Everywhere ya look, there’s an announcement of a new and unexpected pairing: Mastodon/hip hop producer, Metallica/Lou Reed, Mike Portnoy/butt-rock, and Rob Zombie/garment care. Well, Strange Bedfellows Month continues with news that Warbringer’s just-completed third album, Worlds Torn Asunder, was produced by Steve Evetts. His name is on good punk records (Saves The Day, Lifetime), veiny hardcore (Snapcase, Earth Crisis), and Symphony X; and, natch, he’s the Flemming Rasmussen to Dillinger Escape Plan’s Metallica. So dude has some stats.
Okay, before I even get into any of this, I’m going to come clean and be totally honest. I absolutely abhor everything about Liturgy, and think that Ghost is an over-hyped gimmick that features musicians from much better bands and produces enjoyable hard rock songs. Big surprise there. Now that y’all know where I stand, I’m going to do my best to be as objective and unbiased as possible in the following post, because I genuinely think it’s an idea worth discussing, and don’t want to color the content with a bunch of transcenderpal black metal hate. Well, maybe a little.
I really like Trivium, but their latest single, “In Waves,” is just not my cup of tea. That being said, I still feel the need to tip my hat to ‘em, because both the cover art for their new album, also called In Waves, and the video for that song are pretty cool. And I fucking hate everything and everyone, so the fact that I’m saying “Gee, I don’t really like this song but I still think this other stuff is neat” should come across as a glowing recommendation.
Here’s the cover art…
…and you can check out the video, which debuted earlier today on AP, after the jump.
Anyone who plays an instrument has moments of thanking Jeebus for all of his/her appendages & extremities. So often we take for granted the simple inherent nature of having all (or most) of our natural human body parts and functions, and it can be rather inspiring to witness someone overcoming the odds and making good out of an undeniably tough situation.
Enter John Denner, who was born without a right hand but designed a makeshift picking device that enabled him to learn how to play the guitar. And dude didn’t just simply learn how to play — he legitimately shreds! Case in point:
Much like fellow Midwesterners Lazarus A.D., Illinois’ Diamond Plate refuse to just be another re-thrash band with no new ideas.They’ve always been a little more brutal than the froo-froo “I just found out about Exodus” crap that’s been forcefed down metalheads’ throats since about 2006 or so; their music is punctuated by beyond-their-age songwriting abilities, and structured solos that give life to their music.
This blogger ordered the group’s self-released Relativity EP on a whim for like $5 after what might have been a few too many at the pub and a subsequent late-night internet cruising session. And this blogger fucking loved it. So it was nice to see Earache pick the band up in October of last year. (Apparently head honcho Digby Pearson dug the band for quite some time and personally offered them the deal. No big surprise, I suppose.)
Now, gearing up for the release of the band’s debut full-length, Generation Why?, Earache has launched a stream of the song “At The Mouth Of Madness” (above). The album, which was produced by Neil Kernon (Judas Priest, Nevermore, Deicide), is out August 29, and apparently they’re hitting the road with Kittie and fellow Chi-towners Dirge Within later this summer. Dates after the jump!
Turbonegro are back! Turbonegro are back! Okay, I can’t be the only one excited about this. I am? What is wrong with you?
I was scrolling throughKerrang!’s online site on the off-chance there was something worth reading, and, weirdly enough, there was. Tony Sylvester, the former head of the London branch of Turbojugend (Turbonegro’s official fan club/world-wide gang) and their UK press officer, has stepped in to fill front man Hank Von Helvete’s dandy shoes. The Norwegian party-band went on hiatus in 2009 after Hank left to, and I quote, “Pursue a career in acting, the Church of Scientology and goth rock,” leaving me with a party-sized hole in my heart. Great euphemisms for a crippling drug habit, not so great for Hank. Luckily, he seems to be doing fine now, and just released an album this month with his new band, Dr. Midnight and the Mercy Cult.
And now Turbonegro are coming back, too! Happy days!
I’ve been getting e-mails all week about The HAARP Machine, Sumerian’s latest sign, but I haven’t done a post about them yet, because, really, there was nothing to post about. First the band released a video of their guitar player futzing around, and then they released another video of their drummer futzing around, and, y’know, okay. Fine.
