Decibel #206 - December 2021

IS WORTH LIVING IRON MAIDEN LIVE

IMMOLATION OUR BURNING STUDIO REPORT

OBSCURA

THEY SAY GOODBYE, WE SAY HELLO

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EXTREMITY REVIEWED

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INCLUDED DECEMBER 2021 // No. 206

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RARE BIRD

Wherever Good Books Are Sold

JAN 2022

EARLY 2022

NOV 2021

ALSO NEW FROM RARE BIRD FATHER, BROTHERS, AND SONS by Frank Bello of Anthrax with Joel McIver HALLUCINATIONS FROM HELL by Gregg Turner of Angry Samoans NEW FROM DEAD BOOKS TOMORROW RUINED TODAY by Ryan Kent and Brett Lloyd SOME OF US LOVE YOU by Ryan Kent and Brett Lloyd

STILL AVAILABLE MUTATIONS by Sam McPheeters of Born Against SCALE and WATCH by Keith Buckley of Every Time I Die

E XT RE M ELY EXTREME

December 2021 [R 206] decibelmagazine.com

upfront 8 metal muthas Not a bug, but a feature

22 glassing Something from nothing

10 exclusive:

24 swallow the sun Bad moon rising

decibel magazine metal & beer fest: los angeles 2021 preview

From left...

14 exclusive:

decibel magazine metal & beer fest: philly 2021 review ...to right

18 low culture Don’t talk to him until he’s had... actually, just don’t talk to him 19 no corporate beer Hail the Great Pumpkin 20 in the studio:

immolation Straight fire

26 worm Die with a smile on your face 28 portrayal of guilt You kiss your savior with that mouth?

30 emma ruth rundle 666 horsepower 32 stormkeep Party like it’s 1997 34 apparition All that jazz 36 kowloon walled city Ringing in our ears 38 dold vorde ens navn Get behind them, Satan 40 grand cadaver Call it a spill-your-guts feeling

features

reviews

42 lucifer Wrong one to fuck with

75 lead review Converge, Chelsea Wolfe, Ben Chisolm and Stephen Brodsky join forces for one of 2021’s strongest records, Bloodmoon: I

44 obscura Their loss is our gain 46 q&a: iron maiden Guitarist Dave Murray is ready to turn off the T.V. and hit the road 50 the decibel

hall of fame Flotsam & Jetsam step out from under the shadow of metal’s biggest act to shed light on their debut LP Doomsday for the Deceiver

62

76 album reviews Releases from bands that think our fest shirts would sell better if they had the band logos on the back, including Exodus, Mastodon and Unleashed

The Heart of the Matter COVER STORY COVER AND CONTENTS PHOTOS BY JASON SINN

88 damage ink Inked in blood

Decibel (ISSN 1557-2137) is published monthly by Red Flag Media, Inc., P.O. Box 36818, 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, P.O. Box 36818, Philadelphia, PA 19107. © 2021 by Red Flag Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

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December 2021 [T206] PUBLISHER

Alex Mulcahy

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Albert Mudrian

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ART DIRECTOR

It’s been 29 issues since I’ve been able

to write a recap of our Philly edition of Metal & Beer Fest in this column. I could fill the next 29 installments of Just Words with just some of the things that went on behind the scenes during the past two and a half years. We navigated everything from shuttered international embassies and obtaining National Interest Exemptions (ask Barney Greenway about those) to projecting continually evolving state and local COVID mandates and protocols. We even watched one band just fucking break up between the original fest announcement in late 2019 and our revised lineup reveal in May 2021. And that’s just the stuff I can reveal in print.

All of that and much more led to what was our most gratifying Metal & Beer Fest weekend since we started the event back in 2017. Extremely extreme thanks to everyone who came out to Metal & Beer Fest: Philly’s sold-out return. It was so wonderful to see your faces again—well, like a third of each of your faces, but I’ll take it. Further gratitude to the bands, the breweries, vendors, booking agents, friends and the always incredible Fillmore staff who all pulled in the same direction to make sure we could safely execute this event. Their work and your help and participation are why things ran so smoothly; it’s greatly appreciated, and we don’t take it for granted.

Special shoutouts to the equally treasured Mike Wohlberg, James Lewis and Aaron Salsbury, who, along with yours truly, moved heaven, earth and fucking dozens of boxes of magazines, shirts, books, glassware and other assorted stuff that is probably now available in our web store to help bring Metal & Beer Fest back to the greatest live music venue in Philadelphia.

Though deeply restorative, the experience was, admittedly, a little weird at times. Despite what some suggest, we are not “back to normal” yet. When I returned home from Philly, I basically lived in my basement for a week, wore a mask in my own house around my kids (who are still too young to be vaccine-eligible) and didn’t fully rejoin my family until I produced a pair of negative COVID tests. Today there are sacrifices that come with attending events—hopefully you’re looking out for those around you, too.

So, thank you again for patiently waiting more than two years for our Philly Fest to return. Now you only have to wait under two months until we do it all over again in Los Angeles. See you there. albert mudrian, Editor-in-Chief

aaron@decibelmagazine.com

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COPY EDITOR

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Mask appeal radness  Times are still tough, but that won’t stop these dudes from enjoying Napalm Death responsibly

Aaron Salsbury

Vince Bellino Adrien Begrand J. Bennett Dean Brown Louise Brown Chris Chantler Richard Christy Liz Ciavarella-Brenner John Darnielle Chris Dick Sean Frasier Nick Green Raoul Hernandez Jonathan Horsley Courtney Iseman Neill Jameson Sarah Kitteringham Daniel Lake Andrew Lee Shawn Macomber Shane Mehling Justin M. Norton Andy O'Connor Dutch Pearce Fred Pessaro Forrest Pitts Greg Pratt Jon Rosenthal Brad Sanders Joseph Schafer Rod Smith Matt Solis Kevin Stewart-Panko Eugene S. Robinson Adem Tepedelen Jeff Treppel J Andrew Zalucky Bradley Zorgdrager

READER OF THE

MONTH You've been a Decibel reader for over a decade. There are many more metal magazines available in Europe than in the U.S. What’s made you stick with us when you have other, less expensive options?

Choice isn’t as wide as it used to be here, and with the pitiful decline and eventual euthanasia of Terrorizer magazine, I find Decibel the only real choice for quality coverage of the more “extreme” side of metal. The design, Lloyd Hollingworth humor, imagination and Birmingham, England obvious love of metal make it an essential Please tell us what you do for a living. read. Your Hall of Fame articles are a particular We suspect it’s a… magazine-y job? favorite of mine, and if it didn’t cost me so much Yep, it’s indeed a very magazine-y occuin postage, I’d get every issue. pation. I work for a publishing company designing editorial content and advertising Every metalhead knows that Black Sabbath, for various U.K. Chambers of Commerce. I Judas Priest and Napalm Death formed in also dabble in book covers and posters when Birmingham. Can you let us non-locals the endless images of businesspeople know about any other metal bands from shaking hands/standing outside offices your hometown? gets too mind-numbing.

They are hardly “unknowns” to you all, but as

6 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

I live next door to singer Dave Hunt’s mom, it would be impolite—and might get me in trouble—to not mention Anaal Nathrakh. The pedant in me wants to say that Judas Priest are “Black Country” rather than “Brummie,” but that’s nitpicking. I hope those last two colloquialisms make sense to your readers.

The pedant in me wants to say that Judas Priest are “Black Country” rather than “Brummie,” but that’s nitpicking.

I hope those last two colloquialisms make sense to your readers.

Khemmis make their proper Decibel cover debut on this issue. What emerging young band would you give a first-time Decibel cover to if you had the opportunity?

Don’t know if they are exactly young, but as I am playing Those of the Catacombs on repeat, I’ll go with Scolopendra.

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 still waiting for some of you to fInIsH dOiNg ThE rEsEaRcH.

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

This Month's Mutha: Karen Pearson Mutha of Justin Pearson of the Locust /Retox/Dead Cross

Tell us a little about yourself.

I was born in a small town in Illinois and lived all over the state until Justin was born in Chicago. I didn’t want to raise him there, so we moved to Phoenix. After his father died, Justin and I moved to California. He didn’t like the move at first, but now thanks me for it. I am retired now, but was in the hospitality industry most of my life. We liked the perks of free hotel rooms for a weekend getaway or a week vacation in a lot of different places.

Justin’s bands and projects number well into the teens. Do you have a particular favorite?

It would have to be Struggle or Swing Kids because they were so young and enthusiastic.

I was so proud that he was into something he loved and it kept him out of trouble.

Are you happy that he has a source of “conventional” income via his publicity company, The Chain?

Were you influential in Justin picking up the bass? Did he play other musical instruments growing up?

Justin has done so many interesting things, like voice-overs, movies, writing books, speaking about music to college classes. So, I feel that this is just another way to obtain added income without a 9-to-5 cubicle job.

No, my cousin was staying with us and he gave Justin his first guitar. He always did love music, and after that he started bands.

What’s something that most people would be surprised to learn about your son?

The Locust were notorious for their onstage uniforms. We have to ask: Any recollection of what Justin would dress up as for Halloween?

Darth Vader was one of my favorites, but he would be a pirate, and even a funny old man with a big head, hands and feet.

8 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

That he is very artistic. From a young age he was really good at drawing. He designed the picture for his grade school class T-shirts, won a prize painting a Halloween storefront window, and I even have a plate he painted a picture on when he was 8 years old hanging in my kitchen!

Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Khemmis, Deceiver  Obituary, World Demise  Deadguy, Work Ethic  Metallica, …and Justice for All  The Red Chord, Fused Together in Revolving Doors ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  Melvins, Houdini  The Jesus Lizard, Liar  Acrimony, Tumuli Shroomaroom  Acid King, Busse Woods  Farflung, Unwound Cellular Frown ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  Khemmis, Deceiver  Pig Destroyer, Prowler in the Yard  Napalm Death, Utopia Banished  Blazon Stone, Damnation  Archspire, Bleed the Future ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  Khemmis, Deceiver  Unto Others, Strength  Crypt Sermon, The Ruins of Fading Light  Deadguy, Fixation on a Co-Worker  Meathook Seed, Embedded ---------------------------------Aaron Salsbury : m a r k e t i n g a n d s a l e s  Cave In, Until Your Heart Stops  Soul Glo, Live @ WKDU  Concrete Caveman, Demo  L.O.T.I.O.N. Multinational Corporation, World Wide W.E.B.  Portrayal of Guilt, We Are Always Alone

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------Mortiis  Pentagram, Pentagram  Pagan Altar, The Lords of Hypocrisy  Bauhaus, Press Eject and Give Me the Tape  The Hand of Doom, Poisonoise  Manilla Road, Crystal Logic

—ANDREW BONAZELLI CENTER PHOTO BY BECKY DIGIGLIO

PHOTO BY EKATERINA GORBACHEVA

DECIBEL MAGAZINE METAL & BEER FEST: LOS ANGELES

After a two-year hiatus, returns for an unforgettable weekend of suds and thuds

BY VINCE BELLINO

ow do you follow up a festival that features 16 breweries, a quarter-

century-in-the-making Deadguy reunion, a special 1990-1992 Napalm Death set, plus Hall of Fame performances from Converge and Pig Destroyer? You dig your heels in and build an even more massive lineup that boasts a dozen breweries, a West Coast-exclusive Jane Doe set from Converge, a reunion of Deadguy’s Fixation on a Co-Worker lineup, and a bill stacked with veteran and younger acts, not to mention a first time-ever set from Cave In performing Until Your Heart Stops in its entirety. ¶ On December 10 and 11, Decibel brings Metal & Beer Fest back to Los Angeles at the Belasco after two years away from the city. It’s one hell of a birthday party for Jane Doe, which celebrated its 20th earlier this year. That album, however, is a spring chicken when it comes to music being celebrated here. When Deadguy take the stage on Friday, it will be the band’s first L.A. show ever. ¶ “We were always one of those bands that had pockets of people who liked us, and we’d end up in all kinds of unlikely locations, so this is a big win for us,” reflects drummer Dave Rosenberg.

“I spent 20 years living in Northern California, so it’s a chance for all of us to see friends that we haven’t seen in years. It’s also great to be playing at a legit venue, as opposed to a local coffee shop where Keith [Huckins, guitarist] might put his foot through a wall, which actually happened in both San Diego and Portland.”

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The festival comes to a fever pitch on Saturday when Cave In tear into the first notes of “Moral Eclipse,” the opener on their genre-redefining debut full-length, Until Your Heart Stops. At the time, it was an album that pushed at the boundary of what metallic hardcore could be and expanded the genre’s musical vocabulary.

“It’s a mix of feelings,” reflects guitarist/ vocalist Stephen Brodsky. “Dusting off the oldies is more than just relearning the parts— it’s also reconnecting with a mindset. Part of me is right back in it going, ‘Fuck yeah, pushing boundaries—no holds barred!’ or ‘Holy shit, I can’t believe we actually wrote this insanity.’”

Cave In have not performed many of the songs from Until Your Heart Stops in years—or ever, in the case of closer “Controlled Mayhem Then Erupts.” To get back into the mindset and muscle memory of those tracks (which Brodsky dubs “late-’90s riff soup”), the axeman has been practicing on his 1993 Gibson Les Paul, the same one used to record UYHS. PHOTO BY A . J. K INNE Y

In the mid-’90s and early ’00s, metallic hardcore was a rapidly expanding genre that had not yet been saddled with swooped haircuts and good cop/bad cop vocal associations. In the northeast, many of the key bands shared members or developed friendships. Converge’s Kurt Ballou recorded Until Your Heart Stops at his nascent GodCity Studios, Brodsky joined Converge for 1998’s When Forever Comes Crashing, and Cave In’s debut featured contributions from Converge frontman Jacob Bannon, Ballou and Agoraphobic Nosebleed vocalist Jay Randall. In that regard, the headliners of the weekend all represent a specific scene at a specific moment in time.

“Until Your Heart Stops encapsulates a lot of formative experiences in our lives, plus a ton of great music that we had in constant rotation,” Brodsky reflects. “Seeing Deadguy at the Rat in Boston in 1996—then Kiss It Goodbye at the same venue just a year later—had a profound effect.

Also, around that time, me joining Converge and writing the When Forever Comes Crashing album with the band had a huge impact on Cave In. So yeah, the festival lineup beautifully connects all of those dots.”

One important member will be missing from the reunion: Caleb Scofield, who played bass with Cave In until his sudden passing in 2018.

His musicianship, dedication and work ethic were major factors in the band’s development according to Brodsky, who says he sees the set as a tribute to his late bandmate.

LIVING WITH YOUR MASK ON Soon-to-be-not-so-cult metallic hardcore favorites Deadguy were touring before the release of their only full-length release, 1995’s Hall of Fame-inducted Fixation on a Co-Worker, when everything fell apart. Vocalist Tim Singer and guitarist Keith Huckins left the band to start underappreciated hardcore outfit Kiss It Goodbye, and Deadguy released one more EP with a new lineup before calling it a day.

As it works out, 25 years is long enough to bury the hatchet, so Deadguy got back together for the first time to play Metal & Beer Fest: Philadelphia in late September.

“The grudges we held were so weak and idiotic that it only took a few minutes of being together to let a lot of stuff go,” says Rosenberg. “And we’re a little old now, so there was an overarching sentiment that we should stop being babies, ’cause who knows what the fuck crazy thing will happen next.”

Unfortunately, bassist Tim “Pops” Naumann missed Deadguy’s Philadelphia performance due to a kidney transplant. Naumann hopes he can return to the stage in Los Angeles, but either way, the low end is covered.

Dusting off the oldies is more than just relearning the parts—it’s also reconnecting with a mindset. Part of me is right back in it going,

‘FUCK YEAH, PUSHING BOUNDARIES — NO HOLDS BARRED!’ or

‘HOLY SHIT, I CAN’T BELIEVE WE ACTUALLY WROTE THIS INSANITY.’ STEPHEN BRODSKY, CAVE IN

“If he can make it to L.A., we’ll have both him and [’96-’97 bassist] Jim Baglino on bass so we can have the heavy, heavy sound,” Rosenberg tells Decibel. “Jim is an amazing player and a great guy. At this point, we’d gladly have everyone who can fit onstage come play with us.”

VETERAN DISPLAY OF POWER Deadguy won’t be the only one-LP wonder at Metal & Beer Fest: Los Angeles. They’ll be joined by grindcore OGs Repulsion on Saturday.

“We actually are doing a full set of ’80s covers,” says frontman Scott Carlson. “They’re all

by this obscure, yet influential punk metal band from Flint, MI. We’re even going to dress up as them, but with slightly more comfortable shoes.”

It’s not Repulsion’s first rodeo; the trio played Philly's Metal & Beer Fest in 2018, giving us all a reason to skip Easter dinner with the family. Like almost every other band on the bill, Repulsion are just beginning to ease themselves back into the groove of playing shows again.

Though he’s not much for crowds these days, Carlson thinks more highly of the Metal & Beer Fest attendees.

“I am apprehensive and nervous almost every time I leave the house these days,” he admits.

“Not so much because of the virus directly. It’s more because I’ve become quite content staying home with my wife and dogs, hiking, cooking, watching films, visiting with small groups of friends, etc. Going to shows or mingling in large crowds is less appealing than it used to be. Having said that, I am very much looking forward to seeing a lot of the people I anticipate will be at the Metal & Beer Fest.”

Former Decibel cover stars Gatecreeper will cross from one desert, their home state of Arizona, to another to deliver their patented form of “stadium death metal.” It’s an overdue return to the Metal & Beer Fest stage; the Grand Canyon State death dealers were originally booked to appear at Metal & Beer Fest: Philly in 2020, but did not play the rescheduled version in September.

West Coast thrashers will have plenty to rejoice about; namely, the return of Sacred Reich, whose momentum was halted right as the band began to pick up speed again with 2019’s Awakening, their first album in 23 years.

“The general feeling, I think, is just one of joy and elation because we’ve missed it,” says bassist and vocalist Phil Rind.

The frontman adds that Sacred Reich have used their downtime to write new music, and that they would like to release a new record sooner rather than later; still, their current focus is on already-released tunes.

“We definitely want to play [Awakening material] live, and while we had all this downtime, we’ve been writing a whole bunch,” Rind says.

“We have a bunch of songs that we’re working on, and we’ll probably finish the touring and then head back in the studio and record again.

It’s pretty promising.”

Splatterthrash practitioners Ghoul haven’t left their catacombs in two years—18 months because of COVID and eight months because DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2 0 21 : 11

DECIBEL MAGAZINE METAL & BEER FEST: LOS ANGELES

Los Angeles Rock City  (clockwise from l) East Coast Metal & Beer Fest alumni Repulsion, Deadguy and Crypt Sermon are ready to take their act to the second best coast

WE ACTUALLY ARE DOING A FULL SET OF ’80s COVERS.

They’re all by this obscure, yet influential punk metal band from Flint, MI. We’re even going to dress up as them,

BUT WITH SLIGHTLY MORE COMFORTABLE SHOES. frontman Digestor lost his keys in a drunken stupor, he says. Creepsylvania is a long ride from Los Angeles depending on time of day and traffic, but Digestor and company are descending upon Metal & Beer Fest: L.A. with a singular purpose.

“Our first priority, of course, is to our fans,” he says. “We want to torture and murder our fans before we do any other fun stuff. The torturing and the murdering really need to take precedence because not only is that what the fans are expecting, it also makes us happy. After we get that out of the way, maybe we can think about checking out bands and whatnot.”

There is only one more chance to catch Early Graves, who will play their final show on Friday. It’s an affecting conclusion to the band, who had hoped to complete another tour before calling it quits.

“It’s really, really bittersweet,” says guitarist Chris Brock. “Because I think that the band could have had a lot more to say with our original singer [Makh Daniels], who passed away, and I think our band could have had even more to say with the singer [John Strachan] that we have 12 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

now, and I think there’s definitely more that we could have done. But there’s a time and place.

We had our time, and it was fucking awesome.”

WATCH WITH YOUR HEART The present and the future of the underground

are well represented throughout the weekend.

Crypt Sermon, the sole doom band on the lineup, make the pilgrimage from Philadelphia.

“We do not consider our music only for fans of doom,” says drummer Enrique Sagarnaga.

“We take pride in our powerful, high-energy performances. We do want to consider that this is our first appearance on the West Coast. As such, we would like to make sure that the audience gets a full and clear understanding of our musical prowess.”

Las Vegas bruisers SpiritWorld bring their raucous fusion of death metal, thrash, hardcore and Americana to the Belasco on Saturday, opening up the festivities. And California acts round out the rest of the lineup. Heavy metal standard-bearers Night Demon and Saber, both performing hometown shows, keep things trad

alongside Crypt Sermon. The Bay Area is represented by Ripped to Shreds, who have been quite busy, not only recently contributing the song “Sacrificial Fire” to the Decibel Flexi Series but signing with Relapse.

“Unfortunately, we aren’t playing anything off the new LP,” mainman Andrew Lee tells Decibel. “However, we haven’t played most of any of our songs live, so I think attendees will have a treat for them either way. We’ll have a second live guitarist, too, so you know those guitarmonies are gonna pop.”

The bill is rounded out by powerviolence mainstays ACxDC, who made their return from hiatus last year with long-awaited second LP Satan Is King. Their Saturday evening performance will be the first since the pandemic began.

If the Philadelphia 2021 edition of Metal & Beer Fest was anything to go by, there will be much to celebrate in Los Angeles on December 10 and 11: lineup reunions, full-album performances and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to experience it together in the same room again.

REPULSION AND CRYPT SERMON PHOTOS BY ALYSSA LORENZON • DEADGUY PHOTO BY A.J. KINNEY

SCOTT CARLSON, REPULSION

DECIBEL MAGAZINE METAL & BEER FEST: PHILLY 2021

Vision conquest  Napalm Death successfully cross the pond and are a sight for sore eyes on American soil

A

fter two years of frustration and anticipation, thousands finally descended Philadelphia, PA upon Fishtown to bear witness to 14 WHEN: September 25-26, 2021 powerhouse acts who performed at the fourth now-kinda-sorta annual Decibel Magazine Metal & Beer Fest: Philly, paired with beers from 15 of the finest breweries (and one meadery) in North America. Here’s a recap of a long-awaited weekend spent Festing responsibly. —ALBERT MUDRIAN WHERE: The Fillmore Philly,

SATURDAY DIE CHOKING

Hometown heroes Die Choking—fueled by Chok-

ing Hazard, their collaborative hazy IPA with Philly’s own Attic Brewing Company—kicked off the rust on Saturday to open the whole shebang, playing a selection of songs from throughout their career. Drummer Joshua Cohen put in one of the weekend’s most intense performances, pumping out single-foot blasts like a man who doesn’t get tired. Guitarist Jeffrey Daniels and bassist/vocalist Paul Herzog doled out the angular, spastic riffs that Die Choking have become 14 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

known for, while Herzog belted out the lyrics to such “hits” as “Non-Yielder” and “Lungless.”

If the trio was uncomfortable on such a large stage, they didn’t make it known: Die Choking appeared as relaxed at the Fillmore as they did on their quarantine livestream. —VINCE BELLINO

ETERNAL CHAMPION

Early birds got the Hammer when they arrived on time Saturday afternoon to catch Eternal Champion’s powerful, pithy set. The troupe came all the way from Texas to crush Metal & Beer

Fest, except for guitarist/producer Arthur Rizk, who flew in from Germany, where he was in the middle of engineering the next Kreator album.

Opening with “Skullseeker,” the heaviest song from their latest album Ravening Iron, Eternal Champion moved through their set with the confidence and poise of seasoned warlords. When “I am the Hammer” fell to close their set—vocalist Jason Tarpey’s hardcore roots compelling him offstage and into the crowd for the singalong— the audience was concussed into something like satisfaction, even if they did come to soon after, shouting for more. —DUTCH PEARCE

BLOOD INCANTATION

To date, the stars continue to align for Denver-

based death metal luminaries Blood Incantation.

The foursome was radiantly brutal and impressively odd on Saturday. Throughout their threesong, 30-minute set, they never failed to remind the Fillmore faithful why they’re always blessedly sick onstage. They kicked off with Starspawn favorite “Hidden Species (Vitrification of Blood PHOTO BY A . J. K INNE Y

Part 2),” pit-stopped at instrumental waypoint “Inner Paths (to Outer Space)” and swan-songed their appearance with the incredible “Awakening From the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul).” Indeed, there was no sign of the pandemic diminishing Blood Incantation’s might. All alien technology was expertly and thankfully employed (with Luddite mentality). They parlayed the crowd’s year-plus live-show anticipation into a masterclass performance. —CHRIS DICK

MIDNIGHT

I think I speak for all of us when I say we needed a party—a loud, fast and evil party. Luckily, Cleveland’s Midnight were there to deliver the devil’s goods. And when I say loud, I mean LOUD. Even with earplugs in, I could feel the sheer weight of every snare hit, every riff and every barked line from Athenar’s wood-chipper vocal cords. The band gave devotees everything they could want, including characteristic showmanship, tight-as-hell performances and hilariously

awkward stage banter. Any day you get to hear “Fucking Speed and Darkness,” “You Can’t Stop Steel” and “Satanic Royalty” is a good day. Throw in some beers and circle pits and you’ll feel like royalty yourself. —J. ANDREW ZALUCKY

DEADGUY

Let’s be real: The first original lineup set in more

than a quarter-century from these New Brunswick, NJ noise metal legends was never going to suck. You jam five sonic plutonium rods in a makeshift atom smasher and, whether it powers up or melts down, you’re about to witness—to quote J. Robert Oppenheimer quoting Hindu scripture—one motherfucker of a “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds”-level chain reaction.

