Life is strange. For example, do you think that when I woke up yesterday I thought, “I bet I’ll write two headlines with Lady Gaga in ‘em in as many days?” Fuck no! Shit just happens sometimes.

So. This band The Demonstration recently released a video for a cover of Lady Gag’s “Bad Romance.” Here are the reasons I hate it:

1. I hate ironic metal covers of pop songs. If you’re in a metal band and you choose to do an ironic pop cover, that tells me that a) your sense of humor isn’t very sophisticated, b) you’re severely lacking in original thought since 8,000 other bands have already done this, and c) fuck you.
2. I hate ironic metal covers of recent pop songs even more. Because now you’re just appealing to teenagers who have no memory of anything older than a week. “See? It’s funny because it’s on the radio all the time RIGHT NOW, but we made it, like, all metal and shit!” Eat me.
3. Rather than add some personality and find a way to make this song cool, The Demonstration have taken a song I didn’t like in the first place and added the scenester clichés of the day (chugga-chug guitars, vocoder mixed generic death metal vocals, etc); in other words, they took a bad song and made it bad in a different way. It’s like the choice between getting anally raped by a giant dildo or a giant dildo that’s a slightly different shape; either way, it’s gonna hurt, and I’m gonna be bleeding from the ass by the time it’s over.
4. I appreciate cute, scantily-clad girls as much as the next dude, but I don’t think that anyone who has ever actually seen a naked lady up close will find this scintillating.

Hopefully this is the last time I’ll ever have to write about this band, but given our luck, some A&R dude is reading this right now thinking “I’m gonna sign these guys!”

-AR

I’m kidding, of course. Yes, Invictus was a movie last year that Clint Eastwood directed and that got nominated for a couple of Oscars, but it’s also the Latin word for “unconquered.” Given that, I’m surprised it took so long for a  metal band to use the word as an album title.

But here come Heaven Shall Burn to swoop it up! Their Invictus, which will not feature a guest rap by Morgan Freeman, will be released by Century in North America on June 8, and other various territories where I don’t live throughout late May.

I’m literally listening to Invictus as I type this, aaaannnndddd… it sure is a Heaven Shall Burn album! The intro is even a remix/rethinking of the one from their last studio album, Iconoclast, Part 1: The Final Resistance. (Although I guess it wasn’t “the final resistance,” since I’m sitting here writing about the band’s new album.) HSB are one of those bands, like Insomnium, who basically make the same record over and over again, so you should already have some sense of how excited, or not excited, you are to hear this release.

-AR

I could be wrong about this, but by my estimation the lads in After the Burial are in their early 20s. This would mean that at the earliest they were born in 1985, the year Nintendo released the NES in America, and at the latest they were born in 1990 (!), the year the Super NES came out. Either way you cut it, the dudes in the band were either toddlers or not even born yet when the NES — and its glorious 8-bit music — was all the rage. And by extension, I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to say that most fans of the band are probably around the same age or younger.

Still, some zealous YouTuber managed to turn in a pretty decent 8-bit rendition of Rareform album opener “Berzerker.” I enjoy 8-bit remixes in large part because of the nostalgia factor, but that wouldn’t really explain why a 22 year old would long for something he never actually experienced. I guess there’s the whole mystique of longing for and glorifying an era you just missed, the way ’70s bell bottoms were all the rage when I was in high school and the way today’s Williamsburg hipster college students wear the most ridiculous ’80s clothes imaginable. Whatever the case, it’s a pretty sweet cover; check it below.

-VN

Thanks: Spencer Ward

In honor of Revocation’s devastating new video for “Dismantle The Dictator”, MetalSucks is teaming up with Metal Injection for a shredtastic guitar cover contest!  The challenge is difficult but the rewards are plentiful!  Film yourself playing “Dismantle The Dictator” from Existence is Futile on guitar and upload it to Metal Injection.

The most accurate, creative video wins the grand prize of an autographed JS32RT Dinky guitar from Jackson, a Revocation prize pack including their new album and exclusive apparel from IndieMerch, plus loads of gear and swag from Jackson, DiMarzio, and Fryette!  Three runners up will also receive a prize pack filled with Revocation merch and swag from all the sponsors!

