Trademark Of Quality: Decibel Magazine's Precious Metal

Nobody – not even Martin Popoff – likes heavy metal like the guys at Decibel magazine. America's premier metal rag, the Decibel gang brings an appropriately populist slant to their musical coverage that is missing in Terrorizer (U.K.) or Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles (Canada). Reading more like a well-written fanzine than a professional (boring) music magazine, Decibel's staff knows its stuff and they write about the music they love.

One of the Reverend's favorite features each month is the extreme music "Hall of Fame." The magazine's staff chooses (agrees on) a classic metal album, one that is at least five years old, and then they interview every band member involved in making said album for the monthly feature. Decibel's rules for induction to its honorary HOF are notoriously and unnecessarily strict – if they can't talk to all of the members that made an album, whether due to death or a refusal to speak – then the album doesn't get in the magazine. Thus, there will be no Pantera, no early Metallica or any Death albums in the Decibel HOF, regardless of their high quality, high-octane music or long-lasting influence on the genre.

Well, it's their game so they get to make the rules, and the truth is that Decibel has done an admirable job over the past half-decade in choosing a wide range and diverse batch of classic metal albums to cover. As of early 2009, as editor Albert Mudrian explains in his introduction to Precious Metal, the magazine had inducted some 50 albums into its HOF, which makes the chore of choosing just 25 albums to include in this book-length collection of interviews quite impressive.

Subtitled "Decibel presents the stories behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces," Precious Metal offers up the magazine's original HOF induction articles and much more. Mudrian has edited and expanded each interview beyond its original form, in some cases doubling the size of the discussion. As any old music journalist could tell you, any artist interview results in a lot of unused content that won't fit into a print publication, so the Decibel crew dusted off their moldy micro-cassettes and found some more quotes to include in these interviews. Fans of the magazine will find that the chapters in Precious Metal provide a lot more insight and information into each album than was originally presented in the magazine.

More impressive, however, are the album choices made by Mudrian and his metal-lovin' staff. Music fans (and far too many critics) that don't know anything about heavy metal too readily dismiss the genre as a one-trick pony, nothing more than loud guitars and violent lyrics shouted by hirsute vocalists. Yeah, to be honest, there's some of that in heavy metal, as any fan of Norwegian death metal could tell you, but there's so much more as well. Heavy metal, like any musical genre, is made up of various sounds and textures, from Black Sabbath's riff-heavy drone and Slayer's brutal thrash to the desert-honed doom-metal of Kyuss and the impossibly fluid math-metal of Meshuggah.

All of the aforementioned folks and more are represented in the pages of Precious Metal, along with seminal albums from bands like Entombed, Paradise Lost, Monster Magnet, and Opeth, among many others. I was delightfully surprised by the informative and insightful nature of these interviews, the various band members sometimes using the occasion to grind old axes with their former friends, other times criticizing the record industry biases that often marginalize metal music. All of the interviews are interesting, and many are downright enlightening, and the Decibel staff – prolific writer J. Bennett in particular – do a uniformly good job at coaxing the story behind each album out of the musicians.

I was happy to find that I already owned about 1/3 of the albums included in Precious Metal, and the chapters on several others have motivated me to buy copies of those albums as well. At its heart, that is what the staff of Decibel has attempted to accomplish with Precious Metal….share their favorite heavy metal albums with thousands of like-minded readers. The enthusiasm and knowledge shown by the writers is infectious, as important as the albums themselves because if we don't honor and champion these albums, they will drop down into the rabbit hole of obscurity. If you're a fan of any form of heavy metal, you'll like Precious Metal. The Rev says "check it out!" (Da Capo Press)

(Click on the book cover to buy Precious Metal from Amazon.com)

Precious Metal's Hall of Fame Inductees