What transpired, however, was not just a gloriously on-point fission, but also one that balanced the undiluted rage of the songs with the clear joy of resurrection. Throw in a rapt ‘n’ rabid crowd, and it was a cathartic small-v victory lap the band so richly deserved. You can’t kill yourself. You’re already Dead(guy). —SHAWN MACOMBER

MUNICIPAL WASTE

Some of the best nights of my early 20s were spent seeing Municipal Waste rampage small, DIY punk venues, so it was a surreal treat to watch them command a crowd 2,000-strong in the massive Fillmore. Not that Tony Foresta is the kind of frontman to command anyone to do anything. Foresta’s chill, charismatic demeanor shined between songs, truly turning the room into one big party. Kindly, he offered the undulating audience the opportunity to stage dive. Before a backdrop of Gritty’s face, the band stayed locked tight to their human drum machine Dave Witte, faster, heavier and bursting with energy, just shredding through old and new songs both. Like entities so long deprived of their lifesblood, Municipal Waste positively reveled in their set. —DUTCH PEARCE

NAPALM DEATH

Remember that viral Tweet, “If you’re ever sad, just remember the world is 4.543 billion years old and you somehow managed to exist at the DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2021 : 15

IMMOLATION PHOTO BY SCOTT KINKADE • BLOOD INCATATION PHOTO BY HILLARIE JASON • DEADGUY PHOTO BY A.J. KINNEY

 Majesty in delay Though the original lineup from 2020 could not be preserved, (clockwise from r) Immolation, Blood Incantation and the reunion of the legendary Deadguy more than make up for last year’s party foul

DECIBEL MAGAZINE METAL & BEER FEST: PHILLY 2021

same time as David Bowie”? That’s how I feel about Napalm Death—a band that, 40 years on from conception, is releasing some of its best work ever, period. So, to see this constantly evolving iteration perform a powerful and perfectly curated selection of tracks from the initial Barney/Shane/Mitch/Jesse Big Bang of Harmony Corruption (1990; “Inner Incineration”!), Mass Appeal Madness (1991; “Pride Assassin”!), and— hullo, Danny!—the almighty Utopia Banished (1992; “Judicial Slime”!) was, with apologies to Barney’s lovely humanist speech before “Suffer the Children,” a kinda, sorta… okay, totally religious experience. We still abstain from mundane apathy, and when the scummy elements of the world outside the fest cries for sympathy, we’ll still “just sit back and laugh.” —SHAWN MACOMBER

SUNDAY TEETH

From the way Teeth—ahem—masticated the

early crowd, you’d think chewing open (seriously, again?!) the extreme metal portal through which legends like Immolation, Converge and Pig Destroyer would soon traverse was a mere walk in the fire and brimstone park. But with a blackened death wind at their backs, this California quartet set a delightfully grim and brutally majestic tone. Days before, guitarist/vocalist 16 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

Justin Moore told Decibel that the track “The Fog of Futility” expressed “the understanding of how vacuous we are when facing a scale of cosmic proportions. We will be swallowed by the maw of time and space and cannot do a thing about it.”

Well, maybe. But not this day. At dBMBF, Teeth fought the maw… and won. —SHAWN MACOMBER

CRYPT SERMON

Ministrants of doom/veterans of the inaugural

Metal & Beer Fest, Philly’s Crypt Sermon had much to share upon their return to the Fillmore stage. Along with mainstays like “Heavy Riders” and “Byzantium,” the songs from 2019’s The Ruins of Fading Light finally got their due in a live setting.

Unfortunately, Christ was not the only one that died, as the mic cut out partway through single “Key of Solomon.” After some equipment woes and a deft recovery, vocalist Brooks Wilson finally came through the speakers with a pitch-perfect delivery of the chorus, which was met with roaring approval from the crowd. A word to the wise: Do not miss the chance to catch one of modern doom’s strongest acts. —MICHAEL WOHLBERG

WARHORSE

I can’t remember the last time someone mentioned Warhorse. True, the Worcester-based doom demiurges reanimated at some point since

mysteriously dissolving in the years following their now-sought-after album As Heaven Turns to Ash...., but it’s not like the trio is trending anywhere, except maybe in the fore of Albert Mudrian’s devious mind. This explains two things: in 2015, As Heaven Turns to Ash.... occupied #88 in our Top 100 Doom Metal Albums of All Time special issue; in 2021, Warhorse’s much-anticipated return to the dBMBF stage. The trio pulled out “Horizons Burn Red,” “Lysergic Communion,” “Black Acid Prophecy” and “Scrape,” blazing one glorious slow-motion groove after another. Warhorse brought the heavy. —CHRIS DICK

IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT

Few bands can match Imperial Triumphant’s

commitment to their multifaceted art, and the New York City trio was in rare form on Sunday evening. With Alphaville, their most recent album, dropping last year during the shutdown, Ilya and Co. were no doubt one of the more anticipated acts on the bill. Quietly at first, with “Atomic Age,” Imperial Triumphant (de) constructed their set like some kind of audiovisual homage to Escher. Their jazz leanings were apparent in the fact that they were not striving to be the loudest band at the fest, lest they muddy up the richness of their mind-blowing goings-on. It was easy to see why they

MIDNIGHT PHOTO BY HILLARIE JASON • PIG DESTROYER PHOTO BY SCOTT KINKADE • CONVERGE PHOTO BY ALYSSA LORENZON

 Vows unbroken After an agonizingly long year and a half wait, (l-r) Midnight, Pig Destroyer and Converge made good on their Metal & Beer promises

collaborated with Adroit Theory on a coffee stout. Cerebral and intoxicating and completely unique, Imperial Triumphant’s set was like a sustained jolt of electricity. —DUTCH PEARCE

IMMOLATION

PIG DESTROYER

When the whole crowd chanted “This is art!” at

the end of “Jennifer,” you knew this set was going off. Everyone on Team PxDx delivered, particularly drummer Adam Jarvis, who put his own stamp on the material with a performance that was intensely technical and expressive. The first half of the exclusive Prowler in the Yard set passed by in a blur; the album’s initial 18 songs offered relentless punishment. By “Hyperviolet,” the first of the album’s longer, more mutant songs, the quintet had burned off the nervous energy that goes hand-in-hand with a set two years in development. Kinda makes you wish they’d just kept playing and gone directly into a full Terrifyer set—no one would have dared interfere with that performance. —NICK GREEN

CONVERGE

It was Lenin who once said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” It’s no exaggeration that the last 18 months have felt like several decades, and no band is better equipped to capture the emotional weight of those months (or the last 20 years) like Converge. Opening with an L-G Petrov-dedicated rendition of “Wolverine Blues,” the band followed it up with a pictureperfect performance of Jane Doe. After all that’s happened since its release, songs like “Hell to Pay” are especially eerie, and classics like “The Broken Vow” are as powerful as ever. It was a fitting and poetic closing for not only the show, but an era that’s left us as anxious, uncertain and angry as ever. —J. ANDREW ZALUCKY

A blitz through the best beer, cider and mead offerings from

METAL & BEER FEST: PHILLY 2021

BY DANIEL LAKE AND NICK GREEN

A

droit Theory’s variety of stout collaborations became a fest favorite, especially Two

Hundred—a boozy Russian Imperial that the NoVA brewery first concocted for Decibel's 200th issue livestream. That elixir drained quickly from kegs to cups to throats—but their AK Part 5 triple IPA and Illusion of Safety fruited gose kept fans returning to their table on both days. Unlike past installments of dBMBF Philly, sours were not as well represented, but Zeroday’s Strong Island sour brought a potent pucker to the party, standing out from many of the darker beers and sessionable lagers on the balcony.

Panopticon's Austin Lunn checked in with his brother-in-law and business partner at the Hammerheart table; their Master’s Table Belgian beer (a Crypt Sermon tribute/collab) and Weltenwanderer helles lager proudly represented the brewery’s light and flavorful side. Not to be outdone, the fest’s presenting brewery Broken Goblet held court with an inspiring array of flavors, veering from the sweet and satisfying Wasteland Wanderer banana split pastry stout to the official fest beer, an exceptionally well-balanced and smooth barleywine called Ashes in the Air. For those that preferred fruitier and cleaner drinking experiences, Michigan farm cidery Blake’s Hard Cider brought several offerings from their core lineup, including the dazzling El Chavo mango cider with a subtle habanero flare. Brimming Horn Meadery also made a triumphant return to Metal & Beer Fest, creating honey wine converts with their tasty Eternal Champion collab mead Skull Seeker, the complex root-vegetable oddity More Blast Beets, and the aromatic wake-up call Angel’s Fall blueberry cobbler mead, made in collaboration with Immolation.

With over 60 different beers, ciders and meads on offer, this was also a banner year for brewery/band collaborations. You could restrict yourself to only drinking collaborations while the bands were onstage and still get pretty hammered. We did. Drag Me Through Fire, Goldhorn’s Red IPA made with smoked malt, got things moving during Midnight’s performance. And Attic Brewing Company’s pine-y and hazy IPA Choking Hazard kicked the fest off in high fashion during Die Choking’s Saturday opening set.

3 Floyds debuted their third Pig Destroyer beer, a crushable Mexican lager called Junkyard God, along with two variants of Dark Lord, a Russian imperial stout. We all drained a cup for Barnaby Struve, who helped to inspire the cult of Dark Lord, while Municipal Waste dedicated their set to his memory. Festival stalwarts Wake Brewing also crushed it with a barrel-aged version of their own decadent Russian imperial stout Ultra Omega, but unveiled dBMBF Philly’s biggest surprise: a low-ABV Extra Special Bitter brewed with peppercorns, every bit as epic as the Napalm Death Harmony Corruption/Utopia Banished set that inspired it. For this, we did not abstain.

DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2021 : 17

PHOTO BY ISTOCK.COM/GROTMARSEL

Old-school death metal for real, Immolation showed us all how it’s done, crushing their set in what seemed like seconds flat. After opening with “Into Everlasting Fire,” the rest of their performance burned like a conflagration over the packed-tight venue. “Father, You’re Not a Father” and “Burial Ground” stood out like arching flares across the sun’s surface. Otherwise, the Yonkers juggernauts mowed through game-changer after world-cleaving, classic game-changer with sinister grace and scorching flair. There’s nothing like watching guitarist Bob Vigna dig his riffs out from negative space with his flailing headstock in real time. Meanwhile, frontman Ross Dolan stood mightily, front and center, wielding his bass like an instrument of death, casting his wicked sermons. It was like being in the presence of gods. —DUTCH PEARCE

Heavy Metal Thirst Trap here’s been a lot of free-floating nonsense in my head the last few days, so this will be a few bitesized pieces of said detritus—just enough for a taste because that one’s always free.

Besides, next issue is the Christmas one, and I tend to save my high-horse shit for the holidays because I’m nothing if not fucking festive.

I’ve written here and there about the shitty neighborhood I live in, mostly the one time I watched a man catch a few slugs to the chest right by my car. After a lot of hassle, I was able to find an apartment in a part of town that hasn’t had multiple shootings the next block over within a several-week period. And I’ve been trying to pack up a few decades of music-related shit without the urge to snap a record in half and use the sharp end to cut out my jugular.

I don’t know whether to bitch about a) having to deep-clean and throw away a lot of useless memorabilia I kept for nostalgia’s sake, or b) the fact that two stray bullets went through the ceiling above my daughter’s crib, which my landlord was nonplussed about. I will gleefully say that the main person responsible for all the violence and bullshit on my block was stabbed to death by a member of his own family in front of my apartment a few weeks back, and since then the block has been blissfully quiet. But that might be in poor taste, and I don’t want anyone to think I’ve made morally poor decisions in my life.

Seriously though, it feels like I’m curating a museum of USBM history that no one besides me is interested in; and, frankly, I don’t care much either. But it’s reignited the spark of writing a book about my experiences. Maybe in my new apartment I’ll be able to start working on that instead of wondering what noises outside are random shots or if they’re return fire. It’s just weird because so much of this used to mean a lot to me, and now it’s just bullshit that I must move to yet another apartment. Times change.

The other experience I had recently was driving to Philadelphia for the first time since we 18 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

played Metal & Beer Fest in 2017 to get together and record the first Krieg material since we did the Integrity split in December 2014. I haven’t even really touched an instrument in years (not that I was ever proficient in the first place), and I had promised myself I would really practice a lot this summer. Guess what? I break promises constantly. Ask Profound Lore—I’ve been promising our new album for years.

I’ve been intimidated at the thought of working on new Krieg material because our last album is one of two in my overly long discography that I love from start to finish, and following it up seemed daunting; especially when we initially were talking about recording at GodCity and being overly ambitious about what it would sound like. That really jams your head up and you start to doubt yourself—or it just paralyzes you if you’re an anxious mess like me.

So, I let that all go and, for the first time in years, worked on music without the idea of expectation being a burden. We made something with the only goal being to make a recording.

There’s something intrinsically liberating about that, to make something you don’t really care if others like. Times change.

Finally, I wanted to share this tidbit: I’ve given up coffee because of my kidney stone issue I keep prattling on about, but the other day I decided to have a cup. It was fucking terrific. So, I had another. Two hours later I began to sweat and shake, and I felt like I was going to have a heart attack or an out-of-body experience. It was fucking terrifying until I realized that I had triggered a caffeine-induced anxiety attack, the lamest four-word diagnosis next to “sad penis won’t grow.” I’ve had anxiety and panic attacks longer than most of you have been alive, but it’s never been this distressing. I used to take bumps of cocaine from strangers at shows with no regard to my personal health, and two cups of iced coffee almost had me calling 911.

Times change. No matter what. Times fucking change.

Y ISEMAN

TNE

BY COUR

The Great Pumpkin Beer Debate and Five That Don’t Suck

I

t’s that time of year: shots of

staged fun at apple orchards flood Instagram; the rest of the world adopts metal and horror movies as Halloween hobbies; and people start arguing about pumpkin beers. Ah, tradition!

Something about pumpkin beers really gets people fired up. Team Pro-Pumpkin embraces the fleeting joy of yet another beer style to enjoy, and how autumn is captured in a brew. Team Anti-Pumpkin feels its liquid candy offending any true beer enthusiast’s sensibilities.

Would this be a beer column if we did not address this annual debate? Would it be in a metal magazine if we didn’t hear from two powerhouse musicians who also love beer? Representing the “Anti” stance, we have Municipal Waste’s Dave Witte: “Richard [Christy] is gonna hate me, but here goes: It’s July and here come the pumpkin beers. Too soon for something so mediocre-tasting in my opinion. Big Beer has such hype for this seasonal Jack-Off O’ Lantern that everyone follows suit and floods the shelves with it. Yuck! That being said, Cigar City’s Good Gourd Almighty is one I actually like. Aged in rum barrels, this imperial pumpkin ale smashes all the others.”

For the “Pro” stance, none other than Witte’s beer bud, Charred Walls of the Damned’s Richard Christy:

Pumpkins united  Richard Christy (above, at Metal & Beer Fest 2017) shares his well-stocked fridge filled with the finest pumpkin brews available

“If you don’t like pumpkin beer, just don’t drink it—more for me! I consume everything pumpkin; I even use pumpkin deodorant, for Christ’s sake! [I’ve been] a proud old-school pumpkin beer drinker since the mid-1990s, when my dear friend Steve Childers (RIP) from our band Burning Inside introduced it to me, so I’m no pumpkin beer poser!

Pumpkin beer is like Halloween in a glass!

Southern Tier Pumking, Cigar City Good Gourd Almighty, Schlafly Pumpkin Ale, Two Roads Roadsmary’s Baby, Shipyard Smashed Pumpkin, Allagash Ghoulschip—give me it all! My beer guru Dave Witte isn’t a fan, but that’s OK, because there’s about a billion other beer styles we can drink together backstage at the next Municipal Waste show.”

And now for five pumpkin beers you should investigate: Cigar City Brewing’s Good Gourd Almighty

I wouldn’t be doing my due diligence if I didn’t include the one pumpkin beer that even Witte likes. This feels like a grown-up’s pumpkin beer: big, complex and boozy. That said, you may have to make friends with a collector to find a bottle they’ve been storing, since it’s not clear if 2021 will see a fresh batch.

Schlafly’s Pumpkin Ale

Whenever the pumpkin beer debate bubbles up on Twitter, trust that you will see tons of Schlafly Pumpkin Ale citations in the “pro”

category. Proud pumpkin beer lovers wield it as a faultless example, and haters admit it’s one they can’t knock too hard. It’s a classic, with pounds of fresh pumpkin, cinnamon, nutmeg and clove.

Tröegs’s Master of Pumpkins

I can’t in good conscience leave off a pumpkin beer named after a Metallica song. This one gets a point for not pandering to the “basic” PSL lovers we’ve all apparently agreed to mock.

But taste is obviously the most important thing, and this one’s got that figured out with thousands of pounds of pureed, roasted pumpkin for authentic, not candy-sweet flavor.

Off Color Brewing’s Pumpkin Beer for Cafés

Chicago’s Off Color built its loyal fanbase on its creativity, and its “Beer For” series is an example, with brews inspired by non-beer beverages. Beer for Cafés nods to tea, and applied to pumpkin, you’re getting something refreshingly nuanced. It’s got a nutty, earthy quality from cold-brewed red rooibos and a nice, smooth finish.

New Belgium’s Voodoo Ranger Atomic Pumpkin

The best way to cut through any pumpkin fluff is with heat. If you’ve been anti-pumpkin beer because you think it’s candy-coated crap, try the Voodoo Ranger Atomic Pumpkin, made with a kick of habanero chili peppers.

DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2021 : 19

IMMOLATION

N

STUDIO REPORT

ew York death metal luminaries Immolation are only five days into track-

IMMOLATION

good, too. Going into this, ing the follow-up to 2017’s Atonement when Decibel calls. Primaries Bob Vigna we thought, ‘If we get some(guitars) and Ross Dolan (vocals/bass) are chuffed not only that they’ve just thing close to Atonement, ALBUM TITLE reupped with longtime label Nuclear Blast, but that they’re also finally putwe’ll be happy.’ It’s really TBD ting their 11th album to tape at Paul Orofino’s Millbrook Sound Studios. going to crush.”

LABEL “It got delayed a bit due to COVID-19,” says Vigna. “We had planned on recording at While it’s too early to Nuclear Blast the end of 2020. That year, for us, was a writing year. There were many restrictions reveal song or album titles, PRODUCER state-to-state during the pandemic, so we really couldn’t get together until June 2021. the lyrics are no-punchesPaul Orofino The writing was tougher, too. As much as it should’ve been easier to write, many pulled complementary to (Millbrook things that happened during the pandemic made it a little bit harder. Timing-wise, the rage-filled music. Across Sound Studios, things are working out well for us, though.” the 13 songs on offer, they Sharon, CT) Immolation have returned to Orofino for two reasons: habit and comfort. These cover the state of the world, RECORDING DATES two attributes dovetail into the ideal studio environment for the New Yorkers. Their religious impropriety and August 1–16 producer of choice—since 1999’s Failures for Gods—is also family. They can count on things that infuriate RELEASE DATE their man to calm nerves, provide guidance, and stock the studio bar impressively as Immolation, who celebrate Early 2022 they blaze through drums, guitars, bass and vocals. Indeed, Orofino is their calm in year 33 in 2021. a self-imposed, wrath-filled musical tempest.

Decibel expects no compro“We set a high bar with Atonement,” Dolan says. “Musically, this new album is the next level from mise from Immolation. Dolan confirms our Atonement. It’s so much darker, pissed-off and heavier. Steve’s [Shalaty] drum performance on this prediction by saying, “This is black, sick death album is next-level. We were like, ‘Wow! You knocked it out of the park!’ Bob’s writing is really metal.” —CHRIS DICK

STUDIO SHORT SHOTS

DECIBEL FAVORITES CLOAK OFFER MORE BLACK, LESS ‘N’ ROLL ON THIRD LP Atlanta-based dark metallers Cloak have just spent the last five days holed up in the Green House, where the intrepid quartet are tracking the still-untitled follow-up to 2019’s excellent full-length The Burning Dawn.

“Everything about this recording feels different,” says vocalist/guitarist Scott Taysom. “We tried to make the studio more of our own this time. Dress it up a little bit. It’s an eccentric studio. The

20 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

whole band is in there tracking with Sean [Bruneau, drums]. We’ve never done anything like that before. Usually it’s just the two of us while tracking drums.”

Taysom and team are on a day off when they reach out to Decibel. The frontman informs us that Cloak have upped the intensity ante with their third LP. There’s more double-bass, more blast beats and heavier vocals.

“It’s way different,” Taysom says.

“A lot of people have described us as rock ‘n’ roll meets metal on the last two. This album is more metal—black metal specifically. People are going to be surprised in a good way. It still sounds like Cloak, just way more intense.”

—CHRIS DICK

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A Dream of Wilderness

GLASSING

Abrasive Austin trio does things the shard way on and off the stage

S

omeone tried to put us on [Metal Archives],” shrugs Glassing guitarist Cory Brim, “but the [admin] said, ‘This is more... post-hardcore.’” ¶ Drummer Jason Camacho nails the subtext: “‘This is more... poser hipster trash.’” ¶ Brim: “We say that we’re farm-to-table metal.” ¶ “Hand-crafted farm-to-table metal,” clarifies vocalist/bassist Dustin Coffman. “We’re the Andy Dick of metal.” ¶ Believe it or not, one hour shooting the shit over Skype isn’t quiiiite long enough to fully comprehend the labyrinthine psychological makeup of a band. We can only tell you from our hour that, five years into their career, the Austin-based blackened hardcore/doom/punk trio appears to be a) funny as fuck, and b) endearingly, um, unpolished in formal interview settings. ¶ [On their favorite individual contributions to new album Twin Dream] ¶ CAMACHO: “I think one of my favorite songs to play is ‘When You Stare’ because...” ¶ BRIM : “That’s not on this record.” ¶ CAMACHO: [explains songwriting intricacies of ‘When You Stare’ for 60 seconds] ¶ BRIM: “Cool, so what’s one of your favorite moments on the album?” ¶ CAMACHO: “Goddammit.”

22 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

Yup, the ’90s Bulls got nothing on Glassing’s team chemistry. Shit, Coffman’s favorite “individual contribution” to Twin Dream was not playing at all on Side B-opening ambient interlude “Godless Night.”

“We got in this big argument, [and] I got so mad that I had to leave,” he admits. “While I was gone, Cory went into the room and started writing this ambient part, just spitballing, and Andrew [Hernandez], our sound engineer, rushed in and hit ‘record.’

Camacho came inside from smoking a cigarette, probably trying to take the edge off this heated-ass argument, heard Cory playing, and started this really simple drum pattern. When I came back, all three of them were in the room with this bomb-ass track that was totally the vibe I wanted, and they did it without me. It was very humbling.”

Now, let’s get real, Decibel faithful: You’ll come for the shreddedlarynx terror that corrodes “Spire,” “Absolute Virtue,” “Among the Stars” and “True North,” stay for ye olde ambient interludes, but put

down first, last and security deposit for the centerpiece title track, a capital-E epic slow-burn that devolves into nerve-fraying atonal chaos.

Coffman: “We wanted to do something a little more compositionally ambitious. Camacho was super-hyped about this circular cadence...”

Brim: “... which I had an impossible time with.”

Coffman: “He hated it.”

Brim: “That song has a lot of us using restraint, [which] was hard for me because I’m very impatient when writing songs. I fought hard against that chaos part [at the end], too, but now I think it’s one of the more impactful parts of the entire album.”

For a band whose moniker is derived from a Planes Mistaken for Stars ode to assault with a broken pint glass, “iron sharpens iron” couldn’t be more apropos. Unlike that meanie Brim, we’ll let Camacho get a (last) word in edgewise: “We all have these different aspects of fucking nastiness that we’ve been able to combine on an equal platform.” —ANDREW BONAZELLI

PHOTO BY ELAN MENDOZA

GLASSING

SWALLOW THE SUN

Finnish doom crew are doing great— just don’t ask them how they’re doing

F

or anyone familiar with Swallow the Sun’s immaculately layered doom and gloom metal, the impression forms that creating art is an essential part of certain members’ continued existence on this planet. With each passing release—including the heavy of heart (and tone) Moonflowers— there’s a tangible transference of raw emotion between artist and listener that feels genuine. This raises the question: Has the longstanding Finnish act ever thought how life would be without having music as an outlet? ¶ “As we’re simple, introverted Finnish guys getting closer to middle age, it would be a disaster,” exclaims vocalist Mikko Kotamäki. “Stereotypically stubborn Finnish lads don’t go to see therapists, even if they should! ¶ “I don’t know if you’ve ever visited Finland,” he continues, “but people are slightly different. No small talk culture here. We’re quiet unless drunk or high. It takes about two years for Finnish guys to even tell their girlfriends, ‘I love you!’

