Decibel #220 - February 2023

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DARKTHRONE KATATONIA AHAB DØDSENGEL SWEET COBRA CASSIUS KING TITAN TO TACHYONS

FEBRUARY 2023 // No. 220

“Celestial Rot” is ALL OUT WAR’s massive eighth full length offering and contains ten tracks of pure aural devastation. ALL OUT WAR offers up their most expansive release yet while reaffirming their position as one of the most powerful bands in extreme music.

VINYL • CD • TAPE • DIGITA L

Chicago, IL’s READY FOR DEATH (featuring former and current members of Indecision, Racetraitor and Pelican) present their crushing self-titled debut. READY FOR DEATH seamlessly melds the best parts of Hardcore, Thrash, Death and Punk into ten tracks of grinding mayhem!

OUT NOW V I N YL / D I G I TA L

D E S I P H O N Green Bay, WI’s CHOKE delivers their blistering new debut EP “Desiphon”! The EP was mixed by Kurt Ballou at God City.

“Desiphon” encapsulates Death Metal and Grindcore’s greats (think Rotten Sound, Napalm Death and Pig Destroyer) while covering all new territory!

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February 2023 [R 220] decibelmagazine.com

Stomp Thing COVER STORY COVER AND CONTENTS PHOTOS BY GENE SMIRNOV

upfront 12 ahab Going deeper

22 katatonia Sadness will prevail

10 low culture Future imperfect

14 titan to tachyons The highest highs, the lowest lows

11 no corporate beer Sour patch adults

16 sweet cobra Heavy waits

24 q&a: darkthrone Village-idiot-in-training Fenriz is proud to find himself somewhere off time

8

metal muthas

features

Country roads, take her home

18 dødsengel Naturally evil 20 cassius king Money can’t buy you happiness

28 exclusive:

amorphis: the official story of finland’s greatest metal band excerpt Into hiding, indeed

reviews 28 special feature:

the top 20 most anticipated albums of 2023 We excluded your favorite band from this list, too

28 the decibel

hall of fame Done licking the wounds of their hardcore origins, Dinosaur Jr. discover that the only way forward was by looking down with shoegaze precursor You’re Living All Over Me

71 lead review German funeral doom explorers Ahab resurface after eight long years and bring with them career highlight The Coral Tombs 72 album reviews Records from bands that are STILL waiting for us to announce Metal & Beer Fest: Los Angeles 2022, including Envy, Ready for Death and Woods of Desolation 80 damage ink Sound the surrender

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. © 2023 by Red Flag Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

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February 2023 [T220]

Alex Mulcahy

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Albert Mudrian

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James Lewis

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Aaron Salsbury

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Denver, the place where my heart

should be is full, thanks to you. You turned up in such a major way for the first-ever Denver edition of Decibel’s Metal & Beer Fest in early December.

Prior to one week ago, I had never set foot in the Mile High City. But because of the friendships forged over the past decade in both Denver’s exceptional metal and beer scenes, it already feels like a second home.

So, thank you to everyone who raged with us and sold out the Summit in advance. Massive props to the bands who slayed—we’ll go into these sets in-depth in the following issue—and immense gratitude to the labels and merch companies who consistently support us every six months or so through these crazy event endeavors.

Much love to all the breweries who worked their asses off to not only get to Denver, but to brew something special for the event—that, of course, includes our longtime pals at Trve Brewing, who went above and fucking beyond to help us get everyone’s beer to the Summit. And, man, the Summit—wow, what an incredible, thoughtful team of ass-kickers over there. Without revealing too much, our previous West Coast experiences were a mixed bag—OK, the first one was a bag of shit—but the Summit is an absolute class venue. Five stars; would fest there again.

And, of course, eternal love and gratitude to Team Decibel—Aaron, Mike, James and Em—for upending their lives yet again for another Metal & Beer Fest adventure on the other side of the country. I can’t wait to do this with all of you in Philly in April, and then again in Denver in December 2023. But first, a nap. albert mudrian, Editor-in-Chief

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Online DECIBEL WEB EDITOR

Albert Mudrian

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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Emily Bellino Adrien Begrand J. Bennett Dean Brown Brent Burton 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 CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

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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.

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CROWD PHTOO BY MATT “BANANAMASHER” DARCY • PHOTO WITH J.R. HAYES BY TRAVIS STONE • PHOTO WITH ERIK RUTAN AND ALEX WEBSTER BY VINCE EDWARDS

PUBLISHER

READER OF THE

MONTH been hooked on death metal for 30 years, which is longer than I've been a dentist.

This month, Obituary are on the cover of Decibel for the first time ever! What other classic death metal bands that haven’t been given a cover story yet do you want to see on Decibel’s cover?

Obituary was the one missing on the cover among my favorite bands, as Cannibal Corpse, Napalm Death and Immolation were featured in previous issues, but I think Vader, Benediction or Asphyx would deserve a cover as well.

Susana Martínez-Millán Murcia, Spain

Tell us about your profession. Our lousy Spanish prevents us from discerning if you’re a professor, a dentist or a professor of dentistry!

I've been a dentist since 1999, but I am also a professor at the University of Murcia, teaching dentistry for the last 18 years. Now I’m teaching both Spanish and international students coming from other European countries, the Middle East, India and Taiwan.

What is the metal scene like in Murcia?

It's not massive, but there are some good bands like Iron Curtain or Homizide, and a fistful of loyal metalheads hungry for

6 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

concerts. Today, Murcia is a stop for many international metal tours, and I’m proud that I paved the way two decades ago when I started bringing death metal gigs here.

Can you tell us more about how and when you started bringing gigs to Murcia?

I started in October 2001. As I couldn’t travel to Madrid or Barcelona to see my favorite bands, I promised myself that one day those gigs would come here. So, when I started working, I saved some money, and with [Avulsed/Xtreem Music’s] Dave Rotten’s help with the booking agencies, I could go for it. I haven't discarded coming back as a promoter when my kids grow up, as I've

Today, Murcia is a stop for many international metal tours, and I’m proud that I paved the way two decades ago when I started bringing death metal gigs here.

This is our first issue of 2023. What are you looking forward to about the coming year?

Discovering good new bands, new releases like Obituary, Memoriam or Dying Fetus, and attending as many gigs as possible!

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

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

Well, here are the records that we spun most while not caring what you think of the new Metallica song.

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

This Month’s Muthas: Pam Wattie Muthas of Robin Wattie of BIG|BRAVE

Tell us a little about yourself.

My name is Pam and I am Robin’s mom. I was born in Montana, but moved to a super small town in Alberta when I was in junior high. After high school I moved to Jasper, Alberta, and I had Robin in September of 1983, where she took 29 hours to show herself to the world. We stayed in Jasper for four more years, and then moved to Montreal in 1987.

When did Robin first start to exhibit an interest in singing? Who were some of her favorite vocalists?

Robin performed in elementary school plays and choirs. (I think one of the pictures she is sending is where she just finished an elementary school play in the middle of the local mall. She cried when she got that haircut, btw.) However, it was when she performed a solo in a high school play that I really heard what she could do with her voice.

As far as her favorite vocalists when she was growing up, I remember hearing Robin singing to Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morissette, Celine Dion, No Doubt, Sheryl Crow and even the Dixie Chicks.

I always thought she would make a great country singer, but she went way, way the other way!

BIG|BRAVE’s records are fearlessly experimental. Did you have any hand in turning Robin onto obscure art, or did she discover most of her influences on her own?

Robin absolutely discovered her musical influences on her own. She has said many times that 8 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

living and working in Montreal was—and still is—a huge part of her development as a musician and an artist. She really might have ended up as a country singer if she stayed in Alberta.

BIG|BRAVE’s live performances fluctuate from intimate to cathartic. What are your impressions of Robin onstage?

I have only been to two or three Big Brave’s live performances, but my impression of Robin onstage has been mostly “How is that huge voice coming out that little girl?” and “Look, the audience is almost in a trance!” and sometimes, “Holy man, as cool as this song is, I’m pretty sure it’s never going to end.”

What’s something that fans of her music would be surprised to learn about Robin?

I am not sure if Robin’s musical fans know that she spent a lot of her time sketching and drawing when she was growing up. She also went into art programs in college and university, and she now has her own tattoo studio in Montreal.

Her favorite meal growing up was spaghetti. Even really awful diner spaghetti. She loved it. Still does. She’s a master at organizing the refrigerator on grocery day, and she loves to fill out paperwork, so she might not, you know, really be my kid. She also knits, plays chess and loves to do puzzles!

—ANDREW BONAZELLI

Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Obituary, Dying of Everything  Tribunal, The Weight of Remembrance  Royal Thunder, Crooked Doors  Gorguts, Obscura  Godthrymm, Reflections ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  Farflung, Like Drones in Honey  No Trend, Too Many Humans/Teen Love  Reagan Youth, A Collection of Pop Classics  Poison Idea, War All the Time  Off!, Free LSD ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  Obituary, Dying of Everything  SpiritWorld, Deathwestern  Eight Bells, Legacy of Ruin  Dark Meditation, Polluted Temples  Skinless, From Sacrifice to Survival ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  Houkago Grind Time, The Second Raid  Extortion, Seething  Obituary, Dying of Everything  Venomous Concept, The Good Ship Lollipop  Lamp of Murmuur, Saturnian Bloodstorm ---------------------------------Aaron Salsbury : m a r k e t i n g a n d s a l e s  Cronos Compulsion, Copulating in the Crypt  Castrator, Defiled in Oblivion  Psychosomatic, The Invisible Prison  Malignant Altar, Realms of Exquisite Morbidity  Rusk, Om Improvement

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------Alex Mulcahy : publisher

 Millencolin, Life on a Plate (red vinyl)  Millencolin, Life on a Plate (blue vinyl)  Millencolin, Life on a Plate (cassette)  Millencolin, Life on a Plate (mobile fidelity)  Millencolin, Life on a Plate (deluxe CD)

Kent Diimmel in This Moment

Tim Yeung Lone Wolf

´ davier perez

great american ghost

Richard Christy

Death - Charred Walls of the Damned

ddrumusa www.ddrum.com

Y ISEMAN

TNE

BY COUR

The Dull Passage of Time e’re now sitting at the

asshole of 2022, waiting for its last slow, sad fart to propel us into the unknown frontier of 2023 in the dull pantomime that is the aging of the world. I’ll probably post the same confetti-strewn picture of Lt. Dan from Forrest Gump looking like he just saw the anus of eternity wink at him like I do every year while everyone sets down resolutions that they’ll forget by the second week of February. If we’re being optimistic.

But the progression of time doesn’t stop (neither do such astute and deep observations, obviously), and so we’ll begin the cycle anew.

This marks the eighth year I haven’t been fired from this post, making it the longest “job” I’ve ever held down, and almost as long as my longest relationship. I assume Albert will send me a watch for such an important milestone. I want to make a reference to that watch being hidden in the only place his captors wouldn’t look (his ass), but I think a Pulp Fiction joke would really reveal my age. Plus, it’s crass and you would never catch me saying such things.

So, what’s in store for 2023? I have no fucking idea. Normally I’ve already got records I’m looking forward to, or a fest that I’ll say I’m going to, but miss—traditionally because of money or social anxiety, but now because I’m a parent and also because of money and social anxiety—but there’s nothing off the top of my head, and that’s kind of refreshing. Is it because I’m out of touch? Yes, but also because if I just let these things find their way to me rather than sitting vigilantly hitting F5 waiting for someone to tell me what to do (or to buy a new cool record I won’t care about in three 10 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

weeks), I might feel some sense of wonder at it all again. I will be 45 next year, and shit loses some of its luster after a bit, especially with everyone and their friend making a racket.

That’s not to say I’m disengaged or burnt out—far from it. But I’m now at the age where all these fucking patterns are apparent and it takes some of life’s guesswork out of the equation, which I suppose is a “perk” of getting older, but also eliminates the surprise. I’ve dipped the tip into this somewhat in the current year of our lord, 2022, by revisiting bands that meant a lot to me early on that I lost track of for whatever reason. Which means my Spotify wrap-up is going to be 50 percent Gorgoroth and Mayhem. I can’t tell if this is just what old folks do, but it’s not just the “classic” records I’m revisiting, I’m also catching up on what I missed. Am I deluding myself into thinking I’m still approaching this like I did when I was 16? Did I set myself up with this piece’s title for someone to say “The Dull Column” or whatever clever thing metal Twitter likes to say about me? Probably, yes. To all of it.

So, Happy New Year everyone, and please remember that just because the year-end lists are all hung by the chimney with care in hopes that St. Nicholas shoots his, uh, eggnog into them, blessing them with six more weeks of winter or whatever your local tradition is, doesn’t mean that records aren’t still coming out this December. Of course, there are also records that came out this year that are fucking terrific that just didn’t make any lists, sort of like the old dogs at the shelter everyone passes up that need a good home. Is there a moral here? Don’t base your taste and identity around the expectations of others? Probably. Either way, be well and we’ll start this up again in the new year.

Beer Snobs Might Be Bitter, but Fruited Sours Are a Sweet Entry Point for New Drinkers

WE

fight our evolutionary “sweet is good, bitterness means this food will kill us” response and train our palates to tolerate, then like, then love dry pilsners and hoppy IPAs. So, these styles are not always the most welcoming for people looking to get into craft beer. Fruited sours, however, can mimic the flavor profiles of anything from wine and cocktails to ice cream and candy, extending a much more appealing introduction. Often marketed with cartoonlike can art and labels boasting “smoothie” this and “slushie” that, fruited sours get some hardened beer snobs grumbling how they’re not “real beer.” But increasingly, even longtime beer connoisseurs are embracing the undeniable delight of big, bold fruit flavors and appreciating when brewers achieve a good balance between tartness, acidity and sweetness.

Perhaps that’s why the fruited sour category is performing better than craft beer as a whole, according to Bryan Roth, analyst for Feel Goods Company and news editor for Good Beer Hunting. Chain retail sales for 2020 were $69 million and reached $77 million in 2021. When Roth spoke to Decibel in November 2022, sales were at $66 million,

 Not all black and white Despite their colorful exterior, fruited sours like Drekker’s Frosé Braaaaaaaains Double Fruit Smoothie Sour pack just as much of a punch as your grandpappy’s hooch

so a dip from 2021, but on track to beat 2020.

Fruited sours were the fourth most-consumed style with over three million check-ins on Untappd in 2021, beer writer Ruvani de Silva reports in an October 2022 piece for The Washington Post. De Silva has covered the style’s growth for a few years now, and says her WaPo piece reflects how much it’s really exploded and become widely accessible this year, especially with a staggering number of collaborations.

“Almost everyone who has made fruited sours has worked with other breweries who make fruited sours,” she says. “It’s really sort of its own community.” Speaking of community, at the heart of de Silva’s story is how fruited sours appeal to people who previously felt uninterested in beer with an emphasis on bitter hops or crisp lagers. Breweries like TALEA Beer Co. in Brooklyn entice wine and cocktail fans with brilliantly hued, lushly fruity sours in sophisticated glassware, while Fargo, ND’s Drekker Brewing Co. gets playful with graphic novel-esque cans featuring the likes of Slang Du Jour—Raspberry Cheesecake, with raspberries, granola crust, lactose, vanilla and cream cheese. Suddenly, if you like dessert, you probably like craft beer.

“I think it’s really great that, as an industry, we are now open to being this creative,

ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL WOHLBERG

and it opens us up to a broad audience, and to people who might have been put off by beer,” de Silva says. “Especially with taproom culture growing the way it is, people want to go out with friends and maybe not everyone likes beer—this will be something everybody likes. And it’s just fun, even if you don’t drink them all the time, seeing a flavor you’ve never had before.” There’s plenty for a beer geek to feast on, too, de Silva notes, with the nuances of how sours are made, from traditional mixed-culture methods with wild yeasts to the newer process of adding controlled amounts of Lactobacillus to kettle sours.

With those options, as well as the options to add adjuncts like lactose, the sky’s the limit for flavors, and it’s interesting to see what different breweries do with that, reasons Roth. There are myriad results from one accessible base. “Sours have gained traction because it’s an easily distinguishable flavor concept,” he explains. “People know what sour means, so that gives them an entry point where they know they’ll enjoy it. If I’m a customer and know I like sour, all of a sudden there’s this menagerie of flavored sour drinks with all kinds of fruit, maybe fashioned after ice cream… there’s probably going to be something out there for me.”

DECIBEL : FEBRUA RY 2 0 2 3 : 11

AHAB

AHAB

German aquanauts conjure Captain Nemo with first new doom epic in eight years

B

ack in 2006, funeral doom quartet Ahab released their Moby Dick concept album The Call of the Wretched Sea. Their name and debut record hinted at ocean-bound obsession.

But their commitment to the theme has now endured for almost two decades. After three more LPs focused on literature from the murky depths, the band’s last album of new music was in 2015. Their longest duration between records will soon cease, as Ahab resurface in the new year with The Coral Tombs. ¶ Based on Jules Verne’s adventure novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Coral Tombs is a stunning doom epic. Building on the melodic components of The Boats of the Glen Carrig, the record is Ahab’s most diversely textured album yet. Daniel Droste’s monstrous bellow remains, but his clean vocals soar throughout.

The frontman is quick to profess he’s not a trained vocalist. But his performance here demonstrates confidence—despite his uncertainties in the studio. ¶ “I’m actually very critical about everything that I contribute to Ahab musically,” Droste admits.

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“We arrange most of the songs together and work on the material until everyone is 100 percent satisfied with the result. But as soon as we enter a studio, I always start to question if the songs are on the same level as their predecessors. As soon as the guitars are recorded, my doubts are blown away. But with the vocals it’s even worse.”

The seven-track album sails across the hour mark with assured gravitas. The album relishes moods; “The Sea as a Desert” sounds as spare and lonely as the lightless ocean floor. But the mild tides are just precursors of the coming storm.

The album opens with uncharacteristic blast beats. Later, “Colossus of the Liquid Graves” contends with some of their heaviest material.

Ahab returned to record with Jens Siefert, who again achieves heaviness with great depth.

“We agreed that we want to have a bit more dirt in the guitar sound on this record this time,” Droste

explains. “After we finished our first guitar takes in the studio, we were already very happy about the first tracks only recorded with our main amps. Nevertheless, I insisted on comparing that to double-tracked guitars, which led to an extensive amp shootout… and finally ended in triple-tracked guitars.”

Armed with their enormous tone, the band prepares to share new music while fielding old questions.

Despite Ahab’s longstanding lyrical focus, the members are still frequently asked how four metalheads hundreds of kilometers from the coast in south Germany became so infatuated with the ocean.

“Well, it is the distance; it’s just as easy as that,” Droste answers.

“The fact that you’re always longing for things you don’t have makes it something special. That whole topic has not lost any of its attraction for me. I still feel deeply inspired by the sea and its mysterious depths.”

—SEAN FRASIER

TITAN TO TACHYONS

Sally Gates’ star-studded avant jazz-noise crew delivers noises big and small

M

ost instrumental bands start life with a jam session, or at least an instrument. But Titan to Tachyons, an “experimental jazz-metal” outfit from New York City, began with nothing more than words. “On a trip home to New Zealand, I felt I needed a break from my guitar and started writing lyrics and general conceptual ideas,” guitarist and bandleader Sally Gates tells Decibel. “The lyrics never got used, but they helped creatively kick-start things.” ¶ Gates, an alumna of psychedelic death metal act Orbweaver, finally reembraced her instrument not long after her lyric-writing exercise.

