Here are the new heavy metal CD releases for this week.

Aurvandil – Yearning (Eisenwald)
Baring Teeth – Atrophy (Willowtip)
Cannabis Corpse – Beneath Grow Lights Thou Shalt Rise (Tankcrimes)
Decapitated – Carnival Is Forever (Nuclear Blast)
Dischord – Casualties Of War (Diminished Fifth)
Earth Crisis – Neutralize The Threat (Century Media)
Fair To Midland – Arrows and Anchors (eOne)
The Great Commission – Heavy Worship (Ain’t No Grave)
Hekate – Die Welt Der Dunklen Gärten (Prophecy)
Icon In Me – Head Break Solution (Goomba)
In The Nursery – Blind Sound (Plastic Head)
Isis – Live IV: Selections 2001 – 2005 (Ipecac)
Isolation – Closing A Circle (Eisenwald)
J.D. Overdrive – Sex, Whiskey & Southern Blood (Metal Mind)
The Living Fields – Running Out Of Daylight (Candlelight)
Lock Up – Necropolis Transparent (Nuclear Blast)
Mayan – Quarterpast (Nuclear Blast)
Megadeth – Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying Re-Release (Capitol)
NeraNature – Foresting Wounds (Metal Mind)
Rhapsody Of Fire – From Chaos To Eternity (Nuclear Blast)
Sepultura – Kairos (Nuclear Blast)
Sleeping Giant – Kingdom Days In An Evil Age (Ain’t No Grave)
Sol Invictus – The Cruellest Month (Prophecy)
Spellcaster – Under The Spell (Heavy Artillery)
SSS – Problems To The Answer (Earache)
Suicide Silence – The Black Crown (Century Media)

What with Neurot reissuing Neurosis’ Sovereign EP, we thought it was probably no better time to celebrate how great they are. Currently working on the follow-up to 2007′s Given to the Rising, work that we most definitely won’t see ’til 2012, Scott Kelly’s is one of the bona-fide ayatollahs of giganto-riff. Like, him and Steve Von Till are authorized dealers of apocalypse-grade guitar, and Kelly’s work both with Neurosis and Shrinebuilder is kinda underrated in the muso Berkley Tech set. C’mon, the granola-crunchers can keep their hemi-demi-semi-quavers until they can come up with something like this.

Or indeed this…

Anyways, the following is some hitherto unpublished extracts from an interview from a wee while back.

You have a particulalry gnarly ensemble of riffs, which in particular would you say is like a signature riff?
Scott Kelly: “We had a couple in the Shrinebuilder practice that were pretty great, some of the newer ones. That is what I do, I’m not really a lead guitar player. I can’t really play that, it doesn’t feel right. I do the riff at the end of “To The Wind”, on the last Neurosis record. Riffs are weird. I mean, that’s a pretty busy riff, there’s a lot of action to it. Riffs to me are kinda like the foundation, the emotion of the song. It definitely can be about as simple as you can imagine, it could be one chord or one note played in the one rhythmical pattern for it to work. When you think about riffs, for me, the two people who come to mind are Iommi and Jimmy Page and then I start thinking about why and I think it’s because they can play riffs that can move you so much you feel the depths of it immediately when it’s right. I know through the course of my writing I’ve lost a lot of riffs because I haven’t been able to record them or anything at the time that I wrote them. I realise I’ve got the same chords, I’m putting them in the same sequence, like there’s this little tiny hitch somewhere that I’m not remembering, I’m not able to find again and that’s what makes it could. That’s the part of writing music that I really enjoy and trip on.”

The riff is everything…
SK: “Yeah, it is for sure. I definitely don’t like any music that doesn’t have any riffs, unless it’s purposely devoid of them in some sort of jazz fashion or just a drone/noise approach, I can definitely appreciate that. Like it’s gotta have that riff. That’s the stuff that moves me the most. Jesus, that’s why I own every record Wino ever wrote. He just writes riffs, and playing in a band with him he shows up with these things to practice and it’s like, ‘God, that’s amazing.’”

How would you describe your style?
SK: “My riffs are kinda an Iommi approach, just straight power; those guys will do some really intricate guitar work to create these lush riffs. We do a bit more of that in Neurosis ‘cos me and Steve tend to play that way. Steve and I together can create a sort of third element. Those guys together, though, they can both play really good. I really am not anything technical. I have nothing to do with it; I’m just straight power. I can so some quiet, I can do some subtle and I can do some minimal but the intricate stuff just doesn’t happen, I just don’t have the hands for it.”

