Today is the day we finally get to hear new music from Norway’s Mantric, the band formed from the ashes of Extol (who called it quits in 2007). Like much of the Prosthetic Records roster, Mantric offer a proggy take on something a touch more accessible; in this case a captivating hybrid of Isis / Cult of Luna style heavy done up more intricately and ornately and with a touch of post-hardcore riffery and vocals. If Opeth ever decided to dabble in the Neurisis axis of metal and recorded with Kurt Ballou helming the boards it’d probably sound something like Mantric.

I’ve actually only heard the two songs posted on Mantric’s MySpace page, but today marks the U.S. release of their debut album The Descent (it came out yesterday in Europe). I‘ve been waiting for this one for a while, and I can’t to smoke a bowl and dig in.

Pre-order The Descent here for only $10, or $20 with a t-shirt.

-VN

“But seriously, why don’t people respect me for my musical ability???”

Kristen Randall’s biggest contribution to music is a leaked photo of her boobs, and when she left Winds of Plague last year, the world responded with a resounding “whatever” as the band proved that one cute chick keyboardist is as enticing to male suburban virgins as another.

So, following the same line of completely 110% sound logic that dictates that men should not be interested in breasts, Randall is taking the next logical step in her career and launching a solo project.

Click to read more…

Metal Blade is nothing if not a diverse record label, and with the signing of Sweden’s Istapp (which I think is actually pronounced “iss [rhymes with piss]-tap,” contrary to what this article’s Picard facepalm-inducing headline would suggest) Metal Blade are poised to further explore the realm of dark, frosty black metal. Signed in July of last year, Istapp will unleash their debut album Blekinge upon the world in June and will presumably continue to unleash a barrage of Picard facepalm-inducing press quotes as well. Samples:

“We are proud to announce that we have conquered Metal Blade Records. The war against the sun will now proceed with an even stronger force. Our upcoming album “Blekinge” will hit the earth hard. Prepare yourself for the final avalanche!”

and:

“We are confident that the piece of deadly art about to strike down on you all will be the first really true metal-album ever to be released to this world” comments the band on its upcoming release Blekinge, a dark and unrelenting black metal beast of an album set to devour the world this summer.”

Click to read more…

I agree with pretty much everything Vince said in his assessment of Cold Day Memory last week; it’s a really good pop metal record and having Clint Lowery back in the band obviously makes all the difference in the world. If I have a complaint about the record, it’s that at least half the songs – including the first three tracks – all feature ambient intros. It’s as though the band couldn’t decide which track should go first in the sequence, so they just kinda made them all the first in the sequence and decided to let the listener decide how the track list should go. That’s not a terrible thing – especially if, like me, you actually think that the penultimate tune, a surprisingly Swedecore-esque ditty called “Better Place,” should have kicked off the proceedings – but it is kinda weird.

ANYWAY, with that outta of the way, here’s the band’s video for the first single, “Unraveling.” It’s a pretty ho-hum clip, but I do really enjoy this song.

Meanwhile, Sevendust have just been announced as the best thing about an otherwise pretty terrible tour. (I didn’t even know Puddle of Mudd were still around.) So I guess I won’t be seeing them live until at least the fall. Bummer.

-AR

As I Lay Dying have posted a three-and-half-minute sample of another new song from their forthcoming album, The Powerless Rise. This track is called “Parallels,” and you can stream it here.

I’m not entirely sure I understand the band/label’s strategy of only releasing samples of these new songs (they did the same thing for “Beyond Our Suffering” earlier this month). Is it to prevent bootlegging? That might work to some extent, but I can guarantee you that there are AILD fans out there who are so obsessed with the band that they’ll listen to anything they can get their hands on.

Whatever the case, “Parallels” sounds pretty good, if not as heavy as “Beyond Our Suffering.” The sample cuts out right as Nick Hipa is about to rip into what sounds like a pretty epic guitar solo. So Nick has learned at least one lesson from the show he writes about: how to give me blue balls and leave me wanting more. Thanks, Nick! Grrr…

The Powerless Rise comes out May 11 on Metal Blade. There are a variety of pre-order packages available here, including one that comes with a matted, framed and autographed full-color print of the Jacob Bannon designed artwork, which is anything but powerless.

