Recommended by Josh Kidd, via Comixed…

-AR

I went through a big funk phase in college where I’d venture over to the record store every Saturday (Encore in Ann Arbor, MI) and peruse the shelves for the heaviest, dirtiest, funkiest ’70s funk I could find. I still listen to a lot of that music, and it’s one of the genres that [non-]MetalGF and I share as common ground. I mean, how can you not dig this shit?

But none of it was as heavy as what I’m hearing on the MySpace page of ex-Steve Vai / current Headhunters bass player TM Stevens. Shit is just downright dirrrrrrrty! If bands like Extreme, Scatterbrain, early FNM etc were funk metal, then TM Stevens plays metal funk — make sense? This shit is nasty, and I’ve had it in constant rotation for days now — big funky grooves, monster distorted guitar riffs, slap bass, scorching guitar solos (courtesy of Nuno Bettencourt on “Gotta Get My Groove On”) and everything else that makes me wanna smoke a giant fatty J and get my fucking groove on. This isn’t music to make love to… it’s music to FUCK to.

-VN

Thanks: The Gideon

Photo credit: Christophe Lesbats

Since Ratt’s awesome Infestation release party took place at The Key Club on Sunset Strip, the birthplace of hair rock, one could conclude that nostalgia was inevitable. And probably intentional. Even knowing that, it still was easy to get choked up at the sight of Ratt guitar stud Warren DeMartini partnering on a harmony solo with a tall, blond guy. That hasn’t happened since cordless phones were invented and late guitarist Robbin Crosby hadn’t yet been ravaged by hard drugs.

And even though Ratt’s setlist relied on early singles, the event was firmly rooted in the present (contrary to my pathetic wishes). For one thing, there were a ton of 4/20 revelers, and the hot rock chicks present eschewed the timeless appeal of a loose florescent tank top for complicated tattoos and blinding douchewear. But honors for loudest outfit go to the singer, as it should be, as Stephen Pearcy was rocking leather pants that I guess become jeans at the knees.

Click to read more…

From time to time we wax philosophical about the music industry here at MetalSucks in addition to our mindless banter about the music itself. And while we can’t make it to Chicago for the annual NARM Convention the weekend of May 14th through 16th, we highly recommend that anyone who’s nearby and has an interest in the industry attend.

For one, there’s a “The Current State of the Metal Marketplace” panel being held on Sunday, May 16th, and the panel is a star-studded affair full of industry A-listers.

Whether you want to break your band, break into a career in the music industry or better your existing career, you shouldn’t miss The Music Business Crash Course on Friday, May 14 and Saturday, May 15. Panels include “Social Networks & Traditional Promotions: Promotion For Pay, Both Ways!,” “Artist Economics: What Artists & Labels Both Need To Know,” and “Label Economics: So You Want To Be A Music Mogul.” And best of all, if you’re a student you can register for the entire convention for only $49!

This event is definitely not to be missed if you’re anywhere near Chicago that weekend.

-VN

MS reader Jesse Z.’s description of Sludge as “Gojira played half-time” had me interested, but it took all of 5 seconds of watching the above video he sent to have me completely sold. Now I’m in love, head over heels; I want to know absolutely everything about this band and possess their entire discography.

I did a little recon on their Reverb Nation bio page; they’ve been around since 1996, toured all over Europe, released a bunch of records and even share a member with Samael. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of this guys, but I guess they just haven’t had much distro in the U.S.

Someone bring this band to America. NOW. Dear Sludge, if you ever make it to NYC… the weed’s on me.

-VN

Here are the some of the things you will see in “Haifisch” (which apparently means “shark fish”), the latest cinemetallic oddity from the whacky Krauts in Rammstein:

1. A cat fight at a funeral.
2. A woman peeing beside a grave.
3. Some dude getting set on fire.
4. A car exploding.
5. A dude dressed like Snow White spanking some other dude who I guess is supposed to be a dwarf.
6. A picture of James Hetfield.
7. Some murderous mountain climbers.
8. Homicide on the moon.
9. A recreation of the off-screen “feed the fat  fuck to death” sequence from the movie Seven.
10. A girl in a bikini licking a stamp suggestively.