After many tours in the States, I still find it annoying when you’re just walking down the street or going to buy shit from Walmart [and] complete strangers are asking how you are doing.

24 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

Even if I know it’s just the American way of being polite, I can’t help myself from thinking, ‘Why the fuck are they asking—do they really wanna know I’m doing shit and have a hangover?’ So, yes, music is a wonderful way to express feelings that are too tough to speak about.

Music is the therapist for us.”

Because of geographical remoteness and the closed-off nature of natives in general, it seemed to outsiders as though Finns would be better equipped than most to deal with the crippling isolation of COVID-19. Kotamäki says that the pandemic could have been much worse for his country than it was, and that Finland—an extreme metal Mecca to many—didn’t have super strict lockdowns. But sadly, on a personal level, tragedy still found the talented vocalist.

“I lost my mother last year,” he confirms. “I’m glad I was able to be here the whole time for her last months; I actually had time

to stop and be around loved ones after many years [of touring]. I guess that’s the positive side of it.

However, [chief songwriter] Juha Raivio lives in the woods of Sweden, so he was totally isolated there.

The border between Sweden and Finland was closed for a long time.

Maybe the songs got some extra melancholy from that…”

Moonflowers is a continued exploration of life-changing grief—a heavily relatable theme synonymous with Swallow the Sun’s increasingly ornate music (this record comes with a full suite of classical interpretations of its songs). Kotamäki notes, however, that there’s a twist this time—the band is now at the stage where “sorrow turns to hate.”

“When you’re stuck in the house with memories, can’t go anywhere, the world is closed, traveling is banned, lots of time to think about things alone… that’s where the lyrics come from.” —DEAN BROWN

PHOTO BY JUSSI RATILAINEN

SWALLOW THE SUN

WORM

WORM

Duo puts the “fun” back in Floridian funeral doom metal

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hen asked about Floridian funeral doom duo Worm’s upcoming album title, multi-instrumentalist Fantomslaughter (or Phantomslaughter, depending on where you look) explains, “I was thinking of a location like... what would be the best name for some fantasy swamp? Foreverglade is probably like… if you were ever trapped in the swamps or the Everglades forever.” ¶ Worm’s 20 Buck Spin debut is a dark ode to the place they call home. Florida’s endless, humid swamps have been a source of mystery and legend, and these natives express their love in the slowest terms possible. ¶ “Definitely it’s gotta be 50 percent nature, if we’re not just discussing music,” Fantomslaughter continues, discussing his range of influences. “I’m trying to conjure images of these humid swamps, but not in a modern sense. I’m just trying to conjure up a time where there were—or will be—no humans. Nature plays a big role in defining the atmosphere.”

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Foreverglade’s greatest departure from previous Worm releases lies within Fantomslaughter’s use of shredding, heavy metal-inspired leads and solos. He elaborates: “To be honest, I have to throw it back to Florida. I would see what Chuck [Schuldiner] would do in the later Death days; more power metal, more melodic elements. We have this song on the album called ‘Subaqueous Funeral,’ and that’s my attempt at making a ‘Voice of the Soul.’ I don’t instinctively try to sound like those heavy metal bands; it’s just a part of my diet of death metal and hearing their more traditional metal influences.”

About funeral doom metal itself, Fantomslaughter understands the listeners’ difficulties with such slow, brutal music. Even so, it isn’t all gloom and doom for this songwriter: “Funeral doom metal is this

pretty grim thing, but I get excited coming up with ideas. I’m not sitting here being all gloomy; I’m definitely having a great time.”

And this shows—Foreverglade’s melodic and at times acrobatic music isn’t all misery; Fantomslaughter and his mysterious bandmate Equimanthorn’s recipe calls for liberal amounts of, dare we say, fun, which is a drastic departure from Thergothon and Skepticism’s genredefining downtrodden approach.

“I don’t think [funeral doom metal] is a universal sound, that’s for sure,” Fantomslaughter muses on the genre’s reach in a modern market.

“It’s more of an acquired taste—you get it right away or you hate it. I feel like when it comes to modern metal fans, they don’t like slower-moving things and prefer speed. I feel like there should be more funeral doom bands.” —JON ROSENTHAL

PORTRAYAL OF GUILT

Austinites extend their extremely extreme nature to album titles

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the distant future, when Austin trio Portrayal of Guilt are crotchety old men bouncing chubby grandkids on decrepit knees, guitarist/vocalist Matt King, bassist Alex Stanfield and drummer James Beveridge will be able to spin two yarns. How, in 2021, their band released two albums in a calendar year. And how, with that second one, they proved themselves to be a sneaky bunch of motherfuckers. ¶ King explains: “With this album, the actual record is housed in a die-cut slipcase. The album itself is like a mirror board LP and when the cover goes over it, you only see ‘ST.’ So, when we sell it anywhere, it’s going to be marketed as ‘self-titled,’ but people who get it will know what it is.” ¶ What it is is the band’s blasphemously titled third full-length, Christfucker. And any bands that ever experienced internal hesitancy or external pressure from retail outlets, pressing plants or labels outright refusing to manufacture or sell their naughtily-named releases are probably now kicking themselves after learning how easily 28 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

Portrayal of Guilt have gotten away with a title worthy of detention in certain eastern European countries.

“After we came up with the title, I texted Jeff [Casazza] at the label [Run for Cover] and asked if he thought there would be any issues,” King says. “I know they weren’t expecting that because we’re the only heavy band on the label, but he replied that he didn’t think so.

To some people, it may seem super sinful, fucked-up [and] wrong, or that we’re being edgy kids, but I think it’s the greatest album title ever and we’re not afraid of it.”

Luckily, Christfucker is backed with music worthy of the name—a furiously violent, raw and strippeddown exposition of extreme music’s nether regions. Some parts hearken back to the sweaty basements that Pg. 99 and Orchid tore up in the ’90s; others force-feed Botch’s evil math rock into a black metal and

grindcore wringer; and all the while, the frigid industrialized clang of early Godflesh acts as respite and foil to intense bursts of cannibalistic humanoid underground death metal.

“The idea was that we wanted this record to sound like it came straight out of hell,” King says. “There are so many examples of soul-crushing things happening constantly, but actual reality was more a theme on our previous releases, like We Are Always Alone [the band’s other 2021 album].

With the new record, the delivery is definitely influenced by what’s going on, our personal lives and being frustrated with life and not being able to tour, but the actual songs are fictional horror stories coming from really dark places that play into the material. If anything, we’re just trying to sound scarier and scarier. Above all, that’s the key.”

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

PHOTO BY ADDRIAN JAFARITABAR

PORTRAYAL OF GUILT

EMMA RUTH RUNDLE

L.A. singer/multi-instrumentalist digs deep to reach the delicate core of her creativity

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ike stumbling upon the hidden diary of a departed family member, at some point during Emma Ruth Rundle’s new LP, Engine of Hell, you’re probably going to stop and say to yourself, “I don’t think I’m supposed to be hearing this.”

There’s a stark vulnerability to the songs that feels almost uncomfortable—an injection of pure truth when you’re least expecting it. Of course, that’s also what makes the album so remarkable, as Rundle’s decision to condense her typically layered music into the principal elements of voice, piano and acoustic guitar has led to the most emotionally affecting material of her career. ¶ “My intention was to capture an exposed and intimate expression of these songs—to strip away all the textures and obscuring effects I have used so heavily in my music up until now,” she explains. “I’ve long aspired to write and record such an album, even before [2018’s] On Dark Horses, but the timing was never right.” ¶ Indeed, Rundle’s schedule has been jam-packed over the last few years, from touring with a full band in support of 30 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

On Dark Horses to teaming up with sludge superstars Thou for 2020’s May Our Chambers Be Full LP. But once the dust settled on those volumeworshipping projects, she knew it was the perfect time to “boldly go to the cold world of minimalism” by dropping all audio effects… and even her trusty axe.

“There isn’t a single note of electric guitar on this album, which is the instrument I’m most known for playing,” affirms Rundle. “I wanted to serve a vulnerability that could convey the heaviest music I’ve ever written and set the listener on edge a bit. There’s beauty in the flaws and humanism of it.”

To capture this complex beauty, Rundle opted to record live takes of every song—a bold approach she modeled after similarly personal records like Nick Drake’s Pink Moon and Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green.

Engineer/co-producer Sonny

DiPerri even researched the miking techniques that were used on Pink Moon and got in touch with its producer, John Wood, for further clarification. The results are often breathtaking, as Rundle stays so close to the microphone that you can hear every detail in her quiet, impassioned delivery—an anguished soul performing for an audience of one.

“I would do take after take and often break down and cry from the pressure of trying to execute the songs all the way through without fucking up,” Rundle says of the Engine of Hell recording process. “And things are fucked up—we always chose the performance with the most emotion over one where the notes were played or sung ‘correctly.’ The goal was to give a real and imperfect delivery of the songs, because that’s what I really sound like as a human being.” —MATT SOLIS

PHOTO BY MASON ROSE

EMMA RUTH RUNDLE

STORMKEEP

STORMKEEP

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olorado-based epic melodic black metal Stormkeep would rather be labeled, as per tale teller Otheyn Vermithrax, “dungeon metal symphonia.” But stratification is already stratified, and Dungeons & Dragons themes in metal’s greater pantheon have passed into memory along with, unfortunately, Gary Gygax. ¶ Actually, none of that is true in Stormkeep’s vibrant universe, where late-’90s black metal (1997, specifically), sci-fi/fantasy media (mostly art/literature/film) and Vermithrax’s own colorful imagination merge into one. The wild-eyed splendor of the Galdrum EP (2020; Ván Records) merely hinted at the beginning of a wider, deeper world unfolding.

Certainly, Stormkeep’s newest epic, Tales of Othertime (also Ván), plunges storyline protagonist the Seer into an album-spanning journey of magic, mystery, war and dragons. ¶ “Definitely, there are trappings of nostalgia in what we do,” concedes Vermithrax, who also moonlights in Blood Incantation and Wayfarer. “Our whole thing—from artwork and record layouts to band photos and music—is fueled by a nostalgia for a style that has been, for the most part, lost. But it’s not just that. It’s also inspired by fantasy novels, film and artwork. That stuff has always

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appealed to me from a young age, starting with Lord of the Rings. That left such an impression on me. The jump to black metal was very easy after reading that. The nostalgia of it all is the birthplace of Stormkeep.”

Stormkeep rushed black metal’s well-traversed oubliette like a Les Edwards painting in 2017. The group’s demo, Promotional Tape MMXVIII, stirred splendid memories of European symphonic black metal in its pre-mesh shirt heyday. Coursing through Stormkeep’s veins were long-distant, yet compelling strands of Summoning, Covenant, Sirius and Emperor. Tales of Othertime isn’t a rehash of old guard greats, but rather a lens into a band establishing a musical voice that’s indelibly intertwined with Vermithrax’s multi-volume, demiurgic vision.

“Galdrum was specific to black metal from the mid-’90s,” Vermithrax says. “There were many bands I wanted to synthesize into one thing. The new album is more of finding what Stormkeep is itself.

Absolutely, there are still elements of all the bands that we like, but I would also say this album expands more on the singular things that are unique to Stormkeep. That’s been the most arduous and difficult thing we’ve had to do—to find our voice. On Tales of Othertime, we’re crystalizing something that is completely ours.

“We wanted to up the ante as far as bombasity is concerned,” Vermithrax continues. “The drum production specifically. We wanted that large drum sound. We went to a place in Denver called the Cave, which is a large room, to record the drums. We then brought in Michael Zech, who is the producer and live guitarist of the Ruins of Beverast. He mixed the record.

We spent many hours honing the sound. We then had Victor Bullok, who’s in Triptykon and Dark Fortress, master the album. We really went for that Pytten [Eirik Hundvin]/Grieghallen sound on Tales of Othertime.” —CHRIS DICK

PHOTO BY PETRAS VAZNELIS

USBM crew achieves the ancestral powers of mid-’90s Scandinavia

COMING SOON ON MINUSHEAD.COM

DEATHVALLEYHIGH RAISE HELL (SINGLE) FALL 2021

INCITE DEADBEAT SINGLE OUT NOW NEW EP 2022

APPARITION

APPARITION

Californian killers keep the jazz skills sharp so the death metal’s even deadlier

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their debut full-length, the innocuously titled Feel, California-based crushers Apparition prove that oblique influences are the stuff of growth and innovation. Without stepping anywhere beyond the boundaries of death-doom, the quartet mines the undiscovered areas of classic death metal riffs while simultaneously (and seemingly effortlessly) dominating most of their contemporaries. ¶ Apparition was formed by drummer/vocalist Andrew and guitarist Miles, who met at school, having grown up in separate parts of California, but in similar ways. Coming up through the “punk/metal/hardcore” scene, Miles says, he and Andrew “both happened to take our passion for music and playing our respective instruments to the next level by getting into playing jazz.” ¶ During college, they played a show together as an “improv-grindcore” band. According to Miles, “that fizzled out fast, but we still wanted to play sick music together.” ¶ Easier said than done for most, but it was their dedication that would ultimately set Apparition apart. As Miles reflects, “Being fully immersed in jazz while being heavily disciplined in practice

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for four years without looking up had sort of led us both down a weird path of self-discovery, and we basically mutually realized we needed to get back to playing music we truly loved.”

Unlike academia, Feel rewards the listener at every turn. But it’s also the kind of album that, the more time you spend with it, the more you discover to appreciate. Miles tells us that his influences range from Allan Holdsworth to David Lynch on Feel, which is a thematic follow-up to Granular Transformation, their 7-inch from 2020. “Both Feel and Granular Transformation explore the connection between physiological and emotional processes in a way that relates to our personal traumas and experiences,” Miles explains. “They lead into each other and are all part of the same thing.”

Apparition recorded Feel with Taylor Young at the Pit. Miles puts it like there was no question of recording it anywhere else: “We

chose to record with Taylor because I’d known him for about a decade and had gone to him many times before that, and already knew he was the best around.” Young also sent the two songs from Granular Transformation—“on his own accord,” Miles stresses—to Profound Lore, ultimately getting the band signed. Miles continues: “We hold ourselves to a very high standard, and Taylor picked up on that and helped us achieve the best versions of those songs that we could.”

Represented by a quietly unsettling painting from Abomination Hammer, based on an idea loosely inspired by Andrew and Miles discussing the book Spinal Catastrophism

by Thomas Moynihan, Feel arrives as both monument and signifier. But it’s only the beginning. According to Miles, “We have basically been continuously writing since the inception of the band and are always trying to challenge ourselves to outdo past material.” —DUTCH PEARCE

KOWLOON WALLED CITY

KOWLOON WALLED CITY Post-noise rockers move step by step towards first new LP in six years

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hings that have the most space, you’re gonna hear what’s beautiful about them.” ¶ This, from Kowloon Walled City guitarist/frontman Scott Evans, hefts enough existential weight to relate to a whole host of things. But in this instance, it’s one of the guiding principles behind the band’s fourth (stunning) full-length, Piecework. ¶ “On the last record [2015’s Grievances], we were trying to be tough editors, and on this record, we were trying to be even tougher still,” Evans says about taking the band’s sparse, sludgy noise rock and stripping it back even further. “We learned at some point that not everyone needs to be playing all the time, and when only a couple people are, it’s fucking awesome.” ¶ He’s certainly right about that. This cutting down to the marrow has created an immensely compelling, earnest and emotionally pulverizing record by the quartet, who often pull back on the distortion and allow tension-packed silences to stretch out during songs that even Evans describes as “almost uncomfortably long.”

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“One of the cheats you get from having a bunch of gain is it leaves a ton of feedback and gnarl, and it’s just a different experience,” he explains. “We like the sound of things ringing out and dying. It sounds unique to our ears and forces us to write differently. You can hear interesting things you may not hear otherwise, so we’re always trying to chase that down.”

Despite these self-imposed rules, they were able to successfully write the album in about a year, recording most of it in the summer of 2018. The reason it’s coming out three years later, though, is due to 603 words.

“I hit a wall and had some real issues with lyrics,” Evans admits.

“It was just a very difficult time for me with being creative and confident. That basically put the record on hold, and it took a lot

of work to grind through. But everyone was extremely patient and understanding. It speaks to what we’ve realized, which is that we’re really lucky to have each other and do this together.”

Because, honestly, why should they care about anything else?

While Kowloon Walled City plan to tour in support of Piecework (and work on a follow-up), the most important thing is the knowledge that, as Evans puts it, “the band will be here tomorrow.”

“We know this is not the only thing in our lives. But I’ve realized what an incredible gift music and being a musician is. It’s given me my best friends for my entire life.

It gives me people from around the world that I stay in touch with all the time. I feel very fortunate to have it in my life, this shared passion.” —SHANE MEHLING

DOLD VORDE ENS NAVN

DOLD VORDE ENS NAVN

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think [2019’s gjengangere i hjertets mørke ep] was kind of a loose start of something we wanted to evolve,” guitarist Håvard “Haavard” Jørgensen says of his newest venture, black metal outfit Dold Vorde Ens Navn, whose lineup he shares with current and former members of classic BM bands Dødheimsgard, Ved Buens Ende and more. “We had a nice start, and I think that the goal for this album [Mørkere] was to have a more joint experience with all the members. The songs were written, but nothing was written in stone like the EP was. This time we were a band from the get-go. We did this in a more collaborative way. We are really satisfied with the outcome of this album because every member has a real part of it. ¶ “We don’t tend to emphasize playing at 200 or 120 bpm,” Haavard continues. “That’s not the point. The point is to make something and channel what you’re feeling or into at the moment. I’m not sure if this is going to be ‘our sound,’ but we are much closer to something we all can relate to, and the album has a nice dynamic between faster, slower, more upbeat and other songs.”

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“We’ve evolved more and matured more as a band,” bassist Kai S. Halvorsen adds. “This album is just a result of that. The lyrics are way darker, and everything is solitary and evil in that way. It’s not Satan anymore, it’s the evil within.”

Mørkere might come as a bit of comfort for those who long for Haavard’s salad days in Ulver, as this album marks the return of folk-inspired acoustic guitars in his songwriting.

“It wasn’t an option to exclude them,” says Halvorsen. “These songs have everything they need and that’s just how it is. It’s that simple!”

Haavard continues: “I’ve always used acoustic guitars in everything.

It’s just a part of the sound, I think.

It wasn’t really a decision, either. It just fits together. None of the songs are really calculated; there’s nothing where we sat down and talked about,

‘We need this song or that kind of song.’ It just sort of happens.”

With such a maturation in sound and trust in each other’s artistic instincts, Dold Vorde Ens Navn’s full-length debut could very well mark a high point for black metal in the new decade. Even with such a potent execution of black metal in an older way, Haavard’s past will always catch up with him. “[Being compared to older Ulver] makes sense in a way,” concedes Haavard, “as I understand I will always be compared to those records, but it’s also the same way we made riffs and wrote music in Ulver. These could just as easily be an Ulver song because of the riffs, or a Dødheimsgard song because of the vocals. Every artist who has been making music in the past still carries some of that with them.”

—JON ROSENTHAL

PHOTO BY THORMOD LINDBERG

Norwegian experimental black metal vets trust their instincts

LULLABIES FOR ETERNAL SLEEP Québec, Canada’s very own APES present their newest offering of crushing Death-Grind in the form of “Lullabies for Eternal Sleep”! Mixed and mastered by Grammy nominated producer Will Putney (Body Count, Thy Art is Murder, Knocked Loose) and features a guest appearance by Dylan Walker of Full of Hell.

Out January 7th, 2022 V I N Y L / D I G I TA L

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Produced, mixed and mastered by Erol Ulug (Our Place of Worship is Silence, Swampbeast) at Bright Lights Studios and featuring artwork by Mark Erskine.

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XYTHLIA

IMMORTALITY THROUGH QUANTUM SUICIDE Translation Loss is excited to announce the vinyl reissue of XYTHLIA’s crushing debut record “Immortality Through Quantum Suicide”. An epic collision of tech-death, grind and hardcore that is equal parts face melting as it is soul devouring. Mastered for Vinyl by Nick Stanger of XYTHLIA and features the gorgeous art of Carlos Agraz (Teeth, Uthullun).

OUT JANUARY 7TH, 2022 VINYL/DIGITAL

genocidal rite Providence, RI’s Doom/Sludge purveyors, CHURCHBURN celebrate their 10 year anniversary with their most accomplished album yet entitled “Genocidal Rite”. Featuring ex-members of Vital Remains and Grief!

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K N I V E S , L A B Y R I N T H S, M I R R O R S DROUTH’S stunning debut record “Knives, Labyrinths, Mirrors” finally sees a proper vinyl reissue! Featuring all new artwork courtesy of frontman Matt Stikker (Power Trip, Witch Vomit, Outer Heaven)!

O U T A P RIL 2 2 nd, 2 0 2 2 VINYL/DIGITAL

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GRAND CADAVER

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wedish death metal throwbacks Grand Cadaver haven’t plied standard band paradigms since Frankensteining unexpectedly last year. To wit, they didn’t rehearse a single time together before recording debut album Into the Maw of Death (Majestic Mountain). Sticking with that theme, they haven’t shared the stage either. But unorthodox operations aren’t stopping frontman Mikael Stanne and the rest of the Grand Cadaver swarm from firing up Skype for a group chat—presumably about the imminent arrival of Maw—and a collective drink of local and imported beer. At (obviously decaying) heart, this very activity describes the formation of Grand Cadaver, their modus operandi and how they got to where they are today. ¶ “Alex [Stjernfeldt, guitarist] wrote one song a day over two months,” says Stanne with a modicum of disbelief. “He said to me, ‘When I’m writing for Grand Cadaver, it should be very instinctual and not planned.’ I supported that. So, when one song didn’t feel right or didn’t work, he wrote another one.

Simple as that. Suddenly, I get eight [or] nine songs from him.

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He’s like, ‘OK, here’s the album.

I might have one more [song] in me.’ I then put my vocals to the songs. More like a demo. I sent that out to the rest of the guys, and they were like, ‘OK, cool. Let’s record it!’”

Unlike Stanne’s day job in Decibel Hall of Famers Dark Tranquillity, Grand Cadaver are purely instinctual. If there’s something to ponder—songwriting, recording methods—it’s probably not the right call for the deathly Gothenburg upstarts. Along with Stjernfeldt’s shotgun, devil-maycare songsmithing, there was no way the rest of Grand Cadaver were going to spend more time in the studio with producer Per Stålberg than they needed. All told, the Swedes spent six days at Welfare Sounds, where they exhumed and consumed a thick, meaty sound that harkens back to idyllic, preInternet times.

“Per comes from the same area as me,” Stanne says. “He’s our age. He’s totally an old-school death metal guy. So, he wants us to sound like that, too. When we were between takes, we’d sit together and listen to old-school death metal albums in the studio—drinking beer, of course.

We’d sit and discuss what this [Grand Cadaver] should sound like and feel like. The production is now, but it has the spirit of the music we grew up with and were a part of. We didn’t want triggered drums. We didn’t want it to be too polished. Had to be raw, but still sound good. Nothing is fixed or shaped. Most of the guitars and drums are single takes.”

Into the Maw of Death may have been written and recorded over a few weeks, but “Disanimated,” “World Mausoleum,” “Cold Dead Light Leads” and the title track feel and sound like they’ve been rotting delightfully in a Swedish cellar for 30 years. —CHRIS DICK

PHOTO BY RICHARD BLOOM

GRAND CADAVER

Death metal vets die old, leave a disgusting corpse

LUCIFER

FRONTWOMAN JOHANNA SADONIS WALKS THROUGH FIRE

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BY SARAH KITTERINGHAM • PHOTO BY ESTER SEGARRA

he album cover is basically my ‘fuck you’ towards the patriarchy.

To all the shit that I’ve gone through, being a woman in the world.

Especially in the music business—there’s just so much that one has to put up with, and you have to prove yourself a lot harder and make yourself a target for gossip. People make up shit about you. As soon as you put yourself on some sort of stage, you become a target.” ¶ Johanna Sadonis, vocalist and songwriter of proto-metallers Lucifer is referring to the incendiary cover of her band’s fourth studio album, Lucifer IV. Upon it, Sadonis is strung to a cross, cast in a ghoulish red hue, staring the viewer down with utter defiance. It unintentionally evokes the witch who is burned alive in Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s legendary The Seventh Seal (1957). Intentionally, it’s modeled after the work of both Madonna and multi-disciplinary artist Diamanda Galás. ¶ Meanwhile, the music within perpetuates Lucifer’s trajectory of the heaviest classic rock, with an ample dose of Southern sounds. It’s almost as if the dueling themes of ’60s acid hippie culture and ’70s downer Americana have merged: Think Altamont distilled into a band.

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Sadonis continues: “It doesn’t matter how good of a musician or how sincere of a rock fan you are, and how you really mean everything and how much work you put into it. You still have people who are like, ‘Oh yeah, dumb Barbie.

Wouldn’t do it without her husband.’ People always talk shit.”

