Acrassicauda, Iraq’s only metal band, have had to sell all their non-essential stuff (CDs, tapes, t-shirts) so they could move after receiving some pretty serious threats. We don’t have the full story, but they live in Iraq. The folks at VBS.TV, who ran the Heavy Metal in Baghdad series on Acrassicauda (currently pulled from the site as the series is being turned into a feature-length documentary) are preparing a care package of CDs (mix CDs are encouraged), tapes, shirts and magazines. If you have any metal items you can spare or the time to make a mix, send them to the address below and increase your overall International Metal Brother/Sisterhood Karma.

Alice Gougen
VBS.TV
97 North 10th St., Suite 204
Brooklyn NY 11211

There will be no Cookie Monster vocals in this post. Not because we don’t love Cookie Monster vocals here at Decibel, but because we couldn’t actually find any videos of the real Cookie Monster displaying his true talents. Anyway, we already knew that Animal could keep pace with Buddy Rich and that Kermit the Frog secretly roamed the streets of Compton, but we were not prepared for this:

The Muppets cover Cryptopsy!

The Muppets cover Kataklysm!

Fraggles cover The Locust!

By Killusion, Unearthly Trance/ Villains

5. Paul Wolfowitz – Recently resigned from the World Bank. The master of Bush’s Foreign War Policy. Wolfowitz is a long-term proponent of preemptive invasion. NWO coming for you!

4. Karl Rove - This fatty is a real slime ball. Just look at him.

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3. Donald Rumsfeld – Rummy started off in the Nixon administration, hung out with Saddam in the early 80’s, held hands with Reagan and H.W. and so on…The most interesting fact about Rumsfeld is that he helped start up the good ole P.N.A.C. [“Project for the New American Century”], an organization that was ready for Regime Change in Iraq back in the 90’s. Also, don’t forget his fetish for torture and spitting at the Geneva Conventions. Definitely a prime contestant for America’s Next Top War Criminal.

2. Dick Cheney – Recently claimed he wasn’t part of the executive branch!!! Makes bags of loot from Haliburton off the payday of War. Sat like Darth Vader in a bunker on 9/11. Shot an old man in the face and had the guy apologize to him!

1. George W. Bush – It all started when he was reading The Pet Goat and now, many years into a bloody war, he still wants more enemies! His beloved “Patriot Act” is anything but Patriotic. I think that all of our rights will eventually be taken away in the name of “security” if things do not change. Bush claims all the time that he has “Executive Privilege” and doesn’t have to answer to Congress. This man is steadfast in wasting billions of our tax dollars daily! The saddest part is that Bush’s carelessness has created a bleak future for the financial stability of our future generations. “W” lies daily to the people who are supposed to be in charge of this country, not one dictator with beady eyes and bad speaking skills. Not to mention all the dead bodies…

Oni Press has just published a 26-page preview of the new graphic novel Black Metal by writer Rick Spears and artist (and occasional Deciblog lurker/commenter) Chuck BB. Most of the preview follows twins Sam and Shawn’s strange trip after listening to the “true black metal” of kvlt act Frost Axe; get your pre-release orders in now to see how the grim and frostbitten fable finishes out. Spears is one of the geniuses behind the graphic novel Teenagers from Mars and keeps an excellent blog called The Hot and the Cool; Chuck BB maintains his own site which promises “more rants,” but currently houses some awesome rock poster designs, illustrations and concept art for Black Metal. Also, be sure to check out the pair’s recent guest blogging stint on MySpace Comic Books, which features another two-dozen pages of finished art (that’s, like, half the book right there!), Rick and Chuck’s “Top 5 Personal Metal Moments” and some equally hilarious comments. Like this one: “honestly, its an okay comic and all, but i think things like metal are better not made fun of. its just disrespectful to the darkness that drives us.”

Broadcast message to the entire internet: STFU.

Top five bestsellers at Celebrated Summer Records, Towson MD. By Tony Pence, owner.

1. THE VICIOUS, Alienated CD/LP
These Swedes use razor-sharp guitars and amazing melodies to create instantly catchy punk that’s amazingly bleak and as desperate as the end of a noose.

2. COFFINS, The Other Side of Blasphemy CD
Japanese doom/death/sludge that sounds like the end of the world at the burning hand of flowing lava. I’m not even kidding.

3. GOVERNMENT WARNING, No Moderation CD/LP
Fast as hell without being a blur, catchy and memorable without being poppy and hardcore as you can get without being moronic or thuggish. This is a perfect continuation of the best ‘80s hardcore had to offer.

4. HERESY, Face up to It reissue LP/CD
In the ’80s these Brits took early US hardcore and sped it up 1000 times, grew crazy dreadlocks and put pure energy into playing live with the likes of Napalm Death and Larm. A perfect hardcore record.

5. THE ERGS, Upstairs Downstairs CD/LP
New Jersey gave us Adrenalin OD and now this: Amazing pop-punk that owes more to ALL and the Minutemen then to The Ramones, yet still has perfect choruses and all the broken-hearted lyrics you need. They are so good that they have a jazz record, a hardcore record and a country record all coming out this year on top of this rager.

As much as we’re behind Graf Orlock, we must report that they were (sorta) beaten to their own concept. And by a Finn, no less! (Mastermind Gurglenator works alone except for the blastbeats courtesy of Dr. Brutal Robot.) We give you Goretorture, who unleashed the Schwarzenegger-centric I Promised to Kill You Last…I Lied! in 2004. While Graf Orlock take their inspiration from the action genre as a whole, Goretorture focus like a laser sight on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s big-screen and political careers, weaving Arnold samples into the songs—which are kinda retarded sub-Mortician deathgrind, but their dedication to the concept is unbeatable.

MP3: Goretorture - Terminated

I’d rag on the BulletBoys for this homerotic Glamor Shots photo, but least two of these chicks are hotter than my senior prom date. Also, everyone on MTV dressed like this in the mid-’80s to early ’90s — even Faith No More rocked the Information Society look for awhile. Pets, too. Have you ever tied a bandana around a dog’s neck? It goes really well with sleeveless vests and Zubaz! Think about it. In the meantime, think about reconsidering the complete works of the Bullet Boys, if only for today. Sure, their cover of TomWaits on “Hang On St. Cristopher” sucked, but “Smooth Up In Ya” is Top 20 Hair Metal Jams material once you get past the obvious choices (RATT, Skid Row, etc etc) and the Darkness totally ripped off bits of “THC Groove” on their first record. Anyway, there’s a new version of BulletBoys making the festival/ rib cook-off circuit this summer. Frontman Marq Torien (the dude in the picture who looks like Diamond Dave circa 1982) is the only original member in the line-up now, but that’s really all it takes these days. Marq is currently taking friend requests on MySpace to help offset the disproportiate number of porn stars in his buddy list. You can find him here and here. And you can find him to be surprisingly humble in this classic Metal Sludge 20 Questions interview.

The sensitive gentlemen of Agoraphobic Nosebleed are set to release a split album with Apartment 213 (whose vocalist Steve Makita has joined ANB as one of its four vocalists) titled Domestic Powerviolence on July 31st through Relapse, but there’s a lower profile release out now, and completists/collector scum are going to have to suck it up and pay for overseas shipping: The “Clockwork Sodom / Tentacles of Destruction” seven-inch, limited to 800 copies. This one has only four songs, though in theory, after they fit 100 songs onto a three-inch CD (Altered States of America), it could have held as many as 250. ANB’s Scott Hull cracked the top 10 of The 20 Greatest Death Metal Guitarists of All Time if you didn’t see, and Makita has time for three bands, including Wolf Prayer, a dark folk project with his wife.