You’ve listened to Hammefall’s “Heart on Fire” (hint: the video has the smokin’ hot 2006 Olympic Women’s Swedish Curling Team)… but have you listened to “Hearts on Fire” STRETCHED? That’s not a new slang word for stoned; that’s literally stretched out, as in “took a 4 minute song and slowed it the fuck down to more than 25 minutes.” Although the effect certainly makes you feel stoned. Reeeallllly, realllllyy stooooooooooooooned.

According to HF guitarist Pontus Norgren, the song has been stretched 666 times (although the MS Mansion monkeys were quick to fire up their hand-crank-powered calculators to tell us that he must’ve meant 6.66 times); “Just close your eyes and enjoy this journey! This will fit perfect as set change over music and I will also contact Aqua Land in Stockholm an see if the want to use the song as a theme for the under water park.”

Download / stream:

Hammerfall – “Hearts on Fire STRETCHED”

Hammerfall’s newest album, Infected, is out in North America on June 7^th. Watch the new video for “One More Time” here.

-VN

It’s more than a little bit baffling that the same record label that just signed this band:

… also just signed this band:

But indeed, it is so. I’ve already expressed my excitement/bewilderment about the Jungle Rot signing, so for today I’ll just stick to letting you know that Jungle Rot have a brand new track called “Rise Up and Revolt” available for streaming (it’s that tiny blue circular “play” button to the left of the band photo). I guess it’s a pretty sweet slab of groovy old-school DM or something… it’s just hard to take seriously when, well, see above. Kill on Command drops June 21st and is available for pre-order here.

-VN

I get kinda bummed when we hafta write about tours with no dates yet, because it seems like kind of a cocktease — what’s the point of getting excited when you don’t even know if the trek is coming to your town yet? — but these two tours both seem pretty noteworthy. And so:

• Avenged Sevenfold will headline this year’s Rockstar Energy Drink Uproar Festival. Sevendust are also on the tour. And I’m going to pretend that that’s the entire line-up. Yep, just A7X and Sevendust. Two of the best modern pop metal bands touring together, with no one else. What a great bill!
• Firewind are FINALLY gonna do a proper North American headlining tour, with Arsis, White Wizzard, and Nightrage in tow. Not only am I stoked that Firewind are actually touring, but I think it’s really cool of them to have a diverse range of acts as their support. I bet these shows will be a lotta fun.

And we’ll post dates for at least one of these tours as soon as we get ‘em.

-AR

I am a big fan of leading independent music retailer VICTORY RECORDS. Back in the 90s, they gave us unfuckwithable classics of hardcore from bands like Earth Crisis, Bloodlet and One Life Crew, but they didn’t stop there! These days, they conduct themselves pretty much exactly like if someone gave me unlimited funds and told me to start a record label with the express purpose of trolling the fuck out of hardcore/metal fans.

For example, their latest signing makes Emmure and These Hearts look like heroes of the underground by comparison: Corpus Christi’s own DESIGN THE SKYLINE, who are partying like it’s 2008! As someone who misses the days when MySpace was still relevant, you couldn’t wear enough neon, and it was all about being scene as fuck, I am stoked to see this band join the Victory family, although I have to admit that it’s more than a little lulzy.

Cliffs:

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Based on your comments regarding “Moonlight Equilibrium,” the first single from The Black Dahlia Murder’s forthcoming Ritual, it seems like you guys are pretty stoked for the album — and you have good reason to be. It is fucking great. If we had to make our year-end lists tomorrow, it would definitely go somewhere near the top for me. Of course, it’s not even June yet and things could happen, but… one way or the other, this record is fucking awesome awesome awesome. BDM did not let their fans down with this one.

And great news! There’s another new track, “Conspiring with the Damned,” now streaming over at Lambgoat. I imagine you’ll be just as happy with this tune as you were with the last one. And if you’re not, uh… no I mean I really can’t imagine you cats not digging this song. Pretty much every song on this album is perfect or near-perfect. The band could just hit “random” and release the first song that comes up as the next single, and they’d be in pretty great shape no matter what.