PRS in hand, Gates started demoing the genre-blurring material that would yield the 2019 live debut of Titan to Tachyons’ predecessor, the Sally Gates Trio. That metallic improv ensemble featured the formidable rhythm section of Imperial Triumphant drummer Kenny Grohowski and Mr. Bungle bassist Trevor Dunn.

“I kept writing with Kenny,” Gates explains, “but unfortunately Trevor’s busy schedule meant we had to find someone else to play bass.” ¶ That someone else turned out to be Cleric and Simulacrum’s Matt Hollenberg, a jazz-fluent metal guitarist who just happened to have a six-string Fender Bass VI sitting around.

14 : FEBRUA RY 202 3 : DECIBEL

“I met Matt Hollenberg around the same time, and we’d jammed together on guitars a few times,” Gates says. “When I told him we were looking for a bass player, he promptly volunteered to play Bass VI with us.”

Though he was playing with the likes of Melvins’ King Buzzo and John Zorn, in seemingly a gazillion of the legendary avant-everything composer’s projects, Dunn couldn’t quite quit Titan to Tachyons. “When they were recording the first TTT record, [Gates] asked me to sit in on one of the more improvisatory songs,” Dunn offers. “And if I’m not mistaken, it was by Zorn’s prompt that I was asked to play on the entire Tzadik [label] release.”

Vonals, the Tzadik-released second and latest Titan to Tachyons album, features Dunn’s bass rumble throughout. “Having a third voicing allows the guitar and basses to flow and trade off between rhythmic, melodic and soloist roles,” Gates says. “We’re able to add an extra layer of counterpoint and

polyrhythms within the material, which really allowed the compositions to develop and flourish.”

Hollenberg agrees: “When the harmonics and polyrhythms are sorted out in a symmetrical, pleasing way, it’s viscerally satisfying, because the two basses create a harmony that you can feel in your whole body.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, all the low frequencies, Gates is still the fleet-fingered center of attention. Vonals vacillates between her quirky Beefheart riffs and what Dunn calls her “improvised solos… over specific forms.” Add to that the occasional “disintegration section,” and you’ve got a dynamic and disorienting mix that resonates with the definition of the album’s title.

“The word means ‘line’ or ‘to draw/pull’ in Hungarian,” Gates explains. “The image of drawing a line and turning a vague sketch into a complete, colorful image is similar to how I think about building songs.” —BRENT BURTON

PHOTO BY NAEEMAH Z. MADDOX

TITAN TO TACHYONS

SWEET COBRA

Three’s always company for returning Midwest post-noise rock trio

J

ason gagovski can’t believe how long it’s been. ¶ “I saw a headline that said, ‘Sweet Cobra’s first record in seven years,’ and thought, ‘Holy shit, that sounds crazy.’” ¶ The drummer’s surprise is not surprising. Not only has the post-hardcore power trio been touring and putting out smaller releases since their previous LP, Earth, in 2015, but their latest has been done for about three years now. ¶ “We started shopping it to labels in February of 2020,” Gagovski says, and we all know what happened to any long-term plans made in February of 2020. So, the Midwesterners’ fifth studio album, Threes, had to sit on the shelf for a while. But since no one knew that global shitstorm was coming, the band’s writing and recording was protracted during the old normal. ¶ “People are gonna think we fucked with this forever, but we would really just track and leave it alone,” Gagovski says. “We would go into a studio, jam for half a day, then in the early evening start recording this stuff.

16 : FEBRUA RY 202 3 : DECIBEL

Each song we would work on, then add things in later. Maybe we’d get one or two drum captures with the bass or just a little bit of stuff, like vocals on a song or piano. But we weren’t going crazy about the song structures.

The idea was to not overbake or overanalyze them.”

Gagovski estimates it was about five different sessions in two studios across two and a half years to make the record, without too much forethought or practice or worrying about if a song was played perfectly. And putting aside release date issues, this method created what is likely the band’s most inspired and impactful release.

“We know we’re supposed to be a heavy band,” he says. “But I think once we did Earth, we decided we were gonna be the kind of band we wanted to be.”

That means they’ve put aside most of their sludgy bombast in favor of writing a slew of indie noise rock tunes that are mercilessly catchy, with songs like “Coats,” “Cave” and “Alive on Arrival” outfitted with hooks that are nearly impossible to shake out of your skull. And now that Threes is out, and Sweet Cobra prepare for some touring and even newer music, there’s no looking back.

“You’re at practice, fucking around with your friends, you don’t care what anybody else thinks,” Gagovski explains. “We don’t have anything to prove. The reason why I love mid-to-late-’90s hardcore is because there were a lot of bands moving the needle. It was important to me because it took that old-school sound and broke it apart. The only way to keep doing this is to move it forward.” —SHANE MEHLING

PHOTO BY ERICA TORELLI

SWEET COBRA

DØDSENGEL

Norwegian duo returns with latest hellish, psychedelic black metal mindfuck

H

owever evil or demonic Norwegian black metal duo Dødsengel’s music might be, it comes from a very human place. “It’s a labor of love,” says multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Kark. “We do what feels right and natural to us.” ¶ On new album Bab Al On, Dødsengel continue their long streak of high-concept, demonic black metal. Often pairing their works with books or lengthy statements, Karl and drummer Malach Adonai feel that what they do is necessary to fulfill black metal’s extravagance, going so far as to diminish their works as something standard. ¶ “I would not call [our work] ‘going the extra mile’ at all,” explains Kark. “I see it more as simply making a complete and cohesive piece of art, in every aspect. Anyone taking their craft seriously should go ballsdeep in every aspect of their art. Just the tip is not enough.” ¶ Crass. Human. Maybe, not the words of a fanatic demonologist, but still, someone who cares very deeply about their art.

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When asked about the mechanics of the band’s conceptual side, Malach Adonai chimes in: “I find that it arises spontaneously. We usually have long periods of time where we both work on different things and go through different life experiences.

When we meet up, we go through the texts, riffs and melodies, and discuss the theme that arises that we feel lies at the bottom of what we have gone through and expressed through our creative work. Often, this is perceived through the lens of our chosen spiritual tradition, Thelema.

“That becomes the foundation,” he continues, “and everything else follows along naturally. I have tried ‘forcing’ a concept or a theme before and find that it feels a lot less fulfilling and rewarding to express.”

Often finding themselves compared to black metal’s more orthodox wave, Dødsengel recognize that their psychedelic, hellish and even progressive art goes far beyond

a simple tag. “We do what we do regardless of what people may call it,” Kark shrugs. “To define it would be to limit it.”

Even so, Kark and Malach Adonai find themselves entranced by and embedded in the black metal genre structure. To Kark, black metal goes beyond simple musical categorization. “Black metal,” he says, “is to me not so much simply a musical genre, but a name for total creative, emotional and spiritual freedom.”

To Malach Adonai, black metal teeters on a delicate, but powerful precipice. “I find that black metal is defined by the twin heads of tradition and transgression,” he explains. “There are strong traditional roots looking back to the foundation of the genre through the first two waves, and there is room for a sense of rebellion and individualism. These contrasting forces are present at the personal level, too.” —JON ROSENTHAL

PHOTO BY NICOLAI KARLSEN

DØDSENGEL

CASSIUS KING

CASSIUS KING

Prolific scene vet teams with ex-Watchtower vocalist, scratches heavy doom itch

DAN

lorenzo has barely declared this his favorite magazine before promoting his partnership with Type O Negative/Danzig drummer Johnny Kelly, Patriarchs in Black, whose 2022 full-length, Reach for the Scars, twists some definite cain. Later, deep into an Aerosmith disambiguation, the guitarist proclaims his collaboration with Nathan Opposition, doom benders Vessel of Light, the “coolest band in the history of music.” Any bandwidth for Cassius King? ¶ “I wrote all the music for Vessel of Light’s Last Ride and the first Cassius King album simultaneously,” emails Jersey’s one-man metal tradition. “Then last winter I wrote all the music for the new Cassius King album and the Patriarchs in Black album simultaneously.” ¶ “Pleasingly thick, Field Trip commandeers an O.G. bus to the Dio museum,” high-fived dB last year in considering Cassius King’s heavenand-hellish debut, and Dread the Dawn follows suit. Snarled

by Watchtower/Dangerous Toys hellion Jason McMaster— 20 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

while former Overkill stickman Ron Lipnicki and bassist Jimmy Schulman (Hades) stoke the engine room alongside Lorenzo’s ferocious onslaught—the sophomore LP spins like vintage KISS. “Doomsday Hand” and the title track elongate into darker territory.

“I remember Dee Snider once saying he could no longer write angry music once he was successful, and I can’t relate,” offers Lorenzo, powerthrash host of Hades. “When I was 21 and living in a depressing basement apartment with no money, I wrote angry music. Now I eat like a king and I still write angry music.”

Hades once opened for Twisted Sister. “Twice,” corrects Lorenzo.

“The ‘old’ version of Hades with Paul Smith on vocals came up in the scene as a cover band. I got us a gig in 1982 opening for Twisted at a place called the Soap Factory in Jersey. I knew they had just sacked their drummer.

“I walked into the club and started talking with one of the roadies. I told him I hoped Twisted didn’t play ‘Leader of the Pack,’ because it was lame. I asked the roadie, ‘Do you think they’re going to keep their new drummer?’ He said, ‘I hope so.’ I asked, ‘What do you care?’ He replied, ‘I’m A.J. Pero, the new drummer.’

“We played our set. Twisted comes out roaring, ‘What You Don’t Know (Sure Can Hurt You),’ etc. Tremendous show. Dee goes into one of his raps. I’m in the audience and he asks the light man to put the spotlight on the Hades guitarist… me!

“Dee says, ‘This next song goes out to the guitarist from Hades because I know how much he likes our cover of ‘Leader of the Pack.’ I smiled and nodded.

“We didn’t play with TS again until 2010.” —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

SWEDISH EMO METAL MASTERS

K ATATONIA

BRAVELY MURDER THE GREAT COVID DISTANCE STO RY BY SA R A H K I T T E R I N G H A M P H O T O B Y M AT H I A S B L O M

FE DEL CIBEL 22 : A PB RR I LU 2A0R2Y1 2: 0D2E3 C:I B

F

ollowing three years of COVID lockdowns, cancellations and end- the album a couple of times. It’s always nice to

less travel chaos, Swedish gothic rockers Katatonia are eager to do anything other than stay home or talk about the pandemic. ¶ Instead, their focus is solely on Katatonia’s newest studio album, the lush and moody Sky Void of Stars. It’s their 12th LP and closely follows the formula heard on 2020’s City Burials. In the three decades since their formation, Katatonia have morphed considerably. What was once a hypnotic death/doom juggernaut (whose existence arguably helped trigger depressive black metal) is now a gothic, gloomy progressive post metal band with clean vocals and ample keyboards; they’re closer in spirit and vibe to Sisters of Mercy. The gradual shift has been ushered in by vocalist Jonas Renkse, who has increasingly dictated the band’s creative direction. ¶ “I have continuously been writing more and more of the music for Katatonia,” he says cagily, days after embarking on a comprehensive North American tour. “It’s not been a deliberate decision at all, but I’ve been on a creative roll the last few years. I don’t really think about it, though, I’m always pretty caught up in the process, and that’s what counts when I’m in the ‘bubble,’ so to speak.”

The evening that Renkse responds to Decibel’s questions, he’s milling about in New York with his band, hoping that Katatonia’s upcoming Canadian, European and South American jaunts will be uninterrupted by you-know-what. He’s providing little insight into the band given his currently packed schedule, but all told, despite the disinterest in pandemic talk, it's undeniable that COVID has had a strong impact on the outfit he’s helmed since 1991.

“I think I’ve been dealing with these kinds of topics for a number of years now,” sighs Renkse, conceding, “The pandemic put it more in the spotlight.”

Accordingly, there’s a dark, defeated poeticism flowing throughout Sky Void of Stars, whose lyrics address isolation, personal freedom, letting go and loss. From a musical perspective, it’s congruent: Katatonia’s musical evolution seems comparable to their friends in Opeth, reflecting a band that favors natural exploration and diversity as it’s aged. They are now a far cry from the Katatonia of 1991, when Renkse and fellow multi-instrumentalist Anders Nyström spent long hours hanging out in the graveyards and chapels of the “Woodland Cemetery” known as Skogskyrkogården, adorned in full early-’90s black metal attire.

“I think Skogskyrkogården is still an important place. I go there a couple of times a year, but maybe skipping the corpsepaint these days,” says Renkse cheekily. Of course, he’s now a family man and career musician in his late 40s.

Priorities have changed, even if not all of his music-writing traditions have been sacrificed… including the tradition of getting feedback prior to release from old friend and former Bloodbath bandmate Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth.

“I was at his place with some other friends,” Renkse offers. “We had a few drinks and played

bounce a little bit, to hear the opinions from someone outside of the band. I think he was pretty happy with how the album sounds.”

As for Katatonia’s musical evolution, Renkse is resolute: “We have kind of carved out a style that we are very happy with, and we still feel excited about it; there’s more to explore in there, too, which is inspiring. Plus, it didn’t happen overnight either; it’s just been a very natural progression, step by step.”

Even in 1991, Katatonia’s young members were binging on bands like the Cure and Fields of the Nephilim, unaware of how deeply that sound would influence their own until hindsight made it obvious. Indeed, their renowned 1993 debut

I think Skogskyrkogården [cemetery] is still an important place.

I go there a couple of times a year,

BUT MAYBE SKIPPING THE CORPSEPAINT THESE DAYS. JONAS RENKSE Dance of December Souls is deeply infused with that tortured, multi-layered guitar. The howling, crusty, death/doom/black exterior—which evidently helped destroy Renkse’s lower registers—points to other, more obvious influences, of a Peaceville Three variety. Think Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride and Anathema, all of whom preceded Katatonia by only a handful of years.

Given that Katatonia’s style has changed as the years have passed, it’s a fitting cherry on top that the band has finally left the label that had both them and the Three on their roster. Instead, Katatonia are now signed to Napalm.

“We’d been with Peaceville since ’98, and now that our contract with them expired, we thought it would be nice to try out something new,” says Renkse. “I believe Napalm has the right muscles to make us reach out with our music even more, so that’s what I hope for.”

DECIB DEL C I:BFEELB:RAUPARRI L Y 2023 1 : 23

interview by

QA j. bennett

WI T H

Norway’s living legend discusses DARKTHRONE’s 20th album and the evils of fireworks and metronomes

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H

ellooooo America!” That’s the greeting we get from the one and it out for decades and can then return to. And this

only Fenriz, drummer and co-vocalist of underground metal icons Darkthrone. In true Fenriz fashion, he’s quick to point out that this salutation is a reference to Def Leppard’s 1980 single of the same name. Our man is comfortably nestled in his hometown of Kolbotn, Norway, and ready to discuss Darkthrone’s 20th album (!), Astral Fortress, his latest collaboration with guitarist/vocalist and musical life partner Ted “Nocturno Culto” Skjellum. ¶ “We’ve had a continuation of a more internal and introspective style since the creation of Arctic Thunder in 2015,” Fenriz explains. “I have gotten riffs popping into my head real easily since then, so for me our writing process has been ongoing since then. I have tons of material and it just keeps piling on, so for me Astral Fortress could’ve been recorded with [2021’s] Eternal Hails…… session. But now I realize it was a good idea to wait a few months until going into the studio again to make Astral Fortress.” ¶ We should mention that Fenriz is telling us all this via email, which is the only way he rolls these days. “I need to settle down a lot more so I don’t get burnt out again like in 1996,” he says. “A lot of my life has been adjusted to that, which also includes no phoner interviews. SORRY BENNETT! I need a lot of quiet time and alone time these days.” As such, we’ve edited some of his responses for space and clarity. But rest assured, this interview is—as always—pure, unfiltered Fenriz.

Releasing a 20th album is a major milestone.

Does it feel that way to you?

Not at all. I am thinking about the next album.

Twentieth album is another notch in the belt, but let’s not forget that Loudness has done about 35 albums now, hehehe! I could easily record all the time now—it’s all the things around the albums that drain me of energy and also tactics.

Who wants a long-career band to release two albums a year, right?

Physical copies of Astral Fortress bear the slogan “No metronome since 1987.” Why was this important to include?

Ask Ted, but I stand behind it 100 percent. I think one of the reasons people still care (seventh most reviewed band on Metal Archives) is that we decide to keep mistakes and thus very much enhance that there is a strong feeling of ACTUAL PERSONS playing the material. We are not whittling away. We want to rock instead. In the age of social media pressure, perhaps our “good enough, not perfect,” or actually, “we’d rather keep a first take that’s full of soul, but with a couple of mistakes than a third take, which is perfect, but safe and boring” suits the general public more these days.

Now, we’ve done exactly that since the first [pre-Darkthrone band] Black Death demo in spring 1987, but it seems some people appreciate it more now, perhaps. In the spirit of Paul Baloff, I think it’s better this way. So, we don’t play with clicks or metronome, and never PHOTO BY JØRN STEEN

even thought of doing so. It is a typical Fenriz statement, but this was Ted’s idea through and through, and really he wanted it BIG on the cover. In fact, we should have had that statement all along—it’s a miracle why we don’t have it until now. For the trained ear, of course, it has been apparent all along that we don’t use metronome, haha.

toolbox function is a strength in the Darkthrone entity. I think Ted prefers the Mellotron with one finger, and I can sit with any cheap old portable synth and look for sounds and know what effect to enhance with, and then make chords that fit.

They are sprinklings and mood enhancers.

Do you feel that the current era of Darkthrone’s music began with 2013’s The Underground Resistance, or did it begin later/earlier?

That’s a link album, but really the more introspective style began with [2016’s] Arctic Thunder.

I got that idea partly from hearing the Swedish band Anguish. I also like the USA punk band Anguish, to make that clear.

The Cult Is Alive seems like a major turning point for Darkthrone in terms of both sound and attitude. How do you view that record in terms of the band’s overall path?

Good point, Bennett! I hear people saying that, and it was a major change in that we bought [recording studio] Necrohell 2 and started again to record ourselves, which we hadn’t done for 10 years. Also, in the fact that we went freestyle, meaning we could draw on all our past styles and then some. But since the studio then was brand new and we didn’t know exactly how to control it, the result sounds really fresh. People seem to know just that part, but also we had signed to Peaceville again. Another fresh start for us!

Synthesizers have emerged as a nice addition to Darkthrone’s music lately. What led you down this path, and what is your attitude toward the instrument in general?

When you started Darkthrone in the ’80s, did you always have the plan to slowly change styles over the years? For example, did you see the possibility of putting out an album like The Cult Is Alive or Arctic Thunder way back then? Or was your focus much narrower?

I did two whole synth albums in the ’70s style with my Neptune Towers project back in the early ’90s, and also had synths on Isengard at the time, and also the synths on Soulside Journey back in September 1990. I think Ted also dabbled in some synths here and there on a couple of songs in [the] late ’00s. Ted and me are fans of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream and whatnot since the late ’80s, so that’s why we were not opposed to synths. In metal, I struggle with fast synth lines, but when you keep them slow, it’s OK and I was also, for instance, never one to dislike Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time album. In fact, it’s in my top three Maiden albums.

Synths were something we had used, but was difficult for us to incorporate when we recorded ourselves in 2005-2019. But now we are here, and it works well. It’s another example of something we had in our early days more and have in our toolbox—like chugging guitars—and then leave

I love this question, but it is so hard to answer seeing as things change so much over many decades, but: The focus is always USUALLY in the moment. We all know how important it is to live in the moment. No matter how much material I currently have, I usually want to go into the studio with fresh material, so chances are I am scrapping 90 percent and making something new before going in to record. This has, over 35 years, not always been the same of course, but really, as a ground rule it seems to be rather consistent.

