MS Maniac Todd R. sent in a list on Yahoo of the 25 Best Metal Bands. Although the author opens the piece by attempting to explain away the very blurry line of ye old “is it or isn’t it metal” debate, any attempt at qualification is instantly rendered moot by the very existence of such a list. The only way you can really qualify a list like this is to say “these are my favorite metal bands,” otherwise you get into all sorts of sticky epistemological and ontological (Google them) traps surrounding how you can actually determine what words like “good” and “best” mean and how they can be applied to music objectively.

So… Aerosmith at #8? Jimi Hendrix at #5? Whatever, dude.

When will this silly listmaking thing die? Never, as long as there’s hundreds of you guys willing and ready to get your panties all twisted up in a bunch about it! Speaking of which, tell us what you think of the Yahoo list in the comments, as if you needed an invitation to do so.

-VN

As I’ve been saying over and over and over again, this has already been a great year for grind. And one of the best grind albums of the year is Agorphobic Nosebleed’s Agorapocalypse (read Satan Rosenbloom’s review here).

Well, according to our friends at the under-appreciated Crustcake, AnB fans have even more to look forward to this year, in the form of a split with The Endless Blockade. I’m not really familiar with The Endless Blockade, but new AnB is enough to get me to pay the whopping six bucks this 7″ will cost me.

You can order the split here. Only losers won’t buy this thing.

-AR

There must be some kinda smart juice in the Jameson. ‘Cause two months ago the record label gave me free reign to choose a track to premier from Maylene and the Sons of Disaster’s rippin’ new record III, from which I chose “Step Up (I’m On It),” and lo and behold it’s now been chosen as the second single. Vince 1, everyone else 0. It’s the small victories in life, people.

This is a bad ass video for a bad ass song. From the looks of it the clip was filmed somewhere in the U.S. south, possibly near the band’s hometown of Birmingham, AL. For those wondering what the newly minted MetalSucks Mansion Kentucky Korner looks like, this is a close approximation.

NOW ROCK.

-VN

To clarify my comments on Jake E. Lee yesterday: I wasn’t attacking  Mr. Lee’s technical skill. But, with all due respect to my man Vince, I’m not a fan of “Bark at the Moon” or anything else from the Lee era, for that matter. Yes, it sucks that Sharon fired him by telegram, but I actually think Zakk got it worse – ’cause Zakk’s humiliation was public. Just sayin’.

ANYWAY, I don’t make apologies for my slight to Joe Holmes. Holmes replaced Zakk Wylde after the release of Ozzmosis ’cause Zakk was off chasing a potential gig with Guns N’ Roses (Somewhere there are demos of a GN’R featuring co-leads by Slash and Zakk, and although I’m sure that music had guitar-masturbation overload, I’d still love to hear them some day. Fat chance, I know.). The big stink about Holmes at the time was that he’d been a student of Randy Rhodes and was therefore supposed to be the second coming or something.

No such luck – poor dude stayed with Ozzy until Zakk returned in 2000, and never even got to record with Ozzy… actually, as far as I know, he’s the only person to be in Ozzy’s band for so long and not get to make an album. He did get to play on the song “Walk on Water” from the movie Beavies and Butthead Do America, and worked on Down to Earth – in fact, several songs he co-wrote remain on that record, although none of them are memorable (and Earth pretty much blows, although I blame producer Tim Palmer as much as anyone).

I never saw Holmes live with Ozzy, but I did manage to find this video of him playing “Perry Mason” on Ozzfest. It’s edited all to fuck but it does give you a sense of what Holmes must’ve been like live. He’s a scrawny motherfucker, but otherwise seems to have “the look” down, at least. Also, the video has some boobies as an added bonus.

Side note: Holmes also played with Lizzy Borden for awhile, but, if I’m not mistaken, never got to play on a Borden album. It’s like the dude was cursed or something.