If you need a little help, there are two videos of Dave Davidson teaching fans how to play “Dismantle the Dictator” uploaded on FPE TV.  Check out Part 1 and Part 2.

CLICK HERE TO ENTER AND UPLOAD YOUR VIDEO!

Not Krallice. I don’t want you to be confused, because I start this blog by talking about Krallice.

Krallice live is truly something to behold. After checking them out at the inaugural Scion Fest last year, Vince wrote the following about them:

Krallice’s intense psychedelic black metal had me captivated with every turn after twisted turn their music took. Most of the time there weren’t any vocals, which placed the emphasis squarely on the epic, monstrous, riveting compositions. All I could do was stand and watch as each moment was more grand than the last… Krallice are a band with zero pretention and no corpsepaint; just killer, awesome black metal. And fucking INTENSE… that’s the word I keep coming back to. The band played the shit out of their instruments with a passionate fervor you just don’t see in most bands.

If you haven’t seen these dudes live before, well, you should soon get a chance; not only are they spending the second half of April on the road with Ludicra, but now they’re committed to a (too-) brief tour with the reunited Gorguts, Australia’s incredible Portal, and Bloody Panda.

That’s quite a line-up! GORGUTS!!! And who knows when the hell Portal will make it back to the States. Apparently their live show is really something to behold. I don’t know about you guys, but I fully intend to go the show with a clock on my head.

Get dates on Krallice’s MySpace page.

-AR

I’m confused. First, Murderdolls’ Joey Jordison and Wednesday 13 told Artist Direct that their new album, Women and Children Last, isn’t gonna be quite the hair-metal fest that their last album was…

Does Women and Children Last preserve that classic Sunset Strip attitude?

Wednesday 13: Kind of…the title more or less exists to piss people off. Even though I’m a hair metal fan, I’ve become a huge Slayer fan over the years. With the way the new Murderdolls music sounds, it’s everything from that Sunset Strip stuff to Slayer. It goes everywhere this time—whereas the first record was more punk rock.

Joey Jordison: I’m really excited about it. I think it’s actually going to reel in a lot of the Slipknot fans because of the heaviness. We’re not going to lose any fans; this album is only going to gain fans for us. We weren’t like, “Okay, we’re going to crank out some campy songs like we did before.”

…and then they announced that Mick Mars is doing a guest spot on the album, and released the following photo just to prove that Mick can still sit down is really in the studio with them:

Now, I love old Motley Crue and I love Slayer, but you’d never hear Mars play on Slayer album. So either Jordison and 13 (is that how I refer to him?) are full of cow poo, or this is going to be a really, really diverse sounding record. I sincerely hope it’s the latter.

And that’s the second time today I’ve mentioned Mick Mars and Slayer in one breath. Weird.

-AR

This article about Sepultura allegedly being “carbon neutral” really rankles me. It’s been a while since I ranted about the environment on this website (Gojira’s Joseph Duplantier has done plenty of that for me elsewhere), but it’s time. This Sepultura piece is bullshit.

In theory, being carbon neutral is an admirable goal. The problem is that it’s very unlikely that Sepultura are actually carbon neutral. First of all the article cites no source and doesn’t explain what Sepultura are actually doing to become carbon neutral, but that certainly isn’t the band’s fault.

Touring is absolutely brutal on the environment. There’s the obvious issue of gas consumption and the corollary pollution issues; I’m guessing this is what Andreas Kisser is most concerned with… if he’s even given it any more thought than “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to try and be green?”. Andreas, how are you planning to uphold your vow to “neutralize” your carbon emissions? Will your bus run on vegetable oil? Will you buy carbon offsets? Please tell me.

Click to read more…

Aerosmith fans can pinpoint the exact moment when the band’s status changed from promising, young maybes to rock heavyweights. It was May 3 ,1976, the day their fourth album and second masterpiece, Rocks, was released. As of that day, Toys In The Attic, the breakthrough predecessor to Rocks, officially was no fluke; in all likelihood, the success of its mega-singles “Sweet Emotion” and “Walk This Way,” like, embiggened the band to follow up with Rocks, a portrait of dangerous men where ambitious boys once stood.

That was Rocks. Uh, almost thirty-five years ago.

