If you’re reading this, then presumably the headline enticed you and you already know what you’re getting into. So why waste time? Here are some funny/interesting ways in which metal and Hollywood are currently overlapping:
Reader Ben Coughlin be mad. “really? this gets no fucking mention?” That’s the subject of the email Ben fired off to us yesterday, the body of which contained a sole YouTube link to the trailer of the forthcoming Mastodon Live At The Aragon DVD.
Well, Ben, honestly, it just didn’t seem like it was worth posting about. If you’re like us, you know exactly what this DVD is going to look like because you’ve seen Mastodon live 9 zillion gajillion times. I think I saw them four times just on the Crack the Skye album cycle! It’s not that we don’t love Mastodon; we do. It’s just that we know what to expect. You know… Troy Sanders does the thing where he spreads his legs far apart and bends backwards, Brent Hinds stumbles around and solos a lot, Bill Kelliher looks bad-ass with his trucker stache, and Brann Dailor does ridiculous drum rolls… all while tasty psychedelic visuals play in the background. Ya know, Mastodon live.
Live at The Aragon drops March 15th and is available for pre-order now in a bundle containing a bunch of extra-special merch items.
Side note: how awesome is the above Troy Sanders stage-move? Gotta be one of the best / most epic in all of metal.
-VN
Oh hey lookit — Children of Bodom have released another new song from their forthcoming album, Relentless Reckless Forever. You can stream it here, or just on the YouTube thinger below.
I gotta be honest — this isn’t my favorite Children of Bodom song. I think it’s kinda missing a hook. But my confidence in COB isn’t wavering; the last song from the album that they made public, “Was it Worth It?”, was good enough that I’m still reasonably certain that RRF will be another quality entry in the Fins’ discography.
Check out the song, then weigh in with your thoughts in the comments section. Relentless Reckless Forever comes out March 8 on Spinefarm.
-AR
“Evening With” tours are those rarest of gems done by the rarest of bands; you’ve not only got to have a catalog of good songs worth spreading over two sets but you’ve got to have the fanbase that’ll back that up by coming to see you without any support bands in tow. The only bands I can recall in recent years having done “Evening With” tours are Dream Theater and Opeth… that’s some esteemed company right there. But you can add Amon Amarth to that list; according to a press release, Amon Amarth will embark on a tour this April — by which time our Amon Amarth Viking Beard contest will have just ended — simply dubbed “An Evening With Amarth.” The band will play their new album Surtur Rising in its entirety for the first set and a smattering of Amon Amarth favorites for the second set. Presumably there will be an encore written into the set, as is de rigeur these days… maybe even two! And presumably this format will allow the band to put together a killer stage production with plenty of Viking-inspired eye candy.
If you’d've asked me yesterday to make a short list of bands likely to put together an “Evening With” tour, Amon Amarth would not have been on that list. But I love this decision. It’s bold; not only does it say “We think our new album is great and worthy of playing in full” but it says “We think we’re one of the biggest metal bands in the world right now.” And are they wrong? Amon Amarth have been slogging it out over the course of a 13-year career spanning 8 albums. They’ve never over-saturated the U.S. with constant touring, taking all the right support slots with the very occasional headliner. They’ve never gone for the mainstream by trying to write songs for the radio. Instead they’ve always just done what Amon Amarth do best… which is being fucking Amon Amarth. There is no other band like them.
Dates after the jump.
So what’s got the online metal community all hot n’ bothered today? Judging by my inbox, it’s this interview Kirk Hammett just gave to Rolling Stone, in which he claims the band will hit the studio in May:
“We want to record it in two weeks. We had planned on doing it in March, but we pushed it back to May. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s not really 100 percent a Metallica record. It’s a recording project, let’s put it that way. Without getting too deep into it, it’s more a recording project than a bona fide Metallica album. Whether or not we can pull it off in just two weeks remains to be seen.”
So first of all, the members of the band are incapable of taking a piss in two weeks, so I can’t believe they’ll really record something, a “100 percent Metallica record” or otherwise, in that amount of time.
Second of all, whether this is a Metallica LP, or a Metallica EP, or Metallica just re-recording some shit for a greatest hits package, or some experimental side project, or whatever, it doesn’t matter, because it’s not gonna be worth getting excited about. You know how I know that?
Last week we offered a very special prize package for Macabre fans; two cans of the band’s special home-made Jeff Boyardee Human Stew (pictured here and here) as well as a copy of their new album Grim Scary Tales. New MS staffer Kerry Kingsley gave Grim Scary Tales four outta five horns in his review, by the way, so it’s a must for any Macabre fan. And the cleverest captions to the photo at right are:
This week we’ve got a very special prize for the guitar players out there: five (5!) full access memberships to Guitar Master Class. Each of those memberships is valued at $150, so these prizes are nothing to sneeze at for anyone looking to bring their guitar game to the next level. You know the drill… come up with the funniest caption to the below photo (sent in by reader Scott Casey) and remember to use a real email address (or post it with your comment if you’re using FB Connect)!