-AR

Coheed & Cambria skinsman Chris Pennie has taken some time out of his day to record a quick video segment with us in which he shares the metal albums he’s currently spinning. Without spilling the beans so you don’t have to click that play button, we’ll just say this: he’s got awesome taste in metal! No surprise, given the guy played drums for The Dillinger Escape Plan for an entire decade.

Catch Coheed & Cambria on the peanut-butter-and-jelly-like combination tour with Heaven & Hell starting this Friday. Full list of dates after the jump.

[This exclusive has now ended.]

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Short n’ sweet: here’s the video for “Exist Underground,” from the new Poison the Well album, The Tropic Rot.

And if you haven’t read our own Sammy O’Hagar’s interview with PTW guitarist Ryan Primack, well, you really ought to.

-AR

Over at Invisible Oranges, Cosmo Lee continues his ongoing meditation on all things metal, now by offering some advice to upstart metal acts: get back to the mentality of the tape-trading days and give your first album away for free.

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Nah, that’s not fair. Hetfield doesn’t sound this good live.

-AR

[via Metal Injection]

Several of you justifiably called out Axl yesterday for dissing Jake E. Lee in his post about Ozzy’s probable new guitar player, Firewind’s Gus G. Lee could definitely shred, and although his  contribution to the Ozzy legacy ultimately doesn’t stack up against Rhoads or Wylde, he did write the killer riff for “Bark at the Moon” which is actually one of my favorite Ozzy riffs ever.

So whilst making sure I had my historical facts straight here, I managed to turn up this nugget from the Wikipedia page for Badlands, the band Jake E. Lee formed after being fired by Ozzy:

After touring with Ozzy Osbourne in support of the Ultimate Sin album, Lee was fired in a telegram from Sharon Osborne while working on one of his muscle cars back in Los Angeles. Lee was completely caught off guard at the time of his firing and was under the impression he had a solid working gig with the Osborne camp.

Heyo! Sound familiar? Maybe Sharon will officially lay the gauntlet down on Wylde via Twitter. That’d be classy.

Here are Badlands performing “Highwire” live. Lee shreds. And that’s Ray Gillen on the mic, who’d just been let go from Black Sabbath upon forming Badlands with Lee.

-VN

Even if you’re one of those people who only listen to metal, hardcore, or other such heavy music styles, you have to concede the fact that many of the musicians you love do not share that singular devotion to one genre. Some artists go even further and apply their broad tastes to the music they make. (Mike Patton might be one of the best examples of this.) That being said, I was admittedly quite surprised to learn that Melvins drummer Dale Crover plays on indie rocker Lou Barlow’s forthcoming solo album Goodnight Unknown. And not just on one track…

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Laying in a bed in Atlanta, Georgia has never felt so sweet. One week ago tonight I was laying in a hospital bed in Hartford, not sure if I was going to live out the week. One week before that, I was breaking fevers in the van once every three hours, not able to breath, and breaking down from the exhaustion of getting really fucking sick on the road.

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So I’ve been living in the UK for about four months now, and have managed to take in quite a lot of this “culture” thing they’re so fond of over here. I’ve been to nine countries, eight major metal festivals, and a handful of cities in Ol’ Blighty itself; I’ve gate-crashed hotel parties in Norway with the drummer of Swallow the Sun, stage-dived into a sea of muddy grind freaks in the Czech Republic, gotten roaring drunk with Wolves in the Throne Room in the Netherlands, met Gaahl’s boyfriend in France, gotten lost in Rome, watched Electric Wizard blow an amp in Manchester, lost my mind to Eyehategod at Hellfest, seen Manowar (‘nuff said there) – and that was just the first couple months. Between all the metal, mud, bruises, whiskey, calimocho, hard cider, and terrifying Czech liquor (Becherovka and Fernet are no fucking joke, even if it is Kevin Sharp and Danny Herrera pouring you a shot), I realized that, somehow, something was still missing.