Click to read more…

Anima, Enter The Killzone
As many of you know, I’m one of the few people writing for this site willing to give some positive attention to deathcore. With forthcoming albums from Oceano and Rose Funeral still on the horizon in 2010, I thought I might get my quick fix of pig squeals and breakdowns from this, the sophomore album from Anima on Metal Blade. Regrettably, Enter The Killzone sounds like a copy-and-paste job lacking any serious effort to actually write songs, all the more astounding given death metal’s already low threshold. Here you’ll find all the familiar deathcore markers, ticked off as if on a checklist. The triggered drums grate on my patience even more than my ears, and the guitarist proves incapable of crafting a half-decent breakdown. The song titles–”Cu(n)t & Twist” and “The Omnipotent Torture King”, for example–frequently rely on torture porn schlock, another testament to Anima’s complete and utter lack of creativity. “XXXIII”, an apparent attempt at a Winds Of Plague epic, kicks off like the score of a Vincent Price B-movie and gets even worse from there. By deathcore standards, this is a remarkably piss poor showing.

(1 out of 5 horns)

Click to read more…

In his review of The Underworld Regime, the debut album of “black metal dream team” Ov Hell, our own Sammy O’Hagar wrote the following:

With a group of dudes as impressive as this, all the great things about black metal are all but guaranteed to show up. And they do: the riffs are wall-to-wall excellent, Shagrath’s vocals — even despite the fact that I’m not particularly fond of Dimmu Borgir — are solid, and I’ll be damned if there’s a better drummer in black metal than Frost that’s not named Trym or Hellhammer (and even then, it’s a three-way tie). Ice Dale and Teloch even manage to throw in a spidery arpeggio every now and again to keep things from devolving into a haze of tremolo-picked minor chords. Yes, it’s cheesy, but like good power metal, it fully and unironically embraces it, transforming what most would make a groan-worthy affair into chest-beating awesomeness.

That sounds like something you’d wanna listen to, right? Well, now you can! Even though Prosthetic won’t release the album until April 13, our PLPs (that’s “platonic life partners”) at Metal Injection are streaming The Underworld Regime right now. Ov Hell features members of Dimmu Borgir, Gorgoroth, 1349, Enslaved, and Satyricon, so you just know it’ll be ebil. Listen now.

-AR

You will listen to The Ocean. You will like The Ocean. You will love The Ocean. You will realize that they’re one of the very best metal bands on the planet.

Do it. Because I said so and I know what’s best for you.

Precambrian nearly blew our minds when it came out in late 2007 and Heliocentric will do the same when it comes out on April 13th. Heliocentric is their most diverse album to date, exploring sounds all across the metal spectrum and beyond. I’ve yet to really wrap my head entirely around it; it’s the kind of album that’s going to take 6 or 7 dedicated listens to really learn, and likely the kind of album on which I’ll still be hearing new things five years from now. That’s the kind of band The Ocean are — they make dense, complex music that immediately hits the spot but can’t quite immediately be grasped in full. And the best part is that Heliocentric is only one part of the story; in October we’ll get Anthropomorphic,  written and recorded at the same time.

Get a taste of what Heliocentric has in store by checking out the new track “Swallowed by the Earth” on The Ocean’s MySpace page. It’s an alright example of what the album has in store, but evaluating the album as a whole based on one track is really just not fair at all. It does, however showcases new vocalist Loic Rossetti’s range and the diversity his approach brings to the band.

If you’re a fan of The Ocean, now’s a good time to get excited — MetalSucks has something very, very special in store starting at midnight EDT tomorrow night!

-VN

At least half of the bands playing metal today owe huge debts to D.R.I. — also known as Dirty Rotten Imbeciles — even if the band was an indirect influence. Slayer’s Jeff Hanneman was an early fan, and Kerry King had written off punk as just some noisy bullshit before he discovered the group. Prior to the Massive Aggressive LP, Municipal Waste records were essentially D.R.I. albums. If you dig the Waste and don’t know D.R.I., shame on you. Proceed directly to iTunes or eMusic to catch up on the catalog. It’s a hardcore history lesson.

