FEAR, EMPTINESS, DECIBEL: A TUTORIAL ON THE DECIBEL MAGAZINE TOUR’S REGIONAL OPENERS

Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli…

We’re almost exactly one month from the launch of the Decibel Magazine Tour (April 11 in Columbus, OH—great city for music fests, not so great for “Andrew’s friends securing a second semester at OSU”). Deciblog devotees know that we’ve recently begun unveiling regional openers for the tour (you’ll recall us soliciting/ignoring suggestions a few months ago). Well, now that we’ve eclipsed the halfway point, with five of the eight very special guests named, we decided to use this real estate for a little false idol worship.

Be it black-sludge evolutionaries Wolvhammer (Chicago), Rocky Mountain lows Nightbringer (Denver), not-prolific-enough doombringers Samothrace (Seattle), kitchen sink psych-thrashers Stoneburner (Portland) or funeral doom godheads Evoken (Baltimore, Philly, NYC), it’s a daunting but rewarding task cherry-picking bands to warm the black masses for In Solitude, the Devil’s Blood, Watain and Behemoth. According to our trusted editor-in-chief/dB Tour curator, Albert Mudrian, “Normally, these acts wouldn’t perform for 1,000 people unless it was at festival, so it was very important to us to give some of our favorite underground bands an opportunity to perform on a larger stage. And the beauty of the Decibel Magazine Tour’s lineup diversity is that it allows us to add funeral doom, sludge and black metal bands in addition as a few more genre-skirting artists, which we’ll unveil in the coming weeks.”

And now, so the uninitiated know what they’re in for, a (mostly) video homage for each radical opener:

WOLVHAMMER: “WRITHE”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyrHSz6x1cA

NIGHTBRINGER: “LUCIFER TRISMEGISTUS”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9luJybQdCzQ

SAMOTHRACE: “CRUEL AWAKE”

STONEBURNER: “ELESARES”

EVOKEN: “THE MOURNFUL REFUSAL”

-AB

Buy tickets to The Decibel Magazine Tour here.