If that headline means anything to you, you’ll probably like this record.

(three out of five horns)

-AR

Right here. Do it! It’s easily one of the best albums of the year. Decibel gave it a perfect score, fer Chrissakes. Now go check it out. And later this week we’ll have an interview with Jacob Bannon, and then our official review.

Axe to Fall comes out October 20 on Epitaph.

-AR

Sent in by MetalGF by way of the always poignant Onion.

The bottom should read “INSIDE Your Band: We Finally Checked It Out. It’s Not Very Good.”

-VN

Shady times in Poland. We were a little bummed to begin with. Warsaw was coming up and we found out that Behemoth was playing in the same town as us. In their homeland. Ouch. When you get news like that your first feelings are, “Why bother with our show? Why not go hang out at their show?” That’s never a good idea. I remember when we were on the Dark Funeral/Naglfar tour in 2007 and we hit Phoenix, Arizona the same day as Behemoth and Job For a Cowboy. It seemed like a serious bummer, but somehow there were still around 200 kids at our show, which was on par for that tour. Same thing happened on this tour. There were like 400-500 kids at our show. I heard there were 2,500 people at the Behemoth show, but still, 400-500 kids made for good times.

The crowd was enthusiastic and other than the intense heat onstage, I thought it was great times. The promoter was super cool. The food spread he gave us was fit for an army. So many different kinds of everything. Meats, cheeses, breads, drinks, cereals, candies, fruits, yogurts, spreads, etc., etc., etc. His dinner was amazingly catered as well. So many different choices of pastas, meats, salads. The backstage area was huge. We were treated great.

Until the end of the night, that is.

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I imagine that being the child of a celebrity is difficult under any circumstances, and I’m not sure that, had he lived, there’s much Kurt Cobain would have been able to do for Frances Bean, his poorly-named daughter with Courtney Love. The guy was obviously pretty nutty himself so it’s not like we can sit here and say “Well, everything would have been fine if Kurt had lived.”

That being said, leaving poor Frances Bean alone in the sole custody of Courtney has to be tantamount to child neglect.

So. Both Courtney and Frances have left Twitter. That’s sad only because Courtney’s tweets are so consistently fucknuts that the world is now deprived of one of the 21st century’s great free entertainments. (I didn’t even know that Frances was on Twitter.) But then again, the reason for their decision to halt all tweeting is pretty hilarious.

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We’ve got a pair of tickets for the two-day Smokeout Festival in California next weekend, featuring Slipknot and the Deftones, and we wanna give them away to you. The festival is a celebration of weed culture and music, featuring all sorts of seminars and informational sessions about Marijuana as well as band performances all weekend long. If we weren’t based out of NYC, we’d definitely be there.

Alls you gotta do to win our pair of tickets: tell us which member of Slipknot you’d most like to get high with, and why. Leave a comment below, and be sure you fill in a valid email address in the appropriate field. Winners will be contacted by email this Friday.

I know I’m not alone in my excitement over the upcoming Eyehategod micro-tour, which kicks off next week in Baltimore and continues with two New York City shows (including one on a motherfucking boat!) and another one in Cambridge, MA. Openers for these dates include such fine acts as Goatwhore, Pig Destroyer, and Tombs. Peep the sludge metal legends’ MySpace page for more details on these shows.

However, I suspect those of you unable to attend may be pleased to learn that Confederacy Of Ruined Lives, the band’s release from the year 2000, is getting the vinyl reissue treatment via the aptly named I’m Better Than Everyone Records. Limited to a scarce 400 copies on “thick black vinyl,” the album has been specially remastered and packaged in a nifty gatefold, which you can see previews of at the site. An even more limited version is already sold-the-fuck-out, so make sure you preorder your copy before the October 20th release date if you don’t want to miss out.

-GS

[Gary Suarez is amazed at the range of responses to his Oceano review. He usually mismanages the consistently off-topic No Yoko No. Say, why don't you follow him on Twitter?]