For a metal audience, D.R.I.’s Crossover is a good place to start. Beer City Records will release an expanded, remastered Millennium Edition of the album on April 13. (It’s already available on iTunes.) A lot of people with credible taste consider it the band’s signature record. I won’t say it’s their worst, but it’s definitely my least favorite — and trust me, I like D.R.I. more than the next guy. They’re gods and should be treated as such. The bonus material makes the reissue a must-have, even if you think the proper LP blows dog.

Crossover is D.R.I.’s Black Album. It was the band’s breakthrough release. But all D.R.I.’s signature elements were M.I.A. Song lengths changed drastically. Rumbling, raw production was replaced with a big-rock sound. Frontman Kurt Brecht’s lyrics were on a downswing. D.R.I. had a new direction. Some fans love the record. Some fans hate it.

One of the Millennium Edition’s eleven bonus tracks is a wicked live version of “Five Year Plan” that starts with an intro which identifies the group as “one of the hardest metalcore bands ever to come out of the Bay Area.” Now that’s old, old footage, and “metalcore” meant something very different then. Everybody was still figuring it out, and if you wanted to know where heavy music was going, D.R.I. was one of the bands to watch.

“Five Year Plan” live video

Click to read more…

Of all the post-Mastadonian metal bands flooding the metal market these days very few stand out. There’s a buncha bands of dudes with beards who obviously worship Mastodon’s first two albums to the point where if you’re Brent Hinds you’ve probably gone from flattered to offended. Same is true of post-At The Drive In screamo; so many bands have tried and they’ve all done gone and fucked it up, including both The Mars Volta and Sparta.

But combine the two and you’ve got an interesting concept. You’ve also got Santa Cruz, CA’s Scryer, recommended to us by Michael Dunn. No one part of Scryer’s sound is distinctly Mastodonian and no one part is distinctly ATIDian; they borrow equally from both in healthy measures but not to the point of downright imitation. Of course other influences rear their heads as well, but you’ll have to listen to their music to find out for yourself.

Check out Scryer on their MySpace page and let us know what you think.

-VN

Since immortalizing hair rock bimboism in The Decline of the Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, it seems like Riki Rachtman has never passed up an opportunity for humiliation. His tenure as host of MTV’s once great Headbanger’s Ball could be summed up with a prolonged groan. Then, after following commercial metal into oblivion in the ’90s, the panting toady returned to my living room and doghouse thanks to the success of Bret Michaels’ Rock Of Love, as he delightfully set about wagging a judgmental finger at drunken reality show sluts. Maybe I’m out of touch, but that seems kinda contradictory to the spirit of rock ‘n roll, to which Rachtman ostensibly pledges allegiance. We love drunken sluts. We loathe responsible behavior. Shut up, Rachtman. Again.

It’s 2010 now and obviously it was with tittering anticipation that I followed Rachtman’s latest invitation to embarrassment, in which he challenged Good Charlotte’s Benji Madden, total lamewad, to a boxing match. Rachtman stated back in March:

Click to read more…

In case you were too lazy to read my review, I really, really like The Farthest Reaches, the debut album from Son of Aurelius. And now that AOL is giving away a free mp3 of the song “Myocardial Infarction,” you can have a little taste of what an authority no less than me called “one of the strongest releases of the spring, and possibly the year.”

It’s a really short song (under two minutes), but it should give you a pretty good sense of what these dudes are all about. Plus, it’s FREE! So what do you have to lose? Go here to download it.

And later this week we’ll have an interview with guitarist Cary Geare.

-AR

Poor John Cobbett. Ludicra just put out an excellent new album, The Tenant, but the guy has still suffered from some crummy luck, to put it mildly. First, Mayhem canceled the tour Ludicra was supposed to play support on; then they decided “Fuck Mayhem, let’s do it on our own,” and announced a “De-Cancellation” tour.

And then Cobbett’s appendix burst.

And then the doctors at San Francisco General Hospital misdiagnosed Cobbett, gave him a clean bill of health, and sent him home.

Which is how he ended up in the Olympia ER, which is where he remains as of this writing (see photo above). And because this is America, where decent health insurance is unafuckingffordable, John needs help paying all the medical bills.

