I saw the below trailer, for something called Bones that apparently is not the popular television program, on SkullsNBones.com. Like that piece of garbage movie that D. Randall Blythe is in, it seems to me that the most notable thing about this movie is going to be pretty girls in flattering outfits. That, and what happens at the forty second mark.

Holy crap, did Zakk just give that little kid a beer? I understand that this is a scripted film, that Zakk did not really give that kid a beer, and that one beer ain’t gonna kill the kid anyways, but, still… that’s kind of hilarious, isn’t it? I mean, if we found out that giving little pubeless dudes booze was a key component of Zakk’s child rearing techniques, would anyone really be shocked? This is art imitating life, methinks.

-AR

This past Thursday, November 19th, everyone’s favorite party-thrashers Municipal Waste pulled out all the stops for the L.A. Key Club appearance of their MetalSucks sponsored “Waste the World” trek. In the exclusive footage posted below we see Santa do a beer-bong, Jesus stage-dive, and MW bassist Phil “Landphil” Hall perform a bass solo whilst being hoisted above the crowd in a flying harness. If I were Phil I’d be most worried about dropping my pick, but the dude looks as if he’s a flying bass solo pro! Turns out he rehearsed the move before the show:

We had seen a band called Steel Panther at the Key Club do this stunt before and since they play there every Monday I figured that they had the rig set up all the time. When we arrived at the venue I was right! After asking the stage manager if it was ok we began rehearsing the spot, I think I went up in the air about 3 times before the doors opened. When the show started I was looking at the set list counting down the songs getting more and more nervous about it. When I was hanging over the audience (probably about 20 ft. in the air) I remember thinking  “These WASTE fans are really getting their money’s worth, eh?” Ha ha! When I landed Dave clicked in “Sadistic Magician” and the rest was history!

Watch the clip below.

In yesterday’s self-aggrandizing Sumeriancore article many of you commented that you’d have liked to see Conducting From the Grave on this site, including MS commenter Brownsound who provided me with today’s headline. Yes, Conducting From the Grave completely melt brains, and yes, we HAVE written about them here before but they certainly do deserve more coverage.

Conducting From the Grave’s When Legends Become Dust melts all sorts of brains (even the MS Mansion Monkeys’!), and you should listen to a few of its songs on the band’s MySpace page. The band doesn’t seem to have any official music videos, but a fan did put together a pretty funny parody video of their song “Marching Towards Extinction,” posted below.

-VN

I just saw this on Metal Inquisition.

Holy fucking Jeebus.

-AR

Prong have always been kind of a weird band to me, just barely a blip on my musical radar. Should they be considered a metal band? I’m not really sure. Prong eventually secured their own place in the ’90s pseudo-industrial canon (see also: Killing Joke, Gravity Kills) but the band had firm roots in thrash and punk.

What do you folks thing of Prong? I’m asking because I genuinely want to know. I have a feeling Prong are one of those bands who have a solid core of die-hard followers and not a whole lot of interest outside of that… but who knows, I’ve been wrong before.

Here’s the video for “Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck” from the band’s classic album Cleansing.

-VN

Mnemic… a band I have almost no opinion of whatsoever. I don’t hate them, I don’t love them. They have one song I’ve enjoyed in the past, “Door 2.12,” and when I saw them live a few years back, I thought they put on a pretty good show. But, mostly, I regard them as “Mehnemic.”

They have a big following, though, and I imagine that following will be excited to hear their new song, “Diesel Uterus,” which is now streaming here. It sounds to me like a Mnemic song.

“Diesel Uterus” comes off Sons Of The System, which Nuclear Blast will release in January (15th in Europe, 26th in North America).

And that’s all I have to say about that. Here’s that song “Door 2.12,” just because.

-AR

Even if Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary deny the existence of Sumeriancore, at least someone is carrying the torch. A user named “MaidenPriest420″ (a great handle!) at SputnikMusic.com has compiled a list called “Best of Sumeriancore.” The list includes some of the usual suspects such as The Faceless, Born of Osiris and Veil of Maya, and some commenters are even suggesting additions like Broadcast the Nightmare and Periphery!

