Decibel #218 - December 2022

EXCLUSIVE BOOK EXCERPT

THE BRITISH ARE COMING

THE CELTIC FROST TOM G. WARRIOR BEYOND

REFUSE/RESIST

ALSO

CANDLEMASS BLACK ANVIL -(16)BLACKBRAID DREAM UNENDING MORBIKON R.A.M.B.O. THE OTOLITH WORM

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CITY

H A L L O F FA M E

•SPECIAL• PREVIEW

D A W N

O F

A

New Black Metal Age

DECEMBER 2022 // No. 218

T H E

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EXTREMELY EXTREME

December 2022 [R 218] decibelmagazine.com

upfront 8

metal muthas Mommies’ girl

10 exclusive:

decibel magazine metal & beer fest: denver 2022 preview But when are we announcing this year’s L.A. edition?

14 beyond the

gates 2022 review Black majesty

16 low culture If a tree grows in a building and nobody sees it…

56

The New Dark Ages COVER STORY COVER AND CONTENTS PHOTOS BY SHIMON KARMEL

18 the otolith SuperRosa 20 morbikon Drawn to evil 22 blackbraid That old time religion 24 riot city Thunderstruck 26 worm Paint it blue 28 r.a.m.b.o.

Survival instincts 30 dream unending Living the dream

17 no corporate beer A numbers game

features

reviews

32 black anvil Getting their rusty hooks in you

69 lead review Pistol drawn and in a hat as black as their hearts, SpiritWorld ride again to conquer the West with their crushing sophomore release Deathwestern

34 -(16)Not all doom and gloom 36 candlemass Here comes the sun 38 exclusive

book excerpt: denim & leather: the rise and fall of the new wave of british heavy metal Keep on truckin’

70 album reviews Records from bands that aren’t Slipknot, including Mother of Graves, Ripped to Shreds and Queensrÿche 80 damage ink Fall from grace

42 q&a: tom g. warrior The Celtic Frost and Triptykon main man warns you to stay out of the lake 46 the decibel

hall of fame In order to make something truly heavy, virtuoso Devin Townsend recalibrates his volatile Strapping Young Lad to craft his monumental City

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. © 2022 by Red Flag Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

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REFUSE/RESIST

December 2022 [T218] PUBLISHER

Alex Mulcahy

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

alex@redflagmedia.com EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Albert Mudrian albert@decibelmagazine.com

AD SALES

James Lewis james@decibelmagazine.com

DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND SALES ART DIRECTOR

you could flip through this month’s issue and chart nearly the entire history of black metal. It certainly wasn’t a conscious curation from your truly. In fact, between plotting a pair of Metal & Beer Fests, editing new books and finalizing new Decibel Records releases over the past month, there were moments when I wasn’t fully conscious while working on this issue.

Anyway, where was I/where am I? Right. Let's start with Tom G Warrior. OK, maybe black metal starts with Venom, but black metal as we all know it today begins with Hellhammer and Celtic Frost, whose histories Tom discusses extensively in this month’s considerably-over-word-count Q&A. Then there's Chris Dick’s immersive live review of Bergen’s Beyond the Gates festival, at which Mayhem, Enslaved and Emperor turned the clock back to 1994 with performances inside Grieghallen, where the bands recorded second-wave landmarks nearly three decades earlier. Since your travel budget likely doesn’t include Norway, we suggest Denver, which is closer and will be just as grim and frostbitten in December when our Metal & Beer Fest drops Swedish second-wavers Dark Funeral as well as the Americana/folk-inspired Wayfarer in its line-up, previewed wonderfully by returning Decibel fave Cosmo Lee. Elsewhere in the issue, NYC vets Black Anvil (also performing in Denver) bring black metal out of the fjords and into city streets, Blackbraid embrace mainman Sgah’gahsowáh’s native American roots, Municipal Waste’s Phil “Land Phil” Hall reimagines the late ’90s melodic black/death explosion via his new Morbikon project, and Worm adopts the early ’90s black metal aesthetic while crafting epics more reminiscent of classic death/doom and funeral doom.

Not even the Decibel Flexi Series is immune to high contrast shades of black and white. Solo goth-infused black metal phenom Lamp of Murmuur—who crashed Decibel Decibel’s ’s Top 40 Albums of the Year list in 2020 and 2021—contributes an exclusive new three-minute face-melter that’s way more Immortal’s Pure Holocaust than anything associated with “post-punk.”

Which brings us to this month’s cover artist Hulder, who has quickly progressed from raw, solitary, bedroom black metal recordings to a project that takes influence from nearly style of black metal mentioned above. In fact, Hulder actually formed after our cover story author Daniel Lake started work on his book, USBM: A Revolution of Identity in American Black Metal, Metal, in 2017.

So, yeah, maybe don’t squint, but instead keep your eyes open wide because black metal’s rapid evolution continues right in front of you. albert mudrian, Editor-in-Chief

aaron@decibelmagazine.com

Michael Wohlberg michael@decibelmagazine.com

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Patty Moran

COPY EDITOR

Andrew Bonazelli

BOOKCREEPER

Tim Mulcahy

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tim@redflagmedia.com CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Chuck BB, Ed Luce Mark Rudolph

Online DECIBEL WEB EDITOR

Albert Mudrian

DECIBEL WEB AD SALES

James Lewis

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To order by phone: 1.215.625.9850 (10 a.m. – 5 p.m. EST) To order by fax: 1.215.625.9967 To order online: www.decibelmagazine.com 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.

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Without much squinting,

Aaron Salsbury

Emily Bellino Adrien Begrand J. Bennett Dean Brown Richard Christy Liz Ciavarella-Brenner Chris Dick Sean Frasier Nick Green Raoul Hernandez Addison Herron-Wheeler Jonathan Horsley Courtney Iseman Neill Jameson Kim Kelly Sarah Kitteringham Daniel Lake Cosmo Lee Shawn Macomber Shane Mehling Justin M. Norton Dutch Pearce Forrest Pitts Greg Pratt Jon Rosenthal Brad Sanders Joseph Schafer Matt Solis Kevin Stewart-Panko Eugene S. Robinson Adem Tepedelen Jeff Treppel J Andrew Zalucky

Symphonic metal legends EPICA release a unique project written and performed with 16 guest musicians.

The result is a mind-bending release that even surpasses the usual broad scope of an EPICA record!

CD Digipak I Colored Vinyl I Digital OUT NOVEMBER 11!

SONATA ARCTICA in an acoustic disguise - «Acoustic Adventures - Volume Two»

ELEINE unplugs their gear to create a whole new musical experience and deliver a dark acoustic album

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ZEKE SKY reaches for the stars with stunning label debut!

INDUCTION return with 12 progressive symphonic metal anthems and catchy earworms

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Exclusive editions and merchandise:

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READER OF THE

MONTH up strong. Ritual Mass play super tight and I’m really looking forward to their new material.

Also, Pyrithe is incredible. They gave me an album credit for playing trash as an instrument along with members of Noltem. Excited to pick up that vinyl from Gilead Media.

Jason Cantu Pittsburgh, PA

You’ve been a Decibel subscriber for over a decade. Did that subscription prepare you in any way for your job at 20 Buck Spin?

I owe everything to Decibel magazine and some book called Choosing Death. Also, very thankful to Vicky from Pyre Press/Steel & Bone Productions. I was doing a similar job at Get Hip Recordings, a garage/ psych label, for the past decade and she was leaving 20 Buck Spin. I used to read Decibel and dream of being in its pages and working for my favorite label and now it’s a reality. Is manifestation a real thing?

You also run the slowheavymetalmusicplaying Instagram “meme account.” How/why is this a thing?

It all started in a group chat when I posted a screenshot of Eugene from Hey Arnold. He

6 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

was wearing a leather jacket and the audio caption said "(slow heavy metal music playing)." I started putting that on every picture and before I knew it, people were making bootleg merch.

Only drawback is my submission inbox is usually full of mutilated animals and human corpses.

Between Dream Death and Derkéta, Pittsburgh boasts an impressive doom legacy. Are there any young yinzers carrying that doom torch we should know about?

I’d love to see more doom but death and grind seem to be more popular. Liquified Guts was a favorite of mine. Justin Gizzi made me want to be a bass player. I own one of his previous basses and now he’s doing great stuff in Dream Death, playing guitar at live shows. A lot of friends doing great things. Clarissa [Badini] in Castrator is an inspiration. Narakah is coming

I used to read Decibel and dream of being in its pages and working for my favorite label and now it’s a reality.

Is manifestation a real thing?

Serendipitously, Hulder are on this cover of this issue. What 20 Buck Spin artist do you predict next to grace our front page?

That’s great! I’m shipping Hulder vinyl represses right now and about to start on the Daeva preorders. I would guess Worm or maybe Dream Unending! Although Ulthar, Civerous and Kommand are coming so… wait, should I be talking about this?

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

A deluxe discography box set collection; 1984 to 1987 This six album box set includes: MORBID TALES / TO MEGA THERION / INTO THE PANDEMONIUM Deluxe colour vinyl versions EMPEROR’S RETURN / TRAGIC SERENADES / I WON’T DANCE / THE COLLECTORS CELTIC FROST Back on vinyl for the first time in decades! Deluxe colour vinyl versions VISUAL AGGRESSION – new 7” single. Grey vinyl.

GRAVE HILL BUNKER REHEARSALS, demo cassette.

A MORBID TALE: 40 page book of brand new interviews and rare photos with founding member Tom G Warrior and drummer Reed St Mark.

Plus a Heptagram USB drive, enamel badge, patch and double sided poster.

OUT 25th NOVEMBER 2022

Also available as a deluxe 5CD box set with 40 page book, poster, enamel badge and patch.

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

Well, here are the records that we spun most when we were also informing you that this magazine can be used briefly as a boat.

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

This Month's Muthas: Marlene Kerr and Francine Lachiver Muthas of Kathryn Kerr of KEN mode

Tell us a little about yourself.

What are some of her hidden talents?

I am a mom to two daughters and grandmother to three grandkids. I am retired from a career in the healthcare field. I spend my time having fun with the grandkids, cooking and baking for the family, raising a new puppy, going to the cottage, gardening, reading and walking.

FRANCINE: I am a mom of three and have loved watching each of them find their own path as they navigate adulthood. I am an accountant, and have worked in the field of wealth planning for 20-plus years, so Kathryn must get her love of numbers from me. In my spare time, I spend time at the gym, and enjoy the cottage, baking, puzzles and reading.

FRANCINE: Card games, chess, any sport (even ones she’s never tried before!). In addition to her musical talents, Kathryn also played soccer at a high level, and her competitive nature is evident in everything she takes on. She’s not scared to get her hands dirty, and can demo and reno as good as anyone. “Good enough” is not part of her vocabulary.

MARLENE:

In our recent cover story, Kathryn said she wasn’t exclusively involved in heavy music prior to joining the band. What were her musical interests growing up?

MARLENE: Kathryn always liked to have music on in her vicinity (even as a baby, she wanted a wind-up musical carousel to be playing as she fell asleep). She took piano lessons as a young child, then saxophone from junior high on up.

Kathryn never had to be nagged to practice instruments—she played for enjoyment. Her dad and I played a lot of music from the ’60s and ’70s, and then her sister exposed her to the music of the ’80s and ’90s. In senior high, Kathryn joined every jazz band available and became involved with vocal jazz as well. She also asked for private saxophone lessons with a renowned Winnipeg musician. In grade 12, Kathryn made the decision to pursue a degree in performing music at Brandon University.

Kathryn’s other areas of expertise include saxophone, synth, piano and bookkeeping.

What are your thoughts on KEN mode’s music?

MARLENE: Once Kathryn became involved with KEN mode, I listened to some of their music. It would be an understatement for me to say that I really do not enjoy this genre.

What was it like seeing your daughter on the cover of a national magazine?

FRANCINE: I was so impressed with the photos and the depth of the article. Sax in a metal band— who knew? But then again, Kathryn never backs down from a challenge. Our whole family is so proud of her wide range of accomplishments.

MARLENE: I was so proud of Kathryn’s achievement. Members of our family that follow KEN mode and love heavy metal music reinforced that being on the cover of Decibel is extremely prestigious. The whole family is excited to find out what Kathryn is going to do next. Life with Kathryn is always interesting.

This column featured Jesse Matthewson’s mother years ago. Do you socialize with the other KEN mode Muthas?

Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Worm, Bluenothing  Hulder, The Eternal Fanfare  The Afghan Whigs, How Do You Burn?  Def Leppard, On Through the Night  Mother of Graves, Where the Shadows Adorn ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  Agression, Don’t Be Mistaken  Dead Kennedys, Plastic Surgery Disasters  D.I., Ancient Artifacts  Misfits, Earth A.D.  Golden Pelicans, Golden Pelicans ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  Hulder, Godslastering: Hymns of a Forlorn Peasantry  Strapping Young Lad, City  Skinless, From Sacrifice to Survival  Omnium Gatherum, Spirits and August Light  Black September, The Forbidden Gates Beyond ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  Darkest Hour, Undoing Ruin  Worm, Bluenothing  Mortuous, Upon Desolation  The Acacia Strain, The Dead Walk  Strapping Young Lad, City ---------------------------------Aaron Salsbury : m a r k e t i n g a n d s a l e s  Pig Destroyer, Demo  Tribal Gaze, Godless Voyage  Reeking Cross/Escuela Grind, Split  Danny Elfman, Bigger. Messier.  Petbrick, Liminal

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------Alex Richichi : t h e o f f e r i n g  Heilung, Drif  Spectral Lore, Gnosis  Raw Brigade, Aggressive City  Goose, Dripfield  Zeal & Ardor, Zeal & Ardor

Well, we haven’t had the opportunity yet! Maybe we should start a KEN mode Metal Muthas fan club. Kathryn is always saying the other members of the band are awesome; I’m sure the other Muthas are the same! —ANDREW BONAZELLI

FRANCINE:

PHOTO BY

8 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

ROSETTI PHOTOGRAPHY

DECIBEL MAGAZINE METAL & BEER FEST: DENVER

DECIBEL MAGAZINE METAL & BEER FEST: DENVER heads for the mountains (but drinks much better beer)

BY COSMO LEE

10 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

• SPECIAL

PREVIEW •

 Swill and become Having already conquered Decibel’s Philadelphia stage, Immolation (l) and Cannibal Corpse are ready to take their murderous rampage out west

vividly remember the first time I stepped out of Denver’s airport. The

Great Plains stretched wide before me, an expanse that awed even a Midwesterner like me. In the distance, the Rocky Mountains lined the horizon. The scene seemed nothing less than endless possibility. ¶ The locals have done well with all that possibility. Over the years, Denver has quietly built vibrant music and beer scenes, which enjoy a tight-knit camaraderie. The major coastal markets get all the attention, but Denver’s rising star cannot be ignored. Decibel is proud to relocate the western edition of the Metal & Beer Fest, presented by Metal Blade Records and TRVE Brewing Co., to the Summit in Denver on December 2-3, 2022. The words “scene” and “seen” are homophones. Denver’s had the former for a while; it’s time for the latter to happen.

• EPICUS DENVERUS • METALLICUS

Go back far enough and Denver metal points to two names. “Denver always feels like Cephalic Carnage or Skinless—Sherwood, anyhow, who’s lived there forever—to me, because we always see those guys when we play there,” offers guitarist Scott Hull of Pig Destroyer, who headline day 2.

That would be Sherwood Webber, Skinless vocalist, who’s a longtime transplant. “Denver has been my hometown for 18 years now since moving from New York, so I’m very excited, to say the least,” he enthuses. “Denver has a badass music scene, and I’m happy that Skinless kind of gets a dual hometown experience in Denver and upstate New York.” Skinless make a rare live appearance on Day 2 of the fest, for which Webber promises, “You can expect a first-twoalbum old-school set.”

The ties run deep with vocalist/bassist Ross Dolan of Immolation, who play on Day 1. “I am also psyched to see the Skinless guys PHOTOS BY A . J. K INNE Y

once again. I know Sherwood has been out in Denver for a while, and we would always run into him throughout the years,” Dolan reminisces. “Our first show in Denver was in 1992 with Goreaphobia and Cephalic Carnage at the Mercury Cafe. We became really close friends with all the Cephalic Carnage guys over the years, and spent almost every trip through the Denver area at Steve Goldberg’s house enjoying his endless hospitality and never-ending supply of every cereal imaginable.”

A whole new generation of Denver metal, both transplanted and homegrown, has sprung up in the 30 years since that Mercury Cafe show.

Oryx, In the Company of Serpents, Wayfarer, Of Feather and Bone, and Glacial Tomb will rep Denver in this fest, and they’re stoked.

“Denver has a unique metal community with bands across a wide range of genres,” says drummer Abbey Davis of Oryx. “It will be great for people outside of Denver to spend a weekend here to sample some of what our killer scene has to offer.”

Vocalist/guitarist Grant Netzorg of In the Company of Serpents also uses the words “killer” and “unique”: “Denver has an incredible scene that is rife with all kinds of killer, unique bands.

One of the coolest things about it is that no one is really trying to ape anyone else, and thus I feel like there is less one-upmanship bullshit that you might encounter in other towns/markets.”

So, be sure to arrive early on Day 2 for Glacial Tomb, whose vocalist/guitarist Ben Hutcherson exults, “We are thrilled to bring our sludge-corrupted death metal to the party and show out-oftown folks what this city is all about.”

Later that day will feature Wayfarer, whose vocalist/guitarist Shane McCarthy has an inverse perspective: “We will be showcasing our ‘Black Metal of the American West.’ We don’t play too often at home, so this will be a unique place for us to do our thing. We will be hitting the last two albums A Romance With Violence and World’s Blood pretty hard, and who knows, maybe something new.”

Speaking of black metal, this edition of the Metal & Beer Fest may be the grimmest/frostiest one yet, with Dark Funeral, Black Anvil, Thantifaxath, Wayfarer and Oryx weaving various skeins of the art form. It’s setting-appropriate, as temperatures will likely range from the 40s during the day to the teens at night. Bundle up—and if you have to buy fest hoodies to stay warm, we’ll encourage it.

• METAL UP YOUR VATS •

Talk to enough Denver metal bands, and beer

inevitably enters the chat. Other American cities have good metal scenes or good craft beer scenes, but to have both intertwined so strongly makes Denver unique. The living embodiment of DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2 0 2 2 : 11

PREVIEW •

Iron (not) drunk  J.R. Hayes and Pig Destroyer are prepared to grind Denver to a halt if need be

this is Zach Coleman, head brewer of presenting brewery TRVE Brewing Co., and drummer of Denver metal mainstay Khemmis: “I’ve dedicated my life to heavy metal and beer, so this fest is pretty close to my heart,” Coleman says. “TRVE has been invested in the Denver metal and brewing communities for a decade now, and it’s been very cool to watch the metal scene grow from just a handful of killer bands into one that is as good/strong as anywhere in the country.”

TRVE co-owner Nick Nunns concurs: “We always love an opportunity to show Denver off to folks from out of town. In the decade TRVE has been here, both the heavy metal and beer scenes have only gotten better and better.”

Harry Smith of Black Sky Brewery, just a mile away from TRVE, feels similarly. “Beer and music translate in the same terms,” he reasons. “We have a vibrant beer scene with many talented brewers who want to express their creativity for people to enjoy a unique experience. Free your mind and try something new, or consume your favorite flavor!”

Much like how bands fanboy/girl out about seeing other bands—Day 1 headliner Cannibal Corpse evoking the most swooning here—the breweries at this fest also express a strong sense of community. Jon Talkington of the Brimming Horn Meadery is coming from Delaware, and happy about it. “It will be awesome to see our friends from the other breweries pouring at the fest as well,” Talkington says. “We love the community of metalheads, brewers and fans that the fest brings.”

Jason Parris of Illinois’ Wake Brewing puts it passionately: “We are stoked to share our beer with anyone who comes up to our table, wherever they are from. The bond is simple: The love of metal and craft beer, that alone makes you family to us.”

12 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

• I WISH YOU • WERE A BEER

Aside from the “you kind of have to” aspect of watching Wake the band play while drinking a Wake Brewing beer, there’s something to be said for experiencing art—and that’s what metal and craft beer are—on the literal soil from which it springs. TRVE’s Coleman says, “We’ll be bringing beers that represent our Colorado terroir and dedication to balance. In fact, these will be some of the first batches brewed with the TRVTH, our own base malt, provided by the wizards at Troubadour Maltings, with barley grown just outside of Fort Collins. Folks can expect crispy, crushable, subtle-yet-complex beers without a bunch of shit added to them.”

Adds TRVE’s Nunns, “We’re all really fired up to be making the official beer of the festival.

We’ve been working on piecing together a crusher of a recipe to keep everyone at the fest both thirst-quenched and upright at the same time.”

While the profusion of amazing beers at Metal & Beer Fests rewards various tasting strategies (see sidebar, p.17, September 2022 issue), this Denver edition makes a strong case for the OG “watch the band while drinking their beer” approach. There are some incredibly intriguing band/beer collaborations on offer this time, with some being prototyped and refined as we go to print. Black Sky Brewery’s Smith has an artistic take on band collabs. “We have been working with local and national bands from the beginning to showcase what the bands perceive as their ‘flavor.’ I like to ask, ‘If your band is a beer, what would it be?’”

Black Sky is rolling out three collabs at the fest, Smith says: “First of all, Skinless Caveman Kolsch! We have worked with Skinless for a few years on this recipe. It is super popular at the brewery and finally available in 16 oz. cans!

The kolsch is slammable at 4.7%. It is brewed with German Vienna and Pilsner malts, as well as German Hersbrucker hops. We will also be working with Oryx on a Vienna/Mexican-style lager. We will be working with the mighty In the Company of Serpents on what I can only describe for now as a heavy/malty kick-your-ass brew.”

Not to be outdone, Brimming Horn Meadery’s Talkington reveals, “We’ll be making Angel’s Fall again for a collaboration with Immolation.

Angel’s Fall is a mead with honey, blueberries, apples, vanilla and pie spices added, a great mead for winter weather. We’re also making a version of our More Blast Beets for Nuclear Blast Records, which will be called Nuclear Blast Beets, made with honey, cherries, beets and orange zest. We’ll be bringing a third mead to Denver, but we haven’t decided which one yet, so it will be a surprise!”

Festgoers have even more collabs to look forward to. McCarthy says, “We are excited that the folks over at 3 Floyds/WarPigs have something in the works for a Wayfarer beer.” Pig Destroyer’s Hull forecasts, “3 Floyds will have a new Dry Irish Stout called Starbelly for the fest.” (3 Floyds may also bring its Cannibal Corpse collab, called, naturally, Amber Smashed Face.) Ben Hutcherson adds, “We are working with the folks at Metal Monkey brewing on a Glacial Tombinspired beer. Given our penchant for bleak, sludgy atmosphere, we were excited when the team at Metal Monkey pitched a light, crushable, refreshing beer.”