According to a statement from the band, there are multiple ways you can help John out:

Click to read more…

Ever seen Woody Allen’s Zelig? It’s a pseudo-documentary about a guy who immediately assumes the traits of whomever he’s with at the moment; put him in a room full of Chinese people and he’ll turn into a Chinese man, move him to a room full of Hasidim and he’ll suddenly appear to be Hasidic, and so on and so forth. It’s a(n obvious but still pretty funny) metaphor for a guy with no personality of his own.

Now, consider Slash. Guns N’ Roses folklore tells us that Slash is not the best judge of his own material, and often wanted to scrap some of Guns’ best songs; and, unfortunately, evidence suggests that this folklore is fact, and that Slash is a pretty ho-hum songwriter. Axl Rose has his legitimate insanity and over-sized, not entirely comprehensible artistic vision, but all Slash really seems to have is a desire to be like his heroes in Aerosmith and AC/DC, which is to say, a legacy act and purveyor of catchy but fairly middle-of-the-road rock. Consequently, a lot of the pressure on Slash-penned songs in the post-GN’R era is not just on the guitar playing of the Artist Formerly Known as Saul Hudson, but on the performances of whatever singer he’s working with at any given moment. Slash songs can be like underwritten roles in movies that way; you need the best character actors available to give them some personality, or they risk becoming boring.

Slash has personality (or at least persona) to burn, and it’s no shock that on Slash, his first solo record, he keeps up his up his end of the bargain in the guitar solo department. Despite the fact that he was never a revolutionary musician, Slash was always a very distinctive musician; a lot of people play the way he does, but no one sounds quite like him. But it is kind of a shock that on this, the album which is supposed to be a distinct and unique artistic statement outside the confines of his collaborations with various bands, Slash has very much allowed himself, like Zelig, to blend in with whomever was in the room at the moment.

Click to read more…

Guess what Tom Araya won’t be doing any time soon?

I’ve seen Slayer live many, many times, and I can pretty much tell you that, on-stage, Tom Araya only does one of two things:

1. He sings and plays.
2. He headbangs and plays.

Okay? I’m not giving him or Slayer shit because I love them more than I love some of my blood relatives, but the guy ain’t exactly Greg Puciato. His performance style is fairly simple, but it works for him, mostly, I imagine, because he’s the front man for SSSSSLLLLAAAAYYYYEEEERRRRR!!!!

Unfortunately, it seems that Araya will now have to amend that list so that it reads as follows:

1. He sings and plays.
2. He does his best impersonation of Mick Mars.

For he revealed during a recent Noisecreep “Creep Show” podcast…

Click to read more…

Soundgarden reunion rumors have been flying around almost as long as Soundgarden have been broken up. (And in case you lost count, this Friday will be the thirteenth anniversary of the break-up. Someone will have been born and bar mitzvahed in the time since Soundgarden were last together! Egads!) Chris Cornell pretty much let the cat out of the bag that the band is reuniting back in January, and now they’ve announced that they’re headlining Lollapalooza in August. (Unfortunately, the rest of the line-up for that festival is pretty blech, especially from a fan of half-way decent rock; there’s Social Distortion and, uh, that’s it. If the artist on the bill I’d be most excited to see that isn’t Soundgarden is Erykah Badu, well, that’s a festival I won’t be attending.)

And, as usual, my enthusiasm is tempered with cynicism.

Click to read more…

“The last day of SXSW is always the most metal.” – Kip Wingerschimidt, the morning of the last day of SXSW 2009, before staying up all night partying with Dredg and then tearing the insides of his knee to shreds in the most non-metal of ways whilst getting ready to go to the airport. Fortunately there would be no injuries this year, but the last day of SXSW was indeed quite metal, we did stay up all night, and we worked out some really sweet deals.

Only one problem: it was fucking cold outside. Not just Texas cold… actual cold, like low 40s / high 30s. We New Yorkers are used to that kind of weather (on a good day in the winter) but having to endure it in Austin in the Spring was a major buzzkill.

The calm before the storm… E. 6th St. at about noon, while trucks are making their beer deliveries and everyone else is still sleeping off their hangovers from the night before.

But we had our own method of keeping warm. With at least half of the bag o’ herbals left and only one day to smoke it, it was do or die time for the sweet leaf we purchased in Dallas. First mission of the day was to roll it all up. Fifteen minutes later we were ready to begin our final mission, five joints in tow.

Click to read more…