For no good reason other than it’s a slow news week (Three day weekend comin’ up! Whoo-hoo!) and we thought it would be amusing, tomorrow we’re going to have “Be Nice Day” here at MetalSucks.

Basically, the old cliché applies: If you don’t have anything nice say, don’t say anything at all.

Don’t worry. This is a one-day event only. We’ll go right back to being assholes on Friday.

(And, of course, we have no way of making you all be nice in the comments section, so there’s sure to be plenty of dickishness to be found there.)

In the meantime, hope you enjoy us holding our tongues… Well. Basically holding our tongues.

-Axl, Vince, and Everyone at MetalSucks

I’m not even really sure what the heck “Stick Tight” means. My mind immediately goes someplace sexual, but I doubt that’s what the new Terror song is about. (In an accompanying press release, vocalist Scott Vogel says “the lyrics are on the blog,” but I’m not sure which blog he means – it’s ain’t the band’s MySpace blog.)

But, whatever, y’know? Terror are one of the most skilled purveyors of metallicized hardcore out there these days, and this song made me kick a Mansion Monkey straight across the atrium as though he were a football and the fountain were the goal post, so it’s all good as far as I’m concerned.

“Stick Tight” will be on Terror’s new album, Keepers of the Faith, which comes out September 14 on Century Media.

-AR

Few people could be unsure that they’ve ever heard the voice of singer Warrel Dane. A conjurer of dread, anxiety, and doom, Dane doesn’t so much sing as signal an assault, like a bayonet on the musket of his band Nevermore, if you will. In simpler terms, his voice is hard to forget. So it’s fitting that Dane shares a hometown with Queensryche’s Geoff Tate, another skilled operatic vocalist who teamed with a distractingly awesome guitarist. In Dane’s case, it’s seven-stringer Jeff Loomis, now established beyond all doubt as a uber-skilled guitar freak. And though five years has elapsed since the last Nevermore record, Dane and Loomis have kept high profile via a pair of essential solo albums. But it’s now again Nevermore time, and on seventh album The Obsidian Conspiracy, we find a less frenetic and more seasoned Nevermore, one more dependent on composition than tireless riffing. Equally as exciting is Dane’s recent reactivation of Sanctuary, the beloved proto-Nevermore thrash quintet whose two records were produced respectively by future-pop punk guru Howard Benson (Hoobastank, My Chemical Romance) and a presumably wasted Dave Mustaine.

Dane talked to MetalSucks about the exciting new Sanctuary song he’s working on, his planned resumption of voice training, awful McDonald’s food, and my super A&R work on his next side project.

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Ceremony, “Rohnert Park”
After a brief introduction, Ceremony kick off their excellent, genre-defying new record with “Sick,” an aggrieved anthem that unapologetically sneers at the hardcore tradition. Exuding frustration and flecked with bile, the singsong lyrics are less anarchy than heresy. Perhaps the most memorable of these express scene fatigue over the endless worship of Black Flag and Cro Mags, a sentiment that surely will come to define the Bay Area band whether they like it or not. “Sick” hocks a bloody loogie at this tiresome trend and indeed at modern hardcore’s status quo. So how then does Ceremony combat the stagnancy? Not unlike their contemporaries–and dare I say, peers–in Fucked Up and Pissed Jeans, the band funnels its fury into an eclectic mix of seething punk blues fusion (“Open Head,” “M.C.D.F.”) and unconventional slower moments like “The Doldrums (Friendly City)” and the brooding, plodding “Into The Wayside” installments. A willfully subversive and profoundly inspires record, Rohnert Park manages to stay linked to hardcore while being anything but beholden to it.

(4 out of 5 horns)

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YouTube user SoulsideJourneySucks may have a dumb name (it is the only good Darkthrone album, back when they still sounded like early Gorguts), but when it comes to making tutorials on metal subgenres that have no currency despite being incredibly obscure, he really knows his stuff.

I think he meant this video as a joke, but the truth is that it’s pretty accurate. I think you will agree that with this tutorial and a few hours of work, with your mom’s laptop you could be next Cemetery Rapist!

