Last night I was on the subway and smelled a distinct fishy odor.  Immediately I thought what most red-blooded American men would in that situation and looked around for, well, a less-than-hygienic female.  Instead I was surprised to notice that the small well-dressed Venezuelan man sitting next to me was eating a lobster tail.  An actual, full-on lobster tail.  And dude was crunching the shell with his teeth and slurping up all the fishy juice, all the while little bits of shell shrapnel flying about.  As he opened up the courier bag sitting on his lap to drop in the empty tail shell I couldn’t help but notice that he actually had an entire lobster inside (!).  WTF, I asked myself…  And when the guy drunkenly stumbled off the subway car I just had to remark out loud: “Weird.”

So I am honoring this bizzare weekend with a collection of videos featuring everyone’s favorite weirdo, “Weird” Al Yancovic.  Not the master parody-er’s famous song parodies per se, but rather his oft-underwatched joke interviews with superstar musicians.  First up are a few classics (Ozzy & Paul McCartney are ridiculous) and after the jump, Keith Richards, Michael Stipe, Eminem, and more.

Blackout in Brooklyn tonight, anyone?

These are dedicated to the absence of Juggalo Bob’s curly locks (RIP)…

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So we’ve been teasing our new list this week. Yesterday we had some readers guess that the list was of “Best Living Guitar Players,” and, hey, that’s close! It’s actually The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists. (Worth mentioning: the awesome above banner was done by the Derek Riggs to our Iron Maiden, Rodney Githens from Vertebrae 33.)

So what does that mean? Well, there were three qualifications for a musician to be eligible for this list:

• The musician in question has to play metal. (Duh.)
• The musician in question has to play guitar. (Double-duh.)
• The musician in question has to have released a new recording within five years of May 1, 2011 (thus, no Dimebag).

We didn’t invite any industry peeps or musicians to vote on this list — it was decided solely by The MetalSucks Get High Council. So if you love the list, you’ll have us to thank, and if you hate the list, you’ll have us to blame.

We obviously can’t tell you who’s on the list just yet, but we can give you this hint: Dan Donegan’s name never even came up.

It starts Monday. Get ready to be angry.

-Axl, Vince, and Everyone at MetalSucks

Me and Idol Remains were on well-earned hiatus last week, but worry not, you missed nothing. Okay, nearly nothing: On week 14′s shows, Heavy Metal James Durbin was wardrobed like Adam Lambert for a run at Muse’s “The Uprising,” the fat-to-filet ratio rocketed skywards in lieu of departed contestants, and Stefano dimples got bounced like a personal check in Torrance. K later, superstud!

Otherwise, Idol played par for the course: Haley Reinhart wailed, Lauren the winner waffled, Scotty warbled and winked like George W. Bush, ‘Fer-‘Pez resembled a eyebrow-bearing strip of turkey jerky, Casey annoyed the shit out of earth, and Steven Tyler spoke faster than he could think. Bam! You are up to date, Idol Remains readers. Both of you! Lulz

Today, we’re mere days from the release of Tyler’s slightly-awaited memoir, Does The Noise In My Head Bother You? (HarperCollins). Alas, I ask that you behold the lukewarm but plentiful ramp-up action in Tylerland:

• In a Rolling Stone cover story, big fat loudmouth Tyler blabbed that he and Joe Perry did drugs together in 2008 — about two decades after their final clean-up — and their intoxication stalled the ultimately abortive sessions with producer Brendan O’Brien. So Perry was MIA for studio work just this January cuz he’s in rehab?

• To go with his forthcoming tome, Tyler’s poppy new single “(It) Feels So Good” (above) was slated for release on May 10. An ego-drunk Tyler guessed that he’ll “hear it coming out of people’s cars this summer.” We can only assume he’ll ignore the accompanying heckles.

• Tyler previewed the book’s um “semiprologue” in which the scarf-enthusiast laid out his value of imagination over knowledge, his wishes for mass lawyercide, and his mother’s warning about becoming “a dartboard for others’ fears, doubts, and insecurities [sic].” (To prove that he is the excerpt’s true author — as if the catastrophic sentence construction left any doubt — Tyler went ahead and rapped parts of it to unwitting Idol hopefuls on Wednesday.)