I think 99 percent of long-career bands you ask will give you the answer that they were focused on the moment and had little idea on where they would end up, but for me personally, it is very nice to have made a song like “The Sea Beneath the Seas of the Sea” and it turns out exactly like what I pictured Darkthrone would be in the beginning, AND that it happened by some kind of coincidence. YAY! DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2023 : 25

It takes a village......  Fenriz (l) and Nocturno Culto know the perfect is the enemy of the good

In metal, I struggle with fast synth lines, but when you keep them slow it’s OK, and I was also, for instance, never one to dislike Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time album.

In fact, it’s in my top three Maiden albums.

The general idea was to have a snippet for Kolbotn, our hometown, and also the idea of the weird tracks “Danse Macabre” and “Tears in a Prophet’s Dream” by Celtic Frost in ’84 and ’85, or “Weird (Manheim)” by Mayhem in ’87. But Kolbotn IS to the west of the vast forest area called ØSTMARKA. The bedrock is over 100 million years old, with over 250 lakes and around 250 square kilometers, and then in addition to that, the SØRMARKA areas, which is directly into Kolbotn. I have been seeing many games of the top soccer team in the women’s series Kolbotn, but I couldn’t get to grips with making a rock anthem for them. It would be too cheesy, although I played with the idea. That was years ago, but when I finally decided to include this eerie intermission on our album [...] it was the perfect moment to counterstrike my own rather conventional idea of making a song for the football team by instead naming this weird track “Kolbotn, West of the Vast Forests.” Which is now the furthest thing from a homeplace anthem imaginable.

You’ve said that “The Sea Beneath the Seas of the Sea” is what you pictured your metal to sound like when you first started writing in the ’80s. How do you feel you’ve accomplished your vision on this song? Are there any other Darkthrone songs that you feel come close to accomplishing that same early vision (or some version of it)?

Not really. Then I’m sure it would have struck 26 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

me and you’d see this kind of statement before. I got a question on my Patreon podcast a couple of days ago from someone that had the “Day of the Dead” as their fave Darkthrone song, and could I show the lyrics for it? The lyrics were intentionally lost, I guess, but it made me sit down with the song and try to figure out what I hastily sung back then on the Land of Frost demo—while playing drums, no less. And going through the song like that made me realize EVEN more that I was right about the “Seas” song conclusion. What I could hear was, albeit with a lack of talent, a mix of basic slow ’83-’84 Metallica, ancient Iron Maiden, some sad-noted fast riff (that could have been predecessor to the Transilvanian Hunger style, but that’s another story) and then two slow Celtic Frost riffs (even a HEEEY), and then definite slow Metallica harmony part like Ride the Lightning or Master of Puppets era. It’s very ME, and to me it’s the same way of thinking in the “Day of the Dead” and “The Sea Beneath the Seas of the Sea,” although ancient Iron Maiden may have been interchanged with Manilla Road and some inclusion of Uriah Heep.

Why did you decide to continue the “Eon” saga from 1991’s Soulside Journey on Astral Fortress?

When can we expect “Eon 3” and “Eon 4”?

Because having a follow-up like that is something that appeals to me, ever since I realized [Iron Maiden’s] “22 Acacia Avenue” was a follow-up to “Charlotte the Harlot,” I guess. But of course, in my own insane way, I wait 32 years to do it (“Eon” was made in late ’88 or January ’89, I think), and on top of that, it has lyrics and is

not an instrumental. It started with me writing a whole piece (right after having recorded Eternal Hails) in a way that was very unusual to me. It was too long for a lyric, and it was also, in a repetitive way, this poem that would not be suitable for various song titles. It was interconnected, BUT it could be split up into three parts. So, “Eon 3” and “Eon 4” are already there in words, and they will pop up whenever.

What song it will land on is, as usual, up to Ted in the studio. We seldom have plans like that.

We had plans for album covers and titles for Under a Funeral Moon and Transilvanian Hunger, but not for what would be the actual music for those albums. Apart from that, there has been extremely little planning. Let’s hope we can do “Eon 3” and “4” before I croak.

In a recent interview, Ted said that if he could delete two inventions, they would be the internet and airplanes. Which inventions would you delete?

Airplanes and fireworks, maybe. We both hate fireworks—it is not right how they affect animals. I also struggle with the “first impression” pattern of the brain. I think it is a fluke, but let’s say the latter is not an invention. Most things have pros and cons.

When do you think you’ll retire from the post office?

Why do you think the expression “going postal” exists? BECAUSE THE MAIL NEVER ENDS. What do I plan on doing when retiring? BECOMING VILLAGE IDIOT.

PHOTO BY JØRN STEEN

Why did you want to write the hometown song “Kolbotn, West of the Vast Forests”? Have hometown songs always appealed to you?

DIRECTOR’S CUTS 02/24/2023

Read how

sent a failed video into hiding for over a decade in a book excerpt from

AMORPHIS: THE OFFICIAL STORY of FINLAND’S GREATEST METAL BAND

recently announced the publication of Amorphis: The Official Story

of Finland’s Greatest Metal Band, and now Decibel is proud to share the first excerpt from this limited edition, 376-page hardcover book authored by longtime Finnish journalist Markus Laakso.

The following passage takes readers back to 1993, shortly after the completion of Amorphis’ legendary, Decibel Hall of Fameinducted sophomore LP, Tales from the Thousand Lakes.

28 : FEBRUARY 2022 3 : DECIBEL

CHAPTER 10: MYSTIC MUSIC VIDEO SESSIONS IN GERMANY

W

hen Amorphis finished The

Karelian Isthmus the band members were happy that their old songs were finally available to hear, instead of gathering dust on rehersal tapes. Their artistic image, however, still hadn’t fully developed into a distinctive one. The starting point for Tales from the Thousand Lakes was completely different. Everything felt fresh because the songs now represented exactly what the members wanted. After all, they were fans of prog and folk music yet with their roots in death metal. The album was an extension of their personalities. And most importantly: their new melody-rich style was born naturally, without forcing anything or anyone. It felt fabulous.

It felt right.

“I can still remember the feeling when I came home from Sweden with that cassette,” says guitarist/vocalist Tomi “Koippari” Koivusaari. “A few friends came to visit, some of whom are still tagging along as our merch people. We had a few beers and played the tape. Oh, man, it sounded good. I was pretty stoked.”

“I felt confident about Tales,” describes bassist Olli-Pekka “Oppu” Laine. “We knew we had made a damn good record. I was really digging it myself when I listened to it. Koippari and I might call each other in the middle of the night, saying ‘goddamn, this album is great—I just

listened to it again!’ So, yes, we were sincerely proud of it. It was just the kind of music what we wanted to make and listen to ourselves.”

Relapse, too, sensed the album’s potential and wanted to invest in marketing it properly. The label simultaneously began pressuring Amorphis into signing a new record deal that would annul the previous three-album deal they had. The new deal consisted of Tales from the Thousand Lakes as well as a label option for four full-length albums after that. The 18-page stack of papers was tedious to read and full of legalese. It came along with a five-page publishing contract that would take half of the songwriters’ royalties. Because publishing rights couldn’t be given up freely according to U.S. law, the label asked for one U.S. dollar as their price.

“Relapse began blackmailing us after they got the Tales master in their hands,” Oppu reflects.

“They said that the album won’t be available in stores until we have signed the papers. I guess they thought the first deal was too generous.”

Although the band only wanted to get their album out and wasn’t interested in the business side of things, they didn’t agree to sign the deal— that felt too reckless. Instead, they asked for professional advice first. However, for a Finnish artist to have a record deal with an American record company was such a rarity that there really weren’t many specialists available in Finland.

“There was one place in Helsinki where we could have had the deal papers translated,” says Koivusaari,” but it would have cost 20,000 Finnish marks [approximately $3,500]. We didn’t go with that. Out of the kindness of their hearts, Kari Hynninen and the then-chairman of the Finnish performance rights organization Teosto, Otto Donner, checked the papers out and pointed out a few parts that ought to be changed. No one knew anything about Seppo Vesterinen [manager of e.g. Hanoi Rocks and HIM] at the time. He had vanished to be a gardener somewhere.”

Despite fax machines, communicating across continents was slow, so Amorphis managed to defer signing the deal for a good while. Relapse in turn wasn’t in a hurry to release the album: the record was finished in September 1993, and it came out nearly a year later, July 12, 1994. The album was leaked to the tape trading network several months before its official release date.

It disappeared from a party held at the vegetable factory rehearsal space, and soon made its way into the hands of the scene’s most active participants. The fidelity of the cassette copy wasn’t on par with CD quality, so the underground still eagerly awaited the album. In the band’s opinion, the leak was actually more beneficial than detrimental.

Before Tales made its way to store shelves, Relapse released—without asking the band’s DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2023 : 29

CHAPTER 10: MYSTIC MUSIC VIDEO SESSIONS IN GERMANY Am I evil?  Amorphis, already straying from their death metal image, circa 1994.

permission—the songs recorded in 1991 for the Incantation split as an EP called Privilege of Evil, released on December 5, 1993. This angered the musicians because some fans bought this mini album thinking it was as a brand new recording.

Artistically, the band was headed in the opposite direction away from brutal death metal. The cover art irritated them, too. The black and white piece was a more stylized version of the “sausage seller picture” from their Disment of Soul demo.

“The EP was released at a ridiculous time and with no mention that it was already old,” Koivusaari says resentfully. “It was a totally senseless thing to do. Every one of us was already digging a totally different kind of music, and I was in the middle of some weird hippie phase.

Even at gigs I was wearing a pair of orange, bootcut velvet pants, a checkered shirt hanging open with a Doors T-shirt underneath it.”

While the band’s music developed into a more folk-influenced, melodic, and progressive direction, Privilege of Evil was even more raw than The Karelian Isthmus in terms of playing, production, and arrangements. It represented all the elements that the band wanted to bury. To top it all off, guitarist Esa Holopainen’s parents’ postal address was printed on the back cover. As a result, Amorphis fans from Germany started appearing at their door in the hopes of getting an autograph, a photo together, or a chance to 30 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

chat with the artists. Esa already moved into his own place, which made the situation even more awkward for all parties.

The relationship between the band and their label was further strained by how, due to their new deal, Amorphis gave Relapse decision-making authority regarding the album’s song order and final track selection. Relapse then decided to leave three songs off Tales from the Thousand Lakes, to arrange the songs in a completely different order than what the band had planned, and to release the discarded songs later as the EP Black Winter Day. In addition to its title track, the EP consisted of an instrumental called “Folk of the North,” which lasted one and half minutes; “Moon and Sun,” featuring some hues from The Karelian Isthmus; and “Moon and Sun Part II: North’s Son,” which delivered plenty of melodies, each one catchier than the last.

After hearing Tales, Nuclear Blast began to show greater interest in Amorphis. At the time of The Karelian Isthmus, Relapse had a twoway distribution and licensing deal with the German company, which meant that Nuclear Blast released all Relapse albums in Europe and Relapse released all “Nuke” albums in North America. After this, Amorphis was mainly in contact with Nuclear Blast—especially since the messages to and from Relapse turned quite pointed. Thanks to their growing relationship

with Nuclear Blast, the band’s media attention and popularity quickly reached a new level.

Nuclear Blast flew Amorphis to Germany for a weekend to shoot two music videos prior to the album’s release. The label hired Matt Vein as the director, and he showed up at the airport to pick up the musicians who enjoyed the free inflight alcohol. When the director began sharing his visions about the plot for “Black Winter Day,” the musicians fell silent.

“The script of the video was that a little girl goes to the dentist and falls into a trance in the dentist’s chair,” laughs Holopainen. “She then wakes up in the forest where she meets a witch and ends up in the middle of a Medieval ball. We were asking each other, ‘did you hear the same thing I did?’ We started suggesting if falling into a trance might perhaps take place in some other way than at the dentist.”

The director didn’t receive the critique well, but kept insisting that his idea would work. The parties agreed on a compromise: The idea with the dentist was abandoned but the child and the Medieval ball would remain.

Vein accommodated the band at his home and personally spent the night elsewhere. As he was about to leave, he mentioned there were some clothes upstairs for each member to pick from and wear whatever they wished for the shoot.

The musicians, however, already decided they

CHAPTER 10: MYSTIC MUSIC VIDEO SESSIONS IN GERMANY Extra credit  Holopainen and a group of extras for the “Black Winter Day” video.

wouldn’t be wearing any weird gear, so the piles of ruffly clothes the director gathered caused both horrified and amused reactions.

“It was a relaxed evening,” says Koivusaari, amused. “Esa acted as the model: He went upstairs to put on some clothes, came downstairs, and everyone else laughed their asses off.”

Vein arrived home early in the morning. His shock was great when the clothes for the shoot were spread all around the apartment. Next, he was surprised to learn the band wasn’t going to be wearing any of them for the shoot.

On location, all sorts of weird people were on the set. The driver for the band seemed to be buzzed from alcohol and who knows what else.

His arm was bandaged and he had an angry little terrier with him.

“We were wondering what would be more worrisome,” Koivusaari says, “if the guy had his hand in a bandage because his dog had mauled him, or because he’s had a car accident while being drunk or stoned. Every time [keyboardist] Kasper [Mårtenson] tried to put on his seatbelt, the dog snarled.”

They spent the entire night shooting the weird clip. Aesthetically, the video in no way represented the national romantic Kalevala style the band highlighted. Their workload of filming continued the next day by shooting the promotional 32 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

video for “Into Hiding.” The song was planned to be the first single from the album, but because the shoot turned out into an even greater farce than “Black Winter Day,” the idea was abandoned. “‘Into Hiding’ was a video about a school rebellion, and the director chose Oppu as the main character. Oppu’s character was someone who’d been kicked and bullied at school. He was supposed to fill the entire chalkboard, writing, ‘Into Hiding, Into Hiding, Into Hiding…’

At times, they filmed him lying down between the poles of a soccer goal. And then we’re in the classroom, throwing desks around. Oh man,” Holopainen says, shaking his head.

The plot made no sense and the video also looked amateurish. It was a collage of elements chronicling, in a caricature-like manner, a problematic educational institution. Its storyline featured—but was not limited to—a man driving a motorcycle down the school’s corridor; a runaway tarantula; a boy on a skateboard; a burning dustbin; school desks being thrown in a classroom; and a metal band—Amorphis—performing to a pupil audience. To top it all off, some of the assistants hired as pupils looked like they were 30.

When the video was finished the band made Nuclear Blast promise it would never be made public. The record company agreed, but in the early 2010s this shoddy creation—something the

record label folks still entertain themselves with at their company Christmas parties—inexplicably appeared on YouTube.

“We had been in talks about releasing the video as part of our Forging the Land of the Thousand Lakes DVD (2010),” Koivusaari says. “Some of our members even demanded it—but we kept the promise we had made with Esa and Oppu to never release it. We also told the record company that the video simply doesn’t exist, if you get my gist,” he continues.

The band’s promo shoot for their album booklet took place on the morning after a boozy two-day video session. The tiredness and hungover appearance are especially noticeable on Oppu’s face. Even though the video shoot wasn’t quite a success, “Black Winter Day” was received enthusiastically by MTV’s Headbangers Ball, which put the video in rotation. It was one of the first—if not indeed the first—Finnish metal music videos shown on the channel. That honor was a big deal even for the Amorphis guys who watched the show. They had reached another small milestone.

Order Amorphis: The Official Story of Finland’s Greatest Metal Band at store.decibelmagazine.com.

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BY ADEM TEPEDELEN

34 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

2023, “hopefully” is the new “definitely.” One thing we’ve discovered is that the music world—hell, the entire world—ain’t gonna right the ship overnight, after nearly three years of topsy-turvy. As much as we’d all like things back to “normal” (whatever that might mean at this point in time), chaos still seems to have the upper hand, and is continuing to make trouble in various ways: the economy, politics, pressing plants, the never-ending plague. Thus, we’re leaning into “hopefully” in regard to whether our 20 chosen Most Anticipated Albums of 2023 will be recorded, mixed, mastered, pressed and made available to your long-suffering earholes in the year of our (satanic) lord, 2023. ¶ With that definitely necessary disclaimer out of the way, let’s get to the anticipation, because what’s currently lined up for release is pretty fucking tantalizing.

Some heavy hitters who we haven’t heard from in awhile are back.

Prominent up-and-comers are continuing to deliver the goods. And some deep underground bands are emerging from the shadows with albums that deserve widespread notice. Our Most Anticipated list isn’t (and never has been) just about just the obvious choices. Yeah, we can probably all agree on a handful of these, but we wanted to go a little deeper. We’ve got all the various genres and subgenres covered here, along with an unexpected surprise or two. Hopefully the albums on our list will all see the light of day in 2023, and hopefully you’ll find a lot here to look forward to.

IF

ENSLAVED

you pay attentheir unique talent and tion to such musical character to the things, Enslaved table.” For particular vocalist/bassist moments he feels define Grutle Kjellson Heimdal, Bjørnson points gave the metal world a to the single “Congelia” TITLE: Heimdal pretty good clue as to (issued in November) LABEL: Nuclear Blast what was in store for and the title track. the band’s 16th (!) full“They both represent PRODUCERS: Ivar Bjørnson, Enslaved at our best,” length when he provided Iver Sandøy and Grutle Kjellson he notes, “incorporating Apple Music with trackRELEASE DATE: March 3 by-track commentary on history as we, I dare to the band’s Caravans to the say, succeed in creating Outer Worlds EP in 2021. something new and vital He noted that the final track on said EP, “Interin our corner of the world of music.” mezzo II: The Navigator,” is “the biggest indicator The band approached Heimdal from a typically of the route forward to our next album. You could Enslaved position of strength during writing sesalmost think of it as an introduction to what’s sions, refusing to let pandemic restrictions stifle next.” What’s next is Heimdal, where Enslaved hope creativity. “We were very focused on not letting to deliver on Kjellson’s assertion. His bandmate, the state of the world affect us too much,” Bjørnguitarist Ivar Bjørnson, is certainly enthused with son assures. “We worked constantly to find ways both the results and the tremendous effort he and to carry on.” That single-minded focus ultimatehis bandmates put forth in creating it. ly led to great results. “We were all ready to do “The production is powerful as a herd of mamwhatever needed to take this album to where we moths,” he tells Decibel via email, “and that excites wanted it to go,” he concludes. “When it really me a lot. More importantly, the songs are really dawned on me how hard everyone had worked strong and diverse. We are at our strongest on this on their own to strengthen their link in the album. You can hear that this is a group of people chain, ‘gratifying’ might be an understatement. that work toward the same goals, each bringing But it will do.”

IMMORTAL War Against All Nuclear Blast PRODUCER: Arve Isdal RELEASE DATE: TBA TITLE: LABEL:

The title of the latest full-length from Norway’s frostiest, War Against All, might well be applied to the seemingly endless conflict amongst the various members of the black metal pioneers.

Abbath is doing his own thing, and apparently Demonaz and Horgh can’t agree on who personally owns the band’s name. FWIW, Demonaz is still making Immortal albums, assisted on WAA by session musicians, so I guess possession is nine-tenths of the law, or whatever. And on his first “solo” Immortal album since 2018’s Northern Chaos Gods, he’s sticking to what he knows. “I like the production of this one and the wholeness of the album,” he tells us via email. “It’s dark, cold, and it’s got a biting guitar sound—that is crucial to me—which is punchy as well.” He assures Decibel, “The power of Blashyrkh will not let you down.”

