If you asked me to make some suggestions for bands Amon Amarth might want to consider covering, well, I don’t think it would ever occur to me include System of a Down on that list. I love both bands (in different ways, obviously), but when I think of giant bearded viking dudes, my mind doesn’t then go right to politically-minded Armenian-American alt-metal.

Which is probably why Amon Amarth wanted to cover SOAD in the first place! Their version of “Aerials,” from the latter band’s nu-classic Toxicity, will be available as a downloadable bonus track when fans purchase AA’s latest release, Surtur Rising, through any FYE outlet in America (here’s an order link in case you wanna get on that). The cover is now available on YouTube, and you can check it out below — it’s pretty sweet. They’ve managed to make the song sound simultaneously like no other Amon Amarth song, and JUST like an Amon Amarth song.

Surtur Rising, which ten different kinds of awesome, by the way, comes out March 29 (a week from today!) on Metal Blade.

-AR

[via Metal Underground]

When those fucking Melvins announced they’d be playing every Friday in January at Los Angeles’ Spaceland, I was understandably jealous of the Left Coast crumb-bums who’d get to experience live performances of entire albums from the band’s diverse discography. Apparently, God or King Buzzo heard my prayers, because the band will hit New York this June to play two glorious album-centric nights back-to-back.

FAP FAP FAP FAP FAP

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The bad news is that drummer Derrick Nau has left the band, although apparently under amicable circumstances — in a statement, the group says that Nau ”is returning to art school and does not wish to be a musician anymore.” C’est la vie.

The great news is that the band has already named a replacement for Nau, and that replacement is Tony Laureano, who, the statement says, “will be playing drums on our April tour, new album, and for the foreseeable future.”

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Greetings human filth, it is I, Oderus… no need for all the formal greetings that would normally be required for you. After all we have done this several times before. And with each successful snooze-fest (which is what answering your questions amounts to) I swore I would never again waste my time answering your asinine inquiries. But strangely enough, I found myself drawn to the web and reading your questions, no matter how stupid they were… and then I realized that my pathetic need for attention in any form completely outweighed any objections I might otherwise have had. Following that? After all, I did create you, and therefore despite your appalling appearance I am drawn to my creation, much like a father who puts a camera in his daughter’s toilet. So let’s be at it, you cretins!

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At least, that’s what vocalist Jason Wisdom tells Noisecreep the band’s new song, “Path of the Beam,” is about. That sounds like a phrase a stoned Us would use to describe music we thought was awesome, so I can totally get totally get behind the idea. I mean, I think it would be a more appropriate description for a power metal song or a bands whose music is just consistently epic epicness (e.g., Insomnium), but I like Becoming the Archetype, so I’m willing to go along with it.

So: if you’ve ever wanted to hear what it sounds like to ride a motorcycle in space (yesIknowtheresnosoundinspacejustshutitsmartassthisismetalnotthefuckingHarvardclub), go to the aforementioned Noisecreep, who are streaming the track. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on here, although, perhaps somewhat sadly, the elephants marching riff that kicks off the song is my favorite part (natch).

“Path of the Beam” will be on BtA’s new album, Celestial Completion, which comes out March 29 on Solid State.

-AR

The good folks at Heavy Blog is Heavy are celebrating the dawn of spring with Prog Metal March, in which they’re featuring one song by a different prog metal band every day. Why March? Beats me, but any excuse to compile the best of the best prog metal is a-ok with this guy. Yesterday’s entry comes from our favorite frenchmen Gojira, who as you may have heard are finally finishing their Sea Shepherd EP and are even working on a live DVD and writing a brand new album.

Today’s celebration comes from their 2008 smasher The Way of All Flesh in the form of a live performance of the album’s second track, “Toxic Garbage Island.” Few riffs written in the last 10 years get me as pumped as the opening riff of this song. Perfect in every way. I haven’t seen this footage before but it’s unbelievable. I dare you to challenge my assertion that Mario Duplantier is one of the best drummers in modern metal.

I just got chills watching this… srsly.

-VN

I mean, it’s no Hard Eight video, but it’s pretty good, I guess. I appreciate that the director was giving it the old college try, but I think he may have old college tried too hard; really, some street lamps and running and slot machines would have been more than sufficient. And the clip could definitely use some more old people smiling, that’s for damn sure.

“Empyreal” comes off of Sylosis’ latest, Edge of the Earth, which is out now in Europe via Nuclear Blast. The rest of the world can go fuck itself.

-AR

Okay, friends. Be prepared to have your minds blown.

Thank CHRIST that reader Jake Alder brought Hard Eight to our attention. None of the links on this Colorado band’s MySpace page work (I checked on two browsers to be certain), but I suspect industry people will soon find a way to track them down regardless — a band with this ground-breaking and impressive a videography can only have big things looming in its future.

