The Great One just twotted all over the place:
I miss playing live. Planning for 2010 in a number of ways. 2 minutes ago from web
In other news, is it 2010 yet?
If you haven’t already done so, check out Vince’s awesome interview with Devin here.
-AR
By all accounts Bison B.C. and Lazarus A.D. are kicking total ass on the MetalSucks-sponsored Baptized in Beer Tour. The bands wrap up the Canadian leg of the tour on July 16th, and from there kick off the U.S. leg in St. Paul, MN, after which they’ll hook up with Woe Of Tyrants a few days later in Raleigh, NC for the duration.
Bison vocalist/guitarists James Gnarwell had this to say: “We have truly been baptized in beer so far… All of our clothes, the van, and every stage thus far has been soaked in our most favorite beverage… Glorious beer. All kinds of beer: from the finest ales and lagers to the dingiest piss you can stomach and we love it all. Can’t wait to slay south of the border and continue our liver olympics. See you in the future.”
Check out the rippin’ footage of Bison B.C. performing “Medication” live at the sold out Vancouver date below, then take a look at the remaining tour dates after the jump so you can get your beer on. This live footage… I mean, like, woah; if this doesn’t make you wish you were at that show rockin’ out up front, might we suggest this?
Wow. Has it really been four years since Peter Tägtgren got it together to make a Hypocrisy album? I guess the time went quickly because a) as I get older and closer to death time seems to pass faster and b) the dude has done so many side-projects and guest appearances (Bloodbath, that Nuclear Blast All-Stars thing, etc.) that he’s never really been out of the headlines (There was also that Catch 22 semi-re-recording, which, like most re-recordings, was pretty much ill advised.).
In any case, Hypocrisy finally have a new album coming out. It’s called A Taste of Extreme Divinity, and it’ll be released on October 23 on Nuclear Blast.
If nothing else, the cover art is fucking metal.
-AR
This has got to be the best and most fitting name for a Clutch song in the history of ever.
Clutch are like the Slayer of stoner/blues rawk — they just keep doing what they’ve always been doing, despite changing trends and musical climates, and they keep doing it well. Not that Clutch was ever part of any specific trend to begin with; these guys have always forged their own path. Like I’ma do with this sweet machete I just got as soon as I get back down to the Kentucky MS Mansion Annex in a coupla weeks.
Anthrax! Ham Radio! And liquor! Clutch’s new record Strange Cousins From the West comes out today on Weathermaker Music.
-VN
UK retro-thrashers Evile don’t do much for me, but I’m aware that a lot of you are fans. So I’m doing my bloggerly duty and telling you that they have a new song, “Infected Nations,” now streaming on their MySpace page. It’s the title track for the band’s new album, which Earache will release on September 22.
Generally speaking, I think it’s a pretty good song. But I don’t feel very passionate about it. Tell me why I’m an idiot in the comments section below.
-AR
So my buddy San Carlos, who comes a long line of depression-era rum-runners and later micro-brewers, was recently in port at Kingston, Jamaica where he got into a rather heated discussion with a polish backpacker over a game of billiards at a shady pub called The Prickhouse (actually Brickhouse, but vandals had recently improved its title). While the original discussion was an argument over the general superiority of Afghan bubble hash versus B.C. hydroponic cannabis, the tensions were soon eased when the Polack began to tell a naughty yarn regarding himself, a Swedish accomplice and a rather sizable number of seasoned Amsterdam prostitutes. While much of that story was lost in translation (San Carlos only communicates through Creole Sign language), the Swede had reported to the Polish gentleman who had passed it on later to San Carlos that one particular prostitute with Pete Steele-esque vampire fang implants had relations in Canada, specifically a sister who had heard from bar tender who had in turn heard from East-side Vancouver street dweller that Sammy Duet (Goatwhore, ex-Acid Bath) had been paraphrased as having said to an interested fan: “If you like Acid Bath, you should try to get to Louisiana next year, but you didn’t hear that from me.”
And you didn’t hear it here first.
Above, check out the video for “Toubabo Koomi,” which is a phrase so filthy, San Carlos refuses to translate it for me. I’m absolutely going crazy for even the possibility of one of the greatest New Orleans scene bands ever reuniting, or maybe I’m just a big bucket of crazy anyway.
