It’s raining in New York today. AGAIN. At least it’s warm; it’s been fucking rainy and cold for all of June (seriously… hoodie weather in June??). I feel like I’ve been cheated out of an entire month of summer. Fuck the world.

Here’s what happened this week:

• More arguing ensued over our 21 Best Metal Albums of the 21st Century… So Far list. You bitched and moaned to the tune of 444 comments (and counting) about the #11 pick of Deftones’ White Pony — just as you did last week with the debatably metal Tool (#12) and System of a Down (#14) picks — and then when we finally announced more trve/cvlt/br00tal albums you approved of (#10 Opeth, #9 Gojira, and #8 In Flames), comments were few and far between by comparison. You people are fucking morons. Especially Ziltoid.
• Rumors flew about the resuscitation of Headbanger’s Ball in 2010 with Jose Mangin as the host.
• More shit-talking between the two sparring Fear Factory camps provided us with endless amusement. We wondered aloud whether or not FF should be considered nu-metal.
• Shinedown’s Brent Smith claimed to have insider knowledge of a Soundgarden reunion, to which Axl — and possibly but not definitely Soundgarden’s own Ben Shepherd — took offense.
• We spoke with Scott Kelly of Neurosis and Vinnie Fucking Paul.

We out. Stay tuned in a couple of hours for our #7 Best Metal Album of the 21st Century… So Far. I’ll be at tomorrow night’s Black Anvil show at the new Duff’s location in Brooklyn if anyone wants to come out and hang. See you next week for more shenanigans!

So that whole Slayer/Megadeth tour kicked off this week – still no U.S. dates announced, by the way – and, as is the general course of things these days, Megadeth played a new song, someone filmed that new song and stuck it up on YouTube, then it wound it up on Blabbermouth, and now I’m posting it here. Anyone else remember when video bootlegs were a somewhat more difficult item to come buy, purchased at shows and sometimes shitty flea markets and then inevitably shared and swaped with friends ? Oh, the joys of VHS to VHS recording!

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Totally metal. Any questions? Didn’t think so.

-VN

Anyone remember that scene in Spaceballs where Rick Moranis tells Bill Pullman “I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate?”

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1. irrational; unreasoning.
2. of or pertaining to lower animals.
3. New music from Burnt by the Sun. Their new track “F Unit” is currently streaming on their MySpace… and good fucking lord is that some heavy shit! I’ve now heard all of the new record Heart of Darkness (August 18th, Relapse), and let me tell you… this is just the tip of the [brutal] iceberg.

-VN

[View Brutal (Pt. 1)]

Metal Blade will release The Red Chord’s new album, Fed Through the Teeth Machine, later this year. In the meantime, guitarist Mike “Gunface” McKenzie is shooting and editing an in-studio diary for our friends at Metal Injection.

Watch part four below. You can check out part one here, part two here, part three here, and a new song, “Floating Through the Vein,” here.

-AR

At the risk of sounding disrespectful: we cannot look at Michael Jackson through rose-colored glasses just because of his untimely passing. The dude was, to put it mildly, a weirdo, and probably very, very crazy. And the fact that he is now dead does not change that fact.

That being said, back when the guy was slightly less crazy (or, at least, the general public was less aware of his craziness), there’s no denying that he was major talent who had a huge impact on music. Denying this fact because of his later follies is just foolish. And even though I’ve been listening to metal since before I had pubes, I freely admit that I owned a copy of Thriller long before I owned a copy of Reign in Blood.

Jackson apparently had some kind of affinity for hard rock guitarists, or, at least, had someone in his camp who did. Besides employing Jennifer Batten for years, Jackson worked with Eddie Van Halen (“Beat It”), Slash (“Give in to Me”), and Steve Stevens (“Smooth Criminal”).

For the usual dumb reasons, none of the videos for these collaborations are embeddable, but you can easily find them on the net. In the meantime, here’s Jacko and Slash:

On a more cynical note, except at least one, if not more, of these guitarists to start exploiting their relationship with Jackson for publicity any second now.

-AR

We recently polled a wide array of musicians, managers, publicists, label reps, and writers from within the world of metal to find out what they thought the 21 Best Metal Albums of the 21st Century So Far have been. Eligible albums were released between January 1, 2000 and  April 1, 2009. Each panelist turned in a ballot, with their #1 album worth 21 points, their #2 album worth 20 points, and so on and so forth. The ballots are now in and we’ll be counting down one album a day until we reach #1. Today we present the #8 album, coming in with a total of 170 points…

In Flames, Clayman (Nuclear Blast, 2000)
Anders Fridén – vocals
Jesper Strömblad – Guitar
Björn Gelotte – Guitar
Peter Iwers – Bass
Daniel Svensson – Drums
Produced by Fredrik Nordström

It was my senior year of college in 1996, sitting in coffee shop, reading the latest music rag (taking a break from my Old Testament studies) when I came across a review for In Flames’ The Jester Race. Something about it caught my eye as that was the time I was getting more into of the Scandinavian metal like At The Gates and Amorphis. I picked it up and was blown away how they had made “death metal” so “melodic.” I almost denounced my religion and started a cult dedicated to this semi-new genre of metal!

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Congrats to Mr. Lun, the winner of new Darkane, Devin Townsend and Edguy CDs from last week’s funny photo caption contest. Mr. Lun’s winning caption to the photo at right:

“Jimmy gets a taste (and whiff) of the good life at the 2009 Wigger Slam Initiate orientation.”

This week the good folks at Relapse Records have donated copies of Voivod’s Infinfi and Coalesce’s Ox, both brand spankin’ new, to send to one lucky winner. Just come up with a caption to the below photo and they’re yours.

