I’ve never seen Rock of Ages, the “Broadway smash!” jukebox musical that incorporates (recycles) old hair metal and hair metal-friendly songs into what Variety tells me is the story of “two people who meet at the Sunset Strip club Rock of Ages, fall in love and try to stay together.” But I’m assuming it’s awful. I mean, on the one hand, if you’re gonna suffer through a Broadway musical, I understand the appeal of said musical at least featuring songs by Poison, Bon Jovi and Twisted Sister; but on the other hand, no I don’t.

ANYWAY, I mention all of this because Variety also tells me that Adam Shankman is going to be directing a feature film version of this show. Shankman presumably landed the job because he directed the movie of the musical of the movie Hairspray and the studio execs in charge needed 110% assurance that whomever they hired would do nothing original or creative whatsoever. He’s also directed such masterpieces as Bringing Down the House (Queen Latifah shows Steve Martin his inner brother), The Pacifier (Vin Diesel wears a tutu), and Cheaper by the Dozen 2.

Christ. They couldn’t even get the dickhead who directed the first Cheaper by the Dozen.

Rock of Ages has given the world one true gift, however – Bret Michaels getting whacked in the head at the Tony Awards:

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Metal Legacies is an ongoing memorial to extreme music pioneers who kicked the proverbial bucket way too soon.

[MetalSucks contributor Corey Mitchell managed Eric Powell's band, 16volt, from 1996-1998. He asked Powell to write about his friend and bandmate, Raul Raven, for the Metal Legacies series.]

by Eric Powell

Life. It goes by too fast and comes at you too slow. When you are 14, all you want is to be 16 so you can get the keys to the car and just drive, just drive wherever — fucking freedom. It seems like those two years take forever. You count the milliseconds waiting for your ticket out of hell. Then you blink your eyes and all of a sudden you wonder what happened to your twenties, then your thirties, and it’s all a flash. Those two years you waited for the keys to a car, barely a blip. You look back at all the days and at all the scars, and mostly at the memories, now rich with texture and variance, they blur together weaving a sort of out-of-body, self propelled storyline that hopefully ends with some kind of impact.

At some point in our lives we hopefully realize that everything we do counts for something. A never ending chain of events both understated and exaggerated, and our choices link together to write a tangled, barely understandable life story. We hopefully get to a point where our experience with time develops a conscience — a self-aware state where we appreciate all that we missed and we miss all that we didn’t.

Some are born lucky, falling into a calling early, riding it like a well built clipper attacking uncharted seas, often a rough ride, but the ride never lets them down. It’s a single threaded path holding true to itself, a line drawn by our own internal and elusive drive. These lucky few charge ahead with no rules, saber in hand, slashing and gnawing effortlessly through what seem like goals in life, but come off as merely happenstance.

You can apply this babble to the chosen few who get to play music for a living, who get to tour for a living, who make it into the “club” — a silent brotherhood of merry thieves living on the outskirts of society, in the lounges of tour buses and in the dirty back stage areas of outdated concert venues. Gathering in dark hallways to share stories of their battles over catered liquors and fruit plates, duty free cigarettes, and handheld HD video cameras, a broken generator, a sprained wrist, an amp exploding, Roman candle fights in the middle of Montana. So much that can never be spoken. Things left to the moments and events that will never be uttered, the code keeping everyone’s skeletons secret to only the lucky bastards who get to live and witness the real deal. It all falls under the banner of “Rock and Roll,” right?

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So I was working on the proper follow-up to my article “Anatomy of a Record Contract,” which, for all you aspiring bands out there, will be an in-depth guide to self-releasing a metal album.  I was finishing up a section listing effective methods for shipping merchandise, and I wrote a sentence that made me pause and realize how incredibly fortunate I am:

“To aid with packaging orders, your own family is potentially a valuable resource.”

Now family is a delicate subject for some, as it is for me on my father’s side.  But overall in Cormorant, we’ve all been blessed with family members supportive of our music.  While we were holed up for two weeks recording Metazoa, Matt Solis’s father visited us brandishing a mighty cauldron of chicken mole, and his brother Andrew contributed the album’s awesome keyboard tracks.  We’re very grateful for the horrible racket Brennan Kunkel’s poor grandparents were kind enough to endure when we practiced in their living room or garage, and all the beautiful operatic female vocal work on our albums comes courtesy of his sister Deborah Spake.  Nick Cohon’s dad actually tracked the rain stick parts on our song “Ballad of Beast” and did a hell of job of it.  On my end, my aunt Deborah Tibbetts contributed her significant graphic design skills to fashion the look of our EP The Last Tree, and my grandmother, despite being in her 70s (but still spry), comes to rock out at most of our shows.  My girlfriend Amber’s parents Alison and Greg Nelson and brother Ben have backed us for years, and her father not only helped us construct the sound-proof practice studio where we composed Metazoa, but he actually built the bass and one of the primary guitars you hear on the album.

