And they are a fucking EPIC fifteen seconds.

It’s just a demo for a still-untitled song (unless, for some reason, the band ends up calling it “Song 3,” which they won’t), but it already has me hungry for more. ‘Cause it’s not really mathcore as far as I can tell, but it doesn’t sound like “Black Bubbblegum” or “Milk Lizard,” either. Interesting.

The new DEP album, Option Paralysis, is scheduled to come out sometime in 2010 on Season of Mist.

-AR

[via Metal Injection]

This is one of the cooler DIY videos I’ve seen in a long time. The band is Baring Teeth, and they gots chops up the wazoo. I had never heard of them before, but guitarist Andrew Harkins sent in the link to this video and I clicked (see? we do read your emails / listen to your bands’ music). Lo and behold… shred! This rules.

-VN

Dysrhythmia are the Kevin Bacon of metal. The band’s connected to Behold…the Arctopus, Krallice, Spastic Ink and Gorguts within one degree of separation, Cannibal Corpse, Origin, Bloody Panda, The Red Chord, Orthrelm and Watchtower by another. Guitarist Kevin Hufnagel and bassist Colin Marston both have solo projects, and play together in the ambient guitar duo Byla. Try to draw a Dysrhythmia family tree, and you’d end up with a massive tangle of nodes and lines that resembles one of those three-dimensional diagrams of a complex molecule. Converted into notes, it would probably sound like the music on Dysrhythmia’s fifth album, Psychic Maps.

Click to read more…

Here’s something else Zakk Wylde can hear about for the first time over the internet.

Click to read more…

Like the characters in Martin Scorsese’s awesome cops n’ gangsters undercover thriller The Departed, Greg Weeks is from Boston. He doesn’t actually have one of those great MA accents, but, hey, you take what you can get.

Which must why our hetero life mates at Metal Injection selected Weeks to go undercover at this year’s Maryland Deathfest, going into the crowd “to get the fans to explain to him what metal is tr00ly about.”

The results are, needless to say, hilarious. Check it out:

-AR

Straight out of the heavy music mecca that is Providence, Rhode Island, Howl kick so much ass that it’s not really funny but actually rather serious on account of the aforementioned painful ass kickings. Relapse recently released the band’s self-titled three-song EP, which is streaming at Howl’s MySpace and available to purchase here They’re heavy, unpretentious, and not easily pigeonholed into any one of the bandied about subgenres in this grand thing we call metal. I’ll leave it to the opinionated chicken-chokers that make it their lives’ work to define metal in our comments section, but I’d say if the adjective “sludgy” sounds appealing then you’re going to want to get in on the ground floor with Howl before they’re headlining bigger venues.

Click to read more…

My favorite cartoon characters are Brent Hinds and the members of Dethklok. Seriously. I once watched Hinds do a belly-flop onto a bar table covered in beer mugs. He came out of a coma and is only sillier for the experience. You could drop an anvil on that dude’s head and all that would happen is he’d see little tweety-birds buzzing around his head. And then he’d write an awesome concept album about them.

So: in what strikes me as only semi-strange news, Mastodon and Dethklok will co-headline a tour this fall, with support coming from Converge and High on Fire. I am slightly miffed that the mighty High on Fire and absolutely God-like Converge are opening for a make believe band, but since it’s Dethklok, I’ll let it pass… this time.

Complete list of dates after the jump.

Click to read more…

A couple of weeks back we reported on the sudden glut of U.S. metal festivals this year, the latest of which is the MetalSucks-sponsored Planet Caravan 2-day metal festival being held in Asheville, NC this September. Quick refresher: Clutch, Pentagram, Kylesa, Burst (first and last U.S. tour ever!), Wino and many others. Today we’re thrilled to announce that the already strong bill has gotten that much stronger with a slew of heavyweight bands added: Tombs, The Gates of Slumber, Zoroaster, Bison B.C., Sourvein, doom kings/queen Salome, and friends of MetalSucks Hull and Battilus, the latter 3 of which will be touring the U.S. together around that time. All of the newly added acts will perform on the also-newly added second stage, right next door to the Orange Peel mainstage at Mo Daddy’s.

If you live anywhere close to North Carolina, how can you even consider not going to this event? It’s going to be a fucking rager. Tickets are on sale here or at the Orange Peel box office.

-VN

Last night I had the privilege of attending the latest in the monthly series of Pitchfork’s Show No Mercy metal shows in Brooklyn, featuring Stats, Defeatist, Unearthly Trance, and Minsk supporting Keelhaul. I arrived a fan of Minsk — who certainly did not disappoint with their epic blend of doom, prog, sludge and punk — but I left a newly converted fan of Keelhaul, whose razor-tight set of angular post-metal riffs justly lived up to show promoter Brandon Stosuy’s description as “muscular.” Keelhaul absolutely fucking killed it, their furious Coalesce-on-steroids onslaught leaving me wondering how this band had slipped beneath my radar for so long.

Click to read more…

If you missed Friday’s Pig Destroyer show, you should cry. Seriously. It’s totally worth getting upset about.

But don’t, like, slit your wrists or anything: the band has announced another New York show(!)… this one as part of a tour Eyehategod (!!) are doing with Goatwhore (!!!) and Strong Intention (???)… on a motherfucking boat.

To reiterate: Eyehategod. Goatwhore. Pig Destroyer. Boat.

Will someone drown before the night’s end in a sloshed-mosh mishap? Will that someone be me or Vince? Will this be the best boat ride ever? Stay tuned for all the answer.

Here are the dates for the Eyehategod min-tour. Even if you can’t go the NY Pig Destroyer boat extravaganza, the other dates should be awesome, too.

