I know a bunch of people who seem to think that Black Tusk are the shit. I think they sound exactly like you’d expect any band that’s got a guy with a giant beard and artwork by John Baizley to sound like. And while this certainly isn’t a bad thing, it’s mostly a “meh” thing. Why do we need another band like this? We need it about as much as we need another durka durka chugga deathcore band or weedily weedily tech-death band… which is to say we don’t.

Black Tusk have a new song called “Embrace the Madness” streaming on their MySpace page. It comes from their forthcoming album Taste the Sin — out May 25th — and it sounds exactly like it’s been written by a band that’s got a guy with a giant beard and artwork by John Baizley.

Check out the song and listen for yourselves. Perhaps you can all tell me what I’m missing.

-VN

I don’t know Picture, and after seeing this video I’m fairly confident that I don’t need to know Picture. Still, this clip made me giggle quite a bit. Here’s why:

1. The imagery is incredibly cheesy. You can’t have a shot of a heartbroken dude walking along on the beach in 2010. Sorry. It’s just not allowed. Also, that shot at the 49 second mark of the singer super-imposed into the bed of the heartbroken guy is, y’know, insanely creepy. Or least the idea behind it is creepy; the actual effect is too poor to be anything but hilarious.
2. Why is the singer singing in the middle of a bar and/or empty room?
3. I’ve never seen a singer look so incredibly not into his own song. Especially in a promotional video meant to sell the band.
4. The band is incredibly over-lit. No one on set had a light meter?
5. It’s hard to believe that this is a new song. Apparently Picture were an 80s band. SHOCKER.

-AR

Magnum Carnage, a Hawaiian death metal band who just moved to California, sent a killer press pack to the Mansion a few months ago that was anything but dreadful. The package came in a giant red bubble mailer and contained everything you see in the photo above: a press release and bio, a copy of their CD, a burned DVD, a cassette tape (!), a poster, a sticker… and a package of rice candy (?). I guess when you’re from Hawaii and you can’t really tour you’ve got to do whatever you can to stick out.

Unfortunately for Magnum Carnage while their press pack was pretty damn impressive their music really wasn’t. I sure did enjoy those rice candies, though… ate ‘em all up.

-VN

I appreciate all the suggestions you folks made for my article yesterday about trying to find metal that’s appropriate to the wonderful weather. They were a lot of excellent calls in there. But before I even glanced at all the great recommendations, we published the latest guest blog from Cynic’s Paul Masvidal, which, appropriately for the spring, is about a bird chirping. And that’s when it hit me: CYNIC. Cynic is the perfect music for this weather. How could I have been so blind?

After making this realization, I noticed that MS reader Tim had actually suggest Cynic – so if I’d read the comments earlier, I might have had this epiphany a few hours earlier. Oh, well. Tim is the bass player for a band I don’t know called The Stars Threw Down Their Spears. Since he and I are obviously on the same wavelength, I thought I’d try to show his band some love. So go check ‘em out.

-AR

People who care more than I do tell me that today is the anniversary of when they found Kurt Cobain’s carcass (’cause I guess it was hanging around a few days before someone stumbled upon it). That was sixteen years ago. It’s weird to think that he’s been dead longer than some of you have been alive.

I always liked Nirvana, but I never loved Nirvana. In fact I wrote an anti-Cobain piece back in 2007; I know a lot of you weren’t reading MS yet in 2007, so now’s a good time to check this out and tell me what a douche turd I am for kicking a dead man when he’s down.

Meanwhile, here’s Nirvana performing “Lithium” at 1992 MTV VMAs. I like this performance because a) Krist Novoselic hits himself in the head with a bass at the end and b) Dave Grohl goes out of his way to provoke Axl Rose, who was in attendance and performed with Elton John later that night. This lead to an infamous Rose-Cobain scuffle after the show. Good times. Good times.

-AR

In a dramatic but highly unexpected turn of events, Andy Richter, comedic actor and star of the legendary sitcom Quintuplets, has replaced Nathan Ells as the new vocalist for The Human Abstract.

Wait, hold on a sec. Vince is IMing me. Just a minute.

[returns a little while later]

Excuse me. TRAVIS Richter is the new singer for The Human Abstract. TRAVIS, not Andy. Oh well.

