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It’s that time again, denizens of the New York Metropolitan Area!
Here are the vital deets. It starts at 9:00PM tonight at Idle Hands Bar (25 Avenue B b/w 2nd & 3rd St, downstairs). I’ll be DJing four hours of 90s alt rock. There’s no cover, and we’re doing this every 2nd and 4th Thursday. There are some pretty good drink specials too, so come out! Further details can be found here and here.
-GS
I interviewed Joe Payne once, and as far as I could tell from our brief time together, he’s a nice guy, so I feel bad making fun of him.
But I’m gonna do it anyway.
The former Nile bassist has spent the past three-odd years in Dino Cazares’ Divine Heresy, a band I assume we will never hear from again. I know there was never an official break-up announcement, and for all I know, the other members of the band do not believe DH to be dead. But let’s be real here — with all due respect to Tim Yeung and company, Dino IS Divine Heresy, he’s the reason anyone ever paid attention to Divine Heresy, and without him, there is no Divine Heresy.
And right now, Dino is preoccupied with Fear Factory. And I don’t foresee him not being preoccupied with Fear Factory for some time to come. So even if Divine Heresy ever do return, it most likely will not be anytime soon. Especially since Divine Heresy aren’t even listed on Century Media’s artist page right now (the band released both of their albums through that label), which is probably not a good sign of new music to come.
And this fact makes the statement Payne released to Blabbermouth last night baffling:
New Devin (now times three!), new BTBAM, new Protest the Hero, new Meshuggah, new Obscura, new Scale the Summit… most likely new Opeth, Mastodon and Dream Theater… and now new TEXTURES. What did we do to deserve this? As in, can someone please let me know so I can make sure every year is this full of awesome metal record releases??
This is the kind of stuff I really get a kick out of because it illustrates just how closely certain kinds of metal are related to classical music. Check out this “dueling guitar” performance of the “Summer” theme of Vivaldi’s famous Four Seasons suite, as sent in by MS reader Kyle:
Now compare that composition to The Human Abstract’s new song “Faust.” Pay particular attention to the way the guitars are split up; instead of having one guitar play chords and the other play leads like most bands do — or just having both guitars do the same thing — the guitar structure underneath the chorus is much more similar to the way the left hand and right hand of a piano piece are divided (with the vocals providing an additional dimension… the equivalent of lead violin, or a brass instrument, or what have you) or the way the instruments in an orchestra are divided. A similar thing is happening in the pre-chorus and middle/bridge part.
The Human Abstract’s very talented guitarist and composer A.J. Minette has been writing a regularly recurring column for us about precisely this sort of thing, only in way more detail and with way more finesse than I can. It’s called Abstract Theory; check it out! Your inner music dork will thank you.
-VN
There are two kinds of video studio updates worth watching: funny ones that actually take time and effort to produce, like the three-part series Protest the Hero put together for the album that’s now called Scurrilous, and videos where you actually get to hear solid chunks of new songs. Everything in between — which, sadly, is most of the drek that bands pass off as “studio updates” in an effort to get Blabbermouth to post so 10 dudes in the Czech Republic will have to change their pants — is just boring.
So while I’d consciously decided to hold off on posting anything about the new Scale the Summit record Collisions — which I already did here and here — until there was actually new music for us to hear in full, I’m forced to go back on that self-promise because the band’s latest studio update is chock full of clips from the record. In case you can’t tell I really like this band and want you to like them too so I can re-assure my frail ego that my taste in music doesn’t suck.
My first take on the new material is that it sounds PHENOMENAL. It also sounds a lot mellower than much of what was on Carving Desert Canyons, not that this is a bad thing at all. That’s Mark “Pretty Women and Cheap Rent” Lewis in the producer’s chair; why, we were just hanging out with Mark this weekend! Hi, Mark!
-VN
Thanks: Travis Neyhart, ton, and Jacob Gibson
Yep yep — Shai Hulud, one of the rare bands to give metalcore a good name (and one of the rare bands to actually combine metal with hardcore and therefore be worthy of the “metalcore” tag), are doing a headlining tour. I’m not really familiar with the support acts so I can’t actively endorse your arriving early at the show — I mean they could be great for all I know, I just don’t wanna tell you they are when I don’t know their music — but I will say that if you have a chance to go see Shai Hulud and you don’t, you’re a fool. A damn fool, I say.