Click to read more…

You best know those lyrics from the opening track of our #1 Best Metal Album of the 21st Century… So Far. If not, you’re probably a loser… but all can be redeemed by watching the below video sent in by MS Maniac Todd R. It’s a video culled from a cartoon/comic based on the Moby Dick themed lyrics of “Blood & Thunder” with music added for emphasis. Though there’s nothing that groundbreaking about setting a comic to the music on which it’s based, it’s a pretty cool video and gets the point across. Dig it.

-VN

For everyone who complained that The Devin Townsend Project’s Ki wasn’t heavy enough – well, first of all, you’re an idiot. It’s a brilliant album, heavy or not.

But, second of all, Mr. Townsend has promised some heavier shit in the future, and, well, here he is laying down guitars for a song called “Stand” which will appear on the already-planned third DTP album, Deconstruction. And it sounds just as heavy as promised.

Devin Townsend > you.

-AR

The theme for this morning seems to be “terrible quality fan-captured live footage.”

Next up we have John Bush’s (apparently triumphant, if reports are to be believed) return to Anthrax this past weekend at Sonisphere in England. I’d love to post some footage of Bush performing a Bush-era song, but can’t seem to find any, so here he is doing “Caught in a Mosh.”

I continue to hope, dream, and pray that Bush returns to Anthrax full-time.

-AR

I’ve always wondered who actually reads those press quotes companies put on album covers and ads and takes them seriously. Like, who actually sees a poster for some movie they’ve never heard of and goes, “Gee, Gene Siskel said it’s ‘Thrilling!’, maybe I’ll check this one out!”? That is until Relapse Records booked a banner ad with us for the new Man Must Die album No Tolerance For Imperfection which comes out tomorrow. According to the ad, Terrorizer called the record “An unrelenting tech-death firestorm”; little bells went off inside my head whilst entering the banner into our system. Tech-death? I like tech-death. Firestorm? I like firestorms. Who is this techy, deathy, firestormy band I have never heard of? Man Must Die. I must know more. CLICK.

Click to read more…

If you’ve been reading this site on a regular basis, you’re aware that I’ve been very, very, very excited for this past Friday night’s Brutal Truth/Pig Destroyer/Repulsion show, and I was not let down.

There were some minor hiccups – Repulsion went on nearly an hour later than scheduled, which might not have been so bothersome if the Brooklyn Masonic Temple wasn’t hotter than the fucking sun, or even if you didn’t have to wait on not one but two lines to get a drink (one to get your drink ticket, the other to get your actual drink). Plus, when Repulsion started playing, they seemed to be having sound issues for a few songs (compounded by the fact that moshers kept slamming into the soundboard which, for reasons beyond me, was on a platform on unlocked wheels), and no one thought to bring down the house lights until part way through the set. Also, I felt a little bad for Brutal Truth – they killed, as expected, but a substantial portion of the crowd filed out following Pig Destroyer, who ended up being the night’s true headliners.

Then again… of course Pig Destroyer ended up being the night’s true headliners. Not only did they kill as expected (and their 45 minute-ish set felt wwwaaaayyy too short), but Blake Harrison had power tools on stage for the express purpose of making needless semi-pyro. Power tools!!!

ANYWAY, there was a whole lotta stage divin’ throughout the night. But during Pig Destroyer’s last song, it seemed like there were at least a dozen people on stage, all going nuts and stage diving at once. Below you can watch some not-so-great footage of the event that I found on YouTube (thanks, presspass!). If anyone has any better footage of this or any other part of the show, hit me up!

-AR

I’m told that the below is footage of Alice in Chains performing another new song, “Check My Brain,” in Dublin this past weekend. I say “I’m told” because the quality of said footage is so piss-poor that I can’t even make it all the way through the song. This is not the way I want to experience new Alice in Chains for the first time.

That being said, if you’re dying for a fix, feel free to tough it out. And make sure you read Vince’s track-by-track preview of Alice in Chains’ new album, Black Gives Way to Blue, which comes out September 29.

-AR

[via Blabbermouth]

Uncle Vinnie is back; under a moon-lit sky at Saturday night’s Tool show in New Jersey, Axl and I had “a moment” and kissed and made up.

Seriously though, folks, I was just on vacation at the MetalSucks Mansion Kentucky Korner. Did some of you ninnies actually believe I quit?

Wouldn’t be surprising given all the feuding that’s gone down in metal this summer already, though, and we haven’t even reported on the tummy-tickling beef between Machine Head and Limp Bizkit.

Click to read more…

Sometimes it’s goods just to have fruits for brunch. Fruits salads.

-NC

Okay so I’m a little jealous of Axl and Vince manning up and scalping CL tix to go see the always-magnificent TOOL play later today in smelly Jersey…..fumes/Aquanet/festival crowds aside, that shiz is clearly gonna rip.

And in reminiscing back to when that particular band started, I can’t help but think about some other under-the-radar groups that began in the early 90s, and unfortunately didn’t last nearly long enough.

One such act was undoubtedly the extremely artful and powerful underground unit known to those who know as RODAN.

Thankfully bandleader Jeff Mueller has graced our ears over the years with a couple more truly amazing bands, June of 44 and Shipping News (for more mp3s check out my Sunday Spotlight on the man behind the bands here), the latter of which is still active and releasing wonderful albums/touring from time to time…..but there was something about the innate raw energy of Rodan that cemented their sound as seminal to so many fans of the aggressive post-rock scene.

And this track is a perfect example of the runaway freight train meets laid-back dining car melange that the band employed so well.

‘Nuff respect due!

RODAN — “The Everyday World of Bodies”, from Rusty (1994)

-KW