Many of you expressed a deep satisfaction last week when I goofed and [accurately] proclaimed Demon Hunter’s “Collapsing” a Figure Number Five-era Soilwork ripoff, not realizing that Bjorn “Speed” Strid actually made a guest appearance in the song. Oops! Congratulations folks, you really pwned me on that one. But hey, guess what? You still like Demon Hunter and therefore fail at metal. QED.

Here’s the video for “Rejection Role,” the opening track on said Soilwork album. This video is particularly appropriate because it features a guest appearance by Soilwork’s own forebears in In Flames. The difference is that this song doesn’t suck.

Soilwork are working on their new album The Panic Broadcast right now… as in probably right this very minute. They’ve been posting updates over at The Deciblog, including this nugget from Speed in the most recent entry: “… we really feel that it’s a schizophrenic masterpiece. There’s a lot of surprises and trippy parts and sometimes so full-on that it leaves you absolutely breathless. It is the most intense Soilwork album so far, without a doubt.” That quote gets me more excited for the new album than watching bassist Ola Flink do his goofy stage moves… and those get me really excited!

-VN

At first when I saw the new BMFV cover art, for their upcoming release Fever, I was like “Sweet! A naked lady! I like naked ladies.” But then I realized the chick had a claw:

Now, I love lobster and crab, but I wouldn’t wanna fuck one, y’know? I’m sure this supposed to have some symbolic meaning about women, but I can’t imagine even a thirteen year old finding it profound…

Fever comes out April 27 on Jive/Zomba.

-AR

Congrats to Ziltoid and Grover XIII for entering the blogger world. Check out their new blog, The Number of the Blog!  It takes balls to work on something and put it out there for people (the world) to ingest. I’m sure they will get a good following. The Internet is such a specific place so a different perspective goes a long way. If there is humor involved, even better!

Your success is dependent on you and no one else. There are people out there who believe you need to fail for them to succeed. That’s bullshit. There’s room for everyone to step up. Get out there and do what Ziltoid and Grover XIII did. Start something. Congratulations again guys. I’ll check it out as much as I can.

Let’s get your band closer to the success you want, need and deserve. There are so many tools at your disposal to get your band noticed. Networking, playing shows, making merchandise, recording albums, making webisodes, etc. But one of the most important aspects of moving forward in music is one of the most overlooked.

Positive thinking. Yeah, I said it. On the big, bad metal blog. Sue me.

Click to read more…

Though Clint Lowery rejoined Sevendust two years ago, the group’s new album Cold Day Memory — out April 20th — will be the first Sevendust record to feature his writing contributions since 2004′s Butch Walker-produced affair Seasons. Most folks agree that the last three Lowery-less Sevendust records seemed to be missing something, an idea that Lowery acknowledges in our brief chat, but Lowery couldn’t be happier to be back writing new music with his brothers again.

I recently called up Clint to talk about the new album, the writing process, any pressure that he may be feeling now that he’s back in the band, what’s changed since the last time, and what he and the band were trying to accomplish with the new record.

Our chat, after the jump.

Click to read more…

When I posted live footage of a new Trap Them song, “Degenerate Binds,” last week, the reaction in the comments section was pretty much what I expected: you folks think that Trap Them r00lz, and I’m a fool for not seeing what the big deal is.

Well, I’ll have another chance to get hip soon, as the band are prepping the release of a new twelve-inch EP, Filth Rations, and are now streaming another new song from that record, “Carnage Incarnate.”

And, uh, as of right now, I’m still not sure that I “get it.” But I want to! So I plan to give this new song a lot of listens, and hopefully sooner or later I’ll have that eureka moment where I realize what an idiot I’ve been with regards to Trap Them. Either that, or you can all just continue to tell me what an idiot I’ve been in the comments.

Filth Rations will be out on Southern Lord sometime real soon. In the meantime, check out “Carnage Incarnate” here.

-AR

The video for High on Fire’s “Frost Hammer,” from their windpipe-smashingly good new album Snakes for the Divine, has been released! And it’s a pretty perfect representation of the song. It’s totally metal, kinda meat n’ taters but kinda not, completely lacking in pretension, and totally nerdy and ridiculous. Gotta love it.

Snakes for the Divine is out now on E1. If you don’t own it, you’re a chump.

-AR

The MetalSucks co-sponsored Full Metal Texas 2010 just keeps getting better and better! Last week Animals as Leaders were added to the bill that already includes such illustrious acts as Darkest Hour, Fair to Midland, Iwrestledabearonce and Born of Osiris; now it has been announced that Israel’s Orphaned Land will be playing the show, too! And Axl just saw them kick-ass the other night. Good deal!

