As a co-sponsor of the 2009 run of the Thrash & Burn Tour, MetalSucks is pleased to announce the full, confirmed lineup of bands for this year’s trek. The tour will run through the U.S. from July 24th through August 30th, 2009, and will be headlined by MetalSucks-faves Devildriver. Support will come from Emmure, Despised Icon, My Children My Bride, Veil of Maya, For The Fallen Dreams, Oceano, Periphery and Red River Revival [UPDATE: Red River Revival will not be on the tour. -Ed.]

While we at MetalSucks can’t say we vouch for every single one of those bands, we appreciate the “something for everyone” angle of this year’s tour, and there’s absolutely no denying it; that is an amazing lineup, and if you aren’t interested in at least a few of those bands we highly suggest you stop drinking that Haterade pronto. We’ll be there for sure. We’ll have tour announcements for you leading up to and through the duration of the tour, including tour dates and cities very soon. As soon as we know, so will you!

See you this summer.

Last month, The Dillinger Escape Plan frontman Greg Puciato lashed out at President Barack Obama in a lengthy blog post, taking the sitting prez to task for the bailout and calling him “George W. Bush lite, wearing a young black man costume.”

Well, you’d assume that Obama a) has never heard of The Dillinger Escape Plan and b) therefore would not have heard about/cared about what Puciato had to say.

Apparently, this is not the case.

Read President Obama’s response to Puciato after the jump… it’s a doozy.

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Trigger the Bloodshed couldn’t have picked a worse time to be a (something) the (something) band playing death metal with the occasional fit of hardcore swagger: nothing could be hotter, and nothing could be less appealing to anyone over the age of 19. The thing with TtB, though, is that the hardcore swagger is incredibly brief, and greatly overshadowed by the fact that the band play a fierce, unrelenting brand of fucking death metal. The Great Depression, the band’s latest, has all the subtlety, nuance, and melodic sensibility of a bone saw; it doesn’t resort clean vocals or ambient tracks (well, they do one, but it‘s quick), instead opting to tear right the fuck into you until there’s nothing left but skin and hair folicles. Cheesy, overwrought metaphors aside, if one considers the band deathcore, then this is a hefty argument in its defense. But if you’re not so hung up on labels, and, more importantly, if you like your death metal fast to the point of seizure-inducing, Trigger the Bloodshed, believe it or not, are your kind of band.

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Vince and I still don’t really understand the difference between “wigger slam” and “deathcore,” but Metal Inquistion‘s Sergeant D does: he has (by his own admission) pretty much positioned himself as the world’s (or at least the net’s) foremost authority on the wigger slam genre, and, as such a scholar, was even interviewed for an article in Decibel on the subgenre (Which in no way, shape, or form clarified the difference between wigger slam and deathcore. Seriously. Someone explain it to me, ’cause I ain’t hearin’ it.).

One of the bands Sergeant D talks about in said Decibel piece is Waking the Cadaver (again, sounds like deathcore to me!), who apparently didn’t take very kindly to being called “wiggers,” even though one look at them would suggest that, yes, they are indeed white dudes who dress in a manner stereotypically reserved for black dudes:

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We gots the goods. And so do Clutch; like a fine wine, these Marylanders just get better and better with age. We’ve got their brand new track “50,000 Unstoppable Watts” –  from their forthcoming new album Strange Cousins From the West (out July 7th) — streaming for free. Produced by Clutch and the legendary J. Robbins, the effort is the first Clutch original to be released on the band’s own Weathermaker Music. Clutch, the road dogs that they are, already have a 7 month worldwide headlining tour planned, taking flight in the US on May 6th with support from Wino and Maylene & the Sons of Disaster, followed by a July US tour with the wicked, wicked Baroness as main support. Full list of confirmed dates after the jump and the brand new track streaming below — enjoy!

- The MS Dudes

[This promotion has ended. -Ed.]

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MetalSucks contributor and Hipster-Hater Anso DF posted a fine piece about not-metal-but-adored-by-many-metal-fans San Francisco stoner-groove band Dredg on his excellent blog Hipsters out of Metal! We’ve heard all of Dredg’s new record The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion (out June 9th), and let me tell you, it is fucking boner-worthy as all hell. “Information,” the obvious choice as first single, is also quite obviously one of the worst and simplest songs on a record full of great and complex songs, but c’est la vie. I’ll let our friend Anso take it from here:

Art-rock quartet Dredg doesn’t exactly do themselves any favors. Their name is tragically similar to powerfully inferior bands like Staind and Trapt. Get past that, and you’ll find their sound is flittery and intellectual; I bet Neil Peart heard them and was like Goddamn these lyrics are pretentious. And worst of all, they signed to a major label that didn’t have the stones to promote them. Which isn’t to say Atlantic did nothing with 2004′s brilliant Terry Date-produced set Catch Without Arms, nor that Dredg is not a difficult act. But while the Discovery Price concept is a strong inducement to purchase, it doesn’t work if the album is invisible to purchasers. Every fucking body who is aware of Dredg LOVES them. That there will be more of us in the coming weeks is indicated by their yawning, quaking new single “Information” (above). And we’re not closeted Coldplay fans like all those Thrice-humpers.

