[UPDATE, Jan 5: New entry instructions for females! Read here.]

We are thrilled to present one of the most fun contests in our short history. Grow a beard, win a bunch of Amon Amarth shit. Interested? Read on.

Reader Jordan Wean actually suggested this idea to us back in November, and we loved it so much we knew we just had to do it. The only question was, “With whom?” And since the beard of Amon Amarth’s Johan Hegg has few rivals, when Amon Amarth announced they’d be releasing their new album Surtur Rising on March 29th, 2011 we knew we’d found the perfect band, so we approached them about the idea and voila, contest!

Females, fret not: this contest is open to you, too! Read on.

The rules:

Step 1) Send us a completely clean-shaven picture of yourself NOW — before Tuesday, January 11th at 11:59pm EST — holding up a sign that says “MetalSucks” and the date. Send all entries to news [at] metalsucks [dot] net with the subject AMON AMARTH VIKING BEARD CONTEST.

Step 2) Grow a beard.

Step 3) On March 29th, the day Surtur Rising comes out, send us a new picture of yourself… same deal: hold up a sign with “MetalSucks” and the date, only this time you’ll also need to write a secret passcode on your sign that will be revealed on MetalSucks on March 29th.

FEMALE RULES: The same as above, but a little more X-rated! Yes, we’re completely serious, and no, we don’t mean your armpits. You can black out / blur out certain parts if you’re so inclined… or not. You must be 18 year of age or older to enter. but for your armpits or leg hair! We’ll be choosing one male winner and one female winner, both with an identical prize pack, so the playing field is equal for everyone.

The prize:

- a lock from Johan Hegg’s beard!
- the “super duper fan edition” of Surtur Rising, of which only a very small limited number will be made.
- a drumhead signed by the whole band
- a Metal Blade Records t-shirt and lanyard
- a MetalSucks t-shirt in the design and size of your choosing

Once we’ve received all the entries during the week of March 29th (Deadline for picture #2: Monday, April 4th, 11:59pm EST), Johan himself will go through all the entries and select a winner. There are no set parameters by which you need to grow your beard — viking style, Abe Lincoln, Rollie Fingers stache, Fu Manchu, or just plain ol’ au naturale… it’s all good by us! Bigger isn’t necessarily better… it’s the motion of the ocean!

Now, get to growing those beards. You’ve got 3 months!

I think I’ve used the phrase “elephants marching riff” on MetalSucks before, but during a hang sesh with Vince just before the holidays, I realized we don’t use it enough — especially considering how often we actually talk about elephants marching riffs. I don’t remember when Vince and I started using the phrase to describe these lumbering, brutally heavy riffs, but they are absolutely one of my favorite metallic tropes. I fucking LOVE a good elephants marching riff.

Like the taco riff, the elephants marching riff is a little hard to define verbally — but you know it the second you hear it. The easiest explanation is that it sounds MASSIVE and moves at the pace at which you suspect a giant beast of war — say, an elephant — might move. But it can’t just be slow — doom bands and, alas, deathcore bands write slow riffs all the time, but I’d rarely define them as “elephants marching riffs.”

For example, the section of Murder the Frail’s “Disturbia” which begins at roughly the 1:45 mark is leaden — but an elephants marching riff it is not:

Click to read more…

So I promised that I’d announce the winner of the last Completely Unreadable Band Logo of 2010 before the New Year, and then I didn’t. I apologize. In my defense, I remembered, but I was drinking heavily and couldn’t be bothered.

ANYWAY, Pat DeFrancisci got the right answer — the band was called Thy Slaughter — and he was the only one who got the right answer, so shame on the rest of you. Pat wins a Long Livebundle from The Chariot that comes with a CD copy of their awesome new album (Long Live – duh — out now on Good Fight) as well as t-shirt. Enjoy it, Pat!

This week we’re back to giving away some extra goodies we have laying around the Mansion, ’cause you guys seem to be really into it when we do that. So I’ll e-mail the winner and give him or her a list of whatever CDs and/or DVDs we happen to have here at the Mansion, and said winner can take his or her pick of any THREE items. I’m a nice guy like that.

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.

This week’s logo was suggested by a reader calling himself “Viking,” and it’s completely fucking ridiculous. But I’m curious to see who can get it. Consider the gauntlet thrown, motherfuckers.