First SMNnews.com reported that Jose Mangin revealed in a Metal Injection podcast that Headbanger’s Ball will return to MTV in 2010 with him as the host. Then the sleuths at Metal Insider contacted Jose himself to ask him about the situation. Mangin denies any official full-time launch of the show or his place in it, but he does promise that some plans are in the works for Headbanger’s Ball in 2010. Sounds to me like Mangin is at the very least in the running for the host job but perhaps spilled the beans a bit too soon.

But here’s the thing: can Headbangers Ball even be relevant anymore? In 2009, a TV show about metal hardly seems like it will, or even can, matter at all.

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1. crude; coarse. harsh; ferocious.
2. of or pertaining to road injuries to Daath’s Eyal Levi
3. Australia’s The Amenta. And why wouldn’t they be brutal? They’re on Listenable Records, after all. Catch ‘em on the “Monsters of Death” U.S. tour this fall with Vader, Decrepit Birth, Warbringer, Augury and Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky.

Audioslave, Velvet Revolver, Army of Anyone, The Panic Channel – these groups all had the wrong idea. Keeping the band relatively intact but hiring a new singer who sounds nothing like your old singer is, from a business perspective, a huge misstep. At least 75% of the above-mentioned bands could go crawling back to their ex when it was time – poor Velvet Revolver didn’t have that luxury.

No no no, much better to hire a new singer who looks and sounds exactly like your old singer, right?

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Tokyo thrash disciples Grief of War – who call their kamikaze brand of thrash “samurai crunch” – return with a vengeance on their new album Worship, which will be released on July 7 via that bastion-of-stellar-metal Prosthetic Records. We’re proud to host the world premier of the video for the record’s title track. The band’s MySpace page has a stream of another new song, “Disorder,” if you’re jonesin’ for some more Japanese thrash after checking out the new video below.

Any of our 241 readers who leave in Tokoyo or nearby should definitely check out Grief of War live at their July 20th CD release show at Explosion in Tokyo. Banzai!

[This exclusive has now ended.]

I’m a disorganized mess today (fucking monkeys had a late night rager and trashed the Mansion last night) so I can’t figure out who sent in this merengue cover of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” but whoever it was…. uhh, thanks dude. It’s pretty ace.

After the jump you can watch the video for a song called – I shit you fucking not – “Death Dies Hard.” But first, some contextualization.

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All this Fear Factory brou-haha got me huntin’ for Fear Factory live videos this morning… and I found this performance of the band at Bizarre Festival in 1998 performing “Edgecrusher.” Obsolete must have literally just come out. Watching this, I’m reminded of that fact that Fear Factory were totally nu-metal; I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing (that’s for ya’ll to argue about)… I’m just sayin’.

-VN

SPECIAL GUEST BLOGGER D.X. FERRIS, AUTHOR OF 33 1/13: SLAYER’S REIGN IN BLOOD

We recently polled a wide array of musicians, managers, publicists, label reps, and writers from within the world of metal to find out what they thought the 21 Best Metal Albums of the 21st Century So Far have been. Eligible albums were released between January 1, 2000 and  April 1, 2009. Each panelist turned in a ballot, with their #1 album worth 21 points, their #2 album worth 20 points, and so on and so forth. The ballots are now in and we’ll be counting down one album a day until we reach #1. Today we present the #9 album, coming in with a total of 166 points…

Gojira, From Mars to Sirius (Listenable/Prosthetic, 2005)
Joe Duplantier – Vocals/Guitars
Christian Andreu – Guitars
Jean-Michel Labadie – Bass
Mario Duplantier – Drums
Produced by Joe Duplantier

In modern metal, water is the new fire. Mastodon, Isis, Gojira. Especially Gojira. Who knew that environmental concerns could be metal as fuck? Sure, Kreator, C.O.C., and others grazed on some eco-friendly themes back in the day. But these four French dudes make a full meal of it. And it’s not feel-good hippie shit. In Gojira’s threatened world, nature’s green is splattered with red blood. Metal is best when it’s elemental. From Mars to Sirius is a concept album that – if I follow correctly – relates an interplanetary quest to resurrect a dead planet. We’re talking life, death, and rebirth on a grand scale.
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Here’s some advice for those of you aspiring musicians out there who keep asking me questions like: How do I get my band signed? How can we get the attention of people at labels? Etc., etc., etc. And I’ll give you some advice for sure.

But I’m going to start at the beginning. I think that most of you are putting the cart before the horse. You’ve got to get your package up to snuff before you can even begin thinking about labels. This is to take place months or even years before you ever encounter a label person.

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The album drops September 15.

-AR

After the horrific murder of his brother, no one would have faulted Pantera/Damageplan drummer Vinnie Paul for dropping off the face of the Earth. But instead, the man chose to soldier on, starting his own record company, Big Vin Records, and resuming his drumming duties for boozy groove metallers Hellyeah. The former has signed Type O Negative side project Seventh Void and released the successful Dimebag Darrell tribute DVD Dimevision; the latter’s toured the globe in support of their debut album, with plans to record and tour again in the near future. A relentlessly positive guy who sounds a little like the metal version of King of the Hill’s Boomhauer, Vinnie seems content with the past and satisfied with the present (upon hearing that I was conducting the interview from Massachusetts after I shut my tape recorder off, he gave his thoughts on the Boston Bruins’ then-upcoming playoff game with Montreal Canadiens and stated that his dream Superbowl would be between the Cowboys and the Patriots, if it were possible). In his inteview with MetalSucks, he gives his thoughts on the upcoming 20th anniversary of Cowboys from Hell, running a record label, and the future of Hellyeah.

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