-AR

[UPDATE: Some dates have been changes since the above poster was released. Updated cities and venues after the jump.]

A lot of you thought that the “big surprise” we hinted at last week was the announcement of Summer Slaughter 2010 dates. By now it’s obvious that that wasn’t the big surprise, but lucky for you we’ve got Summer Slaughter dates today anyway!

In case you somehow missed the news, the MetalSucks co-sponsored Summer Slaughter tour is without a doubt THE metal package tour to be at this summer with a lineup that’s sexier than Sammy O’Hagar and Kip W. having an orgy with the MS Mansion Monkeys. Decapitated, The Faceless, All Shall Perish, The Red Chord, Veil of Maya, Cephalic Carnage, Decrepit Birth, Animals as Leaders, Vital Remains… and, uh, Carnifex… will be taking the U.S. by storm this July and August. We’re beyond stoked for this lineup, and you should be too.

Dates are after the jump.

Click to read more…

Ho ho ho, it must be Christmas time, because Santa Claus is back on the cover of major magazines. Or, at least, Varg Vikernes was giving me an asymmetrical leer from the cover of this month’s Decibel. I do not envy J Bennett’s charge of having to write that piece – I have met J a few times, he’s my kind of people, and writing this “guess who’s outta jail” bit is a landmine. Still, I was disappointed that he spent more time reporting what was happening in some messageboards than tackling the most compelling question about Burzum and the music community: is it okay to listen to music made by people who you think are bad folks?

Let me say that this goes well beyond Burzum or my like/dislike for VV and his music. I’ve got a number of records made by people who say things I don’t like or do things I don’t like. And I get the sense that a bunch of people in strong, self-identified communities (straight edge, fundamentalist Christian, anarchist, Juggalo, some self-hating mix of all four, etc.) are often uncomfortable with copping to liking music that’s not a part of that shared ethos. So think for a moment beyond the guy peering at you from the top of your mail pile/stuff-I-stole-from-Borders-this-month pile and consider how we separate the artist from the art from the message.

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Trent Reznor might be a rockstar prima donna doucheturd in real life, but he’s certainly managed to maintain the appearance of being a cool, down-to-earth dude – whether it’s because he’s telling fans not to pay for his albums that the record labels are charging a ridiculous markup on, or giving shit away for free, or publicly criticizing his peers that have gone soft.

No wonder his fans follow suit – the dude is leading by example. First, after Nine Inch Nails performed The Downward Spiral in its entirety as part of the “Wave Goodbye” tour, some fans who had filmed the concert edited it all together in a semi-professional package so all the world could share in the goodness (and Reznor actually endorsed their actions, calling it “the best concert film of the year” and offering it for free download on their site). Now, a group of fifteen-plus fans who also happen to be professionals in various audio, video, and other media fields have put together NIN: [after all is said and done], a concert film of NIN’s three-and-a-half-hour (allegedly) final live performance. And they’re selling it on DVD and Blu-Ray for a whopping ten bucks, none of which is actually for profit – they just wanna share the love with their fellow NIN devotees. How awesome is that?

The group call themselves A Tiny Little Dot, and you can order a DVD or Blu-Ray from them here (and, yes, I did just order one). The trailer is above. The footage looks pretty incredible, and the show featured guest appearances by Gary Neuman, Dave Navarro, The Dillinger Escape Plan, and more… plus, it’s Nine Inch Nails, who absolutely kill(ed?) live. So this is totally worth your money if you’re fan. Go get it.

-AR

[via Blabbermouth]

The Internet has been waiting for a TesseracT album for what feels like forever. It’s been like waiting for Chinese Democracy, only TesseracT haven’t even released a single studio album to date. Somehow they’ve managed to generate quite a lot of buzz over the years anyway through the sporadic release of various studio recordings and demos. And somehow it feels like the entire metal Webernets are waiting for this album to finally come out.