-DBR
I hope you guys enjoyed the 21 Best Metal Albums of the 21st Century… So Far. I thought it was awesome that it got so much feedback, and shows that the site is really picking up steam. I was drawn to this site because of the humor and I think it’s coming into it’s own. I called to ask them for the blog and they were gracious enough to say, ‘yes.’ Now that I’m not in God Forbid, they may feel gyped!
With that said, a lot of my blogs have been controversial, and with me leaving God Forbid, everyone is wondering why I still have a blog here. I’ve wondered the same thing. I want to help people out in the biz the best way I can. So for a while I’m going to make this blog a question and answer sort of thing. You can ask any question but if it’s stupid, I won’t answer. If it asks about my decision to leave GF, I won’t answer. Those questions don’t help anyone. Post your questions in the comments section and I’ll try and answer as many relevant ones as possible. I will keep it up weekly if the questions keep coming.
On a side note, I am working on new music that is turning out to be pretty bad ass. Axl and Vince have heard some of the stuff, although rough, and it’s pretty heavy. The vocals are all singing. Think Gojira mixed with Alice In Chains. I’m diggin’ it, bigtime!
OK, on to some questions.
We may have gotten more e-mails about the announcement that Lamb of God and Gojira will be providing support for Metallica on their upcoming tour than, like, any other topics ever all combined. Apparently you guys and girls are excited about this news.
And I understand… in theory. I’ll be happy if Gojira and LOG are exposed to a wider audience, but beyond that, I still don’t especially care (I can’t speak for Vince or any other MetalSucks Mansion inhabitant, of course).
I forgot my earplugs last night when Vince and I hit up The Faceless show here in NYC last night. This was kind of a terrifying realization. I am finally at a point where I honestly feel like metal shows are almost too loud. It’s not that I hate the music – I obviously love the music – I’d just still like to be able to hear it in ten or twenty years (I plan on dying shortly thereafter, so that’s really as far as I need to make it.). Luckily, my man Vince had an extra pair for me, but guess what? When I got home, my ears were still ringing. My point being: it seems inevitable that I will someday suffer from hearing loss in some capacity.
D.X. Ferris recently wrote an article on just this topic for The Cleveland Scene, which includes interviews with such metal luminaries as Keelhaul and Soulless. Here’s an excerpt:
After last week’s announcement that ex-Himsa axeman Matt Wicklund would be playing with God Forbid on this summer’s Mayhem Fest and that God Forbid’s Doc Coyle would be filling in on bass for Trivium for at least one show, I expressed interest in hearing from any readers who caught the gig.
Well, one of you, Ryan Wineman, did indeed e-mail me over the weekend. Here’s his report:
One of the many, many topics we discussed on Friday night’s Metal Injection Livecast (which I fully intend to keep plugging until you’ve all downloaded it) is the new Megadeth album, Endgame. Decibel has already asserted that it’s Mustaine’s best work since Rust in Peace; I think that might be pushing it a little, but it’s most definitely his best since Countdown to Exctinction.
At some point during all the yelling, MI’s Noa Avior tried to bring up Cryptic Writings a bunch of times as a good ‘Deth record that has been released in the years since Countdown. But because I’m a self-involved prick, I never even heard her, and that’s one debate we didn’t get to have.
So let’s have it now. Honestly, Cryptic never made that big an impression on me, although I do recall enjoying the single, “Trust.” It’s not the speed metal kinda thing I think most of us expect from Mustaine and whatever three other dudes are in his employ at any given moment, but it is a pretty good song.
So now I leave it to you Megadexperts to argue about the ins and outs of the rest of Cryptic Writings. Weigh in with your thoughts below.
-AR
Maryland death-thrashers Misery Index (whose excellent 2008 album Traitors our own Axl Rosenberg gave a four-out-of-five-horns rating and our own David Bee Roth ranked his #8 album of 2008) are currently touring the world, and they’ve been so kind as to produce an exclusive 3-part video blog series for MetalSucks documenting their lives on the road and the crazy shenanigans that ensue. Part 1 took a look at the band’s road experiences and bird-watching hobby on their European tour, while Part 2 goes behind the scenes of their Japanese tour; automated toilets, Japanese beer, bullet trains, the band’s visit to a temple in Kyoto, and a funny little Japanese chick in a Burzum t-shirt. You know, the usual. Part 3 is coming soon!
