Decibel Magazine #183 - January 2020

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JANUARY 2020 // No. 183

METAL MADNESS

BRINGING YOU THE BIGGEST AND BEST

OPETH

AS I LAY DYING

RED DEATH

FIT FOR AN AUTOPSY

IN CAUDA VENENUM

SHAPED BY FIRE

SICKNESS DIVINE

THE SEA OF TRAGIC BEASTS

DESPISED ICON

KILLSWITCH ENGAGE

DRAGONFORCE

SACRED REICH

ATONEMENT

EXTREME POWER METAL

AWAKENING

CATTLE DECAPITATION

TRIBULATION

ANGEL WITCH

CIRITH UNGOL

DEATH ATLAS

ALIVE & DEAD AT SODRA TEATERN

ANGEL OF LIGHT

I’M ALIVE

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ICE NINE KILLS

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INSOMNIUM

DEATH ANGEL

LACUNA COIL

RAMMSTEIN

HEART LIKE A GRAVE

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BLACK ANIMA

AMON AMARTH

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January 2020 [R 183] decibelmagazine.com

upfront 10 metal muthas Dogs are a mom’s best friend

features

reviews 67 lead review The ever-prolific Haunt leaves us feeling anything but cold with their latest LP, Mind Freeze

14 abigail williams Wherever he may roam

20 silvertomb Blue No. 2

26 q&a: derek smalls All Tapped out

12 low culture Slippery when wet

16 teeth Marching to the beat of their own drum

22 die choking For dad

30 the decibel

13 no corporate beer Anything but high ‘n’ dry

18 strigoi The fyre still burns

24 sentient horror Very decent, very obscene

hall of fame Madball stand on their own two feet and keep hardcore alive with Set It Off

41 special feature:

the top 40 albums of 2019

54

But what about...?

68 album reviews Releases that were chanting boo-urns at the World Series, including Cirith Ungol, Cradle of Filth and Varials 80 double negative Into the void

We Want to Believe COVER STORY COVER AND CONTENTS PHOTOS BY GENE SMIRNOV

Decibel (ISSN 1557-2137) is published monthly by Red Flag Media, Inc., 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19107. Annual subscription price is $29.95. Periodical postage, paid at Philadelphia, PA, and other mailing offices. Submission of manuscripts, illustrations and/or photographs must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materials. Postmaster send changes of address for Decibel to Red Flag Media, 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor, Philadelphia PA 19107. © 2019 by Red Flag Media, Inc. ISSN 1557-2137 | USPS 023142 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher is strictly prohibited.

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Mudrian (l) with the enigmatic Walker, circa several lifetimes ago in London

Today is the 30th anniversary of Carcass’s Symphonies of Sickness, a record to which I recoiled in absolute horror when first introduced to it at the tender age of 15. Back in 1991, my childhood friend—and now-longtime Decibel contributor, Scott Koerber—was infinitely cooler and more musically adventurous than yours truly (the former still applies). I vividly remember staring at the CD’s gruesome cover art—the now infamous photo collage of unprepared animal meat and autopsy pictures—in his mom’s basement while “Reek of Putrefaction” assaulted my ears through a boom box. Clearly, I was not ready for such multi-faceted extremity and sheepishly suggested that maybe we should revisit …And Justice for All one more time.

This was not an occasion that I expected to fondly recall 30 years later. Yet somehow, Carcass are now more relevant in my life than ever. If you’re a deluxe Decibel subscriber—bless your blackened heart—you’ve likely noticed that this particular issue contains a flexi disc of the first new Carcass song in over six years. And it was all Jeff Walker’s idea! Somewhere over the last three decades, while I was writing the original version of Choosing Death, the Carcass frontman and I became good friends. This was years before his band’s 2007 reactivation—back when he was fond of incredulously asking people, “don’t you know who I used to be?”

I could fill a year’s worth of “Just Words” columns with amusing Walker anecdotes alone. I’ve witnessed him strike fear into the hearts of fellow musicians, stage crew, audience members, promoters, tour managers and rival frequent flyers, secretly knowing that while such confrontations were authentic, the man initiating them actually has a heart of gold and belly full of Taco Bell.

In mid-December, I’ll see him again when Carcass headline the Saturday of the second annual Decibel Magazine Metal & Beer Fest: Los Angeles. I can’t foretell what new adventures await, but I’m relatively sure he’ll refer to craft beer as “lemon-flavored toilet water” from the stage at least once, and that the swirling intro of “Reek of Putrefaction” will still scramble what’s left of my brain. I should be ready for it this time.

albert mudrian, Editor-in-Chief

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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

READER OF THE

MONTH was fun—lots of delicious IPAs, stouts, even tried some mead. Went to the Pre-Fest with Integrity, saw Exhorder for the first time, Obituary doing Cause of Death—it’s a great idea and I’m happy it’s been successful for you.

Brendan Bobzien Philadelphia, PA

You’re originally from the Northern Virginia area, but are now a Philly resident. Have you embraced our local disappointing sports franchises or are you continuing to support the local disappointing sports franchises you grew up with?

Ha, good timing as I watch the [Washington] Nationals push Game 7 in the World Series.

I’ve lived in Philly over half my life and it felt natural to jump ship. I wasn’t really into sports when I was a kid, although I do have a Bullets jersey somewhere. Remember, we didn’t have a [baseball] team growing up; the closest was the [Baltimore] Orioles.

8 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL

According to our admittedly spotty records, you’ve been a subscriber since at least issue #12. First, THANK YOU. Second, WHY?

I first saw Decibel at Tower Records and started reading it. Not sure when I decided I needed to subscribe, but it’s turned me on to a lot of bands and has kept me informed about the metal world. The Hall of Fame [series], Richard Christy and reviews do it for me.

I believe you’ve attended the Philly version of our Metal & Beer Fest in the past. You coming back in 2020 or what?

Yeah, I want to! Money can be tight. Last year

I first saw Decibel at Tower Records and started reading it.

Not sure when I decided I needed to subscribe, but it’s turned me on to a lot of bands and has kept me informed about the metal world.

This issue features our never-controversial Top 40 Albums of the Year list. I won’t give away our Top 5, but how about you give us yours?

Aw, man, that’s tough. I’ll have to say, off the top of my head: Witch Vomit, Sempiternal Dusk, Enforced, Hagzissa and Celestial Grave.

Also, some 7-inches by Under Attack and Hammered Hulls are worth mentioning.

Chuck BB is the illustrator of the graphic novels Black Metal, Vol. 1, 2 and 3 For more info and art, head over to chuckbb.com

NOW SLAYING Wonder what Decibel world HQ has been rocking for the past month?

Well, here are the records that we spun most while avoiding any story with the headline “Metallica Makes Socks Now.”

Because not all of us were spawned in the darkest recesses of hell

This Month's Mutha: Kathy Strouse Mutha of Jarrett Pritchard of Pulchra Morte

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I am retired after 30 years in animal welfare. I live with my boyfriend of 16 years, Bart, along with four chihuahuas, one cat and two birds.

I have been an actor for more than 50 years. I still stay active in animal welfare and animal control. In 2018, I was the co-author of a state bill to require shelters and rescues to ask about bite history when intaking an animal, and to disclose that information upon placement of the animal. Now, you would think that would be a no-brainer, but sadly, NO! This law was the first of its kind in the nation.

Jarrett tells us that you’re the “lady who put Michael Vick in jail for dogfighting.” Does he share your lifelong passion for animal rights?

Jarrett has always been an animal lover and cannot tolerate abuse of animals. [As for] the Vick thing, I was asked to bring a team of officers and walk through the property in Surry County when authorities executed a drug warrant. My role was to see if there was anything in plain view, or anywhere they were allowed to be based on the warrant that was evidence of dogfighting. Of course, there was plenty of evidence, and so several of us were off to secure a search warrant for dogfighting with the disk containing the affidavit in hand. Well, the disk crashed, so we had to write the warrant from scratch! The case was huge in the media and became a wakeup call for America. People had no idea such things went on.

We understand you split your lip in the pit watching his band Eulogy perform in 1994. Was that 10 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL

injury a one-off, or do you often find yourself in the eye of the hurricane during Jarrett’s shows?

You know, Jarrett mentioned this on the phone the other day, but I honestly don’t remember it.

I remember being in the pit at the 4400 Club, and I was very excited to see Eulogy play. I’ve only seen him play a handful of times, but have always been really excited to be in the audience and be a part.

When did Jarrett first start to express an interest in music?

From the time he was a baby! He loved to be at band practice with his dad. I think his love of music showed him his path in life. He is so smart, but was an indifferent student, mostly because he was so impatient with nonsense and bureaucracy.

One time he asked me if I was disappointed in him because he had not become a doctor or lawyer or banker. My eyes welled up. I told him I had always known he was going to be an artist, and no, I had never been disappointed in him. I really do think it is so WRONG of parents to try to live their dreams or ambitions through their children. Our children have their own dreams.

Are you more of a fan of Jarrett’s work as a guitarist or as a producer/engineer?

Wow, that’s a tough one. I’m not sure. Watching and hearing him play guitar leaves me speechless. I have no musical talent whatsoever, so I am always in awe of those who do. I also know he is highly regarded as an engineer and producer. I think that is because he always has a very clear vision. —ANDREW BONAZELLI

Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Paradise Lost, Draconian Times  Paradise Lost, Medusa  Idle Hands, Mana  Blood Incantation, Hidden History of the Human Race  Cirith Ungol, I’m Alive ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Ghosteen  L'épée, Diabolique  Kal-El, Witches of Mars  Opal, Happy Nightmare Baby  We Lost the Sea, Departure Songs ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  Blood Incantation, Hidden History of the Human Race  Blood Incantation, Starspawn  Black September, The Forbidden Gates Beyond  Panopticon, Autumn Eternal  Disillusion, The Liberation ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  Paradise Lost, The Plague Within  Haunt, Mind Freeze  Pig Destroyer, Prowler in the Yard  Trappist, Upcoming Decibel flexi disc  Rosetta, Terra Sola ---------------------------------Alex Yarde : d i r e c t o r o f m a r k e t i n g  Vagabon, Vagabon  Cattle Decapitation, Death Atlas  Code Orange, I Am King  2 Chainz, Rap or Go To the League  Power Trip, Nightmare Logic

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------Riley McShane : a l l e g a e o n  Leprous, Pitfalls  Shadow of Intent, Melancholy  Rozen, NieR: Glory to Mankind  GHOST DATA, The Occulus Occult  Oranssi Pazuzu, Muukalainen Puhuu

They Call Me Squishy ’m fairly certain I’m going to approach

the Top 40 Albums of 2019 contained in this issue like I do with nearly anything in my life: haphazardly and with little focus. I’m one of those people who will look at lists like this one or threads on social media and make a mental note of records I want to check out, but end up listening to the same few dozen records I’ve listened to for the last few dozen years. Maybe this year will be different?

Yeah, no. I don’t see that happening. Why break with tradition? What if I end up enjoying some of the shit that I judge people on my newsfeed for liking? Fucking terrifying.

So, rather than go on about how we’re basically all a year closer to the bombs dropping, I’m going to tell you about a recent work experience I had, because it’s frankly awful. I spent a few days in Atlantic City for my company’s annual conference a few weeks back. It was mostly seminars on the new CEO’s ego-gasmic plans for the next two years and some trade shows. I didn’t think a work function would provide me with this kind of story, but I’ve grown to just expect the worst out of every situation.

My region’s newest manager, a 48-year-old with the personality of a bus station bathroom, ended up skipping the first night’s dinner and spent this time in the hotel bar. Around 7 p.m., she stumbled into two of our execs and started talking their ears off. They probably wish it was their noses missing because, as she spouted all kinds of asinine shit, she began to piss in her pants. Not a little dribble, but the kind of piss that the rest of us heard from across the room, so I’m guessing it was a full sensory experience for the execs. This made me happy because this lady beat me out for a transfer and I’m nothing if not fucking petty.

You’d think once she sobered (and dried) up, she’d be embarrassed that she did that at a work function at 7 fucking p.m., but this did not deter her. She called herself “Squishy,” which might be the most repugnant sentence I’ve ever typed for this column, and I barely go a paragraph without some kind of description of semen. The second night of the conference ended with an 12 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL

awards dinner where they poured wine like it was fucking Caligula before shifting into an afterparty—an ’80s-themed poolside party. I’d rather watch my parents have sex than attend. During the dinner, a few area managers and I moved our chairs in a strategic effort not to be seated anywhere near this shipwreck of a person, but still in eyesight to watch her guzzle cheap red wine like it was going to rehydrate her into having the soul of a human being, as opposed to a grape-stained trash bag.

Later—while approximating human dancing—she again pissed her pants with the poise and class they teach at fancy lady schools. She zeroed in on me because, if you’ve been playing along at home, this is my life. She dripped over to me and grabbed a handful of my ass. When I expressed that this was a problem, she—three feet from our fucking boss—told me she was going to place her Lovecraftian paw on my “package,” to which I reacted, forgetting to use my inside voice, by telling her no the fuck she will not. Corporate intervention mercifully occurred, and I believed this was the end of the story.

Eventually, a few of us ended up on the patio bar to have a cigarette, and the ghost of a person this woman had become showed up and tried to dance with me, rubbing her piss-soaked pants against me, cursing me to roam the earth forever. Her hands were so dry and rough that it felt like holding an overused cum sock that had been forgotten for months. She got close and told me she “wasn’t aggressive,” and then whispered in a voice that will cause me erectile difficulty for the rest of my life that she was “safe,” which I took to mean that no matter how much you water her garden, no flowers will grow. As I was obviously in distress, my boss got in between us and banished this wailing, drippy spirit back to hell. She doesn’t work for this company anymore, but I’m sure she had a real cool conversation with her husband about it.

As for my column last month, I have no news that I want to share just now, but thanks to everyone who reached out. See you next month when we all celebrate my five years with “Low Culture” in some splendid fashion.

TRAPPIST FRONTMAN crafts a monthly journey through

MORBID ALES

BY CHRIS DODGE

Pour Some Maltose on Me

T

he Brits take their beer seriously.

Their dedication to quality brew on a local level predates that of the States by countless decades. Case in point—the network of pubs and clubs that follow CAMRA: The Campaign for Real Ale. Among the many tenets of this organization (established in 1971) to promote “the benefits of responsible social drinking.” This perfectly summarizes the ideology behind English pub culture, one teeming with low ABV session ales meant to be enjoyed with friends over the course of an extended day.

We found ourselves in the South Yorkshire borough of Sheffield. This damp, gritty, working-class town is not only the home of Def Leppard, the Human League and Arctic Monkeys, but myriad charter members of CAMRA. Amongst them, the White Lion Inn, run by underground hardcore and metal fanatics Jon Terry and Mandy Billings. It was established as a public house in 1781, meaning around the same time the U.S. was struggling with insular turmoil and sorting out whether we were a real country, the biggest concern of this pub’s patronage was which fine ale to enjoy during their social hour.

A celebrated site of paranormal investigations, history seeps from every musty corner of the White Lion, which offers the gamut of

Love and hate in pub  (closewise from r) Our fearless columnist and his horrible pourable day, the staff at the Rutland Arms after being asked if they serve Corona and the White Lion Inn’s Jon Terry serves beer as crushable as your windpipe

hand-pulled cask ale, among them the legendary Moonshine Pale, brewed locally by the mavericks at Abbeydale Brewery. Moonshine was a revelation in these parts when it was first released in 1996, utilizing New Zealand hops and introducing bright citrus character previously uncharted in U.K. brews. Terry is an accommodating and generous host, outwardly quiet, with the appearance of a bruiser who could crush your esophagus with one hand.

Fortunately, our only “crushing” on this visit would be that of the finest ales of the north.

Up the hill from White Lion, we happened upon the Brothers Arms, an old world pub where traditional and new-school beers harmonize. I soaked up the vast city view on their outside patio with a pint of Northern Monk New World IPA, a bitter juice bomb from Leeds mixing U.S., U.K. and Aussie hops.

Stumbling through the adjoining park and back down the hill, we fell into the Sheaf View public house. The main room was bathed with the prominent musk of dogs and casks.

I sampled local flavor from Neepsend Brew Co., whose Callisto Pale Ale is U.S.-influenced with a mildly dank mash-up of Mosaic, Simcoe and Equinox cones. The local patronage was gregarious, and I found it difficult to extract myself from any number of conversations once my party was ready to move along.

In the city center, Sheffield Tap—housed in a turn-of-the-century rail station, with the bar mere steps away from inbound trains—has consciously chosen to avoid “big brand” beer and focus solely on their proprietary taps, as well as a selection of independent regional and international pulls. And if you want to avoid the white collar crowd altogether, around the bend you’ll find the Rutland Arms, run by a team of punks and metalheads, offering the most diverse selection of independent U.K. brews in town: Cloudwater, Turning Point, Kirkstall, Almasty, the Kernel.

Returning late to the White Lion Inn, I was sent behind the bar upon the insistence of our hosts for a crash course in pulling my own real ales from the cask. No simple task for a first-timer. The shabby, inebriated and very vocal gathering of hooligans took great delight in heavy-handed heckling of my amateur pouring prowess.

Back home, I miss the personal aspect of the British pub culture. More than simply just providing a room in which to consume, these public houses serve a more important function as a social hub. I would happily exchange my overabundance of isolated, flavor-of-themonth industrial park breweries for a greater selection of locales rooted in neighborhood connections and real ales.

DECIBEL : JANUARY 2020 : 13

ABIGAIL WILLIAMS

ABIGAIL WILLIAMS Ken Sorceron’s nomadic journey finds a location, a sound and a “lineup”

S

ince forming in 2004, Abigail Williams have welcomed a rotating cast of players, operating out of a multitude of locations across the United States. The sound has evolved from symphonic black metal with a deathcore spin, losing the -core and growing ever more immersive, more compelling. New album Walk Beyond the Dark is a formidable recording of savage black metal melancholy. Throughout this time, Ken Sorceron has been the constant, holding it all down, conducting traffic. Which seems only fair, because Abigail Williams are one of the few constants in Sorceron’s peripatetic life. Connecticut, Phoenix, Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City—now Metal Archives lists the band’s location as Olympia, WA. When Sorceron answers the phone, he’s in Seattle. ¶ “I’ve moved the band a lot,” he explains. “I grew up on the move, so I never really felt at home. Things were very unstable. For a while, I was even homeless with my family when I was a kid, and I guess you could say it is weird for me to stay in one place.”

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Didn’t he want to stay in Olympia? Of all those locations, that’s surely the most appropriate, with all those Douglas firs. “I do remember when I first moved here, thinking, ‘Yeah, this is proper for creating black metal!’” he laughs. “All joking aside, the landscape is inspiring.

I like the Northwest. I like the climate. I think it suits me.”

Sorceron has been in Seattle five months, racking up miles as a Lyft driver before he goes on tour again.

He can’t yet say who’ll be on the bus with him (“might end up playing as a three-piece”), but he’s sanguine when addressing uncertainty. “I’ve learned a lot over the years, so it has been to my advantage to have the lineup change as much as it has,” he says. “I’ve learned so much from playing with these people. They are all way more talented than me.”

Bassist Bryan O’Sullivan won’t be joining him. He played on Walk Beyond the Dark, but visa issues have grounded him in Ireland for now. The geography was less of an issue when recording. O’Sullivan, drummer Mike Heller, cellist Chris “Kakophonix” Brown, and guitarists Andrew Markuszewski and Justin McKinney recorded remotely, with Sorceron assembling the finished tracks and sending them to Lasse Lammert to mix. As rock legends go, it’s not Judas Priest recording British Steel at Ringo Starr’s Tittenhurst Park, but everything worked out.

And then some. “I actually liked the album once it was done,” says Sorceron, which, he stresses, is all that matters. “I don’t even see the point of putting out another album unless I like it better than the one before.” —JONATHAN HORSLEY

TEETH

L.A. deathgrind dealers gnash riffs, not dental work

S

ometimes the highlight of a musician’s career is finally putting out that one killer record, especially when getting it made was a goddamn shitshow. Los Angeles-based deathgrind quartet Teeth faced an 11th hour setback that pushed their sophomore full-length back an entire year. But luckily, The Curse of Entropy is also that one killer record. ¶ “It was a pretty destructive process,” guitarist/vocalist Erol Ulug says, describing the sizeable amount of material the band wrote and threw out to create these 10 songs of avant-tech blasting, melodies torn inside out and riffs stacked on top of each other. While comparisons can be made to other bands (the guest vocals by Gorguts’ Luc Lemay are a clue), these songs are incredibly concise, a response to the band’s previous split with Barghest, which was just one 23-minute song. ¶ “We had done an entire release of discursive shit,” Ulug says, “so we thought, ‘Let’s go in the other direction.’

The frame of mind for this record was get to the fucking point.

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Screw this ‘come with us and we’re gonna take you on a journey’ kinda thing. Let’s hit really hard and really weird and leave. I’d rather the listener wanted to hear the entire song again than wonder when it’s going to be over.” Straight. To the point. Seems like the perfect plan for a streamlined path from writing to recording to release. But there was a snag.

“We’re a drummer-eating machine,” Ulug says. “And our previous drummer was Danny Walker. He was only in the band for a few months and the record was mostly written before he joined, but we had begun recording the drums with him when this happened.”

The “this” is accusations of domestic violence, which led to Walker being promptly fired (you may have read about Intronaut doing likewise). Which left the band

with no drummer and half a record, forcing them to search for someone to join up, re-record the drums and have Ulug—who was also the engineer—meticulously fit those drums back under previously recorded music. And the whole messy process pushed a possible 2018 album nearly into the next decade.

“That took a little bit of wind out of our sails,” Ulug admits, albeit with the laugh of someone who is finally getting to see a mountain of hard work pay off. Because with The Curse of Entropy now proving it was worth the wait, Teeth plan to go forward as a stronger, more focused unit, hoping to tour next year in places they’ve never been.

They also wouldn’t mind getting a slot on one of those Metal & Beer fests. In this writer’s opinion, at least, they’ve probably earned it.

