It’s Alive’s clip for “Pieces,” which debuted today on Noisecreep, is on the second worst clip I’ve watched today . This is only by virtue of the fact that all penises survive the video intact, and that’s only by virtue of the fact that no one in the video actually has a penis. They did, however, have a wind machine, in order to ensure that vocalist Zach Webb gets maximum flowing locksitude. So they’ve got that going for them.

Also, is it just me, or could Webb play Marq Torien in a Bullet Boys biopic?

-AR

Vince is really the Mansion’s resident fan of The Showdown, but Vince isn’t here today (all his posts were written in advance of his day out of the office), so I guess it’s up to me to tell you that the band is streaming a new song, “Blood in the Gears,” here. I have no way of knowing what Vince would make of it, but speaking for myself, well, it doesn’t really do anything for me. Then again, I’ve never really be a huge fan of this band, so I’m not really the target audience.

Hopefully Vince will have something more intelligent to say about the song upon his return, but in the meantime, you can check out the track and weigh in with your thoughts below. It’s the title song from the band’s forthcoming offering, which comes out August 24 on Solid State Records.

-AR

Before I read about it on Reign in Blonde today, it had somehow escaped my attention that Jucifer are touring this June. And this information is key; even if the band’s latest album, Throned in Blood, is my least favorite of their releases thus far, I’m still dying to check this band out live – I’ve blown all of my previous chances to do so.

Plus, it’s so very rare that Gary Suarez and I get to attend one of the same shows, since only occasionally do we actually agree on anything (e.g., Black Cobra are boring as fuck live.). But Jucifer will bring us together to hold hands and live with two hearts beating as one! They’re like Wyld Stallions that way.

Get a complete Jucifer tour itinerary here.

-AR

I know this really has nothing to do with metal, but we all enjoyed that video of the so-called “teen werewolves” that Vince posted awhile back so much that when I saw this follow-up on Topless Robot, I just had to watch it; and, upon seeing this kid cry because Josh won’t stop making fun of him (BTW, who the fuck is Josh?), well, I just knew I had to share it. Because I would make fun of this kid, too. ‘Cause he dresses weird, and he’s a sissy cry baby face.

And when you’re finally done laughing at this and you’ve caught your breath and cleared the tears from your eyes, can I please have three cheers for the only teen wolves really worth caring about?

Click to read more…

My post about Kylesa the other day seemed to get a lot of folks riled up. Which is great, because this is MetalSucks and we love getting folks riled up!

But I realize that I made a mistake by including the word “hipster” in the headline, because at least half the commenters who defended Kylesa latched onto that word and used it to characterize my dislike of the band. While it so happens that a lot of folks who don’t listen to much metal do seem to like Kylesa (and that some people might call these folks “hipsters”), that’s not a reason for me not to like the band. I don’t like them because of the reasons I enumerated in the 5+ paragraphs that made up the body of the article. “Hipster” or non-hipster… I couldn’t give a fuck who Kylesa’s fans are. I don’t like ‘em ’cause I don’t like ‘em, and I spent a good amount of time formulating an argument based on the actual music. So if you disagree with me and you love Kylesa, great for you and please feel free to tell the world why, but kindly pay attention to the article that I wrote and the points therein instead of latching onto one word which, admittedly, probably isn’t even accurate.

That said — and I made a point to close the other article this way, which I’ll do again right here — I did see some artistic growth between Kylesa’s prior album and the most recent one, and I’ll still give the new one a shot when it comes out. But based on what I’ve seen and heard of this band up until now I have not enjoyed their music. And that’s that.

-VN

It seems like there isn’t a lot of variation during the course of the new Zoroaster song, “Black Hole,” – even when the song does change riffs at the 2:28 mark, well, it then proceeds to stick with that riff for the remainder of the song. And intellectually I know that should be a real problem, but I kinda like the song anyway. It gets me moving. I dunno. Maybe it’s all the whiskey I’ve been drinking this morning.

Zoroaster’s new album, Matador, comes out July 13 as part of E1′s great metal experiment.

-AR

The slogan on the MySpace page for Relapse’s latest sign, Richmond’s Cough, reads “Get to drinkin’,” but I would have assumed these dudes were big smokers, not big drinkers. Granted, I have no actual basis for this accusation, but let’s look at the facts:

• I’d wager that more time is spent coughing from smoking than from drinking, even if the strength of certain drinks might induce a quick clearing of the throat.
• The band’s music is slower than Rue McClanahan.
• This truly righteous poster:

Not only did that clearly come from the mind of some stoned nerd, but the band’s name is ensconced in a cloud of smoke. I mean, come ON!

