Although the editors of MetalSucks get a vote in the Scion No Label Needed Contest, the staff of MetalSucks, alas, does not. Thus, over the course of the next few days, each MetalSucks writer will post an endorsement for his favorite finalist for the contest. You can check out all the finalists, and vote for your personal favorite, here.

Most of the bands competing in this contest are so underwhelming or otherwise not-to-my-liking that, were they to open for a group I’d actually want to see, I’d bust out my UNO cards. (I kid! I kid!) Much to my surprise, however, I found one group in the running that I think is pretty fucking great: Portland, Oregon’s Proven.

-GS

Listen to and vote for Proven here. You can also visit them on MySpace.

OMG did you hear there’s a 30 preview of a new Opeth song on Amazon??? Holy @*$&!!!!!

To me nothing could be more useless than hearing 30 seconds of a song that isn’t out yet, but people always send us these Amazon pre-order pages anyway. I bet these are the same people who shell out Benjamin after Benjamin for lap dances in strip clubs. What’s the fucking point? It is, quite literally, a cock-tease. I’d rather watch porn in the safety of my own home where I can at least beat off instead of having to walk around with a raging hard on and a constant barrage of tits in my face. What a waste of money.

Anyway, Suckalo Dan Wolfson thinks you all might like to hear 30 seconds of the new Opeth song “The Throat of Winter,” which comes from the God of War: Blood & Metal video game soundtrack (out march 2nd on Roadrunner). It sounds like it’s got acoustic guitars, and it sounds like Mikael Akerfeldt is singing on it… and that’s about all we can tell. I mean new Opeth music is always an exciting proposition, but come on.

For those keeping track, the new Trivium song “Shattering the Skies Above” from the God & War soundtrack is floating around the Interwebs (currently here).

-VN

Although the editors of MetalSucks get a vote in he Scion No Label Needed Contest, the staff of MetalSucks, alas, does not. Thus, over the course of the next few days, each MetalSucks writer will post an endorsement for his favorite finalist for the contest. You can check out all the finalists, and vote for your personal favorite, here.

The great thing about the No Label Needed contest is how it answers the question that we’ve all asked ourselves and each other about countless bands: “How on earth did these wankers get a record deal?” Sometimes the band seems too shitty to interest fiscally-minded music businesspeople. Just as often, I ask that when I’m just wondering why one featureless, unoriginal band landed a contract as opposed to the forty other turd merchants clad in identical clothes and writing the exact same retarded songs. But of course everybody knows that the answer, in each case ,is blowjobs. That’s how crappy/pointless bands get their chance at the big time. B to the lowjobs, people. Don’t look so surprised.

But do stop and realize the magnitude of our voting power in the No Label Needed contest. Though a panel of metal, ahem, experts (including MetalSucks’ own Vince Neilstein and Axl Rosenberg, natch) comprises 80% of the vote, our 20% could decide which hard-working and interesting band will be granted the support that enables them to give the fewest blowjobs possible on the hairy boner-strewn road to success. To the undecided, might I suggest you direct your vote to Scorched-Earth Policy, whose deceptively tasty “Dropping Names” hints at the riffage and the prettiness of Ozzy’s Black Sabbath? Now, this band might get signed anyway. But give them your vote if not for their well-punctuated name, then in hope that once they win, their new team of hard-ass metal consultants will advise them to de-Layne-ify their singer. Vote vote vote!

-ADF

Listen to and vote for Scorched-Earth Policy here. You can also visit them on MySpace.

Check out this time-lapse video of artist Esao Andrews painting the cover of Circa Survive’s forthcoming album Blue Sky Noise. My missive against the relevance of album art be damned, this is pretty fucking cool. Many of you will immediately write this band off because of the way their vocalist sounds, and many of you will will (rightly) declare they aren’t metal… but hey, fuck you, it’s my website!

Blue Sky Noise comes out on 4/20. You can catch Circa Survive on tour with Coheed & Cambria and Torche this Spring.

-VN

We know we’ve said this before, but two things:

1. If you e-mail us about some band you want us to listen to, INCLUDE A LINK TO SOMEPLACE WE CAN HEAR THE BAND. Yes, we know we could just Google that shit, but we don’t think you understand how many fucking e-mails we get from you guys about bands you want us to cover. We’re happy to give them all a listen, but if there’s no link, we’re not even gonna bother, ’cause we have a hundred other reader suggestions to get through.
2. If you e-mail us about some story or band you want us to cover, go over to that little “search” tab on your right and MAKE SURE WE HAVEN’T ALREADY WRITTEN ABOUT IT. In the past twenty-four hours we’ve gotten literally dozens of e-mails asking why we haven’t written about curling and Juggalo news, when we already have (and that’s just shit we covered this week). We don’t expect you to necessarily read the site every day (although we love it when you do), but holy crap, people, that’s only all the more reason to do a quick search.

Yes, we know we’re ungrateful assholes. The things you love about us are also the things you hate about us. Oh well.

-Axl & Vince

I’ve been looking for some reason – any reason – to write about Eparistera Daimones, the debut album from Tom G. Warrior’s new project, Triptykon. It’s been in constant rotation here at the Axl Annex ever since we received it a couple of weeks ago. This album RULES. Yesterday Cosmo Lee praised it for sounding “MASSIVE” and being a logical continuation of Celtic Frost’s Monotheist,” but I actually think it’s superior to Monotheist – it’s that fucking good.

The band has steadily been releasing some teaser videos, which are pretty lame and, unfortunately, don’t even hint at what a great record they’ve made. But the album’s March 23 release date (via Century Media) is closer than you think (it’s almost March already!!!), and I fear if I don’t post this, I’ll never have an excuse to tell you all to seek this bad boy out.

So don’t judge Eparistera Daimones by this video. Just trust me and get it when it comes out in a few weeks.

-AR

Ask almost anyone in the last ten years, and they’ll make a case of how the album is dead. Starting with Napster and moving up to our current state — where music purchased legally or illegally is generally cherrypicked instead of being taken as a part of a greater whole — the album been significantly devalued to the point where, to most, it’s just a hodgepodge of files with some cover art. But this doesn’t mean the form itself — a collection of songs strewn together by, at the very least, a collective mood if not an overall theme — is necessarily a thing of the past. When given an record to review, I still view it as an album: does it have a good flow, do the songs belong together, do I get bored by the end of it or does it just stop to leave the listener underwhelmed? If you’re going to put out a CD, it should still be able to provide an overall experience without having to break down how good each individual song was one-by-one. If that’s the sort of thing you’re looking for, you most likely shouldn’t be reading album reviews, but instruction manuals, Cliffs Notes, or… well, user reviews on Encyclopedia Metallum.

All that being said, I don’t think a proper perspective of how The Breathing Process’ latest album, Odyssey (un)Dead, goes from promising blackened death metal excursion to sub-Bleeding Through gothic metalcore shitshow can be properly expressed in any way other than semi-chronologically. Like a good album, yes, it provides a journey; unlike a good album, it’s not, as a whole, remotely any good.

Click to read more…

Okay, so “A Trash Bag with Tits” isn’t actually the name of this band – they are really just a she, and she calls herself Mary Magdalan, although that’s obviously not her real name, and it’s not even how you spell “Mary Magdalene,” so right off the bat I don’t know what the crap she was thinking.

But after MS Maniac You Don’t Know Me sent us this video, I thought “Even though all or most MS readers will probably be able to agree that this music is terrible, I bet some idiot is gonna leave a comment along the lines of ‘I’d still stick it in her,’” for the simple reason that she shows a lot of cleavage. And here’s the thing: i) cleavage isn’t hard to come by so it’s not a good enough reason alone to sleep with someone (not saying I don’t love cleavage, just sayin’, y’know, there are other things in life), ii) hopefully every once in awhile when choosing your sexual partners you take things like personality into account, and I have a hard time believing that anyone who thinks this is good music has a personality that would mesh with my own, and iii) the whole runny make-up/”I look like I probably have hepatitis” thing just doesn’t really do it for me. If you’d sleep with this girl, I think you’d probably sleep with a bag full of trash, so long as it had tits on it. Or, worse, Courtney Love. Thus, my headline.

Anyways, this sucks. And I looked this twit up on MySpace – her DJ (a fucking DJ in 2010!!!) calls himself “Gzus” and her guitar player calls himself “Jizm,” so clearly we’re dealing with a trio of rocket scientists. If they can create a time machine – and I don’t see any reason why they can’t, given their clearly MENSA-level IQs – they should have a great career opening for (Hed) p.e. in 1997. This is a Sicks Deep level of bad.

-AR

Remember last year when the geniuses at Metal Injection discovered that Google is surprisingly well-educated about metal? Well, they’ve now discovered that Yahoo! Answers has a thing or two to say about a thing or two, too:

Even though this is pretty funny, let’s try to keep the homophobic remarks in our comments section to a minimum, okay kids?

-AR

Ihsahn’s amazing record After is easily the album I’ve listened to most in 2010, but one that’s giving it a run for its money is Shining‘s Blackjazz. The Norwegian band has no relation to the Swedish black metal outfit of the same name, but interestingly they do have a relation to Ihsahn. Shining’s vocalist, guitarist and saxaphonist Munkeby lends his sax skills to Ihsahn’s After, one of the many subtle twists that makes that album such a great listen.

Shining just released a video for the track “The Madness And The Damage Done.” It’s one of the more straight forward tracks on Blackjazz but it’s still pretty fuckin’ out there, and even though the video is a pretty standard live performance clip I’m enjoying seeing for the first time how the band performs and looks. Blackjazz is out now on Indie Recordings in Europe and The End Records in the U.S.

-VN

“I’m On a Boat” by Lonely Island (a.k.a. Saturday Night Live‘s Andy Samberg and some dudes who aren’t Saturday Night Live‘s Andy Samberg) works as satire for the following reasons: a) it’s an incredibly catchy and accurate-sounding facsimile of the very rap songs it parodies, and b) its lyrics literalize the visuals of the music videos for said rap songs, which are concerned primarily with the topic of “bling.” (I’m white… can you tell?) Depending on which particular subgenre you wanted to poke fun at, the metal version of this might be “I’m in a Fireworks Factory” (glam metal), “I’m in the Woods” (pagan or black metal), or “I’m in a Warehouse”* (pretty much everything else).

The dudes in Goatmill, who made the below death metal cover of “I’m on a Boat” (which I originally saw on The Deciblog), clearly have no grasp of why the song was ever funny in the first place. They think it’s funny just to take someone else’s funny song and make it metal. But they’ve robbed the satire of its context, so, really, their version of the song just ends up being stupid and bad.

And if you’re last person on the face of the earth who isn’t familiar with Lonely Island’s original, you can check it out after the jump.

Click to read more…

Demon Hunter are a Christian band, so when I heard that their new song is called “Driving Nails,” I assumed it was about… y’know. And while the lyrics are certainly spiritual-ish (“I was the light/I was the quiet heart”), the chorus leads me to believe the song is not actually about Christ – at least, not in any literal sense: vocalist Ryan Clark sings “It’s driving nails into my soul,” and as the Bible tells us, nails were driven into much more than just Jesus’ soul.

ANYWAY, you can listen to the song here. It’s terrible, which should come as no surprise, because it’s a Demon Hunter song, and the nicest thing you can really say about Demon Hunter is that the Clark Brothers (one of whom, Don, is no longer in the band) are talented graphic artists. But what is up with the effect they laid over Ryan Clark’s vocals? Was that an aesthetic choice, or is he just that terrible a singer that they needed to mask his pipes? It sounds like Gary Suarez on the Invisible Oranges Crustcast.

“Driving Nails” will be on DH’s new album, The World is a Thorn, which comes out March 9 on Solid State.

-AR

This July will mark the twentieth anniversary of the release of Pantera’s Cowboys from Hell, and while I know that some of our readers who either a) weren’t born yet when the record came out or b) were in diapers when the record came out don’t “get” what the big deal is about Pantera, I’m hoping that their youthful arrogance will give way to some appreciation of history – which is to say that just because you’ve heard ten thousand bands that sound like Pantera doesn’t mean that Pantera didn’t do it first, and do it best. Remember that dude who told the Alternative Press “fuck Black Sabbath” and claimed they had no influence on his band? Remember what band that dude was in? Atreyu. You don’t wanna grow up to be a member of Atreyu, do you?

So. Pantera have an assload of reissues coming out. Details are still kinda scarce, but here’s what we know right now:

Click to read more…

We’re moving servers tonight. All this really means for you is that starting at 10pm EST all comments will be turned off. Comments will come back online at some point during the early morning hours.

While we’re on the subject of site functionality, notice how that refreshing problem went away? Big ups to MS reader Jon Thornton for identifying and fixing the problem which, as many of you suggested, was being caused by the Facebook Connect plugin.

See you on the other side.

Congrats to Jackson May and Sophie Holman. They each correctly identified last week’s logo as belonging to the band Paracoccidioidomicosisproctitissarcomucosis, and they each win a vinyl copy of Sigh’s Scenes from Hell for their troubles. Congratulations, kids! It’s an awesome record and we’re sure you’re gonna enjoy it.

