The amazing band Gospel broke up a few years ago, and a number of us have felt the loss. So when it was recently announced that not only has the band reformed, but they have an album’s worth of new material ready to go and they will be playing their first show in three years tomorrow night (for a benefit to help a friend get a new liver) at Union Pool in Brooklyn bloody Brooklyn….well, that was quite the pleasant surprise. Spaketh band member Adam Dooling:

Our original plan was to keep quiet, record the album and just release it quietly. We’ve actually been “reformed” now for about a year. It was important for us to move forward musically and concentrate on writing new material. We didn’t want to put any pressure on ourselves or have anything expected of us. We also didn’t think anyone would really care. So when Matty No-Times (our old roadie and owner of Three Kings Tattoo) got sick, our plans changed to play this benefit show on his behalf. We hope to be recording our next release sometime this March. It will not be on Level-Plane.

You can check out some of Gospel’s mastery here, and info on tomorrow night’s show here.

See ya there!

-KW

A few weeks ago Cosmo Lee at Invisible Oranges called for power metal fans to defend the (in his opinion) indefensible genre, a call which I readily answered because I love the stuff. Almost on cue, Intronaut’s Sacha Dunable issued his own defense of power metal — I swear I didn’t prompt him — claiming that in its current unpopular state, playing power metal in 2010 is about as punk rock as you can get. I salute you, Sacha.

Raintime, one of my favorite Europowercheese bands, have come out with a new song this week on the MySpace page of their American record label, Bieler Bros. The song, “Fire Ants,” comes from their forthcoming March 16th release Psychromatic. Their last release Flies & Lies was an excellent album so I’m curious what this new record will hold for these fine Italian gentlemen, but based on the new track I’m kind of nervous. Musically the song is solid if unspectacular, but vocally it’s weak as hell. Nevermind the fact that Claudio Coassin has ditched his vocal growls completely… I’m more concerned with the fact that his clean vocals kind of suck. Perhaps this was the case on Flies & Lies and I just didn’t notice because the music and songwriting were so strong. There’s a new pre-pro track on Raintime’s own MySpace page which leaves me feeling pretty much the same way.

Way to not give me any more ammo in my power metal argument, guys. With Mercenary ditching half their band last year and Gus G.’s obligation to Ozzy over Firewind for the immediate future, what have we modern power metal fans got left?

-VN

In case ya didn’t know, we’re big Gorod fans here at the MetalSucks Mansion. Rare is the band that can combine tech-y goodness with such melodious songwriting hooks, but there have it. Gorod r00lz.

So we were excited to read on Blabbermouth that the band is working on a new EP. But even more exciting is the description of what’s going to be on said EP:

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I only recently discovered the blog Grind and Punishment after its proprietor, Andrew Childers, made a killer modern grind mix for Invisible Oranges. But it’s a great site, and it’s clear that Childers knows wwwaaayyy more about grind than I do, so I’ve been devouring its old posts ferociously.

Childers named Abuse, the debut album from Singapore’s Wormrot, as the best grind album of 2009, so, of course, I checked it out. Good job, Andrew: Abuse is killer. It was apparently only officially released in Singapore (which is not to say you can’t get it elsewhere if you’re mildly clever), but a press release now tells me that the band has signed to Earache, who will give the album a CD and LP release with extra tracks sometime this spring.

I’m sure that there are some tr00 grind fans who will find the idea of Wormrot signing to a known metal label – and one that houses Oceano, no less – offensive. But I have a hard time imagining three dudes from Singapore who started a band called “Wormrot” from ever selling out. Whatever gets this band’s music into the greatest number of ears possible strikes me as good news.

Check out Wormrot on MySpace.

-AR

Vince thinks that After the Burial’s new album is gonna fuck your face off when it gets released later this year. But that’s an educated guess based on enjoying the band’s past work; truth is, we haven’t heard any new material from the album… until now.