Headbang here, then come back and continue to gush in our comments section. Ritual comes out June 21 on Metal Blade. The band will spend their summer headlining the MetalSucks-sponsored Summer Slaughter tour, alongside Whitechapel, Darkest Hour, Six Feet Under, Dying Fetus, As Blood Runs Black, Oceano, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Powerglove, and Within the Ruins. Get dates after the jump!

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I was stumbling around YouTube last night when I came across some new fan-filmed videos of The Faceless on their current European tour with Born of Osiris, Veil of Maya, and Gorod. And I’m sitting there watching some shitty cell phone footage of the band performing their new song, “The Eidelon Reality” (listen to a pre-production demo of the track here), and I have this realization –

Hey, that ain’t Derek Rydquist doin’ the vocals.

And so I scrolled down to look at the comments where, indeed, some other dude has asserted “that doesnt look like the vocalist,” and the dude who filmed the above video responded, “I think they got a new one and he´s much better than the old vocalist.”

So, trying to be a good detective, I went over to the band’s Facebook page to see if Rydquist had been removed from their listed line-up. And as of this writing, he hasn’t.

But there is this comment on their wall from some fan who saw them in Plymouth last night:

“incredible tonight, tight as fuck but wheres derek? had no idea he was no longer in the band, never the less the new guy did a stellar job”

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Have you guys heard the new Noisear album, Subvert The Dominant Paradigm? Holy shit, is it ever INTENSE — evil, evil, ugly, unrelenting grindcore that has no interest in inspiring anything other than misery and destruction. In other words, you need to check it out.

You know what else you need to check out? This video interview that Scion A/V did with the band, and that we are only to happy to be premiering here at MetalSucks. It covers the formation of the band, their influences, their songwriting process, their place in the metal scene, their desire to innovate and not just play the same ol’-same ol’ grindcore, and a whole lot more. Plus, you don’t even have to read! YOU CAN JUST SIT THERE AND WATCH THE PRETTY PICHERS!!!

Noisear’s Subvert The Dominant Paradigm is out now on Relapse.



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 Colin Marston from Krallice and Behold… The Arctopus…

Colin Marston is one of the youngest guitarists on our list, and his primary creative outlets (Krallice, Dysrhythmia, Behold…the Arctopus) haven’t yet reached the legendary status of so many of the other bands graced by the other 24 inductees. But in terms of his stylistic breadth and the scope of his abilities, Marston is in a league of his own.

There isn’t a signature Colin Marston guitar sound or style. Instead, Marston expertly adapts his talents to fit the project in question. On one end of the spectrum is Byla, the ambient guitar duo that Marston shares with Kevin Hufnagel; the project is all about abstraction and texture. On the other end is Behold…the Arctopus, a band that thrives on over-the-top virtuosity, deployed in the wackiest of ways – and let’s not forget that Marston executes all of Behold…’s atonal tone rows on a 12-string Warr guitar, which means he’s essentially shredding on two instruments at once. Somewhere in between those two poles is Krallice, in which Marston’s guitar lines intertwine with Mick Barr’s, creating ever-shifting harmonic patterns that tickle the ears like few black metal bands do. No matter what the guitar idiom, Marston has mastered it. No wonder that Luc Lemay asked him to join Gorguts as bassist. By the looks of the live footage from Gorguts’ 2010 mini-tour, it would seem like Marston’s fitting in just fine.

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From what I understand, it is not okay for “real metal” fans to like any deathcore bands. For example, you are not allowed to be into both Deathspell Omega and Winds Of Plague, because WoP don’t have the right haircuts or clothes to be considered a “legit metal band.” It is also important to share your unsolicited, excessively strong opinions whenever deathcore bands come up, letting everybody know that you “are into real metal,” and that “deathcore is the worst shit ever.”

With that said, I’m confused about how there are a few deathcore bands that seem to get a pass from metal nerds: Darkest Hour, The Faceless, Between The Buried And Me, etc. The same people who get very, very angry about the popularity of bands like Suiside Silence or Miss May I love The Black Dahlia Murder, All Shall Perish, and The Red Chord, which is weird to me because they do not really sound any different.

Can anyone help me understand this??? Why are some deathcore bands considered “generic garbage for idiots who shop at Hot Topic” but other deathcore bands are “brilliant musicians who keep pushing the boundaries of the genre,” according to metal nerds???