HORRENDOUS TBA Season of Mist PRODUCER: Damian Herring RELEASE DATE: Summer/ Fall TITLE: LABEL:

We’ll admit that Decibel had to brush up on our ancient mythology upon receiving answers to our queries regarding the newie from Philly’s deep-thinking death-dealers, Horrendous. Guitarist/ vocalist Matt Knox described it as “a Horrendous head of Janus” (looking both forward and backward), also noting that, “if [2018’s] Idol could be compared to a Sisyphean climb up the mountain, this album feels to me to be the victory celebrated at the peak—the grand tossing away of the stone.” But seriously, he’s probably just stoked it’s done and finally going to be released.

“The writing process actually took place over many years before, during and ‘after’ the pandemic,” he says. “We started right before the pandemic hit, then had to abandon it for an entire year. The pain of creation was overwhelming at times, but perhaps necessary to produce this little beast.”

PHOTO BY ROY BJØRGE

DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2023 : 35

CATTLE DECAPITATION DAWN RAY’D

ROYAL THUNDER

TITLE:

TBA LABEL: Metal Blade PRODUCER: Dave Otero RELEASE DATE: Spring

TITLE:

To Know the Light LABEL: Prosthetic PRODUCER: Mark Mynett RELEASE DATE: March

TITLE:

Cattle Decapitation vocalist Travis Ryan knows how to tantalize Decibel when asked what’s in store for the follow-up to 2019’s Death Atlas, which was the third in a series of concept albums issued by the humanity-hating deathgrinders. “The new one is a breath of fresh air,” he tells us via email. Not the description we were expecting, but Ryan’s assertion is actually in contrast to its “total downer” predecessor. The currently titleless new disc will also be a concept album, and Ryan assures us it’s “meant to be more of a ray of light coming out of [Death Atlas’s] darkness.” Ryan suggests that the shift in direction “mirrors the contrast of The Harvest Floor to Monolith of Inhumanity [in that era]. Not that it sounds like those records, but I think this record might resonate with people who were fans of that transition in the band.” As for the concept? “Nobody will have seen what’s coming with this new album’s concept.”

If Dawn Ray’d are indeed a black metal band, they’re most certainly an unconventional and very eccentric British one. On the trio’s upcoming third full-length, To Know the Light, they’re moving even further afield. “There are loads of tracks that sound like nothing we have ever done before and will surprise people, I think,” vocalist/violinist Simon B. tells Decibel via email. “The songwriting is so much better and more detailed, the musicianship is better. The record is a real journey.” In addition to Simon B.’s violin work, expect to hear a full pipe organ, a slightly out of tune piano and plenty of clean vocals. “I have really worked on my clean singing for this record,” he says, “and spending days with [producer] Mark Mynett in the studio singing these songs that are much more emotional and personal than before (whilst still being very political!) was such an awesome experience.”

Isolated from each other during the pandemic the three members of southern rockers Royal Thunder—bassist/vocalist Mlny Parsonz, guitarist Josh Weaver and drummer Evan Diprima—sat themselves in front of computers and devices to collaboratively craft their fourth full-length. “We kept sending ideas back and forth and adding to them,” Parsonz emails. “It was depressing and lonely to not be able to physically play together, but as soon as we could, we got back together and tracked everything live in the same room. We have never made an album that way. I think that approach ushered us into a more live sound.” Weaver agrees, adding, “We didn’t use click track on this record, and it really allows the songs to breathe and add dynamics that a click track really wouldn’t allow.

[The new album] also is stripped down in a sense that we did a lot less overdubs compared to some of the past records. It’s not that we didn’t try to add a bunch of layers, but it always came back to ‘less is more’ on this record.”

MAJESTIES Vast Reaches Unclaimed LABEL: 20 Buck Spin PRODUCER: Majesties RELEASE DATE: March 3 TITLE:

The debut from Minnesota’s mysterious Majesties has apparently been gestating for a couple of decades. Formed by a trio of members from Obsequiae and Inexorum as a loving tribute to the first wave of melodic death metal, they channeled their talents into glorifying a nostalgic sound they all still loved. “When we heard the first bands credited with creating melodic death metal in the ’90s,” says guitarist Carl Skildum via email, “there was a sense of unpredictability and excitement in the blend of styles, with black and death metal aggression meeting traditional heavy metal bombast. We missed that wild feeling where anything goes, so that’s what we hope we have recaptured here.”

The songs poured out, as the band tapped into a wealth of unused riffs from bygone days. “We’ve been waiting to use some of these riffs for more than 20 years,” Skildum admits. “We ended up with a ton of material we were excited about; we want this to feel like a lost album from an earlier time.”

36 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

MIZMOR Prosaic Profound Lore PRODUCER: A.L.N. RELEASE DATE: Summer TITLE: LABEL:

Though it’s been four years since the last Mizmor full-length, 2019’s Cairn, the man behind this Portland-based one-man blackened doom/drone project, A.L.N., has seen two collaborations (with Thou and Andrew Black) issued in the interim.

His return to solo work, however, is notable for being perhaps a little less ponderous this time around. “This album is less conceptual and more slice-of-life than my other albums,” A.L.N. tells Decibel via email. “Thematically, it’s intentionally less grandiose and more raw. It’s closer to the nerve and less precious. I haven’t made a record this way in a long time, so it was an interesting challenge for me. I wanted to make an album where I walk the line between taking my time/getting it right and beating a dead horse/ losing my mind. I’m trying to get better at trimming the fat and making music that holds the listener’s attention.”

TBA LABEL: Spinefarm PRODUCER: Tom Tapley RELEASE DATE: June

ALL OUT WAR Celestial Rot Translation Loss PRODUCER: Taras Apuzzo RELEASE DATE: February 3 TITLE: LABEL:

More than 30 years after forming in New York’s Hudson Valley, metalcore vets All Out War refuse to become complacent or rehash past glories. According to vocalist Mike Score, their eight fulllength, Celestial Rot, is full of all kinds of surprises.

“We tapped into many influences that we had not previously utilized,” he tells us via email. “The album is extremely dark and aggressive, much more so than any other All Out War release. We added a lot of grind and black metal influences on this one, and amped up the speed. That kept everything fresh and everyone very enthusiastic with the direction of the band.” The quintet also took on the responsibility of tracking the entire album themselves. “It was no small undertaking, but with [guitarist] Taras [Apuzzo] producing, it was a great experience.”

DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2023 : 37

HOST IX Nuclear Blast PRODUCER: Gregor Mackintosh RELEASE DATE: February 24 TITLE:

Is anyone really that surprised that one half of Paradise Lost—guitarist/keyboardist Greg Mackintosh and vocalist Nick Holmes—did a musical 180 during the plague years and recorded a love letter to ’80s goth/synth pop music? What began as Mackintosh’s solo album became a shared reverence for the pair’s misspent youth. “The main goal for me was summing up the vibe of what was exciting or interesting about the goth/ alternative/rock clubs of my youth,” Mackintosh explains via email. “The influences on this album are quite far-reaching. They start in clubs like Adam and Eve’s in Leeds in the early ’80s with goth, synthpop, stadium rock, New Romantic, etc., through various stages of electronica, ambient and alternative in the ’90s—but approaching it in a modern context. The mere fact that our management and label are having trouble defining it means we’ve done our job.”

200 STAB WOUNDS TBA Metal Blade PRODUCER: Mark Lewis RELEASE DATE: TBA TITLE: LABEL:

We know the death metal’s gonna be entirely filthy on Cleveland quartet 200 Stab Wounds’ second full-length (and first for Metal Blade), but equally important are the band’s unfailingly repugnant song titles (“Skin Milk” anyone?). We inquire, but vocalist/guitarist Steve Buhl is playing it close to the vest, only revealing a tune he and his bandmates have already been playing live, “Release the Stench.” “It’s just a very weird, but cool song,” he assures us via email. “It’s just its own thing. I’m not even sure how to describe it, but I know I like it!” Buhl’s equally enthused about how 200 Stab Wounds have continued to evolve on the new record. “I’m excited about the fact that we’re able to successfully maintain the sound the fans know and love us for, but are still able to incorporate so many different sounds and ideas into the songs without actually compromising our sound.”

38 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

PHOTO BY BAL A ZS SZ ABO

LABEL:

DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2023 : 39

P

NIGHT

re-pandemic, l.a. trad metal trio Leatherby. “The total run time is under 35 Night Demon spent the better part minutes, so it will definitely be something of 2019 recording sessions with a we will be [performing live in its entirety] veritable who’s who of extreme muon tour right out of the gate.” The concept sic engineers and producers—Steve approach led Night Demon to experiment Albini, Flemming Rassmussen, Matt Hyde, a bit and expand their palate on certain Josh Newell—that were issued via a handsongs. “‘Beyond the Grave’ and ‘The Wrath’ ful of singles in 2020. Once the plague hit, stand out [because] they go places this band however, the band took the producing/rehasn’t previously gone,” he explains. “[They cording job in-house for its new full-length, have] more progressive and dynamic feels Outsider. “We did it completely on our own,” that take the listener on more of a sonic notes bassist/vocalist Jarvis Leatherby, via TITLE: Outsider and emotional journey.” email. “We didn’t even use an assistant enLeatherby is unsurprisingly high on the LABEL: Century Media gineer this time around. Just the three of us band’s first new full-length since 2017’s DarkPRODUCER: Night Demon in the studio. [Doing it this way] we realized ness Remains. “Most bands will always tell you how much more comfortable we feel bouncthat their newest album is the best,” he RELEASE DATE: March 17 ing ideas off each other and respecting one says. “I completely understand why bands another as experienced writers, performers say that sort of thing, and I do agree that if and producers in our own right. This resulted in a much more authenyou’re not pushing yourself to be better on the next release, then you tic Night Demon record.” should just quit. However, I think it’s up to the listener to ultimately Given this isolation, they took the opportunity to craft something decide this, and it’s all subjective. Outsider is by far the most Night unlike anything they’d attempted previously. “[Outsider] is in fact a Demon has ever extended ourselves, and for that I am so proud and concept album from start to finish with a cohesive storyline,” says artistically fulfilled.”

40 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

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D E C I B E L : F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 3 : 41

WAYFARER

SANGUISUGABOGG

GODTHRYMM

TITLE:

TBA Profound Lore PRODUCER: Arthur Rizk RELEASE DATE: Fall 2023

TITLE:

Homicidal Ecstasy Century Media PRODUCER: Cody Davidson RELEASE DATE: February 3

TITLE:

LABEL:

LABEL:

LABEL:

As we write this, the uniquely American death metal outfit that is Colorado’s Wayfarer are entrenched in creating the follow-up to 2020’s A Romance With Violence, so it’s a little hard for guitarist/vocalist Shane McCarthy to see the forest for the trees in regard to how it’s shaping up. “We are still in the meat of it,” he reveals via email, “but this is the part we all enjoy the most—taking something from concept through to completion. It feels like we are deep in our own territory at this point, and it is exciting and satisfying to chase down what that is at its core.” That “territory” no doubt involves drawing dark themes from 19th century America and connecting it to black metal juxtaposed with traditional Americana sounds. “It’s a bit darker and more brooding [than previous releases],” opines McCarthy, “while also being a bit more direct, with the musicianship feeling more unchained.”

The cat may be out of the bag regarding the new material on the ’Bogg’s second full-length, Homicidal Ecstasy. According to vocalist Devin Swank, the Ohio OSDM four-piece have already roadtested a bunch of these tracks while touring in 2022, though he says via email that was just “a sneak peek of what’s to come.” Swank assures Decibel that there’s no sophomore slump happening here. “We believe the structure and songwriting is a lot more memorable and put together more fluently than anything we’ve ever touched. The production style ... also helps showcase the album’s rawness and brutality.” The self-professed “music dorks” achieved their ultimate objective on Homicidal Ecstasy by creating “a sound that we’ve always wanted to accomplish as a band, and [also] what we’ve wanted to hear from a band.”

The second album from doom-worshiping My Dying Bride expats Hamish Glencross (guitar/ vocals) and Shaun Taylor-Steele (drums) is set to follow up an incredibly promising debut, 2020’s Reflections, with an expanded lineup and sonic palette. Joining Godthrymm on a permanent basis is Glencross’ wife, Catherine, who provides vocals and keyboards on Distortions. “We had the chance to reflect on and rewrite and develop the songs massively [during the pandemic], and really expand the sonic template,” Hamish notes via email. “It’s great to be playing these songs together as a band now, and we’ve had to expand our lineup as a result to do it justice.” The doom vet promises “greater depth in sound and layering… and the range and contrast within the album is much more ambitious. There is a massive focus on melancholic harmony and crushing dynamics.”

END REIGN The Way of all Flesh Is Decay LABEL: Relapse PRODUCER: Len Carmichael RELEASE DATE: TBA TITLE:

End Reign’s pedigree is the easy talking point here, but as evidenced by the hardcore/crossover unit’s recent boot-to-the-skull contribution to the Decibel Flexi Series, “House of Thieves,” the actual music says plenty as well. And guitarist Domenic Romeo (Integrity) believes it’ll speak to fans of all the musicians involved: Mike Score (All Out War), bassist Art Legere (Bloodlet), drummer Adam Jarvis (Pig Destroyer) and guitarist Sebastian Philips (Exhumed). “Since I’m a fan of all those bands, too,” he tells us via email, “this is exactly what I’d want this band to sound like: Integrity, All Out War, Misery Index, Exhumed and Bloodlet in a blender with a lot of outside influences. I guess in a lot of ways I made this record for my own enjoyment, but I think there are other people out there looking for the same thing.”

42 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

BELL WITCH TBA LABEL: Profound Lore PRODUCER: Billy Anderson RELEASE DATE: Spring/Summer TITLE:

Well, we had this one teed up in last year’s “Most Anticipated” roundup, with a tentative July 2022 release that unfortunately never happened. But, hey, it’s the first album of a planned triptych, so Bell Witch no doubt wanted to get it right with such an ambitious undertaking. “I think our scope has expanded since writing [2017’s] Mirror Reaper and we are able to envision conceptual compositions on a broader scale,” says bassist/vocalist Dylan Desmond, one half of the Seattle funeral doom duo. “The synthesizers we incorporated in [2020’s] Stygian Bough Vol. 1 [collaboration with Aerial Ruin] have grown into something much more prolific and sturdy in this album. Further, I think the bass guitar is much more aggressive and tonally complex. I don’t want to give away too much, but this record is definitely an expansion of what we’ve done before.”

Distortions Profound Lore PRODUCER: Andy Hawkins RELEASE DATE: Summer 2023

CAPRA TBD LABEL: Metal Blade PRODUCER: TBD RELEASE DATE: Fall 2023 (tentative) TITLE:

For a young band like Louisiana metallic hardcore quintet Capra, following up a lauded debut like 2021’s In Transmission can be intimidating, especially if you spend a significant amount of time touring in support of said album. You want to strike while the iron’s hot (touring), but you also need to keep momentum going (new material).

They seem to have found a creative balance with their upcoming second for Metal Blade. Guitarist Tyler Harper tells Decibel that the band is “exploring new areas without sacrificing the sound that were known for on our debut album. I think this one shows a heavier punk side of the band, while giving the vocals more time to shine. It still has the chaos riffs sprinkled in, but it’s going to be more grounded this time. Plus, we threw in some breakdowns, and who doesn’t love that?”

DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2023 : 4 3

C

LAMP OF

cator of what’s to come,” he teases, “but reating new music during the pannot in a way that people may think. Imdemic for one-person underground black metal artists was just another mortal has been a huge influence for day at the office. No masks around the project since the start, and this albandmates, no awkward “pods,” no bum owes a huge debt of its existence to them.” Bringing the new album to fruisending recording files across the country (or world). L.A.’s Lamp of Murmuur issued new tion, however, was seemingly fraught. material—including two full-lengths—at a “It was conceived in a very unlikely brisk clip from late 2020 on. One track from scenario, where my body and soul felt TITLE: Saturnian Bloodstorm like [they were] being torn apart by a the prolific M., “Burning Star of Attrition”— LABEL: Wolves of Hades/ an Immortal-influenced blast of Nordic-style higher punishment of sorts. This anger, grimness—you might recall, even found its this frustration was channeled in a very Night of the Palemoon/Not Kvlt way onto a Decibel flexi in issue no. 218. particular way, almost reckless in its exPRODUCER: Lamp of Murmuur And, as evidenced by LOM’s inclusion in ecution. Pain and discomfort plagued the RELEASE DATE: Late March this issue, there’s plenty more where that long production sessions, but none of it came from. “The outside world has never is found in the album. In its place, greathad an impact in how I approach my writing sessions,” stresses M. ness and might is found. via email. “The writing process has been the same as ever. The songs “My levels of musicianship, mixing and production skills [were] were written in [a] stream of consciousness style in which I sit down challenged in a way I’ve never experienced,” he continues. “I’ve with my guitar and maybe two riffs in my head; I start improvising overcome these tasks feeling victorious and fulfilled, knowing that with those ideas in mind and see where these improvisations lead me.” there is no other way this album could be better if anything would have been made in a different way, or in a different, healthier sceAccording to M., the Immortal energy felt on the flexi track has nario. It’s an absolute statement of sheer will and power.” carried over into Saturnian Bloodstorm. “That flexi track is a huge indi-

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ld-school death metal darlings you have to break that barrier of caring Necrot love metal as much as you do what others will think of it and just make and just wanna get you stoked about something that you personally would love to their new album, like they are/were listen to. I think we are evolving as a band when a favorite band issues a new with every new album. Even [while] mainrecord. “I remember how excited I was or taining our style and sound, every album I still am sometimes when a band I like retakes us somewhere new that can make us leases something new,” vocalist/bassist Luca TITLE: TBA grow as musicians.”

Indrio tells us via email. “I know there are “Growth” for Indrio is all about getting LABEL: Tankcrimes people excited about our new album, and to sick, so to speak. “For every new album we PRODUCER: Greg Wilkinson be able to give that [excitement] to somemake I find myself in front of a piece of paper one else makes us feel accomplished. It’s where [I can] vomit all my disgust and feelRELEASE DATE: Late 2023 really great to be in this position of having ings,” he says. “At the end of the day, we play someone anticipating [our] new album… it death metal, so 95 percent of our listeners doesn’t get much better than that.” might not even give a shit about the lyrics, but I do enjoy writing ‘em, The Oakland trio is following up two highly lauded full-lengths, but and it’s something about this new album that I am excited about.” And Indrio and company aren’t worried too much about meeting whatever though he’s keeping the details of said regurgitations close to the vest, expectations fans may have for their latest effort. “Writing an album he will tell Decibel that he loves every goddamn one of them equally. is always challenging because it is a reflection of yourself expressed “Every single song is our baby, and we are equally excited about all through music and lyrics,” Indrio explains. “For it to be genuine, the newborns that we created to sacrifice on the altar of death metal.”

