We’ve been hearing about “Until the Light Takes Us,” a documentary about the incarnation of black metal, for a long while now – but there’s finally a trailer and a theatrical release schedule.

And I gotta say, based on the trailer at least, the movie looks pretty amazing. Even if you don’t like black metal, there’s no denying that the story is fascinating; a bunch of kids basically set out to make the most extreme, theatrical music possible, and then took their little game of make-believe wwwaaaayyyy too far.

Actually, maybe you don’t find it fascinating. Maybe you just think these dudes are dicks.

ANYWAY, watch the trailer below (you can watch in high def here); there’s also a whole bunch of clips on YouTube. And if you go to the movie’s official website, you can see when/if it will be opening in your town. It looks like it starts rolling out in November.

-AR

Thanks to everyone who e-mailed us about this.

The jokey (although somewhat politically relevant, maybe?) lyrics for Valient Thorr’s “Tomorrow Police” might pull you out of the song a little bit, but there’s no denying that this is a cool video. I suspect that a lot of the credit belongs to director Mike Aho. I wasn’t familiar with his work prior to this, but looking at some other videos he’s directed, it’s clear that Aho has a distinct style.

Plus, even if you do hate the lyrics, the song is still pretty fun.

-AR

Thanks to MetalSucks uber-Maniac (I’m giving him an upgrade since he actually came to New York and sought us out at a show) Mark Mortiz-Rabson for alerting us to the following incredibly important message on Between the Buried and Me’s MySpace page:

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[Writer and musician Tres Crow comes to us from the excellent blog Dog Eat Crow, for which I just published a Halloween-inspired list of The Top 5 Goriest Metal Album Covers of All Time. What follows is an incredible piece of creative writing written by Mr. Crow based on Mastodon's Crack the Skye. The first part ("Intro") is a true recounting of a run-in we had with Brent "Tasmanian Devil" Hinds whilst visiting Atlanta for the Scion Rock Fest. The rest is all culled from the twisted, Mastodon-induced imaginings of Tres' own mind. It is long, but worth it. Enjoy! - Ed.]

The Mastodon Beard
By Tres Crow

Intro

Before I really get into the meat and potatoes of this thing I think I need to make a little confession: I first became interested in Mastodon primarily because of Brent Hinds’ totally wicked beard. Now don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t any kind of creepy infatuation, like watching him shower through peepholes type of thing, but more like, let’s say, professional admiration, as in one bearded red-headed dude to another.

You see I am a man of relatively modest bearded means, and though in my chosen field of Banking I am considered a rebel for wearing facial hair so defiantly against accepted business attire and hygiene, when I first saw the tarantula legs Mr. Hinds was sporting from his chin I was totally awed.

Let me break this first meeting down for you: I’m standing in a tiny hole in the wall bar in Atlanta with the esteemed moderators of this very blog, Mssrs. Neilstein and Rosenberg, a bar which has this night been totally taken over by Metal fans of every shape and size on account of the Scion Metal Fest. I’m sipping a beer and feeling extraordinarily out of place in my bright blue rain jacket and neatly trimmed rebel-Banker beard and I keep eyeing all the khaki military jackets and black band shirts and ferocious, tousled facial mats with a mixture of wariness and wonder. Clearly I am in the midst of something extraordinary, beard-wise; from wall to wall there is the most amazing array of goatees, full-on Hemingway bushes, twisty oriental spires descending like stalactites several inches, handlebars like the Hulk used to wear (still does apparently), faces that seem to grow out from the beards instead of the other way around. Hell, there is even the occasional mustache sprinkled through the crowd for good measure. I mean, basically, the place is like a veritable Beard Convention and we’re all milling about, drinking beers and shuffling feet and exclaiming loudly about one thing or another, everyone with the unmistakable posture of someone waiting for something. It’s like we’ve all come together for a purpose that maybe not everyone even realizes what it is yet, but there’s definitely this feeling of purposeful waiting, of expectation.

And then it happens, what we’ve all been waiting for without even really knowing it. Like some kind of verbal version of the wave a rumor starts to spread throughout the tiny place: Brent Hinds is here. I crane my neck to get a glimpse of this Brent guy even though I’m not really even certain who he is.

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Back in August, Gary “Lucky Motherfucker” Suarez got to see Nine Inch Nails perform their seminal release, The Downward Spiral, in its entirety as part of their “Wave Goodbye” tour. For those of us who weren’t lucky enough to be there, I attempted to compile video bootlegs of the entire performance. Turns out, I shouldn’t have wasted my time. Our friends at Metal Injection report:

One NIN fanatic searched far and wide and found 11 different people at the show who bootleged it (in HD nonetheless!), they edited it and now, presumably with Trent’s blessing, the entire show is online and downloadable for FREE. You can stream it above, download a torrent, iPod version or just a DVD burn. Click here to download it.

