I was having drinks with a friend earlier this week when, during the course the conversation, we came to two particular conclusions about underwear:

• Metal fans wear an awful lot of black. Therefore, it would follow that most people at a metal show are wearing black underwear.
• Many people have underwear for special occasions. Therefore, it would follow that many people at a metal show might have special black underwear they save just for concerts.

Of course, we had no way of confirming either theory — I mean, it’s not like we can just walk into a Deicide show and start asking people to take off their pants (Well I guess we could, but it would probably be ill-advised). And we were bemoaning this inability to collect scientific data when it suddenly dawned on me — Oh, yeah! I co-own an entire blog about heavy metal. We can totally collect some scientific data on this.

So we’d like to hear from you, oh ye MetalSucks faithful. Do you actually wear black underwear to metal shows? Do you have special underwear just for metal shows? Do you really not give a shit? Can you believe this is a post on MetalSucks?

Thank you for your cooperation.

-AR

It’s not hard to come up with theories as to why Slash has gotten so lame over the years — aging, sobriety, marriage, fatherhood, pacemaker, Fergie, etc. — but has anyone ever considered that Slash just might not be real? I mean, I know a truly silly number of people who have been Slash for Halloween over the years (both Vince and myself have done, in case you’re curious), and the reason is, he’s both recognizable and incredibly easy to imitate. Get a dark, curly wig, a top hat, and a cigarette, wobble around drunkenly, and, every now and then, remove a piece of paper that says “MY LEGACY” on it, place it on the ground, drop trou, and poo. Presto, you’re Slash.

But has anyone ever considered that the reason Slash has gotten so lame, and is so easy to impersonate, is because he’s not real? Y’know, like Santa. Like, maybe Slash seemed a million times cooler when I was a kid because my mom was Slash and my mom did an awesome job because she wanted her little gift from God to be happy, but now every time I see Slash it’s just some out of work record executive trying to bring back the good old days, or, worse still, Dj Ashba?

This is the theory that South Park posited on Wednesday night (about Slash not being real, not Slash being Dj Ashba in a disguise), with rather amusing results. (Two words: “Vunter Slaush.”) I can’t for the life of me figure out what spurned on Trey Parker and Matt Stone to include this storyline, although, yes, it does seem like Slash is always in too many places at once. I also feel like these guys lampooned Slash once before — I distinctly remember him being in some All-Star Charity Concert on a past episode — although I can’t seem to find that episode now, so maybe I’m imagining it.

ANYWAY, here are the clips from the episode relevant to Slash, courtesy reader Hetal Bhatt… you can watch the full thing here. In case you need some context for these clips, basically, the boys are trying to get Slash to play the half-time show for their new sports league, the Crack Baby Athletic Association. Yep yep.

-AR

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Gorod’s self-released Transcendence EP is out now; that is, only if you’re one of the lucky folks who attended their May 23rd show in Paris, the first and only place it was available. If you’re a regular sucker like the rest of us you’ll have to wait until the band gets it up on iTunes and other digital retailers, which they promise will happen “later on this year.”

But the band has just released a video trailer containing clips of every song on the EP matched with descriptions of what those songs all represent. Here’s the guide to the EP’s tracks that the band released a few weeks back, including some re-recorded older songs, a Cynic cover,and a brand new song:

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Iwrestledabearonce have released the album art for their forthcoming Ruining it for Everybody, and… Yep. That is pretty much a perfect visual representation of the music on the record. Between that photo and the title, you can’t accuse the band of failing to warn listeners that this ain’t gonna be a Burzum album.

Ruining it for Everybody comes out July 26 on Century Media; we’re still streaming a new song from the album, “Karate Nipples,” right here. The album also features  a song called “Deodorant Can’t Fix Ugly,” a phrase I have said to at least three women in the past four days.

-AR

No Clean Singing are totally killing it lately with interviews lately. Last month’s interview with Nachtmystium was a quality piece of journalism in which Blake Judd candidly shared his feelings about drug use, his record label, haters and more. The latest is a one-on-one with The Faceless mainman Michael Keene (recipient of a #12 ranking in our Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists list!), in which the talented guitarist/singer/producer gives some juicy quotes, including what the new album will sound like and how it feels to be the odd band out on Sumerian Records.

First thing’s first, new album tawk:

Talking of the new album, is there anything you’d like to share about it? You’ve previewed one song (“The Eidolon Reality”) already, so do you know what sort of direction, musically or lyrically, the rest of it is going to go in?

MK: Musically I think the new song that we posted, the pre-production track, is probably a pretty good indication of the musical directions, stylistically. Although I definitely think the album’s going to be a bit more… a bit broader… than anything we’ve done before.

