Walking into the Trocadero February 3rd for the “The Economy Sucks, Let’s Party” tour made me feel like a 12 year old all over again. This tour included Anti-Flag, Aiden,  Cancer Bats, and Star Fucking Hipsters. There were youngins in the bathroom with technicolor hair sneaking cigarettes, kids with sky-high mohawks and Bad Religion shirts, couples who didn’t look old enough to know what sex is rockin’ back and forth holding each other. Barf.

The only band I’m going to talk about is Cancer Bats, who were definitely the highlight, and only highlight, of this tour line up. Heavy drums, lots of wah-wah and pinch harmonics, and unbelievable stage presence. They didn’t really seem to fit the bill, but their upcoming Canadian tour with Billy Talent, Alexisonfire, and Against Me! may be a better fit. The crowd loved the Beastie Boys cover (“Sabotage”), and closing their set with “Hail Destroyer” left a good taste in the pop-punk loving audience’s mouths. Don’t even get me started about the girls Star Fucking Hipsters snuck in who were bragging about using the tragedy in Haiti to not pay for the show, or the pentagram banners Aiden used as part of their stage set up…

Enjoy some images of the CB kids. Sorry there aren’t any images of the drummer!

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Thanks to longtime MS supporter and Mister Booze proprietor Hibernum for this shocking discovery. Have you ever seen Marty Friedman and Kenny G together? I think not. As further evidence, Hibernum posits that some of Friedman’s solo material is suspiciously Kenny G-ish. Not sure if I really hear it but I suppose there’s a case to be made there.

-VN

Hardcore, once a vibrant and often violent mouthpiece for socio-political and econo-cultural outrage, has become endearingly nostalgic for the bad ol’ days, where suffering and disenchantment birthed a sound and an unlikely community. Some revisionists–including those who were there, oddly enough–romanticize the 1980s, though warts-and-all accounts like Steven Blush’s American Hardcore: A Tribal History and Henry Rollins’ stark road diaries serve as reminders of the struggle and duress that bands had to operate under. How nice it must be now for groups like Agnostic Front and Killing Time to perform in the 21st century, relatively free from the heavy hand of law enforcement, accommodated by legitimate venues, and adored by people who were hardly born when they produced their unassailable classics. And yet, it must be downright bizarre to play protest songs in ever-gentrifying, hipster-ized Brooklyn. Still, after spending two nights under the dizzying influence of NYHC, such points seem almost irrelevant. Almost.

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Axl and I have seen Ozzy a bunch of times together, but with Zakk Wylde’s departure dismissal from the band last year the chances that we’ll ever see the Ozzman perform “No More Tears” — the most epic of all Ozzy songs — live in its entirety are dwindling. Not that Ozzy shows are that exciting these days anyway unless you consider a hobbled frog stomp, a fire house and reading from a teleprompter “exciting,” but that time Ozzy played the 2nd stage at Ozzfest in New York was really, really fucking cool.

Not that we think Zakk’s dismissal was a bad thing. I think we both agree that Ozzy badly needed some fresh songwriting and guitar blood. But two dudes who listened to No More Tears ad nauseam in their adolescence (and fuck it, still do) can dream, can’t they?

Thanks to Noisecreep for posting this 2002 live video of “No More Tears” at the Budokan in Japan that I didn’t even know existed. It’s way better than that nearly unwatchable version filmed in the early/mid ’90s that has camera cuts so fast they make me fucking dizzy.

-VN

Italian horror-inspired extreme metal act Stigma’s sophomore album, Concerto for the Undead, doesn’t come out until the spring, but Uncle Axl and Uncle Vince have an early taste for you right now: the exclusive debut of the album’s first single, “Prove You Are a Man!” If you don’t know Stigma, well, here’s your chance to learn a little sumpin’ sumpin: they’re kinda like The Black Dahlia Murder, with a somewhat proggier edge. That sounds pretty cool, right? Right. So click “play” and give it a whirl. Bonus: guest vocals by Dead to Fall’s Jon Hunt!

Concerto for the Undead comes out in the U.S. on May 4 on Pivotal Rockordings. You can pre-order the album and get all the latest Stigma updates on their MySpace page.

[this promotion has ended]

Alcest’s new album, Écailles De Lune so relaxing to listen to… it’s like an aural tongue massage. Even when there’s screaming, it’s, like, the most mellow screaming ever. In fact, I’m making a MetalSucks Mansion Monkey rub my shoulders while we crank it right now. He offered to add the tongue massage part, but even I have standards.