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I got home from last night’s ridiculously, ludicrously fun Dillinger Escape Plan’s show at The Music Hall of Williamsburg in the wee hours of this morning to find a new Limp Bizkit single, “Shotgun,” in my inbox. (The above cover art was apparently done by Wes Borland. Good to know he’s multi-talented.) And even though I was riding high on the buzz of DEP (and other things) and should have just gone to sleep, I decided, no, let me listen to this right now, and in doing so take my joy out back behind the barn and shoot it dead.

And shoot it dead I dead.

There’s a lot about this song that is just bad in a regular, fairly boring way — like the main riff, which is pretty standard 120 Minutes stuff.

But then there are parts of this song that are so phenomenally terrible as to be truly worthy of the name “Limp Bizkit.”

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Mega nerd blog Gizmodo recently ran an open letter to the site’s commenters, so we got to thinking… maybe it’s time we do the same. We don’t make readers “audition” to be commenters like Gizmodo does, we don’t have moderators whose sole job it is to police the comments, and we don’t have all the newfangled commenting technology that they do — nor do we plan to implement any of these things — which means it’s all that much more important that we all behave ourselves here. We will never, ever impose creative limitations on MetalSucks comments that would threaten to neuter the site’s fun and spontaneity, but at the same time there does need to be a little bit of order. So, without further ado, here’s Gizmodo’s post adapted and re-tooled for our own needs:

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I’m a big nerd for Scandinavian melodeath, so I was shocked to find out during a recent car ride with Metal Injection melodeath expert Frank Godla that there’s a top-notch band I’d yet to discover in the form of Finland’s SEO-unfriendly Diablo. Sez Frank of Diablo: “the sweetest band of this genre since Mors Principium Est.”

Their most recent album, 2008′s Icaros, contains all the best parts of melodic death metal without any of the genre trapping that have become so cliche over the past five or so years via a thousand 6-gen knockoffs. Best yet, they step things up a notch in the heaviness department and manage to distance themselves from the masses in part thanks to Rainer Nygård’s distinct, atypical vocals. If ever there were another example of Post-Swede, Diablo are it.

-VN

I’m going to put approximately as much work into this introduction as Throwdown put into not sounding like Pantera.

First up today we have “Wicked World,” the new video from Cold. Because Cold is apparently still a thing. And now only is this song painfully boring, but the video has no logic to it whatsoever. For example, it starts out with a teenage girl wearing a Cold hoodie. Which makes no sense, unless the video takes place ten years ago. If the video is supposed to take place in the present day, then it should really be a divorced single mother of two who works at the Circle K in a Cold hoodie.

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What’s going on, readers of MetalSucks? You’re reading the words of Max Zigman, Cary Geare, and Spencer Edwards of Son of Aurelius. We’ve been asked aplenty about how to get good tone and what we use to achieve our sound, so here is a little overview of our gear. Of course, good tone doesn’t just start at the instrument; it starts with consistently good technique.

The Guitars: An Ibanez RGT6EXFX and Jackson DK2 Pro. Both stock, strung with D’addario strings:

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I couldn’t care less about MMA and couldn’t pick “superstar” Josh Barnett out of a lineup of a dozen other Affliction-wearing muscle-bound goons, but I can tell you this: the lineup of Mr. Barnett’s Japanese Benefit Fit show is completely unfuckwithable, it’s for a great cause (all proceeds will go to the Red Cross), and for that I feel compelled to stand up and offer the man a hearty clap. If I lived in the L.A. area I’d definitely be going.

The show will take place on Thursday, May 26th at the House of Blues in Hollywood and will feature All Shall Perish, Animals as Leaders, Cattle Decapitation and Abysmal Dawn, as well as local acts Internal Corrosion and Thrown Into Exile. Like I said, unfuckwithable. Even better, the show is ONLY $15; tickets are on sale now at www.hob.com and www.ticketmaster.com.