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PHOTO BY CHRIS JOHNSTON

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the

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

definitive albums

by

nick green

Still Choppin’ the making of Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me

W

e’re here because You’re Living

J Mascis and drummer Patrick “Murph” All Over Me is unquestionably Murphy as its anchors. Part of the endurone of the most important ing legacy of You’re Living All Over Me is records in the development its agelessness. J, Murph and Lou have of alternative rock. This is way more gray hair, but it’s often hard to a stone-cold fact. Four years discern the differences between the path before grunge catapulted underground music they started to chart as teenagers and into the mainstream, Dinosaur Jr. laid out the warm, welcoming albums they have a practical blueprint for freaky, noisy “earrecorded since reuniting in 2005. The bleeding country.” This is a style that has three personalities in Dinosaur Jr. have maintained its currency and continues to be always been willful and uncompromising. particularly popular in contemporary music, Despite the tension this kind of dynamic even if it was more of an accidental invencreates, they know that the music they are tion for Dinosaur Jr., reflecting the group’s capable of making together represents a DBHOF218 enthusiasm for Black Sabbath and R.E.M. very singular vision.

The trio’s ’87 masterpiece also proved You’re Living All Over Me is the most-fully to be influential on artists like My Bloody realized document of the original incarnaValentine and Slowdive in the gestation of tion of Dinosaur Jr. The distortion/fuzz on You’re Living All Over Me the shoegaze genre, so named for its copithe first 25 seconds of the album opener ous use of guitar pedals to bend time and “Little Fury Things” and the stoned riff on ST T space. This, of course, led to post-rock, post“SludgeFeast” alone should earn Mascis an D E CE M BE R 1 4 , 1 9 8 7 metal, metalgaze and, oh, about 35 years entry ticket to the guitar god pantheon.

Super fury animals of musicians refusing to make eye conMeanwhile, the rhythm section of Barlow tact during performances and interviews. and Murphy carry burners like “In a Jar” Dinosaur Jr.’s most dramatic throughline and, to a more cacophonous extreme, “The to metal, though, might be that the band Lung.” Every song contains multitudes, represents half of the lineup of legendary even the comparatively obtuse lo-fi tape hardcore punk act Deep Wound, one of the earliest progenitors of what loop piece (“Poledo”) that Barlow put together to close out the album. would become grindcore. You’re Living All Over Me is not a “metal” record by Mascis sums up the enduring appeal of the band best on “Raisans”: any stretch, but it absolutely pulsates with that type of energy on searing “I’ll be down, I’ll be around / I’ll be hanging where eventually you’ll tracks like “Lose.” have to be.” It’s a song about being rejected, but knowing that you’re Less than a year after this album’s release, bassist Lou Barlow got the where you belong. If You’re Living All Over Me doesn’t hook you immediboot and the band continued for a few more years with singer/guitarist ately, you’ll come around.

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DINOSAUR JR. you’re living all over me

The 1985 debut, Dinosaur, was notable for presenting a bridge between the band’s previous incarnation, Deep Wound, and what Dinosaur Jr. would eventually become.

You’re Living All Over Me leans more heavily on folkier songs. Were there specific conversations about where you wanted to take this album?

Deep Wound was a hardcore band, but the first Dinosaur record didn’t sound anything like that, and I think it was really sophisticated. We actually started with very slow Neil Young-style music. There was a little bit of punk in there, too, but it was a lot more influenced by college rock—things like R.E.M., the Dream Syndicate, the Neats, Mission of Burma and the Birthday Party.

Dinosaur was only a post-hardcore band because we’d been in a hardcore band before that. From my perspective, the leap between Deep Wound and Dinosaur was astounding. You’re Living All Over Me happened because J threw a bunch of styles together on the first record to see what stuck. It was an outgrowth of that experimentation. When we would play live, it was tough to negotiate, especially since Murph and I hadn’t gelled as a rhythm section yet. As we became more experienced playing together, J was able to observe what did and didn’t work about those live shows, and he seemed to write towards our strengths.

PATRICK MURPHY: When Deep Wound disbanded, J switched to guitar. He was the drummer in Deep Wound, but he felt like he needed to write songs and front a band. He didn’t feel like he could do that as a drummer. We were all kinda friends in high school, which is how he originally recruited me and the Deep Wound singer, Charlie Nakajima. That was going to be the lineup for Dinosaur, but we ended up booting out Charlie, so it was just the three of us: me, J, and Lou. For the first record, J brought in some songs, but the process of developing them was much more organic. There was a lot of jamming stuff out, which I guess is the way that a lot of musicians in bands typically write music. When we started You’re Living All Over Me, we had a bunch of live shows under our belt, so it was a more focused effort. That was also the beginning of J really taking the reins and becoming a songwriter and composer. When I listen to You’re Living All Over Me, I hear the inspiration. That’s when J was really on fire.

J MASCIS: I don’t think we ever talked about anything, really. I had felt like “Bulbs of Passion,” which we recorded after our first album, was the first song where we were getting our own sound.

We were working a lot of things out on the first album—we’d just formed the band and we didn’t really have an organized approach. You’re Living LOU BARLOW:

 Prehistory in the making (from l to r) Murphy, Mascis and Barlow evolving out of the hardcore scene

All Over Me was really a continuation of “Bulbs of Passion,” getting different elements of our sound together. We were also aware of our limitations, like how well I could sing. I wanted to be able to scream a lot more, but I could only sustain it for, like, 20 seconds before my voice wimped out.

You’re Living All Over Me also reflected what we were listening to at the time, like Black Sabbath and the Jesus and Mary Chain and R.E.M. and the Neats—things that were highly melodic, but also noisy. We were all tired of hardcore.

What do you remember about the writing process for You’re Living All Over Me?

I remember that record coming together fairly quickly. For me, it was kind of a painful process because J was such a stickler for how things should sound, especially with his background as a drummer. I just remember that I had to agonize over parts on specific songs, like “In a Jar.” J would give very specific instructions on cymbal patterns and how I was playing. It was so arduous. If one kick drum pattern was off, J would be like, “No, you have to do it all again.”

It made for a really intense process, especially since I was still at a phase in my development as a drummer where I wanted to jam more and be more creatively free. But J was pretty militaristic about it. Back then, I didn’t see his vision. Lou completely understood what J was going for, but I was still somewhat unsure. It definitely paid off in the sound of the record.

MASCIS: I was in college at the time, so a lot of You’re Living All Over Me was probably written in my dorm room. I think it’s interesting how we made Lou’s songs fit into the band. He wrote songs that were very different than what I was doing, so there was some effort to have his songs fit the tone of the rest of the record. We never quite approached things the same way in the MURPHY:

FEBRUARY 2023 : 50 : DECIBEL

first incarnation of the band—with Bug, he stopped wanting to contribute songs. Things have been different since we got back together. With our latest album, I helped more with the drums than anything else on Lou’s songs. He doesn’t hear drums in the same way when he’s writing.

It’s definitely something I hear with my songs.

BARLOW: It was a little more open for me. On the first record, J composed almost everything. He kinda told me what to play—he had very detailed demos for the first Dinosaur record. For You’re Living All Over Me, the album was split between two recording sessions. For the Side B songs, which were the first ones we recorded, I came up with those basslines. For the songs we recorded in New York, which became Side A, J was very specific about how he wanted songs like “Little Fury Things” and “SludgeFeast” to sound. I added some things, but he largely dictated what I played on them. I only wrote one song and contributed the tape piece [“Poledo”] at the end. For “Lose,” I knew that I wanted to contribute an electric song to the record, so I took every riff I could think of and jammed it into one song. J’s songs were already highly sophisticated in terms of how many parts they had and the rhythmic flourishes he brought to them. He was also very advanced in terms of writing lyrics. The stuff I was writing at the time was extremely simple, like two-chord songs. I was just starting to write, and it was intimidating because J had taken a huge leap.

You’re Living All Over Me was originally released on vinyl, with Side A recorded by Wharton Tiers in New York and Side B at Pine Trax in Holyoke, MA. How much time was set aside for tracking and mastering? What do you recall about the studio experience?

The way we did the album is that we had a few songs written and we recorded them in

MASCIS:

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DINOSAUR JR. you’re living all over me

one session in Holyoke at this guy’s home studio, then I went back and wrote some more. The rest of the album was recorded with Wharton Tiers in New York. He was a lot more sympathetic to what we were trying to do. He’d done Sonic Youth’s Confusion Is Sex and some other stuff. The guy in Holyoke didn’t have any frame of reference for our sound. I think he was in a Journeytype band. He didn’t know punk rock. I had to kind of take control of that session and force my will on him. I guess that was similar to our experience of making the first album. I had to really help form the sound because he didn’t have exposure to anything alternative or punk.

BARLOW: Both sessions were very quick. We were already playing a lot of those songs. The songs on Side B—“Raisans,” “In a Jar” and “Tarpit”—we played those live a lot. Even having played a song a couple times before going into the studio helps.

Murph and I had started practicing together a lot. I’d had a realization after listening to Master of Reality: “Oh my god, the bass and drums really work together.” I guess that wasn’t a bombshell, but I didn’t have a lot of experience as a bass player and didn’t understand the power of a rhythm section. So, I guess we were trying to take some lessons from Black Sabbath and provide some kind of foundation to J’s very full guitar sound. I became kind of obsessed with Murph and I becoming a dynamic rhythm section.

MURPHY: In the early days, when we were younger and before we had kids and families, we’d learn the record forwards and backwards and practice for endless hours. That’s how it worked on the first three records. By the time we got in the studio, we were really well-rehearsed.

We could play the record song-by-song, like we were playing a gig. Once we had families and more constraints on time, we’ve done a 180. We often don’t know anything, and J will hand us demos in the morning. Lou and I will be hammering out parts in the morning, and we will record that song later in the day. It’s completely different. As far as the mastering and the mixing, I think that part hasn’t changed too much. J will work on something until he is satisfied. That’s something that Lou and I have never really been a part of, though. We do our parts and we leave, and months later we hear the finished product. We’re typically not around when J does guitar overdubs and vocals. It has been like that from day one.

How does the sound of the record compare to the sound of the band in live performance? Were you happy with the result?

MURPHY: I was really not happy with the records back in the day, because the drums were completely buried and the mix was all guitar with some bass. It used to bum me out because I had

put so much work into learning those parts and I couldn’t really hear the drums on those recordings. With modern technology, especially when CDs came along, we had those records remastered, and now everything sounds great.

You can hear each of the instruments really well. It wasn’t just me being overly sensitive at the time, either. I’d play those records for friends and they’d be like, “This is great, but where are the drums?” I used to have a hard time with the early recordings because J had a particular idea of how things should sound.

I’m a lot happier with the way those first three records sound now.

BARLOW: Honestly, it was radically different.

The live shows were unmanageable to me. I was extremely anxious and nervous for any performance we ever did. I couldn’t really process the experience. The live sound was so clamorous.

My understanding of what I wanted the bass

“You’re Living All Over Me also reflected what we were listening to at the time, like Black Sabbath and the Jesus and Mary Chain and R.E.M. and the Neats—things that were highly melodic, but also noisy.

We were all tired of hardcore.”

J MASCIS to sound like was pretty chaotic, too—there was a shitload of feedback and noise, and you couldn’t really hear the vocals. For me, it was a real thrill to hear the songs on You’re Living All Over Me because I could really hear J’s voice and his lyrics. I think when we played live, no one could ever hear anything. When we played club shows, we made no concessions towards working with the sound guys—we didn’t give a fuck if the vocals could be heard or whether there would be good sound. We were there to present ourselves in the most aggressive way possible.

It was great to hear the clarity of the recording, for the vocals and the way the bass and drums worked together.

MASCIS: I think it was as good as we could do at the time. I remember Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips complaining about how “tiny” it sounded and how we should go to a better studio and re-record it. Most reviews of the album were FEBRUARY 2023 : 5 2 : DECIBEL

pretty good, but there were definitely some that complained about the sound, too: They’re trying to go for something, but it sounds too shitty to realize. We did the best we could with what we had, so it was kind of hard to consider how we could’ve done it better. Although I guess we took some of these criticisms to heart when we did Bug, because that recording sounded a lot bigger.

What is your favorite song on this album and why?

MURPHY: Wow, uh, there are so many good ones.

We still play “Kracked” and “SludgeFeast” backto-back in our sets now. Those two songs work so well together; it’s especially powerful live. I think that’s a testament to J’s songwriting that those songs have stood the test of time. That’s also why I am amazed that we can still write new material and play it alongside songs that were written 35 years ago and nothing clashes.

It all seems to fit together well. That’s J’s particular genius. Lou and I used to have arguments about this all of the time, and Lou would be like, “You don’t get what we’re doing. This stuff really matters!” And I’d say, “We’re just kids.” And that would set Lou off further: “No we’re not, we know more!”

MASCIS: I guess I would pick “Raisans.” It was maybe the most “Dinosaur” of our songs at that point—it had all of the elements of the sound that we were looking for on You’re Living All Over Me. It works for me.

BARLOW: Probably “In a Jar.” That song is interesting because J pulled the guitars way down in the first verse to spotlight the vocals, and I like the dynamic of that. The way the song peaks has this kind of ’70s hard rock vibe, but it’s also super jangly at the same time. It represents a lot of what we were listening to at the time.

It’s a very cool song. I like that the recording is kinda fucked up, too—it’s kind of lo-fi, but there’s real power coming through. Now that I have more experience as a songwriter, I can see how brilliantly constructed “In a Jar” was. It’s an amazing song.

Subsequent pressings included covers of Peter Frampton and the Cure. Was there any material from that era that you considered for You’re Living All Over Me, but didn’t make the cut?

No. We recorded all of the songs we had at the time. I can think of a couple of songs that were left over from our first album, but that wasn’t the case with You’re Living All Over Me. The songs that became Bug were written after we’d finished You’re Living All Over Me. BARLOW: Nope. That was it. There are no other J Mascis jewels lying around from that period.

Anything that we put that kind of effort in to bring to completion ended up on the record.

I think “Chunks” was recorded some time between You’re Living All Over Me and Bug, so it probably came later.

MASCIS:

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DINOSAUR JR. you’re living all over me

MURPHY: We were listening to a lot of the Flying Burrito Brothers, and we eventually recorded a cover of “Hot Burrito #2.” The Byrds were another big band for us at the time, and again, we ended up recording a cover of “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” for a compilation. Every time we would make a record, we would throw around the idea of the cover, so the Peter Frampton cover was one of the ones that just seemed to make it on You’re Living All Over Me. A lot of times, it’s based on whatever sounds strongest and feels good to play. The cover of “Just Like Heaven,” which came a little later, is something that we still play in our sets. It’s usually one of our encores. A lot of our covers start sort of slapstick, almost like a joke, but by the time we get them down, we’re usually like, “Oh, this doesn’t sound half bad.” And then we start doing them a little more seriously and they end up as B-sides.

Is there a story behind the album’s title?

Bug was named after Maura Jasper did the art, based on her album cover concept. I don’t remember if that was the process with You’re Living All Over Me. It could’ve been inspired by the album design. That all came from Maura.

With the first album, I had a specific idea for the cover and I gave her some directions for what to paint. With this album, she did whatever. I don’t even remember if we gave her the album title. I like what she did with it. I think it ended up looking a lot like the cover to Sonic Youth’s Confusion Is Sex, but that is not something I noticed until much later.

MURPHY: That was when the band was in the middle of a really tumultuous time. Things were mounting with Lou to the point where it was almost unbearable to spend time together and share a stage. It was all for very personal reasons, and that’s probably why it’s called You’re Living All Over Me. The album art is three people merged into one contorted shape. You take three guys who are really different and don’t have a lot in common on a lot of core levels and this will create friction, especially over really long extended periods of times. There was a lot of uncomfortable moments and tension on tour, and that is reflected in the cover art and the album title.

BARLOW: The way it works with me is that I will think that something happened and learn much later that it didn’t. With this in mind, I’m telling you that the album title came from me. J had a group of friends from Amherst, most of whom were students at UMass. I lived a bit further away and I worked at a nursing home, so I would come to Amherst for practice and we would drive around and go to parties at colleges. J didn’t say much back then, but everything that came out of his mouth was either extremely funny MASCIS:

or extremely biting. He could really put you in your place. I think J was admonishing Murph for doing something while we were in the van and I sort of sarcastically commented, “Oh, you’re living all over me.” That’s kind of the way I felt with J. Sometimes he gave me the impression that my mere presence was too much for him.

He has expressed this about a lot of people. Even when I first met him, he had a poster on his wall of Linus from Peanuts and the caption said “I love mankind... it’s people I can’t stand!” As I got to know J, it totally made sense. I’d never met anybody that was so outspokenly disgusted by other people.

What do you recall from the tours from this era?

Do you have any fond or interesting memories of the 1986 Midwest tour with Sonic Youth or the 1987 run of dates in Europe?

MURPHY: When we put out the first record, we’d play to maybe 15 people a show. People didn’t know about us and they didn’t really like us.

J moved to New York between the first and second albums. I think he realized that New York was a cooler place to be. This is when he met Thurston Moore and got into the CBGB scene. When Sonic Youth took us on tour, we went from playing for 15 people to playing to 850 to 1,000 people. It was pretty surreal. It was very exciting. When I saw Sonic Youth playing live, that’s when it all started clicking for me. I really started to see the power of the scene, like how cool and creative a band like Sonic Youth was. Up until Sonic Youth broke up, they continued to have us come out and support them.

BARLOW: Yes, the tour with Sonic Youth was wonderful. We were in J’s parents’ station wagon, traveling around with Sonic Youth.

They were the coolest band on the planet and they absolutely loved J. It blew my mind. Their shows were always pretty intense. Sonic Youth were very warm offstage, but when they’d play together, it was definitely a serious affair. This was right when EVOL came out. We were listening to it in the car on the way back to Northampton and I remember J was like, “I think we’re in love with Sonic Youth.” When we got to Europe, it was amazing, too. We had our soundman driving us around, so we just had to be responsible enough to get into the back of the van. I think I’d only been on an airplane once before that.

The fans in Holland seemed to know who we were, too. That run of dates was great. Up to this point, we really weren’t in the grind of nationwide touring, so everything was still new. After that, it quickly became terrible.

MASCIS: Our first tour with Sonic Youth was the best tour from that first period of the band. The first tour for You’re Living All Over Me is the one where our van kept breaking down and tensions were higher. It was a pretty miserable time.

That’s when the seeds of breaking up started forming—the idea of kicking Lou out of the FEBRUARY 2023 : 5 4 : DECIBEL

band. The big event was getting stranded in Mountain Home, ID after the van broke down.

That was probably a couple of weeks after the album came out. The van broke down and it took a week to repair and we missed some shows.

Then we went to Europe and it was great, even though we weren’t communicating well as a band. Going to Europe was a bit of a revelation because we were treated really well—they’d feed us and welcome us into hotels. We were used to crashing on people’s floors and eating the Wendy’s salad bar. When we came home from Europe, we were more popular. People in our hometown started to like us because we’d been featured in NME and Sounds. The British press was selling us back to our own people.

How did Dinosaur Jr. come to sign with SST? This seems like it happened late in the process.

BARLOW: We were going to put You’re Living All Over Me out on Homestead, but then Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore gave the studio recordings to Greg Ginn at SST, because that’s the label that Sonic Youth was on. That’s really what happened. When we heard about it, we were like, “We’re going to be on fuckin’ SST!” That was our lifelong dream.

MASCIS: I think we had finished the first set of songs when Sonic Youth gave a tape to Greg Ginn.

That was what got us signed with SST. That was our big goal when we formed—to get on SST and be a touring band. So, with that, we achieved our goal. But then we didn’t have any other goals, which was strange. We were just sort of left floating there.

MURPHY: At that time, SST was the biggest thing we could imagine. We figured we’d get on SST and have a run on the label and that would be the life of the band. That’s really what we kinda saw it as. We didn’t really see a future beyond that. Like, we never thought about being on a major; it didn’t seem like it was in the cards for a band like us. But that did end up happening, too.