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Me too. But for now we’ll all have to settle for little clips of a few new songs scattered throughout their latest video update from Split Second Sound Studios in Amsterdam. This episode focuses on the guitar recording process, which seems to be going swimmingly. I think we’re all a bit curious to see and hear how things go with new vocalist Daniel de Jongh, but I suppose we’ll have to continue being patient.

Bonus: this episode also features a little Taylor Swift guitareoke session. Don’t ask me how I know that the song in question is Taylor Swift.

Watch the first studio update here if you missed it. The follow-up to Silhouettes will be released this fall worldwide via Nuclear Blast.

-VN

I’m disrupting our usual posting schedule because some things are just too damn important to wait until tomorrow. And, clearly, this is one of those things.

It seems like forever now that we’ve been hearing about a new Gojira EP, the proceeds of which would benefit anti-whaling organization Sea Shepherd. And we knew that the EP would feature “guests from the international metal community.” Now one of those songs, “Of Blood and Salt,” featuring two of those guests — some dudes named Devin Townsend and Fredrik Thordendal (What a letdown, Gojira. Whassa matter? Dio and Hendrix weren’t available?) — is scheduled to be released with a sampler that will accompany next week’s issue of Metal Hammer. This being 2011, though, the song is already on YouTube. You can listen below.

Do I even have to tell you it’s awesome? It’s classic Gojira — I mean, I think at least 95% of the song consists of a massive elephants marching riff. Add a little Devy and Thordendal (I assume that’s him playing the guitar solo, although I could be wrong) and, well… get ready to have a six and a half minute orgasm.

Hopefully the EP will have an official release date soon. Meanwhile, keep in mind that Gojira’s Joe Duplantier appears on the song “Sumeria” on The Devin Townsend Project’s new album, Deconstruction, which comes out on June 21 via InsideOut.

-AR

Thanks to everyone who e-mailed us about this.

MetalSucks recently polled its staff to determine who are The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, and after an incredible amount of arguing, name calling, and physical violence, we have finalized that list! The only requirements to be eligible for the list were that the musician in question had to a) play metal (duh), b) play guitar (double-duh), and c) have recorded something in the past five years. Today we continue our countdown with Jeff Loomis, until recently of Nevermore…

When metal fans look back at the doldrums that were the ’90s, one American band sticks out as carrying the torch of “true” metal, whatever that term means: Pantera. Nevermore deserve just as much credit. Where Pantera had mainstream jock appeal and tough-guy bravado, Nevermore had the opposite; over-the-top technicality, a flare for the theatrical and the nerdiest of nerd-face fans when all of those things were considered as far from cool as you could possibly get. Nevermore never achieved nearly the popularity of Pantera, but as the band’s guitarist and chief songwriter, Jeff Loomis was responsible for bringing technicality back to metal a good 10 years before it was cool again.

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We had to remove the photo for last week’s caption contest because some sour-puss pictured didn’t have a sense of humor about his bad life decisions and demanded we take it down. But for the 161 of you who commented before the photo was pulled you surely remember the gauge-eared / tattoo-sleeved buffoons pictured. And so, the three best captions for that photo, each of which will net the entrant a copy of the Metallica biography Enter Night:

• Miles Boger: “its hard to gauge who’s a bigger douchebag”
• A2James: “Doublemint gum decided to market to the emo demographic.”
• Larry Patin: “And, check this out… if we hold our arms together just right – there’s a hidden picture of Willie Nelson with a mohawk – kinda like folding up the last page of a Mad Magazine!”

Some commenters pointed out that one of the gentlemen in last week’s picture was from the band Suffokate, which I didn’t even know when I posted the photo, but wow, that’s funny. Great fashion choices brah!!! Also LOL at that guy subsequently commenting and thinking we actually have time to police all the comments on this site and remove his selectively; at least we now know our spam filter is working properly.

This week we’re giving away  the Diary of a Madman and Blizzard of Ozz boxset that’s coming out on May 31st. The boxset contains both records on vinyl and CD, awesome artwork and a whole lot more. Check out a picture of the set here. To enter, leave a comment with the funniest caption to the photo below (sent in by reader Will Kriss). 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…

The only other time Decibel put Morbid Angel on the cover was our fifth issue, in March of 2005. David Vincent had just answered our dark prayers, returning to the fold to “focus on putting together a really brutal tour featuring classic Morbid Angel tracks.” That was radical enough, but what everybody was really rabid for was a new Vincent/Azagthoth collaboration, the first since ’95’s Domination. Predictably, Trey didn’t have much of a scoop for us: “We’re just taking this day by day. It takes so long to put an album together. I don’t think I’m at that point yet.”