What the fuck does any of it MEAN? I think there’s a vague storyline about someone faking his own death maybe, but I’m not really sure. Does it matter? Whatever else you wanna say about Rammstein, you can’t accuse them of failing to make memorable videos…

They shoulda released this thing on 4/20…

-AR

I seemed to be the only person in the world who enjoyed Leng Tch’e's last full-length, Marasmus. The complaint from most people seemed to be “it’s not grind-y enough,” which strikes me as complaining because the music is the aural equivalent of a splitting headache instead of a full-on migraine, but whatever. I thought it was pretty rockin’.

I also think that “Wirehead Imbeciles,” the new Leng Tch’e song streaming here, is good, so I’m sure everyone else will hate it. It’s really not grind at all, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still heavy. And it’s got a lil’ bitta groove to the mid-section, just a lil’ bitta bounce. It’s just kinda basic, meat n’ taters music to kill by. Nuthin’ wrong with that, right? It’s not gonna change the world or anything, but it’s fun. Remember fun?

Check out the song here. Leng Tch’e's new album, Hypomaniac, comes out on Season of Mist on June 8 here in North America and May 24 elsewhere.

-AR

This video is not recommended if you don’t like seeing fake blood or the re-enactment of a coat-hanger abortion. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Like I said yesterday I’m on a real DM kick lately. Can’t get enough of the stuff.

Ways in which this video is brutal:

• Solace of Requiem
• burning crosses
• shirtless metal dudes headbanging
• creepy Cult Leader dude
• coat-hanger abortion (!!)

Thanks to Mano for sending this in and for noticing the different performance takes used to compile the video (based on how enflamed the cross is). Blasphemous, yes, but still a great video.

-VN

We’re less than three weeks away from the kick-off of the MetalSucks/Metal Injection co-sponsored A Taste of Divinity North American Tour 2010 with Hypocrisy, Scar Symmetry, Hate, Swashbuckle and Blackguard. And now, as if to give you a little taste of what you might see on that sure-to-be-awesome trek, Hypocrisy have released a new video, “Weed Out the Weak,” which is really just a performance/concert clip, but is a really solid performance/concert clip. Check it out:

The Taste of Divinity Tour starts May 11. Get dates here.

-AR

Yesterday Anso wrote a piece about how Cynic are good to combat “mega-highness,” and reader Kasper Maigaard left the following comment below the column:

Will you guys please shut up about Cynic now? You’ve given one of their members his own SEGMENT for fucks sake, so will you at least try (TRY) to go a whole day without ONE mention mention of them? Or you could just marry them straight away and skip all the meddling around.

Well, Kasper, we totally WOULD marry Cynic if they’d have us, but it’s still pretty early in the relationship and we’re afraid that if we tell them we love them now, we’ll come across as needy and scare them away. So while the courtship continues to play itself out, I’d advise you to just not read any posts about Cynic (or any other band we write about that you don’t like).

For the rest of you, I would now like to talk about Cynic’s upcoming EP, Re-Traced, a little bit.

Click to read more…

Last year, my esteemed colleagues Vince Neilstein and Van Arseface covered the New England Metal & Hardcore Festival for this site, resulting in a plethora of posts about their experience and the bands. Pretty good stuff, I’d say. For the 2010 Worcester, MA event, I volunteered to be the official correspondent in my capacity as the resident “hardcore expert” (not to be confused with the resident “hardcore sexpert“). With big names like Cro Mags and Disembodied playing the second stage, how could I not?

So, yeah, throughout the weekend, you can follow all of my witty, ascerbic livetweets here (that is, if you have a Twitter account and a major credit card). Show reports will appear here on MetalSucks next week, with some interviews with select bands following in the subsequent weeks (because monkeys can only transcribe so fast). To answer your lingering questions:

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I know all of you guise have been in the situation where you are at a show trying to enjoy a band, but all you hear out of the guitars is just “pshshhrhhhshrhhshhsh” or something similar to distorted white noise and that flubby low-end fart sound that we all know and love dearly. Fingers be a movin’ but the sound remains pretty much constant.