It’s always useful to know your limitations.
SK:“Yup, and surround yourself with people who can play their ass off. I’ve been really good at that.”

When we’re talking about riffs, the conversation always turns to Melvins. Buzz is really an auteur when it comes to playing.
SK: Some of their best riffs they do like one and a half times and then their gone. They just come out and hit you. But there’s that song on Bullhead where Buzz is just doing like an open high E string and— holy shit, [screams in the background] there’s a baby running about with a screwdriver in her mouth. That’s probably the name of the song. God, I don’t know man. They have so many. I tell you, the one that’s the best is, I believe, the last song on Lysol; and of course it’s a total pain in the ass to check on your CD ‘cos it’s all one track.”

They’re so awkward, they weird a lot of people out.
SK: “They’re antisocial. It makes you glad that they exist and wonder what your life would be like if you didn’t know they existed. We’ve been tripping on them for our entire existence. When our band started they had broke down in the parking lot of the warehouse we were living in, and stayed next door for a few days. We were about three/four months into Neurosis and already on our Amebix and Celtic Frost trip and then those guys showed up.”

Amebix have been a huge influence on you.
SK: “It’s kinda like that NWOBHM approach to guitar playing but the way that they did it was so fucked up it was unrecognisable. Yeah, I guess if they’d done it with Marshall stacks, Les Pauls and were like trained metal guitar players it would have sounded like that. But they weren’t. They were just half in and out of squats and recording records with whatever they could get their hands on. They did that album in like a day so it comes off really raw with this energy to it. That was, Amebix, was like finding a fucking grail for us, honestly. The combination of what they were doing was/remains powerful. Tom G. Warrior has some amazing riffs. Morbid Tales has some of toughest, meatiest sounding shit ever. The weird thing is that I don’t remember how I found Celtic Frost, and I’m always really aware of that. I do know that my Celtic Frost record got my roommate out of his room with some Amebix and I remember that. That record still to this day, I’ve probably never played a record louder than I play that record. When I need to wake up, when I’m pissed off or whatever, that’s the record I turn to. To be honest I usually go straight past “Into The Crypt Of Rays” and get to that part where it just rips your head off. I was asking our sound guy, Dave Clark, why the hell that record sounds like that. It’s interesting, the bass is so loud in the mix but the guitars drive it so strong. I dunno, that record’s amazing.”

How does the writing process for Shrinebuilder differ from Neurosis?
SK: Shrinebuilder is different. For the first one, we just went in and we had to get this fucking record done. We had the songs, we were going on a lot of belief that we could just go in there and do it, which we did. But in hindsight it’s definitely not the way we’d prefer to do records. But we don’t live in the same towns, we’ve got different schedules and a bunch of kids. I’ve got a regular day job as well so it’s difficult to make time to really work on stuff. I know this is well publicised but I can’t emphasise it enough; we had played together for literally one hour before we recorded, it was the only time the four of us had been in a room together actually working on shit—which wasn’t working at all, it was just going over the songs. The album’s 40 minutes long so you could imagine that hour we just set up and played our 40 minutes of material, went home and went to the studio.”

You got to spend some more time together after that Volcano that all but grounded Roadburn 2010.
SK: “I thought there’s no point in getting to upset there’s not a god damn thing you can do. I have never, ever had that sort of thing happen to me in any situation except for the earthquake in the Bay Area. I’ve never found anything that I couldn’t figure my way through. You go through life trials, loss, all kinds of horrible shit; there’s always a way to fight through it. We started working on this stuff with all this in mind and it came through; the intensity of the situation and the trials we had to go through as a group. We came up with some stuff there that was just really intense and I am just so totally excited about the second album. I tell you right now, the second album is well going to eclipse the first one.”

Maybe that volcano will be a blessing in disguise
SK: “I told Wino that in ten years from now we’ll put out an album with a volcano on the cover and it’ll be called Thank You. I mean, we are supposed to work on music and who the fuck cares about anything else or than the music and the riffs and the belief that the music is the vehicle, the door to a better fucking world/life/viewpoint/whatever.”