This completely FREE all-day show will take place at Emo’s in Austin, Texas, on Thursday, March 18. Set times for all the bands have been announced, and you can view those after the jump, so as to ensure that you don’t miss anybody you really wanna see. (And there’s a slot open for a “special guest.” Hmm… wonder who that could be?) PLUS, the first 666 Heinekens are FREE, so you’ll wanna get there early.

You can RSVP for the show here – doing so will make you eligible for VIP drink specials at the show, and will enter you into a contest from Eagle Rock Entertainment, who will be previewing two new Classic Album DVDs from Black Sabbath and Rush and are giving away a Blu-Ray player, a bunch of DVDs, and some other cool swag. You can also follow Full Metal Texas on Twitter for all the latest updates.

And here are the set times…

Click to read more…

We’ve been telling you how stoked we are for Son of Aurelius’ new album, The Farthest Reaches, for awhile now, and guess what? It not only has an April 13 release date via the newly-formed Good Fight Entertainment, it’s now available for pre-order, too! This record is eleven songs of proggy tech awesomeness that should make any fan of bands ranging from The Faceless to The Black Dahlia Murder jizz their pants with delight. You can even purchase a bundle that comes with a sweet t-shirt, too! Go here to order.

To celebrate this impending release, MetalSucks is teaming up with Good Fight Entertainment to give away three (3) autographed copies of the album. Here’s how you can win:

1. Take a picture of yourself making your most metal face (if you don’t know what a “metal face” is, congratulations, you’re disqualified from the contest and probably should not even be reading this website).
2. Post a link to someplace we can view that photo in the comments section below. Make sure you register for the comments section with a valid e-mail address, as the winners will be contacted by e-mail.
3. You must live in the U.S. to win. What do you think, that shipping money grows on trees?

And that’s it! Axl and Vince will choose the three most metal faces, and the owners of those faces will now be the owners of autographed copies of The Farthest Reaches, too.

Good luck! And don’t forget to check out Son of Aurelius on MySpace, while you’re at it!

-AR

A few years ago I made a promise to a friend that if and when The Deftones come through NYC we’d go to the show so he can crowd-surf for the very first time. My friend isn’t a metalhead but grew up in Sacramento and has all sorts of love for The Deftones. But since I made that promise The Deftones haven’t done a whole lot of touring for obvious reasons.

Watching The Deftones’ new video for “Rocket Skates” — the track the band released as a free download a couple of weeks back — mostly just makes me really excited to bring my friend to a Deftones show and let him experience what a real moshpit is all about. And don’t fool yourselves, people: the moshpit at a Deftones show is way rougher than most of the kvlt/tr00/br00tal bands you’re all surely thinking of while declaring The Deftones aren’t metal.

Side note: is Chino looking quite svelte these days or what?

Check out a track-by-track review of Diamond Eyes over at Metal Hammer. The album comes out May 17th.

-VN

Video of Orphaned Land in Times Square Monday night courtesy lindersgirl, whomever she is.

The thing about Times Square is, it’s a total dichotomy of a mind fuck. It has absolutely nothing to do with what New York City is really like, but it’s one of the most recognizable and visited areas in NYC; great art is produced there every day, right across the street from cynical garbage cash-grabs; it has some really amazing restaurants, all right down the block from a Forest Gump themed eatery, Applebee’s, and the world’s most obnoxious McDonald’s.

Perhaps no venue better exemplifies this neighborhood’s tension between worthy endeavors and soul-sucking wastes of space than BB King’s. It’s named after one of history’s most revered guitar players, it’s clean, ticket prices tend to be reasonable (all things considered), and they host an abundance of metal shows, when they’re not busy with Beatles Brunch (yes that’s a real thing and yes a cover band in mop-top wigs is involved) or whatever. They also feature the city’s most dickish security staff (no moshing allowed), beer so expensive that even the bartenders will readily admit that the prices are stupid, and an incredible inability to produce decent sound for a place that is allegedly a music venue.

And somehow, it’s fitting that this is where I saw the Israelis in Orphaned Land and the Germans in Suidakra play Monday night.

Click to read more…

Landmine Marathon are back! Following up on 2008′s vicious face-ripper, Rusted Eyes Awake, the band will release their Prosthetic Records debut, Sovereign Descent, on March 16. But you can stream the entire album right now, only here at MetalSucks. It’s more epic, brutal goodness from one of metal’s strongest up and coming bands, so make sure you check it out!

And to help celebrate this event, Prosthetic Records is offering you, oh beloved MetalSucks readers, 10% off any purchase from their webshop! This is an incredible deal that you need to take advantage of; Prosthetic is home to many excellent bands besides Landmine Maratho, including Skeletonwitch, Through the Eyes of the Dead, The Acacia Strain, Animals as Leaders, and more. They also have have a distro section, so you can buy non-Prosthetic artists, too. What are you waiting for? Take advantage now. Make sure to enter the code “Landmine” to get the discount.