The “husband” in question is multi-instrumentalist Nicke Andersson, who joined Lucifer in 2017, replacing guitarist Gaz Jennings (ex-Cathedral). The legendary Entombed/Hellacopters member picked up where Jennings left off, forming the co-writing core with Sadonis. Together, the couple co-formed Riding Reaper Records for Lucifer singles and splits. The full band lineup was fleshed out with guitarists Martin Nordin and Linus Björklund, who joined the fold in 2018.

Bassist Harald Göthblad followed in 2019.

YOU CAN PUT ME UP ON A STAKE AND TRY TO BURN ME, AND I’LL LAUGH IN YOUR FACE BECAUSE I’M STILL GOING TO WRITE A WAY BETTER RECORD THAN YOU’VE EVER RELEASED.

SO, FUCK YOURSELF. JOHANNA SADONIS

“I know some people think [the album cover] is some sort of Jesus mockery,” Sadonis says.

“One can see it as that as well. I mean, why— was Jesus a woman? [Laughs]” “It is supposed to be a stake upon which I’m being burned. It’s just supposed to symbolize me being defiant about it and it’s like, ‘Okay, you can put me up on a stake and try to burn me, and I’ll laugh in your face because I’m still going to write a way better record than you’ve ever released. So, fuck yourself.’”

Sadonis’ words are not flippant—Lucifer IV is the band’s most mature and sinister outing yet, arguably the strongest in her discography.

It’s due to a host of reasons. The album includes writing credits from multiple members; in addition, the pandemic forced the constantly touring band to actually stay home, thus giving them time to focus more on specific flourishes. The impact is palpable.

“I’ve never really liked being on the road,” admits Nicke Andersson. “And I’ve been on the road since I was 18. That’s a very long time.” In addition to largely staying home for 18 months, he explains that album recording conditions correspondingly changed; unlike Lucifer II (2018) and Lucifer III (2020), Lucifer IV was captured over the 2020 winter at both Andersson’s home studio (known as Honk Palace) and Björklund’s Studio Ryssviken.

“Linus sent us quite a few things, and there were two of them that worked out really good, which [are] ‘Crucifix (I Burn for You)’ and ‘Nightmare,’” he explains. “The funny thing is that those two songs are the two songs that sound maybe the most like Lucifer on the last two albums!

“It does make the band feel more like a band,” he continues. “And instead of the two dictators over here… I’ve always said that democracy is

nice on paper, but in bands it doesn’t work. You can’t have a complete democracy in a band. It’s chaos. So, you need captains.”

While Sadonis and Andersson steered the ship, Nordin also contributed in the form of Sabbathian interlude “The Funeral Pyre.” As a result, Lucifer IV is yet another artifact in the band’s discography that feels plucked from another time.

“We hear that a lot, that this is very much like a ’60s [or] ’70s record collector band,” acknowledges Andersson, whose musical repertoire has been so thoroughly mined by the bands that followed in his wake that it’s damn near impossible to separate him from loaded musical terminology. “In some way, that bothers me a little bit because that kind of goes hand-in-hand with ‘retro.’ No thank you. I would call it timeless and just be done with it ... Being in a band, what you want to strive [for] is the golden era, of course.”

Andersson's Death Breath will soon rejoin Lucifer as a band mining an era of timeless music—but in this case, it will be the early Swedish death metal edition. The outfit is finally releasing a follow-up to 2006’s highly collectible Stinking Up the Night.

“We realized it took us 14 years,” says Andersson. “Fourteen years ago, we did everything except with the vocals—everything. Then life happened and other bands happened. It’s our Chinese Democracy.”

In the meantime, Lucifer IV will be released in November via Century Media, resplendent with dark themes, sunny melodies, ominous organs, squealing solos and that aforementioned underlying element of mockery.

“The older I got, the older the music [I enjoyed] got… I just think it’s been done so well,” concludes Sadonis. “You can’t really reinvent it better. I’d rather just dig around the old record crates.”

D E C I BDEELC I:BDEELC:EAMPBREI R L 2021 : 43

TECH-DEATH WIZARDS

CHANNEL PERSONAL LOSS INTO A CREATIVE REBIRTH

BY DANIEL LAKE PHOTO BY VINCENT GRUNDKE

DP EC 44 : A RE I LM2B0E2R1 2: 0D2E1C:I BDEELC I B E L

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early a decade ago, Decibel held up Obscura’s then-latest prog-tech progeny

Omnivium as one of the 100 best death metal albums of all time. It holds up.

The melodies and instrumental pyrotechnics still reward dozens of attentive spins even after the record has become familiar. The puzzle pieces interlock in tantalizing patterns. This second chapter of the German collective’s sprawling quadrilogy (which spans 2009’s Cosmogenesis through 2018’s brain-breaking Diluvium) represents both the band’s prowess at that time and, conversely, one of the moments that convinced primary composer Steffen Kummerer that Obscura had struck off in the wrong direction. ¶ “I see Obscura as a live act, not as a studio band, not as a band doing clinics onstage,” Kummerer asserts. “With Omnivium, we never did pre-production for that album. It was written entirely on a computer. In the end, it turned out we are not able to reproduce most of the material live. This is the reason why we only play three songs off that entire album.”

Having imbued the Obscura name with all of tech-death’s whip-smart wizardry (not to mention fretless bass), Kummerer found himself wrestling against the tendencies that had taken his band to the top of the heap. Nor was this the last time he would feel the group hurtling toward the cliff of inscrutability. “The second time I felt that we were stuck in the situation—becoming too narrow-minded—was with the last album, Diluvium, when we started to go very deep into polyrhythms. It’s almost not reproducible. It’s cool on the record. It’s fine if you sit down and play a clinic. But in a live show, it doesn’t work too well. I had to pull the plug, so to say, and renew the band’s sound. I don’t want to be onstage and have to work absolutely on the edge every night without enjoying playing live. I’d rather go back one step and enjoy what I’m doing.”

Diluvium was an end, both to a thematic thread and Obscura’s tenure with Relapse Records. The band inked a new deal with Nuclear Blast and used the writing sessions for the next record to look back across what was past and gone, and say a heartfelt farewell—A Valediction indeed.

“During the last two or three years,” Kummerer says, “I lost a couple of family members and close friends. The last song, ‘Heritage,’ was written during the week when I heard that Sean Reinert passed away. There’s a certain Cynic and Death’s Human touch in this song. “[But] you can leave behind different things than people. One of the songs deals with the fact that my family had to flee from Eastern Germany before the [Berlin] Wall was down, and we basically left behind everything we had, so we had to start from scratch. This fact is something we are still dealing with to this day. My family really had big issues finding new ground and getting accepted over here.”

Not every loss is a bitter one, though. As Kummerer puts it, “There are also some uplifting themes. The song ‘When Stars Collide,’ or ‘The Beyond,’ they have a more positive attitude because sometimes it can be quite rewarding if you leave some negativity behind you. For

example, if you think you are stuck in a certain situation with negative influences—people, a job, a social life—you can simply do a restart.

It’s quite an American thing, moving from one city to another and just start from scratch, doing everything new. It’s not very common here in Germany where I live. You are pretty much stuck in your social life and family life. It’s not that easy simply leaving everything behind, to go somewhere else and start a new life. I think this is something I picked up during the North American tours I did in the last decade, that it’s quite common in the U.S. to do. It’s quite positive, I think.”

Not only does the whole record benefit from the expert touch of Studio Fredman’s Fredrik Nordström, the triumphant spirit of “When Stars Collide” gets a further boost from the confluence of momentary inspiration and Nordström’s vast network of talented contacts.

“I was in Sweden to record acoustic guitars and vocals,” Kummerer says, “and we thought about [doing] a clean vocal section. I mentioned to Fredrik, ‘This should be something like what Björn Strid is doing in Soilwork or the Night Flight Orchestra,’ and he said, ‘Okay, let’s call him.’ Two days later we had vocal lines.”

Anyone hoping to hear the most technically convoluted Obscura record yet won’t have much use for A Valediction, but fans who can handle a more artistically agile version of the band will find a myriad of enjoyable surprises. “The D-beat in ‘Devoured Usurper’ is something we never did before and it is absolutely unexpected for this band, but I thought it was so cool that we had to keep it. It’s so out of our comfort zone.

Of course, we had some midtempo or doomish songs in the past, but this is so absolutely over the edge. I can’t wait to play this song live. We are in the middle of rehearsing for our European and North American tours, and it’s so much fun playing this song. At the same time, on the same record, we have a song with ’80s power metal keyboards. It’s so diverse, and it’s so much fun to listen to it front to back.”

The last song, ‘Heritage,’ was written during the week when I heard that Sean Reinert passed away.

THERE’S A CERTAIN CYNIC AND DEATH’S HUMAN TOUCH IN THIS SONG. Steffen Kummerer D E C I BDEELC I:BDEELC:EAMPBREI R L 2021 : 45

interview by

QA j. bennett

DAVE MURRAY WIT H

IRON MAIDEN’s longest-serving guitarist on record collecting, the many faces of Eddie and the band’s new album

46 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

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his is the longest break I’ve had for about 40 years.” That’s Dave be looking at the artwork and reading the lyrics

Murray talking about the enforced downtime caused by the pandemic.

Not that it’s been particularly rough for him: Iron Maiden’s longestserving guitarist lives in Hawaii and hasn’t left the island the entire time. “I heard a great quote from somebody who said, ‘We were told to stay at home, don’t go out, sit on the couch and watch TV. Well, I’ve been training for that my whole life.’” ¶ Luckily, Maiden were ahead of the game when the world shut down. On a break from their Legacy of the Beast tour in early 2019, they recorded their 17th full-length in France. Titled Senjutsu, it’s another epic double album in the vein of 2015’s The Book of Souls. This time it’s got a distinctly Japanese theme, with a particularly viciouslooking Eddie appearing on the sleeve in full samurai regalia. “It’s funny—I’ve only heard it myself a couple of months ago,” our man reveals. “Even though we recorded it in 2019, it was held back because of everything that’s going on. I never really got to hear it finished, so I’ve been listening to it quite a bit now and I’m really enjoying it.

Hopefully, Maiden fans will enjoy it as well—and it’ll take their minds off of things.”

We’re talking on the day you’ve released Senjutsu’s second single, “Stratego.” What can you tell us about the song?

Speaking of Bruce, he recently contracted COVID, even though he’s been vaccinated.

How’s he doing?

Janick [Gers] and Steve [Harris] wrote that one.

I was just listening to it before talking to you, just to get a refresher. I love it. It’s got everything that Maiden’s about—the harmonies, the melodies with the vocal. It’s got a nice groove to it and it’s heavy, but very melodic. There’s a lot of octave guitars in there. I think it’s a great song. The first song we put out, “The Writing on the Wall,” was probably a bit away from things we’ve done before, which I think is healthy. And to put it out there as the first one, you’re kind of pushing yourself. But every track on the album sounds different, so no particular song is necessarily a representation of the whole album. But I think “Stratego” sums up the general direction that the album progresses into. I mean, you’ve heard it. There’s a lot of stuff going on there.

He’s doing great, actually. We’ve been in touch and he’s recovered. He said it felt like a bad case of flu, but he’s in great shape now. The first few days put him back a bit, but he’s fit as a fiddle and strong as an ox. Nothing’s gonna knock him down. Obviously, having the vaccine took the wind out of its sails, so it didn’t progress any further. So, we’re really happy that he’s back.

As you said, “The Writing on the Wall” is a little different for Maiden. It’s got a bit of a Western feel to it. What was appealing about that direction for you?

I really like the jangling chords and the beat of it. And absolutely, it’s got a Western vibe.

Maiden has a real identity—you usually know us when you hear us. With that particular track, it was a step outside of what Maiden’s about. But I think it’s good to push out in different directions. I really like the video that went with it as well. Bruce [Dickinson] put that together with 60-odd other people from all over the world.

And I think that kind of reinforced that Clint Eastwood western vibe.

What drew you to the Far Eastern theme of Senjutsu?

I think Steve came up with the initial concept for that. The word itself means “tactics and strategy.” That whole theme is quite majestic. The samurai thing adds a lot of color to the artwork, especially on a large vinyl album cover. We’ve branched out in many different areas. We’ve gone futuristic, virtual reality, medieval—and the Eddie character is adaptable to any situation.

He looks good as a samurai, I think. It gives the album some mystique, and I think many of the songs on this one have a soundtrack kind of feel.

There’s sections that are very moody, especially the intros and build-ups. So, there’s a broad landscape, but the samurai is a base guideline.

I think it’s the best-looking Maiden sleeve since the ’80s.

I think it’s great, too, man. I really love the look.

It’s incredible—so vibrant. When I was a kid growing up, you’d wait for an album to come out and you’d go down to the record store and then you buy the vinyl and take it home. You’d

while you’re listening to the record. With this album, it’s got the big gatefold sleeve, so it’s the same kind of thing. I know people get quicker access to it because of the internet, but I still prefer going to the store to buy an album or ordering it and having it delivered. It’s just the excitement of the whole process. When I get my vinyl copy of this record, I’ll probably crack open a beer and have a listen and look at the artwork and read the lyrics and just enjoy the whole storytelling moment. I’ve kinda gone back to vinyl again myself. I’ve been buying all the old albums I used to love on vinyl.

Are there any you’re still on the hunt for?

I’ve picked up quite a few, but there’s some I’m still looking for. I don’t have a copy of Maiden Japan, actually, so I’ve still got to get that one!

[Laughs] I’ve got a lot of albums in storage I’ve still got to look through as well. I picked up a lot of the T. Rex albums I was looking for, and a lot of the old Zeppelin albums as well, but I still might need a couple of those. Of course, I had them all back in the ’70s when I was listening to them all the time. What else? B.B. King, Miles Davis, Django Reinhardt—his originals are on 78s. So, collecting vinyl has been a nice little hobby.

You recorded Senjutsu similarly to The Book of Souls, which was kind of an unusual process.

What can you tell us about it?

Historically, we’d go and rehearse for a few weeks, get maybe four or five songs worked out and then go into the studio. But for the last few, we go into the studio with a blank page, really. Everybody will have ideas ready or demos of songs they done at home, but we start from scratch, really. Maybe Steve will have a bit of something, and we’ll sit in a circle with acoustic guitars and Nicko [McBrain] will be sitting there with a set of brushes and we’ll have our iPhones to record it, and we’ll just start working on little sections at a time. Some of these songs are quite complex, like 10- or 15-minute songs, so they have to be worked out in sections. Once we’d get a whole song down, we’d record it and then move on to the next. It’s an interesting process, and it’s a couple of months. We’re not rushing anything.

You mentioned that “Stratego” was written by Janick and Steve. Did they write most of the songs on the album, or did everyone contribute?

Yeah, it’s a bit spread out writing-wise. I think there’s a couple where Steve wrote the music and the lyrics, but I know Janick and D E C I B E L : D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 1 : 47

New brave new world  Murray (l) and Janick Gers are ready and eager to return to the stage

We really wanna play this stuff live soon.

That’ll be an achievement in itself, which is not something I’d ever thought I’d be saying a few years ago.

Adrian [Smith] and Bruce wrote as well. I had some stuff as well, but we hit 82 minutes and you’ve got to know when to stop. [Laughs]

been playing that one live for years. But why do they keep getting longer? [Laughs] I think it keeps it interesting for us.

Since Bruce and Adrian rejoined the band in 1999 prior to Brave New World, every album you’ve put out has been well over an hour. Why do you think you’ve been making longer albums over the last 20 years?

Bruce injured his Achilles before you started recording, and actually toured while still recovering. How did that affect that process?

[Laughs] Yeah, that’s a good question. Even from the first few albums, we had some tracks that were seven or eight minutes long. Sometimes you can’t fit everything into three or four minutes. We do feel we can stretch it out and keep the interest without repeating ourselves where it’s just verse/chorus, verse/chorus, you know?

The songs go off on different tangents and come back. I think that’s just the characteristic of the band. It’s also our influences, though. The bands we were listening to were doing 15- or 20-minute songs—bands like Genesis and Deep Purple. Especially live, they’d stretch songs out.

The songs take you on a journey. So, I think it’s just part of our identity. But we make damn sure we can play them live. “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is about 15 minutes long, and we’ve 48 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

That’s right, but he disguised it very well. He was still moving around and performing. He’s amazingly professional, so he was able to still get out there and perform. And as you know, he really gets around onstage a lot. Of course, he could just stand there and still be brilliant. [Laughs] But I think he just knew when he could push himself and when to take it easy.

Not many bands that have been around as long as Maiden are still putting out good music. They tend to lose the plot well before they hit the 46year mark that you guys are at. How do you think you’ve managed to stay focused on quality after all this time?

It’s always been about the songs, really. The strongest songs go on the album, so if there’s something that’s not up to our standard, it’s not going out. No matter what it takes, we make sure

each song is solid. There’s a lot of time taken to work out the melodies and we don’t take anything for granted. So, to be able to continue and try to keep the high standard of songwriting, it shows you the talent of the guys in the band that are writing the songs. The fact that they’ve been able to sustain it over the years is what’s kept the band credible. I think we kind of harness it by touring. We’ll spend eight months on the road and then take a break to recharge our batteries, so by the time we go into the studio again, you’re fired up and ready to go. It feels new again.

Iron Maiden are one of those bands that has really done it all at this point. What do you think is left to accomplish?

Well, I’ll tell you what’s left: We really, really wanna get out and tour this album. We really wanna play this stuff live soon. That’ll be an achievement in itself, which is not something I’d ever thought I’d be saying a few years ago.

But the way everything’s gone, it’s put everything into perspective. So, we’re taking it one day at a time now, but we really wanna tour— and we want the world to heal. That’s what it’s all about.

the

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

definitive albums

To Live Is to Die the making of Flotsam and Jetsam’s Doomsday for the Deceiver

story by

kevin stewart-panko

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DBHOF204

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM Doomsday for the Deceiver METAL BL ADE JULY 4, 1986

Shedding iron tears for what could have been

DECIBEL : 51 : DECEMBER 2021

he arrival of Flotsam and Jetsam’s

debut album caused a stir on many fronts. Doomsday for the Deceiver may have been released by Metal Blade—one of America’s leading independent metal lights—on Independence Day in 1986, but it was the Brits who took an exceptional shine to the pack of Arizona wild dogs (repped by Flotzilla, their jacked-up, Godzilla-meetsanglerfish mascot). Famously, Kerrang! gave the album a review glowing enough to power the grid of the band’s Phoenix home, topping high praise with an improbable six out of a possible five “K” score.

Granted, Kerrang!’s hyperbole concerning Flotsam’s classy-yet-blue-collar, energeticbut-virtuosic thrash was fully justified.

Ribald hook-up anthem “Hammerhead” was a stadium-sized ripper powered by Jason Newsted’s walking basslines; “Iron Tears” had the guitar tandem of Edward Carlson and Michael Gilbert playing off drummer Kelly David-Smith’s precise pounding to deliver an infectious staccato shuffle; “Desecrator” combined galloping classic rock with sinister speed metal; and the title track was an epic, progressive marvel. Then there was frontman Erik “A.K.” Knutson, who quickly shot to the top of metal’s vocal pack with an unbelievable range, contagious vocal lines and the ability to punch holes in cloud cover, especially with the classically inspired, high-pitched harmonization in “Fade to Black” and “She Took an Axe.” The hard-working quintet had a classic at the ready, one which the press had rolled out the red carpet for. But as quickly as the future appeared to be theirs for the taking, all plans were detoured after Metallica’s Cliff Burton was killed and bassist/bandleader Jason Newsted secured the gig that every thrashing four-stringer would have traded their grandma to get. For all involved, Doomsday for the Deceiver meant different things. For Newsted, it was an inadvertent stepping stone to 14 years spent with the biggest band in metal. For Gilbert and Knutson, it was the first of a 15-album career that continues to this day. For DavidSmith and Carlson, it was the dominating force of their creative lives until they both stepped down in 2014. For thrash metal fans, it remains a genre highlight and one we are elated and honored to induct into our Hall of Fame.

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FLOTSAM AND JETSAM doomsday for the deceiver

Flotsam and Jetsam had a couple different lineups and monikers during your formative years. Can you go over a bit of the band’s history?

In the autumn of 1981, I was in a band in Kalamazoo, MI called Gangster who traveled to L.A. to be rock stars. Driving across the country, we ended up in Phoenix, parked our U-Haul in an Alpha Beta parking lot for a couple of days trying to get our bearings [and] figure out what we were going to do, whether to make it to California or to stay where we were.

We decided to stay. I got a couple jobs right away and did that for three or four months when I went to the local music store and Kelly Smith had an ad up looking for band members. I called, set up a time, went out to where he lived in Scottsdale, set my stuff up and there were three guys there: guitarists Dave Goulder and Pete Mello, and Kelly. We hit it off well, and over the next few weekends we would hit it. Eventually, Dave got phased out and Kelly or I would bring in different guitar players.

At the beginning, we called ourselves Paradox; then we changed the name to Dredlox because we liked the way the word sounded and because it had “dread” in it, which we thought was heavy metal-scary. We were so fucking unworldly and ignorant that we didn’t realize what dreadlocks were, didn’t have any idea about Bob Marley or Rastafarianism or what any of that meant. Then, there were two cats in Kelly’s neighborhood: Mark Vasquez was a great guitar player, a very gifted, natural musician. Him and Kevin Horton were buddies from school, and they learned guitar together. So, it was myself, Kelly, Kevin and Mark, and we called ourselves the Dogz. We developed a reputation playing desert parties, kitchens, clubs and all that. After we got a little established and Ed Carlson replaced Kevin, Kelly came across Erik A.K., who came in as we wanted to get more metal; then Mike Gilbert came into the picture.

Somewhere in there, we became Flotsam and Jetsam. It was a left-field kind of name and I’m glad we chose it. We wanted to use Misfits, Drifters and different names [like that] that were already taken. Flotsam and Jetsam was cool because it meant all of those things.

EDWARD CARLSON: We had a song called “Flotsam and Jetsam” before we were ever called that when the core was me, Kelly, Erik and Jason with another guitar player, Mark Vasquez. I can remember discussions about what to call the band. We didn’t want to have a typically metalsounding name and we had that song, which was taken out of a J.R.R. Tolkien book and written about this group who were kind of the misfits, wanderers, scumbag outcasts of society. We were looking at that and thinking it sounded like us, was different and original, and the meaning fit.

JASON NEWSTED:

Dog dayz  After the Dogz were turned loose and became Flotsam and Jetsam, the Metal Shock demo went into heavy tape trading circulation thanks to a dedicated Jason Newsted

Is that the point where you started to take the band more seriously?

ERIK “A.K.” KNUTSON: Newsted was always really serious about it; you knew that’s what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. The rest of us were just kind of hoping, because being in a band was the coolest thing we’d ever done, but I don’t know if we looked at it like, “This is going to be me for the rest of my life.” It wasn’t until Mike Gilbert joined and we got signed that we went, “Whoa, this is an actual serious entity.”

MICHAEL GILBERT: In ’84 and ’85, the metal scene was coming up in Phoenix and they would open up for whoever was coming through town.

I remember going to see Mercyful Fate and Flotsam was opening. They had just changed their name; I saw them and was like, “I want to be in that band.” The previous guitar player was great, but I heard they were going to swap him out because they were going in a different direction. So, I ended up getting a hold of Newsted and going to the Guitar Shop in Scottsdale to audition. I went in, played a couple tunes and he was like, “OK, when can you start rehearsing?”

It was weird because, for a while, I felt like I was on probation. Shortly after I joined, we were doing promo shots and they made me step out for a few of the pictures. I was like, “What the hell?”

But the rest is history because the first song I wrote with them was “I Live You Die,” and that’s the one that got us on Metal Massacre VII and eventually onto Metal Blade, so they had to keep me in their pictures.

DECEMBER 2021 : 5 2 : DECIBEL

KELLY DAVID-SMITH: In 1984, when I was 19, I did a little prison time for selling narcotics, and while I was down, they brought Mike in. The Dogz nucleus broke up because the guitarist didn’t like the direction we were going. So, the first time I met Mike, he was already in the band. [Laughs]

By all accounts, you maintained a rigorous live schedule, which led to the recording of the Metal Shock demo.

DAVID-SMITH: We were connected to Gloria Bujnowski, who is now married to Max Cavalera.

Bootleggers was a club in town we would play all the time, and it was her club. We did a live video there that we sent out to labels, and we also recorded something live off the board. Gloria had a Battle of the Bands one night, and the band that won broke up, so she gave the studio time to us. That’s how we recorded the Metal Shock demo with “Hammerhead,” “I Live You Die” and two other Dogz songs. The guitar player from Icon, Danny Wexler, engineered the demo at Chaton Studios. The Iron Tears demo came later.

ERIK A.K.: We opened up for some cool bands here in town before any label knew who we were, like Armored Saint, the original Riot [and] Icon, who were the Schoolboys back then and the big band in town. We would open for anybody; we just wanted to play and have people hear our originals.

NEWSTED: We’d only ever done Tucson, Phoenix, Paradise Valley, Tempe, Mesa… that little radius.

We were the go-to band to open for whoever was cool that was coming through and not playing

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FLOTSAM AND JETSAM doomsday for the deceiver

the arena: Mercyful Fate, Exciter, Yngwie [Malmsteen], whoever was touring at that time.