Even if Trent hasn’t approved of this yet, I have a hard time imagining that Mr. “Fuck the Record Labels, Steal My Album” would have a problem with it. But whatever the case, I’d like to applaud this awesome fan for all his hard work, which will now allow the rest of us to live vicariously though some means other than a critics’ description.

Here’s a video from the performance, now edited together:

-AR

Brand new MS Contributing Photographer Diana Lee Zadlo was on-hand at the Eyehategod / Goatwhore etc show at Baltimore’s Ottobar this past Friday, October 23rd, and she snapped some killer photos for us of both bands. A sample of her excellent work is posted above… click through the jump for the full photo set!

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Nachtmystium’s Black Meddle, Pt. 1 was one of the best albums of 2008, ending up at the top or near the top of most MS staffers’ top ten lists that year. So, naturally, Nachtmystium fans everywhere have been asking the question, “Hey, where the fuck is Black Meddle, Pt. II?”

Well, hey, guess what? The band has issued an update to that very query on their MySpace page:

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This is literally a nightmare come true for me and my fellow fans of the undoubtedly most UN-metal Mets: do I root for the Phillies or Yankees? This is a perplexing conundrum indeed.

On one hand you have the “root for the home team” thing. On the other hand, those Phillies are shit-talking bastards.

I think I gotta go Phils. Root for the National League (DH is for weenies). I’d love to see Yankee fans all that much more disappointed, because to them anything less than a World Series title is considered a failure. And what’s good for the Phillies this year will ultimately make our rivalry with them that much more heated next year… and an eventually Mets victory that much sweeter.

Oh hey and since this is a metal website, here’s a video of Mike Piazza — one of the most metal Mets of all time — singing live with Overkill in NYC.

-VN

Raise your hand if you don’t think Brian Setzer is a fucking bad ass.

Those with your hands raised please never visit this site again.

Everyone else, please click through for a Setzer Shred Session (and oh hey his Orchestra band has a new album out!).

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James Plotkin is that rare extreme music creator that denies no creative impulse. His back catalog matches the industrial sonic terrorism of OLD with the hollowed-out doom of Khanate, the Lotus Eaters’ cavernous, electro-acoustic drones with Phantomsmasher’s calculated digital brutality. Not to mention his dozens of solo guitar and ambient releases. The thin grey thread that runs through all of Plotkin’s projects? Restless experimentation, a trait that’s found him dissolving and expanding the boundaries of extreme music for two decades. Experimentation is at the heart of Plotkin’s newest group Jodis, an open-ended collaboration with vocalist Aaron Turner (Isis/Old Man Gloom) and drummer Tim Wyskida (Khanate/Khlyst). Plotkin recently sat down with MetalSucks to talk about Jodis’s new Hydra Head release Secret House. As you’ll read, his reflections on his own creative process are just as wide-ranging and thoughtful as his discography.
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I love playing ths game. The famed Metallica + GN’R + Faith No More run would have to be close to the top of my list. Soundgarden supporting Spoonman. Motley Crue supporting Too Fast For Love. King’s X on the Dogman tour, for sure… check out this performance [sent in by Shane Gillis] of the title track from that incredible record, filmed on the short-lived Jon Stewart show no less.

If you had a time machine that could take you back to any one specific tour (but ONLY one), who would you go see?

-VN

Dead on arrival.

(1 ½ out of 5 horns)

-GS

[Gary Suarez welcomes your constructive criticism. He usually manages the consistently off-topic No Yoko No. Say, why don't you follow him on Twitter?]

Just last week Vince called for John Bush and Anthrax to stop pussyfooting around and just announce that Bush is 100% back in the band already; now it seems clear that that announcement hasn’t come because absolutely no one in the Anthrax camp has any fucking clue what the fucking fuck is going on with their band.

Let’s look at some quotes from just the past three days, shall we?

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Honestly, I was never that excited about Them Crooked Vultures, for the simple reason that supergroups are anticlimactic nine out of ten times (and the fact that Queens of the Stone Age haven’t made a record I’ve wanted to listen to more than once since Songs for the Deaf didn’t help). Still, I was open to giving the band a shot.

Then I heard their first single, “New Fang.”

When Gary Suarez described this band’s music as “seriously generic and geriatric classic rock,” he wasn’t kidding.

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Djent flag-wavers and recent Sumerian Records signees Periphery are taking my advice and hitting the East Coast next month for a string of headline dates, welcome news to those of us who saw them absolutely decimate the crowd on this Summer’s hit-or-miss Thrash & Burn Tour despite an asscrack-of-dawn stage time (relatively speaking). To say that Periphery were the standout act of Thrash & Burn would be an understatement; they completely tour up a room that had to be for the most part unfamiliar with them. It was also immensely satisfying for me to finally see a band live that’s been e-famous for years.