So it’s a big week for first-time author/Perry-baiter Steven Tyler. But will the pressure get to him during Carole King tribute week? Will his extensive press tour have distracted him from the supplying of vital guidance to budding young pop performers? Will he seem stoned and aloof, or gibbering and jumpy? After the hop, your 15th (!!) Idol Remains s’gorecard:

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Kvelertak just premiered their new video, for the song “Ordsmedar Av Rang,” on Noisecreep. And I’m watching it and I’m thinking, “Amazing fucking song, good enough live video… wait, didn’t Kvelertak just release a ‘good-enough’ live video?” I was so sure of this fact that I ran a search on MetalSucks, because I saw sure I’d see such a video, and sure I’d posted it, fairly recently. But nothing came up. No such video exists.

Conclusion: I am psychic. I knew there was a new Kvelertak video coming, I knew it would be a live video that was good but not great, and I knew that I kinda wouldn’t care because I love Kvelertak so damn much.

I CAN SEE THE FUTURE.

For everyone who can’t see the future, check out the video below, because it will be brand new to you.

Kvelertak’s self-titled debut is out now in Europe via Indie Recordings; here in North America, we have a version with some sweet bonus tracks (including a demo of “Rang”), courtesy The End Records.

-AR

(Johnson City, TN’s Ocoai)

True to my promise, I’m sticking to only the best of the best for these Unsigned and Unholy columns; no more competent-but-unspectacular mediocrity! Labels, if you’re reading this, these are the bands to look at BECAUSE I HAVE AMAZING TASTE IN METAL, naturally! Colussus, Ocoai and Angel Vivaldi are three unsigned acts that recently hit the MS inbox and knocked my socks off. Let’s check ‘em out.

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I know this isn’t realistic in today’s economic climate, but, no joke, everyone at Metal Blade deserves a bonus. On May 10, they’re release Hate Eternal’s orgasm-inducing Phoenix Amongst the Flames; then, less than two months later, on June 21, they’ll release Ritual, the new album from The Black Dahlia Murder. And at that point, they’ll have released what I think are the two best death metal albums of the year thus far.

Yep. Ritual fucking rocks. (Valnoir Mortsonge’s horny-making cover art is above.) It might be BDM’s best album yet. It’s every bit as catchy as Deflorate was, but way, way more raw. I hesitate to say more because I’m not sure what’s supposed to under wraps right now and what’s public knowledge. But there are some surprises here, I promise you. Cough cough, 100% real string sections, cough cough, not shitty sounding synths, cough.

Can’t wait ’til June to hear this bad boy? Well, lucky for you, there’s already a song from the album streaming online right now! It’s called “Moonlight Equilibrium,” and you can listen to it here. HOLY SHIT IS THIS A GOOD SONG. Go listen go listen go listen go listen.

Like I said, Ritual — which was produced by Mark Lewis and mixed by Jason Suecof, in case you had any doubt that it was gonna sound killer — comes out June 21. You can already pre-order it in a variety of formats here. I just spent $62 on a limited edition box set. No, I am not kidding. It looks freaking awesome (it comes with a cloth ouija board, incense, coffin nails, and a fucking sage wand, for crying out loud) and I’m excited to own it.

BDM will be on tour throughout the world starting next month. You can get all dates here. After the jump I’ve posted the itinerary for the MetalSucks-sponsored Summer Slaughter, which the band will headline and, presumably, dominate.

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A couple of weeks ago I was flipping through the new issue of Decibel when I got a paper cut. In between bouts of crying, I was able to communicate to a MetalSucks Mansion Monkey to tell Vince that I had taken ill — gravely ill, in fact — and that he might need to try and carry on MetalSucks without me forever, or, at the very least, for the next few weeks.

My point being — I am not a very tough dude.

But Phil Anselmo is.

It seems that while doing a show with Down here in NYC last night (Note to selves: How were we not there?!?), Mr. Anselmo got whacked in the noggin with guitarist Pepper Keenan’s instrument (during the song “Lifer,” which, according to this tweet from Sirius XM’s Jose Mangin, Anselmo had dedicated to Dime), and consequently started bleeding from the head.