—SHANE MEHLING

PHOTO BY BRANDON MAVADDAT

TEETH

STRIGOI

Death/doom’s dark genius returns in the form of the restless dead

T

he darkness won’t let go of Greg Mackintosh. As he disbanded Vallenfyre, he also foretold of Strigoi—all in one Facebook post. “Myself and [ex-Vallenfyre bassist] Chris [Casket] will be starting a new project called Strigoi,” Mackintosh wrote back in June of 2018 on Vallenfyre’s social media.

Now, having written, rehearsed, recorded/produced and completed the layout for the first Strigoi album, Mackintosh tells Decibel, “Whilst some people know Vallenfyre formed because of the death of my father, not many know that it ended with the death of my mother.” ¶ Mackintosh reasoned that because Vallenfyre carried such a “sentiment attached” to it, he would be doing the band’s legacy a “disservice” to continue on past those three albums they told us they were proud of back in 2018.

“That said, with the ending of Vallenfyre, I soon realized that I still had the itch,” the Paradise Lost guitarist admits, speaking about his “passion for the underground extreme music scene.” ¶ “The older I get, the more I feel like I’m getting into my stride on a productive level,” he continues. “This comes from a number of different sources. It’s partly because I’m obsessed with 18 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL

extremely dark subject matter and music. Partly because I’m getting way less tolerant of mainstream society, religions, attitudes, etc. But ultimately, it’s probably because I’m a miserable recluse.”

Presaged only by the aforementioned 2018 social media post and an announcement that the band had signed to Nuclear Blast in August of 2019, Strigoi’s debut album otherwise pretty much appeared out of nowhere for most of the world.

Although certainly not for Mackintosh. “When I’m on tour, I’m still constantly writing and recording,” he says. “I’ve built my own studio called Black Planet with a small live room and control room, and I spend most of my days in there.”

Mackintosh describes the writing process for Strigoi’s debut as “a two-person affair, with Chris writing the majority of the lyrics and [myself] handling all the music.”

Our man claims this is similar to how he writes for Paradise Lost, but “the difference here is that, with

Strigoi, for the most part, the lyrics come first.”

As for the album title, Abandon All Faith, Mackintosh reminds us he’s still “a militant atheist,” adding, “I believe that religion is something that should be fought against. It is the most divisive force on our planet.”

Even devoted fans of Paradise Lost and/or Vallenfyre will find themselves caught off guard by the intensity of Strigoi’s debut. There’s no way to prepare for how dark, sick, and full of raw anger and energy Abandon All Faith is, especially the harsh wall of introductory noise.

“From stuff I’ve recorded, I’d put the feel of it somewhere between Paradise Lost’s Frozen Illusion demo and Vallenfyre’s Splinters album, but with many other elements,” Mackintosh reckons, elaborating that those elements specifically are black metal and industrial. “Our goal with Strigoi is to create a feel of foreboding and dread.” —DUTCH PEARCE

PHOTO BY JAKE MACKINTOSH

STRIGOI

SILVERTOMB

SILVERTOMB

Type O Negative vets shake off the October rust with bluesy metal project

T

ype o negative frontman Peter Steele’s 2010 death may have been a huge loss to metal, but it was an even bigger loss to his bandmates and compatriots. Keyboardist Josh Silver quit music entirely to become an EMT. Guitarist Kenny Hickey almost did the same thing, shuttering his Seventh Void project (which also featured Type O drummer Johnny Kelly) and leaving the music business for a while. ¶ “Seventh Void [debut LP Heaven Is Gone] came out in 2009; Peter passed in 2010. That was really mind-blowing for me,” Hickey admits. “I had to reassess my existence—being in a band for so long, and having it be a part of my identity and my whole life’s fabric for so long, and losing my best friend. The last tour we did, I did a tour with Seventh Void in 2011, and I just got disgusted with the whole thing. Tired of waking up with my boots on, taking a shower in a shitty, dirty shower at the venue with graffiti on the walls. So, I put it down for a few years.

I tried to give it up like Josh did, but somehow or another, 20 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL

it just seeped back into me. I had some song ideas. I had a lot of stuff to get out. So, I decided to restart it.”

He pulled in friends for the project: Seventh Void bassist Hank Hell, Agnostic Front’s Joseph James, Empyreon’s Aaron Joos and Kelly, whom Hickey has known since 1986. “[Johnny and I] have a good working relationship,” Hickey notes. “You know, we got frustrated with each other, but there’s nothing held back. ‘This sucks,’ stuff like that. The creative process is a pain in the ass sometimes. My wife can hear us yelling at each other through the walls. But it’s part of the process; it was part of the process with Type O. It’s like having a baby sideways sometimes.”

A different lineup and an evolved sound meant a new name, so Hickey settled on Silvertomb (whose name comes from a spin on lyrics from

Black Sabbath’s “Symptom of the Universe”). While still inspired by Sabbath, Edge of Existence showcases a bluesier beast than Type O, with some Pink Floyd-style melancholy thrown in for flavor. Produced and recorded by the band themselves at a farm in Pennsylvania (and in Hickey’s wife’s walk-in closet), it’s a very personal effort. Hickey’s soulful playing and heartfelt singing come to the forefront on songs like “Insomnia/Sunrise” and the Steele tributes “Eulogy/Requiem” and “Sleeping on Nails and Wine.”

Up next for the band? Touring, of course (back to the dirty showers), and a follow-up album that’s already been written. When asked if Hickey has any message for Type O Negative fans who might be interested in his new project, he has a simple request: “Please check out Silvertomb. I need some retirement money.” —JEFF TREPPEL

DIE CHOKING

A

lot can happen in four years. For the members of Philadelphia grindcore trio Die Choking, much of what happened in the four years since debut full-length III was downright miserable. But grind is nothing if not cathartic, and the 13 songs on second full-length IV allowed the members to deal with their emotions as they navigated a life even more brutal than 20-second songs played at lightning speed. ¶ “IV is the literal collection of sound of me working through a brutal dying process with my father,” explains drummer Joshua Cohen.

“There’s no separating the two. Brain cancer, and specifically glioblastoma, mercilessly eats away at a person both physically and mentally. Coupled with a health system that in many ways is no less merciless, you can see how the ground was fertile with all sorts of emotions.” ¶ Cohen says that his father was a talented guitarist and singer, and was responsible (along with his mother) for the drummer’s early connection with music.

22 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL

It all ties to Cohen’s music today, specifically how he used it while dealing with saying goodbye.

“When my father was in [the] final throes in October of 2018, I would not allow him committed to a hospital to die around strangers,” says Cohen. “I wanted my father to be around family no matter how difficult the physical situation got.

And it did get quite difficult. Even after the brain cancer and barrage of medications had taken my father’s ability to speak, to make it to the toilet, to stand up, even… we would sit up all hours of the night watching Ken Burns’ history of jazz together. I remember, despite the sheer brutal physical reality of the moment, I also enjoyed the time I got to spend with my father, right up to the end, where he literally died in the arms of my sister and I. There were writing and editing

sessions only minutes removed from these situations. So, it does follow that heavy emotion is imprinted throughout—if not dripping from—IV.” Something else that’s evident in the songs on the new album is the writing process itself, a longstanding tradition of the band.

“We don’t adjust the track order of an album after we have a batch of songs to release,” says bassist/ vocalist Paul Herzog. “The order we write it is the order it gets put on the album ... We also wanted a color theme for each release. Again, nothing new, but the collector in me wanted to see our own releases splayed out in this way. By combining the track order, the colors and our OCD collector mentalities, we felt it gave things a complete feel and, as time passes, a clear sonic trajectory.” —GREG PRATT

PHOTO BY LUZ KAROLINA

DIE CHOKING

Grindcore extremists explore blast therapy on latest musical explosion

SENTIENT HORROR

SENTIENT HORROR New Jersey cultists are students and masters of Swedeath

S

entient horror are the closest you can get to Stockholm in the Garden State. Formed after founder Matt Moliti concluded power metal project Dark Empire, they’ve summoned the darkness of Sunlight Studios since 2016’s Ungodly Forms debut. On their new LP, Morbid Realms, Moliti continues to blend David Blomqvist’s deathevocations with Malmsteen shred. As a professional guitar instructor, Moliti has even recruited several ex-students to join the band’s ascent. ¶ “I would recommend Carcass and Death to [my students], planting some seeds,” Moliti admits. “Then, after these guys grew up and went to college, I reconnected with some of them. It just felt natural. I worked with them, knew what they could do musically and trusted their abilities. ¶ “That rapport is there that’s hard to find in a brand new lineup, because I’ve known these guys for years,” he continues. “Even though I was just a guitar instructor, it almost feels like I’ve been in a band with them for way longer.”

24 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL

While influencing the next generation of riff wizards, Moliti asks his students to do their homework.

He’s sure as hell done his own in preparation for Morbid Realms.

From the initial charge of “Call of Ancient Gods,” there’s something meaner in the album’s sulphuric atmosphere.

“I was looking at my favorite old-school death metal records: Left Hand Path, Dark Recollections, Like an Everflowing Stream—Carcass and Death as well,” Moliti lists, “and I was taking note of the twists and turns within one song. One song wouldn’t have the same feel, tempo, type of riffing for the duration of the song.

“So, I was conscious of trying to emulate those kind of structures,” he expands, “taking dramatic twists and turns and throwing that hyperSlayer beat in. I think it resulted in a really angry-sounding record compared to the first.”

The album was shepherded to its final form with a mix and master by the illustrious Dan Swanö.

When he first heard Sentient Horror, Swanö called their demo “one of the best Swedeath projects I have come across in 20 years.”

Despite Moliti’s own Edge of Sanity superfandom, he internalizes the praise to motivate him further.

“To hear someone [who] I consider to be one of the musicians I look up to in the death metal realm give me that feedback, it was super amazing for me and gratifying,” Moliti admits. “I take it as a huge compliment, and I’m glad he feels that way. But I really try not to get so focused on an accolade, [in order] to avoid the feeling I don’t have to try again. That’s what keeps you going as a writer. You can’t be satisfied about what someone said about your last record.

To me, you’re only as good as your current record.” —SEAN FRASIER

“The Curse of Entropy” from Los Angeles based Dissodeath/Grind purveyors TEETH encompasses ten tracks of utter perfection that obliterates with extreme precision.

Features a guest vocal appearance by Death Metal Legend Luc Lemay from Gorguts.

OUT NOW V IN Y L/DIGITA L

TERMINAL THRESHOLD New York’s progressive metal instrumental trio DYSRHYTHMIA deliver their 8th studio album and first batch of new material in three years entitled “Terminal Threshold”. The album was recorded at Menegroth, The Thousand Caves by the band’s very own Colin Marston (Gorguts, Krallice) and continues the story of their organic evolution. Meticulous arrangements house collisions between technical shredding, complex rhythms and straight up thrash riffing for a completely unique outing.

OUT NOW VINYL/CD/DIGITAL

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Seminal metallic hardcore act Bloodlet present their first new material in 17 years with their two song EP “Viper in Hand”! See them on tour in Europe with Darkest Hour in January 2020!

COM IN G E A R LY 2020 10 INCH V IN Y L W ITH ETCHING / DIGITA L

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interview by

QA j. bennett

DEREK SMALLS W IT H

SPINAL TAP’s beloved bassist on internet addiction, going solo and the “hatchet job” of a movie that started it all

26 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL

I

f you blinked—or paused to adjust the foil-wrapped armadillo in your

trousers—you might have missed it: Derek Smalls, the finely mustachioed, pod-befuddled lead bassist for Spinal Tap, released a solo album last year.

It’s appropriately titled Smalls Change (Meditations Upon Ageing), and features such ripe and randy rock cuts as “Butt Call,” “Memo to Willie” and “She Puts the Bitch in Obituary”—not to mention an all-star cast that includes Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan and Steve Lukather of Toto. ¶ The album was apparently bankrolled by an elusive arts organization called the British Fund for Ageing Rockers, a fact that has not gone unappreciated

by Smalls. “I’ve been lucky,” our man tells us over the blower from London. “I’ve got all my limbs. The plumbing works and all that. I don’t have the complaints that some people do. So, there are songs that are celebrating the fact that, as things go away as the years grow older, some things remain. There’s a song that’s an ode to the joys of the meeting of two toothless orifices, a tune called ‘Gummin’ the Gash.’

So, it’s six of one and out the other.”

I was just looking at your Instagram account.

Do you enjoy social media, or do you see it as a necessary evil for aging rockers these days?

Well, I don’t hide this, but I had a spell about 10 years ago when I became addicted to the Internet. My girlfriend at the time saw me sitting at the kitchen table staring at the screen and she said, “Derek, you’re addicted.” I went for two bouts of therapy at this place in the south of London called Crosswinds, so I’m on a strict diet now. I can do 10 minutes a day and then a bit on the mobile as well. So, I make little things for the Internet, but I don’t actually go look at it.

I’m not allowed to. It’s bad for me.

Were there any particular websites that you were addicted to?

No, I was addicted to the experience of zipping about as if I were a world traveler on a magic ship. It would light here and there and didn’t really make any difference. People think when I say that, “Oh, you were addicted to porn.” But no—I wasn’t. Of course, it wasn’t excluded from my list. I’m a living, breathing gentleman. But it was the experience, as I say, of flitting about.

“Oooh, I can go here. I can go there.” As I talk about it, I experience the high of it and it’s like, “Enough of that, mate. Back away. Back away from the laptop.”

So, you don’t feel you’ve been cured, necessarily.

You just need to avoid it.

I’ve been cured in the sense that alcoholics can get cured: They better not take another drink.

I can use the Internet, but I don’t want to get to a point again where it’s using me, if you get what I’m saying.

PHOTO BY ROB SHANAHAN

As this goes to print, you’ll have just finished some West Coast shows. Of course, the U.S. tour famously depicted in This Is Spinal Tap did not go well. Did that leave a bad taste in your mouth as far as touring the States?

It left a bad taste all over—not just in me mouth. But to be fair, that was more about… we call it the “hatchet job” than the tour itself. I’m no mathematician, but I’d say 92.3 percent of the time, we found our way to the stage straight away. And slightly less frequently—I’d say 88 percent of the time—I got out of the pod straight away. But he doesn’t show you that, does he? No, he doesn’t. So, it was that that left the bad taste.

That and I think a couple of burgers I had that probably weren’t cooked right.

So, you feel that you, and Spinal Tap in general, were unfairly maligned in the film?

You know, here’s what I think: He comes up to us—[director] Mr. DiBergi—and he says, “I’m a big fan of the band, and I just wanna document your U.S. tour,” right? And we say fine, have at it. The door’s open, all is yours for the asking. And I think I’m giving him not only the benefit of the doubt, but the entire doubt that he was a fan, but he thinks to himself, “I love this band. They’ve been around for 18 years”—at that time—“and they’ve never really broken through. I, Marty DiBergi, will help them break through by turning them into a laughingstock.”

And it bothered me for years. I had a little therapy about it, and then my dad—the late Duff Smalls, a very wise man—saw me down about it at one point and said, “Derek, better to be a laughingstock than no stock at all.”

Wise words. Do you stay in touch with Nigel or David?

Yes and no—or yes and half-no. Nigel has gotten a big spread in the south of England, and you know guitar players are very extreme personalities. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. They’re like that kid that flew too close to the sun, which I don’t think really happened, but that’s them. And so, Derek—not Derek, that’s me—so, Nigel got into this thing of breeding miniature livestock.

I heard about this…

Yes. But, like a guitar player, he pushed it too far. So, he got to the point when he couldn’t find jockeys small enough to ride them. Now he’s turned to goats, last I heard, and again—pushing, pushing, always pushing—he’s pushing not only the envelope, but the entire stationery store. And he’s got these goats where they’re too small to milk. So, he’s got his hands full. But he did send me a note saying that he liked the record, so good on him for that.

What about David?

David is a whole other thing. Every once in a while, god love him, I’ll get an envelope in the post—an envelope that hasn’t been pushed—and it’s always the same thing. I mean, it’s not the same envelope, obviously—it doesn’t get recycled that quickly. But there’s a piece of paper inside, and written on it are Chinese pictograms. I don’t know if he’s saying, “Miss you. Let’s get the band back together, mate,” or “Great record—congratulations,” or “I’d like dim sum for three.” Sue me, I don’t read bloody Chinese pictograms. So, I don’t know what’s going on.

The press release for your tour announces you as “the bottom force for the fabled heavy metal band formerly known as Spinal Tap.” Did Tap change their name at some point?

No, that’s just a legal thing. It’s what everybody does in rock ‘n’ roll when they don’t wanna be sued. You just slap a “formerly” on it, you know?

Your solo album was funded by what we’re told is a “major grant from the recently launched British Fund for Ageing Rockers.” What can you tell us about the fund?

It was set up, I think, in 2015. I became aware of it when I was over in Albania, hanging out with a friend of mine, Eddie Dregs, who fronts a neardeath metal band called Chainsaw Vermin. He showed me this advert that said, “We’re giving grants to ageing rockers.” Money, I guess, left over from austerity. So, I applied and they DECIBEL : JANUARY 2020 : 27

said, “What’s your idea?” That stumped me for a bit, and then I said, “My idea is that you give me money and I make a record, mate.” And that appeared to work.

from the telephone being a miracle that connects people across the miles—or, if you’d like, across the kilometers—to a point where it’s just a pain in your bloody ass. Or a pain in your trousers, at least. So, that’s what I mean. It’s sort of a double-edged change.

The album title Smalls Change (Meditations Upon Ageing) was obviously too good to sleep on, but what was the runner-up?

What can you tell us about “Hell Toupee”?

I didn’t even know that was going to be the title, but again, my sainted dad said, “If you ever start writing, Derek, write about what you know.” So, they gave me the grant and I think, “Blimey, what do I know?” Well, I know I’m getting older—because I’m not dead—so I thought, “That’s what I’ll write about.” The good and the bad and the ugly and the pretty and the beautiful and the rest of it—about getting old. So, that’s how the title came to be. Because good things happen, bad things happen—it all happens if you stick around.

If you don’t, nothing happens.

Well, I happen to be lead co-author of the Spinal Tap classic, “Christmas With the Devil,” because I do have a fairly intense relationship with the supreme evil one. So, I think about him. I try to keep on his bad side, because that’s the side you wanna be on with him. One of my girlfriends said, “Oh, that’s so shallow, Derek.” But I try to think about how he thinks about how he looks these days, because he’s not getting any younger. Maybe he looks in the mirror and says, “Hmmm... not as much up there as there used to be.” So, that’s where the song “Hell Toupee” comes from.

What do you see as the pros and cons of growing older in the rock world?

How is your relationship these days with… can we just say Satan?

Well, rock keeps you young. But you’re an older kind of young. The pros are you know more. When you see [former Spinal Tap manager] Ian Faith approaching, you develop a radar to say, “Look out, mate. One of these coming. Weasel alert.”

And you know more about your instrument, you know more about music, and how even though you maybe don’t want to sometimes, you’ve got to keep it bloody simple. You go off on these journeys sometimes, like I do, and then you’ve got to just hammer it down. So, I keep that in mind with a song like “Gummin’ the Gash” or “Butt Call.” So, you know your way around a bit more. You’re not slack-jawed and awed by everything you see, like you are when you’re in your 20s or even your 30s.

Or, if you’re Nigel, even in your 40s.

If you wanna take the chance, go right ahead.

What inspired the song “Butt Call”?

As you grow older, you’re sort of awed by these technological changes. In my time, we’ve gone 28 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL

Has your relationship with him changed over the decades?

I think the most extreme change came when I joined a Christian rock band one of the times that Tap dissolved. I was flailing about and I joined… Lamb’s Blood was the name of the band. And we did great. We had a Top 25 charttopper called “Whole Lotta Lord.” But the lads in the band were not quite sure I was a believer because of my background. So, I got a fish tattoo—you know, the Jesus fish thing that they do. I don’t know if that rubbed you-knowwho the wrong way, but right after “Whole Lotta Lord” charted, I got word that Tap had a 26-city American tour, the Break Like the Wind tour. So, I got a follow-up tattoo of the devil eating the fish. I tattooed my way back into his bad graces.

Well played, sir. I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t discuss the song “She Puts the Bitch in Obituary.”

Is that in any way related to “Bitch School”?

No, “Bitch School” was about training dogs. This is about a woman. I’ve had three wives, many girlfriends—all of them named Cindy. I don’t know if that’s what they were called at birth, but that’s what I called them because it was just easier that way. And most of them are brilliant—in that “Blimey, the sheets are on fire” way, not the Oxford “I’m gonna talk about quantum shit” way. But a couple along the way just get their claws into your innards and make a bloody mess of it, and this song is about one of them. I think it’s a rock ‘n’ roll tradition to write about really horrible women.

I know you’re trying to avoid the internet, but there’s a very popular photo of you with departed Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley making the rounds these days. Do you remember meeting him?

I’m not aware of that photo going about. As you know, I’m on a very strict diet of the internet.

But I remember Alice in Chains—Seattle, yeah?

So, it must’ve been backstage in Seattle on the Break Like the Wind tour, because I don’t think I’ve been back in Seattle since.

You have another connection with Alice in Chains: The model on the cover of the “Bitch School” single is also the model on the cover of Alice in Chains’ Dirt.

Really? Well, she traveled in the right circles, I should say.

I was going to ask if maybe you had referred her to them—or vice versa. Both releases came out in ’92.

No. I think maybe it’s just a select group of models who will perform on all fours.

Fun fact: She’s a real estate agent now.

Wow. When she’s showing you a house, is she upright?