ANYWAY, none of this is really relevant. The band seems pretty cool, and drunk or high, I’d be curious to check them out live – I bet they’re as heavy as a post-Thanksgiving dinner dump. They’re working on a new full-legnth, Ritual Abuse, with the great Sanford Parker, which Relapse expects to release in the fall. It seems highly unlikely that it won’t at least be an interesting listen. Check out Cough here.

-AR

That might be a misleading headline, and I apologize if you came here thinking you were gonna see news of live dates for How to Destroy Angels. Actually, just the opposite – The PRP reports that during a recent online fan Q&A, HTDA  announced that they “have no plans to tour in the immediate future and will instead be focusing on their full-length effort which is expected out early next year.”

Which is news that I’m actually okay with. For one thing, it doesn’t say they’ll never tour – just not right now. For another thing, it means they’re working on new music, and even though their EP just came out this week, I could certainly stand to hear even more. And, finally, there’s the fact that the idea of a HTDA live show just doesn’t really get me that excited. Not that I don’t like them – I obviously do – but other than Trent’s usual sweet live light show, I can’t really see this group being all that exciting in a concert setting. It’s obviously very technology-driven music, and in the past I’ve found shows where most or all of the people on stage are playing synths and computers to get kinda tedious after awhile. Of course, I would go see HTDA live and hope I was completely wrong about that – and those aforementioned Trent light shows are always 110% kick-ass – I’m just saying, if I don’t attend a HTDA concert before 2011 or whenever, I’m not gonna bang my head against the wall.

The above photo is from the shoot for the video of “The Space in Between,” by the way, and you can check out more here.

-AR

About two hours before I was scheduled to interview The Haunted’s Peter Dolving at the 2009 incarnation of New England Metal & Hardcore Fest, Van Arseface gave me a pot cookie. The homemade kind that’s loaded with green oily goodness and stinks up the entire room. I ate one. And then I pulled the classic “this isn’t working, let me eat another” move after half an hour… and so I ate another. And thirty minutes after that I was flying. FLYING. The kind of flying you experience only from eating too many pot-infused desserts, where your brain turns to mush and you feel it actually disconnect from your body. And I had to somehow keep it together to interview Dolving, the man I was most looking forward to speaking to at the whole festival, in less than an hour. Yikers.

Click to read more…

As part of our ongoing coverage of the Scion No Label Needed series, today we’ve got the latest video documenting the music industry crash-course bestowed upon much-deserved contest winners Iron Thrones. In this installment, Iron Thrones drummer Pete Clarke lays down drum tracks with Machine Shop producer Will Putney behind the boards.

Remember in Some Kind of Monster when Lars bitches about having to play his drums for too long? Well, in this video, Pete says he’s gonna have to spend nine hours playing to meet the day’s recording schedule. If only aging rock stars could hold onto that youthful joie de vivre, maybe we’d be able to avoid stuff like Death Craptastic.

Stay tuned for continuing video updates from Metal Injection.

-AR

Well, it’s ten o’clock in the morning. Too early for graphic images of a woman cutting off a man’s penis?

Oops. I’m sure I’m supposed to type “SPOILER ALERT” or something before I tell you what happens in the video for “Terror Starts at Home” (after the jump), but who gives a shit? Beneath the Sky are so generic that I didn’t even remember that I’ve written about them before until MS Maniac Zakk (not that one) reminded me. Which is to say, they need to make a video like this to get attention. (And, hey, look, it’s working!) If you had asked anyone I know about Beneath the Sky twenty-four hours ago, they all would have said “Who?” If you ask them now, they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, that band with the video where the dude gets Bobbitted.” Beneath the Sky aren’t gonna be remembered for their music and they don’t have a Kristen Randall or Maria Brink in the band, so what other options do they have?

Of course, the band or their handlers or whomever was the mastermind behind this video couldn’t even think of an original way to be “shocking” — the clip is a blatant rip-off of David Slade’s 2005 thriller, Hard Candy. In that movie, a girl dressed like a modern day Little Red Riding Hood takes revenge against a kiddie rapist by tying him down to castrate him; in this video, a girl dressed like a modern day Little Red Riding Hood takes revenge against a kiddie rapist by tying him down to cut his dick off. HOW INNOVATIVE! I didn’t even think that Hard Candy was that good of a movie, but at least a) it was suggestive instead of graphic, and being suggestive is almost always the scarier option since nothing you can show on-screen will ever be as upsetting as what your mind imagines, and b) it had a plot twist, whereas here she just cuts his dick off and the video ends.