That was really good for us because the word of mouth went around and I’d already had contact with all these bands because I was trying to run the show, fly the flag and be the leader. I was the guy who was the contact for all the gigs.

And it was relentless networking that brought you to Metal Blade’s attention?

ERIK A.K.: From what I remember, this is how it went: We had the Metal Shock demo and Newsted and a friend of his named Eric Braverman would send copies to every label we could think of ... and if we didn’t hear anything back from them, they would send them another one, and if they still didn’t hear anything back, they’d send another one. Eventually, they’d either write or call and say, “Hey, stop sending us this crap” or “We want to hear more.” Luckily, it didn’t take long for Metal Blade to get back saying they thought it was cool.

CARLSON: We did have a plan. The apartment where we filmed the “Hammerhead” video was Jason’s, but I lived there, too, and I remember us going through Show No Mercy, Kill ’Em All, Killing Is My Business… and all the records that were coming out and targeting people like Jonny Z and Megaforce, Brian Slagel and Metal Blade, and so on. We started sending Metal Shock to anyone and everyone who would take it, but we were targeting a couple labels in particular that had the stuff coming out in the vein of what we were listening to and what we wanted to be about.

We sent them the first demo, then the Iron Tears demo, and Brian came back wanting to put “I Live You Die” on the Metal Massacre compilation. Then, we sent him a live video of one of our shows and he called us with the offer to do a full-length.

NEWSTED: I was doing all the correspondence and tape-trading, and as soon as we had the demo available, I was on that. So, people knew about us in a bunch of countries by the time we did our second demo and it really hit well, so we were feeling good about ourselves and I was really motivated. In Phoenix, you work from 4 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon because it’s 110º by noon. So, we’d have the whole afternoon and night to work on the band, and that’s what I did.

I’d get up early, go do landscaping and other shit in the sun, and come back and work on building the band up.

What were the details surrounding you signing to Metal Blade?

I finally got the attention of Brian Slagel, and Kevin Horton drove me out to Los Angeles in his cool-ass white Camaro to meet with Brian. We went to L.A., met with Brian [and] he gave me a contract, which I took back to Arizona, made a few amendments—whatever

NEWSTED:

my 19-year-old high school dropout legal knowledge came up with—and we got going.

ERIK A.K.: I was so young and so full of myself, basically, the only thing I remember is that I was starting to look at Lamborghinis and how I was going to have a different colored one for every day of the week and one for each girlfriend. I was off the deep end at this point, but luckily I had Newsted to fall back on because he was a little more down-to-earth business- and realitywise. He did all the business and all I really did was drink, party, go after girls and spend money I was never going to make. [Laughs] What were the Doomsday writing sessions like?

We were always working and always writing for the time when someone would come along and say, “OK, let’s do a record,” so we would be ready to go. We pretty much had everything written and tightened up by the time we recorded. I think we wrote the instrumental just before we went in to record, but the bulk of it was a done deal.

CARLSON:

“I ran the band like a fucking dictator.

We rehearsed every day; maybe there was a five-day week here and there, but we played as much as humanly possible.”

JAS O N NEWST E D GILBERT: We practiced at Jason’s apartment in Phoenix and there was this add-on to it. There was this really long, skinny room, and you’d walk in and it was all lined with Styrofoam and equipment. It was the perfect jam room; it stunk, it was dirty and loud. The neighbors never cared, the cops never came, and any time we would play with another band they would come over and drink and party, so it smelled like stale beer all the time.

NEWSTED: We were very well-rehearsed. I ran the band like a fucking dictator. We rehearsed every day; maybe there was a five-day week here and there, but we played as much as humanly possible and we got that shit tight. I would get very upset if someone was late to practice. I was really neurotic, really insistent, and kept standards really high and consistent. I probably had a little rift with just about everybody because of my selfrighteous attitude about doing things a certain way, and the only way we were going to get past those other guys was doing it this way. I know DECEMBER 2021 : 5 4 : DECIBEL

A.K., and I had a couple of pretty bad stand-offs, but it got us to where we got.

Was it a given that Metal Blade was going to bring you to record in L.A.?

Bill Metoyer was Brian’s house engineer and producer and if you signed to Metal Blade back then, Bill was going to do your record.

That was fine because we didn’t have anybody and we didn’t know anybody, so we developed a long-standing relationship with Bill, who to this day, still makes killer records. They were like a team; Brian produced it, Bill engineered and recorded it.

NEWSTED: That’s how we did things back then.

Brian was racking up five, seven, nine bands a month, and he’d take Bill Metoyer into the same studios, get deals with equipment and they’d knock albums out for however-many-hundred bucks a session. It was really up to the bands to earn their individuality. We rehearsed as hard as we could, got our shit loaded up on a U-Haul pulled behind my Ford Ranger, and went in three vehicles across the desert to Los Angeles and into the Music Grinder with Brian and Bill.

CARLSON:

I imagine it must have been equally exciting and intimidating going into big-name studios like the Music Grinder, Eldorado and Track?

ERIK A.K.: Back then it was in everyone’s brain that if you weren’t in L.A., you weren’t going to get anywhere. We were in L.A. recording, and I lost my mind completely, thinking, “This is what real rock stardom is like.” It was definitely intimidating with a lot of money and time being spent; you felt the pressure to turn out something good or it was all going to end.

DAVID-SMITH: We did that record for $12,000, which was unheard of. I recorded my drum tracks in two days, but that’s kind of the way it was, even when we recorded here. There wasn’t Pro Tools or anything; you had to know your songs when you went in there, and the goal was one take.

GILBERT: Totally. It was crazy just being in Hollywood. I was 17 when we did the album, had never been there, and it was crazy being there and seeing what was going on. I’d walk up the street and there were people doing heroin right out in the street, and I’d never seen anything like that before. This is the sort of thing you hear about when you hear about Mötley Crüe and what they encounter every day, and I was in the middle of it. I was super-excited, but terrified at the same time.

How was the recording process?

Well, in the studio you’re put way under the microscope, but working with Bill made it much easier to get the performances without much extra pressure. We were very wellrehearsed, so it was just a matter of doing what we do onstage or jamming and letting him

CARLSON:

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FLOTSAM AND JETSAM doomsday for the deceiver

capture the sound. We had the studio blocked out for those two weeks, and at the end of those 12-14 days, everyone was on the same page in thinking that everything was where it needed to be. We were all happy because it was sounding better than anything we had ever heard before. We were on cloud nine.

DAVID-SMITH: We were productive. For me, I had 15 stitches in my arm. On the last day at work before we left to record, I cut my arm, so I did those two days with a bandage on my arm covering 15 stitches. Being the first record, I was pretty stressed. All those years playing Neil Peart songs and looking up at my idols, I started thinking way ahead about how, at some point, there was going to be somebody out there listening to me and how everything would have to be perfect.

So, I might have flipped out and threw my sticks around a couple times. [Laughs] GILBERT: Luckily, we were prepared. I get redlight fever; as soon as they press the record button, I lose everything. I still get it today, even in my own studio. Back then, it was worse. I think the adrenaline and fear played a positive role because it was a do-or-die, fight-or-flight thing. But it was actually pretty smooth, and because we finished a little bit early we were able to go back and do some overdubs on some of the stuff. I heard A.K. doing overdubs during the later part of the recording and remember listening to him doing those half-step harmonizing screams on “She Took an Axe,” and Slagel’s jaw just hit the mixing board.

ERIK A.K.: I adapted pretty quickly. I have this theory that you hire a producer for a reason, and you should do pretty much everything he says. You have a producer who’s done 150 albums or something, you think he might know a little more than the guy who’s doing his first record!

Bill Metoyer had done everybody, and I was at that point where I just wanted to learn everything he knew to use on the next record and in the future. So, I just did exactly what he told me to and it turned out pretty damned good. He did a good job of keeping me from sounding like a 12-year-old girl when I sang.

Having a bunch of teenage metal dudes recording and staying in Hollywood must have been a recipe for an insane story or two…

ERIK A.K.: Every part of it was amazing; I don’t think the smile left my face the entire time I was out there. We were in L.A. recording, going out to the famous bars, and there was always a reason to buy a bunch of beers and party. It was the ’80s; it was a different time.

DAVID-SMITH: Yeah, we were kind of off the rails a bit. I had just gotten sober at the time, so I wasn’t really partaking in partying, but there were… ahem… other activities going on. [Laughs]

“When I stop and look at it, that record put us on the map. That we didn’t use that map very well isn’t the record’s fault.”

E RIK “A .K.” KNUTSO N Ask Jason about mushrooms. I’ll let him fill you in; I don’t want to tell his story.

NEWSTED: This incident happened on the one night we had off where we could go out in Hollywood as a band. We went to the Troubadour, and I had maybe a drink and a half and was feeling pretty good. We had also shared some mushrooms, and those of us who partook were having a great time tripping balls around Hollywood. It was our first time being amongst all the lights, the hair, the girls, the mini-skirts and all of it.

So, we’re making our way down this alley behind the Troubadour heading back towards Sunset Boulevard, and these cops go by as we were kind of running by. They thought we were running from them and, just like in the movies, they come beaming down the alleyway, stopped and searched us. We looked a bit suspicious; we weren’t entirely clean, we all had crazy-ass hair, ripped jeans and leather jackets and shit. The guy pats me down and finds the empty mushroom bag in my front pocket. There was just a little bit of dirt crust in the corner; it was nothing and I probably stuck it in my pocket instead of littering. The cop’s like, “What do we have DECEMBER 2021 : 5 6 : DECIBEL

here?” They cinched me up, put me in the back of the car, took me down to Hollywood sheriff’s department on a Saturday night.

So, I’m pretty fucking nervous; plus, I’m out of my head tripping. I spent the night in the tank. There was one huge dude in there who had long hair, and he had heard of our band.

I basically tried to stay up all night, talk with him and stay as close as I could to this dude so if anyone came around or started any hubbub, he was there. Brian Slagel came down, figured out the bail, got me out and we went on to finish the record. That was very surreal, especially for someone who’s always tried to keep his nose clean and do things right. So, me being the one who got nicked, as the bandleader or whatever, was a weird thing, man.

Was the cover art your idea or something the artist, Kevin Tyler, came up with?

ERIK A.K.: That was our general idea and what he came back with. We were like, “It’s very cartoonish, but it’s very cool.” We just wanted to take a page from Iron Maiden and Eddie; they had their guy and we wanted to have our guy. So, we

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FLOTSAM AND JETSAM doomsday for the deceiver

had him create Flotzilla, and we wanted to show how tough he was, so we thought, “What’s the toughest thing Flotzilla can be doing? Beating the shit out of Satan!”

NEWSTED: It was Kevin Tyler, who was a friend of a friend. My idea was, if you look at the title and the lyrics to “Metal Shock,” it’s about evil forces being defeated by the good forces of metal. That was my tongue-in-cheek concept, and we took inspiration from Eddie and having a mascot.

As far as the Flotzilla, we came from the desert where there was no water and we ended up with this sea creature, so I don’t know how the fuck that happened. [Laughs] But yeah, it was an idea we conveyed to the artist, and we went along step-by-step as he put it together. It was based on “Metal Shock” and “Doomsday for the Deceiver” as the follow-up—like a two-part story.

To this day, Kerrang!’s 6-K review still gets talked about—it’s mentioned in the bio for your new album—but what about other reactions to the album’s release?

DAVID-SMITH: It was kind of overwhelming because, up until that point, we were just a bunch of guys in Phoenix who opened for a bunch of different bands. We had local praise, but we had never had it coming in like that. I still have a lot of magazines stored away from those days because my mom would get them; she’d be at the store reading metal mags and people would be like, “What is this woman doing?” [Laughs] CARLSON: I can remember that review and tripping pretty hard on it. It was outstanding, and they made a big deal out of it, and that carried a lot of weight. At home, we had a base, and it was like a big family where everyone knew what we were about and they grew up with us and those songs. It was awesome for the fans to get the finished product in hand.

GILBERT: It was weird because when I came back from doing the record, I went back to school and finished out my senior year in high school. I was a quiet kid, but I was kind of getting the rock star treatment from people who were like, “Oh my god, you went to L.A. and made a record?”

That was a big deal back then, but I was really humble about it and never stuck my chest out. I didn’t really notice the 6-K thing at first. It was a great review in what was the biggest magazine.

When we got over to England, our first show was at the Hammersmith Odeon, and that’s when I saw what was really happening: People were chanting our name and singing along, and it wasn’t in a small club.

How much touring or live work did you do before Jason left for Metallica?

DAVID-SMITH: There were a few shows here and there, and our last show with him was

Halloween 1986; then he joined Metallica and went to Tokyo. Jason’s first tour ever was in Japan on the Master of Puppets tour.

NEWSTED: We got back to Phoenix, started putting everything together for the record, like promo, thinking about a tour, and I really got on the tape-trading, got a recording out to everyone possible and got reviews from everyone I could.

Once that got going, the record had only been out a few months; then Cliff was killed. I never got a chance to tour that record with them, aside from the local Arizona shows we played; the victory shows, we called them. I remember my last show with them. It was great; lots and lots of people because we had gained quite a following by then.

We were wearing black armbands for Cliff, as it had been two or three weeks since he was gone, and three-and-a-half weeks after his ashes had been scattered, I was auditioning.

Was Jason leaving a bittersweet thing? Like, “Damn, he’s leaving, but it’s Metallica and if I had the opportunity…”?

ERIK A.K.: That’s how we all felt. We were kind of sitting around with our jaws open, thinking, “What are we going to do now?” At the same time, if they called me up to come audition, I would have been there in a heartbeat. We never lost any love for him. It was kind of like, “feel sorry for yourself and be proud of him at the same time.”

CARLSON: I remember seeing a little article in the paper about the accident and Cliff passing, waking Jason up, showing him and saying, “Dude, you better start learning those Metallica songs.” And he was like, “Shut up, dude.” And then Brian goes and recommends him to Lars, and that ball started rolling. It was definitely bittersweet, but, like you said, it was Metallica.

If it had been Kirk Hammett and the shoe was on the other foot, me or Mike would have done the same thing. Once he got that audition, nobody was going to beat him. He was determined, he practiced like crazy and knew everything when he went out there.

DAVID-SMITH: Gilbert and Kevin Horton both assisted Jason in learning the songs he needed to know. So, it’s like you’re a little pissed, but it’s your buddy, so you’re excited for him. We thought it was going to open a door for us as well, but Metallica’s management had other plans. We had no idea what was going to happen. We were young, our record had only been out five months, we hadn’t toured and didn’t have a manager.

GILBERT: I would have done the same thing. I think some of the other guys were bitter about it, but I wasn’t. I kinda knew he was going to get it. With the connection between Slagel and Metallica and us being in the same circle, I knew that once he played for them he was going to get it. I helped him out a little bit to get comfortable with the songs before he went out to audition.

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told me, “Dude, I would not leave for any other band on the planet. You understand?” “Fuck yeah, I understand!”

NEWSTED: Yes, it was mixed emotions, but you nailed it because any one of us would have taken the opportunity and the rest of us would have been a little bitter, but also thankful, proud and victorious in a way that one of us made it to that level. You have to remember—and this is me being factual, not arrogant—that I put every waking moment into that band; every single stamp that ever got licked for something that got sent, every penny for every T-shirt that was made, every single thing. I had a vision and taking the catalyst, motivator, generator, whatever you want to call it, out of the equation was going to be tough. Stepping out left a giant void, not just as a bass player, but as all of those other things.

I remember in our practice room I had written the “rules” on a manilla folder that was stapled to the wall, and it was stuff like “consistency,” “clear-mindedness” and a couple other things I put on there that everybody had to adhere to. So, all that “play right, do right” stuff was there, and at the first rehearsal I came back to after I had been asked to join Metallica, Erik had written across the bottom, “Go join someone else’s band.” That got to me, and I understand his feelings, but the world is the world and everybody is working towards a certain thing where they have their own goals individually and collectively.

How much touring did you do in support of Doomsday?

We didn’t get to tour a lot. We did oneoffs here and there, but basically we did 14 shows with Megadeth for that record. The shows were packed and people were going nuts, which took me by surprise and showed that something was happening. We’d be in Maryland or someplace we’d never been, and there would be hundreds of Flotsam fans. It was all really cool. We did seven shows on the East Coast. The last show was in New York; the next day we flew to Europe, did seven shows, then came home. We’d never been to Europe, and the first show was a sold-out Hammersmith Odeon opening for Megadeth.

DAVID-SMITH: [The Hammersmith Odeon] was Megadeth’s first time in Europe as well, and it was just a whole new world. Our equipment got stuck in customs, so we were 45 minutes late starting and we were all sick because we’d eaten bad hot dogs in New York. They set up our gear, the guitarists did a couple chugs and the curtain went up. There was no sound check, no warm-up; it was “set the gear up and go.”

ERIK A.K.: I don’t remember a lot of the very first time we played in New York, but I do remember sitting in the back of a limo with [former F&J/ Metallica A&R] Michael Alago and Joey Ramone and being like, “OK, I’ve made it!”

CARLSON:

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FLOTSAM AND JETSAM doomsday for the deceiver

“I remember my last show with them. We were wearing black armbands for Cliff [Burton], as it had been two or three weeks since he was gone, and three-and-a-half weeks after his ashes had been scattered, I was auditioning.”

JAS O N NEWST E D GILBERT: I’ll always remember Hartford, CT. I had a Gibson endorsement at the time and had two flying Vs with me on the road. They were sitting in our dressing room and I’m outside talking to Dave Mustaine about guitars and whatever. Suddenly, he takes off, runs into our dressing room and grabs both of my guitars and takes off. He gives them to his guitar tech and says, “Take these apart and dry them out.”

I’m like, “What are you doing, dude?” He says, “Look at the ceiling.” There was a leak and it was dripping all over my guitars. They were soaking wet and he got his tech to take them apart, dry them with a hair dryer and get them all cleaned up. That was the night Dave Mustaine saved my guitars.

Doomsday changed each of your lives in different ways. How so, and what does the record and its legacy mean to you?

ERIK A.K.: I had no idea that record would be that important in my life. It’s always easy to sit around and talk about how we didn’t get as far as we should have or how we didn’t get this and that break, but really, when I stop and look at it, that record put us on the map. That we didn’t use that map very well isn’t the record’s fault.

DAVID-SMITH: It changed my world. It started the dream and got me onto a couple more records

and record labels and more experiences, more tours and more fans. As a young drummer, you’re playing in your room imagining what it’s going to look like, and then it happens. Then comes the responsibility of leading other drummers.

“Am I playing stuff that’s going to inspire somebody else?” and you always hope for that. I’ve met plenty of people, and that’s the gift I get to give: to help somebody else pick up some sticks.

There have been a lot of stories from people who have told us how our music has helped them get through something, and those are the real treasures: knowing you’ve left a mark on the world.

When we’re all gone someday, there’s still going to be Flotsam and Jetsam playing somewhere.

CARLSON: We were die-hards; none of us wanted to do anything else but play. We loved metal and everything that was coming out, and that’s what we wanted to emulate. For me, it cemented my love for guitar, showed me how to be a guitar player, how to perform and to be part of a group and work together. There were parts of the lifestyle that weren’t so positive, but all that stuff has made me the person I am today, and I’m in a good spot. It’s a life experience where you grow trying to do the best that you can at something you love.

GILBERT: I’m super-proud of it. When I go back to listen to it, I hear this energy and hear what DECEMBER 2021 : 6 0 : DECIBEL

the audience is hearing. There’s something about that record that is enticing to people, and we were on fire. We wanted to play fast and loud and we were hungry, and you can hear that in the music.

NEWSTED: If I look back now, to realize how fresh and rubbery our brains were to recall and execute those compositions that efficiently and effectively, that would be the shiniest part of the crown for me. We would play those songs and people would stand back and be like, “Fuck, that took something. You just don’t get that by hoping you can get that.” That came from a lot of hours together and one guy being a little shitty, making sure everything was perfect as we could get it. It’s an accomplishment in and of itself to have five 20-year-old freaks all doing their discovering of drugs, girls and booze while still being able to play those songs that well at the drop of a hat. We could do everything we said we could do—before there was Pro Tools, there were pros, man—and it’s an amazing accomplishment because of the physicality and mindset.

That feeling of accomplishment of selling that much—it had sold 200,000 copies by the time I’d been in Metallica for a couple years, and it’s got to be close to half-a-million by now, if not more—is pretty good for a week’s work by a bunch of thrasher kids.

SHIRTS

SHIRTS

E V I S U L C X E

P A T C H E S

NSORSH IP *S M IL E FO R CE

F L A G S BEANIES

push through their dark nights of the soul to deliver THE MOST DYNAMIC, POIGNANT ALBUM OF THEIR CAREER

FOR

story by MATT SOLIS • photos by JASON SINN

all the intangibles involved in the cre-

ation of art, the notion of “inspiration” is probably the most bizarre when you stop and think about it. Wrenching ideas out of your brain and manifesting them into physical existence is weird enough, but the fact that many creators have to be in the mood to do it? That’s downright preposterous, which is undoubtedly why countless artists throughout the centuries have personified this conundrum in the form of “the muse”—that sensual, mysterious character who provides the necessary spark for classic books, films, paintings and songs to be born. ¶ But you know the rest of this story. The muse can be fickle— prone to taking away what was once freely given. Truman Capote spent the last 10 years of his life, as Martin Amis puts it, “pretending to write a novel that was never there.” Claude Monet would destroy huge amounts of his work in frustration, and after his wife died, he didn’t paint anything for two years. Some artists are blessed with a perpetual creative drive and never have to give it a second thought, but for those who are beholden to the muse, its extended silence can be devastating.

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Of course, sometimes the chaotic disposition of the world you’re living in can mercilessly bulldoze your inspiration without giving you a choice in the matter. Khemmis found themselves in such a situation in late 2019, when a busy touring cycle in support of the previous year’s Desolation LP ended and they were faced with the prospect of writing a worthy follow-up. Eventually, their efforts would result in Deceiver, the Colorado doom metal collective’s darkest, most emotionally charged album to date; but in order to reach that destination, they first had to reckon with the very nature of the band’s existence.

As per usual, the Deceiver writing process started with guitarists/vocalists Ben Hutcherson and Phil Pendergast, both of whom would periodically add riffs to a shared Dropbox folder so they and drummer Zach Coleman could get a feel for the new music’s direction.

But for Hutcherson, something about the routine rang false this time. He felt alarmingly disconnected from most of the material he

DECIBEL : NOVEMBER 2021 : 63

To be frank,

THIS ALBUM VERY NEARLY DIDN’T HAPPEN.

This band almost called it quits, because I was struggling pretty severely and the other guys were confronting their own demons as well.

BEN HUTCHERSON

was sharing, and it wasn’t long before he came to a life-altering realization.

“I didn’t know it at the time, but I was suffering the largest and longest-lasting depressive episode of my life,” he confides. “It got to the point where last spring, I pretty much lost interest in living. I had no creative drive, no drive to do anything—I was being blanketed by depression in a way that I never had before.”

After receiving urgent psychiatric care, Hutcherson was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and placed on medication. “I confronted the darkest days I’ve ever had to [experience], and with the assistance of a therapist, a psychiatrist and my partner, things started coming back together for me,” he reveals. “I started feeling connected to the idea of writing music in a way that I hadn’t for years. When you’re living with mental illness, you don’t see the external—it’s like trying to describe a storm when you’re in the eye of it. But when I came out the other side, I realized I had become disenchanted with creating music, so when I think about why those initial [riffs] didn’t land with me, it’s because they were written in a headspace where I just didn’t give a fuck about what they were or what they could be.”

Unfortunately, Hutcherson wasn’t the only member of Khemmis who had to improve his mental health in order to move forward with his artistic endeavors. Despite enjoying what he describes as the freest moments of his life after the release of Desolation, Pendergast also found himself disillusioned with the concept of making music and was forced to do some serious soul-searching.

“It became apparent that there was some underlying depression that I wasn’t tending to in a constructive way,” he admits. “And then to

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have all of this other cultural shit happening [in 2020]… it really felt like I was drowning in a pit of depression and there was no escape. I also felt like my own suffering was so insignificant compared to what I was seeing everywhere else.

I was like, ‘What do you have to be depressed about? Your band is doing great, you have a steady income… you have it good in so many objective ways.’ For me, that became the big issue with this album. How do I find importance in what I’m doing again? What do I need to be vulnerable about [in order] to make myself a better person and see myself with the same kind of love that others see me with? That’s something I’m wrestling with on every song to some degree.”

“To be frank, this album very nearly didn’t happen,” continues Hutcherson. “This band almost called it quits, because I was struggling pretty severely, and the other guys were confronting their own demons as well. Fortunately, one of the things that came from me getting into this better place was reconnecting with Phil and Zach as people, not just as bandmates. We started talking to each other like friends again, and that helped reconnect us to the heart of what Khemmis is. We stepped back and said, ‘Look at this thing we created. If we’re going to do it justice and respect the dedication of people who’ve spent their time, money and emotional energy with us, we have to feel like we’re doing it for the right reasons.’”