Decibel Magazine

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s not every day that the Deciblog introduces you to a whole new genre of extreme music. But today is special. Today, we bring you a new breed of ferocity. Behold…

CATTLE CORE

That’s right, you mooing sons-o-bitches. Cattle core. Speed metal + cattle auctioneer vocals = cattle core. “Why didn’t I think of that?” you’re saying to yourselves. Because you’re stupid and have no vision, that’s why. But to soothe the burn, recognize that Hank Williams III is the pioneer of this twisted amalgam, and he is, quite frankly, the only one who could pull off such a blazing experiment without turning it into a steaming pile of fertilizer.

These two tracks are off Hank3′s upcoming speed metal album 3 Bar Ranch Cattle Callin, part of a troika of releases set for September 6. The other two albums are Ghost to a Ghost/Guttertown, a double disc of country tunes, and the doom metal Attention Deficient Domination. But it’s Cattle Callin that we decided to explore, if only because it’s so deliriously nuts, it’ll singe your utters and have you reaching for the Bag Balm. In addition to skidmark-inducing metal, the songs features famous cattle auctioneers Tim Dowler and Mitch Jordan. It’s amazing these guys can feel their faces after 20 minutes of work. Download the two exclusive tracks below via SoundCloud. Throwing the horns has never before felt so appropriate.

Hank Williams III “Branded”

Hank Williams III “Tim Dowler – Black Cow”

Decibel Magazine

Welcome to The Lazarus Pit, a biweekly look at should-be classic metal records that don’t get nearly enough love, stuff that’s essential listening for students of extreme metal that you’ve probably never heard of.  Stuff that we’re too lazy to track down the band members to do a Hall Of Fame for.  This week, we are going south of several borders to the verdant plains of Argentina for wizards, swords, roses, and Rata Blanca’s Magos, Espadas y Rosas (Polydor).

Rata Blanca (White Rat, in case you were wondering) really could have become popular with power metal enthusiasts if they didn’t stick to their native language.  They were at least popular enough in their home country to sign with a major label, and according to their biography on All Music, this album, their second, sold over 1 million copies (which isn’t out of the question with a population of 40 million, but maybe they just meant that it went platinum in Argentina, which is a different number in each country, but anyway).  Still, when this came out in 1991, there was pretty much no chance of them crossing over to the states.  Not just because of the language barrier, but because of the musical barrier as well.

See, Rata Blanca are one of those bands that find their way into this column frequently, a group that were concurrently well behind their time and well ahead of it.  After all, it had been 10-20 years since Rainbow, Deep Purple, and Yngwie J. Malmsteen’s Rising Force had been relevant/popular/good, but it would be a couple years before Sonata Arctica, Rhapsody of Fire, and Stratovarius really hit.  Obviously there was a lot of great European power metal during the 80s, but these guys don’t appear to have taken much influence from Helloween and the like.  Because of that, Magos, Espadas y Rosas makes for a good case study, acting as a bridge between 70s virtuoso hard rock and neoclassical modern power metal – and showing that the two styles aren’t actually that far apart.

On the surface, what we have here is six (count them) dudes with unfortunate haircuts and impressively frilly shirts unleashing the fury on their respective instruments.  “La Leyenda del Hada y el Mago” alone indicates that they probably had Trilogy (Rising Force, not ELP, although that’s also a possibility) playing on multiple turntable at once in their apartments.  Operatic vocals, choral keyboards, guitar solos for band and orchestra, if it ain’t Baroque, don’t fugue it; that sort of thing.  None of the boring doubletime drumming that has since become de rigueur for power metal, thankfully.  And yeah, this thing reeks of the 1980s, production-wise.  Still, there is a certain metallic quality underlying the pomp and circumstance.  It isn’t AOR, and it isn’t classic rock.  Although it isn’t obvious, these songs have a layer of muscle under them, one that Judas Priest had started to develop and would later be carried through into the burliness of Hammerfall.  This is especially obvious on “El Beso de la Bruja” and the Dio-esque epic “El Camino del Sol.”  Elsewhere, they show their sensitive side on “Mujer Amante” and indulge in some very deep purple on “Dias Duros,” then cap things off with an ornate instrumental (three ornate instrumentals on the 2004 reissue).  So, no doubt that they were intent on being the men on the Silver Mountain, but their street of dreams pointed the way to the future.

Unfortunately, they never really evolved beyond this style.  A bunch of band members came and went, they broke up and reformed, put out a bunch of records.  They’re still touring, most recently with post-prime Rainbow vocalist Doogie White.  But they never topped Magos, Espadas y Rosas.  Ironically enough, it came at the perfect time, a time of transition for the power metal genre, and once the genre moved on, they were left behind.  Even so, it’s worth seeking out, whether you’re a fan of classic metal, power metal, or South American rock.  In fact, the translation problem may be what they have going for them most these days – lyrics about fairies and witches are much more palatable when you can’t understand them!