PHOTO BY ROB SHANAHAN

All the Smalls Things  Derek Smalls isn’t ready to be put out to pasture

I’ve had three wives, many girlfriends—all of them named Cindy. I don’t know if that’s what they were called at birth, but that’s what I called them because it was just easier that way.

the

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

definitive albums

When Fuse Met Fire the making of Madball’s Set It Off JANUARY 2020 : 30 : DECIBEL

story by

shawn macomber

DBHOF181

MADBALL Set It Off ROADRUNNER JULY 26, 1994

They just took it

DECIBEL : 31 : JANUARY 2020

that of Freddy Cricien, not yet even 10 years old, being stuffed into a drum case and smuggled into early ’80s shows at now legendary clubs like A7, the Great Gildersleeves and CBGB— often toted by Warzone frontman Raymond “Raybeez” Barbieri, no less—to join his big brother Roger Miret’s band Agnostic Front onstage and scream out a couple songs. “Freddy loved the hardcore scene from the start,” Miret writes in his essential memoir, My Riot: Agnostic Front, Grit, Guts & Glory, “and took to it like a pyromaniac to a blowtorch.” And what do you do if you got love for a hardcore pyromaniac?

Well, if you’re circa-1988 Agnostic Front, you create an extremely combustible side project for him to front, arrange a few songs like gasolinesoaked kindling, let him demonstrate his usual microphone-as-flint style and watch those motherfucking stages burn.

Truth is, in the years between the Ball of Destruction 7-inch (1989) and the Droppin’ Many Suckers EP (1992), Madball could have easily would up a quirky footnote rather than this epic, scene-transfiguring novel that still seems extremely far from “The End” three decades later. (Seriously, the 2018 long-playing conflagration For the Cause is among their all-time greatest infernos.) Here’s the wild, beautiful thing about this trailblazing, New York City hardcore-epitomizing outfit, though: They always treated “burn out, not fade away” as a false choice. They never accepted the phoenix rising from the flames as mere mythology. When Madball ran low on fuel, the band smashed apart outside expectations, inner doubts and the crumbling architecture of the decaying, inequitable society around them, then tossed it all on the pyre.

This is the story of how Cricien, guitarists Vinnie Stigma and Matt Henderson, bassist Jorge “Hoya Roc” Guerra and drummer Will Shepler stormed an otherwise fallow scene a quartercentury ago, forged real evolutionary synergy between the old and new schools, fomented a scene revolution and, amidst the flames, created Set It Off, one of the single greatest, most enduring hardcore records of all time.

PHOTO BY BJ PAPAS

A

s origin stories go, it’s hard to eclipse

DBHOF181

MADBALL set it off

Tell us a little bit about what life was like in and out of Madball leading up to Set It Off.

For me, the early days of Madball were really viewed as just a side project of Agnostic Front, of which I was a full-time member in the early ’90s. It was meant to be sort of everything Agnostic Front at that time was struggling with—just raw and off the cuff. Don’t overthink anything. And then Agnostic Front broke up and I moved back to Boston to finish a degree at Berklee College of Music. Madball played weekend shows here and there, which gave me a good excuse to come into New York and hang with my buddies. But I also felt like it was important to keep the band going because it was a weird time for hardcore. The older-school bands were in kind of a funk. Newer bands were on that post-hardcore type thing, kind of running away from the anger and meanness. And those were areas in which Madball definitely excelled.

FREDDY CRICIEN: Me being Roger’s little brother, we’ll always live a little bit in the shadows of Agnostic Front. No shame in that. They are truly the godfathers—everyone was influenced or inspired by them in some way or another. That said, by the time we started to branch out and become our own entity around Droppin’ Many Suckers, hardcore was at a really low point—and nothing about our connection to AF was going to change that. Madball didn’t instantly start selling out CB’s. It wasn’t like that at all. It was more like playing to 20 people at NYU or wherever, making our own bones, paying our own dues, getting in people’s faces. We’d always be yelling, “Hardcore lives!” and “Hey, this shit ain’t dead!” onstage to remind the crowd, but also ourselves ’cause sometimes back then you’d look around and think, “Man, the underground is in a rough place.”

WILL SHEPLER: New York City was a rough place back then, too. Lot of violence, crime. Three thousand murders a year. I was a carpenter working construction, living job to job, week to week, scraping by. But I enjoyed every minute of it, ’cause I wasn’t there to make money or launch a music career. Like all my friends, I was there to be a part of the music and way of life CBGB’s and Tompkins Square Park represented.

Kind of hardscrabble, sure, but that was part of the excitement, of what you tapped into. True art comes from suffering, not comfort or fancy suburban living.

JORGE “HOYA ROC” GUERRA: I got into hardcore through my older brother. Right off the top, Agnostic Front was one of the first bands I conMATT HENDERSON:

“Somewhere around Set It Off, Vinnie [Stigma] and I began to reverse roles. I was basically AF’s mascot for a bunch of years, this little kid tagging along— they called me Agnostic Freddy, prior to Vinnie christening me Madball.”

F RE D DY CRICIE N

How did Hoya end up in the band?

After my brother decided to step away from AF and music altogether, Madball needed a bass player. It had to be a friend. That’s how all our bands have always been—friends and family. A few names popped up before I realized, “Wait, Hoya’s a bass player and he’s my boy.”

CRICIEN:

JANUARY 2020 : 3 2 : DECIBEL

His band at the time, Dmize, which had actually played a couple shows with AF and Madball, was about to call it quits. Natural choice. Of course, I didn’t have any idea how important a piece of the puzzle he would become.

HOYA ROC: Freddy was like, “Yo, you want to fill in for a couple of shows? Might be a week or two of your time.” Yeah, so that was 26 years ago.

And pretty quickly after that, hardcore-to-thebone Madball ended up signing to Roadrunner, one of the biggest metal labels in the world.

How did that happen?

In 1988, I was helping launch In-Effect Records.

We’d already committed to having Agnostic Front’s Live at CBGB be the centerpiece along with Prong’s Force Fed and Bad Brains’ ROIR cassette on CD. During one of Roger Miret’s trips to our Hollis office, he handed me a cassette of some tracks recorded by a lineup featuring him on bass, Stigma on guitar and Will Shepler on drums, plus Roger’s 12-year-old brother Freddy on vocals. Madball. I loved it! Raw, old-schoolstyle New York hardcore, but with an angry-asfuck pre-teen belting out the lyrics. In-Effect later released the songs as the Ball of Destruction 7-inch, which is now considered an NYHC

HOWIE ABRAMS (FORMER ROADRUNNER A&R):

PHOTO BY FRANK WHITE

nected with, but I didn’t see Freddy onstage at 7 years old. That’s before my time, which is why I don’t call myself “old school” even though I’ve been going to shows since 1988. I did see him at CBGB’s when he was probably 12, and it was inspiring as fuck. I’m a kid and, whoa, here’s a kid, couple years younger, doing the shit, you know? Then one day I’m at Bleeker Bob’s [record store] in the city, just looking for something new, maybe a cool cover you’d hope would have some sick music behind it—that’s how we did it pre-internet—and there’s the Madball Ball of Destruction 7-inch. People were still calling it Roger’s little brother’s band or Baby AF, but I was all about it. Fast-forward a few years and my boy Ezec [Skarhead, Crown of Thornz] shows up to my house with this kid, about 15, who had just moved to New York. “This is Freddy, Roger’s brother.” I was like, “Oh, shit!” Next thing you know, we’re hanging out.

DBHOF181

MADBALL set it off

classic. I had no idea some version of the band would continue beyond that. Almost five years later, though, Madball was indeed alive and well.

Their gigs were brutal and volatile, and Freddy was nothing short of tornadic fronting the band.

I decided to call the fellas into the Roadrunner Records offices to see if they’d want to do an album for the label. I think they were caught off guard, but enthusiastic.

HENDERSON: I was grateful an offer was extended, but a little bit reserved about taking it. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to make that type of commitment. In the end, though, my sense was that we could accomplish something really special and unique together. We were working to find our voice in the same way any group of strong individuals coming together with a common goal does, but where we were in sync, it was great.

And where we had different views or strengths, it was more complementary than contradictive.

HOYA ROC: Thank god for Howie. He’s a hardcore kid. He comes from us. And when he got to a position where he could start slipping hardcore under the door, he anted up and did it. At the same time, our attitude was never, “Oh, wow, we’re finally on a big label and can make some real noise.” To me, the deal was more about real recognizes real, you know? The hardcore scene is like that uncle that just got out of jail: Some people in the family don’t want to talk about it, but everybody knows who the fuck they are because they say [what] the fuck they want, dress [how] the fuck they want and do what the fuck they want. So, from my perspective, we brought another layer of credibility—now this underground label’s got the realest underground shit.

Did the Roadrunner contract accelerate the songwriting process?

HOYA ROC: Oh yeah. And it was intimidating, man. I suddenly realized for real: Oh, fuck—I’m basically in a band with Agnostic Front. Not only are they OGs, they’re all killers on their instruments. The stuff I’d been writing for Dmize was rooted in hardcore, but also influenced by my love of groove and thrash metal. Very different from what I assumed they wanted to hear, which was just some fast 1982 hardcore.

CRICIEN: Hoya grew up on AF. Who didn’t in New York? So, yeah, his position was a little tough initially. “Go ahead, show Matt Henderson and Vinnie Stigma what you got, young man!” But everyone in Madball was open to new ideas. I think we all had our own different creative sides we were eager to unleash. I know I did.

HOYA ROC: First I showed them this song I wrote in the vein of Agnostic Front’s One Voice record called “It’s Time,” which did eventually end up on Set It Off. And then I had this other riff more in my own style. Back before GarageBand

and all this other digital shit, I would put my amp under the television while I watched rap videos. The guitar would drown out the vocals, but I could still hear the beat. So, I got Eric B. & Rakim blasting and this thing starts coming to me. I loved it, but did not think these guys would want to fuck with it. I was almost embarrassed to show it to Matt. “Oh, I got this thing, but it’s cool—I can use it for something else.”

HENDERSON: I was between classes at school, so I called to check in with Hoya and he played what would become that chorus part in “Set It Off” to me over the phone. I was immediately like, “That’s it! Keep doing that!” Hoya was already a friend, but I was not entirely aware of his musical capabilities. It was awesome—and kind of a relief—to find out the guy could write monster riffs.

HOYA ROC: It was like Yoda telling me I could start training to be a Jedi. It got me out of my shell. It motivated me. We started seeing how far we could take things.

HENDERSON: I started coming to New York to write on the weekends. Hoya and I would sit together for hours at Vinnie’s apartment with a Boss Dr. Rhythm, which was this popular ’90s drum machine. It had these big drum keypads and a built-in sequencer. One night we had this loop going and Hoya figured out how to hit the delete button to cut out kick drums in certain spots. All of a sudden, the whole thing’s bumping in a brand new way. That turned into the “New York City” chorus. It was fun feeling that type of stuff take shape.

Another thing that set Madball apart was not just this new sound, but also the way Freddy’s vocals locked into it.

Not gonna lie, that was just my natural cadence. Not a lot of thought went into it. I’m a hardcore kid, but I grew up with a lot of different music overall—especially, since I was a little kid, hip-hop. I’d probably have to give credit to that for influencing my later cadence with Madball.

CRICIEN:

The hip-hop element overall is down at a DNA level, though, right? It’s subtle. Set It Off doesn’t sound like the Judgment Night soundtrack.

HOYA ROC: Yeah, we were never trying to be a rap hardcore band. We were doing a hardcore band and all our different influences were coming to the surface. We love Cro-Mags. We love Agnostic Front. We love Leeway. We love a mosh part. It’s in how that mosh part moves or the way that riff gets your head boppin’ that you’d hear those different kinds of influences [come to the] surface. It wasn’t just us. Will didn’t grow up on hip-hop like Freddy and I did. But he loved James Brown, and that was an interesting middle ground all its own.

CRICIEN: At one point or another, all of us pumped the brakes and said, “Hey, let’s not forget that we’re a hardcore band. Let’s not totally remove ourselves from the old school.”

JANUARY 2020 : 3 4 : DECIBEL

There was a lot of freedom in Madball.

If a riff called for an AF-type hardcore beat, that’s what I used. If it needed a John Bonhamtype heavy beat or something fusion—bring it. We felt like we could go new places because Vinnie held down the old-school element, Hoya brought the new school, and Matt and I were kind of like the bridge between the two musically, and it all just meshed really well together.

VINNIE STIGMA: I saw myself as an elder. I saw myself as a leader. I saw myself as a responsible person. I figured, you know, to carry the torch…

I brought the old-school flavor to the front. I think that was the most important thing. To keep that old-school flavor within this rising new generation.

SHEPLER:

Freddy was always a charismatic and powerful presence, but on Set It Off he really hones his attack and comes into his own. What was it like to watch that evolution?

STIGMA: You know, Freddy was like my own private science project. He was a little kid who I—along with Roger—helped set on a course and guided. And now he leads.

HENDERSON: When I joined Agnostic Front in 1990, I was a longtime fan and certainly familiar with the Ball of Destruction release and all that stuff. By the time I met Freddy, though, he was around 15, living in Florida—kind of an awkward teenager, if you will. On my first tour with the band, he still came up onstage to sing those two AF songs like always, but my impression was he was a little self-conscious about it and maybe doing it out of a sense of obligation because that’s what everyone expected from him. Then in ’92, Freddy went on the road with us for this eight-week run with Malevolent Creation, Obituary and Cannibal Corpse. First week in, Roger gets hurt and has to leave the tour. Hernia, I think. Guess who’s singing for us?

CRICIEN: Imagine you were the ball boy for a team, someone gets injured and the coach put you in. I told my brother I didn’t want to do it.

I’m like, “I’m not you, man! I’m not tattooed head to toe! These people don’t want to see a skinny 16-year-old kid up there!” All I could do was try to remember what I learned watching AF and bring out my inner rage, which is admittedly plentiful.

HENDERSON: I was blown away. At that point, he’d spent more time in New York and at shows, kind of coming into his own, but I was not really prepared for how badass he was on that tour.

STIGMA: It was definitely a watershed moment.

Freddy fronted AF on a major tour and he took the cake.

CRICIEN: I could never replace my brother— that’s beyond obvious. It was definitely a great experience, though, and gave me confidence I brought into Madball. I still had a lot to learn, but it helped.

DECIBEL : JANUARY 2020 : 35

DBHOF181

MADBALL set it off

Freddy was special from the get-go—a natural. The idea behind Madball—of handing Freddy the reins and letting him be the full-on frontman—I never thought it’d be anything but great. And it was.

SHEPLER:

Lyrically, Set It Off is a different beast as well.

Set It Off was the first album where I actually wrote lyrics. Prior to that, I was mostly editing or amending Roger’s words. I was really just trying to get this stuff off my chest, to just spit it out. This is how we’re living. This is what we’re seeing. If someone can connect our story to their story, cool. From its inception until now, hardcore has never been one-dimensional. There’s always been the street side of it, the suburban side of it, all walks of life, all kinds of experiences. And that’s the beauty of it. But Set It Off was our story.

HOYA ROC: Freddy had something to say. And it was the right time for him to say [it]. Simple as that.

HENDERSON: Madball sometimes gets tagged as tough guy hardcore, right? And if you want to be accurate about it, there’s no denying Freddy was a tough kid. But there’s a complexity to him, you know? He has very deep thoughts and a very deep heart. He wrestles with very real demons and is willing to go places others won’t to do it.

That’s why his lyrics and who he is as a person resonates with a lot of people.

CRICIEN:

It’s no secret that it took a long time for studios to figure out how to properly record hardcore. But Set It Off sounds huge. How’d you get it right?

JAMIE LOCKE (ENGINEER): Chris Williamson found us at Normandy Sound in the late ’80s and brought in Leeway and the Cro-Mags for Profile Records. That was Born to Expire and Best Wishes.

Then Howie brought in Sick of It All for Blood, Sweat and No Tears. I was new in the studio in ’87 and assisted on those records. That pretty much opened the floodgates. I got my chance to produce my first hardcore record there, which was Supertouch, The Earth Is Flat. A little later, I mixed One Voice with Don Fury. That’s when I met Matt and Will. They liked what I was doing and called me for Set It Off. That’s the history.

HOYA ROC: Recording Set It Off was almost like having a newborn baby: Sure, you know it’s gonna be its own thing soon, but you don’t really have any idea how it’s going to walk or talk or grow. We got to the studio with, like, half the shit written in riffs. We had maybe six songs. Seemed like a lot to us—we’re a hardcore band!—but when we timed everything out, it was maybe 12 minutes of music, two minutes a song. And Roadrunner wanted a 40-minute record. Yeah, okay!

LOCKE: We recorded at Dave Brown’s studio in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He toured with Billy Joel for years and built this awesome studio into an old New England mansion. Then we mixed at Mission Control on Cape Cod, where I moved to from Normandy Sound to be their chief engineer. The owner, Michael Jonzun, wrote and produced tons of hits with New Edition and New Kids on the Block with his brother Maurice Starr.

New Kids to Madball—quite a juxtaposition!

HENDERSON: There was a bit of irony in bringing this very New York, very gritty style of music to Cape Cod to record it.

LOCKE: We had a lot of fun making Set It Off. A lot of humor and ball-busting going on. I still have DAT tapes of them teasing Hoya, knowing I was recording it all. But when it came time to track a song, they were total pros.

Were there ever any misconceptions about the band because of the lyrics or general aesthetic?

“I was between classes at school, so I called to check in with Hoya and he played what would become that chorus part in ‘Set It Off’ to me over the phone.

I was immediately like, ‘That’s it!

Keep doing that!’”

The “Down by Law” video is a really cool mix of art and street.

M ATT HE ND E RSO N STIGMA: We had Pauly the bulldog running around the studio—that was fun.

CRICIEN: I was mostly buried in notebooks, trying to write lyrics. I chimed in like everyone else, of course. I don’t know what the general consensus is, but to be honest—I don’t love my vocals. I was still getting my bearings. I sang with a lot of passion and rage, but I didn’t really figure out how to do it to my standard until [2000’s] Hold It Down.

What’s the story behind the iconic cover image?

Howie was showing us a bunch of images we could access for reasonable money. When we got to that one, it was unanimous. There’s a lot going on there, man—classy, yet disturbing. I would’ve worried about Roadrunner complaining, but it’s actually pretty mild compared to some of the stuff those metal bands were doing at the time.

HOYA ROC: A lot of the stories on Set It Off are really about how violence is handed down through generations. We weren’t trying to be low-key about nothing.

CRICIEN:

JANUARY 2020 : 36 : DECIBEL

Well, people always have misconceptions about other people. So, yeah, there were probably people who thought we were all criminal thugs. On the other hand, we definitely got in some trouble. [Violence] wasn’t our whole life, but it was a part of it. I don’t get in fights anymore— I’m too old for that—but back then I had some pretty brutal encounters, if I’m being honest.

HENDERSON: It never made sense to me when we’d get written off at this meathead band. Our music and lyrics intended not to intimidate, but to be real and honest and represent our city—an unquestionably tough place. For me, growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, it was an energizing experience—not a negative or fearful one—when these intense New York bands came around. That’s the tradition I saw us as a part of.

SHEPLER:

HOYA ROC: We tried to get money from Roadrunner for a video, but the label decided to prioritize the bands that were actually selling all the records. Go figure! I was like, “That’s that, I guess!” But Drew [Stone] was like, “Nah, I don’t give a shit. I’m gonna be the first one to do a Madball video. Period.”

DREW STONE (DIRECTOR): Not to sound corny, but hardcore means something to me, and when I first saw Madball, it reminded me of the original spirit of 1981—those very special early days when I first got into this music. So, I was just following my heart and making the art I wanted to make no matter what. That’s something hardcore instilled in me and I still live to this day.

I initially paid for the video out of my pocket while I was riding high on the success of the other videos I had produced, like Onyx “Slam,” Biohazard “Punishment” and Type O Negative “Black No. 1.” My brother shot it with a 16mm camera. The film stock that I used was leftover scraps I had stored in my refrigerator.

CRICIEN: It captured the vibe. It was our friends, tagging; we were dressed how we normally dressed. It was very organic, very guerrilla. It was also well-edited and put together by Drew, who knew what he was doing. We certainly didn’t.

HOYA ROC: You know when you run into your boys on the corner and you end up hanging out there for hours? That’s what it was like. We’re hanging out one day and someone’s like, “Yo, Drew called.

He wants to do the video.” Aight, let’s do it then.

Next thing you know, we got the drums set up in the alleyway.

SHEPLER: We filmed it right off Mott Street in Little Italy near Vinnie’s place. Now Mott Street looks like SoHo, but we found some gritty little spots over there and filmed everything in one afternoon. Can you imagine trying to get away with that today? Then Drew threw in some great live stuff.

DECIBEL : JANUARY 2020 : 37

DBHOF181

MADBALL set it off Fast. It seemed like a weird dream. We were just a bunch of young hardcore kids, didn’t know shit, taking life as it came, trying to wave the flag for the underground, and it turns into this?

Who would’ve predicted that?

SHEPLER: I started to realize people were feeling it when we’d play shows where I wasn’t sure anyone would know who we were, but everyone would start going wild during the intro [and] all say, “We don’t fake it, we just take it” almost in unison, which was just strange and amazing.

“I was just a kid before Set It Off. Now I’m just a kid who happens to play in a band that some people like. And that’s more than I would’ve ever dared to ask for.”

HOYA R O C STONE: It was very important to the band that we get a shot of Freddy’s brother Roger in the video.

At the time, Agnostic Front wasn’t playing and no one was sure if they ever would again. There’s a great shot of Roger in front of CB’s with the band, and then of him doing a song with them…

My only regret is not picking up the guitar Vinnie smashed in the video! It was laying in the street in pieces and I just didn’t act on it. Fuck!

Did Vinnie’s role in Madball shift with the lineup change and new direction?

It’s fair to say Vinnie wasn’t the heaviest contributor musically by Set It Off, although he absolutely did contribute. The thing about Vinnie is he’s got that spirit and that attitude… It’s almost kind of like a sanity check, right? If you see, affectionately speaking, the old man bobbing his head or his eyes light up, you know you’re moving in the right direction.

He also wasn’t afraid to say, “C’mon, man. That sounds tired.” He was like a coach—a protector of the vision and definitely a huge asset.

SHEPLER: Just Vinnie’s presence is influential.

If you know Vinnie, you know he’s got a lot of presence.