Wake Brewing’s Parris doesn’t name names, but offers, “We have collaborations with two bands and one label. Styles will range from Barrel Aged Stouts to West Coast Style IPA. Every collaboration we do is hands-on with both band and brewery to make sure it’s more than something to get you fucked up—it’s a piece of art… that happens to get you fucked up.”

Of Feather and Bone vocalist/bassist Alvino Salcedo sums up the “band member, but also a fan, but also a beer fan” vibe best: “To not only play the fest alongside legends like Immolation, Cannibal Corpse and Dark Funeral, and amongst a lot of our peers and friends, but to work in cooperation with Bone Up Brewing to create an Of Feather and Bone beer feels surreal. If someone told us 10 years ago that we’d have this opportunity, I don’t know if I would have believed them. People at the fest can expect a suffocating experience where there are no frills, no banter, no gimmicks—just a chaotic moment of the weekend where at the end of the set, you’ll need a moment to catch your breath, drink the special Of Feather and Bone beer and wonder what just happened.”

These are the kinds of moments we live for.

PHOTO BY ALYSSA LORENZON

• SPECIAL

BEYOND THE GATES

BEYOND THE GATES

W

hen beyond the gates announced their full lineup in September 2021, it VENUES: USF Verftet; read like a zine cover from 1995. The Kulturhuset Club; Grieghallen inimitable logos of Mercyful Fate, WHEN: August 2-6, 2022 Mayhem, Emperor, Enslaved, Opeth, Candlemass and PHOTOS BY JARLE HOVDA MOE Satyricon, plus a host of other notables, nasties and wildmen, blazed across the page with unbelievable abandon. The storied festival had survived the pandemic not only bigger, but better. ¶ Beyond the Gates 2022 was held across three indoor venues: USF Verftet, a former sardine factory overlooking the Pudde Fjord; Kulturhuset Club; and Grieghallen .Yes, that Grieghallen, the concert hall that’s home to the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and named in honor of Bergen-based composer Edvard Grieg (the Peer Gynt Suites, In the Hall of the Mountain King, Morning Mood, et al.). That it also inexplicably housed the landmark recordings of Burzum, Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, In the Nightside Eclipse and Vikingligr Veldi under the watchful tutelage of Eirik “Pytten” Hundvin isn’t lost on anyone either.

WHERE:

Bergen, Norway

TUESDAY, AUGUST 2: USF VERFTET AND KULTURHUSET CLUB An early dinner with dear old friends preceded

Germany’s Chapel of Disease. Kin to Horrendous and countrymen Venenum, the Cologne-based outfit parlayed with great effect their oddball yet malevolent groove. Tracks were mostly culled from their third Ván full-length, ... and as We Have Seen the Storm, We Have Embraced the Eye. 1349 ripped into their 11-song offering as if Satan himself was murdering the front row; frontman Ravn commanded the 400-plus faithful, a gospeler inverted. The night, however, went to 14 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

Gaahls WYRD, who had a tremendous set of stoic imposition and guitar hero triangulation.

Abbath (or Ab-baat!) got the job—Abbath’s own words—when Satyricon bowed out. Larger than life (or sillier than expected), our six-time cover man crab-walked, croaked ash and pontificated with healthy disregard for whatever perceived legacy the world had built up around him. The Spinal Tap-esque Abbath logo that spanned most of the stage against a backdrop of Whitesnake-like stairs and platforms sealed the deal. He’s more like the Chevy Chase of black metal than Lemmy now.

The “Night Shift” was held at Kulturhuset Club, featuring the Nergal-fronted Social

 Satanic royalty (from l) Fest highlights Enslaved, Mercyful Fate and Emperor add to the already storied history of Norway’s Grieghallen

Distortion-meets-Nick Cave “adversary country” of Me and That Man. Three songs in and it was time to call it a day. Sad to have missed Jørgen Munkeby’s shirt-on Tim Cappello-isms, though.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 3: KULTURHUSET CLUB AND USF VERFTET Two Terratur Possessions artists—Umbra Con-

scientia and Bythos—occupied the early bird stage at Kulturhuset Club on Wednesday. The Germans and Finns, respectively, brought their own versions of opaque black metal to Norway’s second-largest city.

Clearly, the festival logistics team poked tongue through cheek when they lined up the triple sixes of Swedish doomed-out rockers Year of the Goat, NWOBHM icons Satan and Swedish throwback hård rock impresarios Lucifer.

Year of the Goat fanned old-school flames just as effectively as the lovely Lucifer brought out clove cigarette riffs and black velvet vocals. Satan, whose six-song outlay pulled three from Hall of Fame effort Court in the Act, wasted no time reminding attendees that the past is alive (and well). Icelandic cowboys Sólstafir had Zen in their hearts when they unfurled “Fjara,” “Ótta” and “Þín Orð” to rapt (or tired) watchers.

As someone who’s seen Opeth boatloads over the last 20 years, it was a strange pleasure to hear Mikael Åkerfeldt banter—Stockholm is the Capital of Scandinavia, he jested—in Swedish.

A varied setlist was proffered, with “Hjärtat Vet Vad Handen Gör” and, of course, “The Drapery Falls” topping USF Verftet’s pops.

Mayhem’s best show ever was mere feet from where they had recorded De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas under Grieg’s watchful bronze head. The gods must be crazy.

At Kulturhuset Club, underappreciated bangers Sahg levied severe heavy metal tolls in absence of Perturbator, whose last-minute cancellation bummed out the lipstick and neon crowd to no end.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6: GRIEGHALLEN American badasses Unto Others dedicated

 Until the light takes us The breathtaking Grieghallen bathes the audience in white light during Emperor’s black majesty

THURSDAY, AUGUST 4: KULTURHUSET CLUB AND USF VERFTET The lunchtime slots at Kulturhuset Club were

helmed by Norwegians Djevel and Italians Darvaza. Black milk was spilled apparently, with festivalgoers agog (and aghast) post-assault.

There’s no mistaking Thursday as belonging to anything other than the great beyond. USF Verftet hosted a wicked congregation of the blackest of metals from Iceland (Misþyrming), Norway (Whoredom Rife), Finland (Archgoat) and Poland (Mgła). Horns and hails went up for all as expected, but it was Mgła’s festival day, if not for their crushingly proficient live performance, then the sheer number of punters sporting Mgła shirts and hoodies. No “new” band at Beyond the Gates exhibited the potentiality of the Poles. Their breakthrough is imminently inevitable.

Two more Terratur Possessions bands—Ominous Resurrection and Misotheist—celebrated the aftereffects of witching hour at Kulturhuset Club. The longhair next to me beamed excitement during Ominous Resurrection’s dizzying affair, about which I asked, “Who is this?!” Over the din, he exclaimed, heavily accented, “Ominous Erection!” Apparently, my Loop earplugs had been inserted a tad too far.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 5: KULTURHUSET CLUB AND GRIEGHALLEN After an insanely cool guided tour of Grieghallen

with Pytten (and Enslaved’s Ivar Bjørnson) on

Thursday, anticipation for Enslaved, Emperor and Mayhem amped up considerably. So much so, in fact, spacing on Austria’s Kringa and Norway’s Nekromantheon at Kulturhuset Club during the day was more collateral mental damage than disinterest.

The opening keyboard line to “Lifandi Lif Undir Hamri” filled the 1,500 spectators with awe as three gigantic runes (from left to right: Algiz, Mannaz and Laguz) onstage pulsed and projected psychedelically. Apparently, Enslaved had a technical issue with their in-ear monitors, and had to play their entire run like it was 1994 again, but the throngs offstage were spellbound none the wiser. The appearance of ex-drummer Trym Torson on “Heimdallr” felt extra-special.

Emperor’s outstretched hand was more than welcomed by an eager Grieghallen. The stage setup confounded initially, but midway through, the Norwegians switched over to their second drum kit, exhuming unexpected (and, of course, totally epic) covers of Bathory’s “Call From the Grave” and Celtic Frost’s “Innocence and Wrath/ The Usurper” with original members Bard Faust and Mortiis. “I Am the Black Wizards” under that configuration was positively historic.

Having seen Mayhem many a time over years, it was difficult to prepare for what they were about to unleash. They were unstoppable. Attila Csihar has aged remarkably, his voice as gruesome now as it was almost 30 years ago. At 53, Hellhammer has no business doing “Cursed in Eternity” or “Buried by Time and Dust” with this much conviction and mastery. Several conversations post-show arrived at the same end:

“Nightfall” off Mana to Candlemass; not for nothing, but the lyrics to “Nightfall” ponder, “Nightfall / beyond the gates / you will come to me.”

Unto Others had squared the circle with scary prescience on their first-ever Norwegian gig.

The green hell of Tribulation’s seven-song barrage was apropos for the setup to Candlemass and Mercyful Fate. New guitarist Joseph Tholl in tow, the Swedes belted out “Strange Gateways Beckon,” “Lacrimosa” and “Leviathans,” and fanged four more gothic ragers into the rafters (and beyond).

Having seen Candlemass perform Epicus Doomicus Metallicus at Decibel’s own festival of champions two months before, there’s no way not to be psyched for the Swedes to roll out the red carpet with a full run-through of sophomore milestone Nightfall. Johan Längqvist sang his ass off (again), while Mappe Björkman riddled the proverbial steel in his Chubby Checker pants (again). “Bewitched,” “At the Gallows End” and “Samarithan” rang massive—no joke!

Fuck! Mercyful Fate. “Black Funeral” and motherfucking “Satan’s Fall.” A forebear of the Grieghallen kids, King, 66, still ruling the roost in front of a massive inverted cross and equally large goat-crusted pentagram. Impossibly great!

Lights out.

With that, Beyond the Gates 2022 was memory.

Inconceivable that the organizers pulled off such a gargantuan effort, since this not only marks the end of their “1994 theme,” but also the end of an era with Pytten, as he officially retires into what little sunsets there are in Bergen.

As a festival, Beyond the Gates is immediately lovable. Bergen is intrinsically part of that embrace. The venues are walkable, the staff (technical and administrative) super-pro and the sound, for the most part, perfect. Sure, Norway’s expensive, but seeing the best bands out there, taking in a Tolkienesque fjord or two, pilgrimaging to Fantoft church, hitting up Gaahl’s art gallery (Galleri Fjalar) nestled in the quaint houses at Bryggen while Freyr gleefully and continually pisses rain on you from the heavens? All worth its weight in hordes of kroner.

If there’s one thing to count on, there’s not a parking lot in sight. —CHRIS DICK DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2022 : 15

Y ISEMAN

TNE

BY COUR

I Got a Tree on My House few weeks ago, I started seeing a psy-

chiatrist who prescribed me not one, but two new shiny meds to help me cope with the burden of living with this much charm and talent. I’ve approached this process with as open of a mind as possible since the whole point of this exercise is to somehow “get better,” whatever that means. I was prepared to try even more drugs since that’s what I’m used to—using my brain as a guinea pig for my insurance company to shovel their greedy peckers into—but so far this shit works fine.

That’s not really the point of this column— more just the starting point. Stick with me. Or don’t; there’s plenty of other things to read in this issue.

Since one of the effects of the Zoloft I’m taking is increased energy—sort of a cleaneryet-dull Adderall feeling that hangs around most of my day—I’ve frequently strapped my child into her stroller and taken her for walks. Long walks. It’s grown to a few miles, and I’ve been doing it once or twice daily. It gives me a chance to clear my head and her the chance to yell at nice houses and the occasional cat.

Every day on our walks we come across a corner storefront with an apartment overhead that’s for sale. It’s one of those places that I let my imagination drift and think would make a really cool record store that I’ll never have the time or money to open. And while I’m fine with letting that only be a fantasy, I still stop to look into it every day.

Until one day I saw something that made zero fucking sense, the sort of oddity that makes you pause. And that note? It would read, “Someone put a fully decorated Christmas tree in the middle of an empty store in the middle of summer.”

I took the time to look in every window of the building like some junkie hoping to find an 16 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

extra medicine cabinet or copper pipes, in order to see if there was anything else, any inkling as to why this fucking Christmas tree was hanging out, carefully and completely decorated, when it was in the 90s outside. I found nothing. Not a fucking trace of anything else, not a box that the ornaments came from, not even a fucking shred of paper. I was dumbfounded. Why the fuck was there a decorated Christmas tree in a commercial building that was for sale? Who put it there? The realtor? I’ve never seen that kind of staging on Zillow, and I’ve seen a fucking dildo in someone’s room before. I tried to ask my daughter, but she’s not even a year and a half old yet, and because of that she’s absolute dogshit with conversation—everything is incredibly one-sided.

The tree stayed in the store for a week or two, and then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the thing vanished without a trace.

I’m not sure what’s fucked with my head more: the tree being there or that it was taken out, obviously very carefully, since it was strangled in tinsel. Or that it existed in this room of a building no one inhabited in the month of August through early September. Have you ever taken down a Christmas tree? Inevitably, something breaks or drops, which you won’t find until eight months later. This took skill and dexterity. It took fucking moxie.

I’m not convinced that the tree ever existed, especially since I’m on new meds, and the only other eyewitness to it only says “cat” and starts laughing whenever you try to have a discourse.

So, maybe the meds aren’t working—or they are since I don’t see the tree anymore? Either way, I’ll have something to talk about when I start seeing a therapist soon, since I obviously have nothing else to discuss.

Extreme ABVs: Craft Beer Drinkers Want High Alcohol or None at All

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ast month we discussed the

growth of non-alcoholic craft beer; but that’s just half of the story.

According to a piece by beverage alcohol reporter Kate Bernot for The Washington Post this August, more craft beer drinkers are seeking no booze or high booze.

Bernot focused on packaged beer sales, e.g., grocery stores. This segment is easier to track data on compared to taproom sales, and it’s possible—likely, even—that this oppositeextremes shift is only happening in retail, not in breweries and bars. We know increasing wellness awareness and more appealing options fuels no-alcohol beer’s growth, but what about high-alcohol beer?

“Consumers have really clear expectations these days about how they want to feel when they consume anything, really,” Bernot says.

“There are so many options for consumerpackaged goods today, you can really narrow down to what you want and how you want to feel.” If a consumer wants a bit of a buzz, there are plenty of choices, and ABV is an instant indication if a beer’s got what they seek. Consumers also want bold flavors.

“Think of how Americans like flavor-blasted hot Cheetos,” Bernot notes. “We’re a country that likes big-flavor stuff.” Typically, higheralcohol beers promise more explosive flavors.

“New England IPA drinkers love the flavors in those high-ABV beers,” says Lauren Van Pamelen, head brewer and co-owner of

 Heavy as a really heavy drink Coming in at a staggering 14% ABV, The Veil’s Sandy Imperial Stout (l) will make more than the scales tipsy

upstate New York’s Tin Barn Brewing, noting how, for example, citrus flavors shine more in higher-ABV IPAs and customers look for that.

Knowing you want big flavor and a little buzz in one or two beers often hinges on drinking at home. Bernot theorizes that this trend reflects the ongoing COVID era, with people drinking at home more. “If you’re at a taproom, it’s a social occasion; maybe drinking is not actually the primary goal of why you’re there. But if you’re having a beer after work at home, it’s to relax, it’s to feel something.”

Bernot doesn’t see sessionable beers going anywhere—we just might have to sort through more DIPAs to find them—and the fact people still seem to want middle-ofthe-road ABVs in taprooms, where they’re socializing, might have to drive home, etc., supports that.

“I just did a quick look at our August sales and the average ABV for the top five-selling draft beers was roughly 5.9%,” says Matt Tarpey, head brewer and co-founder of The Veil in Richmond, VA. The Veil’s beers range from 0.5% to 17%, and Tarpey says customers’ ABV choices seem to be more weather-based: lower in warmer months, slightly higher in colder.

At L.A.’s Highland Park Brewery, patrons want lagers and West Coast IPAs, which

marketing manager James Sullivan says range from about 5% to 6.8%. Josh White, director of hospitality at Toppling Goliath Brewery in Decorah, IA, says their customers are trending down toward lower ABVs, but TG is one of those breweries some customers seek out for their well-regarded higher-ABV beers, like taproom-exclusive barrel-aged stouts.

TG brews lower-ABV styles alongside those to accommodate everyone.

NYC’s Finback Brewery is known for hop-forward IPAs, skewing higher-ABV, and owner Basil Lee says comparing taproom sales by style, those beat out lower-ABV categories like lager. “We see die-hard craft beer fans still gravitate towards impact, and that often comes with higher-ABV beers. Our Brooklyn taproom focuses on brewing lower-ABV, modern takes on more traditional styles… and they have been very popular, but still play a smaller part in the overall volume of beer we sell.”

Lee has actually seen growing interest in low- and mid-range ABV beers for at-home consumption. It all depends on whether you’re looking for that buzz in one fell swoop or want to imbibe steadily over the course of a Saturday. Different needs demand different options, so don’t count 5% and 6% beers out anytime soon.

DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2022 : 17

THE OTOLITH

THE OTOLITH Salt Lake City doomsters step both into and out of the shadows

S

ubrosa ceasing in 2019 left a hole in the heavy firmament. Salt Lake City doom midwives, the Utah quintet led

by Rebecca Vernon and Sarah Pendleton introduced their very own minor note to metal, sawing straight through the hearts of heshers via the latter’s violin. Highest pitched in its Italian strata, the fiddle’s soprano range carves drama into the iron and steel of metallurgy. Pendleton leading threefifths of her previous act as the Otolith assuages any concerns. ¶ “‘Otolith’ comes from the Greek for ‘ear stone,’” she details. “They’re small, crystalline structures found in the inner ear of certain animals, including humans. They aid balance, motion detection and sound detection.” ¶ Kim Cordray doubles the group’s violin bloc, both women singing, as does SubRosa bassist-now-guitarist Levi Hanna, whose death roar counterbalances his bandmates’ cultish intonation. Andy Patterson returns to bash, joined by new bass pluck Matt Brotherton. Debut album Folium Limina rises and falls—keening, melancholic, classically wrenching.

18 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

And the math. The double LP pounds six songs—its shortest clocking 9:28—across four sides of vinyl. “Bone Dust” doesn’t simply confront mortality; its narrative reduces the listener to their titular fate. Consider Folium Limina a limited series rather than episodic. “‘Bone Dust’ [retains] a special place as our first completed song,” reveals Pendleton. “Kim wrote the main riffs, and then we all contributed parts. The lyrics are sparse and represent the idea of continuing to fight against despair and ennui, even when odds are bleak. It was Andy’s excellent idea to include the audio sample in the Folium Limina version of ‘Bone Dust.’ The sample is from The Great Dictator, a 1940 Charlie Chaplin film. The words of the sample bring the message of the song full circle, in that maybe the most effective way to defeat despair and fear and apathy is to remember what unites us, to remember kindness for its own sake.

“As for the album title, ‘folia’ are leaf-like structures in the brain that help conduct electrical and electromagnetic energy. Their branch-like appearance is a repeated pattern throughout the universe. And the term ‘limina’ comes from the liminal state of mind, such as the transitory state between waking and dreaming, between sober and euphoric, between alive and dead.

It’s the space between thresholds, a rare and transformative state.”

On second track “Andromeda’s Wing,” the choiristas, the bellowing, and the blood-red violin riffs bubble and boil pure.

“We knew there would be comparisons made between SubRosa and the Otolith, and we’re absolutely fine with that,” writes Pendleton. “They’re two distinct entities, yes, and we happily bear the burden of proving that the Otolith isn’t only worthy of these comparisons, but worthy to fly on its own.” —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

MORBIKON

MORBIKON

Municipal Waste bassist trades in party thrash for black metal bulletbelts

IN

the recent municipal waste cover story, bassist Phil “Landphil” Hall discussed 2020’s touring dearth at length. It turns out he was using the uncharacteristic stationary time to write for a new project called Morbikon. Anyone expecting a blast of party thrash will be immediately dismembered by their first cassingle, “Universal Funeral.” With its wint’ry malice, nocturnal grandeur and slicing leads, it flawlessly channels Norway circa 1997. ¶ “I’ve been a huge fan of mid-’90s second-wave black metal, especially the Big Four arena black metal we all love so much,” Hall offers before listing Emperor, Mayhem, Immortal and Darkthrone.

“I always wanted to give that style a shot. In 2020, I obviously found myself with extra time on my hands. I wanted to make the most epic, melodic songs that I could.” ¶ When Hall was in middle school, a friend dubbed him a tape with Morbid Angel on one side and Emperor on the other. He credits that cassette with lighting his fire for extreme metal. While Hall has explored death metal with his Cannabis Corpse project, 20 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

Morbikon offered an opportunity to be the primary creative force while working within the black metal genre. Morbikon is a fully immersive audio and visual project for Hall, where he plays guitars and bass and also personally animates the band’s music videos. Along with his trusted Waste comrade Dave Witte on drums, Hall recruited Finntroll vocalist Mathias “Vreth” Lillmåns to set the mic ablaze.

“It was a fluke thing; I saw [Lillmåns] pop up on my social media feed as I was looking for a black metal vocalist,” Hall recalls.

“I had tried a few people that didn’t work out. But when I reached out, [Lillmåns] said he had the Municipal Waste hot sauce in front of him, weirdly enough. Once he learned that Dave Witte was also involved, he was super into it.”

Morbikon’s debut album, Ov Mournful Twilight, is a wicked ride into a world of shadowy atmospheres and black magic, as repre-

sented by the album’s cover art by Pär Oloffson. These songs aren’t just rehashed anthems (to the welkin at dusk) with a fresh smear of corpsepaint. Hall welcomes splashes of classic metal, melodic shred, death thrash and symphonic elements to create a powerhouse black metal record. With the music completed and ready for global assault via Tankcrimes, Hall will continue sharpening his animation skills.

“At this point, I’ve put out over 38 releases musically,” Hall reflects, “and I’ve learned how to produce music, track guitars and more. Each release was a learning experience. [‘Universal Funeral’] was video number one for me, and my skills have already improved leaps from that experience. I’m glad I took the time and learned [animation], because I think it will lead to great things in the future creatively. I’m only limited by my own imagination.” —SEAN FRASIER

BLACKBRAID

Indigenous black metal solo project reclaims the dark roots of North America

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enture deep enough into upstate New York’s treeblanketed Adirondack mountains, and you just might spot the solitary figure behind one of the year’s most buzzworthy black metal albums moving silently among the pines. Sgah’gahsowáh is the force behind Indigenous black metal phenomenon Blackbraid, and despite his love for solitude, he has been thrust into the limelight thanks to the success of the project’s self-released debut LP, Blackbraid I. ¶ “Mother Nature is like a song that, sadly, most people have forgotten how to listen to because of the world we live in and modern distractions,” Sgah’gahsowáh says. “Blackbraid is my attempt to help people learn to hear her song again.” ¶ He also draws on his Indigenous heritage for inspiration, and those influences suffuse the music itself on flute-driven instrumental tracks like “As the Creek Flows Softly By” and the epic “Sacandaga.”

“You will never hear a Blackbraid song about Lord of the Rings or Satan or anything like that,” Sgah’gahsowáh promises. “It is not to say that I do not love black metal with those themes, because I really do, [but] Blackbraid is a way to honor my culture, 22 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

and those themes have no place here traditionally, pre-colonization.”