When did the connection between Dinosaur Jr. and skateboarding begin to develop? For a lot of people of my generation, skate videos were the first time we heard the band.

BARLOW: It seems like it happened around the time of You’re Living All Over Me. J skated when he was a kid. Skating was definitely part of the hardcore scene. There were kids with skateboards at the very first hardcore shows I remember going to. The rise of indie rock paralleled the rise of street skating videos.

MASCIS: I think that came from a pro skateboarder named Neil Blender. He put a Dinosaur Jr. song in a video, and he was pretty influential in that scene, so other guys started following suit and putting out songs in different things. It basically came down to having the support of Neil Blender. I was probably most into skateboarding when I was 11 or 12, during the Tony Alva

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DINOSAUR JR. you’re living all over me

days. I wasn’t as into it when I was playing in Dinosaur Jr., but I’ve always skated a bit.

MURPHY: It was definitely after we signed to SST, because we met Neil Blender when we went out on tour in California. He and J got really friendly first, but we all took to him. He was our gateway to the skate scene. As for Dinosaur Jr. and skate videos, I don’t think any of us were aware of it until kids started showing up at concerts and explaining that they knew us through skate videos. If anyone knew about that, it would’ve been J, because he was involved in what was going on behind the scenes with publishing and rights and stuff like that. It has turned into a huge part of Dinosaur Jr. now, and it’s not just the skate community—the ski community was quick to embrace the band, as well.

Shortly after the release of the album, the band was forced to change its name to Dinosaur Jr. following a lawsuit by representatives of the San Francisco band Dinosaurs. How did you hear about that?

I got a letter from Barry Melton, a.k.a.

“The Fish” from Country Joe and the Fish. It was from his office on Haight Street in San Francisco.

They wanted us to cease and desist using the name “Dinosaur.” Although they were “the Dinosaurs” and we were “Dinosaur,” I guess that wasn’t different enough under legal terms. So, I came up with the idea of adding the “Jr.” and they thought that it was an alright compromise. I guess it worked out well for the internet age, because it’s definitely a more specific name than “Dinosaur.”

It’s easier to find us in online searches.

MURPHY: We were in San Francisco, and this old, cranky hippie guy came up to me and was like, “You weren’t at Woodstock, you’re too young.”

And I was like, “You’re right, we weren’t there.”

And he was like, “Well, I came to the show thinking I was going to see the Dinosaurs.” We didn’t know anything about that band. It was a bunch of guys who were connected to the Grateful Dead and Moby Grape and the whole Haight-Ashbury scene. When we got home from tour, we got a letter from the law firm that was run by one of the guys from that band. We thought it was really funny. We added the “Jr.” to our name as a joke.

When we sent them a letter proposing that, they were ecstatic. They viewed it as a tribute, like we wanted to be a mini version of their band.

BARLOW: I was probably at J’s house or his parents’ house. It was like, “Oh, the Fish wants to sue us.” Or was it Country Joe? It was someone from Country Joe and the Fish. The guy’s name was Barry Melton, so whatever capacity he was in Country Joe and the Fish. He was also in a band called the Dinosaurs. Coincidentally, many years later, I was in San Francisco and staying over at this couple’s loft. They were these older, MASCIS:

“When we played live, no one could ever hear anything.

When we played club shows, we made no concessions towards working with the sound guys— we didn’t give a fuck if the vocals could be heard or whether there would be good sound.”

LO U BA RLOW aging hippie types and they were hoarders.

They showed me a pile of posters and invited me to take whatever I wanted. Right on the top of the pile, there was a poster of the Dinosaurs, announcing the release party for their debut album. So, I took it.

You’ve now been reunited for 17 years, much longer than the original incarnation of Dinosaur Jr. What has it been like revisiting material from this difficult era as adults?

BARLOW: I love it. It’s a weird little classic rock record. I’ll never ever get sick of those songs. I can’t think of a single Dinosaur Jr. song I’m sick of. When we play stuff from those first three records, it’s very easy to access the energy that I had when we were playing them for the very first time. It never feels like it’s a chore. It’s almost impossible to be sluggish on a song like “In a Jar.” FEBRUARY 2023 : 5 6 : DECIBEL

MURPHY: Way better. Oh my god. Now I can enjoy it and have fun with it. I’ve had so many years for the songs to seep in that I get what the band was trying to do in its original incarnation. Now it’s gratifying to play these songs, and it brings a completely different perspective to playing the songs you wrote when you were 22 when you’re in your 50s, you know? Back then I always felt like I was flying by the seat of my pants. J and Lou were both very uptight. If I made a mistake, I’d never hear the end of it. Now everyone is mellow. We can all fuck something up live and let it go. It used to be hard to be in Dinosaur Jr. Everything seems like a better fit now.

MASCIS: These were the songs that made our sound. This is considered to be our “best” album, so we still tend to play all of those songs in our sets. But I also personally think it’s our best album, and I always have, so I’m happy to still be playing that material.

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S L OW LY W E

RULE Inside

OBITUARY

’s nearly 40-year journey as the world’s most dependable death metal band ST ORY

BY

JONATHAN HORSLEY PHO T O S

BY

GENE SMIRNOV

DE C I BED LE•CF : N O V ERY I BE E LBRUA M B E2 R02203 2 1• :

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I.

THE CAVEMEN COMETH

Back in 1986, reaching out to P.O. Box 527, Brandon, FL, would put you in touch with a sound that would soon devour the nascent death metal scene. The cassette demo from Xecutioner would open in familiar fashion: a peal of thunder, driving rain à la Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut, before an altogether new kind of hell shook itself loose with the fuzzed-out turbo-thrash of “Find the Arise” and the zombified groove of “Live Like the Dead,” a Romero-esque work of nightmare fuel with a title you might have expected from the Cramps. For the thrill-seeking heavy metal adventurist digging around for something more extreme, this, in the year of Reign in Blood, would offer a taste of things to come: monochrome riffs, capricious tempos, atmospheres of pure, total doom and the haunting squeal of lead guitar that came across like Hanneman/ King on heavy downers. ¶ And just what, pray tell, was going on with the vocals? With his carnivore cadence, this kid, John Tardy, was delivering something different on the mic. It was a sound that would soon catch the attention of Roadrunner A&R Monte Conner, who had an inkling that this sort of thing would find an audience.

The rest is history. The band, Xecutioner (formerly Executioner), would be renamed Obituary, drag a morbid and bestial form of metal out of the Sunshine State—a Hellhammer of the swamp—and carve out a place on the art form’s pantheon, propelled there on the back of an unimpeachable trifecta of albums, Slowly We Rot (1989), Cause of Death (1990) and The End Complete

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(1992), before exhibiting a staying power not unlike that of Florida’s most-famous residents.

That the picture Google Maps uses for Brandon is of a quintet of alligators, arranged in formation—beasts scarcely evolved over eons, alpha predators with their heads barely above sea level—feels kind of apt when talking about one of metal’s most primal and enduring institutions.

But just because Obituary have been death metal stalwarts for some three-and-a-half decades, and, alongside Death, Morbid Angel, Buffalo transplants Cannibal Corpse and Deicide, have helped make death metal Florida’s mostsuccessful pop-cultural export since The Golden Girls first aired on NBC in 1985, we should not take them for granted. We should not take what they do as somehow routine, or something lacking its own arcane magic. “When I first heard of them, I thought it was as heavy as hell,” says Terry Butler, Obituary’s bassist since 2010. A veritable Zelig of the Florida death metal scene, pulling stints in Massacre, Death, Six Feet Under and more, Butler knew that there was something different about them.

“Early on, I knew the guys because we were all from the same town,” he says. “We all ran in the same circles. I always loved Obituary all these years. Musically, you can honestly say that Obituary is one of the forefathers of the whole movement. They were at the frontline of death metal, one of the creators of it, so to be in a band like that is very important to me, and I am very proud of that.”

Animated by primitive impulses, Obituary’s sound is too caveman to be overintellectualized, and yet, still, you can savor this force of nature on many different levels. Consider John Tardy, whose death growl obliterates all plosives before it, obviating any sense of conventional—read: human—elocution. What he was doing on the microphone as their debut LP, Slowly We Rot, opened with “Internal Bleeding” oozing out of the speakers—with the necro fizz of guitarist Trevor Peres’ guitar sawing through the mix atop a punishing rhythm from Tardy’s kid brother,

Donald, on the drums—was exceptional. Maybe even avant-garde. This was the death metal vocal style as performance art.

Or you can go all Fred Flintstone-in-a–battlevest and see Obituary as a soundtrack to life’s simple pleasures, like drinking beer and banging your head; marijuana if you’re so inclined.

“I try to make it simple. I try to make it as dark as possible,” says Peres. “Then there is stuff that’s more groovy and catchy. I definitely try to make stuff sound dark and heavy like it would be a score for a horror movie. We’ve always said that for years—our music is like a scary movie, but in musical form. When I write riffs, I still do the same thing, the same approach. I just try to keep it in the vein of Obituary and have that groove like we’ve always had. Simple catchy riffs—it has always been the same.”

But just because the riffs are easily digested doesn’t make them easy. There is something improbably difficult about making simple music.

Bands who have become singular on the back of an uncomplicated sound have—like the alligator— all been blessed by evolution from the get-go. It’s how AC/DC’s rock ‘n’ roll was in need of nothing else, a band that grew ageless because they never looked young anyway. Ditto, Motörhead. It’s how the Ramones maintained their furious momentum on a count of four. It’s how Autopsy remained vital, sloshing around in the gore of punkish death metal. And it is how Obituary’s return after nearly six years with Dying of Everything feels so familiar, and yet elicits those very same reactions of exhilaration and awe we felt back in the day when scanning the horizon for the next extreme, and first chanced upon Slowly We Rot. “Why would we want to change our style?” reasons Butler. “‘Okay, we’ve done everything.

Let’s try a different direction. To me, I would immediately throw that record in the trash, ’cause it’s not gonna sound good.”

On occasion, Obituary sublimate real-world issues into the roiling storm of death metal, as they did on their 1994 album, World Demise, where ecocide and planetary degradation abutted more abstract meditations on death and dying. But John Tardy instructs us not to read too much into it, that maybe it is best just to lean into the teeth of the Obituary death metal hurricane and surrender to it, then interpret it how we best see fit.

“We never really take ourselves too seriously, even with our lyrics,” he says. “Sometimes it looks like it and feels like it, and that’s certainly what we are after. But I remember when we first started jamming, [our] early influences were Nasty Savage and Savatage, and if you hear those songs like ‘Metal Up Your Ass’ and ‘Sycopathic Mind,’ we were so young we had no idea what we were really doing.” Exposure to early Hellhammer and Celtic Frost changed all that.

“We wanted to make it as heavy as we possibly could,” he continues. “Every album, to this day, every riff that we come up with, we just want it heavy. We want it pounding and heavy.”

Dying of Everything fits that description. John Tardy’s voice is remarkably undiminished by time; likewise his brother’s ability to stretch metal’s rigid form into a groove. It’s an album that’s infectious and raw, that speaks to something primeval in the human condition. And, yes, it’s still real difficult to make out all of the words, but no matter—just make up your own.

Furthermore, as the Tardy brothers tell us, even after all these years, this might just be the most important album they have ever recorded.

Sometimes [guitarist Ken Andrews] brings us stuff and I’ll look at it and think, ‘Man, it’s bit too happy for me, Ken.

WE’RE GONNA HAVE TO DUMB IT DOWN AND CAVEMAN IT UP A BIT HERE!’ JOHN TARDY

II.

THE LOST ART OF KEEPING A SECRET

It’s Halloween 2022, and Donald and John Tardy have the look of two men who have been keeping a secret for two years and have just been given permission to share it. As Donald explains, this was not easy, especially when out on the road for the Decibel Magazine Tour, then for a run down in Central and South America. They’ve played around a hundred shows since the pandemic, and in all that time they couldn’t play any songs off their new record.

“Not only that—we couldn’t even discuss them,” says Donald. “We couldn’t even bring it up, which is tough because I have a big mouth and I talk too much. I’ve been known to blurt out things. It was tough to just remember that we need to keep a lid on it even though people were asking.”

Now, 10 days away from the official announcement that the record is out in January through Relapse, whereupon first single “The Wrong Time” and its video will be shared, they’re pretty much fit to burst.

“It was tough to hold back and not release it, but, for God’s sakes, man, we knew that we had to

wait,” says Donald. “We had to wait for the world to open back up. This is probably the most important Obituary album we have made in our career, so we knew that we had no choice but to wait.”

The most important Obituary album? That’s a strong statement, especially when he told Kory Grow for Decibel’s Hall of Fame feature in 2007 that Cause of Death was the definitive work, the album with diagnostic relevance that “really started kids to realize what the two words mean when they say, ‘death metal.’” But Dying of Everything is coming at a very different stage in the band’s career, and at a different stage in their lives. When the conversation drifts off to those early days pioneering under the roof of Morrisound Recording under the watchful eye of producer Scott Burns, they talk of a band just living in the moment, sneaking bong hits and trying to make a record. Time is cheap to the young, less so for fiftysomethings.

“It’s just important because it has been almost six years since the last record and people are wondering, ‘Where the fuck are they?’” says Donald.

“Also, it feels more important because we are really proud of it,” adds John, the brothers taking turns to finish each other’s sentences.

“I think it’s a really good album, with a lot of good songs; it was just something that we did not want to put out while we were sitting at home for a year and a half. We really wanted to build it and do it right, and have a proper tour set up to support this thing.”

III.

“JOE, JUST RIP PEOPLE’S HEADS OFF.. ”

And they wanted to do it in their own time.

Dying of Everything was largely a DIY endeavor, tracked in the band’s home studio, RedNeck Studios in Gibsonton, FL. Over the years, they have been amassing studio gear, high-quality inputs and outboard equipment, building a Pro Tools rig, and applying the knowledge they first acquired at Morrisound. The Tardys shepherded most of the takes to disc, taking turns to punch each other in or else going alone, tracking when inspiration struck, sharing production and engineering duties and reaching out to old friend and former Morrisound engineer Mark Prator whenever something went south with the Pro Tools. Anyone who saw one of their full-album livestreams recently has an idea of what this setup looks like.

Once they tracked a song, they’d send the files off to Joe Cincotta at Full Force Studio in Long Island, where he’d apply the spit and polish to the mix, just as he did in 2017 for Obituary, and last year for the live recordings of Slowly We Rot and Cause of Death. Cincotta has been the band’s live engineer for the past 15 years. You don’t need to spend long with this new record to guess what instructions were relayed up the Eastern Seaboard. “There’s no question,” chuckles John.

“We tell Joe all the time. ‘Joe, just rip people’s heads off with this mix. Go for it, man. The DE C I BE L BRUA : N O V ERY D E• CF I BE EL M B E2R022032 1• :

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When they came out with [1994’s] World Demise, a lot of bands were influenced by that and took that style.

It even went into some of the hardcore stuff.

Some of the bands nowadays are still influenced by that breakdown groove,

WHICH, TO ME, OBITUARY STARTED. T ERRY BUTLER

bigger, the better. Just crank everything and go for it.’” Spare a thought for the limiters in the studio.

This is an everything-in-the-red record, a little like the Stooges’ Raw Power, but with death metal.

“I think the magic to that is not just that the Pro Tools rig is up to date and we have expensive inputs,and the proper equipment, but let’s face it, it’s the John Bonham theory—play the song well on your instrument and it is easy to mix,” says Donald. “[Cincotta] did a fantastic job with this album. It came back to us and my jaw hit the ground listening to these songs, and just how he mixed them.”

Famously, Donald Tardy voiced his displeasure at how his drums sounded on Cause of Death, where sound replacement and triggering was a groundbreaking moment in death metal production, but an experiment he was not keen to repeat. “I was never happy with our first three albums,” he admits. “I wish we could have redone those.” The lesson he took from those days working in Morrisound was to “stay organic,” and that means hewing close to the principles established by Glyn Johns when working with Bonham and Led Zeppelin.

“That sound that’s on the album is my snare drum and my tom sound,” he says. “I was very adamant to Joe. All these bands who are fixing their shit and making it absolutely perfect, triggering everything and sound-replacing everything, I am not that kind of guy. And Obituary’s songs don’t need that. Again, it goes back to John

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Bonham. He played so clean you didn’t have to put the microphones on the drum set; you just threw the microphones in the room and it sounds great because he is a great drummer. I just always think of that when I am recording a song—just play it well.

“Had I actually played like a maniac with 101 percent volume on my performance, and just been loud with my cymbals and stuff, Joe having to rip it and crush it? It might not have worked out that way. Instead it was played as clean as I’ve ever played on a record, and that allowed Joe to take the kick drum and snare sound and just make it really loud and powerful…

“All these new bands are piecing albums together, and one dude is in his living room, the other guy’s at his mom’s house, and they’re all using Kempers [digital amps that profile regular guitar amps], direct this and triggered drums, and then when they get the album, it is all perfect, meaning that is quantized, the timing is perfect. But it’s missing something. It’s missing a heartbeat. It’s missing blood flow. What we learned from the get-go was, man, you can’t replace that! Just amplifiers, raw, going through a microphone, and that snare drum mic’d up the way you want it, and playing the instrument well. You can’t beat that.”

IV.

GROOVE IS IN THE HEART

Dying of Everything has some of the most punishing and intense arrangements in the Obituary

catalog. The title track takes its title from a poem Donald’s girlfriend wrote—“I was like, ‘That’s brilliant!’ And it just fits this planet right now”—and it is a face-ripper, all jacking backbeat and whiplash changes. “Weaponize the Hate” is quintessential Obituary, a tour de force of 16th-note rough-housing and vintage Celtic Frost guitar. The title makes it sound like it’s a commentary on contemporary America, but in lieu of a lyric sheet, don’t bet on it; the smart money says John Tardy is playing word association, using words as much for the rhythmic potential of their syllables as their meaning on the page. That the syllables of “Dying of Everything” worked musically were a big reason they got used. Lyrically and sonically, Obituary are a Rorschach test; some see eco-panic and existential dread, diatribes against injustice in the courts or in society; others just hear gnarly riffs and death metal’s id unleashed and yowling at the moon.

Opener “Barely Alive”—which alternately could pass for “Buried Alive,” “Burly at Five” or “Very Alive” depending on how in tune the ear is with John Tardy’s gravel-pit enunciation—is the fastest track they’ve written, and it put the younger Tardy through the mill, to the amusement of his brother. “That’s the fastest we’ve ever had him have to do on double bass [drums], and we wait until we’re fiftysomething to do it!”

John laughs. “It just comes out shredding and blasting your face off.”

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This being Obituary, the tempo soon eases off. The band settles into the groove. In metal, it’s easy to blast, harder to groove, but this is what they were weaned on. Donald Tardy and bassist Terry Butler will pare the rhythm down to the essentials. There’s a lot of counting on this record, riffs switched around for maximum effect, tempo changes to spike the audience’s adrenaline, and yet much of it was written in the room and by instinct. Those instincts have been sharpened over the years of playing live and knowing what works. “When they come up with a riff, I immediately know what the song needs,” says Donald. “It’s just muscle memory and getting it right. Sometimes it’s literally immediate, like, ‘Oh my God! I already know what we are doing with this song.’”

This ability to second guess each other and know instinctively how the song is going to go is not the sole preserve of the band. After all these years, the audience—the quarter-ounce-a-day hesher and chin-stroking vinyl geek alike—has developed a second sight into the musicological terrain of the Obituary braintrust. Oftentimes, we know exactly what the band are going to do before they do it, and this knowledge—an immediately gratifying suspense—makes the songs no less rewarding when those tempo changes or breakdowns come in. If anything, the anticipation amplifies the payoff.