And then there’s my mom.

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We haven’t done much writing about Rodrigo y Gabriella, the acoustic guitarist duo sweeping the metal world. But Metal Insider just posted this video of them jamming with Metallica’s Rob Trujillo, so, y’know. That seems maybe worth posting. I dunno. It’s kind of a slow news day.

So here they are doing “Orion”…

…and you can watch more video at Metal Insider.

-AR

I just saw this “Advanced Fast Hand Finger Wizard Master Class” on Metal Injection and, well, like all things Metalocalypse, it’s definitely worth watching.

-AR

RUFKM? (AKA “Are you fucking kidding me?”) takes a look at stellar metal albums and their douchie one-star Amazon reviews.

First up: Metallica’s Master of Puppets.

Zyke says: “I would say that if you are looking into buying this album, you should also look into sticking your head in the toilet after taking a long, smelly shit.”

Christian Soldier “Welcome to Jesus” prophesied: “Only sissey posers listen to this you girls go hug your teddy strokers.”

Flaming MudKip “Fair and Balanced Critic” proffered: “I say to avoid this album at all costs and get St. Anger. Load and Reload are awesome as well, and if St. Anger is too badazz for you, get those two first to prepare for the ANGER!!!”‘

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Here’s The Dillinger Escape Plan’s fifth webisode chronicling the making of their forthcoming album, Option Paralysis. And sorry if I got your hopes but, no, James Hetfield (Hatfield?) is not actually on the album. Just watch, it’ll all make sense.

The best part of watching these remains the all-too-brief teases of new music the band keeps feeding us. But everything we’ve heard thus far seems to be in the vein of classic, Calculating Infinity-style DEP mathcore, and while there’s nothing wrong with that at all, I am starting to wonder if there’s going to be any Ire Works-style Faith No More pop. I’d love for the band to continue to strike a balance between the two styles (as they did on Ire and, to a lesser extent, Miss Machine), but… who knows. I’m obviously speculating based on next to no concrete information, so… “Dead as History” fans shouldn’t lose sleep just yet.

-AR

Although the girl isn’t so little she is definitely black metal and full of shenanigans. This should be the new status quo for grim and frostbitten.

-VN

[Thanks: Max L.]

Photo by Mart Reinson

While winding down their recent European trek with Unearth, Daath and Throwdown, Mark Hunter, vocalist of perennial MetalSucks favorites Chimaira, was cool enough to answer some questions via e-mail. After the jump, get Mark’s thoughts on European audiences versus American audiences, eating at McDonald’s abroad, the joys of Don “The Dragon” Wilson, showers in Germany, and more.

And by the way, there’s a NSFW image in this interview. You were warned.

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[Horse the Band are currently on tour supporting their new album Desperate Living (full stream here!). Keyboardist Lord Gold (his mommy calls him Erik) is recording their current road trek for posterity in this here MetalSucks blog. Entry 3 follows (read Entry 1 and Entry 2). -Ed.]

What has happened in the past week. I don’t remember. I have watched a lot of plants go by through the window and also watched the sky for a very long time while listening to the song “Eskimo Snow” on repeat. There have been some inspirational cloud formations where I thought “yes, life is worth living.”

One night we made a lot of money and people were going insane and I didn’t hate them and I felt very happy and excited because I knew I could make the minimum payment on my credit cards before we went to Europe and still have money left over. The next night we played next to A Day to Remember in San Diego and their show had pre-sold 2,400 tickets. I thought about how their guarantee for the show was probably $25000 and they would sell another $30000 of merch so after expenses each member of the band would probably make $5000 minimum in one night and that would happen every night for a month. I felt sad. If I could be in that band for 3 days I could pay off my credit card bill and have a fresh start in life at 28. It would be funny to pay off 8 years of band induced financial failure in 3 days.

That night our show had 6 local bands.

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So not only is Rose and whatever four to sixty-two musicians he’s calling “Guns N’ Roses” these days really returning to wreak more havoc upon Canada, but it looks like one of the tour stops will be Montreal.