Earlier today, reader Jaziel Ocampo e-mailed us to see if we knew what was up with that free live EP that Devin Townsend was supposed to release, first last week and then this week. Alas, as of right now, we have no idea. We assume it will forthcoming in its own good time, though.
So while we wait, here’s a video of Devin in Prague, working with an orchestra and choir on a song called “Cheeseburger” (which I assume is a working title, but with Heavy Devy I guess you never really know… I mean the dude did make a record about the search for great coffee once). The track will appear on his upcoming album, Deconstruction.
That record is supposed to be on the heavy side, so I’m dying to see where this fits in. In any case, it’s pretty cool that he’s working with an actual orchestra, not a synth posing as an orchestra.
Deconstruction and its mellower companion album, Ghost, should both be out sometime this year on InsideOut.
-AR
Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli…
I’m one of those dipshits who has shamefully mumbled, “I kind of liked the first two Korn albums…” in casual conversation. The karmic penalty has been paid frequently over the last 15 years, from the time a 5’1” girl punched me in the dick during “Faget” at the Cleveland Odeon to every time I have to endure someone trumpeting that they were raised on Morrisound death and never listened to that “poser shit.” The latter of which being just so fucking annoying — the first band (or “band”) everyone got into was either a) something nightmarish your folks played every day, like the Eagles, b) some variation of a boy band, or c) GN’R, which is the most realistic best-case scenario.
Anyway, Korn and Limp Bizkit are the focus of an exceptionally well-written ongoing Onion AV Club series called “Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation,” and just seeing that pic of Jonathan Davis and Fred Durst under their umbrella triggers many still-unreconciled memories for perhaps a few of you guys, and quite a few Decibel staffers. Shane Mehling is among the latter — if “All in the Family” were actually available in a karaoke book, I have no doubt that we could perform it without looking at the screen once. He doesn’t just own up to this on the Deciblog, but even serves up a super classy yearbook photo cementing the sickness. Luckily, this paean to idiocy was preceded by Adrien Begrand’s typically sharp/mercifully not novel-length Justify Your Shitty Taste on Iron Maiden’s The X Factor!, a lifetime contender for most disquieting, yet not even close to cool album cover. Shit, it must be 1995 week on our blog, because evidently Chris Dick just let Dez Fafara write 550 words about, uh, redheads.
We’ll end on a much radder note. If you snap up a dB subscription by Monday at 5pm, we’ll throw you a Valentine’s Day boner — an exclusive, downloadable printable Valentine’s Day by the great extreme cover artist Paul Romano (Mastodon, Hate Eternal, Withered, other highly shitty bands, although a plenty of bands are highly shitty compared to those three).
-AB
You can buy the March 2011 issue of Decibel here, or get a full subscription to get down with the sickness each and every month.
There aren’t any reasons to be using MySpace in 2011. I suppose it can’t hurt to have a band profile there just in case someone happens to stumble upon it, but that’s about it; MySpace is a useless, out-dated, cluttered, piece-of-shit platform and there are better options now available. All bands and labels should now be using Bandcamp for their streaming music needs. Here’s why:
Steven Tyler’s review of “Idol Remains” on MetalSucks
You folks have all been closely following MetalSucks’ own “Idol Remains” column by Anso DF, right? They’re awesome, because they’re just like watching American Idol, without having to suffer through actually watching American Idol.
Here’s what the critics are saying about the column:
“I am, quite simply, in lust with Anso DF’s prose.”
-Satan Rosenbloom“The anxious unpleseantness of awaiting the next ‘Idol Remains’ is akin to forced urine retention.”
-Axl Rosenberg“I am intimidated by Anso’s great dancing and super bod. I finish reading ‘Idol Remains’ in in a state of conspicuous arousal.
-Vince Neilstein
The next “Idol Remains” will go live tomorrow afternoon; in the meantime, you can read Anso’s columns thus far here.
There’s something off about Dragged into Sunlight’s Hatred for Mankind (released in 2009 and reissued last month on Prosthetic). And not SERIOUSLY off, but just enough to be unique and unnerving. Take the album cover: upon first look, it just appears to be a primitive-looking drawing of some druids standing around a thing and… generally being druids. But closer inspection will reveal what it actually is: a naked pregnant woman vomiting what appears to be flies, rocks, or shards of something into the air while crying tears of blood with a baby being either torn out of her or violently springing forth, with the aforementioned druids ornamented with Satanic symbols. Now while this is pretty low on the shocking scale in terms of death metal album covers–a hilarious example of the desensitization death metal has provided us– it takes what could be a ho-hum image and makes it disturbing. There’s a deceptively simple, bare bones way about it that doesn’t focus on life-like detail but still captures a mood. The album follows suit: barely polished but incredibly effective sludgy blackened death/doom reigns supreme. But while there are tons of throwback bands who do the same, Dragged into Sunlight just sound evil and mean as fuck. And angry. So, so angry. Evil, angry, and mean aren’t new in metal, but the tweaks DiS provide a fresh — or in this case, rotten — new perspective.
