What makes The Black Dahlia Murder the cream of metal’s crop is that, while never abandoning their face-ripping ways, they refuse to just spin their wheels from album to album. The dudes started out good, and they keep getting better. No amount of flowery verbiage myself could back that statement up more than just one listen to Ritual will. Because just one listen is all The Black Dahlia Murder needs to grab you by the throat, beat you senseless, and leave you lying on the pavement like some ninety-pound moron who just picked a fight with Georges St-Pierre. But, being the sadistic little fuck you are, you’re gonna pop right back up and listen again, aren’t you? Damn right you are, because this is hands down one of the most vicious slabs of metal we’ll get this year.

Click to read more…

I finally had to make myself stop listening to The Black Dahlia Murder’s new album, Ritual, on such a regular basis (e.g., twice a day for however many days since I’ve had it), because as a blogger I have a responsibility (or something) to listen to a wide variety of metal releases in order to discuss them on the site (or so I’m told).

My point being simply that the album is good to the point of total fucking distraction, and you should be prepared to be totally fucking distracted upon its release. And one such way to prepare yourself is to watch the twelve-minute-plus “making of” video the band has released to Bloody Disgusting. There’s some cool shit in there — Shannon Lucas being the sick drummer we all know him to be, Ryan Knight putting half the other guitar players in modern metal to shame, a live, real, flesh and blood violinist recording the album intro, and, of course, no small amount of BDM tomfoolery.

The video isn’t embeddable, but you can watch it by clicking on the below screen cap of guitarist Brian Eschbach’s ass forever traumatizing Jason Suecof’s dog, Stinky.

Ritual comes out June 21 on Metal Blade, and then TBDM hit the road to headline the MetalSucks-sponsored Summer Slaughter tour along with Whitechapel, Darkest Hour, Six Feet Under, Dying Fetus, As Blood Runs Black, Oceano, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Powerglove, and Within the Ruins. Get dates after the jump!

Click to read more…

John Kempainen, lead guitar player for The Black Dahlia Murder, has quit the band just days before the start of their tour with Misery Index and Soilent Green. The band will still do the tour, only as a four piece. I’m glad that BDM care enough about their fans to soldier on, but the idea of that band as a four piece totally bums me out; for one thing, half the fun of listening to BDM is in the interplay between Kempainen and co-guitarist Brian Eschbach, and for another thing, I always really loved Kempainen’s guitar solos (which I assume Eschbach will now play in at least some capacity.). In fact, I’ve written a love letter to this guitar duo in the past.

Click to read more…