And he just kept performing anyway.

Bad. Ass.

Here’s some fan-filmed video footage… you can get a good look at Phil’s injury starting around the 2:03 mark:

You can check out more videos at Metal Insider, who first alerted us to this story.

This obviously isn’t the first instance of a vocalist not being a sissy-cry-baby-face — in just the past year, I’ve seen Made Out of Babies’ Julie Christmas and Trap Them’s Ryan McKenney suffer similar injuries (although I think those were accidentally-self-inflicted) — but it is the most Anselmoey.

-AR

Once upon a time I pitched Mike Portnoy (through his people) on doing a “Jew on Jew” interview and he turned me down, that persnickety bastid (the Jew on Jew concept did up yielding some fun interviews with Daath’s Eyal Levi [before he was an MS columnist], Genghis Tron’s Mookie Singerman and Orphaned Land’s Kobi Farhi). And here Metal Injection’s Rob Pasbani goes and inadvertently gets all Jewy with Portnoy on the Golden Gods black carpet — over who else, the hero of Jewish men everywhere, Larry David.

It’s all about the shirt. When I first discovered the Larry DavHead shirt last year I immediately bought 10 of them; shirts like this don’t come around every day, ya know? Rob and about 159 other Jewish metalheads I know also bought the shirt; it’s, like, possibly the best t-shirt in the history of ever. So when Rob donned the Larry DavHead shirt underneath his sparkly silver coat on the black carpet, Mike Portnoy was all over that shit like a swarming pack of flies. Watch:

Last post about the Golden Gods and then we’ll shut up about it… I can’t help that Metal Injection’s black carpet interviews are so damn entertaining. After the jump, a quickee with two members of Rammstein; unfortunately there were no cameras around when Till Lindemann was hitting on every piece of ass within a 2 foot radius, but the mental video I took will provide laughs forever and ever. Check out the rest of Metal Injection’s black carpet footage below the video here.

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OH SO MUCH YES RIGHT NOW.

There’s a new Origin song in the world right now. I don’t really know what else I need to tell you. If you have even 25% of a functioning brain, you’re no longer reading this but listening to it. So it shouldn’t even matter what I type here. Sometimes Lars Ulrich like to spike his Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee Coolatta and masturbate to pictures of panda bears he has photoshopped to look like fuzzy versions of Randy Rhoads. Karyn Crisis secretly aspires to be more like Cyndi Lauper. Blue bed bugs beg for blumpkins. See, these things I’m typing don’t even make any sense, but it doesn’t matter because no one is reading this right now.

On the off chance you are still reading this for some reason, OMG IT’S SO GOOD STOP READING THIS AND GO LISTEN RIGHT NOW.

Origin’s new album, Entity, comes out June 7 via Nuclear Blast. The band is also doing an incredible summer co-headlining tour with Hate Eternal, and support will come from Abysmal Dawn and Vital Remains. Get dates after the jump.

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Late last year we had the opportunity to see the amazing Brent Hinds walk his rockabilly and alley cat strut with not one but TWO bands in ONE night at Brooklyn’s intimate Union Pool, when his two side projects Fiend Without a Face (which also features Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor) and West End Motel hit the road for a brief East Coast run. My jaw hit the floor when I saw Hinds jam out those rockabilly rhythms and leads from up-close; it often gets lost in the behemoth that is everything about Mastodon, but good God, Hinds is a positively stunning player of inimitable prowess.

Good news for Fiend Without a Face fans who, like me, had a lot of trouble tracking down their only record; Rocket Science will release a two-CD set on June 7th featuring the lone self-titled Fiend Without a Face record and West End Motel’s brand new debut Don’t Shiver, You’re A Winner. Both bands actually pre-date Mastodon and provide a great look into Hinds influences; stream a Fiend Without a Face song here and a West End Motel song here.

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[A couple of weeks ago The Ocean's Robin Staps took the piss out of us with a mock gear column... and now he's back to take you on a step-by-step walk-through of his actual live rig. Gear nerds, you're gonna love this one; Robin's got a very, very interesting setup. Check out our recent Rigged columns with Between the Buried and Me guitarists Paul Waggoner and Dustie Waring and BTBAM drummer Blake Richardson. Between the Buried and Me, The Ocean, Job For A Cowboy (and on select dates Cephalic Carnage) are on tour through May 15th; get dates here.]