Reader Nathan Shaw sent us this footage of After the Burial performing a new song, “My Frailty,” at the London Music Hall earlier this week. The quality’s not so great, but good enough for you to get the gist of it. Check it out below, then make snap judgements in our comments section.

-AR

Priestess are easily my favorite band on the Tee Pee Records roster, most of which is firmly planted on the psychedelic rock side of the stoner spectrum (although, as I learned a couple of months back, Earthless are pretty fucking rad too). Priestess, however, have serious balls of steel; the easy analogy would be to say they’re a less weird / more consistently rocking version of Queens of the Stone Age, but like most musical band-to-band analogies that description falls shorts of capturing the band’s true essence. Where Queens come from a background rooted in punk as much as metal, Priestess are straight up metal dudes influenced by equal parts by traditional heavy metal and NWOBHM; witness Mikey Heppner’s scorching guitar solos juxtaposed with the band’s Sabbath-esque grooves.

The Canadian quartet’s new album Prior to the Fire has been out in their homeland since October but is only coming to US, UK and European shores February 2nd (unless, of course, you live in 2010 and have the rendering-international-release-dates-useless Internet… but that’s a topic for another day). The entire album is currently streaming on the band’s MySpace page; you best check it out now because it probably won’t be up there for long and that shit is the bomb, I promise.

-VN

While the first run of the MetalSucks-sponsored Metal As Art Tour — featuring Hyno5e, Revocation and The Binary Code — is now entering the home stretch as it winds its way back east (get dates here), the crazy motherfuckers in France’s Hypno5e are gearing up for another month-long U.S. tour that focuses on mostly Northeast, Southeast and a few Midwest markets that the 1st tour leg missed. Starring Janet Leigh and Fallen Martyr will accompany the band for the 2nd run of the tour, which kicks off February 9th in Philadelphia and wraps March 4th in NYC.

Check out this live video of Hypno5e performing “Tutuguri” in their native France. These dudes fucking bring it live with a coordinated light show and video projections, and they sound perfect every night. A full list of tour dates for the 2nd leg is posted after the jump.

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I’m not going to give you Chris Adler’s resumé the way I might in a normal interview intro. If you’re reading MetalSucks, you either know who Chris Adler is, or you’re my mom and you’re just trying to be supportive. Rather, I want to tell you a quick story about my experience interviewing Adler.

When I called him for our scheduled interview, he apologized and asked if he could call me back in a little while. “I’m just sitting my daughter down for dinner,” he tells me. When I later told him that I’m impressed that he actually still sits his daughter down for dinner, he chuckled and replied, “Yeah, dude, when I’m home, I’m totally Mr. Mom.”

And that’s Chris Adler in a nutshell: one of the most accomplished drummers from one of the biggest bands in modern metal is actually a really down-to-earth dude. And that’s not just hype; this is the second time I’ve spoken to Adler, and the second time I’ve walked away with the distinct impression that he is a sincerely nice guy who has managed to keep his head on his shoulders despite all his success. Isn’t that a nice change of pace for once?

After the jump, read my chat with Adler about this Sunday’s Grammy Awards, touring with Metallica, what the future holds for Lamb of God, and, oh yeah, the MetalSucks comments section.

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There are only so many metal riffs you can assemble out of the 12 notes in the western scale. Perhaps that’s why I’ve found myself extending my musical arms outside of what might be traditionally called “metal” lately; bands like Carnal Rapture and Lye by Mistake blew my mind last year because they take something that’s distinctly not metal and pile upon it something that distinctly is.

Norway’s Shining do much the same thing, although the “black” lexeme in the title of their latest album Blackjazz — released this week on Indie Recordings, and by The End in the U.S. — is kind of misleading. It’s more like Industrojazz. With the assistance of producer Sean Beavan (NIN, Marilyn Manson, Slayer), the songs on Blackjazz pulsate, undulate, bleep and bloop underneath progressions and note combos that sound jazzy to these admittedly untrained ears. The snarls and growls of vocalist Munkeby keep things firmly grounded in modern metal though, in stark contrast (in the best possible way) to the lead saxaphone lines played by the same man.

Intrigued? Check out the two tracks from Blackjazz that Shining have up on their MySpace page. I’ve yet to sink my teeth into the full album, but after focusing on the frenetic, mind-spinning instrumental passage in the middle of “The Madness and the Damage Done” and the scorching saxophone solo at the end of “Fisheye” I’m going immediately to dig this one out from the pile of MS promo packages. Shining are fucking different, and I like it.

-VN

[Thanks: Fritz]

I rocked Deflorate for the first time in at least a month yesterday, and, yep, still slays. I can’t believe I still haven’t gotten to see BDM on this touring cycle. What the fuck, me? Get off your ass and do it!

While I wait for the band to come back to town (or within driving distance at least), I can live vicariously through five new live clips out bro-bros over at Metal Injection filmed at the Crazy Donkey in Farmingdale, NY. Here’s “Black Valor,” the opening track from the aforementioned Deflorate; you can watch four, count ‘em four, other live vids here.

Deflorate is out now on Metal Blade.

-AR

No, I don’t mean that the pop duo from France covered Job for a Cowboy (although that would be potentially awesome, too). I mean that a group of kids got together, and each one took a fake air instrument – air guitar, air drums, etc. – and they made this video. Yes, I know that’s retarded, but they seem pretty aware of how retarded it is, and the amount of thought they put into it – right down to close-ups of a kid’s feet doing absolutely no real double bass drumming – make it a worthy endeavor. Well, maybe not “worthy,” but… you get the point.

I suspect that someone smarter (or maybe just higher) than me could make an argument that there’s a profoundly meta statement being made here – the emperor has no clothes, or something cliché like that – but I’m just going to continue to enjoy it as the best viral JFAC tribute since that Spongebob Squarepants thing.

Blabbermouth posted the below footage of Arch Enemy nailing the crowd’s nuts to the wall in New York last week as headliners of the MetalSucks sponsored Tyrants of Evil North American Tour 2010 with Exodus, Arsis, and Mutiny Within. It only captures a teensy-weensy little bit of the amount of energy coursing through the air during this performance, but it will at least give you some sense of how great the show was.

It’s not too late to check out this awesome tour! Remaining dates after the jump.

Click to read more…

I’ve always thought Eluveitie stood out from the pagan/folk/whatever metal pack because they’re one of the heavier bands of the bunch. Where several of these bands choose to dive deep into their respective country’s folk music and metallicize it, Eluveitie instead opt to folk-ify their metal. Their songs are basically heavy Gothenburg-style melodeath with some folksy instrumentation; combine that with mainman Chrigel Glanzmann’s acute songwriting and you’ve got the reason why Eluveitie remain one of the only folk metal bands that continually pique my interest. In a sea of a whole bunch of very mediocre bands in this uber-specialized micro-genre, Eluveitie stand out.

Their new track “Kingdom Come Undone,” now posted on their MySpace page, is no different; it’s great. Eluveitie are letting the metal world know loud and clear that their 2009 all-acoustic record was just an experiment and that the band we heard on Slania is the real Eluveitie. So far we’ve heard two tracks from Everything Remains (As It Never Was) (out February 19th on Nuclear Blast) and they’ve both been bangers.

-VN

The reader known as “culturevulture” e-mailed us to tell us he just this band Diamond Plate open for Behemoth – and apparently they killed.

I believe it. Bassist/singer Jon Macak’s choked vocals take some getting used to, but the music won me over right away. This is thrash that never sacrifices complexity for simple speed; it’s bludgeoning without being dumb. I’d wager that Justice-era Metallica has been a big influence on this band, and that they love Machine Head’s The Blackening; I think they’d seem perfectly at home on a tour with Revocation, even if they’re not quite yet at that band’s level of kick-assery.

Check out Diamond Plate on MySpace; I was especially impressed with the song “Relativity.”