-AR

In the first installment of “OLD BANDS U MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT“, I shared a bunch of old bands that I like. Instead of coming up with a new description, I will just reuse the old one:

When I am not trolling simple-minded, entry-level elitists, I enjoy the soothing, dulcet tones of some classic thrash or death metal. I am definitely not any kind of metal encyclopedia or authority on the subject, but I have realized that (sadly) I’m old enough to have heard a few bands that many younger metal fans have not, just because I have been exposed to a lot of bands over the years — sort of like an ancient desert tortoise who is not a historian, but has seen history unfold before his eyes simply because he is old as fuck. Because I enjoy giving back to my community, I will share some of my favorite older bands in case any of you might like them. If you want to hate on me, that’s OK, too, so feel free to tell me I’m a poser, that everybody already knows about these bands, that I got some trivial detail wrong, or whatever else you think makes you “sound like u rly know what ur talking about.”

With that out of the way, here’s volume 2!

Click to read more…

Let’s use this opportunity to review not one but two of today’s lessons, shall we? Okay, here we go:

BEGINNING: You read on MetalSucks that Neuraxis are streaming a new song, “Asylum,” here.

MIDDLE: You listen to the new Neuraxis song and think, “Ah, this is how tech death is done!”

END: You don’t e-mail us about bands like this one ever again.

“Asylum” will appear on Neuraxis’ latest, Asylon, which comes out on February 14 via Prosthetic.

-AR

I never pay attention to trending topics on Twitter, because it just never really occurs to me. I guess it is kinda interesting to see what people are talking about (in 140 characters or less at a time), though.

For example, some of the most popular topics currently include Macaulay Culkin (people are alternately very troubled to learn that Mila Kunis just dumped him and very troubled to learn that he’s still alive), Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (a new edition will apparently remove the “N” word from the text), and… German metalcore outfit Heaven Shall Burn.

Click to read more…

The fact that Watain are not, like so many of their peers, all talk and no action is not news. It’s one of the reasons people love them so much.

And the great Vincent Castiglia paints in his own blood, so this idea isn’t entirely new.

But I was still caught totally off-guard when I saw the below video of Watain signing autographs in their own blood. I don’t know what I would do if I walked up to an autograph booth to get one of my favorite bands to sign something and they had a little cup of their own blood there for that very same purpose. This is either the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, or the grossest.

Or maybe it’s a little bit of both.

-AR

[via The Deciblog]

[UPDATE: Full tour routing has been posted here. - Ed.]

My good friend Eduardo, a non-metalhead (or “normie” as Juggalo Bob calls them), is a lifelong Deftones fan despite his status as a die-hard hip hip fan. As a youth growing up in Sacramento, CA Eduardo was ensconced in Deftones culture, kinda like you’d be hard pressed to find anyone born and raised in the NYC area who doesn’t like the Beastie Boys regardless of their other musical tastes. But the poor chap has never seen the Deftones play live. Since he moved to New York in 2005 and our friendship began we’ve been angling to see the Deftones live and for Eduardo to crowd-surf for the first time, but it’s just never happened. Deftones haven’t come to the East Coast much during that period, and when they have it’s been as support like on the recent BlackDiamondSkye tour. But we may finally get our opportunity.

The PRP is reporting [via Gun Shy Assassin] that Deftones will be touring this Spring with the Dillinger Escape Plan in tow. Three dates have already been leaked, so presumably more are on the way, and two of them are on the East Coast which bodes well for Eduardo and I. STOKED. That is going to be a moshfest of massive proportions. I hope Eduardo is prepared for the insanity! It’s always fun to see someone react to their first ever metal concert.

The three dates confirmed so far are posted after the jump.

Click to read more…

Korpiklanni have released a video for their new single, “Tequila,” and, uh, it’s boring. I don’t know how the fuck you take a video for a song about the best thing to ever ruin millions of lives every day by a band whose last album was title was the Finnish word for “party” and make it boring, but I guess this director was feeling ambitious.

Please allow me to elaborate for a moment.

Let’s talk about three act structure. You all know about three act structure, right? It’s the thing that tells us that all good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. So, for example:

• BEGINNING: I procured some tequila.
• MIDDLE: I drank the tequila.
• END: I vomitted the tequila.

There. See how easy that was? You wanna keep that shit simple and direct, because brevity is the soul of wit and all that shit. This is especially true if you’re talking about a three minute promotional music video.

Now let’s examine the structure of this video, and why it’s so stinky:

Click to read more…

Well here’s a fun, intelligent, and above all else, exceedingly polite e-mail we got from reader Dan Wolfson last night:

Subject: PAINTED IN FUCKING EXILE YOU IDIOTS
From: dan wolfson
To: MetalSucks

WHY HAVE YOU NOT JIZZED OVER THIS VIDEO YET

FOOLS

So Vince actually had nice things (well, really, a nice thing) to say about this band as part of a Reader’s Choice round-up back in 2009, but as regular readers are aware, Vince is a much nicer person than I am. So please allow me to explain why I have not yet jizzed all over this video or this band:

Click to read more…

Oops! I recently popped a Woodroe when I was informed that Corrosion of Conformity, the COC that I knew and loved, will be playing the South by Southwest (SXSW) Music Festival this March.