Anyone remember what happened the last time GN’R played Montreal?

The above news report is completely correct, of course. The rioting was caused by the injuries sustained by James Hatfield (NOT Hetfield), and not because after Hatfield sustained said injuries, Axl Rose failed to play a complete show. Sure sure.

Anyway, dates after the jump. Here Today… Gone to Hell, which is about as close to an official fan site as GN’R has these days, says the band currently consists of guitarists Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal, Dj Ashba, and Richard Fortus, bassist Tommy Stinson, drummer Frank Ferrer, and keyboardists Dizzy Reed and Chris Pitman. Hey, some of those dudes have actually played on a Guns N’ Rose record!

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An initial impression of Axe to Fall, Converge’s latest bruiser, is that it’s a little too simplistic: the vast majority of the album find the band rocking more balls out than they have since their early days. Even “Worms Will Feed” and “Damages,” two slower tracks, feel more like uneasy breathing room than the expansive, emotional dalliances of You Fail Me’s “In Her Shadow” or No Heroes’ “Grim Rose/Black Heart.” Even despite Axe to Fall’s two further-out-than-ever-before closing songs, the majority of the album feels slight, missing a key element of what had made the band as exceptional as they are up until now. With No Heroes finding the band at once at their grindiest and most experimental, something about Axe to Fall feels empty.

Of course, initial impressions don’t do a Converge album justice; if the band are known for anything, it’s marrying the deceptively simple and the brilliantly complex. Despite its tendency to be more gruff than any modern Converge release, Axe to Fall features some of the band’s tightest, most interesting songwriting, as well as providing one of the most satisfying repeat listens of any Converge album. Compact but alarmingly dense, the band have never been this comfortable putting their heads down and charging at you, with a relentlessness that’s almost militaristic in its approach. More than just a bunch of throw-aways before its wildly expansive ending, Axe to Fall stands eye level with their genre-defining full length debut (Petitioning the Empty Sky) or their genre-shattering masterpiece (Jane Doe). Though foolish and cynical to think otherwise, the band are still as good as they’ve ever been, with no signs of coasting despite having been around exponentially longer than most of the hardcore bands they came up with.

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I’m not convinced that any live DVD filmed after about 1992-ish will be particularly flattering to Metallica, but maybe I’m wrong. I haven’t seen them on the Death Magnetic tour – I haven’t seen them since 2006, actually – so maybe they’re killing it out there. Maybe James’ voice is 100% and Lars Ulrich took drum lessons. I dunno.

I guess I’ll find out November 23, when the band releases Francais Pour Une Nuit, a DVD documenting a French concert from this past July. But here’s the kicker: the DVD will only be available in retail stores in… France. Everyone else will have to order it from the band’s website. So, uh, yeah. Not sure what the benefits of doing that are – more profit into the band’s pocket, less shared with retailers, I guess – but there you have it.

You can watch a trailer for the DVD here (it’s not embeddable because Metallica don’t love their fans anymore). After the jump, get details of the various editions of the DVD, plus the complete track list.

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MetalSucks reader J.A.M. dared us to make it through this entire video of the mysterious Nicki Rose… which I did, gladly. Even if you can’t make it from start to finish, make sure you stick with it until at least the 1:00 mark when the camera zooms out. Pure artistic genius like this doesn’t strike the earth often.

Reminds me a little of another MS favorite savant, Romeo Rose. Any relation?

-VN

Apparently the makers of Rock Band are now allowing fans to suggest which songs be included in the time-wasting game’s next iteration. Reads the official Rock Band website:

Request a Song: Got a band or artist you’d like us to know about? A song you’re dying to play in Rock Band? Go ahead—we’re listening…

The page has a form with three fields: Artist Name, Song Title, and Why It Rocks. We could really have some fun with that last one.

Let’s try and get Cannibal Corpse’s “Fucked With a Knife” on the docket for the next Rock Band. Write in the most ridiculous shit possible in the “Why It Rocks” field… how it inspired you to sexually experiment with knives, or some such real-life true stories nonsense. Go here to do so. Because selecting “Fucked With a Knife” at a party would be massively hilarious (and fun to play).