“Repulsive Salvation” is one of my favorite tracks from Skeletonwitch‘s ripping new record Breathing the Fire, out today on Prosthetic Records (order here). I was lucky enough to be on hand for the David Brodksy-directed video shoot last month at Brooklyn’s famed Lucky 13 Saloon, surprisingly one of the few metal hangs in a borough you’d think would be full of them. While the band rocked out to the track over and over like their careers depended on it, I stood in the corner watching the band rock whilst getting my drink on with $1 Busch cans (win!). The dudes in Metal Injection were on hand to conduct an interview with the band, and in between takes we hung out and drank with the Skeletonwitch dudes and bar-owner Melody Henry like a big, happy family, with guitarist Nate Garnett as the jubilant uncle who has everyone in stitches every time the guy opens his mouth. Great times were had.

Enjoy the video below. Also check out the interview I conducted with guitarist Scott “Scunty D.” Hedrick and the band’s hilarious webisodes (the 5th of which was just released). And pick up the album; highly worth it!

[This exclusive has now ended.]

We didn’t report on this one yesterday, but rest assured we didn’t miss it: Blue Cheer frontman Dickie Peterson passed away yesterday of liver cancer. He was 63.

Blue Cheer are often credited as being the forefathers of proto-heavy metal, heaving gone on to inspire Black Sabbath with their work in the late 1960s. They were kind of the Faith No More to alt/nu-metal, the At the Gates to melodic death metal, the Cave In or Converge to metalcore; though they paved the way and largely invented a sound that would later blow up, they never quite got the credit they deserved. And since we’re pretty much talking about the creation of all of heavy metal here, Blue Cheer were/are a big fucking deal. Though the band denied their involvement in the birth of the genre we all love so much, listening to some of their material proves the Sabbath influence right away. Here’s a clip that Decibel posted yesterday of the band performing in Germany last year.

R.I.P. Dickie Peterson.

-VN

When MetalSucks correspondent Angela Gossowski interviewed recent Sumerian Records signees Periphery last month she asked them about the word “djent,” a phrase that appears on some of the band’s t-shirts (pictured above). Guitarist / band-mastermind Misha Mansoor answers thusly:

It’s basically just a guitar sound. It’s not even a word I invented, but it has become synonymous with the band. It’s something we appropriated because of the way we play our power chords. If you play guitar and you play a power chord and you use four notes… you use a big power chord and you palm mute really hard, it makes it really metallic sounding. There are some guitars and amps and pick-ups that are really conducive to that sound, which I’m a very big fan of. So I started describing things that I liked as “djenty,” because they had that characteristic. Just like you would say ‘bright,’ ‘dark,’ or whatever. It just seemed to have caught on for some reason. I actually heard the term from Meshuggah. They’re the ones who coined the term as far as I know. But for whatever reason people have been associating it with us… So if you’re in standard tuning, for all you guitar nerds out there, it would be 0-2-2-4. Or if you’re in drop tuning like we are, it would be 0-0-0-2.

So, Djent. It’s a term I’ve been hearing more and more lately as a result of the fact that it’s a sound I’ve been hearing more and more lately. It’s a staple of the Sumeriancore sound. And I can 100% get behind it! (for now). Here are a few bands that our readers have sent in that I’d definitely classic as djenty.

• Fuge - Scott Bahash sent this one in and wants us to know that it’s “just some guy from Hungary who makes some tracks at home but they blow away any progressive/djenty bands.”
• CiLiCe – Sent in by BTK 666. “Better than Tesseract??” he asks. Maybe so.
• Haunted Shores – The instrumental tracks up on this band’s MySpace page were actually produced and mixed by Mr. Misha Mansoor himself. They sound damn fine, and damn djenty.

Djent djent djent!

-VN

In 2009, my primary interest in Billy Milano is reading the new and creative ways the dudes at Metal Inquistion come up with to give him shit (read here and here for examples). Still, I recognize that once upon a time the dude made good music, and about a gajillion of you e-mailed us the link to this video of him performing S.O.D.’s “United Forces” with Lamb of God (and Doc Coyle!) at a recent Metallica concert. So, y’know, let’s call this one a reader request.

