Ever since energy drinks became the new weed, there are so many goddamn gears to be done grindeded…….and Bethesda, MD’s BULB aka Misha Mansoor aka guitar player for rad tech-prog band/recent-signee-to-Sumerian-Records Periphery (who Vince has raved about previously here and here) is crankin em out left and riggity-right…

This dude Misha seems to be so prolific that one awesome band outputting an ample amount of material is not nearly enough, so under the moniker Bulb (an old defunct band name) he continues to make tons of tracks and give them away for free online…….says-eth the young man himself:

Myspace doesn’t let you download songs for free anymore, and I’m all about
giving away ideas and demos and whatever for free, so you guys can
enjoy the songs, put them on your mp3 player, burn CDs for you and
your friends and just generally enjoy the music I enjoy making!

GO HERE: http://www.soundclick.com/bulb or http://www.soundclick.com/periphery

It’s the same site, but both names work for it in case you forget one!

There are about 130 songs/clips/random ideas up on there now and they are all up for download.

You do have to sign up if you aren’t already registered, but it’s quick
and FREE, and totally worth it since you can have tons of our music to
pick and choose from!

There’s no catch, all I ask is that in exchange you burn a bunch of cds
for your friends and help spread the word about Bulb and Periphery!!

Enjoy!!

-Bulb

I’m not gonna try to pick one that can represent this dude and his cannon, so follow the links above and check out his music.

If you are so inclined, you may also visit Bulb on MySpace, visit Periphery on MySpace, or read about the infamous MetalSucks Mansion Monkeys…….take your pick.

Now go get those gears a grindin!!

-KW

It’s Labor Day weekend here in the U.S., which means we’re shuttering the Mansion early this week, and won’t be back ’til Tuesday. We’re sure you’ll find some way to live without us.

Here’s some shit that happened this week:

• We debuted a new track from Salome.
• Sigh’s Mirai Kawashima sent in his final guest-blog from the studio, and revealed the track listing for the band’s upcoming album, Scenes from Hell.
• We chatted with Trivium’s Matt Heafy, The Black Dahlia Murder’s Trevor Strnad, Job for a Cowboy’s Brent Riggs, and All That Remains’ Phil LaBonte.
• We celebrated the triumphant return of Beavis & Butt-Head, and decided that in their particular relationship, Vince is the Beavis to Axl’s Butt-Head.
• Tom Araya thinks Dave Mustaine is a dick, Kerry King thinks Dave Mustaine is a dick, Scott Ian thinks Kerry King is a dick, and everyone in Dimmu Borgir thinks that everyone else in Dimmu Borgir is a dick.

Alright. I’m going to enjoy a little sunshine while I still can. See ya Tuesday!

-AR

Not much to say here… Deflorate is awesome, and so is this video for “Necropolis.”

Deflorate is out September 15 on Metal Blade.

-AR

Below is video of Shadows Fall on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night. It’s an awesome performance of the new song “Still I Rise,” but unfortunately, it doesn’t show what might have been the best part of the show: our favorite Massholes completely destroying Fallon’s personal green room (NOT his guest green room) during a live, on-air promo right before they played. If anyone saw that – you should know that it was not staged, and no one on Fallon’s team (or The Shads’, as I understand it) had any idea what the band had planned (these promos usually consist of just waving to the camera and being boring). You can watch video of the band going all GN’R/Headbanger’s Ball on the green room’s ass here.

You might think Fallon was pretty pissed, but apparently he thought it was awesome and is only too-excited to have SF back on his show in the near future – the above photo was actually taken after the green room incident. So props to Fallon for being a cool dude.

Shadows Fall’s new album, Retribution, drops September 15 on Everblack Industries/Ferret.

-AR

Dear Whomever You Are,

Marry me.

Love,

Double-Jew Axl Rosenberg

-AR

[Thanks to bereteando's tweet for the tip]

I know that this is only peripherally related to metal, but the response to that new Beavis & Butt-Head short the other day was so overwhelmingly positive that I thought you’d all like to know about this.

Cinema Blend recently conducted an interview with B&B creator Mike Judge in which they asked him if we’d ever get to see an actual re-visitation of his most famous creation. His answer?

Click to read more…

Monday is Labor Day here in the States, which means Americans will be taking the day off of work and BBQing with friends and family. It also marks the unofficial end of Summer for people who are too beholden to the Western calendrical structure to realize that nothing actually changes from one day to the next (not to mention that the date of Labor Day moves every year), and that September is actually still quite summery in feel.

So, we’ll be closing the gates of the Mansion a bit early today. I’m not sure what Axl is doing, but I’ll bet it involves his vaporizer. I’m going up to the uber-metal environs of Woodstock, NY, birthplace of MetalGF, to spend the weekend pondering what the hell I’m going to do with myself when the sun goes down at 4:30 every day in December. Fuck my life.