Suffice it to say, it took him fucking long enough to get to that point. And in just under two weeks, if you’re not a metal journalist or friend of the band, you’ll finally get a thorough overview of what Tampa’s finest have been slaving away on: the deeply polarizing eighth album, Illud Divinum Insanus. And you’ll learn soon enough if your perspective mirrors the majority of those who have already heard it (mass facepalm) or if Azagthoth’s notorious experimental daring has paid off yet again. J. Bennett grills both principals and gets a pretty fascinating explanation for the startling new direction. It’s the big story in July’s dB, available in the webstore now, for subscribers within two weeks. This one doesn’t have a gushing Mars Volta review (sorry, J.), so it’s an improvement on multiple levels!

-AB

Decibel’s July 2011 issue also features Baroness, Coroner, Autopsy, Revocation, Wormrot, an incredible article about album packaging, and an awesome flexi disc of The Black Dahlia Murder covering Carcass’ “This Mortal Coil” with Jeff fucking Walker. That issue is available here, but why not get a full subscription to ensure you never miss one?

It’s easy to forget that the winner of American Idol is not a good singer, a sustainable product, or an interesting personality. The crowned Idol is nothing more than a flavorless, featureless zombie who most spurs votes from sofa-bound ‘Mericans and squealing little kids — each group a stronghold of high artistic standards.

So Idol is definitely not music. It’s not even good entertainment. It’s like Scooby-Doo or Mission: Impossible, in which any plot hole can be covered by a character’s sudden removal of a life-like mask; it’s ugly theater played by young adults in sweaty pursuit of suicide-averting popularity, for which they’ll mindlessly comply with any tossed-off suggestion from the Idol judges table; it seeks credibility by osmosis via guest spots for legendary musicians (and Beyoncé) who aim to plug a tour/record/book.

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Two weeks from today, Havok will hit the road as part of an awesome MetalSucks/Decibel sponsored Forbidden headlining tour, along with Revocation and White Wizzard. Vince called it “the ultimate fun time happy tour,” and his assessment is 110% correct; these shows are just gonna be deliciously obnoxious music, flying hair, and waves of beer as far as the eye can see.

But Havok are gettin’ the party started early with their new video, “Covering Fire,” which debuted earlier today on Metal Injection. All you really need to know about the clip is that it has lots of fire and explosions — two things every metal vid should have — and the song owns your ass. Check it out:

“Covering Fire” comes off of Havok’s most recent release, Time is Up, which is out now on Candlelight. You should buy it. You should also say hello to the band when you go to their aforementioned concert with Forbidden, Revocation, and White Wizzard. Here are dates:

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Khann’s Andrew LaCour tells Noisecreep that he wrote “Downward” — a new track from the band’s forthcoming album, Erode — “on bass initially, just to have a different perspective on the composition.” So I guess it’s just a doin’-wacky-things-on-the-bass-filled kinda day.

But I honestly don’t care if he wrote the damn thing on a kazoo, ’cause it rocks, and the end result is really all that matters. And if you don’t believe me that the song rocks, you should check it out here, and if you do believe me, you should still check it out here. It’s chaotic hardcore that isn’t afraid to get dreamy and weird, and dreamy and weird and chaotic are fine, fine things to be in my opinion. I mean I just grabbed a MetalSucks Mansion Monkey by the tail and flung him head-first into a different MetalSucks Mansion Monkey, so Khann are doing something right.

Also: the cover art to Erode strongly suggests the band wants you to be high when you listen to this, and who am I to argue with them? Just something you might wanna keep in mind moving forward.

Black Market Activities will release Erode on June 7.

-AR

Is producer Mike Elizondo a weird match for Mastodon? Do you foresee Mastodon jamz with funky beats and cloying catchphrases? Is this pairing the result of label meddling, artist contrarianism, and/or ambition? Will Elizondo grapple with the Mastodon sensibility or is he a mute concession to a returns-hungry record label?

Mastodon’s triumphant 2009 album  Crack The Skye was helmed by Brendan O’Brien, a super hands-on producer. Far from the type to cover his face with a newspaper and fall asleep at the mixing board, dude will play on your jam, co-write it, and arrange it. He gets up in there. It’s like having an extra band member who can play instruments that require study and who owns a studio.

So, it may mean something that Mastodon’s forthcoming fifth album will be produced by a maker of vacuous pop music for Alanis Morissette, Pink, and Maroon 5. A hip hop beat button-pusher! A bass player!! Well, that’s Mike Elizondo, whose recent track record includes timeless greats Switchfoot and Avenged Sevenfold. That’s the guy charged with shepherding the next Mastodon classic. That’s him above left!

-ADF

Congratulations to Isaac Schwarz, the winner of our MDF MVP contest! We had a bunch of great entries, but Isaac’s was chosen above all others by an illustrious panel of Maryland Death Fest veterans, including Andres Erickson (General Surgery/Sayyadina), Matt Harvey (Exhumed/Depakitator), Rich Hoak (Brutal Truth/Total Fucking Destruction), Mike Hrubovcak (Monstosity), Mike Majewski (Devourment), Matt Moore (Absu/ Rumpelstiltskin Grinder),  and Proscriptor (Absu). Isaac any 2 shirts, 1 LP, 2 CDs , and a  mystery prize from the Relapse booth at this year’s MDF (Relapse titles only). Not bad, eh, Isaac?