To my immense chagrin, I had yet to take that all-too-necessary pilgrimage up through the Black Country and into the Unholy Land itself – to Birmingham, England. Every metaller worth his leather (and several million other music fans besides) knows exactly why this unimpressive, coal-smudged city matters so much. Birmingham is the ancestral home of heavy metal. Everything – whether it be doom, black metal, powerviolence, or even the plague that is deathcore – everything came from here. The famed Mermaid Pub provided a fertile breeding ground for extreme metal, nestled as it was in a dodgy part of town where the cops ignored the punkers and longhairs milling around out front as the early rumblings of a deadly new sound thundered away upstairs The city itself was the original stomping ground of the dirty sexy hard rock’n’roll of Led Zeppelin, the NWOBHM gods in Judas Priest, the crusty proto-grind of Sore Throat, the scummy grindcore forefathers of Napalm Death, the industrial noise terror of Godflesh, and the one and only BLACK FUCKING SABBATH.

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This past Saturday night, Vince and Axl bought tickets to hipster-douche fest All Points West with the express purpose of seeing Tool and Tool only. There was a serious and very visible divide in the crowd – namely, other metalheads vs. people who think Interpol is cool  – and your MetalSucks editors were privy to some pretty funny dialogue as a result:

1. “I think they’re called, like, ‘Tools?’”
2. <robot voice>”Intergalactic, planetary. Planetary, intergalactic.” </robot voice>
3. Beat-boxing.
4. “Gogol Bordello are awesome.”
5. “Please don’t block my view of the stage.”
6. “There won’t be any moshing. Look at all that mud! No one wants to get dirty.”
7. “Where are the fried Oreos?”
8. Scowling at Axl’s Slayer shirt.
9. Scowling at Vince’s Paganfest shirt.
10. “What’s that smell?”

No matter; Tool kicked major ass anyways. It’s like there’s an unspoken agreement between the band and their fans: “You bring the weed. We’ll bring the lasers.”

Here’s Tool at All Points West on Saturday night, performing with special guest drummer Frank Ferrer of Guns N’ Roses fame.

-AR & VN

After the super-slick piece of polished turd that was Lead Sails Paper Anchor didn’t launch Atreyu to super-stardom, the band made it clear that they wanted to get back to their roots with their new album. In fact, here’s a recent quote from singer Alex Varkatzas where he uses that very phrase:

“We started as a heavy hardcore band, and I think we’ve gotten away from that in recent years. The last record, for example, showcased us as a rock band with heavy parts. With this record, we want to return to our roots.”

And here’s Varkatzas from the latest issue of Revolver:

“Without trying to throw anybody under the bus, we looked back at our last record, and it wasn’t 100 percent the way we envisioned it.”

And then guitarist Dan Jacobs does throw somebody under the bus – specifically, producer John “Good Charlotte” Feldman:

“We let him get his hands a little too deep into the project… It made us uncomfortable in trying to express ourselves about what we wanted. He’s a big-time producer dude who’s had much success, so we were like, He must know what he’s talking about. What do we know? We’ve never had a gold or platinum record.”

So now that Atreyu have established that they want to get away from the gloss and “return to our roots,” what would you think is the best way of achieving that goal? A tour with Hollywood Undead? Yeah, that wouldn’t be my career advice, either.

Click to read more…

Burton C. Bell has remained pretty quiet on the whole Fear Factory situation up until now, but the good folks at  Rock My Monkey have finally gotten him to open up and do some shit-talkin’ of his own. It’s an audio interview, but Mr. Blabbermouth has transcribed some key portions…

…which I’m not even going to re-print here. Because it’s mostly anti-climatic. But I’ll give you the short version: Bell’s side of the story is that during the mixing of the Dino-less FF offering Transgression, Christian Olde Wolbers started having an affair with the band’s manager, Christy Priske. And I guess things got pretty serious, ’cause the two are married now. Bell found Wolbers and Priske’s shitting where they eat as “completely unacceptable,” and things got worse when Priske, Wolbers and Raymond Herrera allegedly brought Bell some new business arrangement which he also disliked. And then things really fell to shit: Bell says he refused to work with Priske, Wolbers and Herrera refused to let her go and refused to reunite with Dino, and now we have all this fun mud slinging in a public forum.