Sumeriancore 4evr.

-VN

Round about this time of year we start to see those clusterfucks known as year-end lists appear in our favorite metal publications. This morning Axl wrote about Noisecreep’s Top Ten Albums 0f 2009 list, and this afternoon Noisecreep took it one step further by publishing their own “Best Songs of the 2000s” list. And look at that — it’s ranked! Meaning you can all get really hot and bothered about why Tool is ranked higher than Mastodon! A fruitful argument if ever there was one. </saracasm>

Choosing a list of the best songs from an entire decade is a Sisyphean task if ever there was one. What are there, thousands, hundreds of thousands of metal songs released in a decade? But Noisecreep’s list wins points for diversity — Converge right next to Pig Destroyer right next to Slipknot (for example). And hey, here we are talking about the list… so Noisecreep must’ve done something right.

Check out the list then weigh in with your thoughts below.

-VN

Longtime reader Ray Pecheone sent us the following video of French hardcore band Cordier Street, and, uh, there’s really not that much to say about it. The song is terrible and the video is terrible, and this more or less represents everything wrong with hardcore. It’s a wonder Fox News doesn’t run this as an example of why the French suck. Blech.

-AR

Last week I bitched and moaned because, unlike some other celebrities, Cristina Scabbia does not get naked in her new Peta ad. Now loyal reader Greg Heerdt tells us that Ms. Scabbia has responded in a posting on her Facebook page:

Now please allow me to respond to Cristina directly (and by “directly,” I mean via this blog post):

Click to read more…

This video may be relevant for a large portion of our female readership. Thanks to MetalGF for sending it in… thankfully, she won’t need to use it.

-VN

So Slash performed a new song, “By the Sword,” at some benefit over the weekend, and of course there’s bootleg footage now on the net. It sounds better than the crap we’ve heard before, but the sound of Slash taking an actual crap would sound better than the crap we’ve heard before, so whatever.

The vocals are being performed here by Carrot Top. I don’t remember anyone saying that Carrot Top was on the actual album, so either he is and we just didn’t know it ’til now, or someone else sings the studio version. Let’s hope it’s the former.

Filling out the band for this performance is Dave Navarro, another dude from Jane’s Addiction who isn’t Navarro or Perry Farrell, and Blink-182′s Travis Barker, who tragically survived a plane crash earlier this year.

Slash’s solo album should ruin your 2010 sometime in the spring.

-AR

So I don’t think this exactly news as I’m assuming that someone who isn’t me already knew this, but reader Cody Barrick has just tipped us off that our favorite YouTube vocal coverist (I know, I made up a word, eat me), Senor “Deathcore is Not Scene” Bivins, has his own band – What Lies Beneath. Yes, they named themselves after a Michelle Pfeiffer movie. But at least it’s a Michelle Pfeiffer movie with (SPOILER ALERT!) ghosts and a murderous Harrison Ford, and not, say, a Meryl Streep movie about how hard it is to make it in the fashion world. Also, a blog posting from earlier this month promises that they will soon have a new band name – I’d like to suggest they go with I Could Never Be Your Woman. Just sayin’.

Click to read more…

… then Taproot are about to get fucked! Welcome to the club!

The news that Taproot have signed with Victory is a head-scratcher, to say the least. For one, the Ann Arbor, MI-based nu-metal turned radio-alt-metal band sounds nothing like any of the other bands on Victory. I believe that a big part of a band’s success on any given label is directly correlated with how psyched the label’s employees are about the project, and this especially holds true for smaller/niche labels. That said, I can’t see the recent college grads that signed on to work for A Day to Remember and Silverstein getting amped up to do menial work for Taproot.

But moreso, haven’t Taproot heard the myriad Victory Records horror stories?

Click to read more…

And now for something different.

Our inboxes with have been flooded with “Readers’ Choice” entries of late. By and large people seem especially prone to sending us bands that can loosely be defined as deathcore, metalcore, or Sumeriancore, but claiming that for some barely perceptible reason THIS band is different and therefore worthy of our attention. They almost never are.

