Our bro-dogs at Metal Injection were on-set for the filming of Municipal Waste’s “Wrong Answer” video last month, and have now posted their report – including an interview with vocalist Tony Foresta and bassist Landphil. There’s even a cameo by yours truly. MI’s Frank Godla shot me from a low angle, Michael Bay-style, so I’d look extra handsome.

While Frank and on-camera sexy d00d Rob Pasbani were doing their interview, I was on the other side of the set interviewing guitarist Ryan Waste and drummer Dave Witte. We’ll have the transcript of that interview, and some cool behind-the-scenes pics, for you sometime real soon.

-AR

If any two of the big four bands tour together, I think it’d be a pretty sweet show. Any three? Fucking amazing. But all four? That would have to be some kind of miracle, right? I mean, half these dudes hate each other. King and Mustaine practically make their living talking shit about Metallica – and one another, for that matter. So it’ll never happen, right?

Well, King now tells Metal Hammer otherwise. Sort of.

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Well, it was only a matter of time. The remaining members of Dimmu Borgir have lashed back at recently fired bassist/vocalist Vortex and keyboardist Mustis in a statement that, tonally at least, is actually very calm and even-handed (almost disappointingly so – at least from a humor standpoint). But it does make some pretty wild accusations about the behavior of at least one of these former band members.

Our friends at Metal Insider picked out these highlights, thus saving us the trouble:

Click to read more…

-AR

Thanks to Joe Simpson for the vid link.

The video quality sucks, but the audio quality is excellent. The following YouTube video, sent in by MS Maniac Tom Frenette, actually contains 3 clips filmed at the Between the Buried and Me show in Raleigh, NC this past Tuesday. The first clip is from “Obfuscation,” the second one is from another new song which they didn’t name, and the last clip is obviously the end of “Selkies.”

First opinions? These songs sound pretty fuckin’ epic. EPIC, I tells you. Let the debate about whether The Great Misdirect will top Colors rage on. We’ll find out on October 27th.

-VN

Those in the NYC area, pay close attention: TONIGHT, there is a very, very special MetalSucks co-sponsored Tones of Death show going down at Fontana’s in Manhattan. Observe:

• Black Anvil CD release party (download “Margin For Terror” for free here)
• MetalSucks local faves The Binary Code are opening.
• Special guest DJ is Brian Fair from Shadows Fall
• There is a super-awesome, super-secret special guest band giving a surprise performance. We can’t tell you who this super-secret special guest is, but we promise you that you’ll be very, very sorry if you miss this opportunity.
• THE SHOW IS FREE!
• There will very likely be free alcohol of some kind.

See? The madness starts at 8pm, and the show is 21+. See you there!

I know that it’s way later than normal posting hours for us here at MetalSucks, but I just read this news and I find it so exciting that I had to get it up right away.

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It’s not like there weren’t slams at Saturday’s edition of New England Deathfest: Sexcrement and Putrid Pile had them in spades. But Sunday was the Slam Expo to Saturday’s Death Metal Enthusiasts Convention, finally acknowledging the dirtbag elephant in the room: while many will always admire brutal technical death metal and deathcore has become child’s play, slam is THE big thing in death metal right now, divisive as it is. Though it’s redundancy can lead to DMF (once again, Death Metal Fatigue) more easily than other death metal strains, it has great potential for ridiculous heaviness. This made Sunday a little less rewarding than Saturday, but also a lot more fun. Though it’s hard to say if slam is here to stay, it’s certainly here right now, and if Deathfest wanted to be a proper barometer for what’s going on in death metal, it would have to at least tip its hat to slam, if not give it its hat for a while altogether.

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New York’s own Batillus are a band we don’t write about nearly enough. But you should definitely know who they are; like Salome, they make awesome, nut-crushing doom. In fact, they’re about to hit the road with Salome and Hull as part of the awesomely-monikered Beard Destroyer Tour 2009, and are celebrating by unveiling a new song, “The Division,” on their MySpace page.

A press release tells us the following:

The song, entitled “The Division,” is the first BATILLUS song to feature vocalist / synthesist Fade Kainer (Inswarm, Jarboe) and will only be available on a special limited-edition (75) Beard Destroyer Tour CDR-EP. The EP features hand-crafted packaging by Northern Owl and contains three songs at a total running time of 24:10. The tracks were recorded at Sterling Audio in Brooklyn, NY by Brendan Tobin (Red Sparowes, Made Out of Babies) and mastered by Josh Bonati.

The band is looking for additional gigs and places to crash; if you can help out, please drop them a line ASAP.

Get a complete Beard Destroyer Tour itinerary after the jump – it includes a stop at the awesome, MetalSucks-sponsored Planet Caravan festival.

And on a semi-related note, don’t forget that we’re giving away an awesome new Salome song, “With Hell for a Mouth,” for free download right here. I listened to it like five times in a row last night. It slays.

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Of course you do! Sent in by an MS Maniacs who would probably like to remain anonymous:

This kid (who for some reason calls himself Smeagol) is pretty much well known as being the village idiot in the (not so booming) Northern Indiana metal scene. I was horrendously delighted to discover that he recently posted a terrible vocal cover of himself croaking and moaning along to Bleached Bones by Marduk.

Croaking and moaning indeed. Enjoy!

If Smeagol doesn’t turn you off of the whole idea, make sure you go and see Marduk with Nachtmystium, Mantic Ritual, Merrimack and Black Anvil on the U.S. Plague Tour this fall. Full list of dates after the jump.