-VN
[This exclusive has now ended.]
Most Dream Theater fans consider the band’s peak to have spanned the era starting with 1994′s Awake and extending through 2002′s double-disc opus Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (excepting 1997′s bland and boring Falling Into Infinity). I’d actually argue that the band’s “golden” era extended one album further through Train of Thought, unquestionably the band’s heaviest offering ever, if not just because of the good songwriting but for the fact that this was the last album on which the band pushed themselves forward. Since then (Octavarium, Systematic Chaos) Dream Theater have settled into cruise control, pumping out decent but ultimately unspectacular prog metal albums that don’t so much tread new ground as walk confidently atop terrain already explored. The band’s latest, Black Clouds and Silver Linings, continues in this vein; it’s the third album in a row to show little to no musical progression (isn’t this supposed to be “progressive” metal?) and as such ends up feeling mostly same-sounding and… meh. Still, it’s hard to knock anything Dream Theater do too heavily; the band already indelibly changed the metal landscape once, and anything they do warrants at the very least a rating of “pretty good.”
Also: Andrew W.K.
Stay tuned for a special announcement involving Gwar later this week.
[Thanks: Villan and Devin K.]
As The Deciblog might say, I don’t wanna talk about this, but you can if you want to.
-AR
We’ve haven’t posted much about Relapse Records’ resident noise rockers Jucifer since last year’s coverage of a local show gone horribly wrong. Hopefully, no such shenanigans will mar the band’s lengthy headlining tour of North America which is heavy on the Canada dates. Opinion about Jucifer is admittedly mixed among staffers here at MetalSucks, but I reside in the camp that really really digs what Livengood and Valentine do, particularly on last year’s L’Autrichienne (which didn’t make the list that you guys can’t stop complaining about).
This Wednesday, the duo will hit up New York’s Cake Shop with their U.S. touring opener Mount Vicious, a less confounding group that sounds sorta like Danzig fronting The Jesus Lizard. Full dates can be found here. At some point Jucifer plans to record a follow-up to L’Autrichienne (title TBA), expected in the Spring of 2010.
-GS
[Gary Suarez smells dryer sheets. He also writes for Brainwashed and usually manages the consistently off-topic No Yoko No. Say, why don't you follow him on Twitter?]
Living Colour are streaming a new song, “Behind the Sun,” on their MySpace page. It’s our first sample of the new music that will appear on their forthcoming The Chair in the Doorway, which comes out September 15.
If you missed the Metal Injection Livecast on which I was guest this past Friday night, you can download it here. In addition to discussing some of last week’s most amusing bits of metal news, we were joined in the studio by the not-quite-legendary Thor Shredsteen (not “stein”) and took some phone calls that were, um, entertaining. Check it out.
-AR
So in case you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, or this is simply your first visit to Metal=eh, we’ve been sharing our views on the 21 “best” metal albums of this millennium (according to an esteemed panel of metal industry yahoos), and lo and behold — an amazing album by an amazing band topped the list.
Commencing with arguably the “best” (or at least “most metal”) opening lyrics of any album this century (“I think that someone is trying to kill me….it’s infecting my blood and destroying my mind…”), Mastodon‘s epic yet grounded Leviathan ascends above the crop of proto-prog-thrashsters throughout every song, and the range of jamz feels both balanced and diverse, all the while sounding like the same album from start to finish — not an easy feat.
For me, it was always the first and last tunes off this album that exhibit the most, ahehhahem, heart (and of course “Iron Tusk” totally rips……..ROAR).
MASTODON — “Hearts Alive”, from ["best" 21st century album] Leviathan (2004)
-KW
HOLY SHIT, you guys are never gonna believe what just happened. I ran out to buy a pack of cigarettes, and as I was walking down the street, I saw a huge EXPLOSION! I looked up and there was this little girl sticking her head out the window, screaming for help. So I climbed up the wall of the building, rescued the little girl AND her kitty, and then just went about my day like nothing happened! The little girl offered me free cupcakes for life, ha ha! I am awesome. Don’t look to read about this anywhere but here, though, as, uh, sometimes superheroic deeds such as this go unreported.
Here’s some other shit that happened this week:
Don’t forget that I’ll be on the Metal Injection Livecast tonight at 10 PM EST. Listen in, call in, whatever. Just show me some love, you dicks.
-AR