He’s been playing guitar since he was a child, but this band is his first stab at a solo project—and, like so many forest-dwellers before him, Sgah’gahsowáh found himself drawn to black metal, though he connects with the music on a much deeper spiritual level than your average Watain fanboy.

“Indigenous Americans have always tried to live in a sacred way, with a deep reverence for nature and the power she holds; we are also no strangers to war and Christian oppression and hate,” he explains.

“When you look at how many things we have in common with the essence of black metal, which is also heavily tied to nature and Christian oppression, with themes of paganism and war, it really seems like a perfect fit. Blackbraid is my attempt at showing the world that.”

Those who have already fallen under the album’s spell cite its

skillful songwriting, nimble riffs, atmospheric inclinations and controlled aggression as highlights; Blackbraid I may have just hammered the final nail in the coffin of the “shitty bedroom black metal” stereotype. Shades of Agalloch and Panopticon peek through, and Sgah’gahsowáh has mentioned Wolves in the Throne Room as a key influence, but even within the existing field of Indigenous North American black metal, Blackbraid stands alone. Though he shuns politics in his musical life (“I don’t think the fact that I’m a brown person writing black metal should be cause for labeling me as political”), Sgah’gahsowáh did have a very specific goal in mind when he was writing these songs, and is eager to take Blackbraid on the road to open more minds. “If Blackbraid can inspire people to try to live a more sacred and meaningful life in any way, I’d say it’s working.”

—KIM KELLY

PHOTO BY WOLF MOUNTAIN PRODUCTIONS

BLACKBRAID

RIOT CITY

RIOT CITY

Calgary speed metal maniacs leave the pandemic in their rearview

AS

the music industry gets back in gear and the world adapts to the pandemic, one recurring theme in 2022 has been how different artists adapted with the costly, infuriating, yet necessary precautions that the 2020 lockdown brought. “At the very beginning of COVID, we were touring Europe, and basically were stuck there unsure of what was happening for a week or so,” explains Riot City guitarist Cale Savy. “But it gave us a bunch of time to work on the songs we had and write a few more for the new record without the pressure of touring or feeling we had to rush at all, so it wasn’t too terrible in the end!” ¶ Reminiscent of such speedsters as Helstar, Racer X and classic Primal Fear, 2019’s Burn the Night was an accomplished first effort, but the follow-up, Electric Elite, is a huge step forward. One big reason is singer Jordan Jacobs, whose Ralf Scheepers-like scream was brought into the fold shortly after Burn the Night came out.

24 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

“Well, of course, the step up in vocal performance is huge, Jordan is an absolute monster,” beams Savy.

“But one of the biggest things is being able to do so much more vocally.

I’ve always been good at singing and playing, but with a standalone vocalist we can get a lot more out of the melody that couldn’t happen with someone singing and playing.

We’re stoked to get some new music out to everyone who has been waiting super patiently and get Jordan out there on a record.”

As fun as balls-out, over-thetop speed metal is, learning to incorporate nuance into such a high-intensity form of music is a big challenge for new bands, but Electric Elite’s smartly executed dynamics enhance those moments of blinding speed and soaring choruses.

“Personally, I wanted to mature the songwriting, which I think we

did in a big way,” Savy explains.

“Spending more time on every little bit has helped massively and made us a much better band in the process. I love how ‘Eye of the Jaguar’ stays true to Burn the Night, but a more mature version: a fast speed metal attack the whole way through. With ‘Severed Ties,’ I’ve always wanted to do a longer epic tune and keep it true to our sound, which I think worked out great!”

Savy’s enthusiasm is palpable when asked about how excited Riot City are to get back on the road.

“It’s amazing! Especially after having to cut the tour in 2020 short, it was a bit of a slow burn coming back, restrictions on and off, and trying to book tours, having to cancel over and over again. It feels like that won’t be happening anymore!”

Knock on wood, man. Knock on wood. —ADRIEN BEGRAND

WORM

WORM

Shapeshifting black doom dealers offer cerulean transience via essential new EP

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loridian enigma worm slithered their way to #19 on our Top Albums of 2021 with their third opus, Foreverglade. Marked by stygian doom, stunning solos and a bog-like atmosphere, Foreverglade captured the willing and unwitting alike at the inexplicable nexus of vintage-only diSEMBOWELMENT, Unholy, Tiamat and Cacophony. Composed of multi-instrumentalists Phantom Slaughter and Wroth Septentrion (of Atramentus/Chthe’ilist fame), Worm demonstrate out of indie spirit, virtuosity and respectful genuflection that there’s room for innovation. On new EP Bluenothing the duo return to the throne they’ve built out of sheer paludal will. ¶ “Bluenothing, in my eyes, is the nighttime world of Foreverglade,” says Phantom Slaughter. “The darker side of darkness, if you will. It is definitely part of that realm and story.

It does hint at where we will be going in the future, but for the most part it is closing the chapter on the Foreverglade era of the band. Something that I feel is necessary in order to tackle completely new concepts and ideas on our next full-length.”

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Worm’s trajectory from the unadorned black metal of Evocation of the Black Marsh to the manifold genre mastery of Bluenothing is nothing if not remarkable. From the ancient halls of “Shadowside Kingdom” and spooky shred session that is “Invoking the Dragonmoon” to the crepuscular grime of “Centuries of Ooze II” and Bluenothing’s 11-minute titular centerpiece, Worm’s subterranean architecture is purposefully broad-shouldered and wonderfully unique.

“We are now in the era of Necromantic Black Doom,” Phantom Slaughter says. “We are definitely not holding back any influences when it comes to our songwriting cauldron. To me, there shouldn’t be any rules. This is extreme music; there should be no limits or restrictions as to what you can and can’t do. Worm plays the sound of my dreams. I love black metal, death metal, doom, traditional heavy metal, dark ambient and horror

flick soundtracks. Why not combine ’em all?”

For Bluenothing, Worm re-enlisted illustrator Brad Moore (Gatecreeper, Penance) for the creepy ultramarine-colored cover art. The central ghastly figure atop a decrepit castle tower is the perfect lid to Worm’s preternatural metal. If Foreverglade was the group’s “green” album, then this is their “blue” counterpart.

“I was spending a lot of my free time by the ocean,” says Phantom Slaughter. “When thinking of blue album covers, the first person that came to mind was Necrolord and all his legendary pieces. I drew up a quick castle concept, gathered some references and sent them to Brad Moore. We had kept in touch after he did our last cover. He was into the idea and we decided that we should also bring back our cloaked mascot from Foreverglade to continue the story! I knew early on from his sketches that it was going to be something special.” —CHRIS DICK

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To survive a hardcore band, you gotta become a hardcore band… again

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didn’t realize bands didn’t have to break up,” says Tony Pointless. “Turns out you can just go on hiatus and come back.” ¶ It may seem like the R.A.M.B.O. vocalist thinks the Philly hardcore legends made a strategic error by disbanding in 2007, but in reality, the 15-year break has been pretty good for everyone involved. ¶ “We were having so much fun and the shows were so incredible [that] there was a danger it was fleeting. We all felt we had to end one chapter to begin the next.” ¶ That next chapter involved families and college degrees and adult careers that don’t involve loading gear up two goddamn flights of stairs. But Pointless kept in touch with his former bandmates, especially guitarist and main songwriter Andy Wheeler, who’d been sending him tracks over the years just for fun.” ¶ “They were good,” Pointless says, “but a lot of them really weren’t my thing. Then about four years ago he sent me some and they sounded like R.A.M.B.O. songs.

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He started sending more and ended up sending like 50.”

Writing led to demoing and, despite a pandemic threatening to kill all momentum, 25 of those songs were recorded, 16 ending up on their third full-length to date, Defy Extinction. And when it comes to reunion records, it is absolutely toptier, eclipsing anything the band has done before with a blazing, anthemic amalgam of crust punk, thrash and melodic hardcore—a worthy soundtrack for their worldfamously unhinged live shows. But if you assume the album is simply a justification to get back on the road, Pointless has surprising—if not disappointing—news.

“There are no plans,” he says in terms of tours or even shows.

“It’s hard to plan stuff like that with our lives now, and we’re also nervous. There’s 18-to-25-year-olds who used to go crazy, but they’re

grown-ass people now. Nowadays, I would be trading my vacation time with my family for tour. We like to go where we’re invited, so what it would take for us to play shows would be the record being received well and people really wanting to see us.”

Pointless may be surprised how well Defy Extinction will be received and how many people will genuinely want to experience these songs played alongside the classics.

But at least for now he couldn’t be happier with where R.A.M.B.O. has ended up.

“To be able to make art with your best friends, it’s a beautiful thing.

It’s nice to be connected to people with a purpose. We craved that. If there is anything at the core of why we made a new record, it’s because of that intimacy and creative process with the people you love so much.” —SHANE MEHLING

DREAM UNENDING

DREAM UNENDING Oceanic doom duo rides the wave of creativity with second LP in as many years

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hen dream unending released the kaleidoscopic Tide Turns Eternal at the end of last year, it felt like it came out of nowhere. Guitarist/bassist Derrick Vella (Tomb Mold) and drummer/vocalist Justin DeTore (Innumerable Forms) had quietly teamed up during the deep pandemic, and their new “dream doom” project seemed to arrive fully formed. It turns out we didn’t know the half of it. ¶ “We hadn’t even heard a proper mix of Tide when Derrick started presenting new song ideas to me,” DeTore says. “I love it. We both agree that the reason why we work so well together is because of our shared enthusiasm. It’s difficult to match.” ¶ Vella wrote the bulk of the band’s stunning sophomore LP, Song of Salvation, alone in his Toronto apartment, while he waited for travel restrictions to loosen enough for his American wife to join him in Canada. ¶ “I had nothing,” Vella remembers. “I had a bed. I didn’t have a couch. I had this desk and all my gear.

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It’s like those memes where it’s like, ‘Men live like this and think it’s OK.’ That was me. I just pushed all my gear into my bedroom where the AC unit was, and I worked on the record every day. I would come out to the living room, make dinner, get high, listen to a couple records and get juiced off that, then go back in and watch Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes while I worked on the record.”

Vella would shoot his parts over to DeTore, who would remotely track his drums and vocals to the sketches. The inspiration flowed freely; Song was more than halfway finished before the existence of the band had even been announced.

“So far, it’s worked out great,” DeTore says of their fully remote process. “With that being said, though, I would love to one day jam with Derrick in the same room. I bet you we would get an entirely

different Dream Unending if we were to do that.”

In talking about Song, Vella leaps from reference point to reference point, citing albums as diverse as Toto’s Hydra, Low’s I Could Live in Hope, the Gathering’s Mandylion, King’s X’s Gretchen Goes to Nebraska and Opeth’s Damnation. If Tide was sometimes pegged as the work of Peaceville Three revivalists, Song should more clearly show the breadth of Vella and DeTore’s palette. Far more important than their ability to channel their influences, though, is their ability to create a profound emotional response in the listener—one that can even border on the physiological.

“I kind of wanted the record to feel like you just took a big deep breath, and then just exhaled for 45 minutes,” Vella says. “Just one big sigh of relief that is never-ending.”

—BRAD SANDERS

NIGHTMARES HAMMER TRADITION VIA HOOKS ON FIFTH ALBUM REGENESIS story by JUSTIN M. NORTON

photo by SHAYNE SCHRODE

croll through any metal website these days and you’ll eventually see

the term New York Black Metal. If you had to describe the sound in a nutshell, you’d say it was avant-garde and progressive and jazzy.

Black Anvil were a New York black metal band long before NYBM was ever a thing. Their sound is gritty and abrasive, and their New York black metal is more street and less studio. ¶ “I mean this with all due respect, but growing up there were kids who went to nice schools for music,” says Black Anvil’s vocalist/bassist Paul Delaney. “And then you had people in the boroughs and the streets like us who were street people, but still creative. I was into the Misfits and couldn’t go to LaGuardia (Performing Arts) High School because I couldn’t play jazz. There is room for everyone, and that’s a good thing. But to me, part of New York is hardcore punk, and part of that lives with us. We’ve never thought we were any different from that—Black Anvil was just a different part of our growth. We never started this band to make friends—it was about making music we needed to make. My crew is the people with whom I’ve always been connected. It’s important to remember who you are and what your journey is.”

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On their latest album, Regenesis, Black Anvil fully embrace their street and hardcore roots while never losing sight of black metal’s majestic sweep. The result is a more direct, pugnacious album full of hooks and unified in purpose. “The intent was to trim the fat,” Delaney says. “I’m proud of all the records we’ve put out, but the goal was to take it back and strip it down to a back-to-basics approach. We didn’t want a throwback record, but we wanted something natural and it all fell into place. The idea was to tighten it up.

“I don’t think the earlier records had too much fat per se,” Delaney adds. “The possibilities are limitless and it’s fun to get extravagant when you’re writing music and make songs long or take them in certain directions. But ultimately, records should be about structured songs and songwriting and sequencing that honors how you write songs.

We weren’t limited on this album, but we worked on fully telling stories with these songs.”

Black Anvil had Regenesis written and demoed, and were set to record in 2020 after signing with Season of Mist. With the world unraveling during the height of the pandemic, they decided to sit on the music as long as needed and see what happened. “Lots of records that people rushed out during that time fell under the radar because people were just panicking,” Delaney says. “All we had was phones in front of us, and days turned into weeks and it all sort of went to hell. I was just watching things remotely considered comedy on Netflix because I needed things to keep my mind from going dark.”

Delaney notes that he didn’t alter much about the songs when Black Anvil finally got to the studio with Colin Marston more than a year after originally planned. “It’s pretty faithful to the way it was written,” he says. “I did run through the material a few times, but ultimately realized I was proud of it and it just needed to be professionally recorded. We managed to keep it pretty close to how we imagined it. The tool of the studio just helped us get the most out of what we imagined. I’m not looking to write pop music, but look at Iron Maiden. A hook doesn’t need to be pop or nice. A hook can be pretty fucking nasty. I think we achieved that and I’m happy with it.”

One of the album’s strengths is that Delaney and drummer Raeph Glicken’s lifelong friendship is perhaps better represented and honored

than ever. “I met Paul back when he was a kid before he was even in his 20s,” Glicken says.

I’m not looking to write pop music, but look at Iron Maiden.

A hook doesn’t need to be pop or nice.

A HOOK CAN BE PRETTY FUCKING NASTY. Paul Delaney

“He saw me stage-diving at a Murphy’s Law show, and he remembered me from going crazy

at that show, even if he didn’t remember my name. We started playing in New York hardcore bands and we just always gelled. We always had more of a progressive mindset.

“It takes time to get comfortable,” Glicken continues. “The album is the end of a trilogy that started with [2014’s] Hail Death. There’s a lot of personal exploration of the things we’ve been through collectively in the past few decades. When I look at working with Paul, I always think of it as a progression and open-ended and never a finality. It takes bands a few records if they are dedicated to finally exploring the inner stuff. As long as things never diverge from the intent, you should explore different things as you move along. When people are committed to a band, you will be able to see an evolution.”

For his part, Delaney claims that Glicken is never afraid to ruffle feathers and always focuses on how to improve songs. This was doubly the case when the band kicked around ideas for Regenesis. “He’s an older brother, a mentor even,” Delaney says. “I’ve learned to figure out why he is bored of a riff or wants to do something different. It’s almost like Rick Rubin. [Laughs] He’s always pushing the boundaries of choice and getting us to think outside of the box. If it wasn’t for him, I’d be stuffed in an even smaller box.”

TANKCRIMES.COM

D E C I BDEELC I:BDEELC:EAMPBREIR L 2021 2 : 33

DUST NEVER SLEEPS SAN DIEGO SLUDGE CRUSHERS

–(16)–

BLOW OFF THE COBWEBS ON INTO DUST story by ADEM TEPEDELEN ||| photo by CHAD KELCO

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can be sure that any band that’s still standing after

30 years has seen its share of transition, tumult and likely success on some level. Thirty years is not an insignificant amount of time to keep a creative endeavor together. At the very least, it denotes a steadfast dedication to one’s art, or perhaps a stubbornness to persevere through whatever life and the music industry throw at you. ¶ “It’s our craft,” explains -(16)-’s founding and only current original member, guitarist/vocalist Bobby Ferry. “We’ve been doing this a long time, but we also have families, jobs, businesses. The band keeps rolling on, so I have continual inspiration, basically, and we’re committed musicians. This is just area four of a four-part pie that is your life, and it’s most likely gonna be there forever, while you’re physically still able. And we are, so we’re gonna keep doing it.”

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Unsurprisingly after so many years, the San Diego quartet has a long discography—loaded with 7-inch singles, splits, compilation appearances and full-lengths—and a somewhat shorter list of former members to show for their decades spent hammering out a very Southern California version of down-tuned sludge. There was a brief window in the early 2000’s when the band broke up after releasing 2003’s Zoloft Smile on At a Loss Recordings, but they reconvened a few years later with a trimmed-down lineup, and have been issuing new material regularly via Relapse ever since.

Ferry has been the only constant in -(16)- over the last three decades, though bassist Barney Firks and drummer Dion Thurman have been with him for nearly a decade, and lead guitarist

Alex Shuster for a little over five years. The current lineup is the same one that recorded 2020’s Dream Squasher, minus original vocalist Cris Jerue (a.k.a. Cris Goebel), who retired from music prior to Dream Squasher’s release. Jerue’s departure transferred all lead vocal (and lyric) duties for new album Into Dust to Ferry, a crucial change that has had a dramatic effect.

Into Dust benefits not only from Ferry’s lyrical contributions—he’s created a loose narrative through the record—but from his vocal versatility. While Jerue could do the raging, angry hardcore bark with aplomb, Ferry does both that and more melodic singing equally well. The juxtaposition of the band’s usual harsh and aggressive approach with hummable, catchy passages offers a balance that steers Into Dust away from being a nihilistic soundtrack to depressionville. It ain’t exactly uplifting, but it somehow feels, well, less miserable.

“The beauty is where the cracks are,” says Ferry. “I’m trying to create music I want to hear. I totally am. It can’t be oppression and death at all times—especially in sludge. With sludge we get pigeonholed as nihilistic, and I don’t buy it. I’m totally PMA [positive mental attitude]. [Laughs] When you’re at the bottom, you always have to kind of look up. You can’t succumb to apathy. My biggest fear is, I don’t ever want to become cynical about life or music. I just want to keep doing it.”

-(16)-’s last album inauspiciously arrived in late spring 2020 as the pandemic was unfolding. The band, however, didn’t let the fact that they couldn’t support Dream Squasher slow its momentum. “For the last five years, we’ve sort of operated at the same clip,” says Ferry. “[The pandemic] made rehearsals a little weird, but we created our own bubble to get through it. As soon as the vaccinations came out, we continued exactly on just like nothing was happening, to be honest with you. The band still had the same creative pace happening and propulsion; [the pandemic] was just making the in-person [rehearsals] a little weird for a few months.”

Into Dust was once again recorded with Jeff Forrest at Doubletime in San Diego, the same guy and same studio that band has used since its inception, and it was in the can by December 2021. Like every other record made during the pandemic, its release date was basically set for nearly a year later. That’s OK with Ferry, because the details he can’t control don’t matter; it’s all about the creativity.

“This is the muscle that we exercise—jamming, creating, learning covers, making each other laugh,” he says. “I don’t know, man, adults need hobbies. And this is a really good muscle to exercise. And every time we write an album, like every other band—this is our best shit. [Laughs] I hate to say it, but I’ve been saying this since

1992. Every 7-inch is the best goddamn song I’ve ever written, and so is [Into Dust].” [Laughs] If you’re a musician and you don’t feel that way, then don’t do it. Make room for the rest of us who are still super trying.

“The only way [-(16)-] moves forward is new [material]. Because our old stuff was never good enough to just… we never wrote Slaughter of the Soul or South of Heaven. We’ve never created that ‘landmark,’ so you always try to write better; it’s continual improvement.”

There’s no disputing that Into Dust continues that trajectory. Anyone who’s been a fan of -(16)- since their inception knows not to expect a redux of past glories, because as much as they ply the waters of a genre known for a certain, uh, consistency, they don’t necessarily follow the same well-worn path.

“We’re trying to transmit a vibe,” Ferry offers, by way of explaining the band’s creative approach. “The guitars sound like they sound, the bass sounds like it sounds and the vocals sound like they sound because we’re trying to create a vibe that I’ve always strived for—to either success or failure. Every album needs to have its own vibe and its own challenges.

[We’re] trying to have an uneasy vibe with the minor tones, but still throwing in some hope and redemption. I’ve been doing this a long time; what else can I do?”

D E C I BDEELC I:BDEELC:EAMPBREIR L 2021 2 : 35

story by SARAH KITTERINGHAM ands all over the world are desperately competing for your atten- Thy Lover EP [in 2016], but got pretty sick again.

tion. After years of rolling lockdowns, shows are coming back full force. Major labels delayed numerous releases that are currently being unleashed in a flood, smaller artists and labels are being buried in the melee, and local gigs are frequently overlooked in favor of huge festivals and stacked bills. ¶ It’s a difficult position to be in as an artist—especially as a chronically ill artist—even if you’re a member of a band that singlehandedly invented a trending subgenre of heavy metal. ¶ “The only good thing that came with COVID was the fact that I finally could get some rest,” says Leif Edling, the Swedish bassist who steers epic doomsters Candlemass. Formed in 1984 after the dissolution of prior project Nemesis, the band hardly needs contextualization thanks to their resounding musical impact. ¶ “I was very burned out,” he continues. “I still [am], but it’s a little bit better. It’s still hard for me to socialize, go to see gigs, travel.”

Edling’s health issues are well-publicized.

Rewind to 2012, and Psalms for the Dead was advertised as the final Candlemass album. Contrary to plan, the record marked many new beginnings for the bedraggled outfit, in spite of the departure of vocalist Robert Lowe (formerly of legendary American act Solitude Aeturnus) six days before release.

Indeed, it opened the door for original session vocalist Johan Längquist’s eventual return.

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The December before Psalms’ release, Candlemass celebrated the then 25th anniversary of their legendary 1986 debut Epicus Doomicus Metallicus by performing the album in its entirety for the very first time alongside Längquist in their Stockholm hometown. Although six more years would pass before Längquist would officially join, Mats Levén stepped in and Edling soldiered on.

“I thought I felt a bit better,” says Edling.

“Then I suggested that we should do the Death

Crawled back on my feet and made House of Doom [2018]. Took me about six months, that EP—I continued to work and The Door to Doom came out [in 2019]. That album was a bitch to do. And at the same time, we had some problems in the band, which didn’t exactly make it easier for me. But every cloud has a silver lining—it led to Johan’s comeback.

“Then COVID changed everything.”

Finally provided with an ample amount of downtime, Edling eventually began jotting down notes and riffs for Sweet Evil Sun. The 10-track album offers a slight variation on the modern Candlemass sound, and is complete with crunchy production and lurching, massive riffs alongside Längquist’s soaring yet gruff vocals. “Devil Voodoo” has cold steel drums reverberating in the mix; elsewhere, “When Death Sighs” features guest backing vocals from Jennie-Ann Smith of Swedish doom metallers Avatarium (a band that Edling joined in 2013 and departed in 2017).