Now there are several potential reasons for this: some are out of your control like a shitty sound guy, system or room, and those things can make even a great sound engineer have an even worse time than when you French fry when you were supposed to Pizza. But there are aspects within your control which can facilitate or sometimes even remedy those issues to a degree. And that’s what I want to talk about. For those of us who play shows regularly and/or tour we can bitch all day about the things out of our control that make our lives miserable, but sadly those things aren’t likely to change any time soon. But I feel like I see a lot of people who could make their live tone that much better before it’s even miked up, as it’s near impossible to polish a turd, especially not with a line check that’s less than five minutes.

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Last week we offered up two prize packs each consisting of a signed Ratt Infestation CD and poster. Ya’ll don’t know what you’re missing, for serious! Here are the winners:

• Devin Townsend’s Lost Skullet: “Fuckin magnets! How do they work?!”
• metallicbrain: “After many years in hibernation, the Raiders’ number one fan comes…Out Of The Cellar.”

Speaking of Ratt, on Tuesday night the MS crew ventured over to St. Jerome’s on the Lower East Side for the Smell the Glove party, presented by the sick metal-inspired clothing company Nickels & Dimes, which also doubled as a Ratt CD release party. Shit was insane! Seeing so many kids of the new generation rocking out to Ratt surely would’ve made Stephen Pearcy proud; and hey, how ’bout that free PBR? This week we’re giving away Nickels & Dimes t-shirts to five lucky winners; you can check out the designs here (we’ve got M and L sizes). We really like these shirts a lot because they’re clearly inspired by metal without being over the top… ya know? They’re tasteful.

Just come up with a funny caption to the below photo sent in by (and featuring!) MS reader Yoni. Remember to use a real email address or include it in the comment if you’re using FB Connect.

I like Shadowside by and large because of their singer, Dani Nolden. He almost sounds like a husky-voiced woman. Y’know, like Demi Moore or something. I also like Shadowside because Raphael Mattos plays a (presumably custom-made) guitar with a cow design on it. Because whenever I see metal guitarists with their bad-ass guitars, I’m always like, “Naw, dude, skulls and blood and inverted crosses are so over. Cows gotta represent, son.”

I also like Shadowside’s new video, “Hideaway,” because of the story line. I mean, Dani is really passionate about making her masks, and her mom, like, totally doesn’t want her to, and you can tell her mom is a square because she wears a bandana. Also, something with a calendar. I think it’s a calendar. Okay so I couldn’t follow it exactly, but still. This dude is a good singer.

-AR

Shame on us; recently reunited desert/stoner rock legends Karma to Burn have a new album coming out on April 30th and we haven’t even written about it yet.

Behind the scenes, Appalachian Incantation is seemingly at odds with itself; the record was produced by Scott Reeder (ex-Kyuss) which is a slam dunk, but it’s being released by Napalm Records, definitely a head-scratcher. But who really cares what label is on the spine? The record sounds pretty much like you’d expect — deep, dirty bluesy riff after riff in that laid back desert (Appalachian?) groove. I’d wager that longtime fans are gonna dig it, and it might even gain the band a few new fans who came of age during their hiatus. At the very least, how can you resist bobbing your head to these tasty stoner jams?

Stream “Waiting for the Western World,” “Forty One” and “Forty Five” from the new album on Karma to Burn’s MySpace page. UK fans can see the band live this very week, while U.S. fans can catch them on tour in May with Year Long Disaster [featuring Daniel Davies (son of The Kinks' Dave Davies) on guitar], a band cut from the same stoner rock cloth as KtB.

-VN

I’m on a big death metal kick lately. Old school, brutal, tech-death, progressive death, it don’t matter — if it’s dark, groovy and growly I’m diggin’ it (unless it’s deathcore… but even a track like Suicide Silence’s “Wake Up” can be a winner).