While I’ve yet to see a firm release date anywhere for One other than “2010,” the band does seem to be gearing up for something; they released a new song back in October, and they just released a video for another new track called “Deception – Concealing Fate Part Two.” I honestly prefer the song “Lament” (posted on their MySpace) to this new one — it’s heavier, and in my opinion better — but it’s still an alright song, and, if anything it’s got to mean an album is near. Check out the video below.

-VN

As some of you may know, my favorite 19 year-old hottie isn’t Demi Lovato, it’s the internet’s own Cam Argon, better known as Big Chocolate. He’s the vocalist for Disfiguring the Goddess, Abominable Putridity, Burning The Masses, a DJ, and a criminal justice major. For more background on Big C, check out the interview I did with him on Metal Inquisition a while ago — otherwise, here’s some stuff off his YouTube channel.

Click to read more…

Aaaaaaand my DM kick continues. Today I’d like to highlight two newer bands carrying the DM torch into the ’10s.

• Burning the Masses: If you can get past their eye-bleeding (literally and figuratively) MySpace design, BtM (not to be confused with Beneath the Massacre) offer some pretty brutal and adept DM for such a young bunch of dudes. It’s like Job For A Cowboy’s more recent stuff — but more interesting, IMO — with a tinge more technicality and Black Dahlia Murder-style Swedish influence. They’re young, so naturally there are breakdowns, but they seem well-balanced and intentioned. New song “Resonance of the Foul” from their forthcoming album Offspring of Time is their heaviest yet, and mercifully it’s breakdown free. [Thanks: MS Maniac Pioneer jtquake]
• Ignominious Incarceration: Kinda like the above with many of the same influences but with a little more of the Cannibal Corpse-style groove thing going on. More swagger, more groovez.

-VN

At the new age feel goodery of an elementary school that Vince and I attended, recorder classes were mandatory in the fourth grade. I never quite understood the logic behind this, but I do remember fucking HATING that instrument, and those classes. The instructor was a scary old German broad named Johanna (we called the teachers by their first names – like I said, it was a new age feel goodery), who I’m pretty sure had spent her formative years working as a Nazi. If a single one of us ever hit a sour note – and keep in mind we were all of ten years old – she’d shriek in that evil-souding accent, “NO SQUEAKING!” and slap the side of her boot with a riding crop. Okay, so I might have made up the part about the riding crop, but the rest is true. This woman did not like children, did not like happiness, and, I’m quite sure, did not actually like the recorder.

Perhaps this traumatic experience with the instrument is why I find the work of Urresti, a young man who does covers of metal songs on the recorder, to be so deplorable; or maybe it’s just because the recorder is really fucking lame and ugly-sounding. Ever wonder what Maiden’s “Fear of the Dark” would sound like on the recorder? Yeah, me neither.

Go here to view more of Urresti’s recorder covers… if you must.

-AR

Cody Barrick told me about this dude. Thanks, Cody. Ugh.

A couple of weeks ago we told you that Relapse was slowly unveiling a new sign via The Deciblog, first by by posting some album art, then by giving away an entire mp3. Here’s what I wrote about the little scheme at the time:

“…the band has to either be someone really prominent, or feature at least one member who’s really prominent – if it turns out that we’re just talking about some group from Bumfuck, then this whole thing is gonna feel like a massive letdown.”

Well, as it turns out, it is a massive letdown.

Click to read more…

Unfortunately, Tony Iommi didn’t make the list.

Click to enlarge

Morons.

-AR

Thanks to SchenkelTown for the tip.

I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s all I could keep thinking on Friday night when news broke that the Poison front man had been rushed to the hospital after suffering “a massive subarachnoid hemorrhage (bleeding at the base of his brain stem)” and that he was in critical condition.

Because let’s be real: Michaels is a tool. He’s made his career on being a tool. But that doesn’t mean he deserves to die, and it doesn’t mean that I never enjoyed a Poison album. If you read this site regularly, you know we like the old Poison records; yes, they’re absolutely retarded, and they haven’t aged well at all (assuming you ever thought they were “well” in the first place), but crank that shit at a bar at 3 a.m. and you’ll suddenly find strangers and possibly even enemies engaging in a group sing-along faster than you can say “Don’t threaten me with a good time.” Striking a balance between his idiocy and my enjoyment (or Vince’s enjoyment, for that matter) of some of his work would be a tough proposition.