Now, you may ask, why is this year of COC any different? Because they are stripped back down to the original three-piece of Woodroe “Woody” Weatherman, Reed Mullin, and Mike Dean, the same crusty trio I remember seeing up close and personal at the former Ritz Theater in Austin, Texas (which is now home to the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz movie theater) on tour in support of their hardcore-classic Animosity. That was the COC that used to be fucking dangerous. It was a show where you weren’t quite sure if you’d make it out alive. Seriously. It was back when Mike Dean looked more like a Dragworm who just stumbled in from nearby Guadalupe Street (“Dragworms” are Austin’s equivalent to homeless people) looking even more crazed and demented than Charles Manson in front of a television camera. This is the Animosity/Technocracy COC that I worshipped (minus Simon Bob Sinister on the latter EP). Nothing against Pepper Keenan, but I don’t even consider anything beyond this era to be COC.

This COC, along with D.R.I., The Offenders, M.D.C., The Fearless Iranians From Hell, and the Cro-Mags — that was the shit. Now get off my lawn!!

Anyway, time to relive my youth and to, hopefully, find more new metallic talent at this year’s SXSW. Here are some of the already announced metallish bands appearing at the world’s greatest music conference in addition to COC:

Click to read more…

So I don’t think there’s any way I can make an argument for this video as being what you might call “relevant,” but I saw it on Metal Injection awhile back and, well, I feel the need to support the minority race whose females are most likely to sleep with a Jewish dude like me.

Also, I would argue that this is still far more melodious than Bloody Panda, a band that also features an Asian woman and makes music that just barely meets the definition of that word.

Alright so maybe this girl doesn’t get naked, but like the headline says, she does do a lot of rubbing of her naughty spots, so maybe don’t watch it at work, okay?

-AR

Before Mar De Grises were the new Insomnium, Omnium Gatherium were the new Insomnium. “The new Insomnium,” of course, being short-hand for “new band that plays monolithically epic, eternally sad, woefully aching, Scandinavian melodic death metal.” Not that anything’s happened to Insomnium that would necessitate a replacement, but, ya know, it never hurts to have more than one and Insomnium (along with America’s Daylight Dies) are pretty much the masters of this genre.

Needless to say, “Soul Journeys” — the new song and videio by Omnium Gatherum — is great in exactly all the ways you’d want it to be. It uses the standard VI –> I chord progression in the chorus (pretty much one of the most epicly sad chord combos there is) that marks so many songs by these types of bands, but fuck it, who cares… if it ain’t broke don’t fix it! The excellent metal blog No Clean Singing was the first to pick this song up. Says NCS scribe Islander: “This is melodic death metal done right. It hits hard, it makes you wanna headbang, but it’s catchy, and it has a surprising — and surprisingly dreamy — interlude in the middle with clean singing, of all things.”

The track comes from the new Dan Swanö-produced album New World Shadow, out February 9th on Lifeforce and available for pre-order now.

-VN

Despite the fact that thousands of metalheads the world over read our ramblings online on a daily basis it still makes us slightly giddy to see our name in print. So when our favorite U.K. metal rag Terrorizer approached about sponsoring a category in their year-end Readers Poll (issue #205, December) we had no choice but to accept; that the category they asked us to sponsor was the very MetalSucksian “Worst Band of 2010″ made the decision all that much more automatic.

Remember that this was a Readers Poll, so we didn’t get to choose the winner of our category. But I think at least a couple of MS readers can get behind the “Worst Band” pick that the readers did choose, the always-controversial, self-referential Dimmu Borgir!

Pick up Terrorizer #205 with the MetalSucks featurette at a news stand now, or order it online via Terrorizer’s website.

-VN

Metalheads are notoriously cheap and/or poor. Jews are notoriously cheap too, if not necessarily poor in this day and age. Combine these things with a killer sale at Amazon this week and you’ve got two very excited bloggers at your favorite Jewish metal news outlet!

Amazon is continuing their tradition of honoring the previous year’s best releases with a whole slew of 2010 albums — 1,306, to be exact — on sale at their MP3 store for only $5 each for the month of January. Since Amazon knows you’re not made of time they’ve conveniently sorted things by genre, so instead of sifting through all 1,306 releases you can easily see just the 55 Hard Rock and Metal releases to see if there’s anything that tickles your fancy. With 2010 releases by Intronaut, Kylesa, Accept, Holy Grail, Nevermore, Daath, Nachtmystium, The Acacia Strain, Son of Aurelius, Howl, Mantric and, uh… Mushroomhead all on sale (plus many, many more) now’s the time to fill those gaps in your collection or check out a release we’ve been raving about that you haven’t had the time or money to invest in. A few newer classics are on sale too, such as Between the Buried and Me’s Colors and Animals as Leaders’ 2009 self-titled album and Skeletonwitch’s Breathing the Fire.