Peppered throughout are vocal harmonies and “Uriah Heep organ.” All told, the LP took around five months to record.

“Most of the stuff on Sweet Evil Sun is a mix between old-school and modern,” Edling offers.

“Songwise, it is old-school all the way. I hardly

listen to anything after 1982 or ’83, so that’s my inspiration right there. Mainly ’70s hard rock and metal, Sabbath/Priest/Heep/Rainbow, up to the great first Dio albums, early Accept, Anvil, Manilla Road. I’m extremely old-school in my metal taste and I think you can hear it on the album.

“The ‘Scandinavian Gods’ track is a mix between old Queen, Slayer and Judas Priest,” he continues, “and ‘Angel Battle’ is inspired by the first album by Trouble. ‘When Death Sighs’ is a homage to Black Sabbath… well, kind of anyway.

“The modern element is the way we mixed the record,” he adds, “It was recorded the old-school way, with amps and old or retro microphones, in a really good studio through a huge SSL desk. But we didn’t want it to sound dated, so we gave it a more updated mix through Ronny Lahti. He did a great job, I think. All the instrumentation and vocals sound great! It’s loud and in your face!

Like heavy metal should be!”

Of the recording process, Edling describes it as, “reasonably easy for a burned-out old doom wreck.”

He elaborates: “We didn’t rush it, because of my health, but also for the fact that every band on the planet were releasing albums in the

autumn of 2021 and spring 2022. Aiming for the summer festivals. So, we instead played it a bit different. Had an Epicus 35th jubilee last year, and this year we’ve been playing [1987’s] Nightfall.

No clash with other bands!”

The strategy has paid off for the band, who are enjoying a huge uptick in visibility and popularity, bolstered by rock-solid live performances of undeniable classics. Enjoy it while you can, though: Edling and company are quite ready to start performing new material.

“Sweet Evil Sun gets released on November 18. I think the timing is very nice. Then we can skip the ‘retro-bag’ next year and play more stuff from the new album!”

Although Edling is already bracing himself for the health repercussions associated with the impending touring cycle, his resolve has not weakened.

“I’m still an antisocial bastard, but the band and the music are very important, and I hope people understand this,” he says. “What don’t you do for metal?”

Songwise, [Sweet Evil Sun] is old-school all the way.

I HARDLY LISTEN TO ANYTHING AFTER 1982 OR ’83.

D E C I BDEELC I:BDEELC:EAMPBREIR L 2021 2 : 37

Decibel presents an exclusive book excerpt from

by Michael Hann eliable tree-crushers Bazillion Points are back with another thick metal tome to join their genre-defining explorations of thrash (Murder in the Front Row), black metal (Metalion: The Slayer Mag Diaries), Swedish death metal (well, Swedish Death Metal), and even more death metal and grindcore (Choosing Death). The magnificent new arrival Denim and Leather: The Rise and Fall of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, by former The Guardian music editor Michael Hann, is a massively entertaining overview of the British metal explosion that soon came to define heavy metal in America. ¶ We join the story in progress in 1980, as Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Saxon, Girlschool and old guards Judas Priest release landmark albums that gild their reputations.

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PHOTO BY AL MUNSON

1980 was the year that was the catalyst for everybody. If you were going to make it—if you were going to be selling out venues and doing the obligatory Top of the Pops, if you hadn’t done it by ’80, you weren’t going to be one of the top three or four bands later on.

BIFF BYFORD (VOCALS, SAXON):

Making On Through the Night was a piece of piss. It was done at Tittenhurst Park, owned by Ringo Starr. He’d bought it off John Lennon. It’s the house where Lennon shot the “Imagine” video, with the white piano in the white room. That specific room had been turned into a games room. It was a live-in and we drew straws and I got Lennon’s bedroom.

They’ve hated me ever since.

We moved in for three weeks to John Lennon’s mansion, and it was beyond surreal. As we moved in, who’s moving out but Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. They invited us to smoke a bit of weed—and I’d never done that in my life—drink some beer, play some pool. And so I had a game of pool with Ray Sawyer, and I beat him. I got on the phone and called my mate in Sheffield, Andy, and said, “I just fucking beat ‘Sylvia’s Mother’ at pool!” He goes, “Well, he’s only got one eye, so how fucking hard was that?”

JOE ELLIOTT (VOCALS, DEF LEPPARD):

TOM ALLOM (PRODUCER, DEF LEPPARD AND JUDAS PRIEST): They looked like they’d been doing it for years. They were really accomplished and they looked like stars. I went up to Sheffield and did a few days’ preproduction with them. It was very rough and ready. The rehearsal room was on the first floor of a building where there was a bloke downstairs making cutlery. There was a great big hole in the wooden floor, and you could look down and see him working.

That’s not far off the truth, in fairness. It would have been our first real rehearsal room. It was in a complex, a tiny factory, size of a kitchen, where independent people would make knives on lathes and little things like that. It was a really, really old-style complex with older machinery, and there just seemed to be one room that came available. It cost us £5 a week. It was brilliant.

The whole place was falling down, but we were grateful for it.

JOE ELLIOTT: We saw the cover and went, “Okay.

A truck going through space? With a guitar sticking out of the back of it and the moon in the background? Who the fuck came up with that?

It’s just awful…” I don’t know why it wasn’t ever challenged. It was probably five naive, shy kids going, “We’re signed to a big label. Maybe this is what Elton John had to deal with.” We were wet under the collar. That’s when we started to learn: This is how it works.

At the time, I thought On Through the Night was good—I would have given it three and a half stars out of five.

Now, I think it’s really strong. I think it really catches them at a time that should have been captured—with that energy, with that rawness, with that power. A song like “Wasted” is still one of my favorite Leppard songs. It’s an anthem and it always came across really well live. And still does.

MALCOLM DOME (WRITER, KERRANG!):

In 1978, me and Sav [bassist Rick Savage] chalked on the wall of Sheffield City Hall: “Def Leppard will play here in 1980.” And we did. And we sold it out. We had to make a choice after rehearsals: either go into the Sheldon for a one-pint, four-straw, 20-minute drink and walk home, or don’t go to the Sheldon and have the bus fare to get home. We chose the former. We had a quarter of a pint each, and me and Sav took the long walk home to Bramhall Lane and Crookes and Broomhill, which would have been four miles. It wasn’t warm. The shortest route home would have been walking straight down the side of the City Hall. It was one of those moments where you’re walking along, kicking cans, doing whatever you do, and you see a white stone, pick it up and do what teenagers do. I was hardly Banksy, but prophetic maybe. Lo and behold, 15 months later we’d sold the place out.

JOE ELLIOTT:

Songs like “The Rage” and “Living After Midnight,” definitely they were born in the studio, and there would have been other tracks as well. With “Living After Midnight,” we came back from the pub and Glenn [Tipton] plugged in and he got a riff going on, and of course you could hear it all over the house, so eventually we got up and just joined in. I mean, there was no set hours when you would sleep anyway.

We were so competitive, especially me and Glenn. Glenn knew that if he was lazy, I’d do it all. And vice versa, you know. Eventually we decided to form a team, me, Rob and Glenn, where all the songwriting was split equally, so no one person kept pushing their ideas. So, it ensured that the best ideas were selected, really.

For the right reasons. And that was the right thing to do, I’m sure.

Everyone knows about the breaking glass sound effect in “Breaking the Law.” That was smashing milk bottles on Ringo Starr’s terrace. And shaking the cutlery tray was famous.

We wanted the sound of marching feet in “Metal Gods,” but it wasn’t just a cutlery tray, actually. It was also the legs of mic stands, with the rubber feet taken off—you couldn’t just sample sound; you had to get it in time with the music, because we didn’t have sophisticated sampling.

And I thought, “What about some cutlery?” So, I got all the cutlery out of the kitchen drawer. It was a mixture of those two sounds.

TOM ALLOM:

We were just a little bit outside of the box for NWOBHM because of the specific timing of it. But we felt connected in the metal way, and in the British way. But we were there before that kicked off, and I think it’s fair to suggest we were part of the inspiration for the way metal grew from the early ’70s.

ROB HALFORD:

RICK SAVAGE (BASS, DEF LEPPARD):

DAVID BATES (A&R AT PHONOGRAM FOR DEF LEPPARD): The cover of On Through the Night was terrible. Because I was the junior A&R man, I hadn’t learned the ropes yet, but I was learning, as in, “In the future I will be saying something about shit album sleeves.” That’s what you call an album sleeve by numbers. Not something you would want on your living room wall. Even a fantasy painting might have been better than the cover we had. More or less anything might have been better than the cover we had.

We finished On Through the Night in mid- or late January, and the first week of February I was in with Judas Priest, doing British Steel.

TOM ALLOM:

ROB HALFORD (VOCALS, JUDAS PRIEST): British Steel is a unique album, in sound and production and engineering from Tom. Tom made a very special record for Priest, really directing us to cutting away all the dead flesh from the songs and just getting them really, really precise to do the job they needed to do. Tom gave us some valuable insights into putting across the minimalist point of view to maximum effect.

We didn’t have much written. We set up a rehearsal room there and we put songs together while we were recording them. But that was okay. We would go to the pub and come back and plug in. We’d play before we went to the pub, we’d play when we came back. We were pretty prolific back then.

K. K. DOWNING (GUITAR, JUDAS PRIEST):

[Judas Priest] were the first band to really call themselves heavy metal. Sabbath never did. Sabbath were always heavy rock.

Priest embraced the term heavy metal, and made it okay to call yourselves heavy metal. So, they were massively important.

MALCOLM DOME:

With Wheels of Steel, we were writing songs together rather than picking songs from three or four years before we had joined together. You have to remember that quite a lot of them tracks had been played with other bands—the first album was basically the same tracks as the demo tapes we had been sending out. The first album was a mixture of songwriters, but Wheels of Steel was very focused, and the same people writing.

BIFF BYFORD:

When me and Paul Quinn [guitarist] drew up the music for “747 (Strangers in the Night),” we fucking knew it were gonna hit. We sat down and we’d been

STEVE DAWSON (BASS, SAXON):

DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2022 : 39

watching a program about an airplane that couldn’t land because there were a power cut in New York. And it was nicked a bit off Frank Sinatra for “Strangers in the Night,” and “747” were a good thing to sing. So, we’ve got a 747 that can’t land—what sounds good? And then Biff came up with a melody to sing those words. We had a great tune.

“Wheels of Steel” was a great groove in the style of AC/DC. “Motorcycle Man,” because we were mad on motorbikes. We had the idea to have the sound of a motorbike, and we thought, “How can we match the sound of a motorbike? It’s got to be an aggressive fucking noise.” Not a lot of people know this, but “Wheels of Steel” came from steam locomotives. We had another song, later on, called “Princess of the Night,” about the same subject. I’m a massive steam engine and classic car fan. Anything old is a major like of mine. So, I thought, “A steam engine’s got wheels of steel. That’s heavy.” So, I mentioned that to Biff. And he didn’t see it. But what he saw was a car. Which hasn’t got wheels of steel. Not really.

They’ve got steel wheels and rubber tires. But you can’t sing “Wheels of Rubber.”

Why did we write so many songs about transportation? It’s just those songs seem to have landed on the hits. You have to remember I was a biker back then. I used to get on motorbikes and ride really fast. The other guys, I don’t even think they were on a motorbike. I was the biker, so I was writing songs about motorcycle men.

BIFF BYFORD:

STEVE DAWSON: We’d got the Motörhead tour, in 1979, which we didn’t really want to do. Not because we had anything against Motörhead, but we were more UFO people. But it were the best thing ever. They were at the top of their career, more or less. Everything was sold out. It was just like the Beatles coming to town. We were right for that audience. And because we only had half an hour, we just went fucking crazy for half an hour. Absolutely crazy. We went straight off that on to our own headline tour.

They were brilliant people. Philthy Animal and Fast Eddie were so funny. Lemmy were Lemmy. He were a great bloke and he’d always give you the time of day. But he were a thinker, you know what I mean? The other two were just pure comedy and they were always fighting. It were like Pete and Dud. Philthy Animal had an empathy for us because he was from Bradford.

And Fast Eddie were southern. They were like chalk and cheese. There were always banter going off between them.

KIM MCAULIFFE (VOCALS AND GUITAR, GIRLSCHOOL):

Lemmy was quite quiet actually. He’d just sit there and read, keep himself to himself on the tour bus. The others would fight in hotels.

They’d come out of the lift, the two of them, just rolling around the floor.

40 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

On that first tour, I remember knocking on Lemmy’s door one morning. “Bloody hell, you’re up early!” “I haven’t been to bed yet.” I don’t think he ever went to bed. I don’t know how they survived. That first tour, we had some wild times.

We were no slouches in the partying. We used to try to get some sleep and look after ourselves a little bit, but it was three weeks of mayhem.

We saw the cover and went, ‘Okay.

A truck going through space?

With a guitar sticking out of the back of it and the moon in the background?

JOE ELLIOTT • DEF LEPPARD Reading ’81 was a highlight. I remember thinking, “Oh my God, we’re going to headline the Reading Festival.” That was a big deal. A real big deal.

For some reason, they got us this Cadillac to turn up in to the festival. It turned out to be Jayne Mansfield’s Cadillac—not the one she died in, though, not the one she was decapitated in.

It was a big, pink Cadillac, and that’s how we drove to Reading, with the top down, driving up the motorway to Reading. There was a bunch of bikers all beeping their horns at us. And then they escorted us. Fantastic.

STEVE DAWSON: We played quite a lot with Iron Maiden. And we kept bumping into them— we’d go to a motorway rest stop and they’d be there. But it’s like I said, the rivalry between southern bands and northern bands… there’s a massive gap. Humor’s different, accent’s different. Without sounding elitist, I think the tunes we wrote were more catchy songs. Not just a riff with some twat fucking screaming.

A lot of the so-called NWOBHM bands wrote riffs with singing, and not songs—melodic tunes that you can whistle. Iron Maiden were sort of in that bracket to me. To me, they came into their own when they made Number of the Beast, because there were tunes on that. Actual tunes that were crafted. Not just riffs with singing and guitar playing for the sake of it. Like constant guitar soloing all the way through the song. It’s something we could never write.

The sound was bloody horrible on our first album. That music was so powerful and it didn’t come across that way because the overall production was pretty shit. I wasn’t happy at all. We was excited making that first album because it was the first time we’d ever done it.

PAUL DI’ANNO (VOCALS, IRON MAIDEN):

My favorite songs were “Remember Tomorrow,” “Strange World.” When you try and explain the punk side of Maiden on the first album, everything was played too fast. Even now they rush some of the stuff. The slower, more easy on the ears, less frantic songs I preferred. Things like “Charlotte the Harlot” were rush, rush, rush, so you never actually got into a groove when you played it. My personal favorite was “Phantom of the Opera”; even that’s got slow parts to settle down in.

DENNIS STRATTON (GUITAR, IRON MAIDEN):

Wil Malone is a very diverse producer who has gone on to do a lot with different things from different areas. I’m not sure he was definitely a rock or metal producer. But what he allowed Maiden to do was to play. And I think he does a lot to enhance what’s on that first Maiden album. I know that Steve Harris hates it. But what would he have done differently?

Obviously, Martin Birch came in for the second album, very well-established, and took them to a different area, in the same way Mutt Lange took Def Leppard into a different area.

But they needed to do those first albums to get where they wanted to with the next album.

They were good stepping stones, and they still sound really good.

DENISE DUFORT (DRUMS, GIRLSCHOOL):

MALCOLM DOME:

KIM MCAULIFFE: We’d been to Reading ourselves.

So, to do that, and be the first all-female act to headline, was amazing. And we had the biggest flash bombs as well, apparently. They could be heard about 10 miles away when they went off.

That was in the days before health and safety— you wouldn’t have that now! They were like bloody bombs going off. That was a great night.

Denim and Leather: The Rise and Fall of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal,

by Michael Hann is available wherever books are sold, or directly from Bazillion Points.

OUT NOW !

interview by

QA TOM j. bennett

WI T H

WARRIOR TRIPTYKON mainman on the new Celtic Frost box set, his love of Thin Lizzy and why Krokus was once the bane of his existence

42 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

IT’S

difficult to explain how comforting it is to

see Tom Warrior in Thin Lizzy gear. When we catch up with him on a video call from his home in Switzerland, Triptykon’s founding father is rocking a Bad Reputation T-shirt. “My girlfriend has just criticized me earlier today for always wearing Thin Lizzy T-shirts,” he says. “‘Bad Reputation’ is one of my favorite songs, but I basically love all the Thin Lizzy albums from the 1970s. I even love Thunder and Lightning, which I know a lot of fans feel is no longer Thin Lizzy, but I can see they were trying to rejuvenate themselves. But Johnny the Fox is probably my favorite album. I like the diversity and the songwriting.” ¶ If you’re us, this is important stuff. Crucial to the understanding of one’s musical makeup. And it establishes that Warrior is, first and foremost, a fan. But it’s not why we’re here today. The reason we’re talking with the founder of Celtic Frost—one of extreme metal’s most important bands—is the release of the massive Danse Macabre box set. Collecting all of Frost’s early material from 1984 to 1987, it includes Decibel Hall of Fame monoliths Morbid Tales and To Mega Therion alongside Into the Pandemonium, the Emperor’s Return EP, a 40-page book and tons of other goodies. “We all felt the title Danse Macabre would represent the spirit of the music from that period,” our man explains. “We felt it would express the morbidity and experimental attitude of the band.”

Take us back to that decisive moment in 1984 when you and Martin Ain dissolved Hellhammer and started Celtic Frost. What was happening at the time?

It was quite an intimidating proposal, but we felt at the time that we had no other recourse. We felt Hellhammer had run its course, and we felt limited by the scope of the band—as much as we liked the extremity and heaviness. We were young radicals, but we had the feeling that we transcended that as well. We had so many varied interests—we were interested in art and all these things. We had grown into slightly better musicians, and we began to be able to express these other influences. We felt Hellhammer would not give us this platform.

Once you’d made the decision, the transition happened quickly.

This all happened in 24 hours. Martin and I basically decided to leave our own band and start a new one. We ended Hellhammer and sat through the entire night devising the new band.

We wrote everything down on an IBM electric typewriter—the same typewriter on which we had written the Hellhammer flyers—and made sketches of the album cover and everything.

The next morning, we were completely enthusiastic about what we had created. But at the same time, it was very intimidating. There were PHOTO BY SCOT T KINK ADE

moments over the following weeks where we thought, “Did we make a huge mistake by dissolving Hellhammer? Did we give away the only thing we had?” We didn’t know if this new band would go anywhere. We didn’t even know if the record label would accept it, because we had a deal with Hellhammer. We didn’t know if they would agree to this drastic change.

You sent Noise Records this detailed document with all your plans for Celtic Frost. Did you have the band plotted out musically at that point?

We knew exactly what the band would sound like. We had it in our minds and we had one prototype song. When we came home from West Berlin after recording the Hellhammer EP in early ’84, I began to write new Hellhammer material. The song I wrote was called “Visions of Mortality,” and we made a rehearsal recording in our wet, stinky bunker. That cassette sounded so much better than anything Hellhammer had done—and I’m speaking, of course, technically.

A lot of the stuff Hellhammer did sounded good because it was cult, but it was deficient technically. This song was heavy, but it was a little more sophisticated—and Martin’s lyrics were phenomenal. So, we took this as the prototype for what the new band would sound like. Famously, that song was only recorded in Celtic Frost— even though it was the last Hellhammer song.

Does that wet, stinky bunker still exist?

It still exists, but it has been refurbished. I haven’t been inside in like 40 years. I’ve been told another band is rehearsing there, but I guess they weren’t as possessed as we were. I haven’t heard any music over there.

Celtic Frost’s debut, Morbid Tales, is a crucial extreme metal document that helped lay the foundations for both black metal and death metal. Did you feel a sense of accomplishment at the time?

We definitely did. When we heard the finished album, we were relieved. It sounded exactly the way we wanted. If you look back, it was a very short time from the end of Hellhammer to the recording sessions of Morbid Tales, but it was a massive path for us. We had done so much work. Coming out of the studio was the first time we could sit down and breathe and assess what we had created. It felt very good. We came back from West Berlin—the island in socialistcommunist Eastern Europe—and we played the advance tape to our closest friends. They all loved it, so we felt it was working.

What was the writing process like?

Writing and rehearsing the songs all summer was an act of utter fanaticism and enthusiasm and sheer desperation. We had been in this underground bunker and laughed at by the entire Swiss music scene for years. We were young men filled with testosterone and adrenaline, and we wanted to prove ourselves. We wanted to show them they were wrong, that we were on to something. But we had to prove that to ourselves, too.

It was a fantastically magical time, but also an incredibly desperate time because we knew we might lose everything if it didn’t work.

When Morbid Tales came out, did it change your reputation among the other Swiss musicians who had been criticizing you?

No. I know how people talk about Celtic Frost these days, but the reality at the time was of course very different. We were still an underground band, and Morbid Tales was a tiny first step. A lot of the contemporary press said, “Well, these are the Hellhammer guys, and we all know they cannot play.” Famously, Kerrang! magazine, which was the most important metal magazine on the planet at the time, gave Morbid Tales one out of five K!s. So, the album was listened to with prejudice. And the Swiss music scene at the time was obsessed with copying Krokus, which at the time was the only Swiss hard rock band to have made any impact abroad. They all sounded very dated, but they couldn’t understand our music. They laughed about it.

DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2022 : 43

There’s nothing of any artistic value on Cold Lake. Not the lyrics, not the music, not the production, not the photos, not the band members—myself included.

It’s an abomination.

I’m very aware of this paradox, believe me. It’s one of many reasons that I don’t take the Swiss music scene seriously to this day—with a handful of exceptions, of course. The Swiss scene is still an amateurish and provincial scene. If you’re a Swiss musician who really wants to make an impact artistically, you have to go to another country. Unfortunately, not much has changed here. The horizon is limited to making a lot of money—work at a bank, work at an insurance company. The real innovators are very few here, and we all know their names.

Reed St. Mark stepped in on drums when you did the Emperor’s Return EP in ’85. Did this feel like a step forward?

On Morbid Tales, we used a session drummer.

Afterwards, we searched for a permanent one for months. But in Switzerland, as you can imagine, there were only Krokus-type drummers. So, we began to look to America, which was the scene that was happening at the time. We stumbled upon Reed St. Mark, from New York, in February of 1985, and that’s really when Celtic Frost took off. The merging of this absolutely phenomenal drummer with a completely different background from Martin and I, it was just a creative explosion. We were able to artistically go far beyond Morbid Tales, as much as I love that album.

Then you did To Mega Therion without Martin Ain, which means the first three Celtic Frost releases have three different lineups. That must’ve been incredibly frustrating.

It was very difficult, very daunting. When I started writing To Mega Therion, I was 21 years old.