CRICIEN: It’s funny. Somewhere around Set It Off, Vinnie and I began to reverse roles. I was basically AF’s mascot for a bunch of years, this little kid tagging along—they called me Agnostic Freddy, prior to Vinnie christening me Madball.

HENDERSON:

And, to his credit, when Madball started to change, Vinnie was all about it. “Do it, man! Do you! Do it the way you feel it!” Not a surprise.

Vinnie’s always been about the next generation.

Still, AF was done. He wanted to keep doing music, so we kept him on, out of respect—he’s the creator of all this, after all—and he became a mascot of sorts for us.

From an outside perspective, Set It Off seemed to connect quickly.

HOYA ROC: I remember when we played Dynamo in ’95. Every so-called festival we’d played before was in a parking lot with maybe 300 people.

We’re scheduled to go on at 1:30 in the afternoon.

I’m like, “What the fuck ever,” ’cause who’s gonna come out to see a nobody hardcore band middle of the day? I wake up that morning and just start smoking and drinking and doing everything, trying to get out of my mind enough to feel okay about standing on a massive stage in an open field in the Netherlands in front of like 100 people. Then my boy was like, “You better go take a look at that stage, bro.” So, I do and it’s just people as far as the eye can see. Holy shit.

Later I find out there were 80 or 90,000 people out there—still the biggest show we ever played.

Now I’m trying to get straight as goddamn quick as I can. We set up. The intro to Set It Off starts playing. Stigma walks to the front of the stage, everybody just starts yelling. And shit got real.

JANUARY 2020 : 38 : DECIBEL

STIGMA: It’s a very important record in my life.

I put Set It Off up there with Victim in Pain and One Voice.

HOYA ROC: Wow. To hear that Vinnie said that?

I can’t even put it into words what that means.

This band is Vinnie. He don’t got to be here; this shit is his. He’s the heartbeat of this scene and this band. You know, I got to do some great things in Madball—toured the world, built a life around hardcore music—but to have my only idol Vinnie fuckin’ Stigma put us up there with AF means more than all that other shit combined.

HENDERSON: I’m a perfectionist. so some of it doesn’t quite sound how I would prefer, but no regrets because Set It Off was more than just music and songs. I’m very proud of the record, very proud of being a member of the band and what we achieved together, sincerely grateful that people found something in the rawness, sincerity and aggression of it all and show the level of respect and appreciation that they do.

SHEPLER: It’s probably the main record that I played on that I still listen to the most. Those are my brothers. I still talk to them all the time.

Whenever I go to Miami, I stop by, see Hoya and Freddy. Freddy comes down here a lot, too, with his wife and his kids. Set It Off was for life.

CRICIEN: Set It Off didn’t sell millions of copies. We didn’t even hit like Biohazard—it never even got to that level. It’s hard to appreciate the impact sometimes because we’re still out fighting the good fight, you know? But it really did set things off for us, quite literally. And for me, that record was and is everything it needed to be. Everybody brought it, man. Everybody was like, “Hey, if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right.

It’s going to be Madball, not AF: Part Two.” It’s cool to have that AF connection, but be our own thing as well. The lineup has obviously changed, but we’re all still very close. I don’t know, man…

I’m just grateful it happened—and that it happened with these people.

HOYA ROC: It’s everything, man. I got my kids because of the people I met through the band. I feed my children because of this music. People know and respect what I do because of Set It Off. In all reality, I was just a kid before Set It Off. Now I’m just a kid who happens to play in a band that some people like. And that’s more than I would’ve ever dared to ask for.

PHOTO BY FRANK WHITE

How do you feel about Set It Off today?

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by Magnus Lindberg (Cult of Luna)

WOLCENSMEN Fire In The White Stone

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Pagan, dark folk from the mists of England.

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Great riffs, hooks, dreamy spherical melodies – a high quality Hard Rock debut.

This and much more at Indie Recordings webshop, first time subscribers get 10% off. www.indierecordings.no DECIBEL : JANUARY 2020 : 39

40 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL

If the highest office in land is to be believed—and it most fucking certainly is not—deep state conspiracies are running rampant throughout all branches of U.S. government. But while the general public continues to endure useless conjecture about windmills causing cancer, widespread voter fraud and a "total, and very expensive hoax" perpetuated

by China's government, all the cool shit like extraterrestrials and close encounters has been cast aside faster than an EDM DJ performing at “Storm Area 51.”

Of course, I want you to believe that this year’s Decibel Top 40 is no different from the other 15 I’ve presided over. Just an annual gathering of over two dozen seasoned metal journalists passionately expressing their divergent opinions, leaving me to thoughtfully and meticulously parse a seemingly endless amount of music into a coherent representation of the past 12 months. I mean, only the deep-sea divers of subterranean Reddit would perpetuate the notion that I maybe just glanced over the contributor lists and then did whatever the fuck I wanted. Really, it’s not like these red pills I’ve been popping like M&M’s have had any effect on me. That’s all just crazy talk, right? Right… RIGHT?! — A L B E R T MU D R I A N

DECIBEL :

41 : JA N 2020

D E C I B E L : J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 0 : 41

TOP 5 RECORDS THAT TIED FOR #41

[ PROFOU N D LORE ]

41. Hermóðr, Forest Sky, [ SE LF- RE LE ASE D ]

41. High Command, Beyond the Wall

of Desolation, [ SOU THERN LORD] 41. Memoriam, Requiem for Mankind, [ N U CLE AR B LAST]

TOP 5 KOOL AZ FVKK RECORDS THAT WERE NEVER GOING TO MAKE THIS LIST

39

1. Sabïre, Gates Ajar 2. Geheimnisvoll, Venomous Sorcery

Through Hidden Darkness 3. Black Curse, Endless Wound 4. Total Isolation, Winfield 5. Kuka’ilimoku, Kuka’ilimoku

Times of Obscene Evil and Wild Daring | C RUZ D E L SUR

Remember that scene in The Return of the King when Éowyn whips her helmet off, snarls, “I am no man!” and blows up the Witch-king of Angmar’s fucking head?

Smoulder’s debut album sounds the way that scene feels. Its six tracks of chugging, solo-ripping, vocal-soaring capital-m Metal both pay loving tribute to the history of epic doom and inject new life (and tons of catchiness) into the genre’s most niche-and-nerdy caverns. Somewhere in the Halls of Mandos, Ronnie James Dio smiles on these Canadian upstarts. — J O SE P H SC HA F E R

1. Firelink, The Inveterate Fire 2. Striborg, Leave the World Behind 3. Enbilulugugal, We Hope You

Fukken Hate It 4. Merzbow, Noise Mass 5. Aidan Baker, See Through

BY DUTCH PEA RCE

SMOULDER

BY DANIEL LAKE

TOP 5 DEMOS OF 2019

Satan Spits on Children of Light | RE L A P S E On their Relapse debut, Philly deviants Devil Master bring wicked vitality to their party-punk approximation of raw first-wave black metal. From the record’s first creeping synths, Satan Spits on Children of Light is pure Halloween.

The album’s wild pulse courses with Hellhammer’s blood, even as it flirts with surf rock and Rust Belt hardcore. But outside the reverb-soaked snarls and haunted riffs, the record’s ghoulish glory is its intoxicating carnival atmosphere. Pop in your Dracula teeth and grin along to these jams with fangs bared. — SE A N F RA SIE R

41. Dreadnought, Emergence, [ PROFOU N D LORE ]

41. Dead to a Dying World, Elegy,

DEVIL MASTER

40

38

NOCTURNUS AD

37

Paradox | P RO FO UN D LO RE

Nocturnus AD’s Paradox is this year’s best second act. Mike Browning and crew perfectly capture The Key’s vibe—hyper-ballistic guitars, space-Euro synths, kvlt whindchimes and all. The only difference is the 2019 production. Browning still commands like the galactic warlord-cum-Florida Satanic evangelical preacher he is, his drumming and vocals still on top. Does he just sing about time machines, or does Browning know how to surf millennia for real? He is a master preservationist, that’s for sure. — A N DY O ’ C O N N O R

ELIZABETH COLOUR WHEEL

TOP 5 PREDICTIONS FOR OZZY’S NEW ALBUM WITH POST MALONE’S PRODUCER

BY SH AN E MEHLING

1. Bad 2. Very bad 3. Not amazing but who cares?

4. The man recorded Black Sabbath 50 years ago, he can do what he wants 5. Just absolute dogshit

Nocebo | THE F LE N SE R

Nocebo is a placebo that makes you feel worse, and while listening to Elizabeth Colour Wheel may make you heartsick or anguished, that’s just a small taste of what they’re capable of. A sonic tapestry of indie-punk/doomgaze, Nocebo is held together by one singular vision and Lane Shi, a vocalist of immense range; she can be meditative or on the verge of collapse, wielding enough charismatic force to hypnotize an arena. The effects of Nocebo are intense, and they’ll persist long after the record is over. — SHA N E M E HLIN G

MISERY INDEX

36

Rituals of Power | SE A SO N O F M IST It’s difficult to imagine a more apropos title for the potent-by-way-of-savage sixth full-length from Misery Index than Rituals of Power. It is, after all, a consummate recitation of the most galvanizing and trenchant musical/philosophical elements the Baltimore quartet has consecrated over the last 15-plus years of its existence. These nine songs are about are not about Misery Index reinventing their own punk/grind/death wheel, but rather thickening the treads in order to more effectively crush and conquer the petty shibboleths and prejudices du jour. — SHAW N M AC O M BE R

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VASTUM

Orificial Purge | 20 BUCK S P IN You can see the brushstrokes in the painting that Vastum commissioned for the cover of their fourth album, Orificial Purge. That’s a major element of painter Laina Terpstra’s surrealist style, like catching movement in the act. But to what extent did Vastum’s most natural-sounding—yet also most experimental—record pervert Terpstra’s art, and how much did Terpstra’s work influence the San Francisco death-doom stalwarts on their most artistic album yet? One can only speculate, but these two pieces of art together make for an equally thoughtprovoking and skull-crushing death metal experience. — D UTC H P E A RC E

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CANDLEMASS

TOP 5 DUNGEON SYNTH RELEASES OF 2019

BY DUTCH PEA RCE

1. Fogweaver, Fogweaver 2. Nortfalke, Atmosfeer 3. Corrupted Temple of Moss, Demo I 4. Diplodocus, Slow and Heavy 5. Wraithguard, Knave I

TOP 5 HAIR METAL BANDS I DIDN’T KNOW STILL EXISTED THAT RELEASED RECORDS IN 2019

BY K E V I N S T EWA R T -PA N KO

The Door to Doom | NAPAL M Who does doom better than Candlemass? Lately, a lot of others have. But when you’ve dedicated the essence of your being to slow ‘n’ low like bassist Leif Edling has, to not continue along your chosen path isn’t an option. That determination—propped up by the return of original full moon howler Johan Längquist and a guest spot by He Who Planted Doom Metal’s Family Tree, Tony Iommi—ushered in a furious return to form. Edling always possessed the key to doom’s door. With album number 12, he’s simply kicked the stopper aside.

1. Jetboy, Born to Fly 2. L.A. Guns, The Devil You Know 3. Tykertto, We’ve Got Tomorrow,

We’ve Got Tonight 4. Hardline, Life 5. Quiet Riot, Hollywood Cowboys

— K E VIN STEWART-PANKO

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TOXIC HOLOCAUST Primal Future: 2019 | EONE

Toxic Holocaust were at risk of overexposure exhaustion, and have long been polka-thrashing a bit too close to the pizza party, but goddamn if Joel Grind doesn’t deliver with Primitive Future: 2019. The album contains killer crossover and thrash sounds, but it’s also Grind’s best approximation yet of pure ’80s metal vibe, the record basically amounting to a time machine to an era when cool older brothers blew our minds with Nuclear Assault and Omen LPs. The killer cover art sums it up: fun, but deadly. —G RE G P RATT

ABBATH

Outstrider | SEASON OF MIST

On his second album, Bergen’s friendly neighborhood thunder god delivered an impressive slab of relentless riff-o-rama steeped in slashing guitar grooves, razorsharp songwriting and the wintry wonderland atmosphere in which he crab-walks to certain victory. With an all-new lineup and more emphasis on the rock ‘n’ roll and Bathory vibes (note the choice cover of “Pace Till Death”) than his 2016 debut, Outstrider has more in common with Abbath’s short-lived supergroup I than anything else in his impeccable back catalogue. Which is just fine by us. — J . BE N N E TT

CEREBRAL ROT

Odious Descent Into Decay | 2 0 BUC K SP IN

Seattle’s Cerebral Rot came through my city earlier this year, and frontman Ian Schwab looked every bit like a young Jim Konya. In his big “Uncle Bill” glasses, with his tour blowout and ring-adorned hands, Schwab punched through all the neck-ruiners and chorus-drenched solos from Odious Descent, and it was like hearing Symphonies of Sickness stretched out on the rack by Hooded Menace. And for 40 minutes, I felt momentarily redeemed, despite having missed out on the early ’90s underground death metal scene. With their debut album, Cerebral Rot have done the past justice while delivering a real treat to the present. — D UTC H P E A RC E DECIBEL :

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TOP 5 DECIBEL FLEXI SERIES DISCS OF 2019 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Pig Destroyer “The Cavalry” Carcass “Under the Scalpel Blade” Opeth “Cirkelns Riktning” Gatecreeper “Social Decay” False “Neither Path nor Gate”

TOP 5 BONES THROWN IN 2019

BY K E V I N S T EWA R T -PA N KO 1. Artic Sleep, Kindred Spirits 2. Calamity, Kairos 3. Raging Rob, Always the True Assassin 4. Lost Tribes of the Moon,

Lost Tribes of the Moon 5. Hatchets for Hands, Convulsions of

a Dying Empire

TOP 5 BATUSHKAS OF 2019

BY A LBERT MUDR I AN 1. Батюшка 2. Batushka 3. Batyushka 4. Μπατουσκα 5. Батюшка

TOP 5 THINGS OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF MEMBERS OF THE GREAT SABATINI AT HEAVY MONTREAL 2019

Gold & Grey | A BRA XA N HYM N S Despite being Baroness’ final color-coded full-length, Gold & Grey feels more like the beginning of a new cycle than the end of an old one. Sole original member John Baizley plays the reluctant autocrat beautifully, coaxing bandmates into power spots (while nudging new guitarist/vocalist Gina Gleason toward the foreground) as they all repeatedly broach the unknown. Whether setting metal aside, as on krautrocking quickie “Sevens,” or reinventing it per “Seasons,” Baroness never stop offering fresh alternatives to conventions we’d all started taking for granted. — RO D SM ITH

BY K E V I N S T EWA R T -PA N KO

1. (After invading artist’s catering area)

“Come hang out. We’re in the VIP area

eating like assholes.”

2. (While playing in a park in front of 3,000+ people) “We’re the Great

Sabatini, we’ve got merch in the back!”

3. (While watching a fedora-wearing

hipster obnoxious mosh around people

trying to peacefully watch Slayer)

“Can we light this kid on fire?”

4. (After witnessing the massive set of

chains hanging off Kerry King’s belt)

“I bet all of Slayer’s retirement tour

money is in a giant wallet attached to

those giant wallet chains.”

5. (Standard greeting) “Cugino Vinny!”

BARONESS

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29

MISÞYRMING

28

Algleymi | N O RM A E VA N G E LIUM D IA BO LI

Let’s forget that Misþyrming are of Icelandic origin and focus entirely on what the quartet has to offer musically. Following in the footsteps of—or in parallel march with—fellow countrymen Svartidauði, Zhrine and Sinmara, Misþyrming’s atonal, epic, aggressive, expansive black metal is exactly where the genre needs to be. Algleymi hunts off of 2015 debut Söngvar Elds Og Óreiðu, but they differ greatly. Black metal sophists will argue Misþyrming’s missteps, no doubt, but continuous plays through “Ísland, Steingelda Krummaskuð,” “Orgia” and the title track prove fucking religious! Inverted hails in chords major! — C HR I S D I C K

MAGIC CIRCLE

TOP 5 OTHER PEOPLE WHO WERE ON THEIR WAY TO MURDER EURONYMOUS

BY A LBERT MUDR I AN

1. O.J. 2. Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly 3. The locked out 1994 Montreal Expos 4. David Crosby’s liver 5. Courtney Love

TOP 5 PARTS OF YOUR BODY METAL MUSIC IS MOST COMMONLY FUCKING UP IN 2019

BY SH AN E MEHLING 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Your Skull (Crushing, Smashing) Your Spine (Twisting, Also Crushing) Your Ears (Punishing, Deafening, Some Defiling) Your Face (Mostly Just Melting) Your Flesh (Buddy, What Aren’t They Doing to Your Flesh?)

27

Departed Souls | 2 0 BUC K SP IN

It was going to be a tall order for Magic Circle to follow up their 2015 banger Journey Blind with anything approaching that level of gloriously retro splendor, but the Boston trad-metal/doom squad did not disappoint with Departed Souls.

Initially envisioned by denim-throated vocalist Brendan Radigan as a tribute to fallen metal fabulons like Lemmy and Dio, the album’s purview widened into an all-encompassing meditation upon death—delivered in a soulful, classic style somewhere between the towering pillars of Vitus, Sabbath and Witchfinder General. — J . BE N N E TT

SCHAMMASCH

26

Hearts of No Light | P RO STHE TIC

With prolific composers such as Schammasch’s C.S.R.—who has released four albums (one being a triple LP) and an EP over just nine years—the quantity approach tends to severely affect quality. Yet, quite incredibly, this Swiss musician’s compositional acumen for weaving black/death metal, industrial, post-punk and postmetal in elaborate and transformative ways continues to improve. Hearts of No Light is Schammasch at apex strength, the totality of years of studious refinement. It’s the sound of a tireless perfectionist nailing his muse to a cross. — D E A N B R OW N

OPETH

In Cauda Venenum | N UC LE A R BLA ST

How often does a band come around that’s the best in whatever genre it attempts?

Having perfected progressive death metal (the entire genre is still trying to catch up to what the Swedes accomplished on Blackwater Park), Opeth mastermind Mikael Åkerfeldt turned to prog rock and proceeded to master that. In Cauda Venenum may be their most complete expression of that mode to date. A dark, twisting opus performed in two different languages, it’s an infectious triumph that unveils new secrets with every listen. — J E F F TRE P P E L

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4 4 : DECIBEL

25

NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THE DEAD THINK

No One Knows What the Dead Think | W ILLOW TIP

When Jon Chang shrieks, grind fans listen. Here, Chang hollers with all the hysteria he brought to Discordance Axis and Gridlink, and he does so backed by jigsore guitar work from fellow DA alum Rob Marton, making this incredible 19-minute record feel an awful lot like a new DA release. Not that this band can’t stand on their own six feet: Chang and Marton, with octopus Kyosuke Nakano on drums, crafted an insta-classic grindcore release here, and that—despite the relentless DA references—is an inalienable truth. — G RE G P RATT

24

23

22

BY J EFF TR EPPEL

1. Mega Drive, 199X 2. Absolute Valentine, Omega 3. Neoslave, Autoviolator 4. Voyag3r, War Mask 5. Confrontational,

Under Cover of Darkness

INTER ARMA

Sulphur English | REL APSE Informed by modern life’s harsh realities, Inter Arma’s Sulphur English is a subterranean death march, the most bleakly oppressive LP in the Virginia band’s developing history. Labyrinthine passages of torturous doom, sludge, black metal and Azagthothian rites emit zero light—a visceral amalgam of extreme styles pushed to overwhelming ends. In that respect, Sulphur English—musically, but also thematically—plays out like the perfect accompaniment to Cormac McCarthy’s oeuvre: the post-apocalyptic desolation of The Road and the Southern Gothic violence of Blood Meridian writ large. —D E A N BROW N

FALLS OF RAUROS

Patterns in Mythology | G ILE A D M E D IA

Falls of Rauros have been dutifully plying their black/folk metal trade for nearly 15 years now, and if the breathtaking Patterns in Mythology is any indication, they’re nowhere near the retirement home. To what do we owe the spirited gusto of career standouts like “Weapons of Refusal” and “Last Empty Tradition”? All signs point to the inspirational power of Maine—with its eerie lakes, creepy forests and haunting coastline, the quartet’s home state appears to be a hatchery for ferocious, emotionally charged music that tugs at even the blackest of heartstrings. —MATT SOL IS

TOP 5 PLACES TO SEE NEXT YEAR’S METAL & BEER FEST: LOS ANGELES

BY MIKE WOHLBERG

1. San Diego 2. San Francisco 3. Anaheim 4. Your hometown, but only if you

complain enough on social media 5. Philadelphia

TOP 5 ALBUMS OF 2019 THAT I DIDN’T ACTUALLY LISTEN TO, BUT I’M PRETTY SURE THESE ALBUM TITLES ARE CORRECT

BY A LBERT MUDR I AN

DIE CHOKING IV | DCIV E

Grind isn’t dead. And it doesn’t need saving. But occasionally, it is nice to give the scene a swift kick in the jaw as a reminder of what it’s all about. IV does exactly that in under 20 minutes. Philly’s Die Choking write nuanced, dynamic songs stripped down to punk fundamentals and delivered with the speed and fury of wasps fleeing their flaming nest. It’s not a question of why don’t more grindcore bands play like this, but rather who else can pull it off? — SHA N E M E HLIN G

21

TOP 5 NEON METAL ALBUMS OF 2019

IDLE HANDS Mana | EISENWAL D

Many metal bands co-opt classic gothic rock in gimmicky fashion, but only a handful capture the nuance, and Portland’s Idle Hands obliterated the competition in 2019 with a debut album that immaculately balances melancholy, theatricality, aggression and sensitivity. Accentuated by a NWOBHM influence that gives the music just enough muscle, songs like “Jackie,” “Cosmic Overdrive” and “Give Me to the Night” attract the battle-vested hordes who want to headbang, but within minutes will have them dancing like it’s a Sisters of Mercy show in 1987. —ADRIEN BEGRAND DECIBEL :

45 : JA N 2020

1. Babymetal, Is it One Word Or Two,

Oh, Who Cares?

2. Tool, Did You Know That This Is Our

First Album In 13 Years?