My tone obviously starts with my guitars, two Paul Reed Smith Custom 24s.

I have always loved these guitars but simply couldn’t afford them until we got an endorsement with them 2 years ago. The elegance of their design is really just the surface-level: beyond lies unrivaled playability, perfect craftsmanship, a comparably light weight and yet endless sustain. And yes, these guitars are not just pretty, they are also more sturdy than any other guitar I’ve ever had: I have had to deal with 5 broken headstocks in my career as a musician with this band, but to date my PRS guitars have remained in good order. I guess you are naturally taking better care when you are playing such a classy and precious instrument.

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Yeah I just needed a snappy headline. Don’t worry. As far as I know, Autopsy are not constantly flirting with death.

ANYWAY, “Always About to Die.” It’s a new Autopsy song! It’s streaming right now on Brooklyn Vegan! You should listen. This slow, evil, groove-laden tune will be your first taste of the band’s first new full-length in fifteen years, Macabre Eternal. And it sounds like the band hasn’t lost any of their charm in the time that has passed.

Macabre Eternal will come out on May 31 via Peaceville. It’s turning out to be an insanely competitive year for death metal… I’ve already heard too many great releases in the genre to list here. I guess we’ll see how this new Autopsy record stacks up soon…

-AR

Confirming what many astute MS commenters and anyone with a brain suspected since this whole cheesy video series began, the new Dream Theater drummer is Mike Mangini, as revealed in the third and final part of their video series documenting their search for a Mike Portnoy seat-warmer. It was clear from the start that he was a great fit musically and personality wise with the band. Will he be able to fill Portnoy’s mongoloid shoes and will fans accept him in? I can already hear the message board chatter on both sides from DT dorks across the e-metalverse. Here’s part 3 (again, not embeddable ’cause WMG are ass-cats who don’t understand how the Internet works):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QHMQjH17aw

[UPDATE 12:01pm EST: I just watched the full video, and WOW, Mangini sure gets emotional at the end when the band offers him the gig. It's great to have a guy that's so INTO it as opposed to just taking a gig, but what's gonna happen when Portnoy claims his throne back in a few years?]

Sound off with your opinions on Mangini in the comments section below… I wanna see some sparks flyin’!

-VN

We still don’t know when the new Chimaira album is coming out, or what it’s gonna be called, or, uh, very much else about it, to be honest. We do know that that band has a really, really excellent new line-up, though, and that said new line-up will be making their live debut next month, when they do a too-brief six date mini-tour. While new bassist Emil Werstler has played live with the band before, these shows will be the first for his Daath bandmate, Sean Z., and for new drummer Austin D’Amond (Bleed the Sky). So these shows should be pretty exciting.

Presumably, Chimaira will also use these concerts to show out some of their new material. And hopefully we get some official word on album release date soon.

In the meantime, here are the six tour dates, in case you somehow can’t read the poster above:

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This one’s gonna be a headbangin’ party: as previously announced, MetalSucks (along with Decibel) is proud to sponsor Forbidden, Revocation, White Wizzard and Havok on their upcoming U.S. and Canadian tour, and now we’ve got the poster to prove it.

This is like the ultimate fun time happy tour; if ever there were a show to get extremely drunk and rowdy at and to HEADBANG NON-FUCKING STOP, this is the one. Get ready; it starts in June. Dates after the jump.

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THE WEEKEND IS ALMOST HERE! Are you excited? The weather is finally starting to get nice, at least where we live. I’m gonna need to ahead and try and to defeat Portal 2 ASAP so I don’t spend the entire weekend indoors.