So get to buyin‘. $5 is less than the cost of a beer at most New York City bars. Don’t be a fool.

-VN

Thanks: ”Tu-stoned”

Coaches fired, teams failing, and incentives earned. I love week sixteen.

Incentives: they are written into a ton of contracts nowadays to get players to focus more on earning money for themselves than to put in an effort for their team. In the last week of regular season play, we see players on teams who are dead in the water give it their all to earn a couple of extra bucks. I mean, when you’re getting $90 million, you really need that extra $150,000 for one more sack in a game that doesn’t matter, right?  The Red Chord actually has an incentive program in our contract as well. We get free Metal Blade t-shirts, a trip to a rehab of our choice, and a visit to the health clinic, depending on how many rails and groupies we bump during an album cycle. We’re cutting it close, but I can see that t-shirt in my very near future.

Click to read more…

While we were gone for the holidays, Mike Portnoy asked to re-join Dream Theater after being let go by Avenged Sevenfold, surprising no one. We’ve stated our case for siding with Portnoy in this whole ridiculous public drama, but it seems awfully hypocritical of Portnoy to ask back in so soon after everything that’s gone down. Dream Theater accordingly rebuffed Mike, as they should have. Meanwhile, rumors have been flying around about Marco Minnemann being the new Dream Theater drummer, a story which we were the first to report several weeks back.

Portnoy for his part is staying busy; Metal Insider reports that he’s announced a new project with guitarist Steve Morse (Deep Purple, Dixie Dregs), multi-instrumentalist Neal Morse (Transatlantic, Spock’s Beard), bassist Dave LaRue (Dixie Dregs) and vocalist Casey McPherson (Alpha Rev, Endochine) with recording commencing shortly. That should be pretty effin’ cool and nertastically progariffic.

But in the meantime the big question on Dream Theater fans’ minds is: what will the next Dream Theater record sound like?? Will it be any good? Was Portnoy the mojo that kept the band going or was he dead weight??? John Petrucci just tweeted that the band is now in the studio, so I’m assuming that they’re writing the record on-the-fly again as they have with the past several releases.

What do you think about a new DT record?? Weigh in below.

Abysmal Dawn released the sick cover art for their new album, Leveling the Plane of Existence, back in November, but up ’til now, we haven’t heard any music from the disc — well, actually, I have, ’cause I’m part of the cool, Scionist controlled media elite, and I have an advance copy of the album. (And we’ll be streaming it in full starting January 25. Tell your friends.) But you plebes have been sitting around holding your junk.

But no more junk holding for you! For Abysmal Dawn are now streaming a new strack, “In Service of Time,” here. (The song is also available for free download as part of the new Relapse Records digital sampler here.) I really like it, but in the interest of the spice of life, I’m gonna try very hard not to use the same old hyperbolic phrases in 2011 that I/most people usually use (e.g., “It kicks ass,” “It crushes,” etc.), and instead develop all-new hyperbolic phrases. So I’m just gonna say that the song impales aardvark babies. Why is that a compliment? I dunno. It’s metal. Terrible, violent phrases are considered complimentary for some reason.

ANYWAY, check out the song here, then celebrate its arrival in our comments section. Leveling the Plane of Existence comes out February 1 on Relapse. Like I said, we’ll be streaming the album in full right here at MetalSucks starting January 25, so put that shit in your calendar.

-AR

Ever been around a non-metalhead when you’re listening to something and bitching with a fellow headbanger about how it’s not heavy enough, or br00tal enough, or [insert synonym for "heavy" and "br00tal" here] enough? Well the below coming from Wulffmorgenthaler.com sums that situation up nicely…

By the way, how much does that dude on the left look like Valient Himself?

-AR

[via Metal Injection]

Back in November, I praised Greber, the new, guitarless grind project from Fuck the Facts bassist Marc Bourgon and The Great Sabatini drummer Steve Vargas. And I was pleased to see, upon skimming the comments section, that you guys were pretty into the band, too.

Well, good news then, friends: Greber are now streaming their entire debut offering, Hometown Heroin, here. They’re also selling digital downloads of the album via the nifty pay-what-you-like model (the minimum is a buck Canadian) that seems increasingly popular for bands that are just getting started and are looking to get their name out. Of course, you also have the option to buy a physical copy for a perfectly reasonable seven dollars.

So check out Hometown Heroin if you haven’t already. The band is also doing a nine-date Canadian tour later this month; you can get dates here.

-AR

Thanks to Matt McPhee for the tip.