(metal needs more smiles)

Ghostlimb‘s 2008′s smasher of an album Bearing and Distance knocked my socks off. Like literally blew them right off my feet and sent them flying across the room at some poor MS Mansion Monkey’s head, not surprising seeing as the album was penned by Graf Orlock guitarist/vocalist Justin Smith aka “Jason Schmidt.” But you know what? It was worth it. Worth it because the only other alternative would have been to spontaneously start a fierce fucking moshpit and to throw my computer through the window and who cares about that damn monkey anyway two-day sock-stench be damned, get me some more coffee damnit.

But seriously, how can you fuck with these riffs? Only acceptable answer: you can’t. As the years pass I only seem to be getting more and more into this kind of metallic hardcore, the kind that’s fast, furious, raw, chunky and full of mothatruckin’ bluesy RAWK riffs. Think a significantly faster and decidedly angrier Doomriders and you’re close. Peep Ghostlimb’s brand new song “Construction” from the new album Infrastructure below, courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan. The album drops on April 4th via Vitriol Records and will be available for pre-order starting on March 19th (why the wait for the pre-order? I’m scratching my head too.).

-VN

As managing editor of Decibel, Andrew Bonazelli makes your life better each and every month by helping to give you an outlet to discover awesome new music, learn what your favorite bands are up to, sound more intelligent to your friends by plagiarizing opinions that aren’t your own, and have something to read in the bathroom.

Now, with the release of his second short novel, A Regular – the first literary endeavor from Vitriol Records, the label founded by Justin Smith of Graf Orlock/Ghostlimb/Dangers fame — Bonazelli has enriched your life even further, giving you something smaller and more portable to read in the bathroom. Bonus: the book also happens to be really, really good. Here’s a description from the publisher:

“A morose barfly drowns his misguided affection for barely legal trollops in crossword puzzles and wells whiskey. But Murray Baron isn’t just a regular at Seattle dive haven the Kapital — he exists in the bar in perpetuity, days and weeks bleeding formlessly into one another, punctuated only by cock-crushingly banal conversation. When he finally literally unseats himself to save a friend’s life, the decision ignites a series of overlapping absurdist confrontations straight from the id of a 12-year-old. Murray’s fate seems to have been halved into either suffocating barstool inertia or outlandish hyperactive lunacy, and only a highly dubious psychic can help him revisit the pivotal adolescent event that put him in this very literal state of arrested development.”

And if that doesn’t entice you, please be aware that the story also features a robot called “The Eraditroid.”

Awesome. Simply awesome.

After the jump, get the author’s thoughts on why metalheads should care about his book, how Linkin Park and Dennis Cooper have inspired his writing, releasing a novel through a record label, and willfully farting in public. (It’ll make sense if you read the book.) Plus, get a free excerpt from A Regular, so you can have a little taste of how great it is…

Click to read more…

Just because it’s short doesn’t mean it can’t kick your fucking ass. Eighteen and a half minutes after I started listening to their new album Bearing & Distance (Level Plane Records), it ended; so I simply listened to it again.

Through those 18 minutes and the course of 15 tracks — 5 of which are under a minute and the longest of which is 2:08 — California’s Ghostlimb proved that they’re doing something really fucking cool and different. I can’t quite put a finger on their entire palette of influences because there’s a really strong hardcore flavoring, and frankly I just don’t have the musical vocabulary to go there. But fuck it, at the risk of making myself look really stupid and non-versed in the history of punk and hardcore (this is true), I’ll try: Minor Threat, Bad Religion (on coke), Paint It Black, and even NYC’s Wetnurse, but with big, clear production Matt Bayles would be proud of and a whack-you-in-the-nuts metal sensibility that’s also hard to place. Think a faster, non-stop alcohol-fueled Bronx, blending anthemic punk chord progressions through highly overdriven Marshalls and some dude passionately screaming his fucking lungs out on top of it as if he had a fist shoved up his ass and singing these songs was the only way to get it out.

Find out for yourself and check out Ghostlimb on MySpace.

-VN

(four out of five horns)