guitar

. . . Immolation are one of death metal’s most interesting bands musically. Their sound is instantly recognizable, a seesaw battle between dissonance and melody; the title of their 2007 album Shadows in the Light is apt. When I saw them live recently, they opened with “Passion Kill.” The song contains their most memorable riff, […]

Photos and text by Cosmo Lee Yesterday Suffocation played on The Daily Habit, a show on Fuel TV. (The episode will air in a few weeks.) I went to the studios to watch. They played two songs from their latest album. Three celebrity types introduced the band. I didn’t recognize any of them. The main […]

Bill Steer’s guitar has soundtracked much of my life in the past two decades. His work in Napalm Death and Carcass helped lay the groundwork for grindcore and death metal today. Now he has a bluesy retro rock trio called Firebird, for which he sings and plays guitar. I’ve listened to their latest record, Grand […]

I have lost probably days of my life to instructional shred videos. However, I am into them purely for entertainment. In an instructional video, a guitarist typically plays a lick at actual speed, then plays it at a slower speed for the edification of mere mortals. But mere mortals usually don’t stand a chance of […]

I am a complete guitar nerd, and love scoping out what axes bands heft onstage. The more ridiculous and aggressive, the better. This is metal, after all. Below are my 10 picks for the most metal guitars ever made. (Click on each image to enlarge it.) I employed one rule: all guitars had to have […]

. . . For $95, you can sound like Bathory. That is the premise of Dragonfly’s Black Metal Pedal, a tribute to the music’s first wave. The demonstration video here shows off suitably raw tones, though it’s hard to tell anything with YouTube’s audio quality. Note that the pedal’s controls are “Power,” “Hatred,” “Attack,” and […]

Ooh! The Roadburn Festival has chosen Tom G. Warrior as its curator for 2010. By all accounts, this year’s Neurosis-curated event was a hit, so Warrior’s work is cut out for him. He will select 16 bands for the festival. His pals 1349 (reviewed here) will likely make the cut. Perhaps so will Valborg, an […]

The Hall of Fame album for this month’s Decibel (#57, Summer Slaughter tour cover) is S.O.D.’s Speak English or Die. As a kid, I was blown away by Scott Ian’s tone on it. In the HoF feature, Ian recalls, “My philosophy with Alex [Perialas, co-producer] was, we’re gonna have the sickest guitar tone that anyone’s […]

. . . Normally I don’t do pre-release hype, but I want the world to know about Foscor’s Groans to the Guilty. I’ve gushed about Foscor here and here, and judging from the promo trailer above, I will likely love the new record as well. The song in the trailer is called “Searching a Seal […]