon. Read an interview with bandleader Kyle Shutt (The Sword) to find out what makes Doom Side tick.
We recently got turned on to Ontario blackened sludge fiends Longhouse, who also just became a part of the Deathbound family. We also asked the band a few questions, which they graciously answered for your reading pleasure.
Cormorant stream new song “Preserved in Ash.”
Progressive sludge/noise rock with comparisons to Neurosis, Old Man Gloom and Amenra? I’m sold!
We’ve been hitting Soft Kill‘s newest album, Choke, hard for almost six months now. When Choke smashed into winter 2016, it immediately reminded of UK legends The Chameleons (Script of the Bridge is a genuine deserted island-type record), French mopers Asylum Party (whose Borderline album is a must-hear), and Belgian treasure obscure The Names, whose single “Nightshift” went on to inspire contemporary pop-prog outfit like Mew.
To suggest that I’ve been excited for Black Table to release their debut full-length would be something of an understatement.
Whether we’re talking his innovative, grotesque artwork for seminal bands like Morbid Angel, Suffocation, Autopsy, and Dying Fetus or the uber-brutal death metal he’s summoned from the grave for decades via outfits such as Excrescent, Unburied, The Soil Bleeds Black, Grave Wax, and Macabra, it’s difficult to imagine a more legit motherfucker in the extreme music underground than Mark Riddick. And anyone who doubts this is going to have their hands full in a couple months attempting to wrestle with Epicedia, the gnarly, epic, forward-thinking-yet-utterly-feral masterpiece from Riddick’s solo project Fetid Zombie.
Carcass. Crowbar. Ghoul. Night Demon. A basement filled with rowdy Philadelphians. Who will survive and what will be left of them?
For those who had a hunch that the first short story collection from Wonderland Book Award-winning author/Freak Tension zine proprietor/Weirdpunk Books founder MP Johnson — a deft writer who refracts extremely extreme weird horror fiction through a legit prism of punk-metal-hardcore culture and attack — would be an exquisitely strange, beguiling, and brutal experience…. well, Berzerkoids certainly does not disappoint.
Minneapolis’ El-Ahrairah find a new warren at the Greek tape label Underground Soundscapes, release self-titled full length tape.
Featuring ex-members of Transistor Transistor, Trap Them, Landmine Marathon, and Abigail WIlliams, the immersive, affecting debut from True Cross, Pure Divorce, deftly imbues majestic layered soundscapes situated somewhere between My Bloody Valentine, Jesus and Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr and Slowdive with the power and transfixing sway of its primal predecessors.
It’s a legit Zelda Rubinstein-style multidimensional experience — which is to say even as you feel the warmth of the light and the strange, ethereal allure of the other side it is pure sturm und drang all along the path.
Decibel friend Vivek Venkatesh is the curator of Grimposium, a conference that aims to get at the heart of what makes extreme metal special. We’re handing the blog over to him today to discuss his plans for the event next month, which will feature an appearance from our esteemed editor.
To co-opt/augment Riki Rachtman’s old Headbanger’s Ball sign-off, on Written in Blood Darkness Divided has one foot in the metalcore gutter, one fist in the Between the Buried and Me/Devin Townsend-y gold. And for those who don’t reflexively hate the former, the latter will be a very welcome development indeed. Anyway, here’s your chance to…
A six-year gap separates underground gem Animosity from its unlikely successor, Blind. True, the Technocracy EP—with Simon Bob on vocals—acts as a bridge, but few, not even Corrosion of Conformity themselves, could’ve predicted Blind.
In recent years, Chicago has been home to all sorts of experimental and off-the-path metal. Lest you forget it’s also the hometown of Paul Speckmann of Master, scads of restaurants that serve large racks of meat and tons of old-school goodness. On that note, Decibel is happy to provide an exclusive stream of Scythe’s “Leather…
It’s possible you’re not yet an initiate of the Lustre phenomenon. Despite several recent releases, I think the last time the project drew Decibel’s attention was when Scott Seward reviewed 2010’s A Glimpse of Glory. So, yeah, it’s been a while. Since then, head nature-screamer Nachtzeit has given the world another EP, a split, a…
Scale the Summit are pretty much the epitome of the hoary old cliché “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” After all, who would’ve thought that playing instrumental prog rock in the 21st century would be a remotely sane move, much less a valid career path? it seems to be working pretty well for them – although it…
Astrohenge was yet another band I stumbled across last year while perusing what was once a plethora of music blogs. As our Q&A with their fellow countrymen Dragged Into Sunlight indicated, Astrohenge is part of a diverse crop of UK bands “doing their own thing.” Although it’s been over a year since the London quartet’s…
Having shows in one’s place of residence seems like such a big deal to most people. To an old fart like myself, going to see a band play in a basement or living room is as natural as going to see a band play at some place where overzealous security goons get way too familiar…
Hmmm… there are some interesting releases coming up, but the next couple weeks look a little dry. I’ll start with the horribly named BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME, who are releasing The Parallax II: Future Sequence. This is a follow-up to the The Parallax: The Hypersleep Dialogues, both in concept and sound. This isn’t my…
How important was it to separate your solo project, Thomas Giles, from Between The Buried And Me?Tommy Rogers: I think it was very important to separate the two. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people do solo projects that sound like their main band. I wanted to step outside of what I normally…
Every other Friday, Waldo the African Grey Parrot, frontbird of thrash-grind immortals Hatebeak, will get you caught up on the week’s latest “extreme” releases. What the squawk? It’s your old pal Waldo and I’m going to challenge myself. Remember Anthrax’s Attack of the Killer B’s? Well, this is my Attack of the Mediocre at Best…
For the last five weeks, we’ve slowly peeled Sodom’s In War and Pieces apart by presenting you, our faithful reader and hopeful subscriber (shameful plug), an advanced audial view of what the German legends have in store for 2011. We used war metaphors (terrible ones, really) and tried our best to come up with sensible…