Tim Shanks sent us a link to a band called The Chronicles of Israfel that falls into none of the above categories or any easily-definable sub-genres at all other than “really fucking impressive.” This Montreal one-man project falls somewhere in the nebulous continuum between Devin Townsend, Cynic, Meshuggah, Porcupine Tree, Opeth, King’s X and Tool. They (he) play complex, melodic but punishing progressive metal that doesn’t lose sight of the art of writing actual “songs.”

If that description doesn’t pique your interest, I’m not sure what else there is that I can say… so just check out the 7-song collection on the Chronicles of Israfel MySpace page. I actually think the songs farther down the list are the strongest. I listened to all 7 though, and I wish there were more.

-VN

While there are more obvious statements than “supergroups more often than not fail to meet our expectations” – “fire will ruin your house” and “Guns N’ Roses have gone through numerous line-up changes” are tied with it – there aren’t many. And yet, with the announcement of a formation of one, excitement is usually the first emotion called upon. And while saying that supergroup prospects should immediately be met with caution is like saying a new car should be approached with the attitude that you will most likely wrap it around a tree, the failure/success ratio is sadly stacked toward the former. However, this usually isn’t the fault of the uber-collective, but our own gargantuan expectations assuming that this new band featuring members of other bands we like will be as good as all the involved bandmembers main projects COMBINED. And while there have been some out and out failures as of late (cough Greymachine cough), the other two most notable supergroups that reared their heads this year – scraggly doom metal gathering of titans Shrinebuilder and semi-unkempt gathering of some dudes from your uncle’s favorite bands Them Crooked Vultures – have gotten an unfair rap in the wake of their respective debuts’ releases. While to say the bands’ detractors dislike their albums because they don’t rival Neurosis, Sleep, the Melvins, Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age, or Led fucking Zeppelin is unfairly ignoring their actual grievances, to write off either Shrinebuilder or Them Crooked Vultures would be a damn shame, in that, while not reinventing any sort of wheel, in a year where the biggest supergroup commercially was Chickenfoot, a solid doom metal album and a solid stoner rock album are two pretty significant things to dismiss.

Click to read more…

I know that some people were hoping that the At the Gates reunion tour would be followed by an At the Gates reunion album, but that was never gonna happen; the band said they didn’t wanna risk ruining their legacy with an album that could never really live up to expectations, and I think that’s a smart move. Bands like Alice in Chains are the exception, not the rule, and At the Gates would be trying to follow-up one of the most influential metal albums of all time, so I don’t think that would go too well for them.

Still, we are getting some new At the Gates product in the form of a new three-disc DVD, The Flames of the End, which Earache will release on February 22. Here’s what’s in the set:

Click to read more…

Baroness have grown leaps and bounds as a live band. It’s been a cool experience to watch this band mature over the past 2 years or so… from an adrenaline and sweat-filled room in a makeshift venue in the back of a Mexican restaurant, to a poised but still unsure-of-themselves band on a bigger stage a year later, to bonafide rockstars at the end of 2009. Baroness looked completely comfortable on the stage of the Bowery Ballroom, effortlessly commanding the attention of the sold out 550-capacity venue. They’ve now made the ascension from scrappy new band to the big leagues… of course there’s still a long way to go, but last Friday they proved that they’re fully capable.

Click to read more…

Thanks to MS reader Kit Hart for pointing this out. The resemblance is uncanny!

-VN

Although I know of at least one groupie who probably would like to see the fellas in Born of Osiris forcefully lose their butt cherries, this article is actually about the below video, which Sergeant D. brilliantly included in his review of a recent Hatebreed/Cannibal Corpse/Hate Eternal/BOO gig.

The clip is noteworthy for two reasons:

1. It’s just funny to see some kids in a deathcore cover band playing to fifteen people in their school gym. As Sergeant D. notes, when the kids start moshing at the 47 second mark, it makes you “wish you could spray everybody under 21 in the face with AIDS.”
2. This band calls themselves “The Rapist.” What a charming band name. Clearly, The Rapist should be signed to Sumerian ASAP, so that they can rape rape rape all across this great land.

Fear for the future of our world, people.

-AR