Everyone’s been buzzing about Portal’s opening performance for Gorguts last week in Brooklyn. Axl waxed ecstatic the day after the show, and since then the cats at Metal Injection, Crustcake and Reign in Blonde have all weighed in (Cosmo Lee wasn’t there, but he basically wrote the book on American journalists covering Portal so he gets a pass).

Now it’s my turn.

Yes, Portal were good. Very good. Yes, Portal were scary. Yes, they were quite entertaining and a spectacle to watch. But they need some work.

Click to read more…

Digging for duds in the formidable Iron Maiden catalogue is kinda like bitching about the heat at a beach picnic: It makes you seem like an ungrateful, silly jerk-off. But this fact doesn’t make it any less true that by 1990′s No Prayer For The Dying, Maiden was sounding a little tired, uninspired, and probably worst of all, short of patience. The entire album plays like the work of a budget bin Iron Maiden tribute band, rife with shortcuts and pressboard production. Even the usually stellar cover art looks cheap!

But this is old news, and the stunningly attractive and informed MetalSucks readership really doesn’t require a reminder that Maiden’s best record (the flawless, ass-tight Seventh Son rules your world – don’t deny it) was followed by a contender for their worst. Instead, I want to proudly defend this clunker, and I’ll start by saying that I still wear an expression of hurt surprise when NP4tD is described as “an out-and-out shitturd.” That is simply not true. Not true at all, I say!

Click to read more…

Because we’ve gotten a bunch of e-mails that are all like, “Why don’t you make fun of Korn’s ‘Oildale’ video?!?”

And we aim to please (well, not really, but I think I’m supposed to say that). But the thing is, there isn’t actually much to make fun of. Sure, the song is lousy, but we’ve said that already. And the video is pretty dumb, with lots of lowest common denominator “symbolism” that I guess is supposed to be “profound” (the kid is riding his bike, being chased by a big scary dog, approaching a dead end clearly marked by a sign that reads “Dead End,” just in case you don’t understand), but…

Oh, wait. I guess I did just kinda make fun of it. Okay. Well, hope that at least sorta-kinda made some of you happy.

Meanwhile, much to my amazement and amusement, some of you are still arguing about my Korn III listening party report. It’s enough to make me wanna review Gold Cobra!

-AR

Enthroned haven’t toured the U.S. in nine years, and I didn’t see them then because nine years ago I wasn’t listening to any black metal, my attitude being that bands that wore corpse paint were not to be taken seriously. The ensuing decade has taught me much about life, however, including these facts: it is better to have loved and lost than never loved at all, you shouldn’t go swimming for at least half an hour after you eat, always wear clean underwear in case you have to go to the ER ’cause you don’t want the doctor to see your dirty shorts, and corpse paint is not simply a gimmick used by European nerds to make themselves seem scary to other nerds, but, rather, is… actually, yeah. I guess corpse paint pretty much is a gimmick used by European nerds to make themselves seem scary to other nerds. But I’m much more tolerant of it now, and recognize that a lot of these bands are really talented.

My point simply being that maybe this time I’ll see Enthroned when they come to town! Maybe I’ll even wear corpse paint to the show. I mean, I’m not gonna do that ’cause I have very sensitive skin and the make-up would most likely make me break out. But I might go to the show.

Get dates here.

-AR

Exodus are hitting the road for a North American headlining tour this August, and that’s all well and good ’cause Exodus are swell and are one of those veteran bands currently enjoying a renaissance of sorts. That being said, I do think the support acts could be stronger -

• Malevolent Creation – Of course this is a veteran band that has a large fan base of their own, and the fact that Erik Rutan produced their new album means I’ll be obligated to check it out. But they’re never gonna live down that whole “The guitar player claims he shot a robber in the face and was rewared with a lifetime supply of chocolate milk but then it turns out he was completely lying” thing. Just sayin’.
• Holy Grail – Strike me as a pretty typical re-thrash band. Sure, they’ve got awesome Ed Repka cover art, but so what?
• Bonded by Blood – This is what it’s come to: Exodus touring with a young band named after an Exodus album. The mind boggles.