CAST ASIDE the SHROUD

From this seismic shift in perspective came a renewed sense of confidence that the band had never experienced before. They knew that in order to expand their music into more personal

territory, to make Khemmis more than just a collection of epic doom anthems, they had to stay true to themselves in every aspect of their creative output. So, when leadoff track “Avernal Gate” transitions from a lush acoustic guitar passage to a speedy riff that would sound at home on any modern At the Gates record, it may as well serve as a career-defining mission statement: This is who we are, and this is what we do.

“I put that riff in [the Dropbox folder] thinking the guys might like it, but it could feel too different,” remembers Hutcherson. “But Zach latched onto it and said, ‘This riff should be the starting place for how we think about this album.’ The melodic death metal influence has always been there, though, at least on my end.

A lot of people assume that the Peaceville bands were big influences on us because we don’t have thrash riffs or D-beats, but I’ve probably listened to less than half a dozen songs from each of those bands in my entire life.”

“Playing that kind of stuff is fun, you know?” says Coleman about Deceiver’s opening Swedeath riff. “I mean, there’s a reason those bands exist—[the music is] really fucking satisfying.

I just knew that since it was so different from anything on our other albums, we could make a really cool record if we continued with it.”

“On Desolation, we were trying to capture some of our earliest influences in metal, when no one had decided what it was supposed to sound like yet,” adds Pendergast. “I feel like that led us to make our …And Justice for All, where we went off the deep end adding little things that, in retrospect, are musically interesting, but don’t connect as much on a visceral level. Going into this record, we wanted to create a darker,

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more evil album. We knew it would still sound like Khemmis, but we made sure to open the floodgates [for] including direct allusions to stuff we like that we haven’t previously been as forthcoming with. I think it ended up being a more dynamic record because of that.”

while other projects can demand a more technical approach to performance-coaching and editing. With Khemmis, [our] familiarity is a catalyst to allow for more of a two-way conversation. I’ve always felt like they’ve been receptive to musical input and suggestions.”

CAPTURING the UNIVERSE

A PROTECTOR’S SONG

Pendergast is spot-on with his assessment. From its unexpected tempo variations (check out Coleman’s blast beats at the end of “Avernal Gate”) and strongly defined atmosphere to its unforgettable vocal hooks and guitar harmonies, Deceiver is the sound of a band at the top of its game. But it’s not enough to simply write killer songs—for an album to truly land, you also need a trustworthy studio professional who knows how to wrangle that energy into an effective listening experience. Enter Dave Otero, the Denverbased engineer/producer who has been recording Khemmis ever since they landed on the underground’s radar with 2015’s Absolution.

Otero’s working relationship with Khemmis can’t be understated. This is no hired gun who quietly sits behind a mixing board and does what he’s told—because he has worked with the group on essentially all of their recorded material over the past six years, he has earned a certain amount of trust when it comes to helping them shape the overall intention of their music.

“Before we started working with Dave, I don’t think we had any idea about what it meant to be a producer on an album,” says Hutcherson.

“He’s always been hands-on, but he’s become even more so as we get more comfortable with him. We trust him to offer input and he trusts us to [push back] if we’re not comfortable with his advice. And that [trust] takes years to achieve, because it’s easy to be precious about your music and think it’s always perfect.”

“Dave has an ear for our songs in a way that’s kind of uncanny,” adds Coleman. “It started on [2016’s] Hunted. He would make suggestions and we would be like, ‘That’s cool, let’s do that,’ and by the end we were like, ‘Damn, Dave actually contributed a lot to this record!’ He understands what we’re trying to do, so any ideas or changes he has are always with the best interest of the album in mind. We’ve come to trust him so much in that regard. I mean, not every idea goes through and sometimes we’ll go back and forth, but that’s all in the fun of it.”

Otero has certainly logged enough studio hours to discern which type of approach will garner the best results for a particular project—his 20-year résumé is stuffed with classic releases by Cattle Decapitation, Wayfarer, Cobalt and dozens of other needle-movers. “I suppose I take on whatever roles are most needed for the success of the album,” he says about his recording philosophy. “Sometimes, a heavy hand with song structure and writing is more appropriate,

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Otero’s collaborative production style isn’t the only reason that Deceiver feels so adventurous and lively. Thanks to their 2017 signing with Nuclear Blast, Khemmis found themselves with an unprecedented amount of studio time, which they and Otero gratefully utilized to expand their pre-production process, work on vocal ideas, experiment with tones and tweak arrangements. The label move was inevitable to anyone who was paying attention to the band’s trajectory, but they’re quick to point out that the decision didn’t come easy—particularly because it meant leaving 20 Buck Spin and its head honcho, the incomparable Dave Adelson.

“It was a hard choice to make [because] we have a huge appreciation for Dave and everything that 20 Buck Spin did for us,” affirms Pendergast. “When we signed with them, I don’t think they had that level of support for a band before. And I don’t know if it’s related or just coincidental, but there was a rising tide for both of us at the time. Even between Absolution and Hunted, there was a huge difference in the level of resources available for a small label and the amount of support they were willing to provide.

Dave really went out of his way to make sure we got what we needed to make bigger, better albums. Eternal respect to him for being a huge part of where we are now.”

Adelson first got wind of Khemmis when Coleman asked if he’d be interested in checking out the recently completed Absolution. The two had previously worked together when 20 Buck Spin released an LP by Vasaeleth, Coleman’s old death metal band, so Adelson was interested to hear what this new project sounded like. “I was actually on the fence through my first spin until I got to ‘The Bereaved,’” he admits. “That song hooked me, and so did the rest of the album on subsequent listens, so I was convinced they would fit nicely into my developing roster.”

Khemmis’ first couple of years on 20 Buck Spin were all about making records, as touring was a limited proposition due to Hutcherson and Pendergast being deeply entrenched in the upper echelons of their higher education pursuits. But even though they weren’t willing to abandon their responsibilities to hop in a rickety van for an endless series of cross-country drives, Adelson could still see the long-term potential of their intrinsically accessible brand of doomed heavy metal.

“Once Absolution hit some year-end Top 10 lists out of the gate, the guys were already getting offers from bigger labels,” he acknowledges.

“Somehow, I convinced them to stick with me, as I was at a point where I knew that, in order to grow 20 Buck Spin, I had to keep my bigger artists around for more than one album. It all worked out and I think we all benefited, [but] it was clear to me that they would eventually move on. I’m excited to see how far they take things with a bigger machine behind them.”

Adelson encouraging one of his most popular acts to fly the nest may seem unfathomable to those who have grown up with images of backstabbing industry vultures in their heads, but anyone who has interacted with the man knows that his altruism comes as naturally as his ability to spot talent.

“I would absolutely consider Dave to be one of the kindest, most honest people I’ve ever met,” declares Hutcherson. “He set an important precedent for us because we knew that if we ever worked with a label other than 20 Buck Spin, we’d know how things should work in terms of mutual respect and transparency.

Dave gives a shit because [the label] is literally him. He’s never been so shortsighted that he’s willing to risk his reputation for a bit of money.

[Sometimes] just being honest and kind pays dividends in a long-term way.”

A DANGEROUS MEETING Khemmis’ journey toward Nuclear Blast may have started all the way back on Absolution, but the actual logistics of the relationship were forged in a much more “rock ‘n’ roll” fashion: after a late-night hangout with A&R legend Monte Conner, who had heard that the band was playing Saint Vitus Bar in New York and reached out to see if they wanted to talk.

“We didn’t know what to expect because he didn’t say he wanted to sign us right away—he wanted to get a feel for who we were as people,” remembers Hutcherson. “But we had a similar experience with Monte [as we did with Dave Adelson] where it didn’t feel like he was trying to razzle-dazzle us. I mean, he has great stories about running around with King Diamond and stuff like that, but he tells them like how you would tell your buddy, not like, ‘This is what I can make happen for you.’”

“They blew me away with their power and professionalism,” says Conner about what he saw onstage in Brooklyn that night. “The guitar work in particular was so tasteful and classy, and Phil sounded as great live as on record. I just loved how they combined doom with more traditional metal like Judas Priest.”

After their positive experience with Conner, Khemmis felt reassured that Nuclear Blast didn’t have any nefarious plans to steer them in a different direction; that they would still have the freedom to create the music they wanted to make and would never be told otherwise. “Monte had a lot of faith in what we were doing and just

Y ELLOW V I N Y L , C A S S T T E & GA M I NG M I NAT URE S LI M I T ED TO 2 00 PI ECE S E ACH

E XCLU SI V E DECEI V ER PRE - ORDER I T E M S

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Coming up in the Denver scene 100 percent shaped us.

When I moved here from North Texas 10 years ago, I was blown away because people actually supported heavy music and

DIDN’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT STYLE DISTINCTIONS. ZACH COLEMAN

thought that if we had a bigger platform, more people would get to see it, which was a big selling point for us,” notes Pendergast. “It was obvious that if we were going to take a step up, it should be with them.”

The first test for both parties was the corelease of Desolation with 20 Buck Spin, which allowed Nuclear Blast to show Khemmis the true extent of their international reach. When it came time to start working on Deceiver, Conner says his decision to leave the band to their own devices was a no-brainer—high praise from a man who has spent the last three-plus decades signing household names like Slipknot, Fear Factory and Type O Negative to worldwide record deals.

“My job is to provide the band with any support and direction they need,” he explains. “In some cases, I get very involved and micromanage the recording, but with [bands] like Khemmis, I’m completely hands-off. They have consistently demonstrated that they know exactly what they’re doing as far as having a strong vision and knowing how to execute it. The greatest service I can provide is to not complicate their process and just leave them to make their magic.”

TAP the ROCKIES

Khemmis had the great fortune of developing their magic in the rich musical landscape of Denver, CO: home to everyone from genre-bending legends like Cephalic Carnage to modern heavyweights like Blood Incantation and Primitive Man. At first glance, their melodic doom sensibilities might seem out of place in a scene that churns out so much auditory extremity, but paradoxically, that’s exactly what gave them the freedom to cultivate their unique sound in the first place.

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“Coming up in the Denver scene 100 percent shaped us,” says Coleman. “When I moved here from North Texas 10 years ago, I was blown away because people actually supported heavy music and didn’t give a shit about style distinctions.

And since there was crossover in the crowd, we felt comfortable pulling disparate elements into our sound. We knew people would still come to our shows and support us even though we weren’t straight-up doom—we could blend all this different stuff and people were still into it.

It was a really free, creative environment.”

“The thing that defines the Denver scene is freedom from genre expectations,” Pendergast seconds. “If you want to play music that’s doing several different things, there’s an audience for it. The only competition that exists between the bands is like, ‘Man, In the Company of Serpents just put out a really good record and Dreadnought somehow upped their musicianship from an already astounding level,’ which is inspiring. It helps that we’re not fighting for the same local shows anymore, but once you’ve made a record here, it just feels like there’s mutual respect. We’re all getting ahead on the shared strength of the musicians and the great albums that are being made.”

“Nobody gave a shit about Denver for a long time, with the exception of Cephalic Carnage,” says Hutcherson. “The only reason bands played Denver is if they were doing a full U.S. tour. But since there wasn’t a massive scene or a lot of media coverage, there wasn’t a lot of external expectation, so bands could do whatever they wanted. I don’t think any of us were cognizant of that until people started covering Denver bands and had a hard time pinning them down.

We got the opportunity to play with our sound because nobody was watching.”

HOPING to IGNITE

Khemmis first started playing with their sound back in 2012, after Hutcherson and Pendergast met at a CU Boulder grad school mixer and connected on their shared love of heavy metal. They talked throughout the night, discovered they both played guitar and made vague plans to jam, but they wouldn’t actually see each other again for six months. Hutcherson spent that time getting beaten into the ground by his rigorous graduate program, and it got so demanding that he started drinking heavily to deal with the stress.

Thankfully, his wife convinced him to turn to music for a healthier reprieve.

“She said, ‘You need to start a band because you look unhappy. Also, you need to get this fucking amp stack out of the living room.’ So, I put an ad on Craigslist, but nobody replied. Then I edited the ad to include a picture of the Jawas from Star Wars and started getting responses.

One of them was from Dan [Beiers, former bassist], who asked if I wanted to meet him at a new metal-themed brewery in the area.”

That brewery turned out to be none other than TRVE Brewing Company, which non-locals may recognize from its multiple appearances at the Philadelphia and Los Angeles editions of Decibel’s Metal & Beer Fests. TRVE quickly became the hangout of choice for Hutcherson and Beiers, and eventually, they were introduced to its head brewer, Zach, who also happened to be an accomplished drummer in search of a new project.

“When I joined Khemmis, I had mostly been playing extreme metal, but I’ve always loved

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It’s supposed to feel like I can’t put the full range of emotion into the song. There’s something sadder about feeling like

YOU DON’T QUITE HAVE THE STRENGTH TO TAKE IT THERE. PHIL PENDERGAST

rock ‘n’ roll—Thin Lizzy and ZZ Top are two of my favorite bands,” says Coleman. “When we started playing together, I was like, ‘This is cool, I’ll be able to work on some different chops that I don’t normally use.’ I started learning [Thin Lizzy drummer] Brian Downey licks to have a more ‘rock’ approach. Those were great jumpingoff points, and they gave me another way to play.”

The trio ultimately decided they could benefit from adding a second guitar to the mix, and Hutcherson thought back to his prior encounter with a fellow metalhead in the hallowed halls of Colorado academia. He reached out to Pendergast and invited him to his not-yet-named band’s practice space, where the two would sow the seeds of their ongoing musical partnership.

“We played around with a song that he had sent me and jammed on some other riffs that I had, and it was immediately obvious that we were on the same page,” recalls Pendergast. “We had different skill sets that complemented each other really nicely. I immediately realized that [Ben] is a more technical musician than I am— he could pick up what the harmony parts should be and he [knew about] different modes, which I didn’t have any experience with.”

A few days later, Pendergast returned to play with the entire group and Khemmis was officially born. Originally, their aspirations didn’t extend beyond drinking Coors Banquets and playing extremely loud riffs, but as time went on, their mutual influences coalesced and a distinctive sound started to develop.

“I remember those early songs being more traditional stoner-doom,” says Coleman.

“Everybody in the band felt like they were OK,

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but then Ben and Phil started harmonizing some guitar parts and I was like, ‘That’s it right there. That’s the sound.’ We started writing songs based around those kinds of parts and it just took off from there.”

“In some ways, it gave us permission to just play what we wanted to play,” says Hutcherson of Coleman’s eureka moment. “My favorite type of guitar [playing] fills up space in a melodic way, and that has always been a big element of what we do. It could have easily turned into something else, but because of the way Phil and I think about guitar, integrating our classic metal influences just came naturally. And it offered a satisfying contrast to the more sorrowful elements that we wanted to have.”

BROKEN but UNASHAMED

For many doom bands, the sensation of sorrow comes in the form of glacial tempos and sad chord progressions, but Khemmis have a different advantage when it comes to bringing on the heartbreak: Pendergast’s singing voice. His smooth timbre creates a sense of despondency in every song, like he’s fighting against his survival instinct with each leaden step. By no means should that be taken as a slight on his abilities—in fact, it’s quite the opposite, as Deceiver is packed with captivating vocal harmonies and performances that elicit deep emotions in the listener.

“The sound for Khemmis is a defeated voice that’s not your typical metal singer,” explains Pendergast. “It’s supposed to feel like I can’t put the full range of emotion into the song. There’s something sadder about feeling like you don’t quite have the strength to take it there. I do love

Rob Halford and all those guys, and I could sing ‘Victim of Changes’ and it would sound acceptable, but that’s not really what Khemmis is.

“I think my greatest strength as a vocalist is that I don’t try to copy anybody—I’m just trying to be myself,” he continues. “I wish I had a gravelly voice like Bruce Dickinson, but that’s just not what I sound like. Studying someone like Steve Winwood, who has a really soulful voice, just makes more sense. I also love Peter Gabriel for his ability to portray downcast emotion with a hint of hope. Tonally, my voice is closest to his of any major vocalist I can think of. His performance on ‘Red Rain’ is a good example of the kind of zone that I try to tap into.”

WRITTEN with a KNIFE

Thematically, the zone that Khemmis inhabit on Deceiver is unquestionably the darkest they’ve ever encountered, which is perfectly understandable when you consider the personal tribulations they had to overcome to bring it to life. Take the song “Living Pyre”—Pendergast wrote the lyrics to process his feelings about the very act of writing music, so when he sings, “There’s nothing left to give, nothing to rake through coals that I can use to keep the flame alive inside,” the reverberations of past trauma are impossible to ignore.

Perhaps the core of the album’s thesis can be found on its closing track, the phenomenal “The Astral Road,” which is about humanity’s failure to be vulnerable and connect with others through shared experiences and struggles. For Khemmis, most of the blame lies with the eponymous “deceiver”—a personification of the daily war waged between the lies we tell ourselves and the steps we take to move past them.

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“We’re all deceived by the world to think of ourselves as tied to an inevitable fate [that’s] born of family history, genetics and our own personal choices,” offers Hutcherson. “We internalize a narrative about what life is and convince ourselves that we’re failures if we don’t adhere to [certain] markers of success, even if we don’t want them. Once you realize that, you have to confront this internalized deceiver—the voice in your head that says, ‘What you’re doing is selfish. How are you going to keep a roof over your head?’ This album is about the struggle of confronting that voice every day.”

For Pendergast, exploring such intimate topics was an important, cathartic exercise—he even wrote detailed vignettes for all six songs so his bandmates could gain a deeper understanding of how their themes connect to his personal life—but he admits that he still had some hesitation about letting the general public into his protected space.

“I’ve made myself vulnerable to the point where I’m kind of afraid to see what people will think, because I’m exposing all my flaws and laying them out for everyone to see,” he discloses. “Even though [the lyrics] might be obscure enough to not be autobiographical, I still feel nervous to talk about what they mean. [But] I hope I can provide some kind of connection for people who really need it, and I also hope it can strengthen the connection I have with myself. Like, the last words on the album are, ‘Where my will to live is not a lie when the darkness comes,’ and I think that says it all.”

“As much anger and fury [are on this record], there’s also this empathy that has informed everything from the lyrics to the music to the artwork,” adds Hutcherson.

“The story of how the album came to be is a victorious one, and as sad as the music sounds and how painful a lot of these lyrics were to write, by the time you get to the end, it feels triumphant, if a bit uncertain.

That’s why the last note on ‘The Astral Road’ doesn’t resolve—we wanted it to feel like it’s not the end.”

PICKING UP the PIECES

And so Khemmis find themselves at a significant junction heading into 2022. Behind them lies a ruinous path strewn with the remnants of depression and uncertainty; ahead of them sprawls an uncharted landscape brought to fruition by nearly a decade of artistic dedication. Even with the state of live entertainment in disarray due to the ongoing surges of COVID variants, the band heads into the future with a remarkable new LP and a chance to reach scores of new fans with their boldly passionate music. For all three men, there could be no greater honor.

“For many years, [Khemmis] was the only therapeutic thing that I had in my life, and I’ve grown so much as a person because of the things it has forced me to confront about myself,” affirms Pendergast. “It’s shown me that there are other people in the world who care about the same things that I do. When somebody tells you that your song touched them so deeply that it gave them a reason to live… that sort of thing means so much to me.”

“The world is a fucking awful place filled with awful things, and we often feel totally unable to change any of that, but one thing we can do is give people a way to feel like they’re part of something,” says Hutcherson. “If we can put [music] out there that makes someone’s day a little bit more tolerable, then it’s all worth it.”

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INSIDE ≥

76 1914 The 107th anniversary limited edition 76 CULT OF EIBON Thy swampy contract

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

78 DREAM UNENDING The sweet suffering 80 GHOST BATH/MØL Not the real McCoys 86 UNLEASHED It takes a pillage

The Verge-In Diaries

DECEMBER

Boston metallic hardcore royalty CONVERGE join forces with CHELSEA WOLFE and deliver an album-of-the-year contender

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Tickle Me Frank Stallone

5

Turd Ferguson

2

Ezra

1

Better than Ezra

TO

paraphrase a recent social media post by Gnaw Their Tongues maestro Mories, sometimes music comes out that makes all other current releases CONVERGE sound like kid stuff. He was referring to a new song by Dold Bloodmoon: I Vorde Ens Navn, a recently configured powerhouse of NorweE P I TA P H / gian black metal brainiacs, but that exact thought comes to D E AT H W I S H I N C . mind as soon as Bloodmoon: I awakens from my speakers. Some music strains desperately to be relevant through all manner of over-the-top imagery or antics or trying to make their racket the noisiest, the speediest, the edgiest.

Bloodmoon: I bypasses all that pageantry and just announces its intent to grip your heart in its surest of fists and pump your blood to its own unerring beat. The combination of melodic grace, effortless compositional savvy, complete command of sonic space, impeccable performances and an expert channeling of emotional energies makes this record mandatory listening. Period. End of review. (Well, not quite—eds.)

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]

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Listen to it as soon as possible, if your musical ear has any integrity at all.

The album is billed as a Converge joint, which I guess is as good a way to sell it as any and better than most, but Bloodmoon: I isn’t like any other Converge record. This music is rounder, lusher than anything the Massachusetts quartet has flogged into existence and sustained for more than a couple songs per release. Ever willing to expand and experiment, the foursome struck up an artistic partnership with Chelsea Wolfe and her bandmate Ben Chisolm some years ago—and folded the talents of longtime Cave In pal Steve Brodsky for good measure—for some collaborative performances in Europe, and the idea grew legs of its own.

If the word “supergroup” didn’t have such damning baggage, we could consider using it here, but Bloodmoon: I is so much more cohesive, more holistically captivating than such a term suggests. These songs flex and breathe with their own muscle, belonging to none of the worlds that their component creators have toiled in for these past decades. Certainly, Jacob Bannon’s shriek cuts through heaving sound, as perfect as ever, and Wolfe’s voice is as brilliantly charming as Brodsky’s is evocative, but Bloodmoon: I also flashes shades of Giant Squid and Stolen Babies and Mastodon and Failure and Cult of Luna’s Mariner, absorbing every style and refining them all to serve this band’s singular purpose.

Want to get nitpicky? It’s possible there’s too much good music on the record. Taken individually, each moment of music, and each song that harbors those moments, feels perfectly rendered. But the sound is so saturated—with emotional weight, with import and meaning and eminently listenable bits—that trying to take in the full hour might be overly taxing.

After multiple listens, it’s still difficult to discern any particular arc traced out by the totality of these songs. Still, that seems like a petulant quibble amid all this awesome. If you ever wondered what the more adventurous sections of Axe to Fall might sound like if an even more competent band polished them incandescent perfection, wonder no longer. —DANIEL LAKE

1914

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Where Fear and Weapons Meet N A PA L M

The Revelation band was pretty good, too

Ukrainian quintet 1914 have been slinging remarkably reliable metal since their first single, “Caught in the Crossfire,” was released in 2015. That consistency earned them a place on 76 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

Napalm’s roster, and though this third LP has that legendary Austrian label’s monetary backing, the expanded war chest hasn’t dulled their bayonets in the slightest.

Before breaking down where the budget shows, a few words on genre—1914 have been described as sludge, black and melodic death metal in the past. Let’s calibrate expectations: They sound like Behemoth playing Bolt Thrower songs. Rumbling double-bass, melodic tremolo-picked riffs and lyrics focused on World War I have been their plan of attack from the start.

But what was once a scrappy unit is now fully equipped for a major offensive. New ordnance includes guest spots from Paradise Lost’s Nick Holmes on “… And a Cross Now Marks his Place” and Me and That Man’s Sasha Boole on folk interlude “Coward,” not to mention some orchestral backing. Admittedly, the first time a full brass section broke in during “FN.380 ACP#19074,” I questioned whether it was necessary.

To their credit, 1914 never wander into no man’s land. These lush accoutrements accent the storytelling and atmosphere that gives their music its deadly force, but the band remains inside the wire focused on riffs and rhythm, even on 10-minute cuts like “The Green Fields of France.” Tell your commanding officer—this is how to win the war. —JOSEPH SCHAFER

C TRIP A

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U Should Live Here INTERNET & WEED

Yeah, maybe I should!

Does Christian McKenna ever get tired of doing amazing, crazy-interesting shit day in, day out? From his own wild slate of bands (End Christian, the Brazilian Gentleman, Hex Inverter) to turning Translation Loss—the eclectic label he founded along with Relapse production director/Starkweather drummer Drew Juergens—into one of the most consistently killer safe havens for pioneers and perception scramblers, McKenna is a perpetual game-changer.

And, so, perhaps it should come as no surprise that the debut full-length from C Trip A—the darkwave-y industrial hip-hop project McKenna does with Philly MC Anthony Adams—is similarly transcendent. Now, C Trip A, it should be stressed, are decidedly not metal. But they are very much metal-adjacent: The 2020 Ozzy Nights EP, for example, featured a guest spot from Colin Marston of Dysrhythmia/ Gorguts/Krallice fame. This is not the Judgment Night soundtrack, and if you grew up in the

era of grocery store metal mags selling “Rap Is Crap” T-shirts in the back pages and never outgrew that vibe… well, this likely won’t fix that—even with Justin Broadrick onboard for a trippy, hypnotic track.

