If you stretch your pot-addled brain, you may recall that, back in June, Intronaut’s Sacha Dunable wrote about his new band, Graviton, as part of his Blogronaut series here on MetalSucks — in fact, it was a MetalSucks reader who named Graviton.

Well, now Graviton have signed with Translation Loss! Which is great news. And while there’s still no official release date for Graviton’s debut, there is now a title (Massless), cover art (above), and the promise that we’ll get to hear it before the year is through. In fact, there are already several tracks streaming on Graviton’s Facebook page. And they’re excellent — they have all the proggy goodness of Intronaut, but they are, generally speaking, a little on the mellower side… in fact, the title Massless strikes me as being really, really appropriate. Go listen here.

While we wait for Massless to get a release date, here’s what Sacha wrote about the project when he first solicited names from MS readers during April of last year:

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Vic Vaughn already told you that Scale the Summit’s The Collective finally comes out today, and if you read this site regularly there’s no way you could’ve forgotten, whatwith my constant reminders over the past 2+ months. But records this good deserve extra mention, and since Scale the Summit are streaming the entire record at 29-95.com right now… well, there’s the extra mention.

So, stream the entirely of The Collective right now, right here. This record is phenomenal… it’s expansive, trippy, heavy, artful, compositionally sound (aka good songs), sounds fantastic (courtesy of Mark Lewis), there are no pesky vocals getting in the way of the instruments, and it’s just all-around well-balanced in every way. Easily one of my favorites, if not the favorite, of 2011 so far. That’s it.

Buy The Collective on CD for only $8.99 here.

-VN

Thanks: Fellow StS lovers TNOTB

We have a special treat for you today, kiddies: a pre-release full-album stream of Forward Into Regression, the face-fuckingly good new album from Floridian grindsters Maruta. This album is unrelenting in its viciousness; it’s like the aural equivalent of being made to eat broken glass. Somehow, the jagged edges all fit together into a cohesive whole — and that whole is wholly excellent.

Stream Forward Into Regression below, and then, once you realize “Holy shit I MUST own this,” you can pre-order the CD here, or the CD/t-shirt combo here. Willowtip will release Forward Into Regression next Tuesday, March 8.

[this streaming promotion has ended]

Scale the Summit, Trap Them, Weedeater and Omnium Gatherum top the New Releases class of March 1st, 2011. New ones from American Heritage, Bill Steer’s Firebird, Grayceon and others also come out this week, making it one of the healthiest new release weeks for metal thus far in 2011. MS New Release Czar Vic Vaughn takes a look after the jump.

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Manson still loves pussy

Marilyn Manson’s 1998 autobiography, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, is notable for several reasons. For one thing, it was its co-author (read: the dude who listened to Manson babble on and on and then actually turned those babblings into a book) Neil Strauss’ first foray into rock star hagiography, which is to say, it was ostensibly a practice run for Motley Crue’s superior The Dirt, which Strauss which would write three years later. For another thing, it was written at the height of Manson’s stardom, so the dude did not yet know the sting of releasing an album no one cared about, which means that, throughout the course of the book, he takes himself way, way, wwwwaaaayyyy too seriously. (He seems to think that he might actually be the antichrist, claims to have given Axl Rose the idea to record a Charles Manson song for “The Spaghetti Incident?!”, and more or less accuses Trent Reznor of not believing in him, despite the fact that Reznor signed him to his Nothing Records imprint, produced his first two albums, and co-wrote and played on a whole bunch of the songs on Antichrist Superstar.) And both because and despite this fact, the book is actually a really fun read. One of the highlights of MetalSucks’ Heavy Metal Literature Night a couple of weeks ago (and someday I’ll post a wrap-up and photos from that event, I swear) was a young woman reading Manson’s list of ways the reader can tell if he is gay (I say “he” because Manson claims that all women are lesbians) — for example, if you have ever gotten any semen on you, be it your own or someone else’s, you are, apparently, gay. (Allow me to congratulate each and every male reader of this site on being gay, many of you probably just this morning.)