The video for the new single “Information,” after el jumparino.

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So I started getting down with tweeting yesterday, and the verdict is………IT’S SILLY!!!

(but you knew that already)

My fave exchange thus far was when I asked Chris Cornell if he ever rocks Timberlands, cause that would be SO ironic, and he replied that haha yes he had 3 pairs, to which I told him that I actually like the Nelly Furtado cover version of “Jesus Christ Pose”, to which he didn’t reply. Naturally this morning when good ‘ol CC tweeted complaints about having long hair/short hair/hair, I suggested he shave his pubes. Haven’t heard back yet but obvs I’ll let you know when/if I do.

Cause of course you care, right???

When Jamey Jasta of Hatebreed mentioned that he was trying Vietnamese food last night for the first time and asked what he should have, I couldn’t resist suggesting that he try the cream of sum yung gai….to which he responded that my mother recommended the same thing! Mom — how could you??

And so perhaps I could become addicted to this terse, infantile format of communicating the random thoughts off the top of your head — but let’s hope not. What I’d really like to do is harrass as many “celebrities” as possible, and get them to respond to my inane baiting… Star-tweeting, if you will?

Follow our misadventures, and speak up!

(and after you add us, add Valient Thorr too, cause he’s hilarious!)

-KW

This Friday, the one-and-only Melvins kick off a 25th anniversary celebration at New York’s Webster Hall, where (as I’ve mentioned before) the group will perform the classic Houdini LP in its entirety, followed by a set of tracks from the founding 1983 incarnation featuring original drummer Mike Dillard. The talented Trevor Dunn, who played some shows with his new band MadLove a couple weeks ago, will fill in on bass duties as the Big Business boys are currently touring in support of the just-released Mind The Drift album. Yet incidentally there’s another former Melvin who just happens to be in the Big Apple this weekend: Joe Preston.

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To review: last year Wes Borland joined Marilyn Manson. This seemed a little odd because while Manson and Borland both like to play dress-up, Manson is a known Limp Bizkit hater – a fact which Manson explained away at the time by claiming that Borland “used to be in a really terrible band that he left because he felt that it was a destructive force in art.”

Of course, this little marriage didn’t last very long because Borland went running back to Bizkit, thus making Manson look like a fool or, at best, pretty naieve.

So, of course, Manson being the God of Shit Talkers, he has now lashed out at Borland in Kerrang:

“We almost made the mistake of having Wes play guitar but he re-joined Limp Bizkit,” Manson explains. “That move forever eradicated my feelings on his choices in life as an artist.”

When asked why he thinks Borland went back to his old band, Manson said: “That is what I find myself asking when I urinate sometimes. He said he would never go back. If the reason is money, then I’d rather roll up a 5 note and shove it up my urethra. I’d rather set my dick on fire than join something that I hated.”

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I’m loving this new subgenre title Vince has coined - “Sumeriancore.” I love it because a) it instantly lets you know the band in question plays proggy tech deathcore, and b) if we’re gonna get silly with these subgenres names, let’s get really silly with them, right?

So, besides The Faceless, I guess my favorite Sumeriancore band (or, at least, my favorite Sumeriancore band that is actually on Sumerian) is Born of Osiris (whose debut, The New Reign, was actually produced The Faceless’ Michael Keene). Born of Osiris have the adorable nickname “BOO.” Just makes me wanna play with puppies every time I say it. “BOO!” Like the little girl in Monsters, Inc. Don’t ask how I know that. It’s definitely not because I use Pixar movies to lure small children back to the MetalSucks Mansion.

But I’m getting way off-topic here. Born of Osiris have posted a new song, “Now Arise,” on their MySpace page.

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Last week’s logo was way too easy – everyone save for one or two people whom I’m guessing are mentally retarded (THE ANSWER IS NEVER FUCKING SLIPKNOT PEOPLE. IT HAS NEVER BEEN SLIPKNOT AND IT WILL NEVER BE SLIPKNOT.) correctly identified last week’s logo as belonging to the band Alice Through the Windshield Glass. The luck of the draw says that congratulations are in order for David MacDonald, Jose Martinez, and Dan Saraceno, all of whom win a copy of Nightwish’s Made in Hong Kong (And in Various Other Places).

But don’t go slitting your wrists if you didn’t win a copy – Roadrunner has supplied us with two (2) more copies to give away this week. This two-disc set includes live performances recorded around the world, PLUS b-sides and demos, PLUS a DVD with music videos and a documentary chronicling the Dark Passion Play World Tour that took place from ‘07 – ‘08. This sweet package is a must own for all you Nightwish fans, so get crackin’!

All you have to do to win is identify the name of the band whose logo appears below, then shoot me an e-mail with your answer, your name and address at axl AT metalsucks DOT net. We’ll randomly select two winners from everyone who gets it right, and announce his or her names next week.