But here’s the part of the interview I actually found really interesting, and this part I will re-print verbatim:

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I would like to go on record as saying I wasn’t too big on the whole re-thrash trend of 2006-2008 from the get-go. I mean, I loves me some thrash, but 99% of the time any band regardless of genre tries to do something that sounds exactly like an old band(s) I’m against it. The key to artistic progression is moving forward, not back, and unfortunately many of the re-thrash bands just brought nothing new to the table. Taking elements of the old and infusing it into the new is all good by me, though, which is why I’m all for bands that have successfully fused vintage thrash influence into a modern shell; Sylosis and Lazarus A.D. are two examples who readily spring to mind.

And Iron Age. Holy fucking shit, you guys.

I was not expecting to like this record at all (see above). But Iron Age’s blend of ripping thrash, NYHC pummel and doomy ambience channeled through modern-sounding production on their second record The Sleeping Eye just hit that fucking SPOT. This is music for fans of fucking furious, tight, beer-soaked, basement mosh-pit party metal like Trash Talk and Bison B.C., Metallica Ride The Lightning-era guitar riffs pushed to the fullest and real in every way with nary a speck of hipster retro throwback. The Sleeping Eye kicks as much ass as any thrash-influenced record released all year, right up there with Rumpelstiltskin Grinder’s Living For Death, Destroying the Rest (albeit in a different way).

So, without further ado, here’s a stream of the entire album. It comes out today. Listen.

[This promotion has ended. -Ed.]

This is getting kinda ridiculous already, but I can’t help it. This shit is entertaining! And for what it’s worth, this is one of the better ones I think we’ve gotten so far. From Mashup-industries.com, the mecca of the mash-up:

Snoop and Pharrell never sounded this vicious! An early Halloween gift from DJ Schmolli…

Stream it below:

DJ Schmolli – “Drop It Like Black Sabbath”

For more mashup madness: Nuclear Assault / Snoop Dogg, Iron Maiden / The Monkees, Slayer / ‘Lil Jon, and Ghost Busters / NIN.

-VN

[Thanks: Nate. W]

I can’t say I’ve followed everything that Jello Biafra’s done post-Dead Kennedys, but I was quite excited when I heard that Faith No More bassist Billy Gould is part of his new band The Guantanamo School of Medicine. Those familiar with Jello’s two collaborative albums with the Melvins (2004′s Never Breathe What You Can’t See and 2005′s Sieg Howdy) will find the new songs streaming at the band’s MySpace page familiar in style: punky, quirky, and political.

Click to read more…

While our government has used death metal to torture and interrogate prisoners, classically trained pianist-turned-music therapist Arthur Bloom has discovered that the br00tlest of the br00tal can actually serve another, more positive purpose: helping injured veterans of the war in Iraq recover from serious injuries.

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Sellouts or smart businessmen? Unlimited CMU Daily reports [via MS Maniac Charlie F.]:

‘O)))Bow 1′, a track from Sunn O)))’s 2001 album ‘Flight Of The Behemoth’, has been used in a new advert for Norwegian design agency and clothing company Anti-Sweden’s new line of ‘True Black Metal Jeans’. The jeans will also feature the occult-inspired artwork of American artist and Sunn O))) collaborator Justin Bartlett on their labels.

Is licensing your music for use in a commercial tantamount to selling out? Personally I think that if Sunn O))) can get money for it then more power to ‘em in today’s increasingly lean times for sales of recorded music, but I’m sure there are many of you who will cry “false metal” at the mere thought of it. Watch the advertisement above.

-VN