ANYWAY, I’ve never seen Alcest live before, but I’ll get my chance in the spring, when they come to North America for a string of dates. I expect it to be the most chill show I attend all year. There’s also gonna be a string of various excellent bands playing support: Velnias, Liturgy, Clad In Darkness, Woe, Monarque, and Have A Nice Life

Dates after le saut:

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In case Justina Villanueva’s “Five Facts About Fuck The Facts’ Unnamed EP” wasn’t enough to make you wanna buy the band’s new seven-inch EP, now you can actually listen to it and see for yourself that it’s worth the price: the band is streaming the entire thing here. As Cosmo Lee pointed out last week, Unnamed is the very definition of “DIY” – “Vocalist Mel Mongeon designed the artwork, guitarist Topon Das recorded most of the instruments in his home studio, and the rest of the band pitched in with hand-cutting, hand-numbering, folding, and assembling the final product.” (Photos here.) How awesome is that? It doesn’t hurt that the music will rip you a new one, either.

So go listen to the album and then order yourself a copy. It’s all of six bucks. Seriously, don’t be a cheap skate.

And hopefully I’ll have a proper review up this week.

-AR

I’m not sure what the consensus is on track-by-track reviews of albums these days, but given that Roadrunner’s God of War: Blood and Metal EP – a soundtrack to the latest installment of the popular video game – features six songs by six different artists, it seems only fair to give each song its due, rather than consider the release as a cohesive whole. And so, without further bullshit:

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Anyone watch the gold medal Olympic hockey game yesterday? Holy shit. Hockey is just so fucking metal, even with the Olympic-imposed fight ban. What a great game that was… tensions and emotions were so high! It’s crazy to think that this week Americans and Canadians will have to go back to playing on the same teams again after two weeks of blind patriotism and ire for one another and their countries.

Our sisters from another mistress at Reign in Blonde are all over the finer side of the Winter Olympics, offering the whole back-story of Russian figure skater Evgeni Plushenko who’s apparently extremely butt-hurt over his loss to an American. That’s amusing and all, but not as amusing as this video the RiB girls posted of some clever digital effects editor’s take on his routine… to Metallica’s “Battery”… with a battle-axe. Epic.

-VN

Hey, tech heads! Our bro-bros at Metal Injection actually put down the bong long enough to get on a plane go to LA (where they picked up another bong, but whatever) to cover NAMM last month. They came back with a HOUR LONG special, which, if I’m not mistaken, makes this easily their most in-depth project yet. It includes interviews not only with a ton of music gear peeps, but also some cool artists as well. Check out part one below; you can watch the other three parts here. You can also download the whole schebang as a single higher-res file on iTunes.

-AR

Between his suicide-inducingly awful rape of “Paradise City,” his unveiling of the best cover art of 1988, and his general campaign to embarrass himself in public, I’d pretty much assumed that Slash’s new, self-titled solo album was going to be about as enjoyable as life as one of Axl Rose’s shirts. But on Friday Slash released not one, but two songs – one the first single for said solo album, the other a benefit track for Haiti – both of which, to my complete and total amazement, are really quite good.

We’ve actually heard a kinda lackluster live version of the album single, “By the Sword,” which features vocals by Wolfmother’s Andrew Stockdale. I tend to come from the Mike Patton school of thinking with regards to Wolfmother, but for whatever reason, Stockdale’s Robert Plant impersonation doesn’t bother me one bit here – in fact, I really like his performance, even if the lyrics are pretty dumb (Sample: “With the horses that you ride/And the feelings left inside/Comes a time you need leave all that behind.” Leave what behind? The horses? The feelings? The horses and the feelings? ‘Cause I think a man could reasonably part with one or the other, but BOTH? P’shaw!). But the riff is so catchy that it’s been stuck in my head for most of the weekend, and the guitar solo is epic, bluesy, classic Slash, the kind of thing that reminds me why I had this dude’s poster on my wall when I was an adolescent:

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I’ve always loved acoustic interpretations of music that isn’t necessarily meant to be played acoustically. Alice in Chains’ Unplugged record, which incidentally chronicled Layne Staley’s last live appearance with the band, is undoubtedly one of my Desert Island Top 5 albums. I love it more than any one Alice in Chains album, and not just because it’s got a great mix of songs from all of them; there’s just something about the instrumentation and the performance that’s absolutely captivating.

While MS reader Ben Watson didn’t go so far as to say that Devin Townsend’s acoustic performance in Redmon, WA on Saturday was Desert Island-worthy but he did seem to have a great time at the gig. Ben tells us that Devin played a bunch of songs from Ki in between fits of guitar noodling, and that he debuted a bunch of new songs that “had tentative lyrics and titles that he ‘bumbled’ through.”

Here’s footage Ben captured of the new song “Radial Highway,” which Devin [accurately, in my opinion] proclaims “sounds a lot like Trainfire.” Devin shows off some tasty slide guitar licks then flubs a section, and he definitely appears to be “bumbling” through the lyrics… but it’s all good. Hopefully we’ll hear this song in its fully realize glory on either Deconstruction or Ghost, the forthcoming 3rd and 4th albums in the Devin Townsend Project suite.

You can watch most of Devin’s acoustic performance here (skip to the 01:12:00 mark) and here.

-VN