Official site

Buy it here!

Decibel Magazine

Hammers of Misfortune are one of the most slept-on bands to be offering hauté metal compositions that’d sate vinyl gourmands’ appetite for a more adult alternative to power metal and something a bit more compositionally sophisticated than NWOBHM’s greasy denim bark. Like something that’s got all metal’s histrionic chutzpah but doesn’t require an ad hoc dental operation to staple your tongue to your cheek. And it’s not as though they don’t have pedigree: mainman/guitarist John Cobbett has been around for ages, having stints in Slough Feg, Gwar while also co-founding USBM outfit Ludicra. Their alumni has included Janis Tanaka of L7 and Mike Scalzi of Slough Feg, while current guitarist is none other than Vastum’s riff-enforcer, Leila Abdul-Raif.

His idea behind Hammers of Misfortune was partly to create a band that’d exist on its own terms, that it couldn’t be broken up so long as he was still writing songs and could find the talent—no matter how temporary—to complete the arrangements and record them. This is altruistic shit, folks; metal for metal’s sake. Anyways, their new album should be out before the end of the year, you can, should buy reissues of their catalogue through Metal Blade, by clicking here.

And, yeah, taking a moment out from a schedule that’s kinda pretty ramm-o jamm-o full—what with recording Hammers’s new and as-yet untitled album, Ludicra, teaching guitar, sound engineering and bartending—John Cobbett got on the phone to talk about how it’s all built from metal’s ostensible kryptonite—the acoustic guitar/folk music—and that over-intellectualizing things is a good thing.

What is your approach to songwriting for Hammers of Misfortune, and does it differ from, say, that of Ludicra’s, or of any other bands you’ve been in?

JC: “Well it’s a challenge because a lot of our songs I’ll write on the acoustic guitar as a folk song, like your classic Simon & Garfunkel method, your classic Peter, Paul & Mary bullshit method of writing a song, where you sit down with an acoustic guitar and a cup of coffee (in my case) and you hum out a melody or do some fingerpicking. It sounds like a folk song. My theory being that, if a song works as a folk song with one accompanying instrument and one voice, it can sound good in any presentation. So, you could have that song as a metal song and it’ll still be a good song. It stands up to the café test: if you can stand up with an acoustic guitar and a voice and play that song and have it be a good song then it is acceptable for Hammers. Of course, I don’t work that way with Ludicra – Ludicra is a pure metal band. Hammers is: ‘We are going to write some good, credible songs and then we are going to adapt them to metal.’”

Isn’t it a challenge to imagine the finished song if you’ve started on acoustic?

JC: “That makes the focus very much on the lyrics. You can’t depend on a whole band with huge amps, pyrotechnics and all sorts of guitar wizardry to mask your shitty, stupid, clichéd lyrics. Y’know, when there’s just a voice and an acoustic guitar, the lyrics are very important: that’s all there really is on the guitar front so it puts a huge focus on the lyrics. And that’s the difference between Ludicra and Hammers; I don’t write the lyrics for Ludicra. I have nothing to do with the lyrics for that band. To me, Ludicra is just about writing metal riffs and arranging. I don’t write everything for Ludicra. So far, I’ve written everything for Hammers, including the lyrics.”

You’ve likened Hammers’ songs, and metal in general, to folk music, in that it’s largely blue collar working class music. Is it a question of just adapting that folk acoustic song to metal? Is the folk song where it all starts?

JC: “I am not writing metal on an acoustic guitar, per se, I am writing a song. And the idea with Hammers is to take a guitar and produce it and perform the song with a metal ensemble. One of the reasons why we did away with the harsh black metal vocals after the first album was that for Hammers I just wanted to have clean vocals so that I could right songs and then adapt them to heavy metal. So, if I have a nice chord progression on acoustic guitar or piano, you could do that doom, you could do that thrash, you could do that NWOBHM, you could do it cold or gothic and it is still going to be the same song.”

So if you’ve got a good song on acoustic does it make it easier to reinterpret it, flesh it out as a metal/Hammers track?

