Hellbound Metal: “I was delighted when they opened the set with an excellent rendition of “The Devil’s Orchard”, but I was absolutely over the moon when they followed it up immediately with “Ghost of Perdition” and, this was a real shocker, “White Cluster” off Still Life. I wasn’t expecting anything that old to be played at all, so witnessing this live was a wonderful thing.”

Live review by Sean Palmerston; Special concert photos courtesy of Mike Bax / lithiummagazine.com

Hellbound Metal: written tributes by Hellbound writers to the recently deceased Jeff Hanneman of Slayer

In 1996, Hellbound’s Sean Palmerston was offered the chance to do the first ever in-person North American radio interview with Quorthon, leader and visionary behind legendary Swedish black metal act Bathory. They also went out for dinner together beforehand, and here are Sean’s memories of that fateful night some seventeen years ago, shared in public for the first time since.

Originally published in VIEW Magazine in November 2006, this interview was with Warpig founding vocalist/guitarist Rick Donmoyer about the 2006 re-release of their self-titled album, originally released on Fonthill Records Canada on 1971

In early December the inaugural BARGE TO HELL cruise sailed from Miami, FL to Nassau, Bahamas and back and featured live performances by forty-two metal bands. Hellbound.ca was lucky enough to have been able to send some of its contributors on the cruise and here is what they had to say about the performances that took place on the fourth and final day of the cruise.

Live reviews by Adrien Begrand and Sean Palmerston. All photography by Albert Mansour unless listed otherwise.

If this is any indication of what is to come, I think that their return couldn’t have come at a better time. I can’t wait to hear the rest of what Convulse circa 2013 is capable of.

Target Earth is one of those albums that many reviewers will spend more time talking about what is wrong with it than what is right. Since it is the first album to feature Mongrain and it is essentially the start of a new era, you can expect it to be compared over and over to the band’s legacy. This is unnecessary in my opinion, for as Snake sings in “Warchaic”, the band is out “to find a brand new world”, and it is something they manage to do just fine.

As promised last week, here are the Top 10 metal albums of 2012 according to the writers of Hellbound.ca. You will notice that, in comparison to our previously published Top 10 Canadian albums of 2012 list, a few Canadian artists actually ended up charting higher here than on the Canuck top 10. The reason for this is simply because we had more writers submit top 10 lists here than did for the Canadian list.

Collected, compiled and edited by Sean Palmerston