This week’s logo was suggested to us by read Shawn Zeilenga. It’s a mite harder than last week’s…

-AR

Another instance of someone with too much free time on his or her hands…

I don’t think this what black metal’s founders had in mind when they came up with the term “corpse paint.”

Thanks to MetalSucks Maniac David Massey for the tip!

-AR

Heyo! Dream Theater have a new video for “A Rite of Passage,” the very song they gave away for free last week. A new DT video wouldn’t be too much of a novelty if not for the fact that for a good ten years there before Systematic Chaos we didn’t get any Dream Theater music videos at all aside from live videos/DVDs the band put out for sale. I’m so used to only seeing live footage of Dream Theater that it just looks downright odd to see the band lit up all nice amongst spacey CG effects and to see Mike Portnoy dressed in anything other than his trademark custom Knicks jerseys. And the funny thing is, as cool as this video looks, I’m not sure that at this point in their career Dream Theater really even need official videos like this — I mean, let’s be honest, the only things Dream Theater fans care about seeing are close-ups of John Petrucci’s hands and Portnoy’s sick drum chops. But hey, there’s plenty of that in this video too, and any time a band like Dream Theater gets done up with the works the world can’t be all that bad of a place after all.

Black Clouds and Silver Linings will be officially released on June 23rd.

-VN

I know we have more than a few vinyl purists reading this column, so you’ll likely be interested to know that the Aaron Turner / Justin Broadrick collaboration Grey Machine (which we first told you about back in September) just released a 12″ single for “Vultures Descend” via beardo metal specialists Hydra Head Records.

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Another day has passed and you still haven’t heard Goes Cube? This is the headline our own Satan Rosenbloom used for his review of Goes Cube’s The End Records debut Another Day Has Passed, released last month, and recipient of a highly distinctive four-out-of-five horns rating on MetalSucks — and the headline could not be any more true, because Another Day Has Passed is a sick album worthy of the attention of any fan of the Quicksand/Helmet school of post-metal. Now you’ve literally got no excuse for letting yet another day pass, because we’re giving away a free track from Another Day Has Passed right here, right now. So don’t let this opportunity slip by, sucker.

Goes Cube – “Goes Cube Song 57″

-VN

Last year our own David Bee Roth, got to chat with 3 Inches of Blood vocalist Cam Pipes (who has maybe the most appropriate name for a singer ever). One of the topics that came up was the band’s break-up with Roadrunner:

One of the major events this year is that you’ve split with Roadrunner records. What happened to that relationship between the label and the band?

It was time for them to decide if they were going to pick up the option for the next record. They didn’t and we’re happy about it because we didn’t really like being with that label. There was a lot of things inside the label that we didn’t like in terms of how they showed their support for us and how they pushed our band in the press. We really didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. They’re a really big corporate label now owned by Warner, so they’re moving strictly in a “We want to make money” direction and we weren’t putting up the numbers that they would have liked to see. We got dropped on the priority list time and time again and then they finally decided that it wasn’t economically viable to keep releasing this band. It’s enabled us to be a lot more creative on where we want to go. We’re not tied down to a long term contract anymore, so we can go explore other options and hopefully we’ll be a little more free to do certain things with a label that’s a lot more focused to promote us in a better way and [is] more geared towards our style.

Well, following in the footsteps of former and now once again current labelmates Daath (who I guess are still kinda sorta on Roadrunner?), it looks like 3IOB have landed on Century. Thus spake Pipes in a statement:

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This past Friday, I decided to take a break from writing my latest book Savage Son to catch some old school, new school, and something-in-between-school metal. After spending a sweltering hot day at the San Antonio Zoo with my three-year-old daughter and witnessing a Gibbon monkey with an anal prolapse and a pair of crusty old horny humping turtles, I figured the Kreator-led Hordes of Chaos Tour at San Antonio’s Scout Bar might actually be a bit less mentally taxing.

It definitely was, but in a good way.

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Thanks to Cosmo Lee at Invisible Oranges for pointing out that today marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Morbid Angel’s historic debut, Altars of Madness. As Lee notes, “Morbid Angel weren’t kings of death metal yet. Altars of Madness was the beginning of their coup.” My personal favorite Angel album, Domination, was still six years away. But it’s impossible to ignore the importance of this release to the death metal genre.

After the jump, watch nine out of the ten songs on the record, as filmed for the Live Madness ’89 concert film that captures the band performing just months after the album’s release. Live Madness is also available as a DVD that was included Altars‘ 2006 re-release.

-AR

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Fuck off and die.

-AR

No idea how we missed this, but “The Cat’s Pajamas,” the first single off of IWABO’s upcoming Century debut, It’s All Happening, is currently streaming on Absolute Punk. It’s actually kinda different for IWABO – the melody-to-madness ratio is higher than normal – but not so different that my head is spinning. In other words, I’m really digging it.

I know a lot of you already have your mind made up about this band one way or the other, but nonetheless I’d encourage you all to give it a listen. Even if it’s just so you can better formulate your argument that it’s utter crap.

It’s All Happening drops June 2.

-AR