And now here’s the Beneath the Sky video. In case everything I’ve written up until this point hasn’t made it clear, IT HAS VERY GRAPHIC IMAGES OF A MAN’S PENIS BEING SEVERED WITH A KNIFE. I think it looks pretty silly and fake, but I know some people have been really upset by it, so consider yourself warned.

Click to read more…

Last week’s photo caption contest was funny ’cause… well, look at that fuckin’ picture. It’s hilarious! No caption even needed.

Here are the five winners of The Haunted’s Road Kill DVD:

• Double D: “The new nationwide PSA for ‘Vitamin D Awareness Week’.”
• Seer: “While most vampires suck your blood, these ones just suck period.”
• Carlos Ramirez (yes, that one): “I know L.A. Guns have had some ridiculous lineup issues over the years, but this takes the cake. There are actually NO original members left in the band now!”
• Chris: “A Flock Of Shemales.”
• Devon Czekaj: “‘”Not even a nutritionist can help these guys.’ – Glenn Danzig”

This week we’re giving away one copy of the At The Gates DVD set The Flames of the End provided by our friends at Earache Records. It’s three DVDs full of At the Gates goods: a documentary covering the band’s entire career and their recent reunion, a full live performance filmed at Wacken 2008, and a bunch of live material from the vaults (including some from The Wetlands in NYC in ’96… yowza!). All you have to do is come up with a funny caption to the below photo, graciously provided to us by America’s youth. (Remember, if you’re using FB Connect to login, include an email address with your comment so we can contact the winner).

So much good metal is coming out this Tuesday, June 8, that’s incredibly overwhelming: Season of Mist is releasing Watain’s Lawless Darkness (which we’re streaming here), Science of Silence is releasing a Monolith/Voyager split (which we’re streaming here), and Century is releasing Nachtmystium’s Addicts (we’re giving away the title track here) AND Nevermore’s The Obsidian Conspiracy. And THEY’RE ALL GOOD. Sheesh. (Is, like, Papa Roach or someone also putting out an album on Tuesday? Surely there must be something horrific happening to counterbalance all the awesomeness.)

There have already been opportunities to hear some new Nevermore – we’re giving away the title track here, and the band is streaming the song “Without Morals” here – but now there’s another! Revolver is streaming the track “She Comes in Colors” here. I think I’m just about outta ways to tell you how much we love this record and I don’t wanna make any off-color jokes about the use of the phrase “she comes,” so I’m just gonna tell you to stop reading this now and go listen. It’s EPIC.

-AR

I whole-heartedly echo Axl’s sentiment that there is way too fucking much good music coming out right now, “an annoying over-abundance” if you will. How am I supposed to listen to it all? And ’cause Axl and I are linked at the hip, I too have not yet had a chance to sit down with Coliseum’s latest, House With a Curse, which comes out on June 22nd via Temporary Residence.

Stereogum premiered the ripping track “Blind in One Eye” a few weeks back, and now the band are offering a free download of “Everything to Everyone” on SendSpace [via Metal Insider]. So far, they’re two for two; both songs are doozies. Coliseum’s brand of raw punk meets blues rawk and metal isn’t necessarily unique — bands like Doomriders, Scissorfight, Kvelertak and Chambers come to mind — but they’re damn good at it, and listening to these tracks you get the sense that they mean it.

Download “Everything to Everyone” here, and pick up House With a Curse when it comes out on June 22nd.

-VN

If you ever sit through the closing credits of a film (and I don’t really know why you would, but let’s pretend you worked on it and you wanna see your name at the end, or that the movie is Iron Man 2 and there’s a commercial for Thor after the credits or something), you might notice the ASPCA’s logo, and some little message in the fine print about how no animals were harmed during the making of the film. And there has to be someone from the ASPCA on-set to make sure that’s true; if the filmmakers are using any animals, they need to be supervised so the animals aren’t abused. Likewise, if you’re using guns or pyro, there is probably some kind of official on-set to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Of course, there’s no one on-set to make sure that stupid creative decisions don’t get made, but I’d like to suggest that there should be, and this person should also be required to be on-hand for music video shoots. For if such a job existed, then someone might tell any band that is considering wearing matching outfits not to, and might tell any band that tries to use choreographed moves and isn’t Judas Priest that that’s not okay, either.

Because while I don’t think anyonce can save Canada’s Blind Witness from being shitty and generic (unless they, like, hire someone cool to start writing all their songs for them), surely someone could have saved them from the embarrassment that is this video.