ANYWAY, a good way to get your party started is by watching the below fan-filmed footage of Job for a Cowboy performing a new song, “Signature of Starving Power,” at a recent stop on their MetalSucks-sponsored tour with Between the Buried and Me, The Ocean, and Cephalic Carnage. We’ve already seen some footage of JFAC drummer Jon “The Charn” Rice rehearsing this song, but this is the first time we’ve actually heard it with the whole band and everything. And, of course, it’s a bootleg and the quality ain’t great, but it still sounds pretty good to me. Everyone I know who’s heard JFAC’s new EP, Gloom, says it’s the best thing they’ve ever done, and a new chapter for the band, and based on the two songs we’ve now heard (the other being “Misery Reformatory,” which is already available for download), I’m inclined to believe it.

Gloom should be out sometime in the not-too-distant future on Metal Blade.

And here are remaining dates for that awesome BTBAM/JFAC/The Ocean/Cephalic Carnage tour:

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Yesterday we told you that we’ve made another list for you all to get your panties in a twist about. We also gave you some clues about the nature of the list.

Now here are some more clues.

The list concerns musicians.

The following musicians were not eligible for the list:

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The prizes for our last photo caption contest were TWO super-sweet MetalSucks Fanpacks, exclusively being sold at every FYE in the U.S. right now (search via the store-finder app). They each contain an exclusive t-shirt designed by Vertebrae 33′s Rodney Githens and a 20-track CD featuring music by Kvelertak, Thomas Giles, Believer, TesseracT, Napalm Death, Trap Them and several other excellent bands. These bad boys are selling for a mere $9.99, which for a t-shirt and 20-track CD is pretty darn unbeatable. The winners:

• Jason: “Somewhere in Super Mario World a village is missing their idiot.”
• SourDeez: “Chesapeake Grin.”

This week we’re giving away two CD copies of the new Zombi album Escape Velocity, which Relapse Records will release on May 10th and you can pre-order here. You know how we do: leave a comment with the funniest caption you can come up with for the photo below. Remember to use a real email address (or post it with your comment if you’re using FB Connect).

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…

If there’s one thing MetalSucks and Decibel have in common—aside from high-ranking editors with dubious taste in Major League Baseball teams—it’s the unyielding desire to expose and promote bands that totally rip. You’ve already gotten down to your MS overlords’ fine taste in the form of two diverse NYC Sucks compilations. Now your brothers-in-law-who-visit-once-a-week-to-shotgun-your-beer-and-trash-the-place at Decibel are doing you a similar solid. Head on over to our decrepit corner of the Internet for—holy fucking shit—exclusive full streams of unreleased metal albums.

Here’s the deal: dB subscribers will be granted access to a members-only section of our website , where they’ll be able to preview a new extreme album that can’t be heard anywhere else. Kicking off the series of ever-flowing streams is the world premiere of Hell’s Human Remains, which will formally drop May 13 on Nuclear Blast. Formed way back in 1982, the Nottingham squad has overcome intra-band tragedy (frontman Dave Halliday committed suicide in ’87) and endless label woes (as in, they never got one) to finally release their long overdue first-ever full-length. Unlike Anvil, there ain’t gonna be a feel-good crossover movie to commemorate this one. Also unlike Anvil, this band is actually awesome, so show your support one way or another.

-AB

Decibel’s June 2011 issue, featuring Ghost, Killing Joke, Hate Eternal, Gorguts, and Scale The Summit is available here, or make your mama proud and just get a full subscription.

A dude could get used to the practice of semi-annually checking in with loud alternative rockers the Deftones. That’s the pattern at MetalSucks: Every other season, we pry into the personal and professional business of a band destined to be remembered as one of America’s all-time greatest (srs), the post-Cobain Faith No More and canonizer of real-head hall of fame acts like The Cardigans, Duran Duran, Suicidal Tendencies, and The Cure.

And the old Deftones — which, of course, were the young Deftones — seemed just as cocksure and drama-wracked as all those. However, this new, older Deftones is grooving smooth and hanging hard, said drummer Abe Cunningham in an epic gab with MS last week. (One never runs out of conversation topics with Deftones dudes.) Animated and way too modest, Cunningham talked me through even more Deftones details than I covered last time and last last time: The fun of recording awesome cover jams, their wake-up call when bassist Chi Cheng was seriously injured, his chemistry with Cheng’s replacement Sergio Vega and with singer Chino Moreno, their record deal then and now, and silly people like Helmet’s Page Hamilton and the big fat copycats in Shinedown.

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