3. Slipknot, Honestly, Does This Mask

Make Me Look Fat? 4. Steel Panther, Something About Pussy,

‘Cause LOLZ, Right?

5. Korn, Da boom na da noom na namena (20th Anniversary Legacy Edition)

TOP 5 DECIBEL HALL OF FAMES GREG PRATT IS SECRETLY DYING TO PITCH

BY A LBERT MUDR I AN 1. Propagandhi 2. Boysetsfire 3. Lagwagon 4. NOFX 5. Dashboard Confessional

TOP 5 METAL COVERS OF “OLD TOWN ROAD”

BY SH AN E MEHLING 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Lil Nas X – “Old Town Road” ft. Billy Ray Cyrus (Screamo Cover by Our Last Night) Lil Nas X - Old Town Road [DEATHCORE Cover by Vermicide Violence] Lil Nas X - Old Town Road (METALCORE/DJENT COVER) Old Town Road (Metal Cover) | Teaser Video OLD TOWN ROAD - lil nas x & Billy Ray Cyrus (BEST METAL COVER!!!)

20

CATTLE DECAPITATION

`

Death Atlas | M E TA L BLA D E

If you’re reading this magazine, my guess is some well-intentioned family member probably sent you the “death metal” version of activist Greta Thunberg’s fiery speech at the UN regarding climate justice. With all due respect to Thunberg (you go, girl), the most potent environmentalist metal statement this year came from Cattle Decapitation. Death Atlas continues the dirge-like progressive style of deathgrind they’ve honed since 2012. As always, vocalist Travis Ryan delivers screeches and howls that defy common conception of what the human larynx is capable of. — J O SE P H SC HA F E R

FUNEREAL PRESENCE

19

Achatius | THE A J N A O F F E N SIVE

Creativity? In my black metal? It’s more likely than you think. Though Funereal Presence mainman Bestial Devotion (also of Negative Plane) claims that Achatius’ inspirations come from decades past, this solo project’s second album comes off as a futuristic anachronism. Somehow classic, yet forward-looking, the metallic and raucous Achatius is very much its own monster. Weird as all can be, the album melded heavy metal classicisms with black metal’s atmosphere and a progressive mindset that only belongs to its creator. Achatius is one of the finest black metal releases of the year. — J O N RO SE N THA L

18

DARKTHRONE

TOP 5 ROBB FLYNN SOCIAL MEDIA MELTDOWNS OF 2019

BY NICK GR EEN

1. Rails against “sausage gobblers”

who consumed all of the hot dogs

at 4th of July barbecue 2. Angry diatribe against fan who posted

a photo revealing him to be an original

member of The Lovin’ Spoonful 3. Long-winded screed reminding last 12 Machine Head fans that the band

used “Red” in an album title years

before Taylor Swift did 4. Open letter to Pop Secret complaining

about volume of un-popped kernels

in bag 5. Slams critics of new album before

new album even comes out

TOP 5 MISSPELLINGS OF DECIBEL MAGAZINE METAL & BEER FEST

BY A LBERT MUDR I AN 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Decibel Beer & Metal Fest Philly Metal Fest 2020 Metal & Beerfest LA Decibal Fest Philly 2020 Metalfest 2020

17

Old Star | P E AC E VILLE

Fenriz and Ted have been on a serious roll since 2006’s The Cult Is Alive, when they ditched all black metal pretensions, embraced their inner hiking metal punks and decided to just fucking rock. The result is a seven-album run that might be unmatched in heavy metal history. Old Star is another triumph of both form and function, in which the Norwegian duo’s killer riff instincts, wry sense of humor and nods to obscure Euro gems equals maximum satisfaction. We already can’t wait for the next one. — J . BE N N E TT

HAUNT

If Icarus Could Fly | SHA D OW K IN GD O M

Haunt’s debut full-length, Burst Into Flame, placed 12th on last year’s list. No sophomore slump here. Even though If Icarus Could Fly lands slightly lower, it’s only because we now expect great things from Trevor Church’s one-man mission to revitalize trad metal. His roots may lay in the 40-year-old NWOBHM, but his deeply emotional approach elevates songs like “Run and Hide” and “Winds of Destiny” from mere riff-delivery systems into soaring, heartfelt anthems. He’s not afraid to reach for the stars, and his wings remain intact.

— J E F F TRE P P E L

16

OBSEQUIAE

The Palms of Sorrowed Kings | 2 0 BUC K SP I N

The kings of “castle metal” have returned, welcoming us to a rapturous realm of riffs and reverb-cloaked glory. On this record, Obsequiae yet again strike the perfect balance between technique and atmosphere, between rawness and clarity, between revelation and just plain fun. Palms showcases a heftier drum sound than in the past, which gives songs like “Lone Isle” and “Morrígan” an extra dose of power to propel the serene waves of guitars. Like if Sir Gawain and the Green Knight had a soundtrack. — J . A N D RE W ZA LUC K Y

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4 6 : DECIBEL

15

14

VENOM PRISON Samsara | PROSTHETIC

Venom Prison are the sinus-widening, cavity-clearing remedy to musical exhaustion and all your cynical metal maladies. Every element of their sound—from guitar tone and vocals to riffs and rhythmic rampages—is sicker than you deserve. Samsara’s pacing is brilliant: Its first half proves a thesis of ruination through suffocating density and a six-legged ass kicking, while later songs widen the spaces between blows and allow you to count and contemplate your wounds. As death metal closes in on 40 years, Samsara adds dozens more severed limbs to the fire. — DA N IE L LA K E

DEVIN TOWNSEND Empath | INSIDEOUT

You know how a lot of artists say they aren’t constrained by genre boundaries when describing a metalcore record or whatever? It’s actually true here. Devin Townsend contains multitudes, and Empath captures all of them. Strapping Young Lad’s raging industrial metal and the Devin Townsend Project’s experiments with pop and New Age were stops along the way, but Empath feels like the destination. It’s more akin to a symphony or a musical than a rock album. A stunning encapsulation of his work to date, and a tantalizing look at the future. —JEF F TREPPEL

13

TOP 5 TEXT AUTOCORRECTS THAT LOOK LIKE TOOL SONGS

BY SH AN E MEHLING 1. Palate Celanser 2. exterioir/ 3. Fro Mmom 4. 3o’clokc 5. People Le Pew

TOP 5 BEERS OF 2019

BY CHR IS DODGE 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Stadsbrouwerij Eindhoven, Till Death Do Us Burn Imperial Stout The Veil Brewing Co, Broz Night Out Double IPA Moonraker Brewing, Dr. Chill IPA Parleaux Beer Lab, Bearded Brothers Norwegian Farmhouse Ale Aslin Barrel Project, Fenwick Bourbon and Rye Double Barrel-Aged Imperial Stout

MIZMOR

Cairn | GIL EAD MEDIA

Multi-instrumentalist A.L.N. may have ended up in the desert on his third Mizmor LP, but slapping on a pair of snakeskins and conjuring the boisterous spirit of Kyuss were the furthest things from his mind. No, Cairn’s desert is a cold wasteland of metaphysical torments, where the calming voice of God is forever silenced by a furious, yet deeply pensive compound of drone, doom and black metal. It all comes to a head on 17-minute stunner “The Narrowing Way,” whose closing riff resets A.L.N.’s spiritual journey with the violent grace of a battering ram. —M ATT SOL IS

TOP 5 CANCELLATIONS OF 2019

BY A LBERT MUDR I AN

12

MAYHEM

Daemon | CENTURY MEDIA

Five years in the making—after a volley of multi-era live albums—Mayhem return to black metal’s bleached and gnarled throne with Daemon. The legends didn’t advance on Esoteric Warfare, but instead peeled back layers of wormeaten skin to reveal bejeweled and haunted bone. By carving to the center of it all, Mayhem have crafted their most important album since De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. Tracks like “Of Worms and Ruins,” “Worthless Abominations Destroyed” and “The Dying False King” are baptized in the blood of disbelievers and the witless alike. —CHRIS DICK

OF HELL 11 FULL Weeping Choir |

REL APSE

Grind and noise are like glass-chunky peanut butter and hemlock jelly—each cleanses, scours and prepares the palate perfectly for the other. Full of Hell were exciting even from their earliest and ugliest ideas, but those collaborations with Merzbow and the Body were revelatory, and the band’s two records since have been harrowing rifts in reality. Has it really been two years since Trumpeting Ecstasy? This year’s Weeping Choir is yet another 25 acidic minutes eating away at the fabric of your sanity. —DANIEL L AKE DECIBEL :

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1. My cable 2. Last Call with Carson Daly 3. Easter (thanks be to the Darkness) 4. Morrissey 5. Office Revolver subscription

TOP 5 TWEETS OF 2019

BY DRUMMER TOMMY LEE

BY SH AN E MEHLING 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

AUG. 6: My lovely wife just stuck her stinky-ass feet in my face [PUKING EMOJI] JULY 14: Somebody said it’s national naked day.... sooooo...Tommy Lee feat Lil' Kim, Fred Durst Get Naked (Offical Music Video) [LINK TO “GET NAKED” BY METHODS OF MAYHEM] AUG. 8: Ummm excuse me I have to go take a trump!!! [POOP EMOJI] OCT. 16: Can we start a new trend?

How bout people talk to each other......

FUCK TEXTING AUG. 9: Dang! It’s time! Gottta take another trump [POOP EMOJI]

TOP 5 ALBUMS OF 30 YEARS AGO

BY A LBERT MUDR I AN 1. Sepultura, Beneath the Remains 2. Repulsion, Horrified 3. Morbid Angel, Altars of Madness 4. Carcass, Symphonies of Sickness 5. Terrorizer, World Downfall

10

FALSE

TOP 5 VINYL RELEASES OF 2019

Portent | G ILE A D M E D IA

False have a hair-trigger for feel. They’ll play passages of gnawing melancholy and poignancy before shifting up a gear with zero warning, stepping on the detonator to unleash awesome eruptions of second-wave black metal magma with a conviction and freewheeling imagination that doesn’t so much extend the genre’s canvas as tear right through it. Portent is a record about grief, and it surveys every fathom of that darkness, summoning its debilitating presence onto tape, indulging it, before ultimately vanquishing it with exhilarating energy. — J O N ATHA N HO RSLE Y

BY SH AN E MEHLING 1. Disgusted Geist/Medicine Noose, Split 2. Luggage, Shift 3. Vessel of Iniquity, Void of Infinite Horror 4. Hammerhands, Model Citizen 5. Endorphins Lost, Seclusions

SACRED REICH

9

Awakening | M E TA L BLA D E

Two criticisms have followed the release of Sacred Reich’s comeback album.

First, that Awakening’s eight songs aren’t as balls-to-the-wall thrash as small-c classics Ignorance and The American Way. Second, that they should have delivered more than 32 minutes of material after a 23-year break. Given the album’s Top 10 placement, you can imagine which one of these we’re down with. Indeed, a robust melodic sense permeates barn burners like “Divide & Conquer,” “Manifest Reality” and the title track, but Awakening, as a whole, is an undeniable earworm elevated by a classic rock sensibility injected into classy and mature old-school thrash. — K E VIN STE WA RT- PA N KO

8

SPIRIT ADRIFT

TOP 5 METAL REACTION VIDEOS OF 2019

Divided by Darkness | 2 0 BUC K SP IN It’s no surprise that Nate Garrett turned in one of the best albums of 2019, but the manner in which he did so may have caught some Spirit Adrift fans off guard.

On Divided by Darkness, Garrett dialed back the monolithic doom, tightened up the arrangements and let his love for trad metal shine through. Still heavy as hell, there’s more melody, guitar harmonies and brisk tempos driving Spirit Adrift’s (arguably) best effort to date. — A D E M TE P E D E LE N

BY A LBERT MUDR I AN 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Nikki Reacts to BLACK METAL Black American Reacts to Nikki’s Reaction to BLACK METAL Vocal Coach Reacts to Black American’s Reaction to Nikki’s Reaction to BLACK METAL Girlfriend Reacts to Vocal Coach’s Reaction to Black American’s Reaction to Nikki’s Reaction to BLACK METAL Nikki Reacts to Girlfriend’s Reaction to Vocal Coach’s Reaction to Black American’s Reaction to Nikki’s Reaction to BLACK METAL

TOP 5 ALBUMS OF 2019 IN ANAGRAM FORM

BY NICK GR EEN 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Adlib Connotation Aligning Auto Greet A Creep Corpsmen Try Mom lot? dB!

7

BLUT AUS NORD

6

Hallucinogen | D E BE M UR M O RTI P RO D UCTIO N S I’m honestly not one for bands that try to take you on a “sonic journey”; most of the time, it just comes off as jumbled at best, and at worst like a pretentious fucking mess. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, with Hallucinogen being a pretty strong one. Blut aus Nord are consistently dynamic without feeling like there’s some sort of strenuous effort behind their work. This album is organically hypnotic and forward-thinking without a trace of the shit PR firms are shilling today. — N E ILL JA M E SO N

POSSESSED

Revelations of Oblivion | N UC LE A R BLA ST The triumphant return of Possessed on record after 32 years was the kind of comeback that ’80s metal nerds craved, despite deep pessimism. With a foursome of talented young bucks behind him, though, Jeff Beccera leads the Bay Area pioneers with a rippingly brilliant, tourniquet-tight thrash/death hybrid that not only honors the legacy of Seven Churches, but expands upon it. Revelations of Oblivion is so assured, so ferocious, that one can only wish there’s more new music on the horizon. — A D RIE N BE G RA N D

JA N 2020 :

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D E C I B E L : J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 0 : 49

5 TOMB MOLD

Planetary Clairvoyance

T

20 BUCK SPIN

here is no way anything like this has happened before. A band puts out their debut, then a year later the sophomore LP slips into Decibel’s Top 20, and just one year after that, their third full-length ends up as Decibel’s fifthbest record of 2019. ¶ “At some point, the well will run dry,” Tomb Mold guitarist Derrick Vella says of the staggering output that has led to their death metal insta-classic Planetary Clairvoyance. “But before this record, I made a comment to someone that I felt like I’m finally hitting my stride writing songs.”

Which, again, he does a lot.

Started as a duo by Vella and drummer/vocalist Max Klebanoff in 2015 (and ballooning up to a fourpiece with guitarist Payson Power and bassist Steve Musgrave in 2018),

the Torontonians aren’t road warriors, choosing to spend most of their time “writing and writing and writing.”

“We always feel motivated to crank stuff out,” Vella says. “But JA N 2020 :

then we still always feel under the gun.”

Yes, in a blow to perfectionists everywhere, some of these songs were practiced as a full band for just a couple weeks before the studio.

“If I could find you rehearsal recordings, you’d be like, ‘Oh, these sound awful,’” he admits. “I remember halfway through the recording thinking, ‘I don’t know if this is good.’ But by the end I felt much better.”

He clearly came to his senses, as the album’s addicting brutality delivers almost everything that rules in death metal, best described by Vella himself: “Thoughtful twisting and turning technical riffs met with certain pummeling sections of something more ignorant. We’ll bust out these nice passages and then hit you with some crazy dum-dum riff. But just as much thought was put into those riffs as the smart guy riffs.”

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So, with Planetary Clairvoyance further elevating Tomb Mold— and the healthy renaissance of their genre placing them on an incredible trajectory towards bigger things—next year could be the band’s breakout. But instead, they plan to take a break.

“If we wanted to grab the bull by the horns right now, we could, but it’s not what we want,” Vella says, indicating plans to end their streak by not releasing another fulllength in 2020. “It’s not the reason we started the band. Touring’s cool, but I don’t want to tour half the year.

I’m not built for that. And I don’t ever want to be in a position where my bandmates become my coworkers.

The only reason I’m in this band is because Max asked me to do it. And if he hadn’t asked, I would just be enjoying this resurgence of death metal. Instead, now I get to be a part of it.” — SHA N E M E HLIN G PHOTO BY JAKE BALLAH

4 T

hat Crypt Sermon made this year’s Top 40 with sophomore outing The Ruins of Fading Light is no surprise.

The Philadelphia epic doom revivalists have made the cut once before. Their debut album, Out of the Garden, landed at #31 upon release in 2015—but what a difference four years makes. ¶ Guitarist Steve Jansson admits the band felt some pressure to write a worthy follow-up in the wake of their debut album’s success, but remarks that the Crypt Sermon team hold themselves to high songwriting standards for the sake of the music itself.

“I always try to maintain the mindset of not really having any expectations as far as how anything this band does is going to be received or what the future holds for us,” Jansson emails. “Don’t get me wrong: I certainly want people to like what we do and to feel the same way I felt when hearing all of my favorite bands and artists. But in the end, we just really want to make the absolute best music we can.”

PHOTO BY SCOTT KINKADE

Jansson and his bandmates held themselves to such a high standard that they scrapped nearly a half hour of music while writing. “We had about a half of a record written that we scrapped because it just didn’t feel right,” he explains.

“Some of the songs were ‘fine,’ but only that. Nothing felt right when we played it, and the process of writing was starting to feel a bit forced. Alas, we trashed everything DECIBEL :

CRYPT SERMON The Ruins of Fading Light DA RK D E SC E N T

we had and gave ourselves some time to breathe before approaching yet another blank canvas, [then] got into gear.”

The arduous journey that Crypt Sermon underwent while writing shows in the battle-hardened mettle of the ferocious tunes. Extended cuts “The Snake Handler” and “Christ Is Dead” exhibit remarkable range while packing in flourishes of extreme metal that their peers and influences have not explored.

The Ruins of Fading Light gallops and crushes with all the righteous fury of the Knights Templar that adorn its cover, and takes center stage in many of its songs. When

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Reverend Brooks Wilson wails, “For every chink in our armor, there is a notch on our hilt,” in opener “The Ninth Templar (Black Candle Flame),” he might as well be singing about himself, Jansson and fellow guitarist James Lipczynski, drummer Enrique Sagarnaga and bassist Frank Chin.

According to Jansson, he and his cohorts will take their crusade to Europe in 2020, but not before offering some thanks to Decibel: “We definitely would like to thank you! You guys have been extremely supportive of us since day one, and I think we owe a lot of what has happened for us to you guys.” — J O SE P H SC H A F ER

3 GATECREEPER Deserted

E

REL APSE

arlier this year, Gatecreeper vocalist Chase Mason began sneaking the phrase “stadium death metal” into interviews. Not to signal a sharp turn toward fashionable haircuts and radio rock, but rather to encapsulate the freshly honed sonic serrations and aspirational mindset of the Arizona quintet heading into their sophomore full-length. ¶ “As a concept, it has nothing to do with changing the Gatecreeper sound—at all,” Mason tells Decibel. “Honestly, there’s nothing cryptic about this band. Nothing progressive. Never wanted to be yet another HM-2 pedal tribute act, but we’re also not trying to be super original in any sense other than taking tiny pieces of all these influences we wear on our sleeves and creating this new kind of Frankenstein monster out of ’em. On Deserted, that

meant magnifying certain elements of our sound, drawing a little more melody to the surface, putting a little more focus on catchier parts.

“Of course, I can say ‘stadium death metal’ all day,” he adds, “but JA N 2020 :

if that’s not what people hear, those words hold no weight.”

Mason need not have worried— the phrase turned out to be prophetic. The reception for Deserted might as well have been a stadium-sized chorus of metalheads roaring, It’s alive! The dark, menacingly beautiful soul quickened via the headturning, scene-rumbling 2016 debut Sonoran Depravation remains fully intact, but—from the Finnish death metal vibe of “Everlasting” to the intentional Crowbar homage woven into “Boiled Over” to the Amon Amarth swagger on “From the Ashes” to the Chaos A.D.-esque slugfest riffing of “In Chains” to the myriad sly, increasingly refined core reimaginings of classic Entombed and Obituary—the triumphant Deserted finds Gatecreeper trawling new cemeteries for delightfully nasty upgrades.

Part of this savvy cultivation and confidence can no doubt be attributed to the success of Sonoran—which, Mason notes, did

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“better than we expected, better than Relapse expected, better than anybody expected”—as well as soaking up inspiration amidst the subsequent touring with a diverse array of extremely accomplished bands, including Cannibal Corpse, Nails and Pallbearer. And part of it is simply the fact that Gatecreeper are a coalition of forward-thinking, hard-working, self-actualizing motherfuckers who prefer “validation” over “humbling.”

“It’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine when people project false humility,” Mason says. “I don’t think it’s humbling to land on a respected list like this one or to sell out a show. A truly humbling experience would be if nobody came to your show or everyone hated your album. Arrogance is looked down on for good reason, but I personally wouldn’t waste my time making something that I didn’t think was cool. So, the fact that other people like it? That’s great. I love it.”

— SHAW N M AC O M BE R

PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER BARR

2 A

s Kristin Hayter has toured the world promoting Lingua Ignota’s breathtaking second album, Caligula, she has been struck by not just the intensity, but the diversity of reactions to an admittedly personal piece of music. “I had a couple people with public histories of abusive behavior write to me and tell me that the record made them feel afraid, threatened,” Hayter says from Europe. “I’ve heard from more than a few people that it makes them horny. I’ve had people share stories of the terrible things they’ve been through, and that Caligula is the only thing they’ve heard that has shaken them out of themselves.

I’ve heard people say it’s the worst thing they’ve ever heard.

I’ve had people think I wrote it specifically for them. I’ve had people burst into tears before they can even start talking about it.”

The intensity of the reactions is a big reason why Caligula—Lingua Ignota’s second record—is Decibel’s second favorite album of the year.

Caligula is many things: a means for Hayter to process her experiences as a victim of domestic violence; a borderless record that borrows as much from liturgical music as it does from

metal; and a wild experiment that somehow works. It is also, even if indirectly, a massive pushback against some of metal’s lingering problems: sexism and hate.

“I think that there are different layers of meaning that people can read into it, depending on their willingness to engage,” Hayter posits.

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LINGUA IGNOTA Caligula P RO FO UN D LO RE

“There’s a listener who is interested in how it sounds, and the content being brazen in its delivery, and doesn’t go deeper than that. There are people who want to engage with the pain, who want to feel what the record feels, and the music is just a vehicle for that. There are a whole bunch of ways to listen to it that go beyond the personal experience I formed it to frame.”

