As we reported a few weeks back, June is going to be a big, big month for Black Market Activities. The label helmed by The Red Chord frontman Guy Kozowyk begins their new distribution and artist development deal with Good Fight Entertainment with four, count ‘em four, releases in just two weeks — Engineer’s Crooked Voices and Khann’s Erode both come out June 7, and Ed Gein’s Bad Luck and Fit For An Autopsy’s The Process of Human Extermination on June 21.

And guess what? All four releases are fucking fantastic. We dug them all so much, in fact, that we begged Black Market Activities to let us debut four songs at once — one from each album — so we could revel in their awesomeness with you, our beloved readers. You’re welcome, beloved readers!

So check out the tracks below. BMA is a diverse label, and no two of these bands sound even remotely similar, so it’s impossible for us to believe that you won’t dig at least one of these songs. And don’t forget to pick up the full releases when they come out June 7 and June 21!!! You can pre-order them all right here.

ENGINEER, “BRUISED BLUE COLLAR”

KHANN, “THE GATE”

FIT FOR AN AUTOPSY, “THE JUGGERNAUT”

ED GEIN, “WASTED LIFE”

This is the kind of news I like waking up to in the morning: Revocation’s new album Chaos of Forms will not only feature cowbells, but cowbell blastbeats. This on top of the Extreme-style horn section we’ve already been promised! Nom nom nom.

All this comes in the form of in-studio video update #2 featuring drum-tracking with one Phil Dubois-Coyne, who’s got to be one of the hardest and true-hitting drummers in metal right now. I had the (dis)pleasure of smelling his 3-week-old body funk when I joined the Metal As Art Tour for a week last year, but I also had the pleasure of watching the guy nail it every single night; dude’s a machine.

We also get to hear more of the finished version of the jizz-worthy new song we heard in episode #1. Goose bumps at that solo (srsly). Chaos of Forms finally arrives on August 16th; listen to the new song “Grave Cradle Robber” here.

-VN

If you’ve been to a hardcore show in, say, the past fifteen years, chances are that at least one band on the bill played a cover song made famous by another hardcore act. It’s a surefire way to get a pit going even if your band’s original material sucks. Fortunately, H2O and Skarhead, two bands that most certainly do not suck, have decided to pay respects to their hardcore predecessors with respective covers albums. H2O just entered the studio this week to begin work on Don’t Forget Your Roots (a title that H2O fans will smirk at given the anthemic “Family Tree”), which will feature their interpretations of The Ramones, Dag Nasty, Madball, Rancid, Circle Jerks, Descendents, Cro-Mags, Bad Brains, The Clash, Government Issue, Verbal Assault, Gorilla Biscuits, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, 7 Seconds, Embrace, Social Distortion, Sick of It All and Warzone.

Skarhead, on the other hand, have already recorded their covers record, due out this July on I Scream Records. Entitled Dreams Don’t Die, the collection features a shit ton of guests including Paul Bearer (Sheer Terror), Eddie Sutton (Leeway), and Scott Vogel (Terror). Next month, Lord Ezec will lead a Skarhead tour that goes up and down the East Coast with a few Midwest dates towards the end. I caught the band’s set at last year’s Black N Blue Bowl, and if you like your hardcore thuggish and raw, you won’t want to miss this. Furthermore, Eddie Sutton is joining the band for this jaunt! You can find these dates along with the Dreams Don’t Die track-listing below.

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S.O.S., the new hardcore supergroup featuring current and former members of Agnostic Front, Hatebreed, Madball, Terror, and Trapped Under Ice, have a new song, “Part of the Disease,” streaming over at Stereokiller. And while I do not really spend all that much time listening to hardcore these days, I gotta say, I’m digging this. It’s simple , it’s catchy, and it’s short. Kinda like that midget in Vegas who gave me the clap.

You’re moshing here. As our own Gary Suarez exclusively reported in March, S.O.S. have signed with Goodfight Entertainment, who will releases the band’s debut, I Owe You Nothing, on June 21; Reaper Records will release a vinyl edition that same day.

-AR

From the desks of the same folks who have wasted millions (billions?) on unsuccessfully fighting music piracy comes this latest bit of crackpot legislation: the state of Tennessee is close to passing a bill that would make it illegal to share your Netflix or Rhapsody account, or, as the bill is worded, any “entertainment subscription service.”

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Metal Hammer and The PRP are both reporting that the below is the new album art for Limp Bizkit’s Gold Cobra, the comeback a recent New York Times poll tells us is anticipated by more people than any event save for Jesus’ rising. At first I thought it was a joke, but, no, it’s on Wikipedia now, too, so it must fo’ reals, as Fred Durst himself might say.