Click to read more…

There’s no better way to convince you guys that the hype we’re giving any given album is worthwhile than to stream the whole fucking thing and let you decide for yourselves. So we hooked up a sweet deal with The Ocean and Metal Blade Records to give you guys Heliocentric in its entirety for 48 hours only. Starting right now and lasting through 11:59pm EDT on Friday, April 9th you can listen to Heliocentric in all of its proggy, ambitious glory right here on MetalSucks. I dare you to not be impressed by the scope and execution of this album!

Of course, whether you decide to buy it based on what you’re hearing is entirely up to you. But The Ocean have put together some exceedingly cool packages for those who decide they’d like to support the band:

• Heliocentric is now available for pre-order in the U.S. as just the CD ($11.99) or in a CD/t-shirt package ($20.99). The packaging features a black digipak with silver foil and black embossed designs as well as tarot cards in place of the traditional CD booklet. There are a total of 9 tarot cards (one for each song), each with its own artwork on one side and lyrics on the other.
• Europeans will be able to purchase the digipak without the silver hot foil-stamping but with another nifty artwork idea instead that reflects the Heliocentric-theme, the idea that the sun, rather than the earth, is at the center of our planetary system. This version has 3 revolving PVC-dials in different sizes attached to the front side with a screw: the center dial depicts the sun. The second dial shows the orbits of the planet, the outer dial shows the zodiacs. The dials are transparent, so you can see through them the background of a starry night sky on which a star-chart is printed in a special color varnish. We’re not sure where the European version will be available other than in stores.
• A super-limited edition 4xLP box set. This strictly limited box is designed to hold 2 gatefold covers and 4x 180g colored vinyl records: the Heliocentric album and the Anthropocentric album (October 2010). For now, the box is only being delivered with the Heliocentric album included; the Anthropocentric album can be purchased separately in October, to be put into the box. The box and gatefolds include all of the silver foil-stamped and PVC wheel goodness outlined above. More details about this set, photos and pre-order information can be found here.

As for the music itself…. here you go:

[this promotion has ended]

After the jump, check out a video from chief songwriter / guitarist Robin Staps explaining the opening tracj “Firmanent”:

Click to read more…

Yay Sean Murdock! He correctly identified last week’s logo as belonging to the band Heavy Metal Kneesocks. For his troubles, Sean wins a signed t-shirt from Arsis. You’re cool, Sean!

This week, the very nice people at Relapse are giving away two copies of Of Death and Ritual, the new EP from Culted. Decibel‘s Shawn Bosler gave the album 8/10, writing that “Culted crash and bash with the kind of spooky, atmospheric despair usually reserved for outros or cool bridges from your favorite isolationist BM crew.” You want a copy of Of Death and Ritual! Enter this 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 two winners and announce their names next week.

And Isaac Schwarz once again provides this week’s logo…

-AR

Every night, for the past week, I’ve heard the same bird chirping outside my bedroom window. Like clockwork, the chirps start at 10 p.m., and go on for hours without a break. Last night, I sat outside with a tape recorder to see if I could find a pattern in the short melodies and riffs that this curious creature was voicing. What I found rhythmically is intriguing and surprisingly complex:

Bird Chirp Riffs [mp3]

The bird’s set begins with an up-tempo phrase made up of six short bars, with each bar consisting of a varied number of beats, like so:

//////    //////    /////    //////    /////    ////

6        6         5        6        5       4

Next comes a repeating phrase, where a higher note sounds on the fourth beat:

///x    ///x    ///x

Followed by a rapid two-note phrase that starts with a high, staccato chirp punctuated by a sustained lower note:

• ___    • ___    • ___    • ___    • ___

Click to read more…

Do you like your metal with an extra dose of chops? Check out these excellent unsigned bands recommended by our own readers.

• haarp: These dudes seem to be generating a ton of buzz lately and even caught the ear of one Mr. Phil Anselmo. Like a less technical and more straight-up American metal sounding version of SiKth.
• Slowmotion Apocalypse: Dudes kinda remind me of The Haunted meets Dillinger Escape Plan. [Paolo P]
• Defied: Phoenix, AZ tech-death. Brutaler and betterer than most. Reminds me of Psycroptic meets Hate Eternal. [Thanks: Defied guitarist Morris Sevada for manning up and plugging his own band instead of pretending to be a manic fan].

-VN

I saw Dirty Little Rabbits live a couple of months ago, before they headed to Europe to open for Lacuna Coil. (And if any of our European readers saw one of these shows, I’d be curious to hear how they went over the crowd – ’cause the only two things these bands is that they both have a female lead singer.) I was actually stoked to check them out, since a) I liked Shawn “Clown” Crahan’s last non-Slipknot project, To My Surprise, and b) I the only Dirty Little Rabbits song I’d heard thus far, “Hello,” was reasonably catchy.