Hayter—whose earliest performances were inside classrooms at Brown University—says the process of writing and now performing Caligula has been cathartic, and helped her grow as a musician. “This record came from a very painful and dark place, from loneliness,” she says. “It was a processing of some experiences I did not talk about

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otherwise. I think I learned that I am capable; I learned to respect myself somewhat, as an artist, musician and person.”

Hayter is already hard at work on music to follow Caligula—a phase she calls “world-building.” She says whatever follows will continue to build upon relationships she has formed with artists like Full of Hell and the Body. “I don’t want the next one to sound anything like Caligula, but I don’t know what that means yet,” she admits. “There is so much music already written or in my head that just needs to be put on paper. I also want to move my practice back into a more interdisciplinary zone, to not just do music, but incorporate all the other things in art I love as well.” — J USTIN M . N O RTO N

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Before it seized the throne as Decibel’s 2019 Album of the Year, even before Blood Incantation (re)entered World Famous Studios on Friday, June 21 to record the thing with studio engineer Peter deBoer, Hidden History of the Human Race was already the most talked about underground death metal release of 2019. ¶ We had all read that 100-word blurb in Decibel #172 (now sold-out), when the album’s name, intentions and arrival were all revealed. Then, in the studio report a few months later, when Blood Incantation guitarist/vocalist Paul Riedl promised dB readers that he and his bandmates were “determined to make a genuine and distinctive album of monumental and epic psychedelic/brutal/progressive/technical/ambient/funeral death metal like no other,” even the band’s most devout haters knew in their cold, shriveled hearts that the Denver-based ancient astronaut death-prog theorists were going to do exactly that.

On September 19, when the album’s Bruce Pennington artwork and BI’s new slime-green logo were simultaneously unveiled, the band with the most memes in underground death metal broke its own record. When HHOTHR accidentally leaked October 4, less than two months before its official release (early-bird fans were briefly able to download the album instantly from Bandcamp after preordering it), the whole damn internet almost crashed. Well, maybe not quite the whole internet, but on the same day, Dark Descent’s website did crash from the sheer volume of preorders that came flooding in.

All things considered, combined with the likelihood that death metal currently infects more fans worldwide than ever before, this 5 6 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 19 : D E C I B E L

places Hidden History of the Human Race high in the running for most talked about underground death metal album of all time. But what’s truly exciting about all of the global buzz surrounding Blood Incantation and their sophomore album only reveals itself after actually listening to it.

Because Blood Incantation are more than the most memed-about band in the underground; they’re more than the band with the sickest merch, the coolest promo pics, the most nostalgic aesthetics, the best interview answers. Even their in-depth, multi-release-spanning, uniquely spiritual lyrical themes serve only as an augmentation of what really separates this band from the rest of contemporary death metal. Because what truly separates Blood Incantation from JA N 2020 :

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their peers is something that cannot be manufactured. It is their commitment to their art. When it comes to total dedication and an unrelenting creativity that pervades everything from the naming of each guitar solo to subverting the stamp of Century Media—their worldwide label outside of North America—on their back of their new album to read “Century Death,” no other band even comes close to comparing.

“We are always trying to push ourselves and the music,” Riedl writes on his way home from performing at Copenhagen’s Kill-Town Death Fest. Although it wasn’t Blood Incantation that played KTDF. Abysmal Dimensions did.

This is important to point out because it illustrates the tight-knit network of diehard death metallers that Riedl belongs to. Besides Riedl on guitars and vocals, Abysmal Dimensions includes Eli Wendler on drums (he also plays in Spectral Voice with Riedl), Isaac Faulk (Blood Incantation’s drummer) on guitar and Paul’s partner Erika Osterhout (she fronts Chthonic Deity, for whom Riedl also plays guitar) on bass.

So, when Riedl says, “We’ve never stopped rehearsing regularly and spent a lot of time smelting our chops on the road the last three years, so our playing in general continues to grow organically,” he’s practically giving away the secret to his band’s success. Because every moment of mind-expanding/bending sonic astral necrosis on Hidden History of the Human Race testifies to both the intensity and the rewards of Blood Incantation’s hard work and commitment.

“I WOULD EVEN SAY THAT IN WRITING, WE ARE ALMOST MORE INFLUENCED BY BLOOD INCANTATION THAN ANY OTHER BAND. IT HAS BECOME AN ENTITY OF ITS OWN, WHICH REQUIRES LESS SCULPTING.”

—I S A A C FA U L K

“When we play certain parts of certain songs,

we can all feel a very intense presence, for lack of a better description,” Riedl says, attempting to explain what is, essentially, the sublime. “At times it’s as if we are being guided to this music; even when we don’t know how to play it, we can so clearly hear how and where the next riff is supposed to go. So, we just get super into it, really try to explore it and observe it, learn from it and let it flow.”

A band like Blood Incantation doesn’t simply fall from the sky, yet the cosmology of their universe—not to mention its ongoing, tireless expansion—appears something like, to quote the lyrics of Hidden History of the Human Race’s final track, “a mosaic of endless parallel worlds and synchronistic events perceived by Man as aimless Chaos.”

“Blood Incantation is ultimately a celebration (and a continual pursuit) of the very things 5 8 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 19 : D E C I B E L

in life which interest me the most,” writes Riedl. He lists them as “passion, imagination, creativity, philosophy, etc. It is the same for my bandmates, which is why we gravitated to each other to make this band what it is today.”

While living in Salem, OR, Riedl first started playing in metal bands as a teenager in 2002.

“I met Nate Myers [Mania, Predatory Light], Kyle Watson [Merkstave, Leech], Brandon Hill [Idle Hands]—and even an 11-year-old M.S.W. [Hell]! We just started playing terrible music and trying to make it happen.” For seven years, Riedl says he and those heavy hitters who nowadays dominate the PNW corner of the globe played “in all of [their] first bands together,” and went on “all of [their] first tours together.” These were bands like Mania, Leech, Merkstave, Hell, Ancestortooth, Vault Dweller, Elu of the Nine; bands whose tapes are impossible to obtain these days, whether for a reasonable price or not.

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Riedl enjoyed cult success while living “in a crazy old house together that had shows in the basement, a screen printing setup, a zine library, a tape distro” in the Pacific Northwest, but, according to the wielder of the decapitated obelisk, “you can only live in a small town for so long before the desire to get out of there either takes over or you simply give up.”

After meeting them on tour and becoming friends (yet still “basically on a whim”), Riedl says, “I ended up moving to Colorado to join [black metal band Velnias] in August 2011, and met both Jeff [Barrett, Blood Incantation bassist] and Isaac; Jeff moved to Colorado at the same time in order to join the same band, so we have literally been jamming together since the day we met. Isaac and I met at a Velnias/Stoic Dissention show around then and started playing funeral doom as Abysmal Dimensions in late 2011. We started Blood Incantation as soon as I realized what a great drummer he is.”

Faulk remembers the show, too. Back then, Riedl didn’t know Faulk even played the drums.

Still, Riedl had a use for him. Faulk remembers that Riedl “hit [him] up shortly after the show” they played together in 2011, and asked him “to play in a funeral doom band.” Faulk agreed, and still plays guitar in Abysmal Dimensions.

“Then, before one of our jams I showed [Riedl] a recording of my other band, Centimani, in which I played drums,” Faulk recalls. “He was instantly surprised that I played drums and told me of his longtime idea of starting a death metal band. This started as just Paul and I were working on some riffs he had, trying to play in a style of old bands, but with our shared interests in doom, black metal and classic heavy metal.

I remember that Paul already had the whole concept of the band worked out; we talked for hours about the ideas behind the band. A lot of times, our jams would just involve imbibing large amounts of cannabis and talking about conspiracies. Both of us had backgrounds in the metaphysical and spiritual realms, and we started to see Blood Incantation as a vehicle for those ideas.”

Enter Riedl’s companion in hidden species annihilation, guitarist Morris Kolontyrsky. Before Riedl recruited him, the guitarist struggled for years throughout high school and into college to find a solid lineup with which to play some metal.

“No one was committed to the genre. It was impossible to find a proper lineup, so I resorted to joining other bands,” remembers the guitarist. Kolontyrsky says that by the time he was about to graduate from CU Boulder—which, he makes a point of mentioning, was “frat bro party central”—he’d already gone on “five brutal tours that really set [him] straight in terms of what to expect from the road.” This was with a noisy post-punk band “that would eventually become Homebody,” who are still active, and put out an LP early 2019.

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Kolontyrsky goes on to discuss how “around this same time in 2012,” he went to a party at the house of his friend and bandmate in the black metal band Stillborn Fawn.

“I noticed a crew of dudes in leather jackets, so naturally, because I was also wearing a leather jacket, we gravitated towards one another,” says Kolontyrsky. “One of those guys was Paul. He and I had met once before totally randomly at a pizza shop that he was working at in Boulder, probably a year prior to this party. It was a short-lived meeting, but in the two seconds he had free before having to serve someone, he wrote down something like six band names—all of which were past, active and future ideas for bands—on a napkin and handed it to me. One of those was Blood Incantation; Spectral Voice was also on there. Fast forward a year later, and here we are at this party talking about Death, guitar harmonies and jamming. After the party, Paul was resolute on introducing me to Isaac and getting the ball rolling on jamming.” In the winter of 2012, Kolontyrsky and Riedl went to a show to see Faulk’s band, Stoic Dissention, open for Samothrace and Primitive Man. “Next time the three of us met,” according to Kolontyrsky, “we were in the same room jamming ‘Mephitic Effluvia’ and working on the songs that would become the Interdimensional Extinction EP.”

The Interdimensional Extinction EP marks a major turning point for Blood Incantation. In varying forms, three of the four extinction events that make up that breakthrough EP came out the year before on a red promotional cassette called Astral Spells. The cover of Astral Spells features Blood Incantation’s logo, drawn by Riedl himself and still used by the band today, slanted and running corner-to-corner, exactly like the layout for Regurgitation of Blood, Demilich’s demo tape from 1991. The first two songs on Astral Spells are more or less proper recordings, with fretless bass work sent in from Blood Incantation’s antipodean ally Damon Good of Mournful Congregation. The first of these two, “Hovering Lifeless,” made it onto the EP; the second, “Mephitic Effluvia,” makes up Blood Incantation’s side of the Spectral Voice split 7-inch. The two tracks on the B-side of Astral Spells are live, bass-less, rehearsal recordings. These had more fully-realized counterparts that (along with “Subterranean Aeon,” another song Blood Incantation have been playing since their inception) made it onto the Interdimensional Extinction EP, complete with zero-gravity low-end provided by Good.

“While I personally think the playing [on Interdimensional Extinction] sounds like we are about to fall apart at any moment, the music itself was attempting a brutal intricacy that I still appreciate,” Riedl acknowledges.

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All of this bears mentioning because it’s important to understand that Blood Incantation have taken no shortcuts, nor have they enjoyed any overnight success.

In 2013, they released two rehearsal demo tapes and, again, three of the four songs from Interdimensional Extinction are on them. The second of those two tapes, like Interdimensional Extinction and HHOTHR, uses for its cover a Bruce Pennington painting that looks like a Seagraveesque half-alien, half-gothic landscape. Since the beginning, these interstellar slayers have concentrated on a very precise path with a focus that balances their inspiration as well as their ambition. By taking direction from the genre’s history—by, indeed, striving to emulate that history in various ways—they have also simultaneously and undeniably given death metal new life and a brighter future.

In a more practical sense, those demo tapes represent a major key in Blood Incantation’s rise to interstellar space lords because those tapes ended up in the hands of Matt Calvert, owner of Dark Descent Records.

“I used to see Paul and the other guys at shows,” remembers Calvert. “I had talked to them a few times when they were playing with other bands. On a couple occasions, Paul would look for me and hand me demos that he wanted me to listen to. He was always very enthusiastic.”

After saving money working a second job, Calvert founded Dark Descent in 2010. In a few short years, thanks to Calvert’s taste, timing and practical, hardworking tactics, Dark Descent became a label that bands dreamed of getting on.

“I get a lot of demos, so sometimes it would take me a little bit to get through things,” Calvert explains. “I do remember someone messaging me and telling me I really should hear it.”

Whoever that person was, they helped to usher in the inevitable.

Late in the summer of 2015, Dark Descent released the Interdimensional Extinction EP, Blood Incantation’s first release with large-scale distribution. “We’ve had success with other bands in the past, but this was a new level for us,” Calvert says matter-of-factly. The EP came out on cassette, CD and 12-inch LP vinyl with an etching of the cover on side B: the now iconic Bruce Pennington painting of a planet belted with rings composed of human bones and skulls.

Those early days of Blood Incantation, for all

of the members’ involvement in other no-lessactive underground metal bands, seem like a spinning barrage of human bones and holloweyed skulls all revolving around a much heavier object. In this case, the heavier object happens to be the passion for underground metal shared by each member of that larger collective. Even now, besides playing in Blood Incantation, JA N 2020 :

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Riedl has at least three other fully active bands. Faulk has at least three as well, and Kolontyrsky probably more than that. Despite all of that extracurricular activity, when bassist Jeff Barrett joined in 2015, something happened. It was like Blood Incantation assumed its true form.

“Jeff is just so sick; that’s why we’re in so many bands together,” Riedl told Decibel back in 2016, during an interview concerning their debut album, Starspawn. The same interview in which he effused, “Any time a member has come into the constellation, it is because our mutual orbits synchronized due [to] our previous harmonic orientations, so by the time you’ve joined our band, you are our band, and you are not leaving. Isaac, Morris, Jeff and myself are Blood Incantation—[we are] not a band which contains us as individuals, but rather our collective energy consolidated into a conscious force most common people would identify as musical. The only change has been Jeff, as we did not have a bassist until he came from [Spectral Voice] into BI before our first tour.”

With the advent of Starspawn in August 2016 (and subsequent frequent touring), the world came to know Blood Incantation, a proper quartet that shredded extradimensional death metal and mumble deadpan about our ancient alien enslavers in between songs—and, most importantly, hit harder live than an asteroid.

“On Starspawn, I felt like we had [our sound] pretty dialed-in, and the songwriting had expanded to accommodate the more epic structures and built upon what we had started with the EP,” reflects Riedl. “There is always room for improvement, however, and the songs naturally became tighter and more impactful over time; we self-released the Live Vitrification EP in 2018 to document these developments. While I think Starspawn is a great record, part of its charm is the hurried and relatively inexpensive nature of the recording; we did all of the tracking in two days, mixed for two days and mastered on the fifth day. Which, really, is more than enough time to make a sick record. But as you know, there are always things you wish you could have done differently in retrospect.”

“Back when we first started, there was no pressure, no obligations, and no one knew or cared what we would do next,” Faulk writes from the tour bus, somewhere between Sacramento and Portland. “However, what we lost in that innocent creativity we now gain in a distinct trajectory for the band. There is a ‘Blood Incantation sound,’ if you will. There is a unifying thread that brings all of it together, even from those early days. I would even say that in writing, we are almost more influenced

by Blood Incantation than any other band. It has become an entity of its own, which requires less sculpting.”

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DECIBEL : JANUARY 2020 : 61

At the time of this writing, Blood Incantation

are deep into yet another North American tour.

After crushing 20 American cities with Morbid Angel, Immolation, Cannibal Corpse and Bay Area contemporaries Necrot on the Decibel Tour earlier this year, Denver’s premier necrostronomers are once again on the road with god-tier godkillers Immolation.

Riedl, who admits he “would never have thought in a million lifetimes that [he would] be on a tour with Morbid Angel,” says he still takes “huge inspiration” from some of those first death metal bands he grew up worshipping.

“The fact that some of these guys have been jamming the same riffs for 30 years and still keep it fun and are genuinely interested in their music and the people who are into it is incredible,” he enthuses. “Immolation are the chillest dudes ever; it is really amazing to hang out and play with them every day. They are so

touring for decades. They are a DIY band, like we have always been, so it’s great to see these guys get to the venue each day and get right down to business, taking care of everything themselves, from setting up and selling their merch [to] loading in and out each show, and then killing it every night. I have lots of respect for guys like this that can do it all and still deliver the goods each night while still remaining humble, grounded and respectful. They go with the flow and know how to roll with whatever situation is thrown at them, which is super important, especially when you are touring in the U.S.” Blood Incantation’s ability to “roll with whatever” may have something to do with their rider.

“When we were advancing the shows for this tour and asked for their rider,” Dolan recalls, “we noticed they had no alcohol on their rider, but did have weed on their rider for states that it was legal. This was brilliant, and since they live in a state where recreational marijuana is legal, it made perfect sense!”

“WE NOTICED THEY HAD NO ALCOHOL ON THEIR RIDER, DER BUT DID HAVE WEED ON THEIR RI FOR STATES THAT IT WAS LEGAL.A”T I O N OL —ROSS DOLAN, IMM

low-key and just fun guys to be around. They are very keen on keeping things mellow and rolling with the punches, and it has been good to have them around during a few of the hiccups we’ve encountered so far—they always have a positive, solution-oriented mindset, which I really appreciate. They have been able to endure the tides of time and trend by staying focused, taking care of themselves and always looking at the bigger picture. The shows have been great and it’s been awesome to get to see them more, as the Decibel Tour was nearly over by the time they came onboard last March. We are teaching them about yerba mate and telling them to play louder!”

“We love the guys [in Blood Incantation],” says Immolation’s bassist/vocalist Ross Dolan.

“We’ve had more time to hang out with them and get to know them better as people. They are all super intelligent guys, and we have lots to talk about.”

Dolan, who calls Hidden History of the Human Race “the perfect follow-up to Starspawn,” goes on to say that not only are Blood Incantation a great group of dudes, “They are all pro and really have their act together, like a band that has been 6 2 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 19 : D E C I B E L

“In 2012, I turned 25, did two European nightliner tours and toured the States with Mournful Congregation,” Riedl remembers. “I had finally recorded in a real studio and put out a real full-length album. I literally thought my music life had peaked and 500 copies of anything was too many. If you had told me then what the last five years would be like, I would have called you crazier than the sort of people I follow on Instagram.”

Anyone who has been following closely since the demo days can tell you that Blood Incantation’s rise to deathstardom was by no means meteoric, and more of a steady upwards trajectory. At least up until the release of Starspawn, at which point the band’s popularity reached supernova-level brightness. But Blood Incantation kept their hands steady on the controls. While everyone else in the world was losing their heads over Starspawn, the men behind it were watching, calculating and making decisions for the future. Because we once again proved ourselves to be simple-minded JA N 2020 :

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and selfish creatures when given a precious gift.

The precious gift was limited, so we cheated and took advantage of each other over it. Blood Incantation saw this and knew something had to be done.

Thus, it was not without careful consideration that for territories outside North America, Blood Incantation made the leap to a larger label, Century Media. According to Riedl, it was simply a necessity.

“We have always wanted to take things as far as they can go while retaining our artistic integrity and aesthetic style,” he says. “We are resolutely an underground band, and we simply want our music to be available to the people who are interested in a way that is consistent with our autonomy. Self-publishing our music and regionally licensing it to a larger label (while still working with our independent label) allows us complete artistic control of our band while still expanding our reach, which is crucial. Starspawn has been consistently selling out every pressing since its release, with no signs of slowing. Nonetheless, people regularly write to us about how hard or expensive it is for them to get the record in many parts of the world. This happens to a lot of bands and releases, actually, but underground labels generally cannot afford to keep up with never-ending demand for one item without compromising their attention to other artists and releases on their roster, which is not fair to anyone involved. With major label backing, our music will be distributed in greater quantities and more regions than ever before.

“Back in the ’80s, an underground record like Altars of Madness was selling 20,000 copies,” he continues. “By 1993, the initial pressing of The End Complete [sold] 60,000 copies. But these days, people cry ‘sellout!’ or ‘trend!’ if your record sells 5,000 copies. In the meantime, everybody’s still flipping our shirts and records, the label websites are still shutting down during preorders, our shit is literally being bootlegged all over the world—just the whole thing, man! So, ratifying these consistent problems with distribution and availability, primarily due to demand, was very important to us when we started talking with larger labels. Additionally, we retain 100 percent of the rights to our masters and publishing, and I am still able to take care of our artwork and layouts in-house, both of which is rare for most international deals on major labels. Many labels have approached us over the years, but they all had no appreciation for our artistic process and were simply looking to make a quick buck off the Starspawn hype, mostly wanting to mold us into a seven-album soulless corporate monster. Century Media have worked with Dark Descent in the past and were keen on accommodating our many eccentric requests regarding production, publishing, presentation, etc.”

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To prepare for recording Hidden History of the

Human Race, Blood Incantation first, according to Barrett, “played the album together at least once every day for over three weeks straight in June.”

The bassist continues: “It was like going on tour, but not leaving home.” This way, they were able to get tour-tight on the new material without dealing with any of the other demanding aspects of the road. Of course, plenty of bands have probably approached recording an album in a similar fashion, but according to Barrett, that’s not all Blood Incantation did to prepare themselves for recording Decibel’s album of the year.

“The day before the recording session started, we went and did a sensory deprivation float tank as a group.” he reveals. “That was an excellent way to start the intense two weeks in the studio.” The band went to a float tank center that has four separate soundproof rooms, each containing a 9-by-9 tank filled with Epsom salt water. Barrett explains how floating in that darkness “calmed [him] mentally” and helped him to “focus on the session ahead.” He admits that he wishes he “could have floated every day” before recording.

No doubt this ritual had an effect on all of the members. Kolontyrsky describes the material on HHOTHR as “more demanding,” but insists that’s

because he and his bandmates “have all grown both as individual players and as a unit,” and “not because [they] deliberately wanted to be more ‘tech.’”

But the fact remains: Hidden History, as Riedl promised it would be, is “altogether faster, more aggressive, more progressive and more extreme in all facets.” Yet the four of them sound so comfortable—even relaxed—as they race through the veritable asteroid belt of chugs, blasts, solos and abrupt pauses that make up a song like HHOTHR’s opening track, “Slave Species of the Gods.”