Martin was 17, and he came from an extremely strict religious household, which created major problems in his life. It’s a very complex story, but it came to the point where Martin was no longer present during rehearsals even though he was physically present. He just became so distracted that we couldn’t continue. Martin himself knew he had to go sort out his life. We had two or three songs for the album when we parted ways with Martin, which was extremely unfor44 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

tunate. It placed an enormous amount of burden on my shoulders because I wasn’t a very experienced musician at the time, but I wanted to do this album. Martin only wrote one and a half pieces of lyrics and no music for the album, so it was all left to me. But of course, I wasn’t going to give up. We did the album without Martin, and he rejoined shortly after.

How did that happen?

When we returned from West Berlin after recording To Mega Therion, we discovered that Martin had completely changed his life. He had moved out of his parents’ home and had an apartment with a roommate. He had taken the time to refurbish his life, which made it possible for us to reconnect and work professionally again. It’s something that Martin and I have lamented for many years, that he’s not on this album—but he is in spirit because we secured the Giger painting together [for the cover], he provided the title of the album, and we discussed the concept of the album together. I simply wrote it alone.

The final material in the box set is from ’87, before Celtic Frost did Cold Lake—which is an album you’re famously not fond of. But you also disowned Hellhammer for decades, and you’ve since written a book about the band and started the Triumph of Death tribute…

The reason why Martin and I had a critical stance toward Hellhammer for a long time is because it was like a millstone around our necks.

For an underground band in the early 1980s, Hellhammer was ripped apart by the media and the fans. Our affiliation with Hellhammer made the start of Celtic Frost very difficult. Nobody wanted to give us a chance. Being affiliated with Hellhammer made every step difficult for us until maybe 1987, so we began to hate that legacy.

From what I can gather, the rise of black metal didn’t help.

When I moved to the United States in the early 1990s, Norwegian black metal arose. I had journalists contacting me out of the blue, saying, “There were murders of homosexuals, there were church burnings, and the people who have murdered others have quoted Hellhammer as an

influence.” Which, to Martin and me, it felt like someone had abducted what Hellhammer really was and made it into something it was never supposed to be. It was very difficult to live with that connection, with that legacy.

How did you end up changing your mind?

When we reformed Celtic Frost in 2001, Martin and I spent uncounted nights talking about our own legacy and history. We dissected it. That really helped both of us understand it better and look at it a little less critically—with the exception of certain songs, like “Satanic Rites,” which should have never been written. But for the first time we felt we could actually be proud of Hellhammer. Even though that material was recorded under great adversity with a shoestring budget, the energy is real. It’s honest. So, it took us a little longer to realize Hellhammer was cool.

Do you ever see a day when you can re-evaluate Cold Lake and not hate everything about it?

Surely, you can find value in some part of it.

There’s nothing of any artistic value on Cold Lake. Not the lyrics, not the music, not the production, not the photos, not the band members—myself included. It’s an abomination.

It should’ve never been done. And I’m not a coward—I admit that I’m responsible for most of it. I have to live with this. But my recourse was to prove that I can do better, with things like Monotheist or the Triptykon albums. That’s all I can do as a musician.

There are fans out there who enjoy Cold Lake, even though you don’t.

It’s a strange world, isn’t it? My condolences to them.

What’s going on with Triptykon, anyway?

We are looking at the new album at long last. I know all the fans will have a tired laugh about that because we were supposed to do a new studio album for more years than I care to remember. There’s been a lot of shuffling behind the scenes—new management, a new concert agent, et cetera—but the band is at a turning point, and it’s time to mark this with a studio album.

Hopefully we’ll be able to make something special. It’s a daunting prospect, but we’ll try.

PHOTO BY ERNST WIRZ

It’s ironic that an entire country’s hard rock scene, which was copying Krokus—a band that copied AC/DC—looked down upon you for doing something original.

the

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

definitive albums

All Hail the New Flesh the making of Strapping Young Lad’s City DECEMBER 2022 : 4 6 : DECIBEL

by

jeff treppel

DBHOF216

STRAPPING YOUNG LAD City

CENT URY MEDIA FEBRUARY 11, 1997

Urban depacification

D E C I B E L : 47 : D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 2

PHOTO BY MASA NODA

D

evin Townsend’s discography eclipses that of a lot of record labels, but his journey to becoming one of metal’s most beloved (and perplexing) figures took off with an album written on a friend’s couch while eating spaghetti with margarine. The former Steve Vai singer channeled his myriad frustrations into SYL’s sophomore release, 1997’s City. In the process, he reinvented industrial metal, taking what Godflesh, Grotus and Fear Factory had started to its natural anime cyberpunk conclusion. It’s a primal scream from the mind of a restless genius.

The 24-year-old Townsend had already experienced a lifetime’s worth of industry bullshit by that point: brief stints in local Vancouver acts like Caustic Thought (with future SYL guitarist Jed Simon and bassist Byron Stroud); a memorable vocal performance on superstar guitarist Steve Vai’s darkest album, Sex and Religion; and SYL’s failed debut Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing. Townsend found himself at a crossroads. He only wanted Strapping to be a one-off thing. When he couldn’t find enough label interest in his other project, Ocean Machine, he decided to give SYL another shot.

He demoed the entire album himself. Then, once a mutual friend introduced him to man-mountain/drummer extraordinaire Gene “The Machine” Hoglan (who had just come off of critically acclaimed recordings with Death and Testament), Townsend called in his old buddies Simon and Stroud, and they decamped to Vai’s recording studio, the Mothership. After four sleepless days and nights— and some vocal recordings in Canada and a mixing session in Sweden with engineer Daniel Bergstrand—he had the album that truly launched his career. Kerrang!, of all places, gave it a great review. It made Metal Hammer’s Top 20 for the year. Even luminaries like Machine Head’s Robb Flynn and Metallica’s Jason Newsted were fans.

Townsend cites bands like Morbid Angel, Carcass, Foetus, Cop Shoot Cop and Fear Factory as influences.

Those elements populate the city, sure, but Strapping Young Lad created a dense urban labyrinth of its own.

Layers of samples and Hoglan’s hunter-killer drumming immediately signaled a change from the thin-sounding Heavy. “All Hail the New Flesh” demonstrates why Vai hired Townsend, as he effortlessly shifts from demonic roars to angelic singing. “Oh My Fucking God” commits deicide, “Detox” stomps all over the 12-step program, and even the Cop Shoot Cop cover “Room 429” locks you inside Townsend’s brain. It’s a snapshot of his life at the time— which maybe explains why things fell apart.

After some touring with bands like Testament and Stuck Mojo, Townsend stepped away from SYL for a variety of reasons: mental health issues, rehab, the desire to work on solo stuff. That decision curtailed the band’s rising stardom. They reunited a few years later for three more albums (including the equally Hall of Fame-worthy Alien) before calling it a day for good, something the nonTownsend members still lament.

The chaos surrounding Strapping Young Lad’s onagain off-again career perfectly mirrors the chaos of the records, and that chaos is what made the band so unique.

In other words: Oh my fucking God, Strapping Young Lad’s City is finally in the Decibel Hall of Fame!

DBHOF216

STRAPPING YOUNG LAD city

What happened in the aftermath of Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing?

You didn’t intend on making Strapping a full-time thing, right?

How did Gene come on board?

My buddy [Craig McDonald from KNAC] was like, “Hey, man, you gotta come up and meet my friend Devin. He’s in town doing something, and I just caught him at [the

GENE HOGLAN:

Musicians Institute]. He gave a clinic there last week and it was super fun; he brings a broom out with him and he starts sweeping the floor. And he’s like, ‘I’m doing sweeps.’” You know, Devin humor. And I was like, “Devin Townsend! I love that guy.” I’ve mentioned this story many times, but in the summer of 1993, I watched Headbangers Ball every weekend to see Devin’s head. The top of Devin’s head. Because he had the coolest head.

They had just put out the “Down Deep Into the Pain” video from Steve Vai. It was not what I would expect Steve Vai to sound like; it was just a pretty aggressive track. And then you got this Cenobite coming out singing for him with the tribal tattoo on his head, and I was just like, this vocalist is the coolest dude ever. Holy moly.

TOWNSEND: I went back to Vancouver to try to get Adrian to learn the drum parts. But his head was so in the Frontline Assembly world at that point, I just got the impression that he wasn’t interested, which is fair enough. So, I went back down to L.A. and went to see Iron Maiden with Bori. And at that show was Gene. And we had a mutual friend that introduced us, and Gene told me he was really into the first Strapping record. And I was like, “Well, you’re one of the six people. So, that’s shocking, first off, but thank you.” And then we both proceeded to get really drunk. And I asked him to play on the new record, because I had written 99 percent of City by that point. I hadn’t written “Oh My Fucking God.” But the rest of it I had really complete demos for, and hammered Gene said yes. And I went home, woke up the next morning with Gene’s phone number in my pocket. And I was like, I have a very clear recollection that I asked him to play on the record. And I called him up.

And he didn’t remember at all.

DECEMBER 2022 : 4 8 : DECIBEL

 Too Heavy to live, too heavy to die

Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing-era Strapping Young lad, circa 1995

During that time, I went to play with Frontline Assembly from Canada, who Devin had played with previously. And I think I was on tour in Europe. We were talking on the phone, and he told me he met this guy named Gene Hoglan. Of course, he probably could have heard my jaw hit the floor from the other side of the continent. Or across the ocean, I should say. He didn’t realize who Gene was and what his pedigree was. And I was floored and I couldn’t wait. And that’s when it really all came together.

JED SIMON:

How about Jed and Byron?

Well, the first time I met Dev, I was playing in Caustic Thought. I think we were in Seattle, and Dev was there. And I was just standing around with, I think I had a guitar on and some guy ran up behind me and pulled my pants down, and I turned around. I was like, yeah, that’s Devin. So, that was the first time I met Dev. And we laughed, and I kind of wanted to throttle him for a second then. And then I realized that he was just joking.

It’s a really convoluted mess the next few years because we all ended up playing in each other’s band. And it was just this big circle of musicians. And anyway, I quit that band at some point, and Devin was my replacement. And then I think they kicked him out because he was too nuts for whatever reason. And then, God, I don’t know, other things happen. He went to go play with Steve, I think. And then he called me

SIMON:

PHOTO BY FRANK WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY

DEVIN TOWNSEND: We’d come off of the Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing album cycle, in which I put together—not a band, but at that point, I had in mind the vision of being in a band much more so than having any awareness of what it was like to actually be in a band. I just wanted people to get the impression of me being in a band. So, after I recorded that, I put together a bunch of people that had nothing to do with it; basically, other than Jed and Adrian [White, drums], they were all just people that were around town and good people. But I wanted to have a band photo, I wanted to look like a band. And so, I put this together and, without much surprise, it didn’t work. And we did a couple of tours, quote unquote, in a van up and down the coast to varying degrees of lack of success. And when we came home, the record had not done well.

I started recognizing that, because Ocean Machine wasn’t getting any traction, because Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing didn’t get any traction—yet—I had a label, which is more than I had for any of the other things I was doing, and maybe it was in my best interest to focus some more of my attention with those resources being on Century Media. So, I began writing.

And I found myself frustrated about being in Vancouver, I found myself with cabin fever, and Borivoj [Krgin], who is now Blabbermouth [.net], and Ula Gehret, who was at Century Media, said, “Well, we live in Marina Del Rey, down in Los Angeles. And if you want to come stay with us for a while and do some writing, you’re welcome to.” So, I did. I went down to L.A., and I stayed on their couch. Basically, I had a bag of clothes and zero money. And I stayed on Bori’s couch for six months, maybe five months. And I just wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, went broke, was eating spaghetti and margarine until Ula came home one day and said, “Dude, you’re gonna get scurvy.” So, he gave me a job at Century Media. And I was there helping them out while writing. I wrote the majority of City and Ocean Machine on their couch.

DBHOF216

STRAPPING YOUNG LAD city

out of the blue and said, “Hey, I want you to do this noisescapes thing with me,” which is the precursor to Strapping. So, we worked on that for a while. And then I guess it just wasn’t happening. And fast forward an amount of time.

And he called me again, says, “I’m doing this thing, it’s much heavier and do you want to do it?” And I’m like, “Yeah, of course.”

BYRON STROUD: We were still friends. And when he was down in L.A., doing the Steve Vai stuff, I’d fly down there and hang out with him when he needed some friends from Vancouver to be around him. So, I would do that and we always remained friends. I mean, even when he first started Strapping, he wanted me to be the bass player. But my band Caustic Thought had just signed a deal with a small Canadian label. So, I was committed to that. That’s the reason why I didn’t join on the first record.

TOWNSEND: I still wanted this to look like a band.

I had written all this music, I got this vision, I have the idea for the art. I know what I want it to be called, I have the lyrical front, I got the theme, but I don’t want it to look like just me.

It’s really important for me that this looks like a band. So, I called Jed and Byron. And Jed and Byron were always just kind of like the alpha dogs on the [Vancouver] scene. They were cool guys, and you know, people had a lot of respect for them around town. I thought, well, that would make a really kickass band, conceptually, to have Gene, Jed, Byron and me. And so, I flew Jed and Byron down to L.A. And we had one fourhour rehearsal. And then we went to record the following week.

What was the recording process like?

TOWNSEND: We went to Steve Vai’s studio in Los Angeles called the Mothership. And by that point, I had built up such a head of steam in terms of resentment towards Steve, and the Vai project, that there is a part of me that sadistically really enjoyed the idea of making this apocalyptic music in the same studio where I had recorded the Sex and Religion album, which was a traumatic experience for me, in some very mild sort of juvenile sense. And then we went, and I remember Steve thinking, “Oh, shit.”

HOGLAN: Well, I do remember that Steve Vai was out of the house; he was staying at his other place because he was having the house painted. And I remember there being a couple of extremely humorous back-and-forths between Dev and Vai about us possibly staying at Vai’s place, and just, you know, “Hey, we’re gonna be there for a couple of days, you know, we could crash out in your place.” But his place was called the Mothership. And it’s located in Hollywood. And the thing I remember the most was that Deen Castronovo was his drummer at

the time, and there was Deen’s drum kit in the corner, and I was like, I was such a huge—I still am a huge—Deen Castronovo fan. That, you know, I was kind of absorbing the power of Deen Castronovo’s kit being in the corner. And I remember there was a snare stand sitting over there. And so, I just brought the snare stand over and I put a little, like, tabletop kind of thing on the snare stand. And I was like, “I’m using Deen Castronovo’s snare stand to be the place where I got my headphones on, and now my little bottle of water’s sitting there; that’s really cool!” Took a lot of inspiration from that.

“I jump off [stage] swinging, and I have no idea what we’re fighting about.

But we’re fighting with a whole bunch of people, a whole bunch of house crew.

And the audience is just like, ‘What the hell is happening here?’

We’re watching the show, and all of a sudden, you know, a hockey game breaks out here.”

GE NE HO G LA N

But yeah, I remember Steve had all his guitars lined up. All the crazy-looking guitars. And he had a whole bunch of motorcycles down in the garage and stuff, but I was there for 13 hours to track some drums, so I didn’t get to pay attention to a whole lot outside of the focus of, “You got some killer music here, you got a certain amount of time that you have to get this completed, so keep your focus super focused, Gene.”

STROUD: We’d work super late at night and sleep on the studio floor. And I remember Steve getting upset that we were spending the nights there and actually kicked us out; we had to go stay at Gene’s drum tech’s house, which is kind of funny. I remember being in the bathroom [at DECEMBER 2022 : 50 : DECIBEL

Vai’s place]; he’s got all those magazines in the bathroom there, and flipping through them and finding his financial reports and stuff, showing how much money he’s worth. I was like, this is kind of weird that some guy would leave this stuff laying around in the studio bathroom.

What did everyone contribute?

HOGLAN: Devin was a really killer drum programmer. I always work like this—if somebody puts a lot of love into their programming, a lot of effort, time and imagination, I’m not going to come in and just go, “Well, I’m playing my parts to this.” I don’t do that. I’m like, “Dude, you did a great job; how about I just Gene-ize a little bit here and there?” [Imitating Townsend] “But yeah, you see, I don’t have a whole lot of fills happening. So, if you feel like a fill should go somewhere, throw one in and, you know, do your thing to it.” And, like I said, the programming was killer. I mean, everything he programmed was pretty much right in my wheelhouse.

SIMON: Dev did most of it [guitar-wise], but he did let me play on a number of things that he felt that I was right for, which was generally the faster stuff. Let me think here—I did some of “Detox.” “Home Nucleonics,” which is a song that’s like so far up my alley, it’s just ridiculous.

I love that song. And I think a couple of bits here and there. But those two are the ones that I played on.

STROUD: I think Jed may have played something, too; I just can’t remember. Things were written so fast. And we had limited time. I just joined the band basically as the album was being recorded. So, it just made more sense at the time [for Devin] to [play bass]. It changed a lot [live]. And you can hear that on some of the live recordings that we’ve done. Because at the time it was demos, just playing guitar parts and whatnot. But then as we became a band, as we started playing together, I realized that, with the chaos of the music, for the bass to be heard and to be felt, there needs to be a certain style.

So, I spent a lot of time, just Gene and myself, jamming, and we came up with basslines that weren’t on that original record. It’s nothing drastic, but it just gave it more breathing room and more space to be heard. So, my style playing live was actually a lot different than what was recorded on the record. But it seemed to work. And it was good.

TOWNSEND: Well, we were in Steve’s studio for, I think, four days. And during those four days, we had to track all the drums, all the bass, all the guitar. So, none of us slept. Gene was triumphant, of course. He was new to doing blast beats, which was interesting. And he had always hated them, but I loved them. So, he was willing to give it a go. And I just loved them because it always sounded like you had your baseball card clothespinned to the side of

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your bike wheel, and you’re going down a hill.

I think the band Krisiun was the band that I remember listening to and thinking, “I fucking love that, it sounds like military fire.” So, he learned how to do that.

I tracked the majority of the guitars, but Jed came in and did a bunch of it; he played, like, “Home Nucleonics,” but it was all through the same rig. And then Byron tracked what he knew, but granted, he didn’t have any time to learn any of this shit. So, I just finished that. And then I took it back to Vancouver and did it all myself.

From there on out, I just went into a studio called Red Stripe with an engineer buddy of mine. I had a sampler and a bunch of VHS machines. I had rented all these movies from the local library that seemed like they had appropriate themes that I would then run through distortion and use for samples, and I tracked all the vocals and everything. That was all on ADAT and 16-track, and then I bounced it all down to ADAT, and then I flew to Sweden, and we mixed it with Daniel [Bergstrand].

on this record. I used to take notes. Not poetry necessarily, but just thoughts that I would just [scribble] down whenever I got inspired. And in fact, in the liner notes for City a lot of those appear, it’s like a stream of consciousness sort of thing. The comic book Arkham Asylum had a really cool narrative that I lifted a couple of lyrics for “Oh My Fucking God” for. I had this little Mac computer, like one of those little lunchbox ones, the first ones that came out in the ’80s. And it was set up in the studio at Red Stripe, just for lyrics.

So, whenever I had an idea, I could refine it.

And if I’m being honest, my life has now gone in directions that I have to be just so much more aware of what I say lyrically. Just because the ramifications of it are just so much more. At that point, I didn’t have an audience. I didn’t have a family. I didn’t have much to lose, to be honest, when it came to business or anything. I had margarine and spaghetti noodles; like, what’s the worst that could happen? So, lyrically, I had a freedom back then that I don’t anymore. That is regretful only because I enjoyed that freedom, but not something that is regretful in the sense that I wish I had it now because it’s inaccessible to me now.

“There’s a part of me in my heart that wishes we would have kept going.

There’s a bigger part of me, I guess it’s because I’m a little older now, that’s glad that we didn’t, because I might not have made it, personally.”

J ED S IM O N What did Daniel Bergstrand bring to the process?

Daniel Bergstrand was the engineer and mixer for a bunch of things in Sweden. I really enjoyed the Meshuggah album Destroy Erase Improve at that point. And Daniel and I had a chance to work together on a Stuck Mojo record in Atlanta, right before the recording of this, and Daniel and I got along. Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing had been mixed by me. And Greg Reely helped, but overall, that was my trip and it sounded terrible. I thought that if I do this correctly this time, I could maybe make some inroads into an actual career. And fortunately, I’ve got enough authentic nihilism built up in my trip that the music is no longer as goofy as it was. So, Daniel, because he was in America already, offered to come to L.A. and engineer it, and then proposed that I go back to Sweden, and we mixed City at the same studio that he had done the Meshuggah record.

TOWNSEND:

Did you write the lyrics when you were doing vocals in Canada?

TOWNSEND:

Lyrics were hugely important to me

When do you feel like Strapping Young Lad became an actual band?

TOWNSEND: After the record was done and we delivered it, I remember Jed, Byron and Gene saying, “Hey, this would be cool to tour.” And at that point, I was still kind of unsure as to whether or not it would be any different, like, in terms of public opinion to the first record. So, I didn’t want to commit to anything. I was thinking if the label’s not gonna get behind it, and if people care about it as much as they did the first record, it’s not worth the investment, right? But then the record came out and immediately got great reviews. And legitimately great reviews. It wasn’t like, ironically great. And so, I was talking to the label, and they said, “Would you consider touring?” And I said, “Sure, let me run it by the guys.” So, I talked to Gene, Jed and Byron; I said they’re considering this. And all those guys said if that’s the direction it goes, yeah, of course [they’d] be interested in it.

SIMON: You know, I think it was happening before, but nobody really voiced it. It was just, we’re just DECEMBER 2022 : 5 2 : DECIBEL

doing the record. But it was when we did that first tour with Testament and Stuck Mojo, I think, almost ’97 or something, that was really when the band really came together. And I think that’s kind of when we were like, “Holy fuck, we’re really good live—something’s in here.”

What was the audience reaction like?

HOGLAN: Devin onstage every night was hilarious. You know, just because we were opening for Testament, it was a Testament crowd.

Nobody knew who we were. So, you know, we just had carte blanche to go crazy. I remember like, for some reason, I think we were playing—I believe the club was Obsessions in New Jersey. And I remember the promoter was pissed at us. We were pissed at the promoter for some reason. And Devin just came out and started really berating the promoter. So, the promoter—we could see him running out of his office—shuts down the PA. So, for some reason or another, a giant riot broke out. Like, our crew is fighting with people. Byron’s jumping off the stage now and people [are] jumping onstage doing the same thing. Devin is down in the crowd. Devin’s not a violent man at all.

I jump off there swinging, and I have no idea what we’re fighting about. But we’re fighting with a whole bunch of people, a whole bunch of house crew. And the audience is just like, “What the hell is happening here?” We’re watching the show, and all of a sudden, you know, a hockey game breaks out here.

STROUD: Just a lot of jaw-dropping. A lot of people seeing us for the first time, not really getting what we’re doing. And by the end of the show, being totally into it. I just remember being just so angry driving around in an American van in the middle of summer, sweating and just taking out our aggressions onstage and just being super aggressive and super heavy and super loud.

