Two quick things:

1. The cover art for Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s new album, Agorapocalypse, has GOT to be an early contender for best album cover of 2009.
2. The band has posted a second new song, “Moral Distortion,” on their MySpace page. If you don’t check it out, all the other kids are gonna make fun of you, and you will die sad and alone.

Agorapocalypse will be about April 14 here in the States and week later in everywhere else. On Relapse. That is all.

-AR

Here’s some Irish rawk for ya.

-AR

MetalSucks, MetalInjection and BITPOM, in conjunction with EMI (which serves such labels as Century Media, Nuclear Blast, Earache, Candlelight, Season of Mist, Willowtip and Crash Music), are bringing metal to the masses with an extensive “March is Metal Month” campaign with independent retailers across the U.S.

During the “March is Metal Month” campaign, we’ll be running a series of 3 weekly “Show Us Your Metal” contests. To enter, take a picture of yourself at a record store doing something metal; throwing up the horns, making sweet love to a David Lee Roth Crazy From the Heat EP, posing in front of a Beyonce endcap in corpsepaint, buying something that costs $6.66, etc. Be creative! Send all submissions to news AT metalsucks DOT net along with your full name and address.

This week’s prize:
A sweet Cynic box set ($75 value) courtesy of Season of Mist! Awesome fucking prize. Deadline is Monday, March 23rd, so get crackin!

I don’t know if we got a press release for this and I saw the word “Korn” in the subject line and just deleted it, or if Korn’s people actually know better than to send us shit… but in any case, Blabbermouth has just brought it to my attention that bassist Fieldy has an autobiography coming out, the title of which is long and I am therefore not going to re-type (or even bother to cut and paste) here.

As you can see from the book’s cover, it seems that Fieldy is the second member of this band to find God. But only the first, at least as far as I’m aware, to actually equate his struggle with that of Jesus Christ.

To that end, after the jump we will explore the ways in which Fieldy and Jesus are both similar and dissimilar, in the hopes of figuring out whether or not Fieldy is, in fact, the Second Coming.

Also, we’ll look at an NSFW picture of Field’s sister’s nipples. Just because they’re there.

Click to read more…

So I was thinking back to the CMJ Music Marathon here in NYC last fall, and how Bison B.C. seemed to be the “buzz” metal band on everyone’s tongue. If you were there to see them you witnessed something awesome, and if you weren’t there you heard about it from everyone else and felt like a dipshit because you missed it. At the Scion Rock Fest last month in Atlanta the buzz bands were Krallice and Salome, depending on who you asked (there were, after all, four stages running simultaneously). So who’s it gonna be at this year’s SXSW? My bets are on any one of the awesome bands on The End Records / MetalSucks showcase, but your guesses are as good as any.

Here’s a live video of Bison B.C. performing in their native Vancouver. What are the shows you absolutely must see at this year’s hoedown in Austin?

-VN

“Secrets of the Dead” is so fucking good that it’s just made us that much hungrier for Chimaira’s for new album, The Infection. So hungry, in fact, that last week we posted crappy-quality fan filmed footage of another new song, “Destroy and Dominate” – footage so weak that you could barely hear the actual music.

Well, no need to stick your ear up to the computer speaker anymore: after teasing fans earlier today with the cryptic message “3 pm EST,” the band just posted a link to a free download of the mp3 for the actual studio version of “Destroy and Dominate” on Twitter. You can download the song right now, right here. [UPDATE: Looks like the song is down now. I'm sure clever Chimaira fans will be able to seek it out from their peers - Ed.]

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So the line-up for Summer Slaughter – a.k.a. the big summer package tour that isn’t Ozzfest, Mayhem, Warped, or Sounds of the Underground (R.I.P.) – has been announced, and, pretty much as expected, it’s totally solid. Yes, there are a few bands on the bill I don’t care for (I’m looking at you, Winds of Plague), but the presence of co-headliners Suffocation and Necrophagist, plus Darkest Hour, Origin, Born of Osiris, Dying Fetus and Blackguard pretty much guarantees this will be a day (well, late afternoon at least) worth your time and money. Especially since, unlike the aforementioned summer fests, this one plays smaller venues and comes at a cheaper price.