JC: “It almost makes it more difficult that you have a good song but, jeez, you could represent that song in a hundred different ways. There are some songs that I would like to do four different ways, so you’ve got to pick one. And then, that’s kinda how some of our songs grew so long, because we have three or four different ways that we can write this song; if we like more than one or two of them we are probably going to all those ways somewhere in the song. Hammers songs are based on one or two little progressions but we just work these some different ways and different sounds and it turns into a seven-minute song based on two or three ideas at the most.”

With Hammers, there seems to be a strong narrative—especially with The Bastard—and the arrangements and so forth call to mind Rising-era Rainbow, as in almost power metal without the lace shirt hyperbole: were/are they a big influence?

JC: “That is great stuff; though, that was never an influence on Hammers. When I was doing The Bastard, which was our only pure storytelling concept album, I was not listening to Rainbow at the time; I was watching Joseph Campbell lectures and listening to Dissection! Storm Of The Light’s Bane and The Somberlain, I was way into that back then. I don’t know if you can tell that from The Bastard. He [John Zwetsloot played the acoustic parts on The Somberlain] was such a good guitar player, but not only that, he always did such good acoustic interludes in their songs. Like if you listen to black metal which has acoustic guitar interludes—which it often does—his are just stellar, really well recorded, really clear, always prefacing or reiterating a riff which had been or is going to be done on full metal guitar. I love that. He was brilliant at that.”

You’ve always argued that Hammers are created so that you could do whatever you want; can you do whatever you want with Hammers and still be metal?

JC: “We’ve taken our share of heat for that, too. When we put out a record everybody goes, ‘Oh, they’re not heavy metal anymore. They’re no longer heavy; they’re all into ‘70s prog now.’ And y’know there is a little bit of that, but if you break it down to the base components it’s still metal. The minute you bend the rules of metal you are always going to get people who accuse you of not being metal anymore. Especially now, what bands do now is that they compartmentalize themselves into sub-sub-genres of metal, and then they create 10 to 12 examples of that genre and call it an album when basically it’s the same thing for 40/45 minutes. That’s what passes for albums these days. How do you get five albums into a career with that when all you can really do is a few different examples of one specific sound — “We play Cascadian black metal”, well, OK, you can listen to a whole album of this atmospheric black metal but then you’ve got to put out another record like that, and then another and another one. Like, you’re kinda screwed, artistically, you’ve just painted yourself into a corner and you’re going to run out of ideas kinda fast.”

It’s the law of diminishing marginal returns.

JC: “Exactly, you look at a band like Sabbath, they had all different songs on their records. Or Thin Lizzy for example, they went way to far in different directions, saccharine ballads, love songs, y’know; I like those songs, too, I like everything Thin Lizzy have done. But a little variety in your album doesn’t mean you’re not metal.”

Is metal guilty of over-thinking—do we over-intellectualize it?

JC: “No. I think that metal could do with more intellect – especially in the lyric department. So I think it is good when people hold it up to scrutiny. Not many people come to metal looking for intellectual stimulation, and frankly, they shouldn’t. A lot of times when I have seen bands come out and do this pseudo-intellectual posturing with their music, and they have this manifesto, it really does kind of stink of shit to me, most of the time.

To answer your question: people tending to over-intellectualise metal, I’ve seen some blogs do it really, really well. They actually get the point of what the artist is trying to say. So, no: I don’t think people are over-intellectualising it. I am in favour of over-intellectualizing, because if someone is over-intellectualizing, that means that they are actually going to listen to the whole fucking album and read the liner notes. I read a lot of reviews where it looks like they’ve just listened to the first minute-and-a-half of the song and just listed the bands it sounds like. And these people, I’m sure, are not getting paid, they’re just getting a copy, but I’ve read reviews of our stuff where they say Hammers of Misfortune was started as a side-project of Slough Feg—I mean, just go to Wikipedia, dude. So yeah, a little over-intellectualizing might get people to actually pay attention to what’s going on in the record, who is doing what.”

And so what if this audio is a bit ropey, this is cool archive footage and you get the idea.

Decibel Magazine

Until very recently – we’re talking a few minutes ago - I wasn’t even sure if I had previously heard of World Under Blood. Heavy metal and all its many subgenres and permutations has existed for 40 some-odd years now and the use of the words “world” and “blood” in band names, song titles, lyrics and album names reached critical mass a long time ago.