-VN

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We’ve all been cringing at Courtney Love’s latest desecration of her dead husband for a quick buck. Thankfully, the Hole frontwoman and executor of Kurt Cobain’s estate isn’t standing in the way of an absolutely awesome reissue of Bleach, Nirvana’s classic grunge/sludge debut. First released twenty years ago on Sub Pop, the album has been remastered for the label under the direction of bassist Krist Novoselic and original producer Jack Endino.

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Scar Symmetry have created their own online version of the arcade classic Asteroids, and it’s pretty fuckin’ entertaining. Unlike a lot of stupid online games designed to promote new albums, this one is super-simple, works well, is addicting as fuck and is a great time-waster.

A brand new song from Scar Symmetry’s upcoming release Dark Matter Dimension serves as the soundtrack to the game, and I have no idea what the song is called but it’s not the one they posted on their MySpace page a few weeks back (which has since been removed). The new track is damn good and it’s vintage Death Jovi — would we expect anything less? I think I like it more than the previously released new track, though right now I’m not too hot on the new not-Christian Alvestam clean vocalist, though I guess the verdict is really still out until we hear the full new album / see the band live. Dark Matter Dimensions drops October 2nd on Nuclear Blast.

-VN

The fine folks at the unfuckwithable Deciblog have published a list of the Top 10 Manliest Metal Album Covers of all time, and the results are extremely manly indeed. I was thrilled at the inclusion of Accept’s super-studly Balls to the Wall, and not one but two Manowar covers. My only suggestion would have been Poison’s uber-hetero Look What the Cat Dragged In, but I’m sure Decibel would rather shut its doors forever than proclaim anything by Poison manly in the slightest.

On Accept, those German stud-machines, who came in at #4:

Uh, this album cover has been poured over by many a metalhead. What does it mean? What are Accept trying to communicate here? Should I feel slightly uncomfortable when I gaze upon this man’s sweaty/hairy tensed-up leg? Why is he holding a ball? What type of ball is it? It looks hard. How do I know this? Well, the man’s veins are showing. Not his main vein (thank Thor in a g-string!), but the veins in his hand. All these years and we still haven’t reached a conclusion. And, yes, even now we’re slightly uncomfortable.

Touche.

-VN

We are often asked how we train the MetalSucks Mansion Monkeys, and the answer is surprisingly simple: we just play them metal. That’s one of the key reasons we selected monkeys to do our bidding. Yes, they like to throw poop, but they are excellent typists and just fucking love metal.

And now a scientific study at the University of Wisconsin confirms this little fact (about monkeys liking metal, not them being excellent typists). Satan Rosenbloom just showed us this story about the study, which found that monkeys prefer metal to classical, jazz, and even a certain classic rock giant:

Click to read more…

November 3 in the US, November 2 everywhere else. That comes directly from an official press release, so I think we can accept it as for reals this time.

The release also tells us that there will be “a limited edition CD with multiple CD covers, a deluxe edition CD/DVD, and a high-quality, 180-gram vinyl edition.” Presumably cover art is forthcoming.

I’m excited.

-AR

Job for a Cowboy bassist Brent Riggs ended up being one of the most fun interviews we did at this year’s Rockstar Energy Mayhem Festival. For one thing, it may or may not come across in this transcript, but the dude has a really dry sense of humor that matches our own. For another thing, it seemed as though the dude barely wanted to talk about JFAC – he must have to talk about JFAC all the time, so it’s hard to blame him – but when the topics of weed and weightlifting arose, his eyes lit up like a little kid on Christmas, and he suddenly became quite garrulous. A man after our own heart.

JFAC’s new album, Ruination, is out now on Metal Blade. After the jump, check out our full chat with Brent Riggs.

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Even if Kurt Cobain didn’t mind being used as an avatar in Guitar Hero 5, I’m fairly certain he wouldn’t want to be used to sing Bon Jovi or Bush – even if it’s only virtual. Isn’t Bon Jovi exactly the kind of band that went against everything Cobain stood for? And Bush… that’s exactly the kind of god-awful shit-fuck wanna-be grunge band that Cobain accidentally inspired, and I’m sure either hated (if he was aware of them before his death) or would have hated (if he wasn’t aware of them before his death).

I’m not even that big a Cobain fan – but you just know that he’d be pissed at Courtney for letting them do this. What a crock.

-AR

[via Topless Robot]

If you make it past the nineteen second mark of this video, then you will have made it further than I did.

No thanks whatsoever to Joe Simpson for bringing these fucks to our attention.

-AR

Following up on yesterday’s post about stage dives gone awry, reader Karel Goethals sent us the below video that a friend of his shot at a recent Faith No More reunion show at Pukkelpop in Belgium. Skip ahead to roughly the 2:40 mark to enjoy the hilarity of what looks like one of the most painful missed-dives pretty much ever. Even Jon Hudson’s reaction when he sees the jump is hilarious. And gotta give Patton mensch-points for personally checking to make sure the dude is okay.

Ouch.

-AR

Recently sacked Dimmu Borgir bassist/clean vocalist Vortex has weighed in on the split between the band, himself, and keyboardist Mustis. And I’m sure it will shock none of you to learn that he’s siding with Mustis.

SMN News reports that Mr. Vortex (real name: Ian Carter Simen Tourbillion) has posted the following message on his MySpace pagee:

Click to read more…