You know who else is from Woodstock? 3. The band 3, whose logo looks like a giant dong. And I’m incredibly psyched to report that 3 are going to be releasing their new album Revisions before year’s end (October 27th, Metal Blade). The band’s last album The End is Begun was a fucking phenomenal piece of crazy, tripped-out, artsy prog metal with big riffs and hooks accented by frontman Joey Eppard’s unique acoustic picking style. 3 are a band that are truly unique amongst their peers.

My year-end Top 10 list just got that much harder to compile.

-VN

This is not a test. This is a real music video. The year is not 1999. I could list the ways in which this band is terrible, but it’d just be too easy. I feel bad for Director George Burton who had to pretend to like this band and hide his laughs to get his payday. Looks like the guy actually had a decent production budget to work with, too.

This band apparently has a record deal that’s somehow connected to Universal. My head is spinning.

-VN

“dlux”

-AR

[from Cracked, by way of Metal Injection]

When we interviewed Tom Araya a few weeks back, I asked him if the Megadeth/Slayer tour that hit Canada earlier this year and will now make its way to Australia and New Zealand is ever coming to the States. His response?

“You know, [Dave Mustaine is] lucky we did the Canadian dates.”

Araya chuckled when he said it – the dude is too chill to really get angry angry, or at least that was my impression of him – but there was obviously some bad blood there. Shit-stirrer that I am, I made a feeble attempt to draw more ire out of Araya, with no love.

So kudos to Mark Eglinton from The Quietus, who Blabbermouth tells me got this little exchange out of Araya:

Click to read more…

Yesterday, Scott Ian tweeted a response to Kerry King’s accusation that Anthrax have “been in pieces for quite some time.” The tweet pointed towards a recent, possible one-off reunion show with John Bush; I eagerly hoped it was a sign that Bush is coming back to the band for good.

Well, we still don’t know if he is or not. But we do know that he’s gonna do another gig with the ‘Thrax, this time at the Loud Park festival in Japan this October. (Interestingly enough, Slayer and Megadeth are also on the bill.)

I take that as a good sign that Bush is, indeed, negotiating (or something) to re-join Anthrax. But obviously we need to wait for some kind of official confirmation from the group.

Fingers crossed…

-AR

Congrats to longtime MS reader “groverXIII” for winning last week’s funny photo caption contest. GroverXIII wins a signed copy of Bigelf’s Cheat the Gallows and a t-shirt from their recent stint on the Progressive Nation tour. Grover actually submitted two entries that deserved the win, so I’ll just go ahead and post both:

“Jeff was worried that they wouldn’t let him bring his girlfriend to the Gathering because she was black.”

“Sparky realized that, even though he occasionally ate his own poop, he was still smarter than the people that surrounded him.”

Nicely done, Grover. “(required)” also gets a nod for this funny caption: “Epic Failgaiting,” which definitely made me chuckle.

This week we’re giving away three prize packages, each with a copy of Protest the Hero’s brand new live DVD/CD Gallop Meets the Earth, out September 15th, and a matching limited edition t-shirt (pictured here). That, my friends, is a great fucking haul for simply typing in a silly one-liner below. So get to it! This’ll be the last of our Gathering of the Juggalos ’09 picture series, and next week we’ll move on to bigger and better things.

I know you’ve all experienced this. You get into a band. Your friend introduces their music to you, or you find them online, or however it is you discover bands. Their album or songs start to get stuck in your head. You start listening to them on your iPod, in your car, at the gym, wherever. You start reading up on them. You look for tour dates. You get excited because one’s coming up. You go see them. Lights go down. Its go time! AAANNNNNDDDD your dick goes limp, or pussy dries up, whatever the case may be, because these dudes just can’t pull off what you heard on their CDs.

But wait, everything sounds like shit in this club. Maybe it’s the soundguy. Maybe it’s just an off night. Maybe somebody’s mom just died. Who knows? So you give them the benefit of the doubt and you remain a fan. Then a few months later you get a chance to see them again, and same story. Limp dick bullshit. I’ve experienced that soooo much. In fact, I’d say that the majority of bands I’ve heard in this genre give me that feeling.

There are only a small percentage of bands that I think can really stand up to what they put down on CD. It’s not hard to understand why this happens.

Click to read more…

Presumably in response to Kerry King’s claim that “There’s better options than Anthrax [for a tour mate] and that’s nothing against Anthrax, but they’ve just been in pieces for quite some time and that doesn’t make as much sense to me,” Ian tweets:

“Guess Kerry missed Sonisphere”

Does that mean John Bush is back for good? Pretty please with a cherry on top?

This tour is never fucking happening.