But now they’ve finally released an actual song, called “The Escapist Notion,” which you can check out below. Maybe I shouldn’t be this painfully honest with you guys, but I am in pretty much the worst fucking mood ever this morning, so I’m not even going to attempt to judge this right now because I can’t give you an assessment that isn’t clouded by my desire to see the world end. But give it a listen and then let us know what you think in the comments section below. And I’ll weigh in when I’m feeling a little more, uh, centered, for lack of a better term.
The HAARP Machine’s debut will be out later this year. And if you don’t know what label it will be on, you’re illiterate and not reading this part anyway, or you have the reading comprehension skills of a goldfish and fuck yourself.
A month ago we told you about “Holdin’ On to Black Metal,” a little ditty by My Morning Jacket, not a band you’d really expect to write a song about the darker side of music. Based on the song’s lyrics we suspected someone in the band might actually be a fan of the genre, and through the band’s publicist we came to find out that that man is bassist “Two-Tone” Tommy Blankenship. So we did what any hack journalist would do: drafted up a few black metal-centric questions and emailed them over.
After an epic answer to our simple opening question, Tommy lets it all out: he grew up on Obituary and Slayer, really digs the new Krallice record and doesn’t rule out a My Morning Jacket version of Venom’s “Welcome to Hell.” Our quick Q&A after the jump.
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…
Pompous assholes make for great copy, but I would bet all of us are much happier to discover great bands who actually seem like down-to-earth, funny dudes. That’s Wormrot, who not only salvage snoozefests like SXSW, but deliver totally corrosive, sick-as-fuck album art. Decibel just profiled their second full-length, Dirge, in July [#81], and guitarist Raysid had plenty of frugal gourmet advice to share about fine dining on the road: “With four dollars, I can buy two McDoubles and save the rest of the $4 for dinner. If not, I can buy three cheeseburgers. But we’ve been hitting Church’s Chicken. Church’s Chicken has this deal every Monday and Tuesday: 99 cents per chicken [piece]. So, we’ll get two chicken [pieces] for $2. That’s awesome, man!”
I’d say that’s the opposite of awesome, man, but I pretty much do the same thing for lunch every day at Decibel, and our office is surrounded by healthy alternatives that generally don’t result in half-hour bowl-sprayings. But I digress. Wormrot are this month’s sexy Flexi superstars (order here), and the Singaporeans went out of their way to deliver three brand new tracks: “Eradicate,” “Fuck… I’m Sober” and “Vehemence of Denials.” Unlike last month’s Black Dahlia/Jeff Walker cover concoction, is officially streaming, so you can blow your eardrums right here:
As always, only dB subscribers get these fine pieces of colorful molded plastic. That’s an extra value meal worth investing in.
-AB
Decibel’s August 2011 issue features Anthrax, Arch Enemy, Tombs, Origin, Weekend Nachos, and a Cradle of Filth Hall of Fame . That issue is available here, but why notget a full subscription to ensure you never miss one of these awesome flexi discs?
Thursday, June 16th, 2011 at 3:30pm by Axl Rosenberg
Apparently not content to simply piss off Halloween fans everywhere, Rob Zombie has now directed a commercial for the cleaning detergent, Woolite. And as you can see from the video above, it is a fucking weird commercial. I mean, it clearly plays to Zombie’s strengths (maybe I should say “alleged strengths?”) and image as a director, but I just can’t imagine the target audience for detergent television commercials — say, Suzie Homemaker, for example — responding to this.
Jiri Kulik, some executive at the company who makes Woolite, told the NY Times how the commercial came about:
I am not the most well-traveled guy, so I rely on hardcore and MMA to tell me about the rest of the world. For example, thanks to Sepultura I learned that “in Brasil you have only one droom, and one seembol.” Karo Parisyan and Integrity showed me that Turks are terrible, terrible people, and Brujeria taught me so much Spanish that I even named my Wifi network at home “KOOL ARROW.”
In an effort to learn even more about the world, I have been studying the debut video from 6 WEAPONS, a beatdown hardcore band from Chile. From what I can tell, they want you to think that they are tough. Here are my notes so far:
Thursday, June 16th, 2011 at 2:30pm by Axl Rosenberg
Well THAT’S not a shitty line-up.