Perhaps better news still, at least for those of us who don’t live near one of these tour stops, is that the trek is actually a break from the band’s work on a new album — their first since 2008′s jugular-rippingly good Misanthropy Pure. It’s funny, ’cause like five minutes ago, I was feeling really cynical about 2011 as a good year for metal, but not it seems like a bright, bright, bright, sunshiny day.
Here are tour dates, in case you’re too stoopid to be able to read the poster at the top of this article:
“Sleep Shake,” the video for the opening track from Between the Buried and Me front man Tommy Rogers’ solo album (under the name Thomas Giles), Pulse, is no great, uh, shakes. I mean, it’s cool to see Tommy play all the instruments himself, but it is by no means a good video.
That being said, I think you all need to watch it, because the song is killer. It bears only the slightest relationship to metal, but it has a strong kinship with epic epicness… and you can’t get enough epic epicness in your life. You just can’t.
Pulse comes out February 1 on Metal Blade.
-AR
[via Popmatters]
Every now and then you hear about a miracle. I’m not talking about, like, your dad surviving some emergency surgery or anything as circumstantial as that — no no no, I mean a true, honest-to-God miracle, like someone saw Jesus on their toast, or The Virgin Mary in their coffee. It’s moments like these that make you know there really is a Higher Power, and that life has some meaning to it after all.
Well, reader Michael LaGrow has experienced just such a miracle, and he even sent us photographic evidence to prove it. For Michael has a dirt stain on his wall… that looks just like Eddie. Check it out (click on the picture to embiggen):
Lazarus A.D. bassist/vocalist Jeff Paulick is the latest to join the ranks of musicians we’ve interviewed more than once (see Axl’s March 2009 interview with him here). Perhaps it’s because he agrees with our assessment that his band has been unfairly lumped in with the re-thrash movement; “I never wore a jean jacket in my life and I’ve never bought a patch in my life. Last time I wore hightops, I was in kindergarten or I was playing basketball. We’re not part of that crew and a lot of bands are from California and whatnot. We’re from Wisconsin. It just doesn’t exist here.” He also has nothing but great things to say about Revocation and Sylosis, a good barometer for how he approaches his own thrash-influenced — but not thrash rip-off — music. More than anything else during the course of my interview with Jeff a couple of weeks back, he stressed how he feels it’s important for bands to grow musically from release to release rather than simply writing the same record over and over.
Lazarus A.D.’s new album Black Rivers Flow is certainly a change for the band, which you can find out for yourself before its February 1st release by streaming the entire thing on Metal Underground this week. During my interview with Jeff we spoke at length about the new record, the reality of dudes in metal bands having day jobs when they’re not on tour,
One my least popular observations is that Eddie Van Halen’s progress as a guitar soloist was temporarily stunted by the wave of gooey acclaim that soaked him as early as 1978. Until the 1984 album, the newly 56-year old axeman seemed more focussed on wizardry and novel tricks than on crafting memorable solo passages, notwithstanding “Somebody Get Me A Doctor.” His skillz were always bonkers, but apparently good judgement arrived with the keyboards; that’s when he proceeded to rail off beautious leads to equal his unmatched chord choices and phrasing. Then came F.U.C.K., Balance, the departure of Sammy Hagar, the whole Gary Cherone thing, dementia, divorce, marriage, a reconciliation with singer David Lee Roth, a deconciliation with bassist Michael Anthony, the enlistment of Wolfgang “FD-D” Van Halen, and finally Thursday, the happiest day of my adult life thanks to producer John Shanks’ twitter:
Here we go kids … VH.
Critical success was a no-win situation with Xasthur: “basement black metal” is a hard thing for the uninitiated to get into, much less keep up with. It’s harsh, challenging, unlistenable, and is often created by immensely prolific misanthropes with no use for quality control. It’s hard to find a way in, and even if you do find one, it’s even harder to expand your knowledge from there. So that’s exactly what the metal media did: they popped mega-huge critical boners for a few Xasthur releases (2006’s Subliminal Genocide in particular), and then, like they do with most bands, got bored and stopped paying attention. And this didn’t stop the band (well, the guy) from making and releasing more albums, splits, demos, and what-have-you. So when the band/guy decided to abruptly call it quits last year, they went out with a whimper instead of a bang (well, a muffled, tortured bang). The sense that mainman Malefic seemed to give in his statements were that he was as tired of the band as the media were, and while Xasthur did (and do) mean a lot to me, the possibility that Scott Conner (the dude’s real name) has found some sort of sanity or happiness in his life, and that said happiness means he doesn’t have to make suffocatingly bleak funereal black metal anymore, is a strangely heartwarming one. Xasthur’s music always sounded as thought it were made by someone at the end of his rope, so it was good to hear that maybe that’s no longer the case.