And now, without further adieu, Landmine Marathon’s Sovereign Descent…

[this promotion has ended]

I suppose I distrust supergroups because it’s too easy. Throw a bunch of dudes in bands people like together and it should instantly equal something people like/something people will throw money down to hear. And while there are exceptions (Them Crooked Vultures, Shrinebuilder, Cream) to the eating-up-downtime/cash grab rule, it’s more often than not the standard (see: Damn Yankees, Chickenfoot, a library’s worth of other names). But occasionally bands fall right in the middle, where they’re not in it for breaking new ground but also aren’t in it to exploit listeners to get a new yacht (or a first yacht). And along with that comes a sense of nothing-to-lose, in that the bandmembers will have their more-successful day jobs when the project ends, so why not have a good time in the meanwhile? And this is the case for black metal dream team Ov Hell, which includes members of some of the most important bands in Norway. Jagged yet refined and mean but kind of fun, Ov Hell manage to sound pretty decent on their debut, The Underworld Regime. Not quite a classic but certainly more than a distraction, Ov Hell are some of black metal’s most essential dudes flexing their frostbitten muscle, and that’s certainly never a bad thing to hear.

Click to read more…

I bought a six DVD set once. It was called Miso Horny, it cost ten dollars, and it literally took me weeks to watch the entire thing, ’cause, well, it’s hard to get through that much content when you’re only watching in fifteen-second increments. I certainly got a lotta bang for my buck, though!

Speaking of bang for your buck: Horse the Band are releasing a six DVD/photo book set from their Earth Tour. Even though I should be able to watch it for slightly longer periods of time than I was the aforementioned yellow fever collection, I still anticipate it taking months and months to get through the whole thing, which will apparently be fifteen hours long. I mean, it took me a week to watch that entire Cannibal Corpse DVD, and that was only three discs! Six discs is so overwhelming!

Still, I bet it’ll be worth it. The “Horse the Blog” bits that HTB keyboardist Lord Gold did for us are some of the most bestest ever to run on MetalSucks, if you ask me. If these DVDs are even half as entertaining, they should be well worth however much time it takes to get through them all.

There’s no release date on this puppy yet, but we’ll let you know when there is. In the meantime, you can read more details here.

-AR

Speaking of our old pal Dale “Rage” Resteghini, here’s the new Nonpoint video he directed, for the song “Miracle.” It’s a real keeper. See, instead of trying to do anything that might make thematic sense for the song, the video mostly just concentrates on female MMA fighters beating each other. And by “beating each other,” I mean “punching right into the camera as though said camera were their opponent,” which is a totally unique cinematic device that I have never ever seen before.

If you were just trying to use sex to sell the band and were gonna load your video down with old clichés, why not just do a lingerie pillow fight, or maybe some good old fashioned mud wrestling? The cat fight in “Don’t Cry” by Rage’s new friend Axl Rose was sexier than this.

If you wanna watch, I’d mute the sound and play that new Dillinger song instead, ’cause at least then the music won’t make you wish some broad would punch you in the head.

-AR

If the you young ‘uns don’t know Stryper, well, they were like the Underoath or Demon Hunter of their day. Which is to say, they played Christian metal. Their songs had names like “To Hell with the Devil,” and “Calling On You,” and for their 1985 album, they even covered “Battle Hymn of the Republic (Glory, Glory, Hallelujah),” which may still be the single lamest metal cover of a non-metal song ever, which is really saying something.

Now the band is working on a covers album, which will include their take on songs by the homos in Judas Priest, the blasphemous, drug addled guys in Black Sabbath, and the Jews in Kiss.

I don’t really have much else to say about this… it just made me laugh. Fingers crossed that they add a song by Slayer or Mayhem to the mix…

-AR

SMNnews.com linked to a really cool interview on Ryan’s Rock Show the other day with original System of a Down drummer and Apex Theory frontman Andy Khachaturian. Andy played drums for System for 4 years before a hand injury forced his exit from the band on the eve of their breakthrough, but Andy persevered by taking matters into his own hands (ha) and starting Apex Theory, who eventually signed with DreamWorks.

I remember really liking Apex Theory’s debut full-length Topsy-Turvy when it came out in 2002 but I haven’t listened to it since. Going on YouTube to find a video to post with this piece and watching through “Shhh… (Hope Diggy)” and “Apossibly” (above) it’s obvious looking back that Apex Theory were very much a product of their era with some questionable fashion, production techniques and, uh, semi-rapping… but the musical foundation of a good band is definitely there and their talent is still miles above what many of their major label peers were hawking at the time. I’ma have to go back, dig this album up and give it a solid listen.