And every night just like, winning new fans and just destroying, like literally starting riots and stuff. It was intense. It was very intense.

SIMON: A lot of the time it was disbelief. Because Dev was so fucking insane onstage. There was one show—and I don’t know where it was— where he just decided to just take off his fucking pants. He just played the whole show and is in his underpants. Here we are playing this incredibly aggressive music. And he’s just cavorting around the stage in his underpants.

How did it fall apart and lead to the first break-up in 1998?

HOGLAN: We were starting to get on people’s radars. And I’m not sure if that was overwhelming for Dev or something like, “Hey, this is taking me out of my focus on my solo stuff. This entity is starting to become a little bit larger than I ever expected it to be.” And so maybe that was adding to the struggles that he was going through. I’m not quite sure. But he did have

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STRAPPING YOUNG LAD city

some bipolar struggles and we had to shut some stuff down. I remember, we were working on the Infinity album, Devin’s second solo album; we tracked the drums, and we were going to be tracking some more stuff. And that’s essentially when Dev kind of shut down. I tracked the drums in December of ’97. I went home to L.A. for Christmas. And by the time I got back, Byron was like, “Did you know Dev’s in the hospital?

He’s been admitted.” I would imagine Devin has spoken about this plenty. I don’t think I’m laying out any secrets or anything. But Devin was in a facility. So, we would visit Dev as regular as we could, just to try to be his pals and be there for him, but I think it was part of the writing on the wall.

TOWNSEND: Everything that I’ve ever been in, I say the same thing: I’m like, I don’t want to do this forever. I just want to do this for a while.

And I think on a business level that makes fucking zero sense of a banana, man. But as a person, I’m very, very glad that I’m wired that way. Again, it will never put me in the annals of history like Judas Priest or Metallica or anything like that. And I’ve had, in my estimation, several opportunities to “take things to the next level” that I’ve either fucked up or said no to. But that was the right decision for me. And I can say that now more than ever, right? And I am so thankful to Gene, Jed and Byron, for not only being with me through that trip, but also, you know, being—tolerant is not the right word. Because that implies, like, condescension that wasn’t there. But they didn’t understand and they were still very supportive, and even through all the bullshit when I left the band and they’re just like, “Why the fuck is he [doing that]?” Yeah, I still remember when I called up Gene and said, “I can’t do this, man. I gotta go. Gotta fly, bro.”

I remember him saying, to a lesser or greater degree, “You have my blessing. I don’t understand, but I love you, so go for it.” And I remember thinking that that was just a good analogy for our relationship, and I will respect those guys forever as a result of that.

STROUD: I mean, we were destroyed by it. Gene especially. Like myself, personally, I never felt like it was the end. I just felt like it was like a break that we needed to take that [Townsend] needed. I remember Gene being totally devastated because he had pretty much given up everything and come to Vancouver to do this, but I was still there for him. I remember visiting the hospital, and that was pretty hard to deal with, but he came out of it okay, I guess.

SIMON: My reaction was pretty negative at the time, and I got to be honest about that. And it caused some friction between Dev and I, and we eventually made up. I was all about moving forward and keeping going. And I think we all

were, but Dev’s Devin. And in hindsight, I should have been a little more understanding. And that carries over to the conversations we’ve had over the last few years. We’ve reestablished our friendship. We were on a singular mission to destroy everything, and Dev needed to step away.

And it was hard for us to understand at that time, and I feel terrible about that now, because we should have been more supportive to him at that time. And I think I’ve said this to him, as I should have been more of a friend rather than a bad partner, per se.

“I called up Gene and said, ‘I can’t do this, man.

I gotta go.

Gotta fly, bro.’

I remember him saying, to a lesser or greater degree, ‘You have my blessing.

I don’t understand, but I love you, so go for it.’

And I remember thinking that that was just a good analogy for our relationship.”

DEVIN TOWNSE ND

Is there anything you’d change about the album?

STROUD: Yeah, I would like to play on it. If we could have spent the time that we spent getting ready for touring and doing shows, and we would’ve had that time before making the record together—I don’t know if it would have been better for the band. I mean, I think that’s what made it so magical is that it was thrown together—not thrown together, but that it came together the way it did. For me personally, if I would have had more time and been involved in it a little longer, it might have been better for me. But I don’t know if it would have been better for the overall sound of the record.

DECEMBER 2022 : 5 4 : DECIBEL

HOGLAN: I would have changed the touring aspect. Of course, you know, hindsight being what it is, I would have loved to have had Devin’s full enthusiasm and excitement and, like, “Holy shit, yes, let’s make this band the biggest thing in the book.” I felt like it could be.

We had every template in place: killer songs; we might not have been the most attractive guys around, but that doesn’t matter; we had an amazing frontman; everybody was a really good musician in the band; everybody knew their role. And we had Dev as our leader. And I suppose it would be that I would have loved to have more enthusiasm from Dev. But hey, he put it out there before we even really got together that, “I’m not gonna be doing Strapping for very long; it was my last thing.” So, like I said, I was just grateful to get whatever we got from it. And it became a very magical moment in time for… maybe not all of us individually, but definitely for me. I’m very, very proud of every Strapping thing we did.

SIMON: I’ve had a hard time listening to Strapping over the years, just because I know we did it and it’s wonderful. There’s a part of me in my heart that wishes we would have kept going.

There’s a bigger part of me, I guess it’s because I’m a little older now, that’s glad that we didn’t, because I might not have made it, personally. So, it’s hard for me to listen to Strapping, but sometimes when there’s friends around and somebody’s like, “Hey, put on City.” I’m like, “Okay, cool.” We get through half and I’m like, “Please, I got to take it off.” It’s not that it hurts me, but it brings back a lot of memories. It’s just that I’m still really attached to it, I guess. And it hurts in some ways that we’re not out there destroying still, even though we probably need some Geritol and canes and walkers.

TOWNSEND: Well, you know, if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle, right? I don’t know, man. I don’t think so. I think that it summarized the naive, arrogant, exploding mind very well. It’s like, “Hey, I just found drugs!” But you know, it’s fun, man. It’s interesting to me. A number of things are interesting. First off, when you hear people talk about their old work with certain amounts of regret, and then the fallout that happened and the bandmates and all the drama and everything like this… I admit, I imposed a lot of drama on the guys. And it was a type of drama that was just very unique. But I also feel that it doesn’t sully my memories of the touring, the guys, the music. That’s where I was exactly at that point. And again, all bullshit and drama aside, I respect those guys so much and I have so much love for them for them being there for me and tolerating all that shit. My goal in life is to try and unfuck myself, not refuck myself, and that particular period of my life was… ah, dude, it’s just so stupid to even consider. But I love the album. I love those guys. I love the experience. It was super hostile and super dramatic.

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56 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

C O V E R

S T O R Y

orest is Her hrone the

The fanfare is justified for one-woman black metal phenomenon

STORY BY

Daniel Lake

PH O TO S BY

Shimon Karmel

Not the music—a lot of that shit sounds amazing, in the right context,

under perfect lighting, with maybe an epic tome in hand, perhaps serenaded by the distinct scents of nature or the decidedly old-world industries of metal-working, thatch-weaving or the preparation of hearty folk cuisine—but that genre label should probably jiggety-jig its breeches down to the bend in the river just past the ol’ sawmill and fucking drown itself. The melodic and textural concepts involved can be mysteriously thought-provoking, but at its core, it is forever the Samwise Gamgee of music: inherently a travel companion, but never the ring-bearer (for very long). Let it shine as the score on a slew of imagined sequels to those beloved ’80s fantasias of varying quality (The NeverEnding Story, Labyrinth, Legend, etc.), or pair it with metal’s razor intentions for maximum misanthropic impact, but on its own, it will happily tend the verge as age melts into age without ever so much as venturing to Bree for some new tools or a pint of ale.

DECIBEL

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“I don’t spend much thought or energy on labels, whether writing or listening,” says Hulder, the mastermind behind her eponymous breakout black metal band, a.k.a. Marliese Osborne (née Beeuwsaert), a.k.a. Marz, a.k.a. the Inquisitor, who finds a place within her music for the pretty, the poignant and the prickly without ever breaking the fellowship among them. “I feel the concept of ‘subgenres’ has become sort of a mockery of itself and is, frankly, a waste of time. I can understand, to an extent, people wanting a reference that will somehow help them decide if it is worth listening to, but I feel that ties into the dreadful instant gratification and laziness of today’s internet culture.”

When Iron Bonehead and 20 Buck Spin gave Hulder a platform from which to garner a wider audience, the youthful underground internet metal press rushed to praise the project’s blend of dungeon synth with black metal, as if the two sonic signatures hadn’t been conjoined twins from birth, crawling from the wombs of Burzum, Emperor, Darkthrone and others. On the value DECIBEL : NOVEMBER 2021 : 57

which should fuel excitement for another round of touring this fall. And at the center of the endeavor is the woman whose story and solitary artistic drive deserve every bit of the attention accorded her. The winds of Hulder blow baleful and bold, and the storm has only just begun. of surgically severing one form of moody darkness from the other, Hulder mostly shrugs out a simple answer: Who cares? “It isn’t necessary to separate [dungeon synth and black metal], as they both come from the same place, I feel.

When writing for Hulder, it isn’t as if I decide that I’m going to write a song that sounds like ‘this’ or ‘that.’ Each song and release generally comes fairly naturally, and just goes where [it] feels the most natural.”

Hulder’s star has been quick to rise since its frigid 2017 inception, uninterrupted in its ascent by a global shutdown that might have swatted down the promise of less ambitious bands. After stoking creative fires into a blaze of demo and EP recordings within a couple years, Hulder had built up enough steam to release a full-length album in 2021’s Godslastering: Hymns of a Forlorn Peasantry, which transitioned handily—as the pandemic’s grip on the performing world loosened and we all stumbled back into darkened clubs and festival pits—into a 2022 full of tours that would evangelize the Hulder name far and wide. In service of that same goal, 20 Buck Spin delivered the midsummer gem of an EP, The Eternal Fanfare, on Hulder’s growing fanbase,

Belgian Strong

What eventually became the Hulder sound is

rooted deeply in a broad musical palette, instilled in her through family connections. “I was raised in a small town outside of Antwerp called Mechelen,” Hulder says, “before my family made the move over to the States. As a young kid, music was always a part of my life. My grandfather was very involved in local theater and was an avid fan of classical composers. My mother almost always had music playing around the house, as far back as I can remember. She listened to Enya a lot, which is one of my first memories of feeling a strong emotional reaction or connection to what I was hearing. Enya remains one of my favorite artists to this day. My father, being American, was into more of the mellow classic rock and folk country stuff, which I developed a taste and respect for later in life. I cannot speak to how things are nowadays, but in my youth, it seemed like Belgium was quite behind on pop culture, and I don’t remember any real interest in that sort of thing amongst my peers.”

Music stole Hulder’s heart when she was still very young, before she moved with her family

I feel the concept of ‘subgenres’ has become sort of a mockery of itself and is, frankly,

a waste of time.

HU L DER

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to the United States and somewhat before she succumbed to the siren song of metal. “My own journey into the world of music began at the age of 10 when I received my first acoustic guitar,” she recalls. “I could hardly put it down, and later that year I would receive an electric guitar and mini amp, which changed my life. There was always an emphasis on songwriting as opposed to technical ability. I am self-taught, which I feel can work both for and against me. I took some opera lessons in my mid-teenage years, which were instrumental in developing vocal range and overall technique. I feel that those benefited me greatly in the types of vocals I do now: clean and dark. It wasn’t until I started writing for Hulder that I dabbled in any other instruments such as bass, keys, drum programming, etc.

“The first time that I remember being fascinated by heavy metal specifically was when I was about 13,” she continues. “My grandmother was an antique dealer and used to take me with her to many flea markets around Belgium. We were walking around an outdoor market when a copy of Iron Maiden’s Killers caught my eye. I had to have it. I carried that LP home with me, [but] it took me weeks before I was even able to hear it because we didn’t have a record player at home.”

Sheepish Aside #1: This story strikes a particularly personal note. For years, Decibel lifer Nick Green ribbed me about dropping a significant amount of money on a career-spanning box set of Neurosis vinyl, despite having neither the

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“Digger and I started Bleeder on a whim,” she explains. “We played and wrote as a two-piece at first. Even when we brought in the other members, Bleeder was always a less serious endeavor. We did a lot of partying, and most things revolved around drinking, debauchery and listening to Bathory. I am proud to have made music with the rest of those guys, but I do feel that my path has strayed largely from [the one] I was on at the time. That being said, I would be open to revisiting the collaboration if the circumstances were right. Our bassist Liana Rakijian remains one of my closest companions, and has taken most of Hulder’s promo shots, as well as having filmed and edited the music video for [Godslastering’s] ‘Upon Frigid Winds.’”

Borne Upon Frigid Winds

equipment to play it nor any plans to acquire such equipment. But the heart wants what the heart wants… a point on which I imagine Hulder and I might agree. Also, Decibel EIC Albert Mudrian’s Maiden-mesmerized son might be similarly sympathetic, given his growing portfolio of crayon-crafted interpretations of Maiden covers. Derek Riggs’ eye-popping art style has never been accused of anything less than motherfucking brilliance.

Secondhand Second Wave

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“I did not have much access to a computer,” Hulder goes on to explain, “and there were no real music stores around the area where we lived at the time. [Killers] was the extent of my exploration into heavy metal at that time. I had a brief interest in some of the more accessible ’90s industrial stuff, which quickly fell to the wayside when an older friend passed along his CD binder filled to the brim with second-wave black metal bootlegs. I listened to Transilvanian Hunger and The Somberlain back-to-back and remember feeling like I had just discovered the darkest and most meaningful thing on the planet. The spark of interest was ignited, and the search began. [It was] a bit backwards, but this led me to the classics and to delve deeper into heavy metal. Simultaneously, these interests were sort of a personal experience, as I was primarily surrounded by punk and played in various bands of

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the like, which undeniably played its part in my personal musical development.”

As Hulder entered her teenage years, her family relocated to the United States, and while her first West Coast home felt like a poor fit for her personally, she found subsequent stateside arrangements much more to her liking. “I lived in various places in southern California and, while I was able to meet some good people and explore music in a more involved way than I had in Belgium, it was very apparent to me that California would not be a permanent place for me. Back in 2017, I made the move up to Oregon, and it was a large relief to be back in a more natural setting. Since then, I have felt a strong connection to the region and feel that the Pacific Northwest is likely where my roots will grow.”

Encyclopaedia Metallum drops the clue that, previous to and concurrent with writing songs for Hulder, she conjured the rawest blackened punk cacophony with an entity known primarily as Shit Wizard, a.k.a. guitarist and vocalist Digger Andersson. The pair started Bleeder and fired off a sub-10-minute cassette demo of some of the messiest, noisiest, most devilishly righteous kickassery to hit these ears. But in all the scummy sound that characterizes Fuck Off in Hell, the rhythms are damn catchy, the solos rip and evil heavy metal reigns with fists of steel.

When your ears start bleeding, you’ll know who to blame.

As she suggests, even while Bleeder went on to vomit up further demos and some new music in the last year or two, she had something more personal and profound that still needed to find its voice. “Hulder began in 2017. I had just moved to Oregon before the winter hit, and I found that the isolation of being unknown to anyone in the area was very inspiring for me. Instead of going out and looking to socialize or put together a band, I made the intuitive decision to savor the wintertime and make an effort to write and record a demo tape on my own. Circumstances were rough: There was no glass in my window at the time, which made for a very cold winter.

The result was Ascending the Raven Stone. Contrary to what some artists feel about their earliest releases, I am proud of this demo, as it is a snapshot of that time and place for me.”

And proud she should be. The three-song demo hearkens back to black metal’s glory days—or more precisely, to those glorious early days in any black metal musician’s existence when they hand-crafted high drama with low sound fidelity, and everything fed on pure passion and the conviction that the Great Satan inside all of us is the only furnace necessary to smelt the gnarliest of metals and forge our crudest blades into killing tools. “Bestial Form of Humanity” pours gouts of charged black riffing over a thrashy swing; “Implements of Hell” trudges through a mid-paced and malevolent mire; and “Heksensabbat” wins the day with serpentine songwriting and a stellar sense for swapping out ideas before they go stale. This is not the Hulder that stepped from the shadows of the underground in 2021, but it is definitely music from someone whose scathed soul is wholly invested.

“When I started recording for the demos,” she says, “I programmed the drums and recorded all other components in my bedroom, except for the vocals, which were done in our basement, to spare the house full of roommates and the neighbors. Guitars were played through a trusty practice amp that has made an appearance on nearly every Hulder release since. The tracks were then run into an old Sony cassette four-track and

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My life already involved

hunting, fishing, mushroom-gathering and foraging

to different degrees, but this new environment has allowed me to delve further into those aspects of life.

HU L DER

62

mixed. The crude results were definitely a product of my lack of experience, but I am proud of the way they turned out.”

To present these songs to the world—or rather, to 100 members of the world who were paying enough attention to seek out the very limited cassette run of Ascending the Raven Stone— she turned to the black and death metal purveyors at the Stygian Black Hand label. For a batwinged, candlelit, medieval weapon-festooned logo that matched her aesthetic sense, she looked much closer. “The logo was actually drawn by my close friend and old Bleeder bandmate Digger Andersson. I had written and recorded the basic tracks that would become the Ascending the Raven Stone demo, and just happened to mention the fact that I needed a logo for the project while having a conversation with him. A short time later, he sent me a drawing out of the blue and asked if it would fit what I was looking for. What he sent me was the exact logo that is still used.

He just so happened to hit the nail on the head with his first draft.”

Those initial recordings sound so strong because Hulder was unerringly focused on the sound she wanted, and she was willing to put in the time to find it. “A lot of time was spent dialing the sound of the demo and first EP, even with the limited equipment available.

Thankfully, I was able to hone in on a sound that

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captured the intended experience. Bringing in Necreon on drums for the first 7-inch was huge.

This added a whole new layer of writing possibilities, as he thoroughly understood what I was trying to achieve musically.”

By Necreon, of course, she refers to the man to whom she is now married, Sam Osborne of Funebrarum, and a sometime denizen of various other extreme bands. “I had known Sam and the other Funebrarum guys from before I moved to Oregon,” she informs us of her early connections with Osborne and his bandmates, including Charlie “CK” Koryn, who has been involved in the mixing and mastering of Hulder recordings since the project’s earliest moments. “We had a number of mutual friends from the Bay Area and were familiar with each other from that. When I did make that move, I actually lived in a house in North Portland alongside some of the Funebrarum, Ascended Dead and Torture Rack guys. That feels like a lifetime ago at this point. Sam and I have now been married for a number of years, and we see Charlie whenever he is in the area. Since he has been with the Incantation guys, his time has been pretty spoken for these days.”

The aforementioned 7-inch was 2019’s Embraced

by Darkness Mysts…, an EP that threads Hulder’s connection to the natural world more deeply into the two songs’ sonic identity and the dense

forest-shaded cover imagery. Already, Hulder was evolving, with spacious keyboard lines undergirding a high-contrast attack through which Osborne’s percussive performances are allowed to positively glow alongside mean and meaty guitar riffs. By this time, Hulder was truly gathering her forces, preparing for the creative process that would become her debut full-length statement. “As far as my feelings towards those early recordings goes, I can say that they were each stepping stones that eventually led to where the music is now,” she reasons. “They feel linear and cohesive to me, and I hope that this is felt by the listener as well.”

While Hulder’s spark was struck mostly in solitude, the allure of the stage beckoned to the music’s creator, even from the beginning. “In the infancy of Hulder,” she says, “I did not have any real goal beyond writing and recording a demo tape. The idea of playing live seemed like a far-off idea, and I did not put any focus on the concept. Of course, touring was something that I always wanted to do, but it did not seem like it was within reach when I began. There was actually one live show in the demo days.

It happened in Portland and not many people were in attendance. I had Necreon and CK learn the songs from the demo, as well as a cover of Celtic Frost’s ‘Into the Crypts of Rays’ in a day or two, and we played a very short set as

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a three-piece. Once that happened, I knew that the environment wasn’t right and I needed to get back to work in order to hone in on the live side of the band.”

Songs of Loving Hate

That work would get the back-burner treatment,

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though, while a ravaging pandemic shocked the globe… and Hulder further incubated her burgeoning ideas. Another stage—and an even grander identity—awaited, but it wouldn’t have to wait for long. A litany of greater blasphemies was just around the corner, aptly titled Godslastering: Hymns of a Forlorn Peasantry.

“My writing process certainly did change a good deal when I was working on the Godslastering album,” she reveals. “It was the first time that I was able to put full focus on writing, as I was not working a day job simultaneously. When I began working on Hulder, I was managing a tattoo shop in Portland. They shut down preemptively out of fear of the virus going around, as many in the area did. This allowed me to spend my days writing and focusing on being out in nature as much as possible. I quickly realized [that] with time, discipline and a solid plan, the project could sustain itself.

“The freedom to explore any idea and direction that the album took was something that I think lent itself well to the final recording,” she adds. “I was living in the city at the time, with Portland’s oldest cemetery as our front yard.

Circumstance aside, the isolation and general slow pace of life at that time truly solidified my decision to make a life for ourselves that maintained that sort of freedom and stillness. Not to mention the urgency for self-sufficiency. Both themes can be found in Godslastering’s lyrics.”

By the spring of 2020, record labels had begun sniffing around the increasing activity within the Hulder camp. “Early on, there were a few very small labels that reached out, but I wanted to wait until the right deal came along,” she says. “Iron Bonehead Productions was the first label to fit the bill, and they offered to put out a full-length.” The German imprint first reissued a compilation of Hulder’s early demos, called De oproeping van middeleeuwse duisternis (which Google suggests can be translated as The Convocation of Medieval Darkness, and we have no reason to argue), then gave the world Godslastering in the first month of 2021. The partnership was both potent and relatively short-lived—Hulder garnered extraordinary attention for the hauntingly grim and lushly realized new record, but by the time she was prepared to strike again with this summer’s The Eternal Fanfare EP, the band had struck up a working relationship with 20 Buck Spin.

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“Since the release of Godslastering,” she says, “I have fielded some major label interest, but felt that working with 20 Buck Spin moving forward would be the best fit for Hulder. It has been nothing but a positive experience thus far.”

Says label head Dave Adelson of signing Hulder, “I’d been aware of Hulder since around the time the demo was being recorded, and had been watching her musical progress with interest all along. I met [her] because her husband Sam is a longtime friend of mine. In my early years of living in Olympia, WA, I ran a record shop, and 15-year-old Sam eventually wandered in and we became fast friends. Through that longtime connection, there was a level of trust and familiarity that made [Hulder signing to 20 Buck Spin] feel right for all involved. But first and foremost, it’s Hulder’s music and dedication that hooked me. I don’t put out albums based on friendship alone. Her vision of what constitutes real black metal both in sound and aesthetic is a near perfect match to my own. I don’t put out a lot of black metal because not a lot of the current bands and styles meet my personal criteria; the differences may be subtle to the casual listener, but for me it’s distinct.