Periphery are gonna do their first-ever headlining trek starting in September. And we would all pretty much go no matter what, ’cause it’s Periphery, and Periphery rules.
But just to make extra, extra sure that you’re onboard, the band is bringing The Human Abstract, Textures, and The Contortionist along with them.
I can’t emphasize enough what a great bill that is. I know a lot of you who wanted to see THA on their most recent headlining tour didn’t get to, ’cause the tour was cut short due to the loss of a family member of one of the dudes in the band, so here will be your chance to finally get to see them do all that great Digital Veil material live. And it’s Textures’ first time in playing North America, which means, by gosh, you MUST MUST MUST go see them.
Tour dates haven’t been announced yet, but the second we have ‘em, you shall as well.
…so says Australian charter boat operator Matt Waller, who has experimented with different types of music in underwater caged speakers, and found that sharks would get all zen and mellow when he blasted AC/DC. In the future, Waller plans to try out tunes by Zeppelin, the White Stripes, and Ozzy.
The funny thing is, none of those are too br00tal……something tells me a little Gojira might make the great whites seriously hungry for flesh.
Thursday, June 16th, 2011 at 1:30pm by Axl Rosenberg
When I was a young ‘un, guitar dork rags like Guitar and Guitar World and Guitar Player and Guitar Guitar used to have these full-page ads from Shrapnel Records, which weren’t just trying to push one single artist, but, rather, pretty much every album the label had released in the past however long. For x amount of dollars, you could get any three CDs of pure guitar dorkitude, from artists ranging from Paul Gilbert to Richie Kotzen to Jason Becker to some poor guys who probably ended up kinda going nowhere. But I distinctly remember saving up some allowance, cutting out one of the order forms, sending away for some of these records, and then sitting by mailbox for 6-8 years (shipping was mad slow in those days), waiting for my shit to arrive to so I could get my shred on.
I mention this because Jake Dreyer’s new, self-released EP, In the Shadows of Madness, reminds me very much of those old Shrapnel releases. And if, like me, you remember said albums with no small amount of fondness, you will probably enjoy the dude’s CD. I mean, this is just pure guitar ridiculousness. And I mean that as a compliment. I wish I had a more articulate way to express how this EP sounds, but… nope, that’s it. GUITAR RIDICULOUSNESS.
As usual, though, there’s no reason to just take my word for it — you can stream the entire three-song EP here. (The stream includes links to places where you can purchase a digital copy of the release as well.) The cover should tip you off that the music is a mite cheesy, but it’s cheesy in the best possible way.
Thursday, June 16th, 2011 at 1:00pm by Axl Rosenberg
We all already knew that Evan Brewer is a great bass player. But I started to get really, really excited for his new solo album, Alone, after Brewer revealed last month that he’s the only musician to appear on his album, and that “every sound you hear on the album came from a bass guitar.” ‘Cause that sounds like some potentially really interesting, crazy shit.
Now a nearly-two-minute-long teaser for the album has been released, giving us our first real taste of music. The actual song sounds okay — maybe a little too smoove for my own personal tastes, but I’m a cranky old man who just wants to listen to Cannibal Corpse so whatever — but I could really live without that robot voice thinger. I hope that fucker isn’t on the album too much, ’cause that shit could get real irritating real fast.
Evan Brewer’s Alone comes out on Sumerian on June 28. Brewer then heads out on tour with Animals as Leaders, Intronaut, Dead Letter Circus, and Last Chance to Reason, which is a sweet, sweet-ass line-up. Here are tour dates:
Thursday, June 16th, 2011 at 12:30pm by Axl Rosenberg
While we continue to mourn the passing of Anal Cunt mainman Seth Putnam, Metal Injection posted the below memo, in which the band instructs the sound guy for whatever venue they were playing that night on just exactly how they’d like their monitors mixed. And it’s pretty great. The bit about how vocal levels should be “just a cunt hair above the others” is obviously terrific, especially because whomever typed this up (I’d assume it was Putnam himself, but who knows) decided that the words “cunt hair” needed to be italicized for emphasis; but my favorite part is definitely the instruction that guitarist Josh Martin “doesn’t want to deal with this shit.” I imagine that somewhere Vince has a similar memo which he passes out to people that tells them “Axl doesn’t want to deal with this shit,” only he’s not talking about sound levels, he’s talking about fucking everything.