Also kind of advantageous: you’re basically just dealing with death metal on this tour. So… you pretty much know if you’re the audience or not for this tour.

No dates yet… stay tuned for more details.

-AR

Fairly self-explanatory, isn’t it?

PART I:

Part II after the jump.

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Alright. Last week one of you e-mailed me to tell me about this story (and my apologies that I don’t know your name – I’ve lost quite a lot of e-mails in this weekend’s server transfer), in which Obituary guitarist Trevor Peres revealed that his band has been trying to put together a package tour with great old school Floridian death metal bands including (beside Obituary, natch) Deicide, Morbid Angel, Six Feet Under… and Cannibal Corpse?

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Which is why I would never engage in a debate with Gene Simmons about anything. It’s the same reason I rarely respond to comments left on this site. If I post about a band I think is great and someone’s response is “Ur a faggit,” what the fuck am I supposed to say that? My IQ could drop just trying to communicate with that person, so I don’t.

But music biz guru Bob Lefsetz must love  a Sisyphean task when he encounters one, because he’s been feuding with Simmons for the past week. The whole tiff started when Lefsetz criticized Simmons in his  newsletter (of which both Vince and myself are avid readers) for a speech Simmons gave during Canadian Music Week about various ways in which the music industry might stay afloat; Simmons responded with his own e-mail, in which he made fun of Lefsetz’s name. Seriously. This is the level of of maturity and intelligence with which Lefsetz is trying to engage.

The feud culminated in a public debate last week, which you can watch below – or don’t. Simmons’ opening argument rests not on any proof of acquired business acumen (and beside the admittedly phenomenal success of Kiss, it’s worth noting that 9 out of 10 Gene Simmons ventures fail – see exhibit A, Detroit Rock City), but, rather, on a bald joke. Which tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

After the jump, you can watch a clip of Lisa Lampanelli roasting Simmons on A&E last year. Which is considerably more entertaining than the video above.

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As Vince mentioned a few times last week, he and I will indeed be dropping our respective bombz on Austin this week for SXSW 2009. We expect the festival will undoubtedly bring plenty of metal, mayhem, n MEAT a la BBQ (anyone interested in a debaucherous road trip to The Salt Lick?? You drive!)

Sadly, I could not find any songs in my itunes under the tags “barbeque” or “ribs”, but these two lil ditties should suffice:

–if you lived under a poop-stained rock last year, then you may have missed Protest the Hero‘s epic album Fortress; here’s the first track:

PROTEST THE HERO — “Bloodmeat”, from Fortress (2008)

–if you’ve frequented a single strip club since 1993, there’s a pretty decent chance you saw a girl shake her teh-tahs to this old(ish) school alternarock gem:

MEAT PUPPETS — “Backwater”, from BackwaterToo High To Die (1994) (1993) and

For those who will be swilling in the madness first-hand, please join us for the MetalSucks/The End Records rokkker on Thursday night, feel free to try your luck on line the next night to see the fartiest old farts of them all, and for god’s sake, above all, drink some free beer n eat that frickin meat!

-KW

This weekend MetalSucks is moving servers to put to an end (knock on wood) to the crashes and slowness that have plagued this site for the past couple of months. During this transition you may experience inconsistencies and errors in the way the site displays which could last until Monday but, hopefully, will be over with by end of day Sunday. There may also be delays in email delivery, but we should get everything eventually. We’re doing this over the weekend to minimize the inconvenience, as site traffic is lowest on Saturdays and Sundays. If you’re still experiencing problems beyond mid-day Monday or are awaiting replies from us on something specific, please get in touch at news AT metalsucks DOT net.

Thanks!

You bitched and moaned about daylight savings time, even though you were asleep when the clocks changed and you get an extra hour of daylight every day until November. You are all retards.

Here’s what else happened this week:

• Sigh’s Mirai Kawashima gave us another studio report (no naked Dr. Mikannibal pics, sorry), Early Man’s Mike Conte got his cheesesteak on, and Neuraxis’ Alexandre Leblanc gave us his final tour blog.
• We spoke with Darkane’s Christofer Malmstrom, Meshuggah’s Marten Hagstrom, Soilwork’s Peter Wichers and Ross the Boss (ex-Manowar)
• Our man-crush on Trent Reznor grew ever greater.
• You argued over who was the most important member of Metallica, past and present.
• We looked at new releases by Razor of Occam and Karl Sanders.
• It was a big week in the Norwegian courts… the Gorgoroth case was settled, and Varg was granted parole.
• Crazytown and Skunk Anansie are getting back together.