Well, whaddya know? It turns out World Under Blood features within its ranks CKY’s Deron Miller and Tim Yeung, who you think would be laying low for a spell, trying to downplay his partipation in this mess. The band is now signed to Nuclear Blast and have their debut album called Tactical set for release on July 26th. Here, we present exclusive streaming of lead single “Dead and Still In Pain” which is loaded with twists on the melodic death metal sound and will probably someday compete for an award for having some of the most intelligible vocals in any category of extreme metal.

04 Dead And Still In Pain by Decibel Magazine

Decibel Magazine

Violins. In metal that shit is real hard to justify.

But honestly, when it comes to how Chicago prog-doom experts Living Fields are able to have these underappreciated instruments scrape at their strings, there’s enough furious noise that it really does seem okay. It also helps that “Glacial Movements,” off the exceptional Running Out of Daylight full-length, has enough hooks and trench-digging chugs that throwing in some mandolin would’ve probably been acceptable.

The band is definitely old school but there’s enough rock to not only set the stage for some well-placed orchestration but generate a chorus that would make Rob Halford bow his bald head in admiration.

This approach to metal is overblown and melodramatic with too many bands, but give this until 2:50 and see if you’re not on the edge of your seat, desperate to know what these guys are going to do next.

Living Fields: “Glacial Movements” by Decibel Magazine

Decibel Magazine

The cover artwork for “The Hunter”, the new album from Atlanta progressive metallers MASTODON, can be seen below. The CD, tentatively due in October via Reprise Records, will contain the following tracks, among others:

* Blasteroids
* The Octopus Has No Friends
* Stargasm
* Curl Of The Burl
* All The Heavy Lifting
* The Sparrow
* The Ruiner

Zymurgy magazine recently revealed the “Best Beers in America,” a list derived from more than 28,000 votes from readers around the world. While Russian River’s Pliny the Elder imperial IPA topped the list for the third year in a row, Stone Brewing, of Escondido, California placed three of their brewtally named beers—Arrogant Bastard, Ruination and Sublimely Self Righteous—in the top 15. This strong showing prompted one of our Twitter followers (@TeamIRISH666er) to note that, “if they were a band, they would be Slayer.”

We can’t disagree with this assessment because, like Slayer, Stone’s beers aren’t for the meek. Like many of their San Diego-area brethren (Ballast Point, Port, Green Flash, Alesmith, etc.), they aren’t cheap with the hops in any of their brews. And there’s a reason for this: the water in that area is perfectly suited for, according to Tomme Arthur, director of brewery operation at Port and The Lost Abbey, “anything that has a hop emphasis to it and IPA styles in particular.”

So Stone created a solid lineup of beers, all sporting a distinctly demonic—dare we say, satanic—beasty on the label that are gloriously well-hopped and best described as “aggressive.” Just as Slayer’s iconic album covers warn the uninformed quite explicitly that the contents herein will likely be brutal, so too does the devilish winged fellow on Stone’s bottles provide ample warning to all ye who enter. Don’t like hops? Don’t bother.

The mainstream appeal of their beers is limited, but that’s OK, because the people who love Stone’s beer are diehards. Sound familiar?

Decibel Magazine

Zymurgy magazine recently revealed the “Best Beers in America,” a list derived from more than 28,000 votes from readers around the world. While Russian River’s Pliny the Elder imperial IPA topped the list for the third year in a row, Stone Brewing, of Escondido, California placed three of their brewtally named beers—Arrogant Bastard, Ruination and Sublimely Self Righteous—in the top 15. This strong showing prompted one of our Twitter followers (@TeamIRISH666er) to note that, “if they were a band, they would be Slayer.”

We can’t disagree with this assessment because, like Slayer, Stone’s beers aren’t for the meek. Like many of their San Diego-area brethren (Ballast Point, Port, Green Flash, Alesmith, etc.), they aren’t cheap with the hops in any of their brews. And there’s a reason for this: the water in that area is perfectly suited for, according to Tomme Arthur, director of brewery operation at Port and The Lost Abbey, “anything that has a hop emphasis to it and IPA styles in particular.”

So Stone created a solid lineup of beers, all sporting a distinctly demonic—dare we say, satanic—beasty on the label that are gloriously well-hopped and best described as “aggressive.” Just as Slayer’s iconic album covers warn the uninformed quite explicitly that the contents herein will likely be brutal, so too does the devilish winged fellow on Stone’s bottles provide ample warning to all ye who enter. Don’t like hops? Don’t bother.

The mainstream appeal of their beers is limited, but that’s OK, because the people who love Stone’s beer are diehards. Sound familiar?

Decibel Magazine