Seriously, this is some next-level shit. In fact, I felt the need to do an extensive write-up on two of their videos just to prove my point. There is no band making videos as thought-provoking as these in 2011, and everyone should sit up and take note.

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(click to enlarge)

The above picture shows MS Maniac “Goro923″ standing outside a giant bullfighting arena in Spain — and wouldn’t ya know it, he’s wearing his brand spankin’ new MetalSucks “Appetite for Deconstruction” t-shirt! That makes Goro923 the latest winner of our ongoing Show Us Your MetalSucks contest, where winning is stupidly simple: just send us pics of yourself wearing your MS gear and soon enough you’ll receive a prized box of metal goodies straight from the Mansion. MetalSucks… where the price is wrong, bitch.

Thanks for playing, Goro! We would’ve loved to see some pictures of what goes on inside that arena, but beggars can’t be chosers.

Kip W. and I arrived in Austin, TX the night of Tuesday, March 15th. We’ve never flown in before Wednesday, the official start of the music portion of the festival, but that we felt compelled to be there for all of Wednesday’s day-time activities speaks to the volume of metal at this year’s festival. It was amazing and even overwhelming at times, but too much metal is never a bad problem to have. After a tasty burger at the Jackalope and some delicious but incredibly spicy chicken-wings that would leave our arseholes tingling the following morning, we headed to bed to rest up for the madness to follow. Sleeping is metal. Kip’s righteous snore is definitely not metal, but thank Odin for earplugs.

There was a lot of action on the first day of SXSW: face-punching hardcore via the Brooklyn Vegan day party, a ripping set by recent Ironclad signees Turbid North, and of course the MetalSucks-sponsored Sumerian Records showcase featuring Animals as Leaders, Veil of Maya, The Faceless and more. There was even the somewhat odd but nonetheless fun sight of watching Phil Anselmo play a guitar in his old-school hardcore project Arson Anthem. Deetz and videos after the jump.

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I am a strong believer in the healing and soothing effects of tea. I drink it all the time. So I was tickled by this “commercial,” which praises tea while deftly lampooning both pro-wrestling and metal culture.

I have no idea who actually did the V.O., but doncha think he sounds exactly like The Ultimate Warrior?

Hopefully the creators of this sketch are now hard at work on Fuckin’ Chicken Soup!!!

-AR

[UCB by way of The Deciblog]

Massive amounts of alcohol: Never responsible for altered memories or people saying stupid, insane shit.

So the thing is, Sammy Hagar seems like a swell fella — certainly much nicer than any of his former cohorts from Van Halen — and there was a time when I really enjoyed Van Hagar, and was able to view the (then-) two different VH eras in a kind of different-from-one-another-but-both-killer-in-their-own-way light. (“Poundcake” and “Runaround” from For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge actually still get my blood pumpin’.) But the Van Hagar albums have not aged very well, and Chickenfoot is certainly a total waste of resources. But, on the whole, I have nothing against Sammy Hagar.

Oh, yeah, except that he’s apparently crazy, and thinks he was abducted by aliens — multiple times. Mr. Not DLR tells MTV:

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The New York Dolls are the OG glam rockers, the gnarliest, the realest, the least bullshitty. Therefore merely invoking their name in any conversation lends instant credibility to your argument. Just last week in Austin, TX, Kip W. was trying to convince me of the superiority of chicken tacos over pork tacos to which I simply said “New York Dolls!” and the conversation was over. Similarly, another metal journalist tried telling me that Between the Buried and Me are wanky instrumentalists with no songwriting ability to which I said “New York Dolls!” and that shut him up right quick. Nikki Sixx knows this tried-and-true method of debate-winning all too well; when he was confronted about going back on his statement that he’d never tour with Poison, all he had to do was point out that the New York Dolls were opening and that shut just about everyone up (except us).

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Remember last month when I gave you the heads up that The Great Sabatini were going on tour? Well, that tour is happening right now! And as if seeing the band live weren’t enough incentive to get you off your ass and over to the show, the band will  have a limited run of their new 7″, Napoleon Sodomite (making of video above!), available for the remainder of said tour. Dates are after the jump.

But if the tour isn’t coming near you and you still want a copy of Napoleon Sodomite, don’t cry — you can also order one here. The first hundred orders come with an original wood cut print of the cover, which is a stupid-sick tribute to The Shining. And it only costs six bucks, so you really have no excuse not to get one.

And here are those tour dates:

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A Perfect Circle are like the Ross and Rachel of bands. They split up, and then they got back together, and then they split up again, and then they got back together again. And now they’ve announced a summer tour, which I would go to if I were you, just in case they break-up again immediately following its completion — assuming they don’t break-up before it even starts.

I kid, I kid. I love APC, and they’re terrific live. This is their first proper tour in six years, and, at least as far as we’re aware, they won’t be playing eMotive in its entirety, so it should be worth the ticket price. So if you’ve never seen them before, here’s your shot, and if you have, well, I bet it was a long time ago and you’ll be happy to go again.