Next week Kip and I take off for Austin, TX on Wednesday. We’ll be live-blogging whenever possible. To everyone else, have fun not being there, suckazzz!!

-VN

It seems that all the hip music blogs were all a-twitter yesterday about the latest side-project from Jack White. Yet unlike The White Stripes or The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather actually sounds pretty darn good. Unlike with those other projects, Mr. White steps away from the spotlight and plays the drums. His fellow Raconteur Jack Lawrence handles the bass and Queens Of The Stone Age member Dean Fertita is the axeman, but the real star of the show is singer Allison Mosshart of the staggeringly good duo The Kills.

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Darkane guitarist Christofer Malmström defines dedication. So considering the Swedish melodic death-thrash quintet’s great fifth record Demonic Art (Nuclear Blast), a direct support slot on a grueling tour with Soilwork, and his band’s place in a burgeoning thrash metal renaissance, it’s clear he has cause to be in high spirits. Even a doom-obsessed interviewer couldn’t dispirit Malmström, who was battling a cold on his way to rock Portland when MetalSucks phoned up to chat about their brand new singer Jens Broman, playing 50 shows in 52 days, and not listening to new music.

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Let’s face it: Ministry without Paul Barker just isn’t the same. Nothing on Houses Of The Mole, Rio Grande Blood, or The Last Sucker offered the thrills and low-end chills of albums like Psalm 69 and Filth Pig. As a longtime industrial music fanatic, I am sick and fucking tired of being let down every time Al Jourgensen puts out new music. His latest outing, the positively plebeian cash-in Sex-O Olympic-O, should never have been released under the Revolting Cocks name. Enough is enough! The time has come for Hypo Luxa and Hermes Pan to hug-it-the-fuck-out!

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When Sigh mainman Mirai Kawashima offered to do a series of blogs from the studio where the band is recording their new album, Scenes from Hell, it was an opportunity too cool for us to pass up. Below find Mirai’s third entry; you can find his first one here and his second one here. More will follow in coming days and weeks. Enjoy!

First of all, our apologies to people who were looking forward to the sequel to Dr. Mikannibal’s recording rules for the serious studio report this time. She’s still working on the vocals, naked as usual.

Well, the biggest difference between the recording of Scenes from Hell and the previous albums is definitely the use of orchestral instruments. There were a few of “real” trumpet parts on Hangman’s Hymn, too; however, this time they fill the album from the beginning to the end.

Obviously the real instruments sound way more powerful, vivid and emotional than MIDI or synthesizers. But handling them isn’t easy at all.

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MetalSucks is proud to offer two lucky San Jose, CA-area residents the chance to see one of the best lineups out on the road this spring: Lamb of God, Children of Bodom, As I Lay Dying, God Forbid and Municipal Waste… for free! Alls ya gotta do is send an email to lambofgodcontest AT metalsucks DOT net with your full name and address, and tell us why you’re the one who deserves to win. One lucky winner, chosen a few days before the show, will win two tickets, so you can bring a friend too. Have fun, and remember this is MetalSucks, not a fuckin’ high school essay contest, so make your entries funny. Good luck!

So. I love Stereomud. I’ve written about them several times on this here webernet site. For those with short memories: Stereomud was an early-2000s supergroup of sorts, featuring members of Life of Agony, Stuck Mojo, and Pro-Pain. I know, I know, they were bottom of the barrel, C-rate post-nu-metal… but I can’t help it! “Pain” and “Steppin’ Away” were just so good! No, I’m not being ironic. And their second record Any Given Moment, which resulted in the band being dropped from Columbia, was a damn fine effort too.

With that in mind, question not why I’ve been following the drama that recently unfolded when Stereomud vocalist Erik Rogers attempted to form what amounts to a new band under the “Stereomud’ moniker. When actual members of Stereomud put up a stink, he was forced to change the name of the new band to Dangerous New Machine and issued a protracted public apology.

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