It’s also a record without much adherence to traditional structures and, thus, challenging in many ways. If, however, you have any affinity for rap and/or deft atmospheric soundscape-building, U Should Live Here is an adventurous and gratifying experience, indeed. —SHAWN MACOMBER

CULT OF EIBON

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Black Flame Dominion

IRON BONEHEAD

Thy mighty (intergenerationally binding) contract

When Jim Mutilator, Sakis Tolis, George Zacharopoulos and the other forefathers of the Hellenic black metal scene signed their pact with the Devil—thus granting them the instructions on how to conjure those evil and hyper-addictive melodies that are the hallmark of Greek black metal—did they, just kids at the time, understand that they were signing a contract that was so deeply binding? One way or another, the Hellenic sound has proven to be so potent that loyal followers continue to gather at its sonic altar, and so do neophytes eager to adopt the nowsacred approach.

Now at the forefront of the late black magick metal resurgence, Cult of Eibon arrived in 2016 like a band 32 years late to the swamp party. Even going so far as to name their drum machine, this Athenian duo play their black metal like they found the recipe in Stefan Necroabyssious’ copy of The Book of Eibon.

Within minutes after its brief synth-troduction, Black Flame Dominion, Cult of Eibon’s debut full-length, delivers on its six-years-in-themaking promise. The almost-too-slow pace of the dreamily familiar riffage, the stiff drum machine cadence, the gothic keyboards—it smacks you right in the nose like a heady scent of salty sea winds. Yes, Cult of Eibon’s Porphyrion and Nyogtha have taken up a heavy mantle. Taking such a tried-and-true approach and making it sound fresh three decades after the fact is quite an accomplishment.

Despite having numerous other bands doing pretty much the same thing between the two of them, Cult of Eibon succeed in releasing a worthy addition to the Greek canon. But they should realize that even their heroes took inspiration from outside the scene. —DUTCH PEARCE

Waldgeflüster - dahoam The new magnificent album feat. guests from Lunar Aurora, Harakiri for the sky & Panopticon

www.aoprecords.de

CDS, VINYL & MERCHANDISE

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THEARTISANERASTORE.COM

E S I S NEW ALBUM OUT NOW N

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DARKWOODS MY BETROTHED

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Angel of Carnage Unleashed N A PA L M

Make it Dimmu, but less sucky

Returning after more than two decades in the wilderness, with Nightwish keys player Tuomas Holopainen a full-time member, Darkwoods My Betrothed present us with another black metal epic propelled by a sense of dark theater. No mean feat. When the most deadly serious of metal’s subgenres is presented in ambitious aspect ratios such as this, it can be exposed as a preposterous venture, every pump from the keyboardist like applying icing on top of a Halloween cake with a shovel. Mostly a triumph of tone and composition, Angel of Carnage Unleashed avoids such pitfalls, and is something of a throwback, too.

“You Bitter Source of Sorrow” is a stein-swinging second-wave groove that, on sheet music, might look boilerplate; yet our critical defenses are helpless against it. A riff such as this is black metal’s Green Onions; no matter how many times you have heard a variation on the theme, Pasi Kankkunen’s barked amphibian vocal pitched on top, it remains every bit as thrilling. “In Thrall to Ironskull’s Heart” is pure medieval camp—“Dream On” for a barbarian feudalist world—and had it been tracked in 1985, it would have been perfect for Paul Verhoeven’s Flesh + Blood. The clunkiness of its verse only adds to the appeal, grounding it in the ramshackle grammar of classic black metal arrangements.

These moments of cinematic pomp are plenty, but rarely pull focus from on-point performances and a ferocity that is often impossible to take any other way. See “Massacre,” a helter-skelter, blast-heavy track that wants only for a flame pot and the faint scent of patchouli to spirit you away to a mid-’90s Wacken Open Air. —JONATHAN HORSLEY

DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT

8

Noctvrne

SEASON OF MIST

Remember that name… or do your best

It’s not until a couple minutes into the second track of Noctvrne that you start sensing what kind of band Der Weg Einer Freiheit actually are.

But the German black metallists keep you guessing until the end.

The quartet has continually refined their sound over the course of four previous fulllengths, but this is their most confident leap.

The term “post-black metal” is derogatory to 78 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

some people, but it’s an apt description for a record that can be uplifting, somber, enraged or just gorgeous.

Of the seven songs on here, only four contain traditional black metal, and even then, it doesn’t overwhelm the quiet passages and layered, visceral post-rock. This genre ain’t exactly known for its brevity, but here it’s put to good use, with an incredibly well-balanced sense of pacing and variation. And when the blasting comes in, the riffs are equal parts memorable and monstrous. They also choose the unconventional approach of not only having audible bass, but making it integral to melodies and their full-on attack.

One critique is guest Dávid György Makó, whose smattering of vocals in “Immortal” just feel off. His style, which could accurately be called “soulful,” does not mesh with the rest of the (very good) song, and sticks out awkwardly within the album. But if this is in fact a misstep, it’s one of the very few on Noctvrne. Der Weg Einer Freiheit have been building towards something like this for a long time, and it’s a pleasure to finally hear it. —SHANE MEHLING

DREAM THEATER

8

A View From the Top of the World

INSIDEOUTMUSIC/SONY

Rightoverture

Celebrated New York-based progressive metallers Dream Theater have come a long way since 2016 lowlight The Astonishing.

They’re back to writing riveting and musically insane (if sometimes lilting) high-concept stuff, which is a good thing for fans of the band’s golden era (2009’s Black Clouds & Silver Linings and the albums before it).

New album A View From the Top of the World cuts most of the high-minded, overelaborate trappings that have come with the quintet’s inevitable maturity. Certainly, Dream Theater have never been workaday in their myriad approaches, but the collegiate fidgeting eventually needed to give way to the simplicity of rocking the fuck out. Tracks like “Honor Thy Father,” “The Shattered Fortress,” “Burning My Soul” and “The Dark Eternal Night” immediately come to mind.

Not that Dream Theater in 2021 are showing discontent sonically. The able-capable musicians are, however, writing songs again that capture the tension of the past while continuing to elaborate on the very things that made them stand out, going all the way back to 1992 breakout album Images and Words. “Answering the Call” has that edge, built with crunchy syncopation, but powered by a fresh chorus (thank you, Mr.

LaBrie), the kind not really heard since “Hollow Years” and “Vacant” coalesced the best of their respective influences in Rush, Sabbath, Maiden, and ELP. Indeed, “Sleeping Giant,” “Invisible Monster” and “The Alien” take this idea forward. Under the showmanship and levelling up—guitarist John Petrucci is in a league of his own here—the songs are allowed to develop without too much progressive metal tedium.

Even at the insane lengths, the bedrock of this View is songcraft. Turns out, Distance Over Time wasn’t a fluke after all. —CHRIS DICK

DREAM UNENDING

7

Tide Turns Eternal 20 BUCK SPIN

Tide also turns gothic, rapture and the painless

An intriguing new collaboration between Tomb Mold guitarist Derrick Vella and Justin DeTore, drummer/vocalist for Boston’s Innumerable Forms, the only citation for Dream Unending’s existence at press time is a 20 Buck Spin social media post. One of the only facts currently available about this band is that they cite early Anathema as a touchstone, which straightaway betokens promise; with Anathema long since defecting to indie-prog chillout zones, there are many facets of the pensive Scousers’ early work that warrant building upon. There is something of the lumbering, exploratory dynamics of Serenades and The Silent Enigma here, but far as the weight of doom-death goes, the predominant influences are no later than 1992’s The Crestfallen EP, and there’s no let-up from morose monotone gurgles until the time-honored female vocals help push the epic closing title track to greater heights.

Perhaps inevitably, Anathema’s longtime touchstone Pink Floyd are also name-checked, reflected in some of the moody, floating solos, radiating resonantly in a vaguely Dave Gilmour idiom, even over the Bolt Thrower-style doublekicked rhythmic chug at the end of highlight “In Cipher I Weep.” The lead work is arguably the album’s strongest asset, Vella’s guitar also responsible for some monstrous riffs and winsome acoustic passages (although some of the Cure-ish effects and shoegazey cadences sound a bit dropped-in). The integration between gnarly, old-school, slow-death churn and mopey goth twang feels a bit ungainly at points, but it’s a debut recording from an extremely new project, and presumably they’ve not yet played live much, so this process will sharpen up and smooth out.

As a raw representation of a new partnership cottoning onto something good, Tide Turns Eternal hits the spot; there’s some beautiful playing here, and it should be a treat to watch them fulfill their potential. —CHRIS CHANTLER

EXODUS

8

Persona Non Grata NUCLEAR BLAST

War on everyone, not just the middle class

In the spirit of present-day capitalism’s business model, part of this review will be contracted out while I sit back and reap credit, reward and Decibel’s executive compensation. Please recall our Persona Non Grata studio report from issue No. 195, in which guitarist Gary Holt walked us through the making of the band’s 11th album, ebulliently describing it as “crushing… so fucking heavy… the aggression is insane and over-the-top.”

Boy howdy, was that assessment spot-on! I mean, we’ve had a lot of smoke blown up our collective butts in 17 years, but damn, this is loaded with vicious and incisive riffs propelled by an obscenely brutal guitar tone, recalling the days when Exodus’ sound was driven by dual distortion pedals. Think the good-time, roadrash thrash of Impact Is Imminent and Fabulous Disaster dropped an additional half-step, with that signature gallop accented by the minor-

est of minor keys and darkened hammer-ons/ pull-offs.

The title track and “R.E.M.F.” ignite with riffs that are shifty, sidewinding face-rippers; they summon unbridled youth, tapping into the blues, old metal, Holt’s time in Slayer and Lee Altus’ time in Heathen. The hummable vocal phrasing in “Elitist” and shuffling Sick of It All feel of “The Beatings Will Continue (Until Morale Improves)” has everyone sounding like they’re having the time of their lives. Holt also noted that Persona Non Grata features some of the longest songs of the band’s career, a point that more than one person has mentioned since promos started making the rounds. All well and good if you live by the credo “the more, the merrier,” but sometimes a lack of brevity transforms bristling energy into wrung-out repetition. Case in point: The mostly rollicking “Lunatic-Liar-Lord” and “Antiseed” (a thrashy take on Melvins’ “Honey Bucket”) could both have been cut in half.

So, thanks to all who contributed to this review! After slapping my name on the byline, the album and I will be transforming my living room into a one-man mosh pit. Albert, if you

could forward a longbox copy to my summer beach house, that’d be awesome. Thanks, duder.

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

EXSUL

7

Allegoresis CALIGARI

Seeing death in everything

Exsul’s self-titled debut EP veritably helped usher in the winter of 2020, and already they’re back with another EP of ancient philosophy-inspired atmospheric death metal. Even more so than on their debut, Arizonans Charon (“strings & curses”) and Phlegyas (“sticks & spells”) play these songs like monolithic idols to elder gods long obscure, raised up from surging, primordial magma. And if their debut almost sounds a little traditional at this point, it’s only in hindsight after having experienced Allegoresis.

Seemingly as interested in creating a mindwarping overhaul of the senses as they are a death metal album, Exsul deal in mountainous riffage (whether grinding or doomed, the tone’s

DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2021 : 79

FEAR CONNECTION 5 Progeny of a Social Disease MDD

More rock, less Rolf

Judging by their hardened visages, Fear Connection certainly didn’t discover metal a year or two ago. In fact, these German death-thrashers look like they’ve been Wacken-ed since the early ’90s. In terms of style, the “death” side of this debut LP primarily comes from vocalist Rolf—possessor of barnacled vocal cords, yet clear enunciation and a timbre not far removed from Amon Amarth front-Viking Johan Hegg. Musically, the remaining members— guitarist Naushad, bassist Sipo and drummer Doc Tim—favor Swedish DM (we won’t call it metalcore, even though some riffs veer towards that classification) and bygone thrash. In addition to the odd melodic tangle between guitars and bass, there’s a hardcore backbone to the likes of “War Inside My Head,” as the band careens recklessly through a chantable, yet predictable chorus. Because of Rolf’s clearly growled vocals, the very generic lyrics (English as a second language, no doubt) are way more audible than anyone other than Rolf would probably like— plus he’s positioned too high in the mix.

All of this is terminally distracting throughout; any time the band works up steam through jolting tempo changes underpinning taut riffage, Rolf starts barking out cringeworthy thrash-bynumbers slogans. “Fight the Plague” is so obvious that it hurts more than the frantic charge backing it. “Democracy Dies”—a token sociopolitical thrash screed—will make your eyes roll to the back of your skull, never to return with its “Stand up for your rights!” refrain. So, for every 80 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

horns-worthy idea—and there are a few on this average LP—there are at least two heavy-handed clichés waiting to hammer you over the head.

—DEAN BROWN

FUNERAL CHANT

7

Dawn of Annihilation CARBONIZED

Total (black/)death

In case you can’t tell by the skull-adorned black and white artwork and plainly nihilistic album title, Funeral Chant play black/death metal summoned straight from the depths of Lucifer’s sulphureous ball bag. Like Teitanblood or Watain at their most orthodox and thrashed-out, these Oakland (Hell) Raiders fire off frenzied ‘n’ blasting extreme paeans at a vicious pace. So much so that the tailspin created is enough to leave listeners impaled in the dirt like a row of inverted crosses. Sure, you’re not going to find anything musically unique or eyebrow-raising on this tautly pulled 33-minute record, and that’s fine.

Since metal as a worldwide movement currently has plenty of boundary-pushers at play, sometimes all you need to upend your furniture is full-on riff-rage, cacophonous vocals, solos that screech between dive-bombed and melodically angled, spine-jolting tempo changes and frenetic recorded performances.

Yet while all of those nasty goodies are almost enough to forge a strong album, dynamic song construction is still essential no matter how deep underground you intend to keep the noise. After multiple spins, Funeral Chant’s evolving skills at crafting high-impact (yet clever) riff transitions thankfully do become apparent, even though there is still some toiling required to distinguish their overall blasphemous and traditional black/ death sound from the horde of cloven-hoofed heathens out there that have sparked similar miasmic hellfire. On their second LP, these miscreants have proven that they’re on a creative ascent while remaining loyally tethered to the abyssal depths. —DEAN BROWN

GHOST BATH

5

Self Loather

GUS G

7

Quantum Leap AFM

“Al, unleash the fookin’ fury.”

NUCLEAR BLAST

MØL

power vacuum has been left in New Bermuda.

Can ordinary corrupt human lovers Møl or Ghost Bath take the road all the way to Judah?

Møl have been around almost as long as Deafheaven, but the Danish quintet has been much less prolific—they didn’t get around to releasing their debut full-length until 2018. The most damning thing I can say about Diorama is that my attention drifted briefly during “Photophobic” and I literally thought I was listening to Deafheaven for a moment.

I guess they don’t really hide it: Their promo photos have a lot of pink. The main difference lies in a more pronounced melodeath influence (evident in some of the riffs on “Serf” and “Vestige”). Sometimes the vocals sound like Zao. Otherwise, they mostly ape their Californian counterparts’ shimmering beauty, and they aren’t bad at it. They just aren’t as good at it as you-know-who.

Ghost Bath first gained attention by pretending to be from China when they’re actually from North Dakota—which is definitely not in China—and they will never live that down. Here we are on album number four, Self Loather, a title that even sounds like Sunbather. Their logo appears to have grown some more branches, thus reaffirming their commitment to the black metal side of their sound.

In fact, they’ve ditched the major-key parts in favor of some serious northern darkness. They still have the jangle; just not the prettiness.

Unfortunately for them, that moves them out of the somewhat crowded blackgaze space into the extremely crowded post-black metal space.

They previously stood out by gazing into the stars instead of at their shoes. As much as I hate contributing to their insecurity, by losing that they’ve lost the actual non-gimmick thing that made them special.

I guess Møl win this race, so if you want harsh vocals with your blackgaze, go look at their Diorama. Your best bet is probably to stick with Infinite Granite, though. —JEFF TREPPEL

6

Diorama NUCLEAR BLAST

Deafhaven’t

Now that Infinite Granite showed us that Deafheaven have decided to bathe in the sun full-time, a blackgaze

When Ozzy Osbourne introduced Gus G. as his new lead guitarist in 2009, replacing the wyldely popular Zakk whatshisname, there was the tiniest glimmer of hope that the prolific Greek guitarist formerly known as Konstantinos Karamitroudis would awaken the Prince of Darkness from his post-millennial creative stagnation. After the release of 2010’s middling Scream, anyone familiar with our man’s

PHOTO BY HRISTO SHINDOV

always massively heavy), impossible tempo changes, hypnotic interludes, and a dual vocal attack that frequently sounds like the summoner and his conjured underworldly beast.

Although it opens similarly to Exsul, with the sounds of chains clinking and other obscure, ominous movements, it doesn’t take Allegoresis long to distinguish itself as the much stronger effort. With seriously one of the thickest guitar tones you’ll hear this year, the three original tracks (there are also two instrumentals and a Motörhead cover) tower almost peerlessly as far as the primal brutality they display.

Given the eclectic nature of Allegoresis’ sound and structure, the EP seems to go by in no time at all, like an all-out melee between several different species of humanoid monsters. No doubt, the power that Exsul wield is formidable and, at this point, it’s intimidating to realize that their best work is still ahead of them. —DUTCH PEARCE

work in Firewind, one of the finest power metal bands of the 2000s, knew immediately that he was nothing more than a hired gun, instructed to play whatever lowest-common-denominator, Kevin Churko-produced stadium rawk OzzyCorp® had demanded.

Since leaving Ozzy’s band, Gus has kept himself busy, releasing a series of solo albums.

Quantum Leap, his latest, treads very familiar territory, and although an instrumental album by a flashy metal guitarist is a niche market within an already niche market, he manages to keep things sounding fresh. The album consistently shifts from the ebullient style of Joe Satriani and the far more expressive tones of Uli Jon Roth, but the cool thing about Gus is he’s a smart enough songwriter to allow his solos to serve the songs, not the other way around.

When he shreds, it’s always tasteful, without a hint of arrogance. Granted, the flashy playing still gets very boring very quickly—we get it, you’re fast—but the hooks are consistently there, as “Into the Unknown” and “Enigma of Life” firmly attest. What could have easily been a tacky affair is economical, professional and surprisingly memorable. —ADRIEN BEGRAND

ILLUDIUM

8

Ash of the Womb PROPHECY PRODUCTIONS

I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen pain

The West Coast has been under siege from wildfires a few times over the past two years. Families evacuated homes that were reduced to cinders as the fires dyed the night sky orange. Some lives were swallowed by the flames. As Californians, the cataclysmic imagery of an inferno world certainly informed the creation of Illudium’s sophomore record of heavy dreamgaze. But Ash of the Womb is just as interested in resilience as destruction; picture green saplings growing from the smoldering wreckage of a forest fire.

Illudium is a force driven by the talents of Shantel Amundson. Her vocals shiver when the shadows are cold in her compositions. But they also soar and soothe when her gentle guitar work summons the sun (“Soma Sema”). “Aster” and “Sempervirens” boast distorted fuzz that feels like organic monoliths. While Illudium have zero interest in abandoning melody for heaviness, there’s still a foundation of post-doom crunch used for dramatic emphasis.

Although only one song is under seven minutes, “Ätopa” and “Madrigal” are the designated epics at over nine minutes each. The former patiently shapeshifts like a cloud changing forms, and the album’s momentum stymies to

watch those clouds. But “Madrigal” is a journey of light stabbing through dense smoke; a dynamic experience of eerie quiet and the looming thunder of distortion. “Where Death and Dreams Do Manifest” begins with an ominous blast, but Amundson quickly supplants the darkness with clean guitar.

Illudium’s music lives between those forces of fiery trauma and healing. Ash of the Womb is catharsis through meditation as the world burns around you. Amundson has harnessed the power to extinguish the flames. —SEAN FRASIER

KAYO DOT

8

Moss Grew on the Swords and Plowshares Alike PROPHECY PRODUCTIONS

You got mossed!

Screenwriting 101: Begin any scene with the action already in progress. Moss Grew on the Swords and Plowshares Alike follows through on its tale-in-a-title from the first note. As vast and varied as Kayo Dot’s melodic prog is, it erupts only a tiny sliver of the discographical grandeur narrative, stacking theory, poetry and punishment like Cloud Atlas—across lifetimes and permutations.

Nearly double decades in as KD, guitarist/bassist/drummer/vibraphonist/violinist/flautist/ clarinetist/synth master/saxophone whisperer Toby Driver reassembled previous band Maudlin of the Well to track herein. They put out four LPs across 1995-2009, and here mark two decades since the release of double album opus Bath/ Leaving Your Body Map. As his emo/death/thrash vocal prism ascends into shoegaze, Moss plateaus Driver’s overarching accord.

The conceptual tale of a knight errant, a princess and the evil denizens keeping them apart, the album rises and falls exactly in line with its bandleader’s previous milestone.

Transcending the Floydian omniscience of Kayo Dot’s Blasphemy (2019), plus the first-wave goth of 2016’s Plastic House on Base of Sky, these seven chapters (logging an hour) transmute the doom ambiance of Driver’s earliest work into dulcet, freeform extremity.

“The Knight Errant” resonates a harmoniousness that lends the tune’s death rattle a palpable expansiveness. “Brethren of the Cross” affects a Roger Waters-esque shrillness. “Void in Virgo (The Nature of Sacrifice)” glistens with crystal blue keyboards and Driver’s guitars rippling and crashing against the shores of 1980s expansiveness. Thirteen-minute closer “Epipsychidion” sucks everything before it into a vortex of celestial exsanguination that devolves into a long tail of industrial discordance. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

MASTODON

9

Hushed and Grim REPRISE

Name a more iconic duo—I’ll wait

Double albums seem like a good thing, but more often than not prove the idiom about what happens when you have an excess of said good thing. Kudos to Mastodon, then, for pulling off what their peers both contemporary (Baroness) and legendary (Iron Maiden) couldn’t: a studio twofer that doesn’t waste your goddamn time. More than anything else, the goal of a feature-length record is to guide the listener safely through all four sides without them getting up to go watch the hockey game.

Hushed and Grim wastes no time pointing the way up Yggdrasil. Side one reminds the listener that Mastodon still know how to stampede, only they employ fancier footwork than we’ve seen previously. Side two takes a more winding route, starting under the Allman Brothers’ southern blue skies and ending in a mathematical nightmare. Side three may be the real keeper between “Peace and Tranquility”’s titular lie, “Had It All”’s heartfelt monster ballad and Leviathan throwback “Savage Lands.” They close things out with the three longest songs, and while they aren’t as memorable as what came before, they bring the journey to a somber close.

The secret to the album’s success? Besides the welcome variety in musical styles, they center Hushed and Grim around a deeply personal emotional core. The death of their friend/ manager Nick John inspired these songs. That tragic event provides a north star to the band’s lengthiest quest to date. The tribute Mastodon have created to their fallen friend truly honors him with their best work in at least a decade.

—JEFF TREPPEL

ME AND THAT MAN

4

New Man, New Songs, Same Shit Vol. 2 N A PA L M

Boo-hemoth

You know those records that are clearly just for the completists who will pick up anything? Well, for the diehards (and only the diehards) of Behemoth’s Adam “Nergal” Darski, there is Me and That Man’s New Man, New Songs, Same Shit Vol. 2.

This is Darski’s third album under the moniker, and the second that’s packed with guest vocalists. If you’re familiar with Vol. 1, you’ll expect more of his “dark folk/blues/Americana” mishmash, and while that is certainly the aim, this falls short of its already flawed predecessor. Despite a few songs that try their best, too DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2021 : 81

many of them are simply, well, terrible. Fundamentally, with so many vocal styles, there’s a lack of cohesion, but it goes further by wringing some truly corny performances out of these people. Making Abbath sing on a bar band blues number may be the nadir, though he’s certainly got some competition from a group of very talented people performing the musical equivalent of picking Darski up from the airport. And just focusing on the music doesn’t help much.

Darski has written some decent murder ballads in the past, but here he shows the fine line between being one of Nick Cave’s bad seeds and a member of Brian Setzer’s orchestra.

Is Me and That Man a waste of Darski’s time and talent? Who knows? Maybe this is creatively recharging him for Behemoth or some future project. But pray to the dark lord that Vol. 2 is not followed by a Vol. 3. —SHANE MEHLING

MONOLORD

7

Your Time to Shine RELAPSE

Doom it yourself

Ensconced in their own rehearsal/recording facility, Studio Berserk, Gothenburg triad Monolord fully populate on Your Time to Shine. The Swedes’ naturalistic doom upheavals crystallized on 2019 Relapse debut No Comfort, which now sounds like a studio album given the live dynamism of their fifth full-length. Following its predecessor’s fearsome owl photography, Shine leads with the image of a coal gray and cobalt blue bunny laid to rest inside a ring of flowers on a thick carpet of grass. Organic finality, done and dusted.

As sharp as Thomas Jäger, Mika Häkki and Esben Willems rumbled and shredded before, here they decompress into a rock of ages. “To Each Their Own” lumbers unto Gargantua, cracking terra firma with Jäger’s careening axe and the faultline foundation laid down by the engine room. Yet the passages where volume fades and the pluck of guitar cradles the frontman’s firelight truths pump the lifeblood of this beast as much as the massive dBs. Even so, opener “The Weary” and third temblor “I’ll Be Damned” sandwich the aforementioned cataclysm with elephantine melodies. On the former, Jäger entwines a plaintive, back-ofthe-mix bay with grinning riff bends that stick as sweetly as an everlasting gobstopper gummy.