But by the end of the performance, I felt pretty confident that this band is not for me. The band clearly puts a lot of effort into their live performances, but everyone seems kinda ensconed in 90′s alt-rock clichés that I didn’t like much back when they were “fresh.” (To wit: keyboardist Michael Pfaff was wearing a tuxedo with no shirt, dancing in a manner that approximated the expand-and-contract movements of a Slinky, etc.) And the music wasn’t much better. When a fairly brief forty-minute set feels like a lifetime, you know you’re in trouble.

But decide for yourselves how you feel about this band. To me, their new video for “Professional Hit,”  which debuted on Noisecreep, exemplifies everything that’s wrong with the band – the song just sounds so dated, like an umpteenth generation Rage Against the Machine rip-off with no discernible chorus and ridiculous lyrics. But if anyone digs this and thinks I’m being too hard on the band, by all means, speak up.

-AR

It doesn’t feel like spring out today – it feels like summer. The sun has been going down later and later and the weather has been getting nicer and nicer, and now, all of sudden, it’s 90 (!) degrees out. I don’t think it will last all that long – the East Coast often gets one last snowstorm in April before the nice weather begins in earnest – but it has made for some very relaxing, long walks as of late. (Not hurting: that the ladies of NYC have wasted no time adjusting their wardrobes appropriately. It’s like a Rock of Love casting call out there, except, mercifully, with fewer surgical “enhancements.”)

The problem is, when the doom n’ gloom of metal is your music of choice, it can be hard to find an appropriate soundtrack for such a beautiful day.

Click to read more…

In a move that will make the people that despise them despise them somewhat less, Despised Icon are breaking-up. They made the announcement today via MySpace, and while Blabbermouth reports that the statement has since been removed, no DI fans should get false hope – we hear that the band is really, truly over.

Which I find to be a bummer. 2007′s The Ills of Modern Man was a example of how deathcore doesn’t have to suck; while I enjoyed last year’s more traditionalist release, Day of Mourning, a little less, it was still totally solid. And I saw these dudes annihilate a live audience once. It would have been nice to seem them soldier on.

Click to read more…

And that’s about all I have to say about it. Stereogum [via SMN] is streaming the track “Trapped in Space & Time,” — from the band’s recent Tee Pee Records release Prior to the Fire — which you can listen to below.

Priestess – “Trapped in Space & Time”

See also: my brief writeup of one of Priestess’s many SXSW performances.

-VN

One last thought about Slash’s solo album, and then I promise to shut up about it for awhile.

Everyone who buys/downloads/whatever Slash the album will get “Nothing to Say,” a collaboration the axe-slinger player did with M. Shadows from Avenged Sevenfold. It ostensibly sounds like an A7X song with Slash on guitars. But what’s really interesting is that there’s an alternative version of the same exact song, this one entitled “Chains and Shackles,” on the Australian version of Slash. And this being 2010 and the internet being what it, we have both versions of the song, and therefore have a nice example of the various ways in which you can make a piece of music sound completely different from itself.

“Chains and Shackles,” you see, doesn’t have M. Shadows vocals or lyrics or melodies – it was done with ex-Queens of the Stone Ager Nick Oliveri instead. The intro, main riff, and even a large chunk of the guitar solo is completely identical in both songs – but the production style is completely different on each one, the outro is different, and “Chains” is a good minute shorter. That song has clearly been designed to sound like something off of Songs for the Deaf, and succeeds every bit as much as “Nothing to Say” does at sounding like a A7X tune. I don’t know if Oliveri and/or Shadows were personally involved with all of the changes made to each variation of the song or not, but it’s funny to see that Slash really IS like Zelig – a chameleon who just blends in with the crowd.

Here are the two versions of the song side-by-side:

By the way, if you’re wondering why one of these ended up on the album proper and the other only made it as an Australian bonus track, well… guess which two musicians share the same manager?

-AR

Last month, Nergal found himself in a lot of trouble with Polish authorities because he destroyed a Bible on stage in 2007 (video above).  Poland has a law that prohibits the offending of someone’s religious feelings, and he managed to offend several people.  Could a law like this be passed in the United States?