“It’s one of those things, like when we went out for [2014’s] Inked in Blood and we were playing like seven or eight songs off of our new album,” says John. “Most bands don’t play that much new music when they come out, but we are not afraid to play new songs right out of the gate. They are easy listening, if you will. They are not complicated. If you can get into them and anticipate and feel it, that just makes it fun listening as far as I’m concerned.”

That also makes Obituary, fundamentally speaking, a rock ‘n’ roll band, not all that far removed from the Pat Travers Band, whose “Snortin’ Whiskey” will tear through the public address to announce their presence onstage, before a limb-loosening amble through “Redneck Stomp” and launching into the savagery proper.

The Tardy brothers were raised on that stuff.

“Yeah, you’re right—groove is where we are at,” says Donald. “Groove is where we came from.

What’s the grooviest shit you can put on if a friend comes over and says, ‘Let’s listen to some music?’ Or if an alien comes down and says, ‘Play me a killer drummer.’ It would be John Bonham.”

He holds a similar affection for Vinny Appice’s work with Dio and later Heaven & Hell. “That Heaven & Hell album, the last thing they did with Dio, could possibly be the greatest album and the heaviest riffs… ever!” he adds. The Nasty Savage and Savatage, Slayer, Venom, Hellhammer and Celtic Frost influences played their part, but rock helped established their musical vocabulary, a sensibility that can be transposed from every-

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man blue-collar denim rock and country to the über-bleak morbidity of Obituary live favorites such as “I’m in Pain” and “Dying,” or the comic book audio violence of “Chopped in Half.” It’s not that they don’t enjoy watching virtuosity take metal into new directions; it’s just that this is not who they are.

“There is no question, we come from a classic rock and southern rock background, early on, lots of Skynyrd and Zeppelin, stuff like that,” says John. “D.T. will tell you; we did a tour with a band called Psycroptic, and he fell in love with them, listening to their albums nonstop. And those guys are so incredibly gifted and talented; it’s incredible what you hear when you listen to those albums. You can’t help but be impressed. But we’re just the opposite, caveman-style. We like to slow it down to get you going, so you can tap your toe to it.”

I was never happy with our first three albums.

I WISH WE COULD HAVE REDONE THOSE. D ONALD TARDY

Ken Andrews has been with the band for what seems like forever in real time, but in Obituary years, counted out in albums recorded, albums released, he is a relative newcomer. He contributed two tracks during the 2017 Obituary sessions, one of which ended up on the record, the other, “No,” as part of the Decibel Flexi Series, and another two here: the title track and the most Obituary-sounding track on the album, “Torn Apart.”

“They both came out fucking great, man,” says Donald. “‘Torn Apart’ is killer! I immediately thought, ‘Dude, Vinnie Paul!’ I thought Pantera. It had that beat, it felt really like Pantera, and I have always been a huge fan. I am not afraid to bring Vinnie’s style into my drumming because he was an influence. And once Ken heard that rhythm, he said, ‘That’s killer!’ And we put it together.”

“That was another one where I sent D.T. an idea and then it just kept building, more and

more,” enthuses Andrews. “Fifteen riffs, and then we had to cut them and trim it down.”

One of Obituary’s gifts over the years has been to recruit well, finding the right player to complement Peres. Allen West helped define the Obituary sound on their debut, leaving for its follow-up before returning for The End Complete, recording five albums all in with the band before leaving in 2006 and eventually getting into all kinds of legal issues, first getting jailed in 2007 for a DUI, then again in March 2013, for cooking meth. James Murphy sat in for West on Cause of Death, his unimpeachable pedigree gilding an all-time genre classic before West returned, and he headed off to cement his legacy with Disincarnate and Testament. This era, both Butler and Andrews note, was the hardest to master.

“When we are doing those songs, I try to do them as close as possible to what they did, but then add my own thing to it,” says Andrews.

“Because I love the solos. I’ll add my own little ending or whatever, but it is on my mind all the time. I just try to put my own spin on it and give respect to those guys, and on the new album especially, I try to add my own stuff to it.”

“There are a couple of songs on there where I was like, ‘What the hell were we thinking?’” says Peres. “Sometimes simple stuff is harder to play in a way because you’ve got the flow, the nuance, the change of the riff; that sort of stuff has got to be spot-on or else it sounds messed up.”

The late Ralph Santolla moseyed on over from Team Deicide to fill West’s spot and drop hyperproficient shred on Xecutioner’s Return (2007) and Darkest Day (2009). Andrews, however, is cut from a different cloth, and it makes John Tardy laugh just to think about it, because, as a thrash diehard, Andrews was never the obvious choice.

“Ken’s funny—back when we were growing up, when we were first starting out, he was not a fan of Obituary at all,” John says. “He was not a death metal fan. He was more of a thrash guy.”

Andrews gets it now. Even so, he occasionally has to be reminded of the house style that’s been established over the years. “It’s a fun challenge with Ken,” John says. “Sometimes he brings us stuff and I’ll look at it and think, ‘Man, it's a bit too happy for me, Ken. We’re gonna have to dumb it down and caveman it up a bit here!’

[Laughs] But you know what? He’s totally down with whatever we talk to him about, and he’ll try anything. His leads, man?! God, we play all these old songs and Ken plays all these leads— whether they are Allen’s, James’ or Ralph’s—he can play ’em all to a T, every night. When you listen to his solos, in the songs that we have written with him, he can combine them and it almost feels like you are listening to each one of those guitar players. He comes up with such tasty leads. He is really fun to work with. His style is a lot different [than] Trevor’s, and it makes me try to do things a little bit different.”

V.

SLOWLY WE EVOLVE

Dying of Everything is evolution by increments.

As in, by John Tardy’s reckoning, it is the first death metal album to feature “a little plastic shaker,” which at the risk of giving Obituary a Santana feel, turns up on “The Wrong Time.”

What else is new? There’s a box-office production to “War” that will sound like the first act of Saving Private Ryan should you avail yourself of the upcoming Dolby Atmos release—another genre first—that’s presently getting mixed at Morrisound’s new facility. It moves to a beat that has a ’90s hip-hop feel—a remnant of Peres and John Tardy’s 2004 collaboration with Necro?

“I tell you, it is exactly why we can go out and tour with Hatebreed and Agnostic Front and their fans still get into Obituary,” says John. “It’s songs like that that are a little bit different. It’s just fun. It’s as heavy as can be, but it’s fun.”

The all-action production on “War,” and its physicality, is reminiscent of the World Demise era, when a Photoshop 3.0 of burning smokestacks and environmental degradation adorned the cover and there was muscle and vigor to the arrangements that was still death metal, but more pit-friendly, less abstract. Here’s a weird thing about Obituary: For all their success, where are the clones? You have the Cannibal clones, the pathologically forensic Carcass clones. It has been said that some bands—and we hope you are sitting down for this revelation—ripped off Incantation. Entombed, the same. Obituary clones? They’re harder to spot. Butler thinks the World Demise era made its presence felt on the extreme metal scene, only that its influence was scattered and carried by the wind.

“When they came out with World Demise, a lot of bands were influenced by that and took that style,” says Butler. “It even went into some of the

hardcore stuff. Some of the bands nowadays are still influenced by that breakdown groove, which, to me, Obituary started. But going back to the question, if you were to imitate Obituary, you’d be caught out immediately because Obituary is a certain style that is theirs. That tone, the way the chords are used—that’s Obituary. And if you want to blatantly rip that off, all power to you, but it’d be noticed immediately.”

Now, if you want to go try, the band sure ain’t hiding their secrets. Buy yourself a ProCo Rat 2 distortion pedal for $79, a Fender Stratocaster and a Marshall amp, et voila! You’ve got the raw materials for Peres’ rhythm guitar tone. That’s half the battle right there. “There is no rocket science behind anything that he does,” says John. But here’s where it gets real tricky. What do you do for a singer? Craigslist? No. Sourcing a bootleg John Tardy might require some weird science, an expedition to the Everglades in search of the perfectly preserved body of the skunk ape.

Administer 2-4-5 Tioxin and see what it can do on the mic, what shape its throat is in. Just don’t look to tech for the answer.

“It’s just keeping it simple,” says Donald.

“Too much technology is sometimes not a good thing. Trevor’s raw, muddy, organic feel and Ken’s blend of choppy, really tight [playing] style blend so well together. That’s where the Obituary sound comes from. I feel sorry for those musicians who can’t figure out their sound, that are still like, ‘I got a new toy…’ Dude, find your shit!

Find your shit and have fun with it.”

Obituary have already got that side of things down pat and are having fun with the sound.

Also, after 11 studio albums and nigh-on four decades at the death metal coal face, Hall of Fame accolades, whatever, they are exactly

where they want to be. They are back on support slots. Andrews, Butler and Peres all roar their approval, moving in and out of a Zoom background like an acid flashback, as they check in from San Antonio, where they’re supporting Amon Amarth and Carcass. The Tardy brothers said the same thing, too. Their legacy as genre trailblazers, the classic albums, “Chopped in Half,” a rep as one of the fiercest live bands on the circuit, all this has been building to become a career support band. First to the bar, early to bed. That is success.

“Man, I do not miss headlining,” says Donald, John nodding, both looking like they’ve been given free cable and beer for life. “We worked 30 years to be a support band! [Laughs] This American tour is just about to start, and how lucky are we that we get to go play 29 shows with Carcass and be able to watch Carcass every night, to be able to watch Bill Steer’s guitar playing? I mean, the dude is a god on guitar. And then the Amon Amarth dudes. We toured with them 10 years ago and remained friends. They invited us out and we didn’t waste a split second to say yes and be a part of this tour. Again, it goes back to [being] friends, family, brothers.”

That’s not to say there’s not a little friendly competition between bands. Book ’em and they’ll bring their A game.

“We know what’s happening after we play,” says Donald. “Carcass is absolutely going to be doing some blast beats and killer riffs… What is Obituary gonna bring? We’re gonna bring the meat and potatoes! All these songs that are 1,000 miles an hour? We gotta bring some groove and some heaviness and some Florida stink-swamp shit to it! You know what I mean?!

That’s our job.”

DE C I BED LE•CF : N O V ERY I BE E LBRUA M B E2 R02203 2 1• :

65 65

INSIDE ≥

68 DEADFORM Dino + Bolt Thrower riffs = Not Garbage 69 EMBALM Not exactly protected from decay

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

69 ENVY Really, really, really wish it was longer 69 OLD FOREST Back in the woods...

71 VV Between a goth rock and a hard place

Finding Nemo AHAB

FEBRUARY

12

Fight for the Bill of Rights!

10

Kill at Versailles!

5

The Devil Dog is out!

1

Volleyball! Join me!

Seafaring funeral doom pillars set their fathometers for 20,000 leagues on their tremendous fifth LP

T

here’s nothing particularly novel about scouring the briny deep for heavy metal subject matter, but at this point I think it’s fair to say that no band has made ocean worship their primary character trait more than Ahab. Ever since they AHAB stormed onto the scene with 2006’s incredible The Call of the Wretched The Coral Tombs Sea (#100 on our “Top 100 Doom Metal Albums of All Time” list), the N A PA L M German quartet has been pairing its instantly identifiable music with maritime literature themes and artwork to create a wholly original oeuvre—so much so, in fact, that they basically invented an entire subgenre in the process: nautical funeral doom. ¶ Alas, it’s been eight years since Ahab poked their heads above the waves—probably something to do with the Coriolis effect—but thankfully, they dredged up The Coral Tombs, one of the best albums of their 19-year career, on their way back to the surface. ¶ Perhaps the sense of urgency from being at sea for so long explains the first 90 seconds of “Prof. Aronnax’s Descent Into the Vast Oceans,” which kicks off the proceedings with a torpedo barrage of blast beats and shrieks (the latter courtesy of Ultha’s Chris Noir)

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]

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DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2023 : 67

that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Anaal Nathrakh record. Anyone wary of a total style reboot won’t have to wait long, though, as the riffs soon settle into the silt and the ghostly croon of vocalist/guitarist Daniel Droste sets the tone for the 66-minute voyage ahead.

Past Ahab releases have used renowned tales

by Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe for thematic inspiration, and The Coral Tombs continues this tradition by bringing Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea into the fold.

CliffsNotes if you’re unfamiliar: A natural scientist sets sail in search of a fabled sea monster that ends up being a giant submarine piloted by a dude with a serious case of ocean madness.

Droste flips the album’s narrative voice between the two protagonists, Professor Aronnax and Captain Nemo, as they visit mysterious underwater regions and battle existential dread amidst a backdrop of lurching funeral doom.

Ahab have always shined brightest when they’re crafting cinematic soundscapes that intentionally mirror their source material, and The Coral Tombs is no exception. When “Colossus of the Liquid Graves” hits that familiar Ahab stomp—with drummer Cornelius Althammer and bassist Stephan Wandernoth locked into a pulsating groove while Droste and fellow guitarist Christian Hector weave punishing riffs and watery melodies on top—it conjures vivid images of a gargantuan beast slowly clomping across the Mariana Trench. Halfway through “Mobilis in Mobili,” a series of falling notes mimic a descent into the fathomless depths before an atmospheric instrumental section lets you know you just hit the seabed.

A similar tactic colors the end of the record, as “The Maelstrom” sends its final riff into a deadly whirlpool while Esoteric frontman Greg Chandler bellows, “Descend the maelstrom, ’til bolts give way to mighty waves!” in the voice of Captain Nemo, spinning further and further down, fated to lie in aquatic obscurity. —MATT SOLIS

CASKET ROBBERY

6

Rituals of Death B LO O D B L A S T DISTRIBUTION

Nature vs. nurture

There’s part of the bio accompanying this, the second album by Casket Robbery, referring to them and their sound being influenced by their emergence from “the darkest and most desolate areas of the Midwest.” Dude, this quintet is from Madison, an oasis of liberal hipness amid backwoods, chaw-spittin’, cheese-fuckin’ Wisconsin conservatism. The last time your intrepid scribe found himself wandering the streets of Madtown, I stumbled across both a Primus cover band 68 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

soundchecking in a dive bar and a women’s synchronized water-skiing team practicing on Monona Bay in the heart of downtown. Spare us the “hard done by” gibberish, please.

Casket Robbery sound like the sort of dudes (and dudette) who grew up on Korn and Coal Chamber before discovering Fear Factory and Soulfly, then Suffocation and Morbid Angel.

This isn’t a slight on them for being young— one can’t control when and in which backseat two strangers in the parking lot of a Judas Priest show felt moved to copulate—it’s more that Casket Robbery come across as a T-bone collision of eras. There’s death/metalcore (complete with electronica bloops) dripping all over the machine gun groove of “The Hidden… the Hideous”; pinched harmonic squeals delightfully make up the lion’s share of the riffs in “Beautiful Death” and “Bone Mother”; and it’s obvious the band (like everyone else) loves them some John Carpenter, a dude who is as old as time itself!

Most importantly, however, the band sounds like they’re having fun doing what they do. Far from the supposed inky bleakness of their home and more in tune with the celluloid horror themes explored in “Worm Food” and “Don’t Forget the Eyes,” Casket Robbery marry broad streams of extreme music with broad smiles. Even if it doesn’t sound like it.

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

DEADFORM

8

Deadform BRAINSAND

Life is abuse

Deadform are the wholly logical end result of three dudes from Dystopia, Stormcrow and Laudanum getting together in someone’s practice space in Oakland, cracking their knuckles (and maybe some beers), and turning up the volume. With Dino Sommese on drums and vocals, Brian Clouse on bass and backing vox, and Judd Hawk handling guitar and assorted noise, the end result is precisely as ugly, sludgy and miserable as any fan of their respective bands might expect—a hot blast of metallic punk with a brilliantly thick guitar tone and a bad attitude, spiritual kin to both Bolt Thrower and pre-reptilian downfall Amebix. Calling it a supergroup seems reductive; this is no shiny nostalgia trap or major label cash grab, though completists may thrill at seeing the members’ combined résumés. This self-titled five-song demo comes courtesy of Clouse’s own DIY label, Brainsand, and they turned down Tankcrimes’ offer to release it on vinyl, preferring to claw their way up on their own time.

Deadform doesn’t hold many stylistic surprises, but it is extremely satisfying if you’re

in the market for nihilistic, sludgy death crust. These are experts we’re dealing with here, who have been operating at the top of their games since most of the people reading this were in diapers (or rocking embarrassing ’90s fashion). It stands to reason that there’d be a formula on most of these tunes: Set the tone with an unsettling spoken word intro, build up some delicious tension, then launch into chuggy, mid-tempo, punk-inflected excoriations of humanity’s cruelties and environmental decay. “Crawling Chaos” and “Man’s Greatest Fraud” are perfect examples of the form, while the instrumental “Eutrophication” fully leans into the cracking creepiness and closer “Dead Zones” is pure feral metalpunk with a rock ‘n’ roll sneer.

As they’d tell you, it sounds like Oakland (in the best, least gentrified sense of the word).

Sometimes you just want a taste of the good stuff, and Deadform deliver. —KIM KELLY

DRYAD

5

The Abyssal Plain PROSTHETIC

Schlock Cousteau

Would you listen to this noisy little nugget of nastiness? Seriously, would you? We’re really asking, and now, so are Prosthetic Records, who have thrown their never-predictable weight behind Dryad, the Iowan quartet with a forest sprite name who nonetheless seem obsessed with subaquatic themes. Five years, a couple demo EPs and one split release into their run, Dryad have compiled their first full-length, a raw and regressive 35 minutes of spirited retro black metal dressed up in death/thrash crossover and slashed with an unrepentant punk attitude. And don’t forget the keyboard interludes that inform the band’s sound as much as any of those other elements. Have you made up your mind yet about listening to it?

Just a couple years ago, Dryad gathered their short recorded history into Anthology, which might indicate they were clearing the way for renewed focus on writing a sleek, carefully curated album of highly organized songs. Their partnership with Prosthetic—whose roster tends toward the technically proficient and the sonically pristine—might suggest that Dryad had cleaned up their act a bit. Neither assumption bears out. Dryad have packed a rude and raucous basement show into a hairy little package, then sprinkled it with glittery synth bits for color. The songs trade mostly in straightforward rhythms and uncomplicated riffs. Claire Nunez’s screechy and heavily reverbed bark gives the most aggressive songs a real sense of life they might have lacked

otherwise. Dryad’s talent and urgency are evident throughout much of this material, but The Abyssal Plain struggles to make a cohesive point, nonetheless. —DANIEL LAKE

EMBALM

7

Prelude to Obscurity 20 BUCK SPIN/ H O S P I TA L P R O D U C T I O N S

Not just old-school, but well-preserved

You’ll never dig deep enough. No matter how hard you try, there will be some death metal release, either current or birthed soon after the subgenre screamed bloody gore, that you missed. After more than 30 years, death metal’s reanimated corpse still marches on regardless of trends. And the undying interest in this fucked music is the reason why there are labels out there still looking to unearth lost DM—releases buried as relics and now encased in viscid maggot excreta.

Not to be confused with Cleveland death metal steamers Embalmer, Embalm existed from 1992 to ’97 and never got out of the embryonic stage. But by the time they had the final demo, Prelude to Obscurity, primed, DM was somewhere between stages three and four of rigor mortis: autolysis, bloat, active decay and skeletonization.