“I am not using hyperbole when I say that HHOTHR is the most difficult record I have ever worked on,” admits Faulk. “The material on the album is the most challenging in structure and also endurance of any band I have ever been in.

I tend to write drum parts to be as hard as possible for Blood Incantation, usually coming up with parts that I can’t really play, so I have to learn how to actually perform them. Added onto this self-defeating mentality, we also recorded entirely to tape again, which meant that most songs had to be done in one entire take, as opposed to digital recording in which you can punch drums in and out easily. There are a few places on the album in which we were able to split the song up … but most of the record was done in one take. That means I often did 10 to 20 takes before we got the right one.

“IF YOU HAD TOLD ME THEN WHAT THE LAST FIVE YEAR S WOULD BE LIKE, I WOULD HAVE CALLED YOU CRAZIER TH AN THE SORT OF PEOPLE I FO LLOW ON INSTAGRAM.” —PAU L R I E DL

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“On the third day of tracking the drums, I became ill and my legs began cramping because of the sheer exhaustion from performing these songs so many times. I would say I am somewhat of a perfectionist, but only to the extent that I wanted to album to be the best that it could be. We would often finish a take and the other guys would say, ‘That sounded great!’ I would come out of the recording room and tell them we had to start over; one fill or one hit was wrong. This part of the recording process was difficult and made for some tense moments, but I would say that at the end it was worth it, as the album is, while not perfect, a work which I could say I am proud of. This band has always been about pushing ourselves, challenging ourselves and taking our music to places that we haven’t heard before.”

Hidden History of the Human Race proves that a death metal album can aspire to (and achieve) being so much more than a collection of brutal songs made up of heavy riffs and gory lyrics.

But so did Starspawn. The difference between the two records is merely that Blood Incantation improved at being Blood Incantation. But it must be mentioned that they’re able to do this because of the immense support shown by us, their fans.

According to Riedl, “the worldwide response [for the new album] has been insane! People have been clamoring relentlessly for more information since the moment it was announced, always with messages of support and anticipation. At the shows, the response to the unreleased songs has been tremendously positive. Even though we have been playing some of the new songs [like ‘Slaves Species of the Gods’] live for a few years, now that the album is impending, there is a palpable excitement in the air that is taking the shows to another level. At times it almost seems people like them more than when we play Starspawn tracks. We are proud of the music, but we definitely thought people would need several spins of the album to begin fully processing whether they liked it or not. But the songs have gone over incredibly well and we are honored that our fans have been so quick to support the new material.”

Looking back on the band’s success over the past five years and the journey leading to this point, Riedl humbly suggests, “The mysteries of the cosmos, the nature of consciousness and the vast history of humankind are literally the questions which have been compelling art, culture, religion and society as a whole for millennia.

For whatever reason, there has been a historical lack of brutal/New Age/epic/melodic/old-school/ experimental/psychedelic/progressive/technical/ambient/funeral death metal that’s all about metaphysical conspiracy theory, outer and inner space [and] ancient civilizations, so we just put all of the crazy shit we’re into in one pot and called it Blood Incantation.”

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DECIBEL : JANUARY 2020 : 65

CoMe oNÂ FeEl The Noize

ThE StOrY Of HoW RoCk BeCaMe MeTaL FEATURING:

JiMmY PaGe / OzZy OsBoUrNe / IaN GiLlAn JaMeS HeTfIeLd / NiKkI SiXx DeE SnIdEr / & MoRe! available on VOD - December 3rd available on DVD - December 17th 66 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL

INSIDE ≥

70 BASK Soak on it 72 CRADLE OF FILTH Blood and drum transfusions

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

72 COFFIN ROT Box of (decayed) matter 72 DENIAL OF GOD They who denied it, supplied it 78 WRAITH Toxic thrash metal

Cold Front

JANUARY

Rising California trad rockers HAUNT continue their impressive run on album number three

15

New Wave of Old-School Death Metal bands

12

Old Wave of New-School Death Metal bands

5 1

New Wave of Second Wave of Norwegian Black Metal bands Norwegian pagan folk band from Ohio

I

n the nearly three years since Shadow Kingdom—purveyors of all things old-school—released the physical version of the first Haunt four-track EP, Luminous Eyes, it seems as HAUNT though new material from the solo project-cum-band has appeared Mind Freeze with increasing frequency. Haunt are pumping out albums at a SHADOW KINGDOM pace equal to bands in the early ’70s like KISS, AC/DC and even Judas Priest, who were kicking out an average of one album every six months in short bursts early in their careers. If those bands are any indication, being prolific could well be a good problem for Haunt to have. ¶ To be more precise, it’s a good problem for Trevor William Church to have. Haunt famously started as a solo side project from Church’s stoner/doom band Beastmaster, where the guitarist/vocalist wrote, played and performed all the material (save drums), surreptitiously posted the Luminous Eyes demo on Bandcamp in May 2017 and was amazed by the response to his roughly recorded, yet astoundingly good NWOBHM-influenced trad metal.

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]

8

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RUMBLY RU MBLY THROUGH A SPEAKER THROUGH

After Shadow Kingdom officially issued Luminous Eyes in early 2018 and raised Haunt’s profile that much higher, a nearly nonstop succession of releases has appeared on the label and Haunt became a “real” band, fleshed out by lead guitarist John Tucker (Beastmaker bassist), bassist Taylor Hollman and drummer Daniel Wilson.

Album number three, Mind Freeze, arrives less than a year after its predecessor—2019’s If Icarus Could Fly—and shows a band that has some serious momentum. Like the previous full-lengths— and all the best albums that were originally released on vinyl—it clocks in under 40 minutes and features a well-executed selection of songs that glorifies the best of late-’70s/early-’80s hard rock and metal. The one-two punch of “Light the Beacon” and “Hearts on Fire” sees the band kicking off with a loping, anthemic fist-pumper and following it with a high-speed sprint, one of the fastest they’ve performed.

Haunt’s strength has always lain not just in Church’s obvious reverence for Maiden/Priest/ Lizzy guitar harmonies, but in the atypically personal/emotional lyrics and the expert soloing, which seems directly inspired from a generation of guitar gods that predate Yngwie Malmsteen and that ilk. Though songs evidently flow freely from Church, nothing here feels tossed-off or poorly conceived. Yes, Haunt have an identifiable sound— drawing from Angel Witch and early Maiden, Priest and Ozzy—but great attention seems to be paid to writing strong choruses and memorable harmonies, so every album has its standouts.

Songs like “Saviours of Man,” “Fight or Flight,” “Have No Fear” and the title track are solid earworms, especially with the more prominent (but subtle) use of keyboards that provide welcome dynamics and shading. Being prolific is obviously preferable to the alternative, but consistency and quality is necessary for Haunt to turn this early run of releases into a successful long-term career. Mind Freeze not only continues the momentum built by its predecessors, but offers every indication that Church has the talent to keep moving forward and producing great albums—even if he and his bandmates don’t continue to work at such a torrid pace.

—ADEM TEPEDELEN

Slowly They Rot

BY DUTCH PEARCE

ABYSMALIST

OCCULSED

CALIGARI

U N H O LY D O M A I N

Reflections of Horror One half of West Coast OSDM duo Abysmalist happens to be Federico Avila, the musician behind Maggot Stomp’s solo tech-death anomaly Unurnment [TASR, issue #178].

Joined by drummer/vocalist Jeremy Meier (his [other] bandmate in Primal Rite), Abysmalist approach OSDM like a tank approaches a battle: at a steady, unstoppable roll. A keen ear for melody bends each of these thoroughly cloutful bangers, and opener “Lascivious Rapture” even succumbs to a rather epic doomdeath-esque denouement. For displaying a new formidable strength while forecasting something greater yet to come, Reflections of Horror proves to be essential.

DWARROWDELF

From Beneath the Fells FÓ L K VA N G R

From Beneath the Fells is a collection of five dungeon synth “reimaginations” from UKBM solo artist Dwarrowdelf. Overall, this amounts to 45 calming minutes of lawful neutral, medieval new age, neither misty nor ruinous in sound. The production here sparkles, and multilayered melodies soar through that metaphorical fresh mountain air like so many stately battlements and spires. Here’s hoping the talented Tom O’Dell decides to try his hand at constructing more dungeon synth—but next time from the ground up.

EXIT BAG

Exit Bag NIGHT RHYTHMS

ADMIRAL SIR CLOUDESLEY SHOVELL

8

Very Uncertain Times RISE ABOVE

Good times, bad times

The brilliance in the title of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s fourth album, Very Uncertain Times, is that both it and the music the U.K. trio is playing would be just as relevant 50 years ago as it is 68 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL

Exit Bag were a short-lived band that originally uploaded this 12-track recording (then called Death Slides) to Bandcamp five years ago. They existed only briefly in Tacoma, WA, and little else is known about them. Frankly, that’s fine, because if these broken-edged, misanthropic blackened punk numbers are any indication, whoever’s behind this project is a mean, pugnacious sonofagun.

Meanwhile, Capt. Tripp (whoever that is) did a great job capturing this outfit’s rage without letting it corrupt the recording.

Cenotaph to Putridity Cenotaph to Putridity may only be six minutes and 57 seconds long, but Occulsed fit plenty of obscure brutal grinding death into that short time span.

Nor is this demo “over before you know it.”

Rather, Cenotaph seems to slow down, then divide time. Based in Atlanta and featuring the likes of J. Stubbs (Encoffination, Father Befouled), Cenotaph to Putridity relapses the listener back to the sickest demos of the early to mid-’90s. The title track in particular demonstrates these newcomers’ dedication both to brutality and experimentation.

MOTH TOWER

Clavitasian Threshold GONDOLIN

Clavitasian Threshold is Moth Tower’s second full-length, sounding at once more polished and evolved than their debut. Moth Tower’s signature dusty and slow melodies remain, but an expansive, wide-open production lets these songs out into the light of day where counterpoint leads frolic alongside like butterflies dancing in flight. As ever, Moth Tower employ clever and discreet percussion, always seeming to get the absolute most of their compositions. A track like “Reviving the Dead,” for instance, with its mummy swagger and cinematic strings, really demonstrates not only the depths of Moth Tower’s powers, but also the potential for dungeon synth to be incredible still.

PHOBOPHILIC

Undimensioned Identities B LO O D H A R V E S T / R OT T E D L I F E

Phobophilic are from Fargo, of all places. Way up there, where the sun hardly shines, these four North Dakotans have put together a nasty, tight and highly combustible style of death metal. Two of these songs were on the band’s rehearsal tape, released earlier this year, but while that tape certainly has its septic charm, there’s nothing like hearing the swarming intro to “Subterranean Miscreation” as captured by a professional engineer. Corroded, but still perfectly audible tones deliver memorable riffs while the drums get annihilated four times over. You need this tape.

s/t |

VESPERITH LP / CD / Digital Nov 22th 2019

Entrancing astral visions from Finnish female experimental Black Metal artist Vesperith, co-produced

by Oranssi Pazuzu mainman Jun-His.

PH (ex- Mr Peter Hayden) Osiris Hayden |

LP / CD / Digital

PH’s 20 years of psychedelic space-travel lend them a gargantuan understanding of the roots of music, towards the core meaning and power of transcendental sound. Look no further for a sound beyond the limits of modern psychedelia.

These Finns are way out there.

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today. Their unabashedly retro proto-metal (or hard rock, if you prefer) remains solidly rooted in an era when the world was grappling with things like the Vietnam War and civil rights, and psychedelic drugs were opening minds to societal injustices. Very uncertain times, indeed.

In 2019, the issues and the drugs are (somewhat) different, but both Britain and the U.S. are certainly experiencing their own modern turmoil. A new album from Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell—in all its greasy glory—is just what the doctor ordered to put the insanity out of mind for 36 blissful minutes and lose yourself in heavy, throbbing blues-fueled grooves. New drummer Serra Petale keeps things swinging across eight rough-and-tumble tracks that invoke all the best heavy psych bands from the era— from Hawkwind to Dust to Mountain, with occasional blasts of (early) Motörhead aggression.

The recording is warm and fuzzy—a bit like early ’70s-era Black Sabbath—and there’s little gloss or polish to any aspect of it. This is likely what it would sound like were ASCS to set up in your living room—psychedelic lights flashing, strong scent of cannabis emanating from the band—and just let loose. The loping title track, with its understated (yet catchy) chorus, perfectly sets the pace for what’s to follow. Shovell bring in a good mix of tempos throughout, occasionally shifting from slow dirges to rumbling sprints, but always staying heavy. Yeah, this unequivocally sounds like it’s from another era, but it somehow makes a lot of sense in 2019. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

BASK

7

III

SEASON OF MIST

Hem in the seed

Bask formed in Asheville, NC, in 2012, but uninformed listeners would be forgiven for thinking they hail from that other esteemed hole in the Bible Belt, Savannah, GA. The quartet’s progressive and unabashedly melodic take on sludge harkens back to the time about a decade ago when outfits like Kylesa and Baroness rode vanguard among the legions of America’s metal and hard rock bands. Indebted to Skynrd, Sabbath and Muddy Waters at his most electric, those bands seemed poised to bring hard guitar music into the pop mainstream, and a few of them made esteemed careers for themselves by nearly doing just that.

Bask fit squarely in that tradition seemingly by design. They’re so reminiscent of that place and time that they even enlisted Matt Bayles—who produced Mastodon’s Leviathan— to make their third album, III, sound pristine.

To its credit, III scratches the bluegrass sludge 70 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL

9

CIRITH UNGOL, I’m Alive Kings, no longer dead | M E TA L B L A D E

Admit it: If you came of age listening to metal in the ’80s and saw the Michael Whelan painting of Elric (first used on the DAW paperback of Michael Moorcock’s Eric of Melniboné) on the new Cirith Ungol collection, you might weep. The images that covered Elric novels and Cirith Ungol albums attained iconic status decades ago, but were seemingly relegated to the vault of outsider nerd history along with the original hardback Dungeon Master’s Guide. No longer—it’s 2019, and one of the progenitors of doom metal are back.

First off, I’m Alive isn’t new material, through with new songs already released, that is certainly imminent. Instead, it’s a two-disc live set of a beyond-energized band playing a treasure trove of classics at three festivals, most notably Up the Hammers.

From the first notes of “I’m Alive,” the audience is all in, singing along to choruses

itch that Baroness did with their full-length debut, Red Album.

Consider Bask less southern-fried and more grilled, however. There’s no fat in their songs, but not much edge either. With nary a scream to be found, guitarist Zeb Camp’s melodious voice edges toward the melancholic and folkloric—so much so that You'll also get a whiff of the Canterbury scene on the bifurcated “Noble Daughters I: The Stave” and “Noble Daughters II: The Bow.” These songs excite one's imagination, but leave you wishing even one riff stirred the circle pit pot. It’s unclear if Bask will have the touring success of their forerunners, but their manners and polish ensure they’re just as palatable to casual listeners as those bands are today. —JOSEPH SCHAFER

they’ve heard for decades—or, in the case of younger fans, a few years.

What separates a classic live album from something average is that it faithfully recounts a special night worth enshrining in history—think Cheap Trick at Budokan or KISS Alive!. I’m Alive is also a special performance; a long-delayed victory lap by a band that received most of their praise posthumously, a raucous celebration with fans who waited their entire lives to see their heroes. It’s not just the fan enthusiasm pushing this collection to near-classic level; it’s a band that is invested in every second of their performance. Tim Baker sounds like he took a few months off, rather than decades, and drummer Robert Garven is firmly in the pocket.

For completists, this collection also includes a two-hour documentary on the band. But just like the gatefold LPs back in the days, the music is enough. “Finally, we live the dream together,” Baker says at one point. Damn straight we do.

—JUSTIN M. NORTON

CHILD BITE

8

Blow Off the Omens HOUSECORE

Noise rock vets address the trouble with today

Shawn Knight’s presence in interviews ranges from affable to downright charming, while onstage he’s this perfectly believable everyday guy—no cosplay, no makeup, no supernatural conceits—who appears to have genuinely and profoundly lost his shit to the point where he’s about to kill people with farm implements. This disconnect contributes greatly to making Child Bite’s founder, guitarist and vocalist one of the scariest frontmen in show business. But it’s nothing

DECIBEL : JANUARY 2020 : 71

compared to what he sounds like: an amalgam of David Thomas, David Yow, Daniel Higgs, Jello Biafra, Mike Hard, several wards of the state you never hear about because they’re way the fuck too scary and some demons—all of them gone completely batshit in the same body on the actual day the entire universe ends. In other words, Knight would be perfect for now even minus the lyrical slant of the Detroitbased outfit’s fifth full-length and/or the air of detached bemusement behind the singer’s words.

He first flexes the album’s philosophical spine on opener “Mock Ecstacy,” bellowing, “If you don’t have a dream / There are plenty out there for you to borrow,” over riffs like knife fights in a building made of elevators, adding, “The unreal is ideal / The unreal is yours to fabricate.” As on the balance of Blow Off the Omens, guitarist Jeremy Waun handily snags the band’s second-scariest player spot, largely via solos that could easily serve as announcements of open borders (with maps and directions) for any Lovecraftian abominations who might be listening. —ROD SMITH

COFFIN ROT

6

A Monument to the Dead B LO O D H A R V E S T / ROTTED LIFE

Break it down

Body decomposition in a casket takes eight to 12 years, wherein the corpse essentially digests itself. Depending on that final rotting place, skeletons can then last centuries. In the scientific parlance of Young Frankenstein, Coffin Rot thus rate as freshly dead.

A Portland death metal quartet as dank and gory as any Oregonian hike, the rotters’ fulllength debut tenders eight tracks in a swift and slippery 32 minutes. A Monument to the Dead modulates its tempo shifts fluidly throughout, despite the album’s production EQing somewhere between muted and homogeneous.

Drums pummel up front, while guitar and vox muddy behind them, and solos bury themselves alive. Even so, much here reeks just right.

From the moment that opener “Copremesis” bursts into double time, Hayden Johnson’s subcutaneous vocals pool into a puddle of gristle.

Match that to the knotted, rippling riffs of the two-minute “Saw Blade Suicide” and all is right with this end of life. Tre Guertner’s zigzagging stringwork on the succeeding “Miasma of Barbarity” engages in a game of chicken with bassist Brandon Martinez-Woodall and skins windmill Derek Johnson.

“Forced Self-Consumption” bubbles the frontman’s voice into a liquid core of something rotting from the inside—fetid, decomposed, stank.

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“Incubation of Madness,” a slapping, snapping, gag reflex of thrust-and-lunge, hits where it hurts, but backup “Mechanical Separation” sounds like it reconvenes its predecessor. Remix?

Suddenly, everything sounds the same—retroactively, even. The group’s namesake track closes the album, yet doesn’t rise to its sevenminute runtime, the jackrabbit beats and plodding lurch sounding standard-issue. Once again, though, Coffin Rot erect the very foundation of A Monument to the Dead. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

CRADLE OF FILTH

9

Cruelty and the Beast Re-Mistressed SONY

Cruelty brought thee orchids and some re-recorded beats

In 1998, British black metal antagonists Cradle of Filth were two years removed from their vampyromantic landmark album Dusk and Her Embrace. While that record’s atmosphere was pure mist and moonlight, Cruelty and the Beast was the band’s first proper concept album. Reimagining the deviant deeds of Hungarian blood-bather Countess Elizabeth Bathory, it deserves to be mentioned among heavy metal’s most riveting narrative records. Frontman Dani Filth is in peak form as a devilish wordsmith with infinite vocal range, elevating psychosexual thrills with iambic pentameter. The twin guitars capture elegiac beauty and the sudden splash of Goetia. The only problem: The original drum tracks sound like absolute shit, a notoriously flagrant distraction from an otherwise lovingly detailed record by an ambitious band in their prime.

Twenty-one years later, the great injustice of the album’s mix has been corrected on this new Re-Mistressed version. Every element of the master has received a virgin-blood rejuvenation, but the original’s percussive villainy enjoys the most notable makeover. Now, for the first time, you can appreciate the album’s salacious artistry without the need for an asterisk*. *Except those fuckin’ drums.

The album’s elegant compositions boast dramatic movements between gnashing blasts and keyboards, from slow-burn ominosity to a stunning denouement. Eleven-minute centerpiece “Bathory Aria” reveals Cradle of Filth at their most deliciously verbose, replete with a soliloquy from actress Ingrid Pitt (who played Bathory in 1971 shocker Countess Dracula). Then there’s skin-flaying finale “Lustmord and Wargasm (The Lick of Carnivorous Winds),” an album before Cradle would forge the smallerscale revenge tragedy “Her Ghost in the Fog.” This record was a near-masterpiece upon

release that earns that title with its fresh coat of blood. —SEAN FRASIER

DENIAL OF GOD

8

The Hallow Mass OSMOSE/ HELLS HEADBANGERS

Do you want to listen deliciously?

The Hallow Mass represents only the third album in Denial of God’s nearly 30-year career. The Danish black metal veterans’ output is so scarce because brothers Azter (guitars) and Ustumallagam (vocals), the core and only constant members of DOG since 1991, didn’t release their first fulllength until 2006, a year after drummer Galheim joined the band. So, really, the solidified trio that we’ve come to know as Denial of God have now released their third album in 14 years.

Each song on The Hallow Mass stands on riffs that sound like they were written by Azter in the early ’90s, then magically sealed away where other guitarists couldn’t pull them from the aether. As if they could only be revealed when the time was right. Thus, a song like “Undead Hunger,” for all its neogothic death-doom leads and graphic (but intelligible) lyrics, comes as a welcome distraction from the riffless copycats crowding the underground nowadays.

Overall, The Hallow Mass marks an epic listen.

Just three songs come in under 10 minutes.