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So, did you love the Rush movie premiere on Saturday? You bet you did! That shit was awesome! I mean, even peppered with commercial breaks of grueling duration on VH1 Classic, Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage made an unmistakable statement: Rush is better than everybody.

Now, we all know about their engaging, evolving sound (over the course of 24 records) and that their concert experience is quite similar to an eye-rolling orgasm; plus, there are the little consequential benefits to Rush fandom, such as a near-total absence of casual fans (whose fleeting enthusiasm endangers a good concert vibe), and of course the fact that only at Rush shows am I the best-looking guy in my section (I pull Rush honeys like whoa!); and finally, we agree that Rush is only beginning to enjoy a critical thaw that is due them for 30+ years, and that Rush-hating mainstream music press is staffed by jelly-spined girl-worshippers who don’t like music so much as fall in proxy self-love with musicians.

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TesseracT are like the Tool of djent. Mysterious, never to be seen, and never releasing albums. The entire guitar dorkdom of the Webernets has been on their collective e-toes for years waiting for a TesseracT album, ANY TesseracT album. When will it come? Why is it taking so long? What the fuck?

Bassist Amos Williams and drummer Jay Postones finally gave some answers in a recent interview with Altsounds.com [via Got-Djent] in which the Brits spoke about what they’ve been up to lately (touring all over Europe), their worldwide success via the Internet, and where plans stand for releasing an album (which has finally been recorded), among other topics. On the ever-lasting album release delay:

Altsounds: Can the fans expect the new album in 2010?

MOS: We’d hope so. We are very close to finalising the details of a contract. It has been hell for us to sit on this album, but we’ve had to make sure that all our hard work does not get thrown away on a contract that was wrong for us in the long term.

It really amazes me how many bands pay no heed to the details of their recording and publishing contracts. Just a little bit of clear thinking, patience, and foresight can be the difference between a career that flounders and is suffocated, and a career that steadily grows and blossoms into a success. We know its frustrating for the fans, but I think they’d prefer to own more than just one TesseracT album, and by being thorough and sticking to our guns, not getting carried away and rushing into a business relationship that can make or break most of our life goals, we may have a better chance at survival.

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If you read this site regularly, you know my opinion about covers. Nine times outta ten, they blow goats. So often, we hear bands perform a cover that either a) sounds so much like the original that you wonder what was even the point of covering the song, or b) sounds like the original only “heavier,” so that wonder what was even the point of covering the song. When bands fail to put their own spin on the material, all the end up with is an inferior copy of the original.

And apparently Mouth of the Architect agree with me: for their latest EP, The Violence Beneath, they recorded a cover Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” that keeps the basic melody line of the original and not much else. And the results are… well, this is one of the best covers I’ve heard in ages. I really, really dig it. And y’know what? As much as I like Peter Gabriel, I actually hate this song — not because it’s bad or anything, but just because it’s become such a cliché that I feel like I never really need to hear it again. (I feel the same way about U2′s “With or Without You,” Biggie’s “Hypnotize,” and pretty much anything by Madonna.) So the fact that I like this so much is an even greater testament to the excellent job MotA have done.

Thanks to Noisecreep for bringing this cover to my attention — The Violence Beneath is out now on Translation Loss, but I haven’t heard it. Guess I should get on that!

-AR

If there’s any band that’s even come close to filling the void left by the late wonky, freaky prog metallers SikTh, that band is CiliCe; they even inexplicably capitalize random letters of their one-word band name. You may remember that CiliCe vocalist Daniël De Jongh left the band in March to fill the void in Textures left by departed singer Eric Kalsbeek, so if you weren’t familiar with CiliCe until then, that should tell you something about the band; they’re really, really good. Kalsbeek was no slouch, and any band that’s compared favorably to SiKth and Textures certainly isn’t full of any slouches either. “Slouch” sounds kind of funny when you repeat it a bunch of times. Say it aloud. Slouch slouch slouch. What the fuck?

Got Djent is reporting that the still vocalist-less CiliCe have released a new video for “Mental Breakdown” from 2009′s excellent Deranged Headtrip album. This strikes me as somewhat of an odd time to release a video — the album having come out almost a year and a half ago — but perhaps the band is just trying to stay in the minds of fans, and at the same time trying to get into the news to aid their vocalist search. It’s a live clips video, but it’s a really well-done one, and since the band has never come to the U.S. (to my knowledge) it’s a cool look into what these dudes look like and play like. Check it out.