In ’97, Scandinavia had DM records worthy of attention, but the melodicism of Children of Bodom’s Something Wild or In Flames’ Whoracle was miles away from the vile racket of Embalm. As 20 Buck Spin and Hospital Productions are acutely aware, 2022 is the right time to spit-shine this demo, since the nasty end of DM is more popular now than ever before. The live tracks added here are rough as hell, but the demo’s brutality in its remastered state (thanks to the ubiquitous Arthur Rizk) leaves you wondering what would have happened to Embalm had they released these vicious songs a few years earlier in the ’90s. This is an intriguing collector piece for diehard DM gravediggers. —DEAN BROWN

ENVY

6

Seimei TEMPORARY RESIDENCE

Functioning on impatience

Japan’s Envy, the postscreamo stalwarts that have been kicking around for 30 years, put out a full-length in 2020 and are following it up with Seimei, a three-track EP that is 11 minutes flat.

And there just isn’t a lot here, folks.

The recording begins with the title track, which is your standard Envy song. There is some

spoken word, harsh screams, big lush riffs, nice melodic guitar leads, quiet parts, a triumphant ending… it’s the kind of song the sextet is really good at writing and what a million other bands have ripped off at this point. Song two, “Zanshin,” is really driving and more straight postrock, with just the spoken word, but the same big, layered inspirational parts. It’s what you’d want to hear playing when someone’s running really fast to go save the love of their life. And finally, we have closer “Tamayura,” which is just some heavily reverbed guitars and/or keyboards wafting behind more spoken word for about two minutes. Then it’s over.

So, what should we make of this? The proper songs are good. The first one might even be a standout track on a full-length. But there is nothing noteworthy or unique here that really required them to be put out all by their lonesome.

This isn’t the band’s first minor EP, and as a stopgap reminder that they’re still around, Seimei does the job. But anyone waiting for new Envy would have probably been happy to wait a little longer for something more significant.

—SHANE MEHLING

IMPERIUM DEKADENZ

6

Into Sorrow Evermore N A PA L M

There are no uninteresting things…

Imperium Dekadenz take their brand of windswept black metal more seriously than the corpsepaint they lack. Over nearly 20 years, the Germans—featuring multi-instrumentalists Vespasian and Horaz—have built on a solid foundation of intensity and atmosphere. The group’s 2010 platter, Procella Vadens, was their lighthouse moment.

New album Into Sorrow Evermore is the current evolution, where aggression, repetition and melody churn scenically in a cauldron of Weltschmerz.

This isn’t a particularly “dangerous” or “revolutionary” expression. Not that it’s needed, either.

Instead—in concert with Winterfylleth, Wolves in the Throne Room and Wiegedood— Imperium Dekadenz take on the task of positing a far more insidious notion. Musically, Into Sorrow Evermore pans from sweeping introspection (“Aurora,” “November Monument,” the title track) to violent insurrection (“Awakened Beyond Dreams,” “Forests in Gale,” “Memories ... a Raging River”). Much like predecessors Dis Manibvs (2016) and When We Are Forgotten (2019) parlayed consistency in sound, pacing and style as strengths, they’re also the Germans’ greatest weakness.

While albums are designed around full songs, dropping the proverbial (or actual) needle anywhere on Into Sorrow Evermore results in a

distinction-free experience. Imperium Dekadenz are their best in transition or at either end of the extremity spectrum. The middle, as the Germans are wont to live in, works well when used with constraint—the middle of “Awakened Beyond Dreams” is a good counter, for example— but nearly an hour of it, at this stage of life, borders on tedious. —CHRIS DICK

OLD FOREST

8

The Old, Old Forest: Complete Demo Collection 1998-2001 C U LT N E V E R D I E S

Feed the trees

When most people hear the words “English black metal,” they’ll immediately think Cradle of Filth; the more “obscure” might go with Hecate Enthroned, and the on-the-nose types will scream for Venom. And while these are all correct answers to some degree, the band that should be on their lips is Old Forest. And thanks to this collection via Cult Never Dies, we might be a few steps closer to that reaction.

This release compiles three demos that were recorded between 1998 and 2001. The first two, ’98’s Of Mists and Graves and The Kingdom of Darkness, contain tracks that would remanifest as the debut album Into the Old Forest, albeit in a more caustic and esoteric manner than their later versions, bringing the listener into the time of early Emperor, Gehenna, et al. Raw yet atmospheric traditional second-wave hymns performed with passion and sincerity.

The third demo, 2001’s recently unearthed Sussex Hell Hound shows the band sharpening their craft right before tragically (temporarily) disbanding for nearly a decade. They don’t stray from their original (left hand) path, but of the three demos, Sussex shows a leap in songcraft maturity. Think of the jump from Under the Sign of the Black Mark to Blood Fire Death and you’ve got the idea.

For years Old Forest stayed unfairly obscured by shadows. Hopefully The Old, Old Forest helps rectify this, as all three demos—like the rest of their recordings—are a treasure waiting for maniacs into sincere old black metal to discover.

—NEILL JAMESON

PSYCHONAUT

6

Violate Consensus Reality PELAGIC

Progressive psychedelic post-cosmonaut metal

A lifetime to craft a debut yields just 18 months for a follow-up, which then either rides the lightning of the bow to equal or greater glory, DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2023 : 69

7

Dad religion | T R A N S L AT I O N L O S S

The origin story of these wayward thrashing Chicagoans is simply adorable, and involves taekwondo tykes, play dates, toy swords, COVID boredom and a menagerie of prior experience with progressive instrumetal, thrashing grind, full-on NYHC, angular hardcore, black metal and minimalist noise rock. Originally designed to be an isolation-era dad-thrash band—guitarist Dallas Thomas (ex-Pelican, Asschapel, the Swan King) and vocalist Artie White (ex-Indecision, Milhouse, Concrete Cross) met at their kids’ martial arts lessons—Ready for Death found themselves ready for the public eye after self-recording their debut and drafting in Racetraitor guitarist Dan Binaei, drummer Shawn Brewer

(Haggathorn) and bassist Luca Cimarusti (Luggage, Annihilus).

For descriptive simplicity’s sake, Ready for Death sound like a bunch of dudes with years of diverse and collated experience dragging their knuckles through a stack of Nuclear Assault, Bolt Thrower, Plutocracy and early Anthrax records.

Sometimes it’s ornately melodic and layered, like in the stratified and deceptively technical “Worldwide Blackout.” Other times, a beast of towering meaty riffs and tattooed-neck sing-alongs are unleashed via the anthemic “Church of the Nuclear Bomb” and “Vaporized.” Graciously, Ready for Death is terse and compact at 20-some-odd minutes; it makes its hamhock-sized point on the cave wall and gets the fuck out before overstaying its welcome. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

—DEAN BROWN

SHAAM LAREIN or slumps into forced inspiration. Psychonaut manage both on their second LP, Violate Consensus Reality, making gains, while also waning from their hurtling psych metal launch, 2018’s Unfold the God Man. Four years waiting for the Belgian trio to rocket back to a churning, burning, pulsing void ends in a bigger, broader and ultimately more homogenous zone.

Apple Music underlines this in classifying the first full-length as “psychedelic post-metal.”

Now, Stefan de Graef (vocals/guitar), Thomas Michiels (bass) and Harm Peters (drums) identify as “progressive post-metal.” Tech codification means less zero, and although album two flexes only hard, steely muscle and precision, that tone’s known, seen and heard, whereas its predecessor jammed a delirious faux instability—screaming, shouting, throat-singing—akin to Finnish cosmonauts Oranssi Pazuzu. Violate Consensus Reality instead conceptualizes, long a jumpstart to album deliveries, so it thrusts more composed, like the notation of a wave rather than the wave itself.

70 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

Opener “A Storm Approaching” sounds like Mastodon arrived, then Leviathan-like next of kin “All Your Gods Have Gone” doubles down on the blood and thunder for an instant Psychonaut essential. “Age of Separation,” punishing and uncompromising, ramps up the centerpiece title track, featuring fellow Belgian Stefanie Mannaerts of Brutus. All good—except Side B flounders.

“Hope” fosters tone deaf rock lite, ’90s nümetal vox and piano, after which all else after lapses into generic vocals and “progressive postmetal.” By the end, closer “Towards the Edge,” that lean into uniformity cauterizes Psychonaut into a psychoblot. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

RE-BURIED

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

Dig it repeatedly

“From Beneath” opens Re-Buried’s full-length debut with Morbid Angel-esque cacophony.

7

8

Sticka En Kniv I Världen S VA R T

Miranda’s sex garden

If In Solitude and the Devil’s Blood got into a psychotropic drug war over the common ground between doom metal and post-punk, it might resemble Swedish mavericks Shaam Larein. Or, if Sandy Dennyfronted Fairport Convention saddled up with Comus in a time machine and found themselves not in present-day London, but in hardscrabble Gottsunda, there might be an approximation to what Shaam Larein are up to on their sophomore effort, Sticka En Kniv I Världen.

As with most magic of the unorthodox type, the eight songs on offer aren’t memory gum. At no point on Sticka En Kniv I Världen is the attraction instantaneous. Rather, much like nonconformists Reveal!, the outermost edges of Tribulation and the weirder parts of now-dead Purson, the allure is in the vibe, the upper atmosphere and lowest soil. This is “so below, as above”-type

PHOTO BY MICHAEL VALLERA

READY FOR DEATH, Ready for Death

The Floridian death metal masters’ patent demolition is evident from the serpentine riffs and the martial blasting. But with that comes black metal’s harsh tonalities and a subterranean bass rumble that’ll rattle your sternum—all of which is captured by a signature Billy Anderson production job, with the dirt of the recording left intact.

Infusing death metal with shards of BM and righteously noxious doom is nothing new to the scene at this stage, yet Re-Buried handle the requisite balance of styles better than some.

Having Fórn vocalist Chris Pinto’s staccato guttural barks and rare pitched shrieks, as well as the rhythm section of U.S. funeral doom act Un (the clearly now-caffeinated tandem of Alex Bytnar and Clayton Wolff), helps in that regard.

The monstrous collective low-end, aided and abetted by rhythm guitarist Eddie Bingaman, allows lead player Paul Richards ample room to distinguish tracks from mere classic Florida/ New York death metal worship. For instance, highlight “Sepulchral Stench” sounds oddly like High on Fire if they were loaded on Immolation rather than Motörhead’s speed-snortin’ mania.

It’s in this sludgy death metal style—akin to a bonged-out Dismember—that Re-Buried excel, and they should continue to focus on expanding this niche in the future.

For now, this formative band’s churning syncopations, jolting blasts and equally impactful drop-tempo doom dirges will keep the (beer) bellies of Dead Congregation, Cruciamentum or Autopsy gluttons full ’til the next round.

stuff. Whether it’s the old church smell of “Flesh of Gold,” the (funeral) march of “I Have No Face” or the velvety Victorian noir of “Murderer,” the anchor is Shaam Larein’s haunting crepuscular cowls and carols. She’s at once frighteningly immense and incredibly fragile.

Her band (or rather, the band) is just as skilled. Throughout, they pull in, absorb and eruct supernatural musings with no real genre, or color brightly in established lines. Under such conditions, even songs like the vaporous “Leave Me Here to Die” and dark Bond theme song “Massacre” appear congruous to Shaam Larein’s expression. That they close out Sticka En Kniv I Världen is no stranger than the title track and “Flesh of Gold” opening it. Shaam Larein’s wound is open. Dive in. —CHRIS DICK

At the Gates of Dusk ROCKMARK

Love the craft

Promotional materials push Ultar’s position as a postblack metal band, but first impressions of At the Gates of Dusk don’t seem to support the claim. The music’s shining steel face—an alloy of powerfully produced blast beats, rasping vocal volleys, and evil guitar and bass riffing—appears to live more comfortably among the high theater of Emperor or Cradle of Filth rather than wander in the low-concept personal miasma of the shoegazers that have cropped up over the past decade or so. It’s not until the introduction of third track “Antiques” that anything gets quiet enough to hear the actual strings on those guitars, and even that moment builds pretty quickly into a midtempo march that wouldn’t be out of place on any straight-up black metal flamethrower.

There are enough sharpened fangs on this record for any aficionado of the abyss to appreciate.

But “Antiques” provides a key for relistening to the rest of the songs, and that’s when Ultar’s landscape really opens up. The waifish melodic vocals buried in the chorus of “Evening Star” begin to rise out of this otherwise bloodthirsty war machine of a song. The skull-scouring intensity of “Rats in the Walls” roars atop a somewhat more serene bed of breathy guitar lines. “Through the Golden Gates of Dawn” attempts to marry a relentless martial violence to something more ethereal, and succeeds to greater and lesser degrees across its seven minutes. In all, Dusk hurtles through a corkscrewing fire wheel of modern black metal with polish and style, though it’s this panache that occasionally obscures the substance of Ultar’s art and calls into question what it is exactly that they have to say. —DANIEL LAKE

8

The Falling Tide

Treebather | S E A S O N O F M I S T

For all the kvlt handwringing that came in the wake of Roads to Judah and especially Sunbather, the emergence of Deafheaven didn’t really end up having much of an impact on black metal as a whole. (We don’t talk about Ghost Bath in this house.) Much like their spiritual forebears in Alcest, Deafheaven moved further and further away from the genre as their career went on, and shimmering, shoegaze-inflected post-black metal vacated the zeitgeist accordingly. In the brief window when it felt like a post-Sunbather revolution was afoot, Wollongong, Australia’s Woods of Desolation released their third album, As the Stars, arguably a high-water mark for the subgenre. Then they promptly went silent.

Now, eight years after As the Stars, Woods of Desolation have returned with The Falling Tide. It feels like they never left. Project leader D. is still a master of the chord progression

VV

7

Neon Noir S P I N E FA R M

Total eclipse of the heartagram

Do you miss H.I.M.? I miss H.I.M. They were a great way to figure out which members of mid-2000s messageboards had a chance of finding happiness and which were gonna die alone in an Aborted longsleeve, surrounded by empty Mountain Dew Code Reds and bags of 3D Doritos. It’s okay to have feelings besides berserker rage and funeral doom sads! Sometimes you just need super-sappy, heartagram-on-sleeve melodic metal. The Finnish goth gods last released a record in 2013. Now frequently-unshirted frontman Ville Valo has unveiled (get it?) his first solo full-length as VV, looking and sounding more vampiric than ever.

that somehow feels depressing and uplifting at the same time. He heaps his riffs with a deep wistfulness that serves as a reminder of this sound’s awesome emotional potential. “Far From Here” and “Beneath a Sea of Stars,” are archetypal post-black metal epics, all twinkling guitar, wind-tunnel drumming and forlorn howls building in an endless crescendo. The quiet instrumental “The Passing…” adds a dollop of Disintegration-era Cure to its Slowdive-y swirl, while “Anew” closes things on a radiant note, its major-key coda being maybe the most explicitly beautiful passage on the entire record.

There’s nothing world-shattering about The Falling Tide, but it stands as a sterling example of what blackgaze can do when the “black” isn’t totally neglected in favor of the “gaze.” Like As the Stars and its immediate predecessor in the Woods of Desolation discography, Torn Beyond Reason, it’s one of the best albums of its style.

—BRAD SANDERS

Neon Noir does not stray far from the H.I.M. formula of melodrama and melody. If anything, the loss of his infernal backing band has pushed things a little more to the poppy side of things, although not significantly—guitars toned a little less heavy, maybe. Otherwise, the topics deal with love and loss and depression and all that good stuff. And he’s not subtle about it—half the song titles literally have the words love, loss, and tears in them. So, he hasn’t cheered up in the intervening time.

Good for listeners. Who wants a happy Valo?

Songs like “Echolocate Your Love” and “The Foreverlost” fulfill the expected quota of lachrymose lullabies.

Unfortunately, same problems with this one as the last few H.I.M. efforts: too long, hooks don’t latch on until after a few listens. It’ll still piss off messageboard CHUDs. —JEFF TREPPEL DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2023 : 71

PHOTO BY NUIT PHOTOGRAPHY

ULTAR

7

WOODS OF DESOLATION,

by

EUGENE S. ROBINSON

A CURIOUS CASE OF

J. MASCIS DId

you know that

Marlon Brando’s best friend—some have claimed lover—was a guy named Wally Cox, who, despite the porn star name, laid his claim to fame playing a bespectacled betacharacter called Mr. Peepers? Weird bedfellows, indeed, and not at all on the mark for the comparison I am about to make, but if ever there was an unlikely philosophical touchstone for me over at least a quarter of my life now, it’s been J Mascis.

Which I am sure would come as a complete surprise to J Mascis.

One thing that needs to be considered when you consider hardcore is that the scene at its height was never that huge. So, sitting on someone’s stoop in Boston with Gerard Cosloy— who went on to start Homestead Records, and then Matador—on the occasion of a Whipping Boy show in Boston that still wins the prize for the most violent show we’d ever played, packed as it was, for which we got paid the least—$4 by the late Mr. Billy Ruane—the talk was loose and wide as he tried, without much success, to explain Boston to me.

72 : FEBRUARY 2023 : DECIBEL

He explained Kilslug to me.

Slapshot. And then Deep Wound, Mascis’ pre-Dinosaur Jr band.

Something else I just didn’t get.

He, if memory serves, had a boom box and played me some, and my orthodoxy wouldn’t let it make sense, but I paid attention, and when they became Dinosaur Jr. and got signed to SST, I was fully dialed in. It was—or sounded to me like—the music of surrender.

There was nothing in hardcore’s DNA that had spelled surrender for me. It was almost, in fact, the music of anti-surrender, sporting iconic songs like Blitz’s “Never Surrender.” But there it was all over You’re Living All Over Me, what I like to call the Bukowski Paradox, after the poet, this mating of talent and absence of any kind of obvious forms of ambition.

But the time was absolutely right for it since it was right around when people you’d seen at shows vomiting on themselves a few years earlier were actually playing to thousands of people, touring and making enough money to at least afford televisions.

Unlike the metal from the same period, there was no obvious interest—or maybe availability—in the trappings of success. But if success was getting to never not be on tour? They had it.

However, that’s not where it worked its way into my head.

“I think it would probably be best if we lived apart.” It’s not easy hurting someone you genuinely like, but life is short, and being miserable about who you go to bed with and where is not a way to spend your time.

“Why?” The question I should have expected and didn’t, so the fact that the answer was what it was, I found shocking since, without a pause, we got to this.

“Because.” OK. I was under a little pressure.

“Because why?”

“You’re living all over me.” And there it was. Without shame or pause, I was letting Dinosaur Jr. do the heavy lifting for me. I might take a break here to lie and say this is the one and only time, but I won’t. Mascis’ worldview just kept creeping into spots where things

were getting hot for me and lots of things were getting hot for me, and all of that Mascis disconnected cool was just the thing.

A thing I had totally forgotten when Oxbow had, in one of the world’s strangest pairings—up there with us and King Diamond, or us and Celtic Frost, or us and Peter Brötzmann—gotten to play with Dinosaur Jr. some place at SXSW. I spied Mascis there on the periphery of the outdoor stage and was heading toward him to say… something when I got detoured.

It was a record industry type, a friend of an ex, who decided for reasons never clear to me to continue an argument I had with the ex, using herself as a proxy. Not what I wanted or expected, but then there was this.

“Hey… she just ran away from me.

Faster than I could crawl.” She worked her mouth around that, wordlessly, either recognizing the lyrical lift or not. In either case, it was enough to stop her. Which is all I needed.

So, Mascis, again, for the win.

And me? Just glad to be along for the ride.

ILLUSTRATION BY ED LUCE