So, for now at least, let’s just say this: yes, Bret Michaels is a buffoon. But we sincerely hope he makes it through this okay, and has many more years of buffoonery ahead of him.

-AR

Anyone else as excited about Keep of Kalessin’s new album as I am? Their 2008 album Kolossus was one of my favorite black metal-ish records of the year, close to Nachtmystium’s Assassins: Black Meddle Part 1 and Enslaved’s Vertebrae; it was the most traditionally black metal sounding of the three, but it too had flecks of psychedelia and progressive experimentation. The album wasn’t without faults but was a really solid record that showcased the unique brand of black metal the band had to offer.

Two years later Keep of Kalessin are back with new album Reptilian, having gained a lot of notoriety since then both via word-of-mouth and through the Eurovision competition earlier this year. Their new song “The Dragontower” took them surprisingly far in the Eurovision competition; that song’s been streaming at Keep of Kalessin’s MySpace page since then, and the band has just posted another new song from Reptilian called “The Awakening.” It’s an ambitious 8+ minute epic — counter to the 3-minute pop structure of “The Dragontower” — which hopefully hints at what this album’s going to offer.

Reptilian comes out on May 10th in Europe via Indie Recordings and June 8th in the U.S. via Nuclear Blast. Stay tuned to MetalSucks for a full album stream soon.

-VN

UPDATE: The Testament camp has just told me that the band will not be playing The Legacy live in its entirety on the American Carnage tour – they will do a “100% new brutal set spanning their 24 year career.” Hopefully that makes you happy and not sad…

It seems to me that the current trend in metal of bands playing classic albums live in their entirety all started when Dave Lombardo returned to Slayer and the band started playing Reign in Blood from start to finish (complete with raining “blood”); then Metallica did Master of Puppets, and then pretty much everyone jumped on the bandwagon.

So I don’t think you can accuse Slayer of trend-hopping now that they’ve announced that they’ll be celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Seasons in the Abyss by playing it in its entirety on the upcoming American Carnage tour with Megadeth and Testament. They started it, so why shouldn’t they continue to reap the benefits? And who would complain anyway? Seasons is the band’s second-best album after Reign!

Click to read more…

We’ve come a long way since we launched in December of 2006 (with the above header), based on a stoned conversation between Axl and Vince at an Amon Amarth / Children of Bodom show in NYC.

We’re still working out a few kinks, but let us know what you think of the new layout. We hope you like it. Feel free to call us sellouts.

- VN & AR

I think we’ve teased this big surprise a million times already, but come Monday, it’s FINALLY going to be ready. So we need to finish the day a little early to make sure that that happens. We’re sure you can all make due without one last snarky blog post for the day. But in case you can’t, here are some things you may have missed this week…

• Eyal and Emil from Levi/Werstler took over the site for a day!
• We debuted a clip from the Sevendust Cold Day Memory DVD.
• Cynic’s Paul Masvidal pondered death (and Death), As I Lay Dying’s Nick Hipa pondered L O S T, and Periphery’s Misha “Bulb” Mansoor pondered flubby low-end fart sounds.
• Anso became besties with John 5.
• We checked out new releases by Laethora, The Austerity Program, The Abominable Iron Sloth, and Cynic.
• We found a photo of the girl of our dreams… but who is she???

Have a good weekend, everyone. On Monday, everything changes… FOR-EVAH!!!

-AR

Last year I wrote about Finnish melo-doomsters Black Sun Aeon, and just a couple weeks ago Axl wrote about ‘em too. Call it a unanimous Suckitude, but both Axl and I are really digging these guys. Must mean something. But really, if you enjoy dark, doomy, melodic metal bands (and in particular the Finnish ones) like Swallow the Sun and Insomnium there’s no reason you won’t like these guys.

Black Sun Aeon have a new video for “A Song For My Funeral” from their recently released album Routa. It’s just a bunch of stitched-together live clips, but as with most videos these days it’s a perfectly fine excuse to listen to an awesome song and talk about it. Check it below, then listen to some more (sans video) Black Sun Aeon on their MySpace page.

-VN