It’s interesting, then, to hear that last year’s Portal of Sorrow is an anomaly in the Xasthur catalog. It’s the band (fleshed out with some guest musicians, thus actually almost warranting being called “a band”) at its most expansive, perhaps even to the point where the Xasthur concept begins to collapse in on itself. The classic Xasthur sound is still here — the woozy wall of untuned guitars and that sickly haze of synthesizer s– but is filled out with female vocals and Malefic’s improved drumming (a welcome sound after it killed any kind of forward momentum on 2007’s Defective Epitaph). After a decade of meandering in the basement, Portal of Sorrow hints at the prospect of looking out the window, if not actually venturing outside. Of course, violent introspection and isolation were the band’s lifeblood, and thus the idea of the outside world is Xasthur’s flashpoint. The album as a swan song is both disappointing in that it’s an endpoint in terms of potential, and fascinating in that it serves as a statement of the band’s progression throughout more than two dozen releases. In a lot of ways, it may be their most easily digestible album (which, for some, equates it with being its worst), which for a band so obsessed with suffering and anger, is about as close to a happy ending as the Xasthur catalog could come.
Dude windmilling in the jacuzzi as some band plays behind him. Jacuzzis = metal.
Our brothas and sista at Metal Injection are having a grand ol’ time on the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise, which by now you’ve surely heard about: a 4-day cruise from Miami to Cozumel and back featuring close to 50 metal bands on three stages, many of them playing more than once. You can imagine the scene… lots and lots and lots of black t-shirts.
MI’s Rob, Frank and Noa are posting regular liveblog updates from their voyage by continuing to add updates to this page. Among some amusing highlights:
Seems like there’s been a spate of significant band signings over the last week in the world of metal. Despite all the industry’s woes, it’s good to know that labels are still investing in bands. But that begs the question… what kind of deals are these bands getting? Do their deals have advances? Do they include merch? Do they include mandatory monthly ass-fuckings? Inquiring minds would like to know.
After the jump let’s take a look at the new label homes of Chimaira, A Life Once Lost, Demolisher, Funeral for a Friend and Mercenary, and how those new relationships might work out.
Just yesterday we debuted the full album stream of Abysmal Dawn’s aardvark-baby-impaling new album, Leveling the Plane of Existence; now our bro-bros over at The Deciblog have an awesome guest column from Pär Olofsson, a.k.a. “The Dude Who Made the Awesome Cover for Plane.” Olofsson has done art for bands ranging from Immortal to Immolation to The Faceless, so he really knows his stuff, and this a very in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at one of his creations. Here’s a sample:
“When Charles [Elliott; vocals/guitar] contacted me the only lyrics that was written was “Leveling the Plane of Existence.” It makes reference to us crawling out from the primordial ooze and is basically about wiping us from the planet so that everything starts from zero again. It had great potential as a cover piece since the concept included fossils and things crawling out from ooze. So I made a quick sketch of a fossilized human hand with never before seen bugs crawling around it, a lake of ooze and some city ruins in the background.”
Now, obviously, what you see above is not the finished cover… but I won’t give away how this sketch evolved into the final product. To learn that info, you’ll have to read the post at The Deciblog. It’s well worth it; visual are is such a huge part of metal, and the men and women who make said art are so often overlooked, that it’s great to peek into the process like this.
And if you haven’t already checked it out, listen to Leveling the Plane of Existence in full right here, and pre-order it here. It comes out on February 1 on Relapse.
-AR
Well here’s a pair of tweets from William Shatner — yes, that William Shatner — which will most certainly catch you off-guard:
I don’t even know what to say about this. I’m not offended because at this point I really don’t care what Zakk Wylde does, but I am kinda worried about the guy. I don’t know if he’s really hard up for money or is a just a huge fan of the Esperanto classic Incubus or what, but… I know that this is no less ridiculous than something Ozzy would do, but I think that Ozzy was about ten years older than Zakk when he started embarrassing himself this badly. So I guess I’m just saying that Zakk should slow his roll, y’know? He’s got years and years left yet to convince us that No More Tears was a fluke.