-VN

If all the rumors are to be believed, Jonah Hex — both the box office mega-flop and Mastodon’s accompanying score — was pretty much (ahem!) hexed from the get-go. Massive re-shoots took place, and original composer/Mastocollaborator John Powell left the project, taking with him what Brent Hinds has called “some of the best shit I’ve ever written in my life.” His replacement, Marco Beltrami, apparently wanted something different outta the Mastodudes, and now we don’t get to hear any of that great shit.

Of course, none of this information is really relevant to a review of Mastodon/Jonah Hex EP. But I feel like making excuses — it’s rare that a band I so admire releases a product I care so little about. This EP is six songs (really four songs plus two “alternate versions” of the same material) clocking in at a little more than a half an hour, but you’ll probably be asleep well before the first track ends.

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According to the ol’ Wikipedia, musth is “periodic condition in bull elephants, characterized by highly aggressive behavior, accompanied by a large rise in reproductive hormones - testosterone levels in an elephant in musth can be as much as 60 times greater than in the same elephant at other times.” Based on that description, you’d expect a band of the same name to be super-aggressive, right?

Wrong, I guess. Reader Bjørn-Are Johansen e-mailed us this morning to insist we check out “Fish & Ships,” a video by Norway’s self-proclaimed “schizometallers,” Musth, and the band sounds more like Mr. Bungle than Cattle Decapitation. Not that that’s a bad thing… and not that Musth are as brilliant as Mr. Bungle… in fact, as much as I love Mr. Bungle, this is really just not my cup of tea. But at least I don’t feel like I’ve heard this song a thousand times before, or, for that matter, have seen a million variations on this same video.

Check out Musth for yourselves and then let Bjørn have it in the comments section.

-AR

Jon Fine’s best known band was Bitch Magnet, a (usually) three piece active from the late 80s to the early 90s. Though hardly a metal outfit, Fine was a vocal apostle of heavy music in the independent circles the band traveled in, deeply knowledgeable and conversant in obscure, loud shit going back to the early 70s (and earlier). I met Jon at a number of shows in NYC and read a bunch of his enthusiastic and thoughtful posts on the now-dead Chugchanga mailing list and figured he’d have an opinion or twelve on this. Jon also played in Vineland, Coptic Light and even did some time in Don Caballero.
These days Jon pays rent as a media analyst. You can find him on Mediabistro, CNBC and Twitter (where he has about eleven times as many followers as Gary Suarez).

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Congrats to MS Suckalos Patrick Alberts, Gilby Ellis, and Andrea McCann — they each correctly identified last week’s logo as belonging to the band Nachzehrer. For their troubles, they each win an awesome prize pack from Minnesota’s black metal masters, Wolvhammer, which includes a copy of their new album, Black Marketeers of WWIII, plus assorted pins n’ stickers! Enjoy that shit, you guys and girl!

This week we have a really awesome prize to giveaway, courtesy the fine folks at Eagle Rock Entertainment: a copy of the Blu-Ray disc of Classic Albums: Black Sabbath, Paranoid. This 97 minute documentary chronicles the making of this classic album and features interviews with all four original members of Black Sabbath, and the engineer behind the record, plus demonstrations, archive videos, and feature cuts from timeless epics such as “War Pigs,” “Iron Man,” and the title track, plus more than forty minutes of bonus features. If you’re a Sabbath fan — and who isn’t? — then this exhaustive disc is for you. Check out a clip after the jump. You can buy a regular DVD copy here, a Blu-Ray copy here, or just enter the contest to try and win one!

All you gots 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. ALL ENTRIES WITHOUT AN ADDRESS WILL BE DISQUALIFIED. From everyone who gets it right, we’ll randomly select one winner and announce his or her name next week.

Big ups to reader Berto Ortiz for suggesting this week’s logo…

And here’s that clip from the documentary:

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The big question since Paul Gray died last month has been, “Will Slipknot go on without him?” On the one hand a member passing away is obviously a huge emotional trauma for a band to have to cope with, and Gray was, at least as I’ve always heard it, a key songwriter for the group; on the other hand, bands persevere in the face of tragedy all the time, and there’s already another potential bass player in the band (and I suspect they could make do without a second percussionist/third drummer/whatever) if they didn’t want to bring someone new into the fold.

But – no shocks here – Jim Root, guitarist and guy who gets to sleep with Cristina Scabbia, says the band hasn’t even discussed it yet. From an interview posted on the official Sonisphere site:

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I know that Vince just jocked the new Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza album, Danza III: The Series of Unfortunate Events, yesterday. But longtime MetalSucks Maniac Ceth Carter sent us a link to the below video of Josh Travis tracking guitars for the record, and since a) it’s a really cool video that shows off what an awesome guitar player Travis is, and b) Danza III is one of my favorite albums of the year so far, it seemed worth mentioning again. I mean, c’mon… doesn’t this make you wanna hear the record? IT’S SO FUCKING GOOD!!!

Danza Trois comes out July 8 on Blackmarket Activities.

-AR

I usually try not to judge bands by their names. Even if a name is the most cliché thing I’ve ever heard (The Red Death, Within the Ruins, etc.), the bands that have those names can still sometimes manage to serve up some quality metal. With Chambers, my judgment ended up being a bit different. Chambers isn’t necessarily a BAD name… it just seems too simple, and honestly, a bit commonplace and lacking “zazz.” Now, I don’t really think that Chambers’ name affected how I feel about their music in a negative way. But it sure didn’t make me feel optimistic or confident about their musical style.

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Last week I posted a pretty awful mash-up of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” and some random, generic metal riff, which, to my surprise, a lot of you actually seemed to dig. So I’ll be curious to see what you think of “Going Through Changes” a new Eminem track that samples – duh – Black Sabbath’s “Changes.”

Now, as I’ve said, I don’t really have anything against Eminem, and I actually think this song is okay… although I honestly find the Ozzy vocals to be kind of out of place. More successful, I think, was the track “Sing for the Moment,” which sampled Aerosmith’s “Dream On”…

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Adam Muirhead sent us this video of Lux Drummerette — I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume that’s a stage name — who is the drummer for California’s Sacred Storm. Who, as far as I can tell, are by no means a great band.

But give Lux credit. Playing this shit in high heels is rough, man!

-AR

Anyone who reads this site knows well our unabashed fandom of John Bush as the pre-eminent singer of Anthrax (Anso DF excepted… that assclown!). And, unless you’ve skipped over them (likely), that I’ll rant about the environment from time to time. But combine the two? Well shit, then we’re getting into Joe-jira territory. Which is precisely the level to which this latest video of John Bush talking being green elevates my opinion of the man.

This is no David Draiman whining about our world’s dependence on oil while living in a huge California mansion with expensive, gas-guzzling cars and a lavish back yard. This is no Korn boycotting BP to appear green, despite it being a complete bullshit PR tactic. This is the real deal. Saving unused shower water to water your plants? Holy shit, that’s brilliant. That’s exactly what I’m talking about when I say we all need to seriously re-think the way we use our resources. I love you, John Bush.

Watch the brief clip below. Armored Saint’s La Raza is out now on Metal Blade.

-VN

Somewhat embarrassingly I’ve had Christhammer, the latest by Louisville, KY outfit Stonecutters, on my desk for probably about a year now. I’ve been meaning to write about it and the complex stoney / progressive / psychedelic metal grooves contained therein all this time but… I was too busy holding back the electric car. Sorry dudes. But I owe it to you to finally deliver, because Christhammer is one hell of a record certainly deserving of the attention of the MS faithful.

Seeing as MetalSucks is developing an outpost in Eastern Kentucky I’m somewhat fascinated with the metal scene there. And though the MS Kentucky Korner is a good 2.5 hours from Louisville, I’d love to see Stonecutters and their Simpsons-loving riffs when I’m down there some day. Stonecutters have a few gigs lined up in Central Kentucky, so if you live nearby go check ‘em out and let me know how they are live. In the meantime, jam with a few tracks from Christhammer on their MySpace page.

-VN