-AR

At least two of you have emailed us about this kid’s bedroom guitar cover of Attack Attack!’s “Stick Stickly.” When we first looked yesterday, the video had about 1,000 views… now it has 11,000, and I’m about to make it climb even higher.

This video just confirms what we’ve all known all along, which is that Attack Attack! (and other bands like them) are popular amongst 15 year olds not because of their completely generic music but because of their look, crab-crouch, and synchronized guitar swings. Total gimmick. This kid even does it all just like the band does in their terrible video, right down to the retarded disco dance at the end.

And here’s the worst part… 3 years from now this kid is going to realize what shitty taste in music he used to have, and he’ll go on to listen to bigger and better things (hopefully). He’ll be ashamed of this ridiculous piece of YouTube detritus and he’ll probably delete it to avoid embarrassment amongst his new college chums. Then, 5-10 years after that when he’s all growed up and has a job and possibly a family, he’ll be reminiscing about the glory days of Attack Attack! with some buddies over a few beers — as will his peers elsewhere across the U.S. — and boom, the screamo-crunk-whatever-core revival is born. UGH. FUCK ME! Life sucks.

Anyway, here it is…

People seem to be pretty into Them Crooked Vultures, the new group featuring Josh Homme, Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones. Ya’ll have been emailing us all sorts of live clips that have been popping up, and Blabbermouth posts news about them any time one of the members so much as takes a shit. I admit, the prospect of this band is pretty tantalizing and I’m quite excited about them myself — I just don’t need to get all in a tizzy about 30 seconds of crappy cell-phone footage and a U.S. tour that doesn’t even hit New York (prediction: CMJ. Watch for it.)

Anyway, here’s some actual, real, worth-reporting news about the band: there’s a preview of the song “Scumbag Blues,” along with some nifty old-school looking animation, posted on Them Crooked Vultures’ official YouTube account (sent in by MS Maniac Jonathon Edwards). Watch it below.

So the guy with the umbrella/cane is obviously JPJ (cane = old, and all of those platinum records on the wall behind him), but of the other two vultures which is Grohl and which is Homme? Your guesses are as good as mine.

-VN

Sitting down with All That Remains frontman / Affliction-wearer Phil Labonte was a tad bit uncomfortable, for all the not-so-nice things (but not terribly offensive, either, comparatively speaking) we’ve said about his band. I’m actually not even sure that Phil knew with whom he was conducting an interview — the on-site press coordinator at the Rockstar Mayhem Festival simply introduced me by my birth-given first name, Phil said, “Hi, I’m Phil,” we sat down at a table and that was that. It’s probably a good thing too, since Phil is really into his iPhone, Twitter (which I asked him about) and claims to “read a lot of stuff on the Internet.”

So, whether he knew who I was or not, Phil and I chatted mostly about the band’s newfound mainstream success. What’s it been like? Has he seen a change in the audience at shows? Will it change the band’s approach on the next record? Has it alienated the core fans? Despite my best attempts to get some kind of averse reaction out of Labonte, he held his ground quite well and insisted that for the most part nothing about the band has really changed all that much. Phil was a nice chap and certainly seemed earnest about his answers.

Our chat, after the jump.

Click to read more…

I saw this on Reign in Blonde. I have no idea where those crazy bitches found it, I have no idea why this guy is playing the gee-tar on the shitter, I have no idea why he taped it and threw up on these here interwebs… I am generally just very, very confused about all of this. Kind of the same way I felt when I heard Risk for the first time.

-AR

Lambgoat is reporting that shitty faux-hardcore band Too Pure To Die have broken up. Oh well! For once I actually find myself agreeing with Lambgoat commenters. To wit, the first three responses to this announcement:

twadorno:
first post. excellent news.

youaresceneasfuck:
second post. excellent news.

Chomp_Chomp:
About fucking time. Not one sect of kids is bummed.

Fourth post. Excellent news!

-VN

“Russian Circles” is like an onomatopoeia of band names; I have no idea what a Russian Circle is, but I do know that if the band name is spoken — not written — it’s accurate as fuck. Listen to any Russian Circles song and tell me their music doesn’t sound just like circles that are rushing, spiraling and spinning (hint: it helps if you’re stoned). Their excellent 2008 release Station was one of my favorite instru-metal releases of that year, and judging from the new track “Malko,” their new record Geneva (October 20th, Suicide Squeeze) will bring more of the same rushing, circling goodness.

Noise/post-rock fans, take note: ex-Botch, current-These Arms Are Snakes bass player Brian Cook is now a permanent member of Russian Circles. Yeah!

Listen to “Malko,” courtesy of The Fader, below:

Russian Circles – “Malko”

Catch the band on tour with Young Widows and Red Sparowes this fall. Dates after the jump.

-VN

Click to read more…