And don’t forget that Maryland Death Fest starts tonight, and rages all weekend! Four day passes are now sold out, but three passes and tickets to individual days are still available here. This year’s line-up is incredible, and includes Neurosis, Coroner, Voivod, Nuclear Assault, (the soon to be departed) Cathedral, Corrosion of Conformity, Exhorder, Exhumed, Kylesa, Ghost, Skinless’ farewell gig, and tons more. If you have the chance to go and you don’t, you’re a damn fool.

And on that note, here’s Isaac’s contest-winning essay…

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German grind merchants Vaulting have come along way since their deathcore-leaning, Street Fighter II-sampling early days (documented on this free 2007 demo). Over the course of two further EPs, Vaulting have grown more abstruse compositionally, while becoming more sonically potent – check the video they made for last year’s “We Are the Cavalry” for that rare tech-grind recording that sounds heavy and natural.

By the sound of this exclusive track “80 Gy” from their forthcoming album Nucleus, Vaulting have listened to a lot of Cephalic Carnage and Psyopus over the past year. The song sidesteps the silliness of the former and the crankiness of the latter, reaching for a place that tempers its spazzy fireworks with a unifying coldness of feel.

I’m guessing the title “80 Gy” means “80 Gray,” which is a specific dosage of radiation used to treat various cancers. That would fit with the album title “Nucleus” and roughly map on to the lyric “The back of the head already bald… It penetrates the skin, deeper, gilds the genotype” (that’s translated from the original German). As with all great grind though, Vaulting’s individual parts all merge into one big whooshing force.

[this streaming promotion has ended]

-SR

Within the last year, djent has picked up followers by the truckload, replacing the tedium of deathcore with some long awaited inspiration and… also some more tedium. Low tunings and monotone vocals an interesting band do not make. So why should you bother with another 8-string-aping sound-alike? Because France’s Om Mani doesn’t really sound like Meshuggah, and they sure don’t sound like Periphery, either.

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Like I (and many others) have said before, drone doom, like grind, is incredibly easy to make and almost impossible to make well. But unlike grind, its success lies not in its riffs or intensity, but in its overall atmosphere. People don’t like drone-doom because it’s slow (well, unless they’re insufferable people); they like it because it’s menacing, ominous, and full of intensifying-yet-rarely-resolved dread. Which, fortunately, means it’s easy to weed out genuine dronesmiths from the scores of assholes-with-amp-boners. There’s nothing quite like the toxic air great drone-doom summons, and inversely, there’s nothing quite as unbearable as vapid, pretentious, assfaced hipsters thinking they’re conjuring evil when all they’re doing is contributing to a trust fund-financed circle jerk because metal is the cool thing to nod to when your Deerhoof vinyl is backordered. Profound Lore’s Dark Castle don’t sit firmly on the latter end of that spectrum, but they don’t really sit at the former, either. There are some decent songs, some great ideas, but ultimately, not a whole lot to grab on to.

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Reader Jose Carnage (real name: Jose Peacefuldiscussion) sent us a link to the below video by A Tragedy at Hand (I love it when the band name allows the bad jokes to just write themselves!), proclaiming them to be the “BEST NEW BAND EVER” and “DOPE.”

He was wrong on both counts.

I fully expect this band to be signed to Century and out-selling Hate Eternal by the end of the year.

-AR

When Evan Brewer announced the impending release of a solo album last month, Vince rightfully pointed out that “The market for these kinds of acts is limited — extremely limited, especially for a bass player.” And I would wager that the market for a solo album from a bass player featuring no other instruments besides the bass is even more limited.

But by golly, I hope I’m wrong, ’cause apparently that’s what Brewer made: not only is the former Animosity/current The Faceless bassist the only musician to appear on his album, appropriately titled Alone, but “every sound you hear on the album came from a bass guitar,” according to the interview with Brewer in the below promotional video. And in the hands of the wrong musician, that kind of gambit could obviously be a total fucking disaster, but Brewer… well, not only is a top-notch bassist, but his motivations for recording such an album sound really fascinating and forward-thinking. We may not know if the record is actually gonna be good or not until Sumerian releases it on June 8, but we do know that Brewer is trying to do something different, and that’s always commendable.

Meanwhile, remember that awesome tour Brewer is doing this summer with Animals as Leaders, Intronaut, Dead Letter Circus, and Last Chance to Reason, and how only some of the tour dates had been released? Well, now we have more dates! So if a town near you wasn’t in the first batch, don’t freak out just yet.

Here’s the new itinerary, courtesy The PRP:

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