The quick answer is “no,” though there are, as always, some exceptions.  At the most basic level, the First Amendment keeps the government out of religion as well as the regulating-speech business.  There is a plethora of diverse beliefs about the ultimate nature of the universe, and the US government is not going to get in your way if you choose to believe in any one of them.  Essentially, you can believe any crazy thing you wish, but you may not be able to practice your religion if it involves breaking a law that is not related to your religious beliefs.

Click to read more…

Speaking of groovy-djenty stuff… the U.K.’s Fellsilent have broken up, according to a post on the band’s MySpace page [sent in by Kyle Heath with the above cartoon]. I’m not exactly stricken with grief; Fellsilent were a decent band but I found them to be a tad generic when it came to this kind of metal.

Though their presence will be missed in the U.K. scene, the band’s members will continue on under various other monikers. There’s guitarist Acle Kahney’s TesseracT, a long-running (and vastly superior) project that’s seemingly always on the verge of releasing an album that never seems to actually come out. Guitarist John Browne and Neema Askari are continuing on with their super-groovy and even more proggy (think: SikTh) band Monuments. In a much less interesting vein, Joe Garrett is rapping in a project called Sonick with Christopher ‘Noddy’ James, and the latter is working as a studio musician, teacher and drum tech.

-VN

We need to come up with a new genre name for one-man, instrumental, groovy, Meshuggah-influenced bedroom projects. Pioneered by dudes like Misha Mansoor and Tosin Abasi and proliferated amongst the myriad guitar message boards of the Internet, the metal micro-genre is a force to be reckoned with that’s spawned many bands/projects we’ve written about — such as Keith Merrow, Chimp Spanner, Cloudkicker, etc — and hundreds more we haven’t. This is not Sumeriancore, though that genre is akin to something of a cousin. “Djent” is stupid. “One-man, instrumental, groovy, Meshuggah-influenced bedroom projects” is way too long. “Groovy progressive instrumetal” doesn’t have a good ring to it. Halp.

The latest example is Tre Watson of the Baltimore band Carthage. Tre emailed us last night to tell us that he just released a solo album under his own name that he’s made available for free download [updated link] to the masses (side note: putting up your album for free download is totally the “IN” thing to do in this scene). Then The Number of the Blog‘s deseee posted about it this morning with an embedded stream of the track “Conflicting Intentions” from the album. Don’t let the super thrashy intro fool you; about a minute into the song things get mighty groovy and progressive.

What can we call this genre? ‘Cause lord knows the need to categorize exists in the human psychology and we at MetalSucks certainly aren’t above pigeonholing. So let’s go… give it your best shot. Anyone who answers “crap” (or similar) gets an e-slap on the face.

-VN

I’ve been looking for an excuse to write about Nachtmystium’s latest, Addicts: Black Meddle Pt. II, for awhile now. The band just announced a June 8 release date via Century and “unveiled the track list,” as the metal-news terminology goes; I don’t usually give a shit about track lists, because unless the band is Metallica and the song is “Unforgiven XIX,” titles don’t actually tell you very much about the music. But since the Nachtmystium is in the headlines, now I can write about the album and not feel like I’m being completely random.

So: it’s still early, but as of today, April 7, Addicts is the best album of 2010 so far. And there’s a lot I want to say about it, so please excuse me while I ramble a little.

Click to read more…

Some of the brutalest, trvest, kvltest metal dudes that I know are all in agreement: the new Ratt record is the fucking shit. I always get a bit of an odd look when I tell someone “You gotta check out the new Ratt record!” after being asked what new music I’ve been digging lately, but every single time I get an email or text a couple of days later saying, “Holy shit dude, you were right. This rocks!” And this is true all across the board, from dudes in brutal metal bands to casual fans who only know a couple of Ratt’s biggest hits. Because let’s face it, we all grew up on this shit and it’s in our blood. No one came out of the womb loving “true” black metal that was made by a one-man band in a cabin somewhere in the remote reaches of Norway and is only known about by you and your best buddy. It’s ok… let it go… it’s ok to enjoy this music! Your cred will not be damaged. Just the opposite, in fact; you’ll be the coolest and happiest motherfucker on your block.

I’ve extolled the virtues of Infestation plenty in this space, so this is my last ditch effort before April 20th’s official album release. Roadrunner Records is giving away the album’s opening track “Eat Me Up Alive” for free right here. The song is a helluva way to kick off a killer album and a helluva introduction to said album if you’ve been hesitant up until this point. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back… promise.

-VN