Fan donations are becoming an increasingly common fundraising tactic for bands to raise some dough following catastrophe; we’ve re-posted a handful of such calls on MetalSucks when bands found themselves in dire straight on the road due to van accidents, thefts or other shenanigans (Poison the Well, Periphery and The Ocean immediately come to mind). Philly-based post-metallers Rosetta are taking things to the next level, though, by not only asking for donations to cover costly van repairs bills incurred on their last tour but by promising to put some of that money towards a new recording. And by doing so in a much more organized manner than the usual “send donations to this PayPal address”-style drive.
Rosetta are using Kickstarter, a platform specifically designed for bands soliciting fan donations, to ask for money to help fund the recording of a new track for a split with MetalSucks fave atmospheric Cure-metallers Junius. Their goal of $900 has already been long surpassed (as of this writing they’ve raised $1,832) but perhaps the most striking figure is this: of the 47 people who have donated (“backers”), 9 people have pledged $100 or more to receive the “super-duper special package” (an LP of the Rosetta/Junius split from the most limited color pressing, signed by Rosetta, with your name in the album credits as a sponsoring partner). The band only made 9 of these packages available, meaning they’re sold out. Wow! Talk about fan loyalty and a new way of creating value in music in the Internet age.
The above video (which I first saw on Movieline) is of Mad Men star Jon Hamm doing a reading from My Dad Was in ZZ Top, a new book by Conan writer John Glaser. The book uses allegedly “found” documents to tell the secret history of rock n’ roll — Hamm is reading a chapter about the secret origins of the Butthole Surfer’s moniker.
Sadly, Hamm will not be at the MetalSucks sponsored Heavy Metal Literature Night at Hank’s Saloon on Thursday, February 17 — but lotsa other cool people will be! Members of God Forbid, Tombs, and The Austerity Program will all be on hand to do readings from some of metal’s greatest tomes, including Motley Crue’s The Dirt, Led Zeppelin’s Hammer of the Gods, Slash’s Slash, Marilyn Manson’s Long Hard Road Out of Hell, and more; MS’ own masters of mischief, Axl Rosenberg and Vince Neilstein, will also be on hand to read and DJ, respectively.
Oh yeah, and, of course, we plan to get pretty drunk.
Even more details coming next week!!! Get excited!!!
You know Intronaut, and you love ‘em; their 2010 opus Valley of Smoke placed in several MS writers’ year-end lists and we waxed about it endlessly ever since it came out, nay, before it even came out. Guitarist Sacha Dunable even writes a semi-regular column for MS, didjahear? But I’m guessing many of you haven’t yet had the opportunity to witness Intronaut’s punishing grooves and ethereal soundscapes live.
Now’s your chance, sorta: Intronaut’s new video for the Valley of Smoke track “Sunderance” takes you inside an Intronaut show but better, ’cause you get to see close-ups of Dunable’s and Dave Timnick’s agile fingers, and of bassist Joe Lester’s and drummer Danny Walker’s superhuman prowess on their respective instruments. And of one super-stoked dude in the audience who clearly knows what’s up windmilling at the 0:35 mark.
[this streaming promotion has ended]
MS reader Brian Kessler went on an apple cider-making expedition in the great Berkshire mountains of Western, MA this past fall, and — guess what? — since he happened to have the good fortune of wearing his MetalSucks “Completely Unreadable” t-shirt that day he’ll be rewarded handsomely with a box o’ metal goodness courtesy of MetalSucks. You, too, can Show Us Your MetalSucks and be rewarded with free CDs and assorted other metal swag!
First… the picking of the apples, followed by some APPLE BASEBALL!
Onto the grinding:
I’m positive the power of the unreadable band logo added to the flavor of the cider. Now, the pressing:
My friend Martin, who is mostly into goregrind (he’s a big fan of Cemetery Rapist), slam metal and shitty southern rap, always says EMMURE is this generation’s Limp Bizkit. Until now, I kind of wrote him off as an out-of-touch hipster who didn’t know what he was talking about, but I am starting to think he is right after leading independent music retailer VICTORY RECORDS debuted the album’s debut music video today.
In addition to the stellar heavy metal line-up featured at this years South by Southwest (SXSW) Music Festival in Austin, Texas, the SXSW Film Festival will showcase more than a handful of heavy metal friendly flicks when you feel you need to take a load off your feet after standing around listening to raging metal bands all day long.
Here is the list of heavy metal films at SXSW ’11 with descriptions from SXSW.com:
Guitar Hero, age six, passed away yesterday, February 9, 2011.
The cause of death was “continued declines in the music genre,” according to a statement by its publisher, Activision.
Well, this is kind of a bummer.
Andrew Tapley — who, until recently at least, was one of three guitar players in The Human Abstract — has posted the following message on his Facebook page:
