Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces (2009)

I'm a recent convert to Decibel Magazine after honestly not reading any print 'zines for the past several years, but recent in-depth articles on Burzum and Amorphis has drawn me into this impressive magazine and I feel it's about time I subscribed to it. However, that's another story, but it's exactly what lead me to this book. Decibel has a monthly feature called, 'Hall of Fame,' which documents the making of monumental metal albums via gripping and sometimes hilarious interviews with all of the members that participated in the chosen albums creation.

For me some of most interesting interviews include Black Sabbath talking about Heaven and Hell, Celtic Frost's Morbid Tales, Morbid Angel's Altars of Madness, Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger, Opeth's Orchid, Down's Nola, and Emperor's In the Nightside Eclipse. What makes them interesting is that the reader will be able to read about the writing process for the album, memories of working in the studio, the scene at the time, the bands motivation and influences, how certain songs or lyrics came to be, fan reactions, the tour(s) that followed, how key members joined (or left), cover artwork creations, etc, etc, etc. In particular though hearing Emperor's old bass player, Tchort talking about Varg Vikernes visiting them in the studio while wearing his medieval armor and eating an ice cream cone really stuck out for me as well hearing Mikael Akerfeldt talking about how Johan not wanting to wear a suit for their infamous top hat photo, but rather wanting to go bear chested with sun glasses made me laugh too.

The majority of the book is quite engaging and fortunately almost all of the albums mentioned I owned and have owned for years, though one of the albums, Paradise Lost's Gothic I'd never heard before and funny enough I found the album at a second hand store yesterday and snatched that baby right up. There are however some albums like Dillinger Escape Plan's Calculating Infinity, which are honored in this book. Really, DEP? I guess that one throws me off since they're not even a metal band and having once owned the album I really fail to see what's so special about it. A few other bands honored are Converge and Botch, and again I'm left confused, but whatever. There's also albums from Kyuss and Diamond Head mentioned and although I've never heard much from these bands the interviews, like Paradise Lost's Gothic, definitely made me curious. Collectively 25 interviews are conducted over the course of 365 pages of fun and memorable metal stories.

All in All, I enjoyed almost all of this book and I do hope there's a part 2 of Decibel's Hall of Fame some day, because these guys really know how to ask the right questions and keep me interested throughout the entire interview.

If perhaps some of the albums mentioned in hear are among your favorites and you'd like to get the most in-depth scoop on them then I'm quite sure this would be the book to turn to. Likewise if you're new to metal this could very well be a great read for those that want to discover at least some of the individual sub-genre's true gems.