Still, this tour might very well be worth hitting up just to see Exodus. And at least there won’t be any karate kicking in the pit.

Get dates after the jump.

Click to read more…

Yesterday we wrote about Dio’s public memorial service, which took place this past Sunday; unfortunately, since no one from MetalSucks was actually in the area and able to attend, all of our info was second-hand. But those magnificent bastards at Metal Injection sent the great Johnny Orlando Jr. to cover the event and have filed the below exclusive report.

Mostly it’s interviews with Dio fans who are, generally speaking, somber and sincere if not necessarily hyper-articulate (see the quote in our headline), but the best parts come towards the end – first when Mr. Orlando Jr. interviews one of the protesters that was pictured in our article yesterday and actually gets him to participate in duet of a song I won’t spoil for you, and then when he interviews Dio’s biggest fan, who… well, just watch, I promise it’s totally worth it:

By the way, I estimated that there were 75 protestors at the event, a number I pulled directly from my anus; those of you who were there say it was far, far less. Needless to say, that information makes me very happy, so thank you for sharing. How far less, though? Did anyone even see Fred Phelps there? The fact that Johnny interviewed a guy who was also photographed by the AP makes me think there really must have been, like five or ten protestors. Either that, or this dude is just an attention whore, and will be joining Dio in Hell just as soon as his God can send him there. Vanity is a sin, dude!

-AR

If you read MetalSucks regularly you know we’re huge fans of Cracked.com. But they’ve gone and made this list of “The 7 Most Impossible Rock Stars to Deal With,” and while every rock star on the list is probably a massive dick, there is a major, major oversight on the list.

See, Ozzy and Nikki Sixx both made the list, but did so based on past exploits – e.g., peeing on the Alamo, dying of an overdose, being revived, and promptly going home to shoot-up again, etc. And, yeah. That’s some crazy shit that those guys did, and a big, big part of their respective legends. (There’s no mention of the infamous “Ozzy licked up Nikki’s pee” incident, even though it was a glorious moment in time when these two nutcases’ paths intersected.)

But at this point, I doubt that either of these dudes are quite the handful they once were.

Click to read more…

Technical sludge/doom outfit National Sunday Law — who The Blogronaut name-checked last year and whose free 4-song EP we featured here just this past April — are calling it quits. Cerebral Metalhead is reporting that jack-of-all-trades Darin Tambascio is moving back to his home state of Maryland:

After playing over 50 shows with some of our favorite bands (Intronaut, Mouth of the Architect, Irepress, Behold…The Arctopus, Dysrhythmia, Exhausted Prayer, Solar Wimp, Hurt Model, Fight Amp and so many more), we are taking a break from National Sunday Law. Due to a dire financial situation and ongoing employment issues, Darin will be moving back to his home state of Maryland in late June. Therefore, the band will be on an indefinite hiatus after two more shows.

Click to read more…

Reader Rich H. (no, not that Rich H.) sent us the below video, which suggests that “The Lotus Eater” from Opeth’s 2008 opus, Watershed, is a rip-off of Immortal’s “Cryptic Winterstorms,” from 1992′s Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism.

Now, I fucking LOVE Opeth, so I hate to say negative about them… but it’s hard not to hear the similarities between the two riffs. It’s also hard to imagine that Mikael Akerfeldt hasn’t heard Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism. So… make of this what you will, I guess.

So, what does everyone think? Weigh in below.

-AR

To celebrate the release of Sick of it All’s awesome new album, Based on a True Story, we asked SOIA vocalist Lou Koller to compile the definitive list of quintessential hardcore albums. Luckily for us and all of you, he agreed! So we’ve been running one entry a day from Lou’s list of the top-ten (+1) hardcore records of all time for the past couple of weeks. Now here’s Lou’s final entry…

Click to read more…

Alright, so this really has nothing to do with metal, but reader “LeglessMoof” sent us the link, and it’s just so fucking funny… Just watch:

-AR

Suckalo “Wzh” sent us a very impassioned and articulate e-mail about Poland’s Drown My Day, who he called “some new breed of Polish death metal (or technical deathcore, progressive vegetarian grindcore or whatever – you know),” and described them as sounding “a a bit like Despised Icon, with a bit djenty Meshuggah style here and there.”