-VN

[Thanks: Adam Muirhead]

When it comes to being epic, Insomnium are second to few. We had the pleasure of catching them on one of their rare U.S. tours a couple of years back with Katatonia, Scar Symmetry and Swallow the Sun, a bill of massively epic proportions. They were indeed mighty. But the audience wasn’t nearly as psyched as they are in this video of the band performing “Down With the Sun” from their latest opus Across the Dark, sent in by MS reader Josh Kidd. This footage was filmed just a week ago in the band’s native Finland, which would explain the crowd’s level of enthusiasm. I’d love to see Insomnium in Finland… in a forest or on a boat, perhaps… that would be epic.

-VN

MetalUnderground.com is reporting that Meshuggah will release a live DVD in early 2010. This is great news for us U.S. Meshuggah fans who get to see the band live, like, never. Except when we got to see them at BonerFest 2009, aka with Cynic and The Faceless — that ruled.

No details have been released yet about when and where the footage for this new DVD was filmed. In the meantime here they are performing “Straws Pulled at Random”; this clip was included on the DVD portion of the re-release of Nothing.

-VN

If you’re an asshole like me, then you probably missed New York’s only chance to catch the way-too-minimal St. Vitus reunion tour last night (with baddass Bay Area bandits Saviours opening). But if you’re anything like me, you surely had somewhere much better to be.

Truth is, I never got into St. Vitus in too big a way, but after seeing legendary guitarist Wino absolutely destroy a Valentine’s Day show with his now-defunct excellent trio The Hidden Hand some years ago in the East Village (with up-n-comers Kylesa opening, who nobody had heard of at the time), I’m ready to join forces with and follow the man into battle no matter what the project.

Okay, so Wino’s actually not playing on this track and admittedly this tune is pretty silly, but it’s hard to argue that it’s not a goddamn stonyyyyy song………especially when the weird guitar solo comes in around the 2:10 mark, accompanied by some trippy jump cuts, brah!

And thus, I feel compelled to bestow upon this soon-to-be legendary YouTube video from 1992 all seven possible MS horns — this is clearly gonna change the face of YouTube.

(7 out of 7 horns — top honors for YouTube videos)

Please remember, not only does my post reflect the opinions of every writer here at MetalSucks but each and every one of you readers as well……so no need to disagree.

For the scant handful of remaining St. Vitus reunion dates (in Worcester tonight with The Misfits and Type O Negative (whoa), then Baltimore, LA, and San muthafuckin Fran) and/or to listen to some of their early seminal recordings, check em out on MySpace.

After the jump, a shitty-quality video of Wino’s first ever performance with the band in 1986 at the Palm Springs Community Center, some killer Hidden Hand stuff, and a couple interviews with the man himself.

WUT WUT!!

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Pretty big week here at the MetalSucks Mansion. We laughed, we cried, we fired someone, we rocked out with our cocks out. Here’s a rundown of the highlights:

• We debuted a new song by The Devin Townsend Project, a new video by Skeletonwitch, a new song by Javelina, and the cover art for Sigh’s new album.
• Horse the Band’s Lord Gold blogged about Nawlins and cocaine, God Forbid’s Doc Coyle gave us an exclusive statement about that whole cup throwing incident, Dallas Coyle is giving away music for free, and Daath’s Eyal Levi talked about a run-in with the Polacks and drum triggers.
• We spoke to Dethklok’s Brendon Small, Converge’s Jacob Bannon, Gojira’s Joe Duplantier, and Liturgy’s Hunter Hunt-Hendrix.
• We checked out new releases from Baroness, The Red Chord, Skeletonwitch, Immortal, Vains of Jenna, Vampire Mooose, and Javelina. Also, some asshole really likes Oceano.
• We’re sponsoring the incredibly awesome Tyrants of Evil North American Tour 2010 with Arch Enemy, Exodus, Arsis, and Mutiny Within!

Alright. I’m going to see Where the Wild Things Are now. I’m fairly certain that it is going to make me weep like Gary Suarez. See ya Monday.

-AR

We have fired Gary Suarez. There will be no more Scraping Genius Off the Wheel.

We have put up with Gary’s bullshit for a long time now. Whether it was praising Bush or defending Chris fucking Cornell or giving unauthorized interviews where he admitted to being “the odd man out at MetalSucks” or naming Kingdom of Sorrow’s album the best of 2008 or Andrew WK’s I Get Wet the best metal album of the 21st century, Gary has been at the center of more screaming matches during MS editorial meetings than any other writer we’ve ever worked with. And we generally loved his writing just enough to put up with his nonsense.

But that Oceano review was going too far.

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