The 9-date headline tour also features This or the Apocalypse and Roadrunner young guns Mutiny Within, starting November 8th in Richmond, VA and wrapping up November 16th in Providence, RI. If you don’t live in any of these limited markets, fear not — the band will definitely be touring a helluva lot in the coming months/years.

Full list of dates after the jump, and of course you can listen to the band on MySpace. Also check out our interview with Periphery’s Misha Mansoor and Alex Bois as well as this video of drummer Matt Halpern laying down some ridiculous grooves in the studio.

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Canadian stoner metallers Priestess were way too cool for their alma mater RCA Records, for whom they released only one album — 2006′s Hello Master — before being dropped. The album undoubtedly underperformed by major label standards, even with that nice sync fee they got for the inclusion of “Lay Down” in Guitar Hero III. Fitting then that stoner stalwarts Tee Pee Records have picked up Priestess to release their next album Prior to the Fire in February of 2010. Tee Pee’s roster includes a lot of acts just a tad too like wayyy stooooned ouuut maaaan for this site’s tastes, but with the release of Iron Age’s stellar thrasher  The Sleeping Eye earlier this year and the announcement that Priestess have joined their ranks, things are looking a bit heavier at the Tee Pee camp.

Priestess have a new song called “Sideways Attack” up on their MySpace page. Me rikee… it’s a bit more up-tempo than a lot of the material from Hello Master and the production is super-dry but tight, not unlike that of Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf.

Priestess performed in NYC this week twice at the CMJ Music Marathon… if you were there, kindly fill us in.

-VN

Then he threatened to put himself in the hospital for bringing up Metallica.

-AR

After refusing to battle hour-plus lines in our quest to eat the best of NYC’s dumplings, today I ended up comfortably toasted with Zena Metal and Relapse Bob listening to Ratt’s greatest hits collection, Ratt & Roll 8191. It was the perfect afternoon activity for a rainy Fall day that capped another week of late CMJ Music Marathon nights full of booze, music, and a festival-best performance by Boston shredders Revocation.

A greatest hits collection doesn’t necessarily convey the original artistic intentions and context of a band’s songs as thoroughly as listening to a full album does, but it does provide an interesting look into a band’s career arc. By the late ’80s Ratt had shifted towards the cheesier metal constructs and lighter pop-metal of then-popular bands like Warrant and Poison, and listening to their greatest hits collection underscores that transformation. The fact is, everything after 1986′s Dancing Undercover is doused in heapings of weak sauce, even the moderate hit “Way Cool Jr/” (which Zena Metal pointed out I liked for purely sentimental reasons… the song does kinda blow). But out of all of Ratt’s later material we all agreed that one song matched the edge and swagger of their earlier stuff — “Nobody Rides for Free,” a track that only appeared on the 1991 soundtrack for Point Break.

Stephen Pearcy looks absolutely ridiculous in this video, the first step of his descent into his current status of looking worn-the-fuck-out. Someone needs to add this man to Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians.

-VN

There’s a lyric in the song “Hour of Rats” from Fed Through the Teeth Machine, the album by The Red Chord, and this particular lyric has really taken hold in my brain as of late: “WE’VE KNOWN EACH OTHER TOO LONG TO BE FRIENDS.” What a simple, beautiful statement that I can 110% relate to these days. Hm.

Speaking of The Red Chord…

• We’re streaming The Red Chord’s new album, Fed Through the Teeth Machine, through Monday! It’s awesome, so definitely give it a listen, then go buy it when Metal Blade releases it on Tuesday, October 27! We also spoke to The Red Chord’s Mike “Gunface” McKenzie.
• We got a European tour wrap-up from Chimaira’s Mark Hunter, had a nice chat with Kowloon Walled City’s Jason Pace, and even played nice with Oceano’s Andrew Mikhail.
• Lord Gold from Horse the Band graced us with another awesome tour blog, Eyal discussed physical CDs, and Dallas explored the evolution and importance of deathcore.
• We checked out new releases from Converge, Ancestors, and Smite the Righteous.
• Janet Reno quit Attack Attack!
• We’re fairly certain that Dave Mustaine is still a Megadick. Actually, we’re positive.

Have a good weekend everyone…

-AR

Last week we gave Fed Through the Teeth Machine, the incredible new album from death/grind/prog pioneers The Red Chord, four out of five horns, and, honestly, we’re not even sure that that’s a high enough rating. Certain to make many year-end lists, Fed Through the Teeth Machine displays The Red Chord doing what they do best: defying expectations, breaking genre conventions, and tearing the listener a new asshole.

Metal Blade will release Fed Through the Teeth Machine this coming Tuesday, October 27, but as always, MetalSucks has ya covered: we’re streaming the entire album now through Monday, so you can hear how awesome it is before you buy it. We hope you love it as much as we do.

And while we’re on the topic, why you don’t read our interview with The Red Chord’s Gunface about the making of the album?

[This promotion has ended. -Ed.]