Hulder checks all the boxes for me.”

The animating spirit behind The Eternal Fanfare embeds the Hulder identity even more deeply in the Pacific Northwest, while further embellishing upon the power of that place.

In a recent interview with Decibel’s J. Andrew Zalucky, the music’s primary songwriter explains that the record’s inspirations lay primarily in her experience in the local natural world, and she reveals that the lyrical content was finished in a mountain cabin. “Earlier this year,” she reports, “I changed scenery a bit and am now located in rural Washington State, living in a small off-grid cabin near Mount Rainier. This has allowed me to place a strong focus on engagement with the natural world and take steps to live a life that is more akin to that which the human form is intended.

My life already involved hunting, fishing, mushroom-gathering and foraging to different degrees, but this new environment has allowed me to delve further into those aspects of life.”

Due in varying degrees to choice and change, the brief record doesn’t follow Godslastering as much as it exists as an alternate path into Hulder’s experience. “The Eternal Fanfare is both a logical progression and a diversion from what Hulder achieved on her first LP,” Adelson suggests. “You can hear the continued level of confidence rising in the songwriting, and the production style is becoming more brutal and unique at the same time. Nonetheless, those who think they have Hulder figured out are fooling themselves. I believe she will both continue to surprise us and uphold tradition in the important ways of old. I expect the second fulllength will be a game-changer for USBM.”

In-Person Purgations

Before any such album can materialize, however, Hulder had grand plans to fulfill—the continuation of stateside domination through dogged touring. As more venues opened and more fans embraced the idea of flooding clubs for the chance to experience their favorite music in person, Hulder finally coalesced into a functioning live band. As the project’s lead tells us, “Sam has recorded session drums for the majority of Hulder’s recordings at this point, but is a jack of all trades, so it made sense for him to join me on bass for the live lineup. On top of that, I have had the pleasure of working alongside Charlie’s professionalism in the studio when it came to mixing the album, so it was an honor to have him on board for the first live lineup [on drums] as well. The last addition that we brought into the fold was Casey Lynch [Aldebaran, Witch Vomit]. We had all known her for years, and her guitar playing in numerous bands speaks for itself. It seemed like a perfect storm to get the ball rolling.

“Bringing Hulder to a live stage requires a considerable amount of logistics,” she notes.

“The first set of dates that we did back in the spring took a few weeks of intense rehearsals, but the dynamic of the band that I had the fortune of playing with was very comfortable. I feel fortunate to get to share the energy and stage with people I truly respect and trust. I would venture to say it was I who needed the most practice, since I had never played these guitar parts and done vocals simultaneously. I quickly realized I would need to train my physical body in and outside of rehearsals.”

Zalucky showed up for Hulder’s Brooklyn performance in mid-April alongside Montréal black metal tornado Spectral Wound. He describes her stage presence as “a dark eminence. Her performing style, along with that of her band, was actually rather understated, subtle and unencumbered by theatrics. She and her compatriots wore standard black metal fare: corpsepaint, spikes, leather, the works. Her playing was focused, like a machinist carefully watching a tool’s every application. The music was executed perfectly.

The sound production could have been better, but the space itself was perfect for two bands that have ascended from small-club obscurity to prominence as two of the best black metal bands playing today.”

Sheepish Aside #2: I should have witnessed one of the shows on that Spring 2022 run. Tickets were purchased, carpool plans were established.

This story might have been richer for the experience. But the day before Hulder’s Baltimore date with Nixil and Cemetery Piss, I was handed my first-ever positive COVID test, so I spent the evening (and the following week) shut away in my disappointing, non-music-venue apartment.

But no matter. Hulder returns in November and December alongside Exhumed, Castrator and Vitriol, and barring new virus variants

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and any of the other biblical plagues, I consider attendance mandatory. And by all reports, the band’s performance will only have grown sharper with time.

“I am primarily motivated by pride and spite,” says Hulder of her approach to the stage.

“Performing these songs live with some of the most talented musicians I know has certainly aided in my drive to continue on my path of selfimprovement. Rehearsals are for the technical aspects of a live set; the rest comes naturally, as there really aren’t too many bells and whistles.

For now…

“Performing live is usually a chaotic and cathartic experience,” she continues. “The melody and lyrics remain the same, thus offering a general theme, but there are many factors at play when it comes to how I utilize the outlet.

The varying degrees of energy expelled are inevitably in part determined by the participation of the crowd, but for the most part I am in a world of my own. I accept the emotions as they come, which ensures no two performances are ever quite the same.”

When asked about the visual imagery and traditional clothing choices for various promotional photos taken over the last several years, Hulder says, “The imagery that I have used has all been inspired by many different acts. Elements from both my upbringing in Mechelen and photos/ elements from old black metal zines all coalesced into what would become Hulder. There are many bands, books and other art forms that have all undoubtedly incorporated deep mystical elements in their works both musically and in atmosphere. Much of my attire used for the visual aspects of Hulder is inspired by medieval garb, fantasy art found in books and my natural surroundings. That gets simplified in a live setting to avoid any distraction.”

Perilous Journeys, Future Fanfares

The band’s extensive fall tour—planned to

66

stretch from their familiar home territory of Portland, OR across the north and central sections of the U.S., then southward through the East Coast and west again along the ever drier southern corridor—promises a grand showcase of Hulder’s prowess for those knowledgeable (and disease-free) enough to turn out, but our heroine confesses her primary intention to return to the hermetic inner spaces that allow her to explore new musical ideas and create more novel expressions of darkness both human and wild.

“Personally,” she says, “I much prefer to separate myself from the world and write music.

Most socialization that accompanies playing

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I expect the second [Hulder] full-length will be a

game-changer for USBM. DAVE ADELS ON , 20 B uck Spi n

live is something that hasn’t ever felt like it was second nature to me, but I do understand that it is an inevitable part of the process. While I could have chosen to just sit at home writing music for myself—and it would have been much easier for me to do that—the experience of touring and playing the material held within Godslastering seemed like the more natural thing for me to do. The album garnered a surprising amount of attention that, to be honest, was not at all what I expected. Bringing those songs to life was something that ended up being a trial run of sorts, but I believe that the future of Hulder has been more or less solidified as the experience of both tours [the aforementioned spring tour, as well as the longer summer tour with labelmates Skeleton] has been unparalleled.”

Out of a relatively brief and inordinately fruitful pupal stage, Hulder’s music has exploded into form, but anyone expecting it to hold steady in its current state is likely to be left in its wake.

Its creator insists that her art is still in the process of growing new limbs, new teeth, new structures that will, in turn, open up even further avenues for expansion on her sound.

“The future holds many things,” she concludes. “I am currently working on a few new releases that will be available in due time. My hope is to continue with touring and writing as long as I feel inspired to do so. Stylistically, I have said from the beginning that Hulder will not be confined, and my music will take itself where it needs to go. Most of the time, it guides me amidst the process. I aim to follow it wherever it may wind. As far as the artistic or atmospheric direction of Hulder is concerned, I set out to create something that is not bound by any confines. Of course, the works that I have created thus far have been within the shroud of ‘black metal,’ but my intention has never been to work inside of one style or genre. I will continue to write what I please.”

DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2022 : 67

INSIDE ≥

70 CHOKE Abandon all identity 70 DEFLESHED No meat on these old bones

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

72 INCLINATION Metalcore Tendencies 76 THE OTOLITH Reconfigured cells 78 WORM Blue period

Death Rides a Horse SPIRITWORLD

DECEMBER

10

Kevin Sharp’s cowboy hat

5

Jeff Walker’s cowboy hat

0

Nergal’s cowboy hat

-666

David Vincent’s cowboy hat

Vegas crossover black-hats unleash lawless hell on sophomore LP

W

hen it comes to extreme metal’s cinematic affinities, horror movies are an obvious and potent source of inspiration. But before the prominence of giallos and the slasher boom of the ’80s, western flicks veered SPIRITWORLD into darker territories during the Vietnam War era. With movies Deathwestern like Four of the Apocalypse and Cut-Throats Nine, the genre pushed CENTURY MEDIA deeper into the shadows of moral depravity with shocking violence and nihilism. ¶ Back in 2017, Las Vegas outlaws SpiritWorld released a demo of snotty country punk shout-alongs. Their “Viper Blood” single toyed with heavier rock tones, but largely retained their hard-luck alt-country approach. That all changed with the first few diabolical seconds of SpiritWorld’s 2020 album Pagan Rhythms. Their old honkytonk embellishments got a shallow burial, as they were steamrolled by the album’s godless crossover metalcore. ¶ Sophomore record Deathwestern begins with shimmering, sunbleached clean guitars. You can practically picture a mysterious anti-hero astride a black horse, silhouetted by a night-beckoning sunset. The title track swiftly smashes every

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8

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nearby acoustic guitar to smithereens. “Relic of Damnation” represents their bludgeoning sound distilled into moonshine. Pair Integrity’s apocalyptic hardcore with Slayer’s thrash leads and garnish with a bandolier. SpiritWorld basically invite those comparisons with a guest appearance from Integrity’s Dwid Hellion on the gangshout anthem “Moonlit Torture.”

That recipe results in memorable crushers like “U L C E R” and “Committee of Buzzards.” Too often, the technical demands of thrash produce studio recordings that sound and feel clinical.

But Deathwestern’s teeth-grinding urgency captures unhinged stage energy. Look no further than the bruising breakdown in “The Heretic Butcher.” These are songs made with the pit in mind. If Deathwestern was a movie scene, it would be Franco Nero pulling a Gatling gun from a coffin and mowing down droves of red-hooded villains in the 1966 classic Django.

Unfortunately, the album’s western theme is reduced to a few palate-cleansing introductions. The promise of that idea becomes more of a visual identity than a strong element of the music. SpiritWorld introduce novelty with some movie audio clips, but those link more to the themes of religious hypocrisy than ghost towns and outlaws. By the halfway point of the album’s expedition, the song structures begin to feel derivative. But none of that will matter in a live setting. Even with some late-album predictability, Deathwestern is an explosive collision of genres that keeps firing until each chamber is empty. —SEAN FRASIER

THE ANTICHRIST IMPERIUM

6

Volume III: Satan in His Original Glory A P O C A LY P T I C W I T C H C R A F T

Aftercocke

The fact that the Antichrist Imperium was conceived as a vehicle to repurpose the unused riffs and structures intended for Akercocke’s ill-starred Antichrist follow-up is still as obvious as ever three records in. From the bonin’ ‘n’ Baphomet leitmotifs and the precise alloy of death and black metal with a murmur of prog to the tonality of the clean singing—essentially the whole damn enchilada—the Antichrist Imperium are basically an alternate-timeline Akercocke.

Yet there’s a weightlessness here, a quality of triviality that dissatisfies. Most of this owes to production choices designed to make all of the melodic intricacies more decipherable (a challenge for any engineer working with these breakneck paces). Unfortunately, in order to achieve the desired sonic clarity, all of the lowend frequencies have been comprehensively 70 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

Roanoke-d. This provides the riffs much more elbow room—even when the tempos reach a rolling boil—but it gives the Antichrist Imperium an unflattering, overly-hygienic floatiness.

Listening back through Akercocke’s seminal releases, the contours and grime of their lowerend information do much to counterbalance the band’s charming chauvinism, Lonsdalecigar-and-billiards erudition and occasional melodicism. It festooned their elegance with actual menace. I don’t mean to suggest that the Antichrist Imperium should be entirely disregarded. Matt Wilcock is a font of fap-worthy riffs (refer to this or any Werewolves record as evidence), and my initial play-through of Volume III was admittedly a joyful mindgasm.

But the wear shows quickly on repeated visitations. The band’s mimeographed DNA has anemia embedded within it, and the overarching airiness leaves the listener hungry for more substantial fare immediately after the album has spun. Hail Satan… a cab, please.

This has all been lovely, but it’s time he mosey on. —FORREST PITTS

AUTONOESIS

8

Moon of Foul Magics SELF-RELEASED

Foul moon fever

I don’t trust anonymous one-person bands that self-release music on digital platforms for a few reasons. First, tech giants aren’t any better than labels. Second, internet anonymity helps racist assholes spread their ideology. Third, hobbyist music without accountability tends to be bad.

For every Panopticon or Mare Cognitum, there are thousands of phoned-in, self-indulgent ego trips. I avoid those bands.

I broke that rule for Autonoesis, and I’m glad I did. This anonymous Torontonian has crafted a riff clinic on sophomore LP, Moon of Foul Magics.

Nominally, this is a black metal record, but it uses genre trappings like blown-out vocals and tremolo melodies as a springboard, not a container. The title track begins Immortal enough, then locks into a neck-snapping Prongy groove. “The Conjurer” balances quick death metal riffing with intentionally dunderheaded drum beats that would make Possessed proud, then opens into a pastoral prog segment and funk breakdown. “Raise the Dead” is a Teutonic thrash workout with a shout-along chorus.

Those are just the highlights—every song requires repeated listens. Every riff is an earworm, and there are more than I can count.

Autonoesis doesn’t dodge every bad habit on Bandcamp—Moon of Foul Magics is self-indulgent.

The introductory track vamps for four minutes when it could be 40 seconds. Four of these nine songs nearly break the 10-minute mark. It’s also so niche that it’s almost bespoke. An album with this much variety won’t please genre purists, but who cares? Moon of Foul Magics has more well-executed ideas in one song than most one-man bands have in their discographies.

—JOSEPH SCHAFER

CHOKE

7

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

You are immediately one of us

What does Desiphon, the debut EP by Wisconsin’s Choke, sound like? I have racked my brain, but can’t top a certain unnamed editor-in-chief’s description that this is, “a thing that sounds like things that Nails sounds like.”

That really gets to the heart of this record, and it comes with some obvious pros and cons.

The pros are that this is five tracks of death metal, grind and hardcore that just throw shit around your house for approximately 13 minutes, and then it’s over, ready for you to dust yourself off and listen again. Following the official grindcore protocol, the record is short, super-fast songs until the closer, which is longer and ends up as a slow headbanger. Nothing is wasted, and the record would fit most people’s definition of “fucking brutal.” The riffs, drumming and vocals are at full attack at all times. Throw in a few short, Morbid Angelreminiscent solos and there isn’t really anything not to like.

But, as aforementioned, this is not exactly blazing any new trails. It’s hard to find anything in here that is distinctly the band’s own.

You’re not really putting on a specific album as much as pressing the red button that releases a big old landslide of heavy shit.

If this is the thing you crave, though, that is probably a selling point. So, while Choke may want to try and distinguish themselves a little better on the follow-up to Desiphon, they’ve certainly made an impact on this brief EP. —SHANE MEHLING

DEFLESHED

6

Grind Over Matter M E TA L B L A D E

One way and one way only

As quietly and quickly as they disappeared back in 2005, Swedish spleen-smearers Defleshed have returned. The original trio of members who delivered five albums of death-thrash whoop-ass—

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including 1997’s stellar Under the Blade—are back for another kick at the corpse. Unsurprisingly, they unleash a full-on assault of steel-toe violence and curb-stomping brutality the instant the starter pistol goes off with hardly any let-up until, literally, the final seconds of “Last Nail in the Coffin,” where you’d have to try really hard to not figure out what the closing sample is.

From the off, muscular guitars spit out helpings of indubitable Swe-death akin to fellow cranial crushers Carnal Forge and the Crown.

It rapidly becomes evident, however, that Defleshed’s approach to brutality is monochromatic and offers little more than a severe battering at high speed. There’s no solos or tempo shifts to break up the one-dimensionality lurking around Lars Löfven’s guitar, Gustaf Jorde’s in-your-face rasp and Matte Modin’s perfectsounding triggered drums. Ironically, it’s three songs in—during “One Grave to Fit Them All”—when it becomes obvious that one tempo, tone and vocal delivery (and maybe two drum beats) comprise this record.

That the album is only a few minutes longer than Reign in Blood helps in tolerating its singular, balls-on-the-cheese-grater approach, but even Reign in Blood had “Raining Blood” and the first part of “Criminally Insane” as comedowns. When the most textural move of an album is gang backing vox (“Heavy Haul”), you know you’re in for a good kicking, which, despite the tunnel vision, they do very well. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

GEVURAH

7

Gehinnom P R O FO U N D LO R E

Gevurah Salatası

Canadian black metal troupe Gevurah haven’t seen the light of day since their 2018 Sulphur Soul EP. They’ve been scheming, though, incessantly busying themselves—principally multi-instrumentalists A.L. and X.T.—with the Devil’s work. Years in the making, Gehinnom expiates the Quebecois of their inexplicable tardiness with a seven-track exercise in dissonant anti-songwriting.

Like peers Aosoth, Funeral Mist and Dodecahedron, Gevurah parlay continuous assault (“At the Orient of Eden”) with episodic bursts of “groove” and melody (“Blood-Soaked Katabasis”).

True to form, the instrumental tracks (the title track and “LV 16-22”) are setups for the parents that succeed them; they offer a foreboding atmosphere, if only a brief respite from the Mephistophelian din that inevitably ensues. Epic closing track “Gloria in Excelsis Deo, Et Ira ad Homines in Terra” follows its 20-minute forebear “Hallelujah!” (from the 2016 LP of the same name) in duration and approach.

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To Gevurah’s benefit, they’ve had an age to flower. At 13 minutes, “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” is a feat of buzzing death and terrifying tritones.

While competent and blisteringly intense, it’s hard to find repeatability in Gehinnom, however.

It’s suffocating to no end—the kind of music architected for (personally harmful) rabbit holes or warzone Zen sessions. Then again, Hallelujah! was no different. The striking (and appealingly unorthodox) cover art does summon returns to Gevurah. Their ungodly intent was perhaps successful then. —CHRIS DICK

INCLINATION

8

Unaltered Perspective PURE NOISE

Krazy Fest redux

For any band that counts itself part of a genre (or subgenre) revival, trying to stand out amongst a massive swath of artists attempting to emulate a few key pioneering acts is an unenviable task. In the case of the countless bands currently aping the sounds of metallic hardcore’s initial heyday, trying to find an inspired, enduring album is no different. That said, a small handful of these bands have successfully managed to create interesting, memorable records while avoiding complete thievery, and Louisville’s Inclination is a prime example. The band’s first two EPs contained many knowing nods to the more intelligent, X-spangled bands of the ’90s and early aughts while maintaining a sense of originality.

Luckily, Inclination’s debut LP does much more than simply deliver on the promise of early releases. Vocalist Tyler Short, guitarists Peter Katter and Isaac Hale (also of Knocked Loose), bassist Caleb Murphy and drummer Christopher Mills have honed those initial sounds into something that, at times, rivals their forebears’ classic output. Echoes of straight-edge hardcore’s most lyrically pensive and musically accomplished acts carry across the album as the band proudly displays the influence of Harvest, Trial, Bloodlust Revenge-era One King Down and the early New Age Records roster, creating something immediately familiar, yet never predictable or derivative.

The performances throughout are spot-on, technical yet tasteful. And they perfectly compliment the high point of the album: Short’s thought-provoking lyricism and dynamic, highly emotive vocal delivery. Using his personal straight-edge philosophy as a lens through which he attacks the political and economic roots of the drug epidemic, Short creates something of a conceptual think piece on Big Pharma, for-profit insurance and other related forms of bureaucratic corruption, expertly matching the varying tension in the music throughout. The result is

an incredibly passionate, pointed and impressive record that will doubtless land on more than a few year-end lists. —DAVE WILLIAMS

KAMPFAR

8

Til Klovers Takt INDIE RECORDINGS

Norsk at-risk black metal

Apparently, Kampfar’s ninth studio album, Til Klovers Takt, draws from and expands on themes and inspiration from “Kampfar,” the first song vocalist Dolk and long-departed guitarist Thomas Andreassen wrote together in the mid’90s. The Norwegians have, over time, waxed and waned; their black metal-infused pagan/ folk metal is either wonderfully panoramic or unremarkably prosaic. There hasn’t been much in between since Mellom Skogkledde Aaser cast its late-’90s spell via Germany’s defunct Malicious Records (Mortiis, Borknagar, et al.).

Turns out, Kampfar are on a late-life upswing.

Moored by “Fandens Trall,” “Urkraft” and ruminative closing track “Dødens Aperitif,” Til Klovers Takt traverses the very things that have come to define Norway and the music it historically renounced, but has since embraced with unfettered arms. That is to say, Kampfar capture majestic nature, independent spirit and folklore with more conviction at 28 than they did at 10.

This is no truer than on the sprawling eight minutes that are “Lausdans Under Stjernene.”

The past is alive in Ole Hartvigsen’s roving, mountainous guitar work, as it is in Dolk’s fierce caw. From the cunning groove to the winding descent-like blasts, Kampfar rewind time, but aren’t bound by it. This is very much modern in sound and vision. Of course, it doesn’t always work. “Rekviem” vibes perfunctory against the others. If “Lausdans Under Stjernene” and “Dødens Aperitif” are the bow and stern of the proverbial longship, “Rekviem” is the apparently necessary cast-off of its construction.

Fans of Moonsorrow and Helheim are no doubt already knee-deep in Kampfar’s wintry, fjordy expanse, and therefore need little convincing of Til Klovers Takt. But fellow couch Vikings into Amon Amarth will do well to widen their horizons. And that activity should start right here. —CHRIS DICK

METALIAN

8

Beyond the Wall TEMPLE OF MYSTERY

Fuck authority!

Ottawa, winter 2018: Somehow I got roped into running a show featuring Montreal-based metallers

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Metalian as headliners. When set times were being worked out, I asked guitarist/vocalist Ian Wilson how long their set was. He said they had at least two hours of material at the ready and asked, “How long can we play?” This jarred my memory back to the first time I saw Metalian, wherein they played for 90 minutes and seemed pissed when they were told to wrap it up.

Point being, this band loves playing, whether it’s a bar gig or covert after-hours rehearsals in a secret bunker during the stupidly strict curfew lockdowns instituted by Québec authorities during COVID’s apex. It was under these conditions they rehearsed songs from their previous three albums, wrote the 10 that would constitute Beyond the Wall, and probably knocked out a few Priest, Riot, Grim Reaper and Angel Witch covers over beers, shits and giggles. Knowing this, I’m surprised Beyond the Wall is only 45 minutes long and doesn’t max out at the time capacity of CD technology.

While the lines of inspiration are thick and conspicuous, what makes Beyond the Wall worthy of everyone sporting a Canadian tuxedo is how Metalian take the usual list of heavy/speed metal suspects and inject a unique brand of convivial energy. This isn’t Judas X, Metal Gods, Algernop Krieger’s Screaming for Van-geance or any other form of rote Priest worship. Wilson and Simon Costa can definitely harmonize like their heroes, but they do it at Violence & Force and All for One tempos, backed by a Steve Harris gallop in “Motorhorse” and “Fire on the Road.” And when Wilson layers his voice alongside the guitars, like he does on “March to the Death” and the title track, it’s fucking majestic!