“The Shapeless Mass” is nine minutes long, almost Hellenic in its melodic catchiness due to a mutual heavy metal influence. Of the other two “shorter” tracks, “A Thousand Funerals” preambles the closer with solo organ and, before that, “Hour of the Worm” rips full-blown black metal before jackknifing into an atmospheric ritual state and then out again so quickly, it’s almost like a cult flex. Otherwise, DOG have mastered the craft of their long-form “black horror metal,” and there’s never been a better time to let these devils in. —DUTCH PEARCE

IN MOURNING

6

Garden of Storms AGONIA

Not quite a bumper crop

For most of their 20-year career, Sweden’s In Mourning have been a band that checks all my boxes on paper, yet struggled to hold my attention on record. Gothic overtones, melodic death metal riffs, gentle progressive rock bridges, equally pristine growls and clean singing—these ingredients make comfort food, but they’re also used by juggernauts like Novembers Doom or (let’s be

real here) Opeth. It’s tough to beat those bands at their own game.

However, practice, as they say, makes perfect.

In Mourning started to grab me more on their last album, 2016’s Afterglow, and their latest, Garden of Storms, is even better—though it’s not a quantum leap. In Mourning still mine the same vein, albeit with a little more precision.

The songs, in general, run a tad shorter (though closer “The Lost Outpost” nearly breaks the 10-minute mark), and the rhythm section feels a little tighter thanks to new drummer Joakim Strandberg-Nilsson. The central groove in standout “Heirophant” scratches a long-ignored itch. Indeed, the band may just be benefiting from having fewer groups in the zeitgeist trying to perfect this precise craft cocktail of genres.

Strandberg-Nilsson’s drums, however, suffer from a production style that leans too much on the melodic death metal side, not enough on the prog-rock side. This is what happens when an ex-Scar Symmetry guy does the mixing and mastering. I can’t think of a band that would benefit more from a warm, analog recording—next time call Jens Bogren or Jaime Gomez Arellano, fellas.

—JOSEPH SCHAFER

NIGHTSTALKER

8

Great Hallucinations H E AV Y P SYC H S O U N D S

Eight counts of psych doom

We think of music as linear: first song, last song and everything in between.

The digital age, however, allows for a closed circuit. When the CD player in your 15-year-old climate heater bangs out the last track, ’round comes the opener again, now seamlessly segued into an endless loop.

Ancient Athenians Nightstalker perfect just such a cycle on eighth LP and HPS debut Great Hallucinations. Notching three decades in 2019, odyssey captain Argy Galiatsatos, fuzz specialist Tolis Motsios, bass torpedo Andreas Lagios and Mediterranean Bonham-esque Dinos Roulos transpose the ritualistic Mojave rock of SoCal to the similarly hot, dry days and cool nights of Greece. What’s gained in translation is palpable.

As a non-native singer of English, Galiatsatos’ broad but nasal tenor catches the ear at every turn, its whine somewhere betwixt Ozzy, Lemmy and…

Todd Park Mohr? He moves from a flat monotone

on “Black Cloud” to the rising, falling, twisted cry of everything else. Repeated central phrases waft over the band bashing away in some airy room where fat, gaseous guitars and big drum dynamism hang in the space like motionless clouds on a scorching day.

“Sweet Knife” might as well be about Richard Ramirez rather than love gone wrong (“Can’t sleep at night / The air’s so thick you can cut it with a knife”), Galiatsatos wailing away as the group upticks into a murderous Church of Misery boogie. “Sad Side of the City” follows suit in lording his soul lament over Roulos’ sleek, metallic funk. “Hole in the Mirror” conjures a six-string serpent as the frontman moans about demons and the falling sky. Great Hallucinations doses flashbacks on repeat. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

NORTHWIND WOLVES

7

Mountains and Darkness BLACK LION

1997 wants its KORG Z1 MOSS back

Los Angeles-based symphonic black metallers Northwind Wolves are poised to take over the

DECIBEL : JANUARY 2020 : 73

throne left vacant after Norway’s Gehenna ran out of spells and fell into death metal’s nasty grip. In many respects, the Wolves purloin elements—mostly compositional and thematic— from the greats. We’ve already mentioned Gehenna, but there’s a fair amount of Emperor, early Dimmu Borgir and (lesser-knowns) Twilight Ophera imbued throughout Mountains and Darkness, the Wolves’ second full-length and first for Swedish indie Black Lion.

From opener “Before Dawn’s First Light” through closer “Curse of Ages,” songwriting primaries Noor and Astaroth have Halloween in their blood. Ivories are tinkled between creepy, semi-melodic riffs ripped straight out of the Head Not Found/Hot Records vault. Vocally, Noor represents the lost art of the distant snarl— something Charmand Grimloch did well back in the day—seething the nights when the moon isn’t visible. In all seriousness, Mountains and Darkness is a remarkable effort for an album that feels, sounds and looks anachronistic. While the production is off for the right reasons— cold, mysterious—the drums/drum production doesn’t help the Wolves ascend the highest levels of the castle parapet.

It’s unknown why bands would want to weaken the very instrument that relates to tribalism, but as on the Bishop of Hexen’s storied debut, so too here. In places, like on “Lord of Winter and Death,” “Pale Winter Storm Lightning” or “A Knight Called Death,” it’s as if the Wolves want constraint rather than bombast. If there’s one line of distinction throughout Mountains and Darkness, it’s that the songs, at their longest, never reach the five-minute mark. Blessed be the short symphony! —CHRIS DICK

OATH OF CRUELTY

8

Summary Execution at Dawn DARK DESCENT

Execution mania

Oath of Cruelty’s debut fulllength comes nine years after their formation, seven years after their demo and five years since Hellish Decimation, their last release, an EP. Given an especially Texan title, Summary Execution at Dawn sounds every bit like the three sworn diehards behind Oath of Cruelty were all the way through those near-10 years rehearsing these timeless killers, whetting these riffs until they ripped with deadly precision. Whether or not the trio is still jamming Sodom’s “The Conqueror,” as on their first demo, or practicing their cover of “Necrophiliac” (hear: their second demo), those lessons helped to shape Oath of Cruelty in their formative years.

74 : J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 0 : D E C I B E L

It’s been a while since the last transmission, so if you want great neon metal from earlier in this solar cycle, Absolute Valentine’s Omega, Voyag3r’s War Mask and Neoslave’s Autoviolator will stimulate your circuits. Fresher data below. —JEFF TREPPEL

G

OST were poised to join Perturbator and Carpenter Brut at the peak of the

darksynth pantheon, especially after 2018’s Possessor fused Baalberith’s demonic beats to a black metal exoskeleton. Valediction [ C EN TUR Y MEDIA ] takes the now-duo to a territory somewhere between gothic industrial and industrial black metal. Unfortunately, that move doesn’t play to their strengths. The big problem?

The songs just aren’t as catchy, something GosT usually excel at—as evidenced by standouts like the Sisters of Mercy-ful “Bloody Roses” and the John Carpenter-quoting “She Lives in Red Light.” Better to reign in hell, etc.

Tom Stuart has a few ongoing storylines he explores under his OCCAMS LASER persona. Occult 89 [ TIMESL AVE] is the culmination of his ’80s Satanic Panic tetralogy.

This is the part of the horror movie where all hell breaks loose—literally, in this case. The concept focuses on the dark side of the Rapture, continuing a fascination with religious iconography also seen in his Divine Comedy-inspired pieces. He’s thickened his sound considerably, raising the intensity and the quality. Don’t leave this one behind.

VHS GLITCH’s last three releases were all annual Halloween horror-themed records.

System Hacked [ SEL F- R EL EA SED] breaks away from that series. Instead, as the title implies, it focuses on a cyborg who gets infected with a computer virus and turns into a merciless killing machine bent on destroying the systems of authority that corrupted him (I think). Pretty metal. “Infected by the Church of Darkness” is the keeper here, a slamming Castlevania homage pulled forcibly into a world of digital vampires.

While a lot of darksynth artists go bigger with each new release, DREDDD has focused his laser into a surgically precise killing machine on Pain Deluxe [L AKESH O R E] . He equips the hammer strikes of hardcore and gabber while leaving the cheesiness in the docking bay. Despite the minimalist architecture, deadly dance floor fillers like “Frog” and “Dominance, Submission and Power (No Time to Pray)” leave little room for escape.

And if Oath of Cruelty’s debut has anything, it’s shape. Summary Execution knows exactly what kind of record it is, and it never strays from its operative. There are plenty of highlights: “Stabbing Forth With Invincible Damnation,” similar to Slayer’s “Kill Again,” overpowers with a circular-headbang-inducing black magic; “Into the Chamber of

Death” grooves with Morbid Angel-style hyperdemonic speed; and “Denied Birth (Merciless)” confirms that Oath of Cruelty can write a straight-up roof-burner. The riffs are lethal, way sharper than they need to be. The drums practically give off heat. The vocals evoke deep memories with their old-school snarl and catchy patterns.

But more than their killer riffs, their sick drummer and a vocalist who knows his history, Oath of Cruelty’s true genius comes from their perfectly-wrought banger engineering. At every transition, OAC push their black death-thrash to its most explosive conclusion; each song and every part therein are executed with honed-in, militaristic accuracy. Summary Execution at Dawn shows no mercy, but boasts plenty of chops and a surprising amount of brains. —DUTCH PEARCE

ORODRUIN

8

Ruins of Eternity CRUZ DEL SUR

To doom it may concern

If you’re not familiar with doom trio Orodruin, we won’t hold that against you. After all, their last full-length album was 2003’s Epicurean Mass, and their most recent release until now was 2012’s In Doom EP. The metal scene has become so saturated that it’s all too easy to either forget about obscure underground bands or become distracted by the relentless pace of new releases. And when it comes to doom metal over the last decade, it’s not exactly easy to make yourself heard amidst such towering innovators as Pallbearer, SubRosa, YOB, the Body and Thou.

If there’s a great new record by someone more obscure than the buzzworthy bands, however, it’s imperative that we tell our readers about it. Which is where Orodruin’s Ruins of Eternity comes in. If you’re drawn to the more traditional side of doom, the one influenced most

by Trouble and Solitude Aeternus, you need this record in your life. The songcraft is gorgeous: funereal marches accentuated by smartly timed NWOBHM gallops, with guitar work by John Gallo and Nick Tydelski that is expressive to the point of soulful. Best of all, though, is the performance of Mike Puleo; not only does he handle both drums and bass, but he also provides the exact kind of dramatic singing this form demands. His Robert Lowe-esque grandiosity lends just the right amount of emotion to these already skillfully arranged songs, to the point where there’s no chance you’ll forget this album any time soon. —ADRIEN BEGRAND

OSI AND THE JUPITER

8

Nordlige Rúnaskog EISENWALD

Atmospheric excellence from… Ohio?

A fog blankets the ancient forest. Trees as tall as the sky. The spirit world entangled with this one. This isn’t necessarily the setting for Ohio’s 76 : JA NUA RY 2020 : DECIBEL

Osi and the Jupiter, and yet their contemplative brand of neofolk is transportive, sending the listener to a mystical place of gray skies and tales of old.

Osi and the Jupiter play a specific brand of neofolk—not quite in line with the verboten classics, but rather something more atmospheric and meditative. Putting the bowed cello in the forefront, multi-instrumentalist Sean Deth and cellist Kakophonix’s music is that of opulence rather than the asceticism that defines their predecessors. Osi and the Jupiter’s folk-inspired music slowly dances across dry meadows.

On Nordlige Rúnaskog, the project’s second album on German label Eisenwald, the music found within is denser (partially due to Greg Chandler’s work at Priory Recording Studios) and more pensive than its predecessor, 2017’s Uthuling Hyl. Though Kakophonix’s cello takes center stage, Deth’s simple, haunting songwriting plays an important role here. The backbone of the album itself, the delicate streams of Deth’s plucked guitars and subtle arrangements flow with a purpose that carries the thick, layered cello above it Of course, this is a very metal-adjacent approximation of ancient Norse music. It is still nice, and the whole general “Viking metal” aesthetic doesn’t necessarily detract from Osi and the Jupiter’s pleasant, introspective music. However, it would be pretty incredible to hear some musicologically researched “Norse” music in the metal-adjacent world. —JON ROSENTHAL

PISSED REGARDLESS

6

Imperial Cult

C R E AT O R - D E S T R U C T O R

Headbangers late for the Ball

Two of the songs off Imperial Cult—“Behold a Pale Horse” and “Hell’s Coming With Me”— immediately bring to mind Tombstone. Not only because those are both oft-quoted lines from the 1993 film, but also that was the year I started listening to a lot of the music that sounds like Pissed Regardless.

Okay, that timeline isn’t perfect, because this metalcore stew is more reminiscent of music that really started getting churned out a few years later, but you’re still gonna need to be in a chain wallet state of mind to truly absorb what’s going on throughout the album. And there is a legitimate argument to be made that what is happening is right and good. The band hits a lot of those high points from the era, with the songs “Bleeder” and “Dark Disciple” having some dark, nostalgic hooks. And if you were hoping they wouldn’t forget the groove metal, you can

look forward to some no-nonsense scratchythroated Biohazard rapping. Plus, these songs don’t ask much, with thrashier attacks tossed in to help the 10 tracks go by briskly.

The flip side, though, is simply that it just sounds a lot like groove metal and metalcore from the ’90s. On Imperial Cult, Pissed Regardless do an earnest, well-executed version of once-beloved music that has been shown to have a varied shelf life. The best of this stuff, along with great films like Tombstone, has aged quite well. But that doesn’t mean there needs to be a reboot. —SHANE MEHLING

P.O.O.R.

8

Glutton for Punishment M E AT 5 0 0 0

Pointless to resist

Californian grind rebels P.O.O.R.—an acronym for Point of Our Resistance—have been keeping their fans at Decibel salivating for new material since the release of Extinction of Trust back in 2012. Fellow dB scribe Shawn Macomber wrote about that record glowingly upon release, stating that it “happens to be one of the great grindcore records of the last several years.” Despite the band’s contagious mix of Nasum grind and hardcore party punk, the record remained mired in unjust obscurity.

Seven years later, P.O.O.R. unleash 27 tracks in 45 minutes on the aptly titled Glutton for Punishment. The long-overdue sophomore record reveals guitarist Neil Burkdoll welcoming more deathgrind influence into his riot-starting riffage. Like the split EP that Exhumed released with Iron Reagan, “Breeding Frenzy” reimagines Gore Metal as a depraved descendant of Minor Threat. “Shut the Sky” continues that Molotov-hurling aesthetic with diseased gang shouts and a breakneck sprint.

While the album’s last five minutes are dedicated to covers (Corrosion of Conformity, Sepultara and Denak), 40 minutes is long for a grind record where no song eclipses three minutes. Consuming this record in a single sitting feels like a whirlwind of dirty gutter riffs and weaponized blast beats. But P.O.O.R. don’t try to mimic the grim veneer of top-shelf sociopolitical grind bands.

There’s a sense of jubilant lunacy throughout the record as the band growls, snarls and shrieks like a cast of delinquents out of Mr. Bungle’s earliest material. With seven years of Burkdoll’s riffs fueling the record’s giddyup, Glutton’s restless spirit and go-for-broke lawlessness is crucial to its unique charm.

—SEAN FRASIER

DECIBEL : JANUARY 2020 : 77

TOOTHGRINDER

6

I Am

S P I N E FA R M

They are

“Too soft for the scene TOO MEAN FOR THE GREEN” is almost surely not about golf—unless maybe Justin Matthews’ aspirations include having Volkswagen sponsor the band he fronts and name a limited edition of their all-time most popular model after said band per fellow Jersey natives Bon Jovi (in 1996). If such is the case, he might wanna consider a name change— ”Volkswagen Toothgrinder Golf” sounds way too uncarlike and way too much like a game that involves torture, bruxism and/or meth, all things VW have been trying to distance themselves from since WWII ended.

Regarding the groove-intensive scorcher’s real topic—if, three albums in with a chameleonic entity prone to revealing a deeper iteration of itself with each release, he’s really all that bummed about not getting enough scene cred and/or money, the guitarist and vocalist should maybe consider omitting rap interludes like the one that lightly mars otherwise orgiastically grand opener “The Silence of a Sleeping WASP.” It’s not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with the form, or that it doesn’t still have the potential for a proper marriage with metal; it’s just that the last things most people (including A&R types, one hopes) want to be reminded of include both Fred Durst and the dude from Korn.

Minor missteps aside, I Am finds the band flashing way more backbone—and an even stronger command of melody—than on 2017’s Phantom Amour. Refusing to let themselves get pigeonholed might be slowing Toothgrinder down a little, but it’s making for rich results.

—ROD SMITH

VARIALS

6

In Darkness FEARLESS

Growing pains and righteous riffs

Shortly after writer/director Jordan Peele’s Us hit theaters earlier this year, IndieWire senior film critic David Ehrlich convened a symposium to debate whether the increasingly popular descriptor “elevated horror” was a “real thing” or rather “just a reductive way of forcing a high/low hierarchy onto a genre that has always struggled to be taken seriously.” Jamming the undeniably catchy, ultra-heavy In Darkness by Philly 78 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL

quintet Varials, it feels as if metal may be on the precipice of a similar debate in the wake of highly influential recent records by Code Orange, Harm’s Way and Knocked Loose: Is this growing trend of wrapping straight-ahead caveman riffage in arty or experimental passages a brave new frontier in which aural violence is earned/“elevated”? Or is it all window dressing to avoid having your chops, vision and ambition dismissed as so much chugging and grunting in the wind?

The answer is, pretty clearly, a little of both.

As with the aforementioned bands, there are songs on In Darkness that boast real flow and seamlessly meld borderline shoegaze passages and Fear Factory-esque industrial groove with a metalcore attack. And Varials definitely have the ability to reach into listeners and flip the head-bob switch, voluntarily or otherwise. Yet, there are also less compelling mishmash tracks that work a little too hard to hammer a round nü-metal peg into a square circa-’96 primeval beatdown hole.

Admittedly, part of this occasion ambivalence may be your humble correspondent’s steadily advancing age—I’d probably need to be 10 years younger to have any nostalgia for the processed rap metal vibe of a song like “South of One” or some of the Slipknotisms—but that’s ultimately a small price to pay in exchange for a gaggle of intriguing, adventurous jams that could portend a truly radical future. —SHAWN MACOMBER

VESPERITH

7

Vesperith S VA R T

Space cadet

I’ve always found it fascinating that humans have expended so much creative energy on pinpointing the “sound” of space. Neil deGrasse Tyson can blather on about vacuums and air molecules until he’s blue in the face—lasers, synthesizers and John Williams-style bombast will always be more relatable than the silent reality above our heads. Finnish vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Sariina Tani concurs, albeit in a much more mystical sense. In a galaxy far, far away from theremins and imperial marches exists Vesperith, her debut LP under the moniker of the same name, which utilizes elements of psychedelia, dark ambient and black metal to burrow into the deepest crevices of the cosmos.

Opening meditation “The Magi” sets a clear course for the 40-plus minutes to follow— despite the grim imagery and co-production from Oranssi Pazuzu’s Juho Vanhanen, Vesperith is more of a spiritual exercise than a heady

romp through a riff-filled star system. Tremolo guitars and blast beats do peek out their gruesome heads on tracks like “Fractal Flesh” and “Valohämärä,” but for the most part, Tani colors her self-described “pilgrimage to the abyss” with extended passages of synth drones, swelling cymbals, guitar noise and her own celestial voice.

That last aspect is ultimately what makes Vesperith work as more than just a collection of psychonautic sounds. Tani’s mastery of layering is evident throughout much of the album’s instrumentation, but never more so than in her varied, beguiling vocals. Whether she’s reaching for the ethereal realm on “Quintessence” or employing a hellish shriek on “Refractions,” her voice is an important grounding element on this otherwise abstruse journey. —MATT SOLIS

WRAITH

7

Absolute Power REDEFINING DARKNESS

Rhymes with moxic fallocaust

It would be understandable if you were to take Wraith’s second album for a spin and think you’d accidentally fired up the latest Toxic Holocaust jam. Let’s go ahead and address that elephant in the room first thing so we can get it out of the way. This album sounds like Wraith clearly draw from both TH and the same bands that inspired Joel Grind—Venom, Broken Bones, English Dogs, Motörhead and the rougher side of the NWOBHM. It’s all here pretty unabashedly in this punky blackened thrash.

But if you’re gonna follow a similar musical path as one of your contemporaries, why not try to do it better? That’s where Wraith distinguish themselves. The playing, production and (to a certain extent) songwriting are a notch better all around, which makes Absolute Power a damn enjoyable listen for anyone who likes any of the bands mentioned above.

Tempos are mostly standard D-beat blasts, but Wraith mix them with sludgy grinders like the title track and “Meaningless Planet,” which, apart from the blackened vocals, sounds like it would have fit right in on Priest’s British Steel alongside “Metal Gods.” Another distinguishing factor in Wraith’s favor is vocalist/guitarist Matt Sokol’s explosive, melodic lead work. That, along with the precise and propulsive drumming from Mike Szymendera, elevates Wraith from mere pretenders to legit contenders. Yeah, this is pretty derivative, but it’s also damn good. And the cover of the Misfits’ “Death Comes Ripping” that closes things out is a solid reminder that this isn’t the latest Toxic Holocaust. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

DECIBEL : JANUARY 2020 : 79

80 : JANUARY 2020 : DECIBEL ANSWERS: 1. The pink swirl of radiation is reversed 2. Two more of the blood rays are veined on the left side... one at the top under the satellite and one toward the middle-bottom near Anubis’s ear 3. There are more stars clustered under the pharaoh head at the top right 4. The planet’s green aura is much less intense 5. There are some serious dents on the satellite at the top left 6. The pharaoh head is developing several cracks 7. Get out your magnifying glass: Several of the blood ray tips get much closer to the planet 8. A Xenomorph skull has replaced the alien head on the left 9. There are a few chunks of tan rock behind the satellites at the top left 10. Anubis has a dog tag 11. The little alien’s arm is tucked under his head and at a different angle 12. None of the meteors cross the planet on the left side 13. The glow is missing from the pink swirl 14. The flat rock at the top right is actually a delicious space cookie 15. One of the asteroids at the bottom right looks like that meme guy from ‘Ancient Aliens’

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