Well, with a pitch like that, how could I not check out the band?

Unfortunately, when I made my way over to DMD’s MySpace page, I almost immediately saw this picture of the singer wearing a straight-brim baseball cap and a Parkway Drive shirt:

And I know it’s wrong to judge a book by its cover, and maybe I could forgive the hat, or even the shirt, but the hat and the shirt? I think I can be excused for thinking, “If this band is good, then Kerry King is my grandmother.”

And Kerry King ain’t my grandmother.

So, yeah. This is pretty generic stuff. Still, Wzh’s e-mail made me laugh, so check out Drown My Day and make up your own mind.

-AR

If I needed music to represent the act of breaking a glass bottle and using its jagged edges to repeatedly stab someone in the throat, I might very well point towards Heaven Shall Burn as that aural example. Oh, sure, guitarist/co-producer Maik Weichert says the band isn’t advocating violence in their music, but how can you listen to HSB and not wanna kill every other living entity in the room? It’s almost impossible!

And the music band’s latest, Invictus, will do little to quell your bloodlust.(And while we’re on the topic, we’re still giving away an mp3 of the song “Buried in Forgotten Grounds” off of that album.) It was released by Century last week in Europe, and comes out June 8 in North America – so this seemed like an ideal time to shoot Weichert a few questions via e-mail. After the jump, get his thoughts on the thematic connections between Invictus and the other entries in HSB’s Iconoclast series, why he prefers not to work with an outside producer, his thoughts on being a vegan, violent political uprising, Asterix & Obelix vs. The Simpsons, and more.

Click to read more…

A compilation that combines my love of metal with my love of bodacious, curvy babes? Count me in! A press release that just landed in the MS inbox proclaims:

Whole Lotta Love will feature all-new recordings of popular songs praising the fuller female figure, originally made famous by some of the biggest names in rock and pop music. These anthems to abundance will be performed by renowned rock & rollers from yesterday and today, along with a select few rising stars. In direct opposition to the “no fat chicks” mantra espoused by some, Whole Lotta Love will be a star-studded celebration of large and lovely ladies.

Click to read more…

Three songs through my first listen of The Blackest Tears, the new album from the Jamey Jasta / Kirk Windstein collaboration Kingdom of Sorrow, MySpace greeted me with an advertisement for Dove GoFresh moisturizer. Fucking metal! Dove sure knows their audience well.

With less than a week to go until the album release, Kingdom of Sorrow are streaming The Blackest Tears in its entirety on their MySpace page. So far I’d say it definitely delivers on Windstein’s promise of  being “literally heavier than pre-op Johnny Popper bashing the living you-know-what out of Carnie Wilson in a tub of lard,” and I like it more than I did self-titled debut. In an emergency MS Mansion summit called the other day to discuss the abominable condition of the Monkey Playhouse, Gary Suarez remarked that he didn’t like this record as much as the debut because he thought it didn’t have as many good hooks. Taste is a funny thing, because I think this record’s actually got better hooks than the first. But that’s why we keep Señor Suarez around; we say tom-AY-to, he says tom-AH-to.

The Blackest Tears drops June 8th on Relapse Records. Stream it all for free right here.