Noticeable detours include the sullen prog of “Solar Winds”—think early Scorpions and Sad Wings-era Priest—the rousing major-key bro-hugging anthem “Dark City” and the punky “Cold Thunder,” which conjures up images of the Dayglo Abortions drinking at a late-’70s British working man’s pub, and is a very good thing. As is this album. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

MOTHER OF GRAVES

8

Where Shadows Adorn W I S E B LO O D

Closer now than ever

If you close your eyes and listen to Where the Shadows Adorn, the full-length debut by Mother of Graves, you might think you’re listening to a long-lost recording by Katatonia or My Dying Bride, but this band hails from Indianapolis, not Sweden or England. And though these Hoosiers are far from the first to try and recreate the hallowed sounds of the Peaceville Three, they nail the aesthetic better on the first try than most bands ever do.

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DISCO IS DEAD BUT SO ARE YOU

P

erhaps the only artist that will ever be covered in columns by both Dutch Pearce and myself, HEXENKRAFT excels at chiptuned video game metal inspired by the intensity of classic bloodbaths like DOOM (1993). He certainly walks the walk on his latest LP, Permadeath [ N EW B LO O D] —song titles like “Nightflame Eternal” and “Ebon Towers of Dis” wouldn’t feel out of place on a basement black metal tape. Neither would the recording—while it’s higher fidelity than, say, dungeon synth, it’s meant to be heard blasting through a CRT monitor’s beige speakers. “Chainsaw” will leave a trail of viscera through your next LAN party for sure.

Magonia is the name of a mythological city in the clouds that’s home to sky pirates, so I guess WE ARE MAGONIA claim to be buoyant buccaneers? That has nothing to do with their image, which features demons and neon lights, or their sound, which features demonic synths and neon beats. Their third album, Triangle Unicode [ N EWR ETR OWAV E ] , finds the darksynth trio moving more towards the electronic realm. Songs like “Triangle Unicode” and “Pushing Up Daisies” aim to get victims onto the dance floor rather than the killing floor. It’s a smart direction to go—the opposite from acts like Perturbator and Gost, giving WAM more flesh to carve their name into. Swashbucklers who don’t consider Carpenter Brut brutal enough anymore can get their fix here.

The film will be out by publication, so the extremely specific song titles on the Halloween Ends: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack [ SAC R ED B O N ES] by JOHN CARPENTER, CODY CARPENTER and DANIEL DAVIES shouldn’t ruin the film for you (spoiler: a lot of people die). Carpenter’s late-career musical collaborations continue to push his composing skills to new heights. The score for this final entry in the sequel trilogy doesn’t differ immensely from its predecessors—I hope you like the “Halloween Theme,” ’cause that motif gets repeated a lot—but there’s a noticeably more downbeat, melancholy vibe, especially on the multiple “Requiem for ____” tracks. The subtle evolution over the course of his latest Halloween triptych shows how Carpenter’s honed his killer edge.

Some credit is owed to Dan Swanö for giving Where the Shadows Adorn an authentically classic mix—the tasteful piano accompaniment especially shows his sensibility. But the Edge of Sanity mainman can’t take all the glory. Unlike many of their peers, Mother of Graves nail the fundamental sonic elements that gives this sound its oomph. Guitarists Ben Sandman and Chris Morrison build each of these songs around an outstanding lead melody, and that’s half the battle. “The Emptiness of Eyes” could pass for a Gregor Mackintosh joint.

More importantly, they remember that not every doom-death track needs to be a slog.

Mother of Graves rack up eight fully formed ideas in under 50 minutes. Highlights like “The Crown” maintain their melancholy while

focusing on more upbeat rhythms. Those more rocking songs in the middle of the record are so good, in fact, that the finale sometimes sags.

But these are minor quibbles. Where the Shadows Adorn is such an assured debut that even its prolonged end just feels right. After all, what good goth night doesn’t end with a little junk in the trunk? —JOSEPH SCHAFER

ORM

8

Intet • Altet INDISCIPLINARIAN

Into the infinity of feelings

When I agreed to review Orm’s Intet • Altet, I didn’t expect to open the file and find that the album

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was composed of four songs, each roughly the length of Venom’s colossus At War With Satan.

Part of that is on me, as I never checked out the band’s two earlier albums, which also feature very long songs. For all I know, I saw the song lengths and moved on. For years I’ve thought albums and songs are getting too overwrought, and that once mighty bands have forgotten how to edit. (I’m looking at you, Senjutsu.) So, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to digging into an album that is as long as most career retrospectives.

There’s always room for exceptions in life and music, and Intet • Altet is a noteworthy exception.

The songs on this double album are brimming with vitality, passion, emotion, licks and power.

One of the essential things when considering a mammoth album is if that length is earned. Is each song long and involved because an artist was indulged? Or is it long and complicated because the length is necessary to tell a musical story?

Intet • Altet wouldn’t work if parts of it were relegated to the cutting room floor. Each song is a mini-symphony that builds to an emotional crescendo. The labyrinthine songs are like miniature landscapes with peaks, valleys and hidden details.

The musical talent here is breathtaking; mere mortals could not have put this album together.

I’m happy to have been wrong about Intet • Altet. This music taps into something deep and primal and eternal in the human spirit. Intet • Altet isn’t just powerful—it sounds like the future of black metal in the next decade.

—JUSTIN M. NORTON

THE OTOLITH

8

Folium Limina BLUES FUNERAL

Divine consistency

An otolith is a little organ in the ear that helps you tell when you’re accelerating, and also what you look at to figure out how old fish are? Pretty easy to tell how old the Otolith are: SubRosa, the beloved experimental doom coalition that four-fifths of its members come from, broke up in 2019. Kim Cordray, Levi Hanna, Andy Patterson and Sarah Pendleton (along with Visigoth bassist Matthew Brotherton) formed this project almost immediately—making it clear where the fissure formed in SubRosa—and while it took them a couple years to get up to speed, Folium Limina continues the snail trail formed by their previous act.

As obvious as the Sub Rosa comparisons may be, the musicians make it difficult not to put the two side-by-side. Both bands play haunting doom, they each feature violin and unusual percussion, and their songs average 10 minutes in length. If you tossed “Andromeda’s Wing” or “Ekpyrotic” on a playlist with For This We Fought the Battle of Ages, they’d fit right in. Not that that’s a problem!

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SubRosa have such a sterling reputation because they were so singular, and if you take most of the collaborators from that project and have them work in the same milieu, you’re going to wind up with something in the same branch. Thankfully, no obvious loss of quality seems noticeable. “Sing No Coda” and “Bone Dust” demonstrate the idiosyncrasy you can expect, with the latter’s intro lasting for half the song and the former pulling in folk-reminiscent rhythms. Hopefully nothing arrests the Otolith’s acceleration. —JEFF TREPPEL

QUEENSRŸCHE

7

Digital Noise Alliance CENTURY MEDIA

It’s a play on DNA, ya rube

Not really sure that Queensrÿche’s status in 2022 is the right time to be talking about the band’s “DNA” (see the cover and album title), considering there are only two original members in the quintet: bassist Eddie Jackson and guitarist Michael Wilton. But for whatever reason, that seems to be what they went for conceptually, and Queensrÿche have never shied away from a concept. This doesn’t seem, however, to be a concept album, per se, so we’re left to judge the 12-track affair on its own merits as the band’s latest postvocalist Geoff Tate effort.

As we’ve said on these pages before, it’s been a lot easier to appreciate what Queensrÿche have to offer compared to Tate’s pompous Operation: Mindcrime efforts. For what it’s worth, this sounds like Queensrÿche, in spite of the notable lack of longtime members. The band successfully replaced Tate’s iconic vocals in 2012 with someone (Todd La Torre) who sounds just like him, which is kind of weird, but apparently not that objectionable to a lot of fans. Tate’s a tough act to follow, so I can see the rationale, but it’s also kind of like pretending that he’s not actually gone. Newsflash: He is.

Despite whatever luggage accompanies a release such as Digital Noise Alliance—the fourth since Tate’s departure—it’s objectively a good Queensrÿche album. The musicians involved—La Torre, Wilton, Jackson, guitarist Mike Stone and drummer Casey Grillo—sound like Queensrÿche, and if you just want a Queensrÿche fix, this will do. And unlike Tate’s post-split releases, it supports the idea that the band is bigger than one person. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

RIPPED TO SHREDS 8 劇變 (Jubian) RELAPSE

Come for the riffs, stay for the history lesson

As Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu once counseled, “Supreme excellence

consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” Having a 35-minute lesson in SinoAmerican relations screamed at you by a Taiwanese American dude from NorCal may be a tough sell at first, but Ripped to Shreds are adept at luring in unsuspecting new pupils. Their secret?

Making really, really good death metal records.

Founding member Andrew Lee is no stranger to the underground, having launched a baker’s dozen other brutal bands over the past few years, but Ripped to Shreds are his most fully realized concoction yet, and their third album, Jubian, has taken another step up from 2020’s excellent 亂 (Luan). It’s got all of the atmospheric decrepitude, sore throat vocals and, yes, buzzsaw riffs a girl could ask for, and Lee is a first-rate shredder, punctuating the album’s dissonant murk with screaming solos and dredging up supremely satisfying caveman chugs on tracks like “Peregrination to the Unborn Eternal Mother.” His commitment to fancy fretwork is especially apparent on album highlight “漢奸 (Racetraitor),” a preternaturally catchy melodeath number that dives headfirst into the complexities of racial identity.

Jubian’s focus on Chinese history and identity is everywhere, from Chinese artist Guang Yang’s cover art to the lyrics. Here, apocalyptic infernos smolder north of the 38th Parallel, not in a hokey pastiche of Hell; the visions of war are all too real, and the lyrical linchpins are not zombies or ghouls, but the evil that men do—war crimes, military invasions, indeterminate bombing campaigns. Instead of valorizing the conquers, Jubian castigates them. The album kicks off with a guttural retelling of the Mukden Incident, and on “Reek of Burning Freedom,” Lee skewers the American imperial war machine with lyrics like “Stench of flaming corpses / No ground gained nor lost / Another victory for liberty”—a thumb in the eye to this country’s jingoistic tradition of sticking our boots where they don’t belong. —KIM KELLY

STORMRULER

6

Sacred Rites and Black Magick N A PA L M

Slouching towards hokum

Stormruler are a duo out of St. Louis that are clearly prepossessed with enough ambition to write the ultimate secondwave epic. A noble cause indeed. Twenty tracks of long-form black metal and synth interludes sure make their sophomore album epic all right, but Jason Asberry (vocals, guitar, bass) and Jason Schobel (drums, vocals) ultimately must place their faith in the theatricality of their swordsand-shields songwriting and their abundant virtuosity to bring the summit of their own creative Kilimanjaro within reach.

PUNK//METAL//HARDCORE & MORE

PORTLANDDISTRO.COM @PORTLANDDISTRO

DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2022 : 77

SET THE CONTROLS FOR

EXHAUSTIVE NOISE RECORDS' YEARS COLLECTION

VOIVOD,

9

Forgotten in Space NOISE

Praise be to Korgull: This beautifully packaged box set takes a very successful deep dive into Canuck prog-metal maestros Voivod’s Noise Records years. Rrrröööaaarrr sounds great, the remaster actually bringing a bit of crisp clarity to this most chaotic of records. Killing Technology is essential, here the post-punk vibes clashing with the caveman trash in crystal-clear sound. Dimension Hatröss is one of the greatest metal records of all time, so of course I’m going to welcome a vinyl remaster into my life.

The Dimension Hatröss – The Demos LP, which contains demo versions of the entire album in the same playing order, is a treat to listen to after so many years of hearing the finished product. (And check out the change in opening vocal patterns in “Psychic Vacuum.”)

Sacred Rites and Black Magick opens with a splash of acoustic guitar that sounds like it was tracked in a high-ceilinged marble throne room (“Hymns of the Slumbering Race”) before—boom!—we’re off to the races with “Internal Fulmination of the Grand Deceivers.” Stormruler take a moreis-more approach. Their sound has a distinctly Swedish feel, frosty and present, in your face and ahead of the beat. Asberry’s vocals are on point, the performances redoubtable. But were Stormruler born too late? They throw everything at tracks such as “To Bear the Twin Faces of the Dragon,” as though cast as a desperate Salieri trying to extricate himself from Mozart’s shadow; only the Mozart here is classic black metal from the tail-end of the ’90s onwards.

Sacred Rites is either the most exciting thing you have ever heard or more of that thing that used to be. All those brief synth interludes should not be seen as an act of mercy on those who might consider 20 tracks an overly generous bill of fare; as on Stormruler’s impressive 2019 debut, Under the Burning Eclipse, they just interrupt proceedings, breaking the audience’s concentration, testing their patience. —JONATHAN HORSLEY 78 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

The No Speed Limit Weekend ’86 double LP is a treat, the youthful energy of the time and era just outrageous here.

The Chaosmongers DVD features a seemingly endless amount of live footage from various years, great behind-the-scenes footage of the filming of some classic video clips, a full ’88 concert (inspiring, forward-thinking), and audio of the band’s set at the World War III ’85 festival (exuberant, primitive).

The vinyl set comes with a Korgull-shaped (!)

USB stick containing all the audio from everything above, with a couple exceptions, as far as my battered brain can tell: There’s no ’85 set, and there’s instead an ’87 set and a different ’88 set, showing the band progressing at an alarming rate.

The LP-sized Cosmic Drama book is full of great archival pictures and a quick walk through the band’s history from drummer Away. All the vinyl is gorgeous colored splatter or swirl, adding to the visuals in a set that is, thankfully and respectfully, much more than a quick cash grab. —GREG PRATT

VARIOUS ARTISTS

6

A Future of Bad Men: A Melvins Tribute BLACK DONUT

Bad men, okay-ish record

Compilations are logistical nightmares. And it gets even tougher with cover albums. So, A Future of Bad Men: A Melvins Tribute certainly gets credit for pulling off what they set out to do. But aside from that, there are issues.

We have nine tracks here, so there isn’t much to feast on, and despite the band’s vast catalog, five of these are just off two albums—Houdini and Stag—and only one is after 1996. But there are some winners. Night Goat’s cover of the deepest cut on the comp, “Antioxidote” off the Eggnog EP, turns a straightforward rocker into a sludgy mess that Buzzo would likely approve of, and Work Party put in the effort to make “Skin Horse” their own, with some editorial decisions that honestly make the song better.

But not everyone is successful. Trigger Cut speed up “Lizzy,” undercutting the song’s muscle, and while Bovine Nightmares are clearly talented, for some reason they thought the

best treatment of “The Bit” would be to make the best riff not good. Aside from that, a lot of these songs pretty much just sound like faithful covers. Grizzlor’s version of “Oven” and Olde’s take on “Hooch,” for example, are both done well, but hearing the originals is going to give you about the same effect.

A Future of Bad Men is possibly for Melvins completists, or maybe for anyone who likes classic songs with a fresh coat of paint. I just know it’s not really for me. —SHANE MEHLING

WORM

9

Bluenothing 20 BUCK SPIN

Vermillion miles of bad road

Bluenothing is a four-track mini-album, half of which consists of leftovers from 2021’s superlative Foreverglade, but all things considered, it’s hard to see how this could be a more immersive and fully realized habitat of creepy über-doom death metal. And that’s just the first two cuts, Side A’s title track and “Centuries of Ooze II.” This is as close as extreme metal gets to a VR experience, a hesher metaverse with a texture that you can reach out and touch—no, a texture that reaches out and touches you. Welcome to the irradiated swamplands; bring your own towel and weed.

As with Foreverglade, Bluenothing contains multitudes. Its arrangements conjure an all-embracing cosmic fog, dreamy organs and languid death-doom ambience, solemnity jostling with the box-office thrill of guitar solos that dare to be technically adroit and melodic, like they came from the fretboard of a subterranean Vito Bratta. It’s actually Wroth Septentrion (a.k.a.

Phil Tougas of Funebrarum, et al.) who’s credited with judiciously introducing some shred to these Side A compositions.

Phantomslaughter’s synths walk the fine line between chintzy B-horror and the deadly serious, and are effective throughout. Bluenothing is a triumph of tone, finding equilibrium between the spectacular and the daydream, the awesome and the melancholy, and this magic continues on Side B, despite Phantomslaughter changing up the lineup. The opening to “Shadowside Kingdom” calls to mind Charles Bernstein’s A Nightmare on Elm Street score before availing itself of black metal’s sound and fury. No one made metal like Bluenothing in the ’80s, and yet it sounds fluent in the decade’s aesthetic excess. It’s audacious, one hell of a bad trip. —JONATHAN HORSLEY

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by

EUGENE S. ROBINSON

SAYING GOODBYE

TO THE BAD GUY I’vE

had friends who murdered people.

Who’ve gobbled every conceivable drug they could get their hands on.

I’ve had friends who have gone to prison for both. Friends who have stolen. Pimped out their girlfriends to a serial killer. Friends who have abandoned their kids to lives of certain misery in Thailand.

And still, I call them friends.

No quotes. No attempt to explain why and how that works outside of maybe an occasional and vaguely worded riposte: “Well, he was always nice to ME.” I’ve said the same about my past associations with Charles Manson and Anton LaVey from the Church of Satan. I could have also said that about noted serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who I was in regular contact with—before his date with the death penalty—regarding an interview and his now “infamous” paintings.

“I don’t think I know anyone who’s got more friends who’ve murdered people.”

The woman I was talking to was searching my eyes for an answer.

80 : DECEMBER 2022 : DECIBEL

Sure, she understood that, as a journalist, I had multiple occasions to have these people in my orbit, but that wasn’t really the question. The deeper question, as I understood it, was why. And beyond that, is there ever any point where you’d draw the line?

The latter question I’ve been dealing with myself for a while, because I think all of this is animal brain and often outside the reach of analysis.

“Eugene is like a dog,” a friend of mine once opined. “If you’re nice to him, he’s yours forever.” The converse is also true, and enemies live forever on lists in my head. But is it possible to cross that line?

Well, sure. Things that violate my sense of fair play? I don’t decide or choose to repulse those that partake; it just happens. Murder would seem to qualify as that exactly, but to a person, every murderer I know is aware of the (logical?) chain of events that took them from not being a murderer to being a murderer, and in only one case amongst those I know did it violate my sense of fair play.

But beyond fair play, which is like porno—hard to define, but we know it when we see it/feel it—what quality separates those who remain friends no matter what they’ve done and those who become memories?

Simple: identity.

Every bad man I knew and know could have it be said about them that they are easily understood because they are as they are. And in that way, they are truth tellers.

Then, like being shot with a diamond bullet through the forehead (apologies to John Milius), I realized: My heart hardens in the face of the teller of lies.

There are a few types of lies, though. Lies we tell to avoid punishment (these make sense to me).

Lies to make ourselves look better (these less so). Lies we tell to gain advantage (these anger me). And finally, lies to advance a shit-filled agenda (the worst). The last group plays anyone who listens as a sucker and undercuts at the very sinews of our social connections.

In the last few weeks, those of us in this community have been exposed to surprising revelations

from once-respected members within that touch on all of the above.

I’m not here to cast any stones since, well, how could I? But as a man who doesn’t beat his wife or his children, and doesn’t lie about having done so, I have to understand that the feelings I have about those who do—no matter how well I appreciated them as friends and fellow travelers—is sorely undercut by the fact that I got so much of that wrong and they’ve emerged as people I don’t know.

So, they join the panoply of other people I imagine I once knew but that don’t exist at all. People like Travis Bickle (who was really Robert De Niro acting). The mellow and avuncular Bing Crosby on film and in song, who violently abused his kids. And finally, the guy who said to me, “I stopped screaming at my kids when I saw real fear in their faces, and I decided I didn’t want them to feel about me the way I felt about my father.”

In the end, no matter the intent, that wasn’t what happened, though.

But who was it who said that?

You know, I really have no idea.

ILLUSTRATION BY ED LUCE

45 YEAR ANNIVERSARY TOUR

PERFORMS THE LIVE SCORE TO

DARIO ARGENTO’S

FOLLOWED BY A CLASSIC GOBLIN SET 10/25 KANSAS CITY MO SCREENLAND ARMOUR THEATRE SOLD OUT 11/20 NEW ORLEANS LA POOR BOYS BAR 10/26 KANSAS CITY MO SCREENLAND ARMOUR THEATRE SOLD OUT 11/21 HOUSTON TX WAREHOUSE LIVE BALLROOM 10/27 ST PAUL MN FITZGERALD THEATER 11/22 AUSTIN TX PARAMOUNT THEATRE SOLD OUT 10/28 CHICAGO IL THALIA HALL SOLD OUT 11/23 DALLAS TX TEXAS THEATRE 10/29 MADISON WI THE ORPHEUM THEATER 11/26 MESA AZ NILE THEATRE 10/30 MILWAUKEE WI THE ORIENTAL THEATRE 11/27 LOS ANGELES CA PALACE THEATRE 10/31 GRAND RAPIDS MI WEALTHY THEATRE 11/28 SANTA CRUZ CA RIO THEATRE 11/01 DETROIT MI FLAGSTAR STRAND THEATRE 11/29 SAN FRANCISCO CA CASTRO THEATRE 11/02 INDIANAPOLIS IN THE KAN-KAN BRASSERIE SOLD OUT 11/30 SACRAMENTO CA COLONIAL THEATRE NEWLY ADDED 11/03 PITTSBURGH PA CARNEGIE MUSIC HALL 12/02 PORTLAND OR HOLLYWOOD THEATRE SOLD OUT 11/04 CLEVELAND OH HEIGHTS THEATER SOLD OUT 12/03 PORTLAND OR HOLLYWOOD THEATRE SOLD OUT 11/05 NIAGARA FALLS NY RAPIDS THEATRE 12/04 VANCOUVER BC RICKSHAW THEATRE 11/06 OTTAWA ON MAYFAIR THEATRE SOLD OUT 12/05 VANCOUVER BC RICKSHAW THEATRE 11/07 MONTREAL QC LE TULIPE 11 12/06 SEATTLE WA EL CORAZON 11/08 SOMERVILLE MA SOMERVILLE THEATRE 12/09 ESTES PARK CO STANLEY HOTEL 11/09 QUEENS NY MELROSE BALLROOM 12/10 ESTES PARK CO STANLEY HOTEL 11/10 PHILADELPHIA PA PhilaMOCA SOLD OUT 12/12 WINNIPEG MB THE PARK THEATRE 11/11 PHILADELPHIA PA PhilaMOCA *MATINEE* NEWLY ADDED 12/13 WINNIPEG MB THE PARK THEATRE 11/11 PHILADELPHIA PA PhilaMOCA SOLD OUT 12/15 CHICAGO IL THALIA HALL NEWLY ADDED 11/13 NORFOLK VA THE NORVA 12/16 LITTLE ROCK AR RON ROBERTSON THEATER NEWLY ADDED 11/14 WASHINGTON DC THE HOWARD THEATRE 12/17 ST LOUIS MO RED FLAG NEWLY ADDED GET TICKETS 11/15 ASHEVILLE NC THE GREY EAGLE NEWLY ADDED 11/18 TOKYO JP CLUB CITTA

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