And, well… it’s certainly an improvement over the old album art. And is that a clever allusion to Macbeth I spy?

No, it’s probably just the Kardashian sisters. Common mistake.

So anyway. There. I said something nice about Limp Bizkit kind of! Feeling is healing, y’all.

Gold Cobra comes out June 28 on Interscope, which means I may actually have to do what I promised Vince I’d do like a million years ago and review it. FML.

-AR

The less you know about this video before you start watching it the better, but suffice it to say, clearly, this band will be headlining Scion Rock Fest next year.

-AR

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 Meshuggah’s Fredrik Thordendal…

We could have easily chosen Meshuggah’s rhythm guitarist, Martin Hagström, for this list. As the primary music writer on about half of Meshuggah’s songs from Chaosphere onwards, Hagstrom is equally responsible for Meshuggah’s deliriously complex rhythm schemes, which have largely defined the band’s music for nearly twenty years and more or less inspired the entire djent movement. In 2004, Guitar World threw up its hands trying to decide who was better, and inducted both guitarists to the #35 spot on the magazine’s list of 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists of All Time. Let’s not forget that Thordendal and Hagström also made seven and eight-string guitars cool again, after the scourge of nu-metal tainted the reputation of the extended range axe.

But there are a couple things that give Thordendal the upper hand.

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Remember back in February, when Emmure’s Frankie Palmeri claimed that he was really some otherworldy being named Thanos Reignz? Here, I’ll remind you:

“For the record, my name is Thanos Reignz, although you may know me as Frankie Palmeri. My true self is beginning to emerge.”

And this is a ridiculous statement, not just because of its both pompous and preposterous, but because Thanos is a character from Marvel comics, which means that either Frankie can’t tell the difference between make believe and the really real world, or otherwise has all the imagination of a corpse.

Well, now Frankie has a new, apparently electronic side-project which is in fact called Thanos Reignz. And guess what? Not only is it terrible, but it consists almost entirely of unoriginal material.

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Though Fucked Up, Made Out of Babies vocalist Julie Christmas and the annual free tech-metal comp Mecha Organa are completely unrelated in just about every way, they all concern heavy music and they’ve all got new tunes. So:

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Jennifer’s Body was screwed before a single image flickered in public. The immediate reasons were twofold.

First, Karyn Kusama directed it. That would be that same Kusama whose gritty indie-film Girlfight was celebrated, but whose pricey, high fashion futurist Æon Flux was shredded by the studio and then released without reviewer pre-screenings. The press surveyed the carnage, located the person least responsible— ironically, Kusama — and promptly laid blame on her.

Around the same time, Diablo Cody was still flush with the out of the box success of her first screenplay, Juno. Was it time to knock the attractive ex-stripper down a few pegs no matter what she wrote? Yes it was.

So — deadset on consigning Kusama to the dustbin of one-hit-wonders and eager to loathe anything Cody crafted, the critics promptly lowered themselves to the occasion by trashing the hard-to-pigeonhole Jennifer’s Body on its release in 2009 for reasons that were united mainly by their inchoate ugliness. But later for what may have explained Body’s kneejerk drubbing.

For I am here to praise Cody/Kusama’s great film, which may have MetalSucks readers going, “What the fuck is Jennifer’s freakin’ Body release doing in the New York Times of Metal anyway?”

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MS Maniac Steve Gates recently journeyed all the way to Turkey from his native Rhode Island. Based on the pics he sent us it looks like his journey consisted entirely of going from one airport to another, which must have been boatloads of fun. Where are all the pics of you throwing the horns or holding invisible oranges at the myriad epic monuments we’re sure you visited?? Come on, Steve! But hey, thanks for sporting our “Appetite for Deconstruction” MetalSucks t-shirt in airports worldwide! We hope the flight attendants enjoyed it. At least the above pic, taken back stateside in Washington D.C., shows you’re not ashamed to show your MetalSucks love outside of the confines of flying steel tubes.

For entering our ongoing Show Us Your MetalSucks contest Steve will receive a box o’ metal goodies from the Mansion. You can do the same by buying one of our shirts or hoodies available at District Lines – or the “Appetite for Deconstruction” design Steve is wearing at Indie Merch — and then sending pics of yourself doing something metal to news [at] metalsucks [dot] net.

Take a look at pics from Steve’s Turkish vacation after the jump.