Some sexy years ago, Vince and I met through a friend outside a Mastodon show at Starland Ballroom in smelly New Jersey. Sure we hit it off, but moreover young scrappy Neilstein could clearly tell that one day I would save his life (hasn’t happened yet, as far as I know), we’d introduce each other to shittons of great music (has happened in spades), and we’d grow to be like-minded bitter NYC Jews together (happening every day).
The very first show Vince and I ever attended together was to see Sleepy Hollow’s own No Remission at legendary defunct Times Square haunt Siberia (Vince’s review of that show here). We were both immediately impressed by this group of heady thrashsters who clearly took their roots from Death and Metallica but have certainly branched out over the years to evolve their own sound to new heights.
And now the band is poised to release a ferocious new full-length entitled Through Blackened Skies, and all you NYCers have a chance to help them celebrate said album at their record release show this Saturday at The Studio at Webster Hall (with Alekhine’s Gun, Arcane Malevolence, and Left In Ruins).
Thursday, June 16th, 2011 at 11:30am by Axl Rosenberg
I finally got to hear Revocation’s Chaos of Forms in full earlier this week, and, ladies and gents, I am pleased to let you know that, hol-ee shee-ttt, it does not disappoint. Not only does it bring the metal as fuckness in full force, but there’s some really nutty, unexpected twists n’ turns on the album, too… which I won’t spoil just yet. (Okay, I’ll spoil it a little bit: BEST USE OF KEYBOARDS EVER.) But I will say that if you don’t enjoy Chaos, we should probably have you declared legally dead, for, surely, being deceased is the only logical explanation for such sour pussness.
So. “No Funeral,” the new song the band has just unleashed over at Guitar World, is your latest taste of the album, and it’s a potent reminder of why we just named Revocation’s David Davidson The #1 Top Modern Metal Guitarist. The songwriting is top notch, as is the musicianship. There is just nothing bad about it.
Headbang here, then come back and exchange hugs n’ high-fives in the comments section. Relapse will release Chaos of Forms on August 16; in the meantime, Revocation are currently part of the MetalSucks-sponsored Forbidden headlining tour, along with the also-killer Havok and White Wizzard. You can dates for that trek here, and read Davidson’s recent “Rigged,” in which he told us about his live set-up, here.
When I heard about the Dream Theater-shaped hole in the life of drummer Mike Portnoy back in September, I wanted to pitch him on my long-gestating idea to form a killer Jellyfish cover band. I bet he’d be into it cuz of his Jellyfish super-fandom (he has cited 1993′s Spilt Milk as a top ten favorite album); and he’s a pro at pulling together all-star jams, like his awesomely fun tributes to The Who, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin with guys like Paul Gilbert, Jason McMaster, and Dave LaRue; and lastly, The Ghosts At Number One (that’s my vote for our band name) could serve as a totally non-cynical tribute to another hardcore Jellyfish fan, the late Dimebag Darrell Abbott. And what better way to hip headbangers to irresistible non-metal jams? How could Mike say no to that? Can I call him Mike?
But, shit, while I was dicking around, gobbling drugs, and failing to corner, pressure, and/or threaten Portnoy about the Jellyfish idea, he teamed with qualified musicians he knows who actually, like, realize their ideas. Even if those ideas aren’t so great. Symphony X singer Russell Allen talks about Adrenaline Mob, one of Portnoy’s new bands:
I haven’t yet done the research, but as of this writing my hypothesis on the Velvet Underground is that the vaunted ’60s art-rock act is one of America’s earliest hipster bands, kinda faux-daring (drugs) and pseudo-cutting edge (violinist) but tuneless, boring, and ear-nasty. And if the aged music snobs in my life are to be believed, frontman Lou Reed’s post-VU career also is kinda silly, starting with dark, Bowie-assisted rock and then thirty solid years of critically-reviled claptrap.
I reiterate that these are all second-hand insights and my people might be wrong about Reed. (According to Axl, they’re super-wrong.) However, their observations got a full endorsement Wednesday night via the announcement of Reed’s collaboration with rock’s most artistically bankrupt artists, Metallica.