The latter mines a livewire hook that uncoils an instrumental narrative: the snaking, venomous, tail-eating savagery of mankind. Its rising, falling, sidewinder slithers into the abyss.

Side B steps off the cliff altogether, its 21 minutes divided between two tunes that bleed an arid acidity via Sarlacc tempos and sandworm82 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

ravaging. Lesser brutes ignore shaded chords and deep cavern percussion. Monolord radiate elemental sanctity. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

MORTIFERUM

6

Preserved in Torment P R O FO U N D LO R E

Not perfect, not offal

Initially, pushing play on this Olympia, WA quartet’s sophomore slab yields all the right results. The album sounds excellent. It feels excellent. Over the course of these 40 minutes of doom-laden death metal, listeners will absorb all those evil, crypt-crusted nutrients that can be expected from any diet rich in the disinterred dead. The riffs smell like the tacky mixture of sweat and street grime that clings to long, tangled hair; the drum hits were custom-crafted to reverberate off the cement walls and recently de-leaded pipes of subterranean club venues. Getting lost in the lurching tempos of “Exhumed From Mortal Spheres” or the hell-breath exhortations on “Mephitis of Disease” is both easy and welladvised. Is it good? Sure it is.

But does any of Preserved in Torment rise above simply being “good”? Not really. First listens are satisfying at the most basic level, but any hopes for hearing something transcendent—some awareness that such songs can take on different textures, or any sense that an album can take on a shape beyond an amorphous bag of morose bangers—will go unrewarded. This is deathdoom that has been informed by death-doom and whose destiny was always to be death-doom, unhindered by any further ambitions. The record reminds me of perfectly serviceable sets croaked out by homegrown metal lifers during those early evening hours when patrons’ first beers are still being poured and sound levels are still being worked out. The performances and recording quality are definitely worth a few spins, but after a while, it all starts to sound like a warm-up for something better. —DANIEL LAKE

NEGURA BUNGET

7

Zau

PROPHECY PRODUCTIONS

Laid to rest

Is it strange that I remember where I was when I found out that Gabriel “Negru” Mafa had died of a heart attack? (I was at the Fillmore in Silver Spring, MD, at the top of the stairs between the main floor and the basement bar.) It’s not like I knew the guy or had even connected very much with his past couple records. Still, the fact weighed on me. Ten years earlier, I had come across Negura

Bunget’s breakout masterpieces, and even after most of the band walked away to form Dordeduh in 2009, there was enough creative spark in the transitional Vîrstele pamîntului to be worth celebrating. Once Negru steadied his course, he and his new collaborators fired off two albums of a planned “Transylvanian trilogy.” When he died, it felt like the thing he most wanted to say would necessarily be left forever unsaid.

Incredibly, Negru had left behind notes, demos and a full complement of recorded drum tracks for the trilogy’s conclusion, and now, more than four years after his death, the remaining members from the band’s final period took the time to complete the album, apparently in full service of Negru’s original vision. As a monument to a scene icon’s artistic evolution, Zau has to be considered a success. As a metal album? Well, it’s weird as fuck.

Mystical flute intros abound. Much of the atmospheric material that wafts through these tracks (less songs than movements) would feel right at home on a mid-’80s fantasy flick soundtrack. The metallic bits tend toward majestic flights of wide-eyed sorcery rather than anything dangerous or legitimately aggressive. But given that it’s all composed and performed by seasoned rock veterans, it’s hard to imagine that any part is accidental or out of place. Fans should definitely make this pilgrimage, and everyone else should consider becoming fans. —DANIEL LAKE

PATHOLOGY

6

The Everlasting Plague NUCLEAR BLAST

Along the beaten pathology

Presuming you’ve yet to hear Pathology, confidentially speaking, you’ve still basically heard Pathology. I mean, you’ve heard Tomb of the Mutilated, right? ’Course you have, pal! What about Aborted? Fuckin’ a!

Well, congrats. You, my friend, have heard Pathology. Sure, there are other influences to consider, taken from what I simply refuse to accept as legitimate subgenres: “slam” and “deathcore.” Nevertheless, you definitely know what these dudes are peddling. The real question is, is this rehash of mic-cupping, cave-roosting, br00tal death malarkey worthy of your time and shekels?

Tentatively, yes. My tepid endorsement does pain me due to the fact that Pathology are currently 11 albums into a career that boasts a Trail of Tears-worthy body count of former and current members (17 in total, nine of which are vocalists) with direct ties to outfits including Cattle Decapitation, Origin, the Locust, Whitechapel and a slew of loblolly ear-infections like Disgorge and Hydrocephalic. I haven’t bothered to investigate the band’s bizarre, internal

into the maw of death

Grand Cadaver “Into the Maw of Death” debut full length out October 29 on vinyl and CD

Majestic Mountain Records majesticmountainrecords.com

P r o u d ly P r e s e n t s

records

EXSUL

ALLEGORESIS

REDEMPTUS

Desalmado

“blackhearted” (Intense Sludge Metal) OUT NOW

“Mass Mental Devolution” (Antisocial death/Grind) OUT NOW

Ruttenskalle

SHADOWS. HEARSAY. INIQUITY. VENGEANCE. OUT  10.22.21

“Skin ‘em Alive” (old school Death Metal) OUT ON HALLOWEEN

MUSIC IS OUR PASSION, UNDERGROUND OUR DEVOTION www.gruesomerecords.com www.gruesomerecords.bandcamp.com

DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2021 : 83

volatility, but with a résumé like this, there’s no excuse for them to be third-stringers.

The Everlasting Plague, their Nuclear Blast debut, is solid enough to nudge these guys over midfield. While its dime-piece production impresses (no spoon-in-the-disposal sonic incoherence here), the album’s real selling point is an ineffable cohesiveness. The record still slouches due to the oatmeal rote-ness of the band’s formula, but taken by the teaspoon, the satisfying leitmotifs, flagrant melodicism and overall skillfulness are plenty righteous.

I feel that if Pathology can retain their current lineup for just one more record, we’re in for something far more than just an honorable mention. Here’s hoping that Nuclear Blast’s HR department can head off any brewing beefs for these here fickle bruisers. —FORREST PITTS

REAPING ASMODEIA

5

Darkened Infinity PROSTHETIC

The soul of a new machine killed by technology

The individuals who invented the gravity blast, eight-string guitar and ABY box are to be commended for not only their innovations, but their iconic reinvention of various wheels. As standalone techniques and items, they’ve allowed metal’s voice to be expanded into different territories pertaining to velocity, breadth of sound and the ability of one person to sound like multiple people, at the very least.

Minnesota’s Reaping Asmodeia unfortunately mute these advantages by playing into technical death metal’s frustratingly conservative hand. No doubt Daniel Koppy can hit drums at a faster pace than what Prosthetic wishes he could be hitting my face with right now; that Steven Lane can growl like a schizophrenic Sasquatch; that guitarist Alex Kelly is adroit enough to not need another player to complement a razor-sharp twang that’s indebted to Meshuggah and every deathcore outfit that ever sold all-over-print shirts. But Darkened Infinity, the band’s third LP, not only misses an effectivity mark given their lack of second guitar and bass, but yet again provides proof that prodigious talent and skill doesn’t necessarily translate into coherent songs. When you’re too busy using your ability to play “look at me!” instead of sculpting gripping compositions is when people kick up their heels, yawn and wait for the next fastest band, deepest growler, most ridiculous sweeppicker and brownest brown note to come along.

All is not entirely lost, as there are quality riffs, melodic convergence and promising ideas amid the clutter—“Dreamcaster” and “The Consequence of Being” both embrace melodic prog/ thrash excellence reminiscent of Shai Hulud and 84 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

Toxik, and Kelly’s leads are generally tasty and fluidly phrased. Reaping Asmodeia just need to carve out an amount of singularity with what’s at their fingertips instead of throwing techdeath volleys at an exhausted tech-death scene.

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

RUNNING WILD

8

Blood on Blood

SPV/STEAMHAMMER

Things that make you go “argh!”

“One for all / and all for one…” Deny as much as you like, but after this past year, you can’t shake the galvanizing glory of a heavy metal anthem like the eponymous opening gambit on these buccaneering badasses’ 18th album. And compared to some heavy metal heroes of yore who are still putting out records in their fourth decade, Running Wild are at least still writing tunes that will rouse even the most dampened spirit at your favorite ale-soaked German metal fest.

Captain Hooks himself, Rock ‘n’ Rolf, is back with his ol’ shipmate Peter Jordan and two new rhythm section cabin boys: Michael Wolpers (of Herman Frank) and Ole Hempelmann. This time, their mascot Adrian (yes, that’s really his name) is hitting the high seas on the hunt for organ traffickers, or the Knights Templar who predicted it. And Running Wild have hijacked our hearts with an album full of power metal booty, its coffers bulging with glam stomp and a real KISS-esque shanty.

It’s been 40 years since the Priests of the High Seas issued their first demo, and despite teasing us since with threats of walking the plank for good, it looks like the Peter Pan of speed metal has plenty of firepower yet. We hope they’ll be sailing under the Jolly Roger for many years to come. Never grow up, Rolf. Here’s to many more “Wild, Wild Nights.” —LOUISE BROWN

SCARECROW

6

II

W I S E B LO O D

From Russia with riffs

“I’m prisoner in the dungeon of stone,” Artyom Nikitin sings on “Magic Flower,” the bluesy third track from Scarecrow’s sophomore album, “but magic flower helps me wait until the dawn.” That’s a pretty good metaphor for the Russian proto-metal band’s whole deal. Raised in the shadow of decaying Soviet prison camps in the city of Perm, the band’s members turned to the age-old powers of the sweet leaf and the almighty riff as an escape from the grimness of their daily lives. Before long, they were channeling their coping

mechanisms into original music of their own. II sounds like a lost gem from the few months in 1970 between the releases of Black Sabbath and Paranoid, when heavy metal didn’t yet exist and even the hardest rock was still an extension of the blues.

Like a lot of bands playing this style of music, Scarecrow often sound like merely the sum of their influences. At various points on II, you can hear the harmonica-laced stomp of Sabbath’s “The Wizard,” the sun-kissed (albeit Russian-accented) wailing of Robert Plant and the earthy psychedelia of Leaf Hound. When they stretch their legs into more grandiose territory, as on the towering, twopart doom epic “The Endless Ocean,” a potential way forward for the band reveals itself.

In the meantime, Scarecrow have enough musical chops and reverence for their elders to make II a worthwhile listen. It doesn’t reach the same heights as the best work by Graveyard or Witchcraft, but fans of those bands should find plenty to like here. —BRAD SANDERS

SEVEN SPIRES

7

Gods of Debauchery FRONTIERS

Knowing me, knowing you

At the unlikely nexus of Kamelot and Cradle of Filth reside Boston-based Seven Spires, unobserved.

Now, if the opening salvo of glossy, disparate metals has eyes twitching and minds roiling, there’s two options: Stick around for more Top Gun theme song melodies, or run headfirst into Cerebral Rot’s fragrant cesspool.

Parts of me really wanted to feel joyfully odious after repeated run-ins with Seven Spires’ third full-length, Gods of Debauchery, but the heartstrings kept on pulling. Fair enough—I’m a fan of all the sordid, fulsome things that brought this symphonic schizophrenia to bear, but lines have been crossed over the years. Yet, Seven Spires, despite edging ever-so-close to that red, unctuous line, remain on the other side.

Well, that’s not true. There are parts of Gods of Debauchery—namely, “Lightbringer” and “This God Is Dead”—that have the ignominy of Nuclear Blast’s multi-dimensional sin via their release of the gag-reflexing ABBA Metal (A Tribute to ABBA). While most of Seven Spires’ polished, musically adept power metal has a Lost Horizon/ Eternity’s End-level seriousness to it, there’s a cloying, clubby thing happening that just sits wrong. Similarly, the Dani Filth-isms of singer Adrienne Cowan are stiff compared to her increasingly capable pipes. They’re simply not necessary against her stronger ability, as well as the band’s attempts to apply brutality to their high-flying, lordly metal.

Then again, it’s really hard to forget the promise of “The Cursed Muse” and its companion, the

decidedly anime-flavored “Ghost of Yesterday,” where Seven Spires ace their between-spaces, more-is-more lunge. Gods of Debauchery is prime in spots, but perhaps too candied to assume the gilded throne currently occupied by Immortal Guardian. —CHRIS DICK

SNARES OF SIXES

7

MoonBladder

N E FA R I O U S I N D U S T R I E S

Too good to snare a 6

The word “lunacy” derives from a medieval belief that mental health was connected to the phases of the moon, so it seems pretty appropriate that Snares of Sixes would choose our big gray buddy in the sky as the subject of this half-hour kitchen sink composition. MoonBladder throws together a truly astonishing array of sounds clearly meant to freak out my cat—in other words, 100 percent the kind of thing that Scott Seward would know how to describe poetically in his late, lamented “Wages of Din” column.

Its main perpetrator, Jason Walton, is best known for his work with Agalloch and Sculptured, and while this shares almost nothing on a surface level with those acts, the unpredictable composition style feels in line with his other work. He truly doesn’t limit himself here. It’s a soup of ominous field recordings, noise machine fiddling, bursts of guitar, decomposing video games—even a disembodied jazz quartet floating through the void. A bright Oneohtrix Point Never-style synth motif surfaces throughout to tie everything together. That’s not all Walton—a lot of the above is provided by members of Sculptured, Kayo Dot, Dreadnought and Lawnmower Deth. It’s all his vision, though.

Usually, this kind of thing can get a bit too conceptual to maintain the listener’s attention all the way through, and truth be told, it does get a little soggy around the middle. Still, Walton does a remarkable job of maintaining the piece’s gravity—especially at the end, when a human voice pulls everything back down to terra firma.

—JEFF TREPPEL

TEARMYSELF

8

Eternal Suffering HOMEWRECK

Actually, only for about 12 minutes

If you’re going to get mugged by a trio of Connecticut residents—and, let’s face it; if you live long enough, at some point you absolutely will—my sincere hope for you is that they’re wielding a swirl of insanely sick death metal riffs, wrecking ball breakdowns, math-y metallic hardcore twisters and industrial

furnace blasts, rather than the more traditional instruments of that trade.

Which is to say I came into Eternal Suffering extremely cold—it is not easy to find even the most basic information on Tearmyself; an oddity in the social media age—and I came out lit waaaaay the fuck up. And thankful for the sucker punch, to be honest. How often are we allowed to be surprised these days? Even the greenest bands seem to have a fairly sophisticated, multi-layered marketing plan in place. God bless ’em. But there is something beautiful about coming across a band like Tearmyself, who seem to have little interest in anything other than showing up, fucking shit up and disappearing back into the shadows.

Anyway, as noted, the band has the songs to back up the mystique. Twisty and unpredictable, the vibe here is Plague Bringer meets Godflesh meets Crowbar meets Prong meets Integrity. If literally any of that is your bag, you should head into the dark back alleys of Bandcamp for your pummeling. Buy a T-shirt and maybe they’ll go easy on you. Or maybe it’ll make things worse.

Who the fuck knows! Just empty your pockets, son, and count yourself lucky to be in the presence of such skilled artisans of sonic violence.

—SHAWN MACOMBER

TEETH

8

Finite

T R A N S L AT I O N L O S S

Death metal in the multiverse of madness

Death metal has undergone a dramatic and unexpected evolution over threeplus decades. The formative DM we know and love—Obituary, Deicide, early Cannibal Corpse, van Drunen-fronted Pestilence—was outwardly menacing, but as reliable as ’80s pop. There were big hooks and comfortable song structures, not to mention sing-along parts. The songs might have been about dead babies and cacodaemons, but the material was presented with a formulaic orthodoxy that would make an IKEA designer proud.

Death metal was engineered to make you press replay and get that dopamine hit from hearing caveman brutality.

With the rise of technical death metal via Morbid Angel, Cryptopsy, Nile and others, many bands shed traditional trappings and ventured further into the unknown. From this strange place, we’ve entered the death metal multiverse, where multiple realities intersect and compete for dominance. On their new EP Finite—in the works since before the pandemic—Los Angelesbased Teeth have traded death metal-brand pilsner for DMT. Like fellow outliers Blood Incantation and Artificial Brain, they see death metal as a stepping-off point to some larger cosmos. There is no place to call home in this music.

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UNLEASHED, No Sign of Life

7

Stroke, stroke, stroke… | N A PA L M

For a number of reasons, Unleashed will forever hold a soft spot in my heart.

“Before the Creation of Time,” from 1991 debut Where No Life Dwells, remains one of the best death metal songs ever. The Swedes have managed a virtually unfuckwithable consistency over 14 albums (especially the last six or seven since 2006’s Midvinterblot).

And, most recently, they closed out the last proper MDF in 2019 with a set that absolutely enthralled from beginning to end following four days of non-stop bands, shitty food and shittier sleep. The Viking ship is steady as she goes with these dudes manning the oars, and No Sign of Life offers up another top-notch rendering of Swedish DM that also ensures the once bright light at the end of the tunnel is as dim as it’s ever been. On top of that, they’re one of the bands offering up bits and pieces of versatility via heartfelt selfreflection and expansion beyond the confines of the longboat.

It would be lovely if I could provide a big picture takeaway that neatly summarizes Finite. I can say that when you listen to old-school metal for the reliable hook, you listen to Teeth for the experience. It’s the journey that counts, not the familiar destination. That said, the fact that it’s nearly impossible to describe Finite speaks to how perfect it is for our extraordinarily challenging times—times where the truth itself is under assault. We can only crawl forth, blind, looking for answers. —JUSTIN M. NORTON

TYRANNIC

8

Mortuous Decadence SÉANCE/IRON BONEHEAD

Sumptuous rawness

You’d be forgiven for having missed out on Tyrannic up until now, but sleeping on this Australian duo’s 86 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

No Sign of Life is as much three-on-the-tree Swedeath as it isn’t, especially with regard to its sonic properties. Guitars abuse the mid-range and drums possess a flatter, clicky manual typewriter tone. Johnny Hedlund still sounds like a marvelously tuneful caveman, and Fredrik Folkare’s leads continue to be expertly executed mini-songs within songs themselves. The band puts a spin on things by pulling from Painkillerera Priest on “The King Lost His Crown”; from Bay Area thrash on the title track; from elegiac doom on “You Are the Warrior!”; from good oldfashioned meat-and-potatoes heavy metal on “Midgaard Warriors for Life”; and from even a bit of Big Black-type noise rock on “The Shepherd Has Left the Flock.”

It all adds up to yet another reliable slice of Swedish death metal that, on the surface, is looking backwards (note that their logo hasn’t changed at all, Viking sagas remain the main lyrical topic and the similarity between new/debut album titles), but actually pushes the envelope appropriately forward. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

sophomore album would mean missing out on one of the more unique sounds coming from Down Under. Defiant in the face of taxonomy, Tyrannic keep their influences true and simple, building atmospherically decadent songs up from riffs somewhere between simple and majestic.

And every track on their latest album lumbers beneath layers of evil vocals, insane Paul Chainstyle doom-singing, maddening synth trills and guitar solos galore… just in case you were wondering if these guys could really play or not.

Boundlessly creative/undaunted by any genre restrictions, Tyrannic do pretty much whatever they want across these five tracks.

What they want to do, it turns out, is rip like Dream Death through some old-school heavy thrash with the same kind of reckless wonder Hellhammer had when they were just discovering the raw power of evil metal. Doom crawls resounding with bellowing clean vocals

transition smoothly into first-wave black metal epics. In the case of “Night Plague Manifest,” that’s only the beginning.

As old metal in spirit as they are in songwriting, Tyrannic seem preoccupied most of all with relating a heavy experience to the listener. So, Mortuous Decadence boasts a production that puts this record on its own pedestal, in a way that makes loving it easy. The production captures the depth and the heights in utter totality and places it, booming and insane, among the depths of the void. —DUTCH PEARCE

WALDGEFLÜSTER

7

Dohoam AOP

Homeward bound

German black metal veterans Waldgeflüster begin their new album with unassuming clean guitars and the chirps of woodland birds. While the acoustic/ambient intro is now a trope within black metal, the purpose of “A Taglachinger Morgen” is more meaningful for Waldgeflüster.

Consider it the cinematic wide shot setting the scene. The title of new album Dohoam translates to “home” in Bavarian. On their seventh LP in a 16-year career, the band crafts a concept album exploring Upper Bavarian locales.

As one of three tracks that cross the 10-minute plateau, “Im Ebersberger Forst” is dense with sky-flung and clean-sung lines and lush keyboards. The song is vast by design, with blackened heaviness buried beneath the atmospheric mist. The urgent charge of “Am Stoa” strikes a balance between founder Winterherz’s animalistic snarls and the supporting synths.

But the guitars remain sovereign in the mix, which is where Waldgeflüster excel.

That’s no slight against “Am Tatzlwurm,” a massive sprawl of shimmering riffs that pairs blast beats with autumnal blackgaze before it’s cleansed by sun showers. Despite the LP’s heavy lean on melody and pensive post-metal—especially in the album’s more plodding second half—Dohoam is black metal through and through. Ulver, Panopticon and numerous others have expanded the genre to a soundtrack of fallen leaves and forest whisperings. Once a solo project for Winterherz, Waldgeflüster have never shied away from epics. Hell, even their 2009 debut was an hour long. That said, the project has confidently blossomed to integrate sullen elements that create a sense of place. Black metal is Waldgeflüster’s home, but they still go for a woodland walk to escape the doldrums from time to time. —SEAN FRASIER

by

EUGENE S. ROBINSON

IRON MAIDEN HATES ME.

AND I DON’T CARE. T

he old days? Before cats got

their rock ‘n’ roll starter kits and sleeved-up tattoo styles, something very different was happening for those that wanted to document their lives and times on skin, documented with inky smears of blood. And remember, this is before anyone purchased tattoo gun kits or needed to save up cash for half a year to get one.

You found the best artist you knew and… tried to figure it out.

In this instance, it was Kevin Crowley, singer for NYHC stalwarts the Abused. Though their records (if you can still find them) show—in full lead pipe glory—how cool hardcore could be when people actually got good on their instruments, what marked the Abused much more significantly, at least for me, was the flyers that Crowley managed to churn out. Full of muscled skinheads, street beatings and syringe-wielding Nazis, they were a flipbook of New York hardcore from the early to mid-’80s.

And Crowley’s stippled pen was the key.

88 : DECEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

Sitting at his kitchen table in Brooklyn in 1982, he took a Bic pen, punched out the tip, put a needle in it, and—wrapping it with black thread and dipping it into a jar of India ink—poked his way to doing my first tattoo. It was two words at first, and they said: I’m Sorry.

Followed by a skull with a bandanna around its forehead, three crosses in the bandanna, and a flagged legend next to it that read: La Vida Loca. (Don’t even get me started on the whole Ricky Martin thing.)

But the skull? Never any question who the model would be: Eddie. As in Iron Maiden’s Eddie. Nine hours of poking and talking shit later, it was on my right bicep.

For those keeping track, I have only two other rock-influenced tattoos: the F.U.’s Kill for Christ Pushead rendering of Christ and the Stabbing Hand, and an OXBOW song whose title had started to haunt me.

But no Black Flag four-bars, no Dead Kennedys, no Circle Jerks’ skanking man. Nothing to mark my passage through the music of my life.

But why Maiden? The calculation was simple. Maiden hit like some of the best hardcore, and with their stripped-down stylings and an aural interest in both speed and power, listening to them in 1982 was like listening to Venom. Or Accept.

Different bands, but complete with various elements of the forbidden.

And if you got sick of singers screaming about the government, this was just the thing the doctor ordered.

So, imagine my surprise when Maiden’s Steve Harris appears on Metal Evolution and talks about how much he hates punk. Bruce Dickinson also seems to not care for it. More than not care for it, they both seem to go out of their way to establish and then re-establish how shit it was.

A strange take since it’s clear, when considering NWOBHM, that they had a punk-looking singer (whom they fired and replaced with another punk-looking singer), played music influenced by punk and, of course—and maybe most significantly—used a punk-looking icon in Eddie.

Then it hit.

Or rather: Kid Nate from the Let It Roll Podcast that I do helped it hit: “It may be that he’s thinking about ’77 punk with skinny junkies who couldn’t play and not hardcore.”

And then I start to remember shows so crazy I think I must have imagined them: seeing Motörhead with the Bad Brains, the Cro-Mags playing metal shows, Anthrax blurring the line, and in the most massive crossover move ever, Phil Anselmo shaving his head and, bald and tattooed, drawing comparisons with that other muscled, bald, tattooed hardcore singer, Henry Rollins.

Yeah, Harris’ use of language was clever, and only there for those with ears to hear it, but I’m going to make the claim that while he may have hated punk (as he said multiple times), he was never viewing hardcore as punk.

Yeah. That must be it. Well, that’s it or I’m trying to not feel stupid for having an Eddie tattoo on my arm.

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