Why am I rambling on and on about this? Because apparently Manson has hired former LA Weekly writer Erin Broadley to pen his new, authorized biography.

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Not Chris Jericho

Does anyone take Chris Jericho seriously? I’d stopped paying attention to pro wrestling by the time his career started, and the one time I heard Fozzy at a listening booth (remember those?), I thought it was pretty awful.

But the guy has his fans, I guess, and some of them are probably pretty upset that he’s going to be on the latest edition of ABC’s reality show, Dancing with the Stars. (In case you’re not familiar with the program and are too stupid to grasp the basic premise based on the title, it’s a show in which “stars” dance, and, uh, stuff.) His co-contestants will include The Karate Kid, a talk show host, a woman who actually used to let Hugh Hefner fuck her, a model, a retired boxer, and the morbidly obese lady who used to be on Cheers.

Honestly, I find this much less disgraceful than Vince Neil appearing on Skating with the Stars, because there are no ice skates involved, Jericho doesn’t look as though he could audition to play the title role in The Blob, and, like I said, I never held the dude in very high regard anyway. But like I said, Jericho’s fans might be upset right now, so, uh, let’s all give them a hug or whatever.

On the bright side, maybe Jericho will fall down and break his leg or something on television, and then at least we can all have a good laugh.

-AR

As first reported on MetalSucks two weeks ago — despite various other websites not giving us credit – System Of A Down have announced the North American tour dates everyone expected they eventually would. The exact locations of some of the tentative dates we’d reported have changed, but the general routing is the same. From SystemOfADown.com:

5/10/11: Edmonton, AB – Rexall Place (on-sale Sat 3/5, 10am MST)
5/12/11: Vancouver, BC – Rogers Arena (on-sale Sat 3/5, 10am PST)
5/13/11: Seattle, WA – Key Arena (on-sale Fri 3/4, 10am PST)
5/15/11: Mountain View, CA – Shoreline Amphitheatre (on-sale Fri 3/4, 10am PST)
5/18/11: Denver, CO – Comfort Dental Amphitheatre (on-sale Sat 3/5, 10am MST)
5/19/11: Albuquerque, NM – Journal Pavilion (on-sale Fri 3/4, 10am MST)
5/22/11: Las Vegas, NV – The Pearl (on-sale Sat 3/5, 1pm PST)

Support will come from Gogol Bordelo, an odd choice but an eclectic one consistent with SOAD’s tastes. Our original batch of tentative dates included two Southern California shows on the tail-end of the above run, so when SOAD say on their website that “more touring news” will “follow very soon,” we can only guess that news will include those dates. An East Coast leg would be nice too.

-VN

Bret and Nikki in happier times

Clearly, Motley Crue (or, at least, Nikki Sixx) do not wanna do this tour with Poison. Nikki has been quoted as far back as 2004 as having said that The Crue “would ever, ever tour with a fucking band like Poison,” who he called “fake bullshit.” Even though both bands wore make-up and got by on their image as much as their music, Motley seem to think they’re better than Poison. And there’s a strong argument to be made that they’re correct — they were around when the Poison dudes were still living in Pennsylvania, and their music, although certainly dated, definitely holds up better.

But the fact is, they’re doing this tour with Poison, and now’s the time for them to man up and stop firing shots over the bow. Right?

Wrong.

See, when CNN’s website for Piers Morgan Tonight broke the story (via an interview with Bret Michaels) that the rumored tour was a go, they also ran a press release which distinctly says that the two bands will “co-headline.” But not so, according to Motley Crue’s Facebook page:

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Slayer is already down one member, what with guitarist Jeff Hanneman currently recovering from surgery on his arm while Exodus’ Gary Holt fills in for him — or, rather, is supposed to fill in for him. ‘Cause the band got to play exactly one show with Holt before canceling their scheduled appearance at Australia’s Soundwave Festival after vocalist/bassist Tom Araya found himself in the hospital.

Lotsa folks, including us, suspected that the culprit must have been the same the same back issues that forced him to cancel touring plans last year, but this is apparently not the case. From Slayer fan site Slayerized:

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