This week we have another very special prize from the fine folks at The End Records: three, count ‘em three, autographed 7-inches from Goes Cube. There were only 500 of these bad boys pressed, and they contain the songs “Property” and “The Ban Has Been Lifted.” This is a really talented band and a really special prize, so get crackin’!

All you have to do to win is identify the name of the band whose logo appears below, then shoot me an e-mail at axl AT metalsucks DOT net with your answer, your name, and your address. From everyone who gets it right, we’ll randomly select three winners and announce his or her names next week.

This week’s logo was suggested to us by reader Tom Kelly…

-AR

Good day all,

This evening, a new episode of L O S T awaits with intentions of confusing, bamboozling, and casting us further down the six-season-vortex-of-mystery we have known for too long. Mid-season theorizing tends to be laborious in that the writers’ method for answering one question is to pose several more, which as a result leads to an overwhelming amount of hazy supposition on all forms of LOST sites. If any of you check out DarkUFO, The Fuselage , 4815162342, or even LOSTPEDIA, I’m certain you’ve noticed how gnarly it is to navigate through and read any concise analysis of what’s going on. The good news, though, is that the seemingly eternal-end-in-sight is right around the corner, and gauging from a lot of the ideas being shared here, I think we’re heading down the right path!

Click to read more…

In case ya forgot: Metal Insider’s Dan Rodriguez and myself will be at live blogging from Andrew W.K.’s public Q&A session at Santos Party House here in NYC tonight. This despite the fact that I’m still sick and it’s pouring fucking rain outside! The sacrifices I make for you, oh beloved readers!

The fun starts tonight at 7 pm EST. You can read all our coverage and witticisms here. Be there or be square.

-AR

Although the editors of MetalSucks get a vote in he Scion No Label Needed Contest, the staff of MetalSucks, alas, does not. Thus, over the course of the next few days, each MetalSucks writer will post an endorsement for his favorite finalist for the contest. You can check out all the finalists, and vote for your personal favorite, here.

Sure, the requisite 80s thrash, jagged-logo-concept-thing might not sell Hammerlord’s 2008 self-titled debut alone, but their music should. And while these cats might have spent time with the likes of The Esoteric and The Blinding Light, among others, the band’s moniker comes from drummer Adam Mitchell’s handle during his time with The Esoteric. Plus, Scott Hull found it metal enough to man the knobs for the debut, so they must have been doing something right, right?

Click to read more…

I have a hard time believing that Johnny Depp is a metalhead, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know right from wrong. And apparently he’s going to be on the CBS program 48 Hours Mystery this Saturday night, speaking out in defense of the West Memphis Three:

If you don’t know who the West Memphis Three are or how it relates to metal… well, you probably shouldn’t be reading this website.

Anyways, good to know Depp might not be a total d-bag the way so may Hollywood stars are.

48 Hours Mystery airs this Saturday, February 27 at 10 p.m. ET/PT. I’ll try to remember to DVR it so we have something to talk about on Monday.

-AR

As a staunch proponent of physical product even 2-3 years ago I would covet CDs for their tangibility, album artwork, and superior sound quality. Now I just view them as a nuisance, items that take up space when there is a more efficient and convenient option available.

But I really don’t wish this to be a debate about the merits of physical product. The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley already covered that. What I’m specifically concerned with here is how modern metal fans value album artwork, a subject which is inextricably tied to the aforementioned debate but can stand somewhat on its own.

When it comes to album artwork I’m kind of over it too. I definitely enjoy cool album covers and associating visuals with bands, but I feel like these days those visual needs are better served by carefully curating an artist’s appearance via their website, MySpace page, merch, posters and their general aesthetic. These mediums are WAY more expressive than a single image on a sleeve anyway, and in the context of digital music the meaning of the word “cover” — something which serves as the face of and protects from damage what’s inside — is rendered meaningless. The concept of an album cover seems kind of quaint in the Internet age; a cover used to serve as something cool to grab your eye on the record shelves in the store, but it definitely doesn’t serve that purpose anymore. Today we have more efficient recommendation tools that hone in on what a band sounds like much more accurately and efficiently than a drawing or photo, and we easily and instantly look up lyrics, album credits and other information online — more than we ever could’ve crammed into an album sleeve.

Again, I want to stress that I’m not anti-visual or anti-art… I’m just saying that the idea of  an album cover and album artwork is outdated.

What do you guys think? And because this argument is surely (at least to some degree) tied to the way in which you were brought up, please also tell us your age.