Today’s piece de resistance is a tech-death entry courtesy of the recently re-jiggered Santa Cruz, CA quarter Brain Drill. Brain Drill just released a video for the track “Beyond Bludgeoned” — a Class-A death metal song name if ever there was one — over at Bloody Disgusting. It’s full of lotsa “weedily weedily” shred and beyond bludgeoningly brutal blasts of riffs; it’s exactly what you want Brain Drill to be. The video was filmed in the San Jaoquin valley of California. I just had the opportunity to drive through this area on tour with Revocation and The Binary Code, and literally hundreds of miles of rich orchards of all kinds have been allowed to die en masse due to a bizarre piece of water re-routing legislation. It was like passing through an area completely devoid of life from nuclear fallout. Fucking freaky, but the perfect place for some brutal death metal.

The track comes from their forthcoming album Quantum Catastrophe, which Metal Blade will release on May 11th.

-VN

Even though Justin Foley has provided this site with invaluable contributions — from praising the awesome power of the “taco riff” to ruminating on the satanic majesty of Joe Lieberman — I’m afraid that my conscience compels me to call his band out. Simply, The Austerity Program are spineless cowards, as their latest release Backsliders and Apostates Will Burn proves. How can I make such a possibly defamatory claim, you ask? Let me explain. In 2008, Messieur Foley and unsettlingly photogenic bassist Thad Calabrese released the greatest noise rock album of the 21st century (to date), a snarling Shellackian opus with the oblique title Black Madonna. When I met the band members for this first time last year at a Hydra Head showcase, they looked at me from their lofty perch behind the merch table as if I were some sort of coprophile as I loquaciously expressed my passion for that record. Now, I understand why.

Click to read more…

A lot of media outlets are treating this fall’s Alice in Chains/Deftones/Mastodon tour as rumor since there’s been no official announcement yet, and while I appreciate their caution, let’s be real here, folks – this tour is happening. For one thing, there’s this YouTube teaser clip, which, scrambled though it is, clearly features music by all three bands:

Click to read more…

That’s how long it was before I heard a reference to the Black Tooth Grin, a drink which – in case ya somehow don’t know – was favored (and I believe created) by Dimebag.

I’m (obviously) all for commemorating Dimebag and celebrating his legacy when it’s appropriate. But why does it feel like Vinnie Paul constantly needs to remind us who his brother was? Does anyone in Hellyeah really think we’d forgotten? Maybe I’m not being fair, but this feels exploitative to me. It’s as though the band were aware that no one would care about them if they weren’t Vinnie’s first serious post-Dime project.

Also, the song, entitled “Cowboy Way” sucks as bad as the movie of the same title. That’s not surprising, but just in case you thought this band had maybe gotten better since their first album… the answer is apparently “Nope, they still make shitty music.”

You can listen to the song, below or, if you’re really so inclined, download it for free here.

-AR

Not even in a Lambgoat funny haha / trying to cause a stir kind of way; in a really malicious, dispiriting what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-the-human-race kind of way. This coming from MetalSucks, where our comments are unfortunately so often filled with grade-A assholes.

Take the above video, sent in by MS Maniac Israel Dellinger. I see a girl covering a Necrophogist song and doing a damn fine (but not perfect, sure) job of it. Apparently her fellow YouTubers and likely aspiring guitarists see it differently:

It’s fairly obvious from the caliber of comments, choice of expressions and spelling that we’re dealing with either genuinely uneducated scum, young kids, or both. But still; this girl knows she’s up against a lot here, and she also must know she’s pretty good. Female guitarists are SO rare in metal, and by extension I’m sure that YouTube guitar covers played by females are also vastly out-numbered by those of their male counterparts. Still, she puts herself on the line for the world to see and makes a go at it, and not even with a more mainstream metal song that could be considered a) more girly, b) easier to play… but she chooses to tackle fucking Necrophagist! Props, girlfriend. You keep doing what you do. I’ll be the appalled guy at his keyboard that’s glad YouTube didn’t exist when he was a kid.

-VN