Here are dates:

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If you were hoping for a new Converge full-length this year, well, don’t hold your breath. In a recent status update, the band said that “no date is ready to announce yet,” but I heard through the grapevine that when said date comes, it won’t be for 2011. Now, sometimes the grapevine is wrong, of course, but… yeah, I wouldn’t be shocked if we didn’t get a proper follow-up to Axe To Fall until 2012.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the band has just announced summer headlining tours of both the U.S. and Europe, and that they’ve got some other goodies in the works to tide fans over until we do finally get a new album — namely, a split 7″ with Drop Dead that the band hopes “to be available at the U.S. shows” starting in May, plus a new DVD, which is currently be editing and, “If the Hard Drive Gods smile on us,” will be out this year.

So, there ya have it. If we really aren’t gonna get a new Converge release in 2011, at least the band is coming up with plenty of ways to keep us entertained.

Here are those tour dates:

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Okay, so I had no fucking clue about this whole Rebecca Black/”Friday” phenomenon until a reader left a comment about it under one of our stories last week; then another reader sent us an e-mail bemoaning the fact that Black was so successful while brilliant metal musicians everywhere are struggling to make ends meet. And suddenly even Bob Lefsetz is talking about her.

So, yeah. Rebecca Black is hilariously untalented in every conceivable way — the amount of autoLaBonte she uses suggests that even her speaking voice is probably off-key, and she has the lyric writing prowess of an aborted retard fetus — and I imagine that that’s why she’s become such a sensation. I do not think there’s any reason to get upset about her “success” in the sense that even if right now she’s outselling everyone in the world at a ratio of a gajillion to one, her fifteen minutes are probably almost up. This is not a situation like the one we’ve run into with Britney Spears, where twelve years later it’s like “Holy crap I can’t believe this girl is still famous.” Unless Black and whomever is aiding her can write several more albums’ worth of stuff as hilariously idiotic as “Friday,” only VH1′s I Love the 10′s or whatever the fuck it will be called will remember this girl in twelve years. And if I’m wrong, well, I’ll just kill myself, because it will mean that Idiocracy was not fiction.

But let’s hope I’m not wrong. And while we ride out the wave of this nonsense, here’s the inevitable “clever” deathcore version of Black’s mega-hit, which was sent to us by our own Dave Mustein. I actually think this sounds even worse than Black’s original, but maybe it will give you a giggle.

-AR

I’m gonna keep this short because HOLY SHIT IT’S NEW DEVIN TOWNSEND MUSIC, so you really don’t care what I have to say (fuck, I don’t care what I have to say about this). At NAMM earlier this year, Heavy Devy performed some new music, including the song “Feather.” Now the actual studio recording of the song (or last a version of it — this one is labeled “edit,” but it’s almost nine minutes long, so, uh, I guess the song is really long?) has appeared on a Century Media compilation that, according to the YouTube description included with the below video, was “handed out at the recent DTP shows in Europe.” But all that really matters is WE ALL GET TO LISTEN TO A BEAUTIFUL NEW DEVIN TOWNSEND STUDIO TRACK. See? Aren’t ya glad ya got outta bed this morning?

“Feather” will appear on The Devin Townsend Project’s Ghost, which should be out this summer on InsideOut.

-AR

Thanks: Drew Webb

My love of the new Hate Eternal album has inspired me to go back and re-listen to all the other Hate Eternal albums. And you know what? This band was always awesome… but they just keep getting awesomer and awesomer. And this song has to be some kind of goddamned masterpiece.

Especially when you add weed.

-AR

Oh my fuck, you guys, IT IS 71 DEGREES OUTSIDE. I was gonna stay home and watch Vanilla Ice’s underrated cinemetallic classic, Cool as Ice, but instead I am getting stoned and going for a long, long walk in the sun. Quickly, before I ditch you losers to actually enjoy life, here’s what we did this week:

• God Forbid’s Doc Coyle weighed-in on Sergeant D.’s “band life is for losers” theory.
• We broke the news that hardcore supergroup S.O.S. has signed with Good Fightand got an exclusive report on the status of He is Legend from the band’s manager.
• We debuted new music by Napalm Death (thanks, Decibel!), The Haunted and Clutch.
• We said cel-lo to Grayceon’s Jackie Perez Gratz and got the skinny on the new Today is the Day album from drummer Curran Reynolds.
• We checked out the latest release from Total Fucking Destruction.
• We wondered if women make better metal singers than men.
• We examined the Kid Rock-Confederate flag controversy.
• We watched the worst video of 2011 so far.
• Dummy Nosenothing listened to the new Meshuggah song and then chased an ice cream truck.
• WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK…

Alright, I’m gonna go have some ice cream! ICE CREAM! YYYYAAAAAYYYYY!!!

-AR