Blind Witness’ latest, Nightmare on Providence St., is out now on Mediaskare.

-AR

Darkthrone. Immortal. Mayhem. These are bands that are part of the black metal lexicon spoken by every fork-tongued and cloven-hoofed miscreant in the scene.

Sonic Youth? Interpol? Wax Trax Records? Not so much.

It’s a crystalline look into the mind of Blake Judd, the figurehead of the behemoth known as Nachtmystium, the black-metal rooted Chicago band that morphs it’s shape with every release. On the heels of their much lauded and much respected fan-favorite 2008 LP, Assassins: Black Meddle Part I, the band is prepping a second LP that is bound to confound the black metal purists and tip the scales in their favor for best-of year lists. Enter Addicts: Black Meddle Part 2, due June 8 via Century Media.

In between crafting his Nachtmystium material, Blake has stayed active with Twilight, a black metal supergroup of sorts that features multiple notables in the heavy music scene: N. Imperial (Kreig), Wrest (a.k.a. “Leviathan,” Lurker of Chalice), Aaron Turner (Isis), Sanford Parker (Minsk), and Stavros Giannopoulos (The Atlas Moth). The hydra-headed (pun!) beast recently released their second LP, Monument To Time End, via Southern Lord.

With Addicts on deck and the ravenous beast Twilight already in the wild, I sat down for a chat with Blake Judd himself to discuss the new Nachtmystium LP, Monument To Time End, his label Battle Kommand, hitting the road (they play NYC on June 12th), and black metal in 2010.

Click to read more…

Our friend Amy Sciarretto from Noisecreep reports that Birmingham City University (in England, not Alabama) is naming an award after everyone’s favorite heavy metal grandpa: the Ozzy Osbourne Development Award “will be bestowed upon the student that makes the most significant progress on their degree in the Media and Communication/Music Industry degree.” I assume that the Osbourne family donated a nice chunk of change to get the award named after him, but this doesn’t really make that much sense to me. For one thing, I don’t know if Ozzy has really shown any musical development in, oh, the last hundred years or so, and as much as I admire a lot of his past work, you’ll never convince me that the bulk of the credit doesn’t lie with his collaborators – especially given that the dude doesn’t actually play an instrument. And beyond that, fuck has Ozzy got to do with media and communication? If we’re talking about his work with various reality shows and what have you, well, then, shouldn’t the award be named after Sharon, since we have her to thank for Ozzy’s wonderful non-music endeavors.

But whatever. This piece of news got me thinking: what other awards could we name after heavy metal musicians? And so, after the jump, my suggestions for new university kudos monikered in honor of various other members of the heavy metal community.

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I don’t think that the below video, sent to us by reader “boboniboni boboniboni,” is quite as funny as the one from yesterday… but it’s still pretty freakin’ funny.

-AR

A few weeks ago I asked you guys for help with naming a new band I started with my good pals in National Sunday Law, and the response was literally overwhelming. Thanks so much to everyone who replied! Some were good, some were hilariously bad, and some were just hilarious. We ended up debating for another month, and decided on the name Graviton (not Gravitron, as I just discovered MS had reported (smoke weed)) [We've since fixed it! Sorry.  -Ed.], which was inspired by MS reader Nate’s suggestion of Hadron. Thanks for turning us onto string theory as a band theme, Nate! Email me at sachadunable [at] gmail [dot] com with your address and I’ll be sure to send you all kinds of crap.

Honorable mention should definitely go to reader Dave B, who provided such gems as Hella Smelly Belly, GuhGuhGuts, Sweatpants Surprise, and Don’t Injure Car Keys (D.I.C.K.). I don’t know you Dave, but I know we’d get along. Send me your address for some crap as well.

Anyhow, we’ve posted two full Graviton songs for you to check out on our Myspace, Bandcamp, Twitter, and if you’re too lazy to open a new window and require colorful moving pictures along with your music, Youtube:

Click to read more…

The Monolith/Voyager split we’ve been talking about for weeks — the very first release by new label Science of Silence Records — comes out on June 8th, less than a week from now. But we’re offering you the opportunity to stream the entire thing, which includes two monolithic songs by Monolith and four epic voyages by Voyager, today. And you best not be disappointed.

The split is a limited edition run of just 500 copies on clear vinyl, available exclusively at The Omega Order. Each purchase of the vinyl will receive a FREE digital download of the album as well. The release will also be available on June 8th via iTunes, eMusic, Amazon MP3, and all your other favorite download stores. All digital downloads features a bonus track not on the vinyl.

We hope you enjoy it… because we do.

[this promotion has ended]