SKINDRED’S BENJI WEBBE WANTS YOU TO “STAND FOR SOMETHING”
Benji Webbe is like the Mike Patton of reggae metal… or something. Many bands followed in the footsteps of Dub War but none approached the creative genius of that band. He’s a total badass and strikes me as kind of a weird/interesting dude, too.
So Benji’s new(er) band Skindred have a new mini-album Shark Bites and Dog Fights out September 22, and a video for the first single “Stand for Something” came out last week. It’s predictably pretty solid and positive in tone… par for the course for Skindred. One day perhaps this band will go on tour in the U.S. with bands that don’t suck and I will finally get to see them live.
-VN
“Metal” or not, I think we can all agree that Jane’s Addiction was a truly awesome and original band, and their seminal 1990 album Ritual de lo Habitual still sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard elsewhere.
Guitarist Paul Gilbert is a renaissance man, a master of performance, composition, rhetoric, and ahem playing guitar with a drill. He’s the creator of blinding shredgasms as part of Racer X (“Scarified”) and of one of history’s most charming singles in Mr. Big (“Green-Tinted Sixties Mind”). But as a self-proclaimed man on a mission, Gilbert’s passion is to put play back in guitar player through both his teaching (at GIT) and his riotous and bizarrely informative columns (in Guitar Player, Guitar World, Total Guitar, Total Fucking Guitar, and Guitar Out The Yingyang). Meanwhile, Gilbert and fellow Pittsburghian Freddie Nelson are responsible for United States, a scrappy, infectious melodic rock record that, if not for the mind-mangling fretwork, would be claimed happily by Cheap Trick, Jellyfish, U2, and Stone Temple Pilots as their own work.
[Welcome to the new category "Not Quite Metal?" for those bands who aren't necessarily metal but often cross over to a metal fanbase, whatever the reason may be. Note the question mark -- because really, what the fuck even is metal anyway??]
Hatebreed have a new song, “Merciless Tide,” available for free download right 
In case you haven’t been following along, Zakk Wylde has been plagued by 
You would think that the new album from a band called Dying Fetus would have funnier song titles. I’m not judging their music, mind you. Nor am I disregarding the fact that a few thousand thirteen year old boys are about to actually go pull the dictionary off their parents’ shelves so they can look up words like “coercion” and “insurrection.” (I imagine that pretty much every kid immediately understands the basic concept behind “Fucked with a Knife.”) I’m just surprised that a band with such a vivid moniker doesn’t trade in songs called “Montezuma’s Revenge in Your Eye Sockets” or “Disgorged from My Dick” or whatever.
Congrats to the winners of 
Talking to Skeletonwitch guitarist Scott “Scunty D.” Hedrick was like talking to a long-lost bro. The dude is just so incredibly down to earth, straight-forward and easygoing that I felt like I’d already known him for years despite the fact that we were speaking for the first time. Scott spoke a whole lot about Skeletonwitch’s roll in the metal community, about that community as a whole, and the general “we’re all in this together” attitude of pretty much everyone who’s involved in metal right now. We also chatted about the new Skeletonwitch record Breathing the Fire (October 13), working with producer Jack Endino, being able to tour with so many different types of metal bands, Twitter, and Scott’s fanboy reaction to praise bestowed upon his band by Enslaved.