-AR

Earlier this week I hinted that there’s an awesome metal release coming out on 4/20 (besides the new Periphery album), and based on something I wrote, a bunch of you guessed that it’s the new album from Cynic. And I’m sorry to tell you that that’s not quite right.

But what’s coming out on 4/20 is gonna be awesome, and at some point real soon, I hope, we’ll get a new Cynic album, too. In the meantime, a reader known to us only as “Mario” says that his buddy Luigi Luke filmed the below footage of Cynic performing a new song, “Wheels Within Wheels,” this past Monday in Cleveland. To say it sounds promising would be to put it mildly. Enjoy!

-AR

The Austerity Program play this Sunday January 31, in Brooklyn at Public Assembly (70 N 6th St) with White Suns, Immanent Voiceless, Daniel Malinsky. You should go, goddammit!!!

I did not get into metal until relatively late in life. My teenage years were spent buying everything that came out on Touch & Go and Amphetamine Reptile. I’d see long-haired wasteoids hanging out in suburban playgrounds and think “Look at those chumps who’ve got it so bad for Reign in Blood while I know that Atomizer is really where it’s at. (Actually, I still pretty much feel this way.) At that point, MetalSucks was not a website, it was a personal belief.

Still, I was not unaware of what the metal kids were up to, even around fourth grade. A few of them that I invited to my birthday that year party chipped in and bought “Shout at the Devil;” since I only had about twelve records at that point, I figured that I’d listen to the record once a day because what else are you going to do? And it kind of freaked my parents out, and that was cool. And it had a pentagram on the cover which I spent a lot of time trying not to look at because I was worried something might happen to me.

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What the fuck are we calling Alcest? Are they even metal, really? Did I hear someone refer to them as black metal once? Fuck kinda black metal is this? What about pastoral metal? I guess I could get behind that.

Whatever you call them, there’s no denying that Alcest’s music is super-relaxing. I mean that as a compliment; a fella can’t mosh all the time, y’know, and Alcest create the kind of music that makes me see those inter-cards from Punch Drunk Love in my head.

The band has a new album, Écailles De Lune (if my six years of not paying attention in French class serve me correctly, that means “scales of the moon”), coming out in Europe on March 29 on Prophecy. There’s no North American release date yet, but while we wait, we can all enjoy the beautiful album cover:

-AR

Yesterday I wrote about The Dillinger Escape Plan’s upcoming tour with Iwrestledabearonce; well, it now seems that it’s actually a tour with Darkest Hour, Iwrestledabearonce, and Animals as Leaders.

Holy shit, that’s a good line-up. That’s a “get to the venue early so you don’t miss any of the bands” line-up right there. These are the kinds of bands that jump around on stage like they were having epileptic fits or something, and yet somehow never hit any sour notes – in others words, the best kind of live bands. And there’s some diversity amongst these groups – even if there are sonic correlations, no two really sound the same. Very nice.

Here are initial dates… there should be more announced in the not-too-distant future, so try not do flip out just yet if you realize the closest show is a six hour drive away or something.

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Here we have a bunch of clowns in black clothes with vampire-ish makeup using 4th generation Swedish metal riffs, breakdowns and alternating between screaming and auto-tuned vocals. How horribly, awfully, unbelievably generic. Fuck this band. Fuck them hard in their scrotums. So help me God if this band ends up with a record deal.

-VN

[Thanks: Matt Mitchell]

Soilwork have a lot to prove with their next record, which a press release from Nuclear Blast tells us will be called The Panic Broadcast. It’s not that 2007′s Sworn to a Great Divide was bad, but it’s that it was just OK. Ever since the departure of primary songwriter Peter Wichers from the band before that album was recorded (and the subsequent departure of his uncle, longtime guitarist Ola Frenning), it’s felt like Soilwork have been rambling along somewhat aimlessly, trying — and falling just short of — re-living their past glory.

But now that Wichers is back in the band the game has changed.

Click to read more…