-VN

Thou’s third full length, Summit, starts out in the last possible way one would think it would: when the drums kick in after about thirty seconds of a lonely arpeggio, they’re blastbeats. The strangest part isn’t so much their presence, but the way they absolutely fit in, shaping thunderous droning chords into something immensely palatable. This theme follows for the rest of the song (“By Endurance We Conquer”) and the album itself. Even when Thou get almost impenetrably slow, there’s some meat there, be it in the form of an evocative riff, vocalist Bryan Funck’s dragged-slowly-across-the-coals vocals, or simply what would be for most bands a beautiful moment stretched to its logical breaking point, making for an incredibly unpleasant result. Bad doom metal makes you wonder if there’s a greater purpose or if it’s just a bunch of unwashed dudes standing in front of their amps, stonedly laughing at the rumbling gently shaking the room; Thou avert this masterfully. They test you over the course of Summit, but there’s always something there.

Click to read more…

Photo by Jeremiah Cooper

Everyone says that Landmine Marathon kill live, but for no reason better than stupid ol’ shit luck, I’ve never actually seen them in the flesh. But guess what? They just announced a summer headlining tour! Which means I’ll get to check them out at last. I suddenly feel all tingly with excitement!

Bonus: for four of the dates – the two here in NY, the one in Philly, and the one in Baltimore – they’ll have Salome with them. And Salome are absolutely punishing live. Seriously. If you’ve never seen them live, feel bad for yourself.

But even the Salome-less dates oughta be a blast. Get dates after the jump…

Click to read more…

The Summer metal tour market for 2010 is crowded, yo.We’ve got the older and mainstream metal-skewed Rockstar Mayhem Fest (Korn, Zombie, 5FDP, Atreyu, Winds of Plague, Hatebreed) the Rockstar-branded radio metal “Uproar” Tour sure to be a hit in Red States (Disturbed, A7X, Hellyeah), the Christian, metalcore and Christian metalcore fest known as The Cool Tour (As I Lay Dying, Underoath, War of Ages, Blessthefall, and uh… BTBAM) and the sexiest of all sex kittens, Summer Slaughter (Decapitated, The Faceless, All Shall Perish, The Red Chord, other cool bands). And, if you count 6 dates as a “tour” you’ve got Ozzfest, which does a surprisingly good job of combining the old (Ozzy, Motley Crue, Rob Halford, BLS) with the new/cool (Kingdom of Sorrow, Skeletonwitch, Goatwhore, Saviours).

So with all that on our plates, we’ve got yet another tour coming down the pipe this summer? As you’ve no doubt gathered from this article’s headline and image, yes, indeed we do.

My thoughts on the 2010 Thrash & Burn lineup — and dates — after the jump.

Click to read more…

Remember how the incredibly nice people from the Westboro Asylum for the Criminally Insane Baptist Church were going to picket outside of Ronnie James Dio’s public memorial service this past Sunday? I have no idea how many people actually showed up for that protest (there’s no mention of it on WBC’s oh-so-charming website, and I can’t find the number in any news reports of the event), so in lieu of being responsible and not just publishing some random figure I made up, I’m going to do just that and assert that my original estimate of 75 whack-a-dos was accurate. This number is based on some photos of the protest that have been posted online – it really doesn’t look like that many people showed up. It also doesn’t look like those people were exactly on-point with their message.

(AP Photo/Jason Redmond)

Okay, Dio is going to Hell. I don’t agree with that statement, but I understand your point of view and why you’re here protesting at the man’s memorial service and -

Wait, what?

Click to read more…

The MetalSucks co-sponsored Eyehategod headlining trek with Nachtmystium, Brutal Truth, and Black Anvil starts tomorrow in Orlando, and as if EHG alone weren’t enough to lure you to a gig, well, this oughta do the trick. Zena Metal – somehow scooping us on news about a tour we’re sponsoring!!! - reports that for $40, you can purchase what is pretty much the best VIP package ever: “a BBQ, soundcheck access, a meet & greet and a limited-edition poster.”

Again, that’s for forty bucks. So for literally hundreds of dollars less than you’d pay for a VIP package to Ozzfest or whatever other big-name tour you’re planning on going to this summer, you can eat (hopefully?) good food, hang out at soundcheck, meet the band, go home with a souvenir, and not be married by some guy you’ve never heard of. Holy shit, that is awesome.

Click to read more…