Anyway, the Ryan’s Rock Show interview is really interesting. Khachaturian talks about his time in System of a Down, starting Apex Theory, that band’s eventual break-up, how business pressures can ruin young bands and what he’s up to musically these days.

-VN

You all know Dale “Rage” Resteghini, right? He’s the music video director who somehow ended up managing and helping to sign Straight Line Stitch; then, when Vince wrote something negative about the band and MS readers chimed in to agree that they do, indeed, suck the big one, Rage actually started leaving comments here defending the band. Here’s a sample:

“I have been in ‘metal’ most of my entire life as a fan and professionally as a video director of over 250 videos…so I do have the cred, the respect, the understanding and a whole lotta ‘other stuff’ that makes my opinion the one that trumps all of yours.”

It’s good to know that he’s been into this kind of music for “most of his entire life” and not just most of most of his life, but I don’t know why the word “metal” is in quotes like that; did he used to be into Poison or something, and feels the need to let us know it wasn’t really metal? Whatever, not important. I shouldn’t question him. He has the cred and the respect and the “other stuff” that makes his opinion the one that trumps all of ours. Anyway, here’s another pearl of wisdom:

“Metal Edge and EAT a substantial Japanese music rag are interviewing the band for coverage…the buzz and support o this band is amazing so no matter how many rehashed hate blogs some of you want to throw into the mx…it just doesn’t matter as you can see and you will continue to see and hear throughout this band’s career!!!”

Well, I sure am glad that they’ve got Metal Edge on their side. I look forward to SLS’ July 20never cover story. But why did they eat a substantial Japanese music rag? Were they not given a per diem for some reason? You don’t think he meant “EAT, a susbtantial Japanese music rag, are interviewing the band for coverage,” do you?

And while we’re asking questions, if it “doesn’t matter” what the people on sites like this one say, then why do you think that this successful, presumably very busy dude was leaving comments on MetalSucks at 9:45 at night and 2:30 in the morning?

Sorry, sorry, I’ll shut up. Rage has the cred and the respect and… y’know. His opinion trumps ours.

Why the hell am I talking about this again?

Oh, right. Rage has been hired by Axl Rose to shoot stills for the band’s upcoming South American. tour, and to direct some videos for Chinese Democracy. So that should go swimmingly.

Click to read more…

Is there really not already a metal song called “Lethal Injection?” I know there’s an Ice Cube album by that title, but I can’t think of any metal tunes by that name. That seems weird, ’cause it’s such an obvious title. Am I forgetting something really obvious?

While I search through my CD collection (’cause I still have a CD collection) to try and figure out if I’m missing something, here’s a bootleg video of “Lethal Injection,” a new Soulfly song, being performed live. Max Cavalera even got Prong’s Tommy Victor to come out and do guest vox, as he apparently does on Soulfly’s new album, Omen. It sounds pretty much like a Soulfly song to me. But props to Cavalera for being the metal d00d who finally laid claim to the song title.

Metal Injection also has a bunch of exclusive studio reports on the making of Omen. You can check those out here. The album comes out May 25 on Roadrunner.

-AR

Hats off to Karina Rucinque. She correctly identified last week’s logo as that of the band Nasty Pig Dick. For her troubles, Karina wins a copy of Arsis’ new album, Starve for the Devil, signed by the band, and an Arsis poster that is also signed by the band. Congrats, Karina!

March is Metal Month continues now with another awesome prize: an autographed copy of Shovel Headed Tour Machine, the excellent new two DVD/CD set from legendary thrashers, Exodus. It’s Exodus! It’s autographed! You want it! Enter the contest!

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 one winner and announce his or her name next week.

This week’s logo was once again suggested by read Isaac Schwarz. You rule, Isaac!

-AR

Virtually every Sayid episode we’ve ever seen has delved into some form of his past and inner gnarliness, so it only makes sense that last week’s “Sundown” blasted us with all sorts of action, violence, and brutality. Viewing the episode for substance, though, we were only handed little nuggets of answers to some very minor questions (Who is Dogen?) in exchange for even more: how was Dogen the only thing keeping Nemesis out? Why couldn’t Nemesis be killed by stabbing when Jacob can/was? How can Nemesis give people “anything they want in the entire world?” These are the freshest of mysteries which I’m fine with keeping on the back burner (for now) to get into the more crucial topic of the timelines.

With the flash-sideways of Sayid’s life, the alternate timeline has remained consistent with the kinda-consistent-to-the-OT-facts direction it has been taking since its introduction at LA-X. In both timelines, Sayid was an interrogator in the Iraqi Republican Guard and holds his love interest Nadia as “the most important thing to him in the world.” The OT inconsistency here is that in the ALT Nadia is unobtainable to him as she is actually the wife of his brother. Here are a few more examples of characters with the standout details of their past as we know it in the OT being similar but slightly different in the ALT:

Click to read more…