-AR

Cave In shows weren’t always fraught with apprehension, as was last week’s support set to Coalesce at Hollywood’s Knitting Factory. It’s weird but the whole experience came into sharp focus, actually, upon my exit from the club. Opposite the silly L. Ron Hubbard library stood a vendor and her rack of sizzling, spitting hot dogs. The price was right, dinnertime was hours past, and I love hot dogs. And though each was wrapped in unnecessary bacon, I happily forked over my three bucks only to be handed a cold frank on a foam-rubber bun topped with streaks of revoltingly white mayonnaise. Staring down at Anita Baker’s star on the Walk of Fame, I felt like crying. Was I hungry enough to choke down this corruption of an American classic?

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I’m gonna keep this short n’ sweet, because we’ve already expressed many times how much we love this album. But if a few of you need some graphics of horns to really convince you to go out and buy this thing, so be it.

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Last week we posted a call for questions to ask Metalocalypse creator / Dethklok frontman Brendon Small, and you all gave us your best questions in the comments. Later that day we hand-picked our favorite ones and got on the phone with Brendon to pass them along. Your questions his answers, below.

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Skeletonwitch has been a welcome anomaly these past few years. Amidst a resurgence of thrash and 80s throwback nostalgia, the band managed to stand head and shoulders above most emerging, like-minded acts, no doubt many thanks to their inclusion of equal parts thrash, N.W.O.B.H.M. melody, black metal vocals and Nordic nods in the quintet’s riffing and tempos. Breathing the Fire, their new Prosthetic Records release, further codifies these styles and influences, and confirms The ‘Witch’s music as both original and refreshing.

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Nuno Bettencourt is apparently going to be on CBS’ How I Met Your Mother. How I Met Your Mother is a shitty show, but I guess I should just be happy that Nuno is on television again? And I liked Jason Segel in Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, so there’s that.

Anyways, I have no idea at what point this video will actually air on the show, or how it ties into the plot of the show, or why anyone would watch the show to see if now that you can just watch it on the net anytime you like. Take what enjoyment you can from this.

And just for fun, here’s Extreme’s video for “More Than Words,” which was the inspiration for the above.

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We hate these displays of pure speed because they lack heart and show only athletic-like, my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours abilities. We fucking love this kind of shit because it’s awesome!! You can tell this one hasn’t been doctored because the guy in the background’s movements clearly aren’t sped up. Long live shred.

-VN

If the only thing I got from Beasts Among Sheep was a newfound respect for Javelina’s biggest influence, the defunct sludge-punk troupe Buzzov*en, that would be enough for major props-giving. But hot damn, does this Philly band have a lot of other stuff going for them. Least of which is that they’re easy to believe. There’s no polish to Beasts Among Sheep, no foundation for artifice, just eight tracks of mud-caked riffs and cantankerous dispositions. Producer Sanford Parker gives the album that first-take raw vibe that this kind of light-on-subtlety metal requires.

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As many of you successfully guessed on Friday, the headliner to the MetalSucks-sponsored mystery tour is none other than Arch Enemy. They join the already super sweet bill of Exodus, Arsis and Mutiny Within for the Tyrants of Evil North American Tour.

Arch Enemy just released The Root of All Evil, a recording of some of their best songs from the pre-Angela Gossow era, with Gossow now handling vocals. We have seen AE lay to waste many a venue full of unsuspecting metal heads, and having an extra dose of their classics in the arsenal ain’t gonna save any lives. Add the aforementioned three generations of awesome metal bands, and you’ve got the kick-ass tour of the winter. You will not wanna miss this.

Get tour dates after the jump!

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I haven’t had much time to write my blog as much as I would like. To apologize I wanted to give you guys a free download of a small amount of music I’ve done since I’ve left God Forbid. This music is under my moniker Graphic Novel or [GN]. I scored a film a couple of months back and this is a sample of that ‘style’ of music I like to create. [GN] definitely is not metal by any stretch but it is some interesting stuff. I hope you kids here can appreciate something besides metal music.

Here’s the tracklisting for the songs cause I’m not sure they will go into your music player in the right order.

1. The Vultures Titles
2. Voices – Score
3. Settle The Score (Inst)
4. Fate-ality
5. Warren’s Fate
6. The Baron’s Theme
7. Push, Shove
8. Death Dance
9. Whistle Blower

The music ranges from horror score to electronica to weird remixes. It will only be up for three days so get it while it lasts you crazy fuckers.

[download is no longer available]

–D