-AR
[via Metal Underground]
The #4 album in the country last week came from Social Distortion, yet that album failed to register on the “Top Hard Music” chart I usually cover in this column where it would’ve been #1 by a long shot. I mean, I know Social Distortion aren’t exactly splitting eardrums anymore, but come on, Mike fucking Ness! Bizarre? Yeah, but this is the music industry we’re dealing with, the same group of retardos who regularly send us MP3s for review without any artist, label or track name labels whatsoever and who make us jump through flaming hoops to download them. So, surprising? Not at all.
Anyway, let’s look at said Social Distortion-omitting Top Hard Music chart for the week ending January, 25th, 2011. The new Times of Grace project featuring ex-Killswitch Engage vocalist Jesse Leach and current KsE guitarist Adam D. charted respectably in its debut, but there wasn’t a whole lot else out there in the metal world that was big enough to chart in its debut week (aside from Electric Wizard) despite a decent list of new albums. As such, there’s a lot of greatest hits packages leftover from the holiday rush showing up on the charts (Aerosmith, Ozzy, Van Halen, etc) and perennial butt-rock sellers like Nickelback, Disturbed, Three Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin, etc. Let’s take a look at a few notable releases:
FULL BLOWN CHAOS ARE BACK! It’s been more than three years since the release of the metallic hardcore heavyweights’ last offering, Heavy Lies the Crown, but next week will finally see the release of the band’s brain-splatteringly brutal new, self-titled album. And you don’t just have to take our word for it when we tell you that this is a killer release — you can check out a brand new track, “Villains,” below. You might wanna put on a construction hard hat or a bike helmet or whatever before you hit that “play” button, though — ’cause this song is the aural equivalent of having FBC front man Ray Mazzola reach through your speakers and crack your fucking skull in the palm of his hand.
Full Blown Chaos, the album, comes out February 1 on Ironclad Recordings. Once you’ve listened to this song and subsequently returned from the emergency room, you can pre-order it right here.
[this streaming promotion has ended]
The first time anyone ever used the term “re-thrash” on MetalSucks was in an article I wrote on July 2nd, 2008. I’m not claiming to have invented the term, because I’m pretty sure I didn’t. But the funny thing about that article is that it’s about Exmortus, a band who, by today’s much more developed definition of “re-thrash” would actually transcend that pejorative term. Exmortus are one of the young crop of thrash bands that actually infuse their obvious thrash influences with a healthy heaping of something of their own to create metal that’s actually unique.
I know I’m always talking about Revocation as the golden example of a band with thrash roots that’s taken things to a whole new level, but there ya have it… Revocation are just so fucking phenomenal at it. Exmortus are cut from the same cloth: death metal-infused thrash with enough technicality to impress but never overwhelm. Look no further than the two new demos they’ve posted on their label’s page; they’re thrashy, deathy, subtly technical and catchy as all hell. Expect finished versions of these songs to appear on Exmortus’ sophomore release Beyond the Fall of Time, out later this year via Heavy Artillery Records.
-VN
So yesterday The Big 4 finally announced a U.S. show, but it caused as much weeping as it did celebration, ’cause fans were hoping for a full tour, not a single gig. Now Metal Underground tells me that Lars Ulrich was on KROQ-FM yesterday, explaining the decision. Here’s what metal’s most famous living midget had to say, with my own comments in bold:
So yesterday, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross got an Oscar nomination for their score for The Social Network. I didn’t write anything about it because a) I was too busy fuming that somehow Christopher Nolan didn’t get a Best Director nod for Inception, and b) it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Reznor and Ross would be nominated, so it didn’t really feel like news. Still, it will be great if a few weeks from now we can start referring to the Nine Inch Nails mastermind as “Oscar winning composer Trent Reznor.”
But, no, the much more interesting cinemetal story to break this week is that Slash — who announced the formation of Slasher Films, a production company devoted to creating “edgy contemporary horror fare with a nod to the thrillers of the ’70s and ’80s,” back in October — has now started to discuss his first potential projects as a movie producer. From an interview that Entertainment Weekly conducted with the guitarist at the in-progress Sundance Film Festival:
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