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Cosmo at Invisible Oranges, whose pieces are becoming ever more introspective in his last days running the blog, posted a really interesting article last week. “I don’t keep up with new music anymore.” How many times have you heard this from old friends of yours, many of whom you grew up listening to music with? Cosmo wants to know why people tend to lose interest in new music as they age; is it the loss of the teenage need to rebel? the presence of other obligations in life? the feeling that new music just doesn’t carry the same rush it used to? Here are two quotes from the editorial:

This phenomenon has bothered me for years. A good number of friends with whom I first bonded with through music don’t share that passion anymore. They always cite things like family, work, and time. But that doesn’t stop them from watching movies or TV. That makes sense. Watching movies or TV is often more passive than listening to music. Movies and TV come at you through your television set (and, increasingly, your computer screen). Outside of radio, one has to go to music. Music also doesn’t hand people visuals like movies and TV do.

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The problem with \\\Maytag, the “refrigerator drone metal” band, is that it’s so hard to market them, because, really, who do they tour with? On what bill do they fit? Others bands in the vein of Sunn O)))? Other comedy metal bands? Comedy metal bands that don’t know they’re comedy metal bands? It’s a tough quandary to solve!

But help is on the way, thanks to this washing machine:

And if you thought, “Sure, the washing machine sounds kinda like it’s drumming, but it’s not very metal,” well, you thought wrong. ‘Cause this band called Science of Demise wrote a whole metal song based around it:

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Everyone whose parents raised them correctly loves Gojira, and so everyone whose parents raised them correctly has been eagerly anticipating the band’s seemingly-forever-in-gestation Sea Shepherd EP since, well, seemingly forever.

But now it looks like we might actually be getting close to its unveiling! Last week we got to hear a new song, “Of Blood and Salt,” which features guest appearances from Meshuggah’s Fredrik Thordendal and Devin Townsend’s Devin Townsend; now Gojira’s guitarist/vocalist/mastermind, Joe Duplantier, has given an interview with Metal Hammer in which he reveals that Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe (who previously appeared on the group’s “Adoration for None”), In Flames’ Anders Friden, and some dude named Max Cavalera are all going to appear on the release, too.

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One of my favorite bands, Bloodlights, has a still-untitled album coming out this fall. Now this is good news,because, well, I love them. I’ve had the opportunity to hear a few of the bands newer songs and I’m happy to say it’s more of the punk-influenced, sleazy rock n’ roll fun that they’re fast becoming known for.

Fronted and founded by ex-Gluecifer guitarist Captain Poon, the Norwegian foursome have been around since 2006. Though their music has slowly started trickling over to the States, they’re a fairly well known act in Europe, and this latest offering will mark their third album. Each record has steadily become more metal and boogie-rock influenced, and while they still retain their signature raw punk feel, I think they’ve really got a solid hold on their sound with this third release.

“Gimme Blood” is a track off the new record, and my pick for one of their best. Enjoy!

-LF

[this streaming promotion has ended]

Opeth have just uploaded the cover for their new album, Heritage, to their Facebook page, and hol-ee crap, is it ever cool. I imagine a lot of people will object to the fact that the faces of the band members are in the tree, but I think even that is awesome; it’s very easy to imagine Mikael Åkerfeldt saying, in his usual deadpan manner, “Yeah, put our faces in the tree, that’s metal.”

I’m saying I feel like this is incredibly epic and metal, but in no way takes itself too seriously.

Opeth’s Heritage is tentatively scheduled for a September release via Roadrunner.

-AR

Thanks to Tim for the tip!

[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. Read Part I and Part II from weeks past. Part III follows.]

Part III: “It sucked and it sucks still.”

Fenriz so succinctly summed up a few things with the above words in the documentary Until The Light Takes Us. While applicable to any situation of a sucking nature, and serving as a recurring quote being thrown around in the Woods camp this tour, the negative vibes drowning this blog need to be turned down right now. It’s of the utmost importance to keep it “posi” on tour for mental health if nothing else.

Besides, who from the east can really complain about being out west? Alberta, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California. The tour rolls on generally unhindered. A crucial show was cancelled but I went into the topic of failed promoters in the last entry of this blog and I really despise rehashed anything. We’ve blown through of almost all the merch we expected to carry for the entire five weeks, requiring us to pick up a shipment here on the coast. It’s a good problem to have. Get it while it lasts, kiddies.

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Lotsa stuff happened over the long weekend while we were away, so yesterday we did our best to catch ya’llup. But Vic Vaughn would never leave you hanging, and as such here’s his take on all the new metal hitting the waves this week.

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Butt rock reigns yet again, with Seether nabbing the top spot for the second week in a row. Boris and Cave In cracked the Top Hard Music charts with their new albums (hooray!), while Hollywood Undead and Asking Alexandria actually experienced sales gains for the first time since their new records debuted a few weeks back (boo!). Click on through to see what else charted and how much it all sold.

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