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Not that record sales alone are really a barometer of very much these days, and not that the majority of Vampires Everywhere’s fans are of record-buying-age (it’s like the new drinking age), but the amount of units Kiss the Sun Goodbye (lawlz!) shifts when it comes out tomorrow should give some indication of how many t-shirts, VE makeup kits, fangs and vampire belt buckles have been sold, right? Let the merch empire begin.

In any case, this is the first I’ve heard of Vampires Everywhere’s music since we brought the band to Century Media’s attention last year. Considering the fact that this music barely constitutes metal, I have to say that it’s a lot less offensive to metal than I’d originally thought it would be. It’s pop-emo — basically Paramore with a male (but no less pretty) vocalist — but it’s terrible any way you chose to classify it. At least Zena Metal will be happy.

-VN

Okay so that’s not a direct quote, but still.

Last week I expressed some disappointment that everyone in Mötley Crüe and Poison seems to be getting along in advance of their upcoming summer tour, with Nikki Sixx apparently even going so far as to apologize to Bret Michaels for derogatory comments he had made about Poison in the past — y’know, like when he called Poison “fake bullshit” and declared that The Crüe “would never, ever tour with a fucking band like Poison.”

But guess what? As it turns out — shock of shocks — either Michaels is a liar or delusional, or Sixx is a liar or just an asshole. ‘Cause now Nikki has taken to Twitter to assure the world that, no, he never apologized for his comments:

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[Blackened doom metallers Woods of Ypres are currently touring North America on the so-called "Pain & Piss Tour." Bassist Shane Madden will be taking us along with him on his journey of pain and piss, to be delivered in four parts throughout the tour. Part 1 follows.]

Part One: The Manifesto

Were I to choose one thing to say about touring in North America it would be that it’s not a memorable experience. The day to day is exceedingly dull and occasionally overwhelming. The windshield and its filth don’t change no matter how long I stare at them; the view broken at a gentle curve midway by the one-and-only existing mechanical arm that continues it’s symmetrical dance partnerless. We roll through here and there, and admittedly it’s a nice time of year to tour. Everything is green and it’s warm, but not hot (until we get to the desert), and there are minimal expectations for anything. Folks in the northeastern States feel that it’s springtime when the weather is pleasant here for a few weeks, and there’s hope. Nothing can go that badly. Any wrong can be righted. It’s Aphrodite or Freya or the Easter Bunny fooling humans into procreation and continuation and perpetuation. All in all, probably the best season to tour.

Now, let’s get down to brass tacks:

The drives are long. We don’t always eat enough every day. Money is important to do this. The shows are good. The shows are okay. There’s booze and debauchery. We do it out of passion. Name-drops. Tour blog rehash. Tour blog falsehoods.

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UPDATE: I somehow did not realize that this is the chick from Danzig’s video for “Mother,” about whom we’ve written before. Whoops. Still pretty funny shit, though. Thanks to everyone who pointed out my error.

If you have an erection right now but you need it to go away IMMEDIATELY so you can continue to go about your day, well, have we got a video for you! I’m not really sure what the fuck this is, or why it’s on YouTube… really, since I’ve seen this, I feel like I’m not really sure of anything anymore… other than, yeah, this a major boner killer. Like, the anti-Viagra.

It’s also incredibly funny.

Even though this whacky broad doesn’t ever get fully naked, this is definitely NSFW, so consider yourself warned.

-AR

Oh, Colin Driehorst, why did you send this to us???

A week or two ago word got out that Animals as Leaders, Intronaut, Last Chance to Reason, Dead Letter Circus (who I don’t really know but who just signed with Sumerian… and apparently Textures’ Stef Broks is a fan, which ain’t a bad sign), and Evan Brewer were gonna do a tour together; we didn’t write anything at the time because, well, we just told you everything there was to write. There were no other details to give!

There are still no other details to give, except now Animals as Leaders have put the tour poster up on their Facebook page, which I guess is something. I mean, if you thought this tour was just a rumor, now you know it’s a really real thing. You don’t know when/where they’re playing or whether or not you can go, but, hey, you do know that they’ll all be on the road together.

Hopefully information that is actually of some use, like tour dates, will be released soon, too.

In the meantime, uh… enjoy this poster I guess?

-AR

Thanks to everyone who e-mailed us about this! Feel free to e-mail us again when dates are released.