On Tuesday, we reported that Cipher drummer Danny Bobis had gone missing while on a surfing in Indonesia. Now our worst fears have been confirmed, and Bobis’ body has been located. From The New York Post:

“Fishermen found the body of Bobis, a 32-year-old teacher, Thursday morning in the waters off Sumatra island, according to the state-run Antara news agency.”

Bobis was only thirty-two years old, and he was a vital member of the New York / New Jersey metal community, and he will be severely missed. Our thoughts are with his friends and family.

-AR, VN, and the MetalSucks staff

It’s rare that I feel like I can get behind something Metallica-related in the modern age, but this is actually pretty sweet. The band will be celebrating their thirtieth anniversary with four “unique shows” at The Fillmore in San Francisco on December 5, 7, 9, and 10; the concerts will “include special guests and events, rare songs, varied set lists, odds and ends, and all the nutty stuff you expect from Metallica.” (Like horrible vocals and drumming.)

But that’s not really the cool part — this is: the shows are only for Metallica fan club members. And while that may sound like a rip-off, those Met Clubbers are going to pay next to nothing for their tickets. From the band’s official website:

Click to read more…

In June, ICP released their annual infomercial for their annual Gathering of the Juggalos, the largest music festival I still can’t believe a) exists and b) has never been napalmed. That commercial ran twenty-seven minutes long, or about a minute for every IQ point of your average Juggalo, so you’d think that everything there was to be said about this ridiculous event had, indeed, been said.

But you’d think wrong. Not only has ICP now released a second infomercial for the Gathering, but this one is THIRTY-THREE MINUTES LONG. To give you some idea of how crazy that is, keep in mind that a single episode of a half-hour network sitcom only runs about twenty-two minutes (the other eight minutes being, of course, devoted to commercials).

Why do these things have to be so friggin’ long? Do Juggalos really need to be convinced that they should attend this thing? Did adding Charlie Sheen to the line-up merit more than another half-hour of material? Or did some poor starving child ask the group for a donation, and they were just like, “Fuck you, we’re making a thirty-three minute commercial for our festival instead?” The mind boggles.

-AR

[via Metal Insider]

Pretty much the only good thing to ever come out of having Zilty express his barely-post-adolescent insecurity in our comments section was the discovery of Cormorant; longtime readers will remember that Cormorant bassist/vocalist Arthur von Nagel even ended up doing some guest blogging for us for, like, ten seconds. (You can read his three columns here.)

So I’m happy to tell you that Cormorant have completed work on a new album, Dwellings, and that that album is now scheduled to come out “mid-fall.” Vague and not entirely helpful information, but, hey, it’s a start!

And, unfortunately, that’s really all we know right now. But there is the below, not-terrific-quality video of the band performing the instrumental title track in San Francisco last summer, so that’s nice. Music sounds pretty cool, at least — not that that fact is a huge shock or anything.

And hopefully we’ll have more info soon.

-AR

While I would generally prefer it if all of metaldom would stay as far away from the phrase “Crush ‘Em” as possible from now until the sun dies and all of humanity is forgotten forever, there’s no denying that the Crush ‘Em All Tour II has a pretty solid line-up — After the Burial, Veil of Maya, Misery Signals, and Within the Ruins is not a bad night at the opera. The support acts which will appear on select dates — I The Breather, Structures, Volumes, and Your Memorial — are bands that I’m alternately less familiar with or less excited about, but whatever, this is still a totally solid bill.

Now the initial round of dates for the tour have been announced. There are pretty large gaps in this itinerary, so don’t freak out just yet if you don’t see a show on this list that you can attend. Unless you live in Bumblefuck, where metal tours never ever stop. Then you just have shitty luck and there’s no hope for you until you get the hell outta Po’dunk. Sorry.

ANYWAY, those dates, courtesy The PRP:

Click to read more…

I wasn’t alive back in the 1980s to see it firsthand, but from what I understand it was considered cool back then to play guitar solos. And I can see why: if you are home sick from school and you watch VH1 Classic, whenever the guy in the video plays a solo, the crowd goes crazy. All the dudes are like “OMG he is so talented!!!” and all the chicks are like “GET IN MY PUSSY!!” It must have been awesome to be a guitarist back then!!

But that was a long time ago, and things have changed a lot. These days, only fat guys with ponytails and glasses care about guitar solos. Nobody thinks it’s cool to be like “CHECK ME OUT, I’M SHREDDING THE FRETBOARD *WEEDLY WEEDLY WEEDLY*” There’s only one thing that makes dudes lose their shit and chicks get wet in 2011: BREAKDOWNS!

Unlike a lot of you, I’ve been listening to metal since late 2004/early 2005, so I think I know what I am talking about. With that said, I’m not a musician, but I know a lot of you are, so I am asking you, the readers: ARE BREAKDOWNS THE NEW GUITAR SOLO???

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1) Be nicer to Sebastian Bach
2) Compare penis sizes with Tommy Lee
3) Hire Phil LaBonte as a vocal coach
4) Hire Billy Milano as a personal trainer
5) Hire Tripp Eisen as a baby sitter
6) Sleep with present-day Tawny Kitaen
7) Help Danzig clean up his motherfucking bricks, bitch
8) Listen to Ted Nugent talk about politics
9) Listen to Ted Nugent talk about romance
10) Listen to Ted Nugent talk about Ted Nugent

Click to read more…

As part of our coverage of this year’s Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival – currently winding its way through North America — we’re bringing you a series of “Rigged” columns in which several of the tour’s musicians take you on piece-by-piece guides of their current live rig setups. Check out the rigs of Machine Head’s Phil Demmel, Unearth’s Buz McGrath, Hatebreed’s Wayne Lozinak and In Flames’ Peter Iwers. Saturday, July 9 was Dethklok’s only performance of 2011, taking Megadeth’s place on the festival bill in San Bernardino, California, but band mastermind Brendon Small was kind enough to enlighten us about his rig anyway. Here he is:

Hello, MetalSucks! This is Brendon Small from Dethklok… let’s take a look at my rig:

Click to read more…

The dictionary defines a dystopia as “a really fucking miserable place to live,” and, as you can see, the cover art for Iced Earth’s new album of that name is a wonderful depiction of just that kind of unhappy town. The people are being kept in pens, held captive by IE’s mascot, Set Abominae (which I believe is pseudo-Latin for “Not Eddie”), as well as a seemingly not-very-tall wall with barbed wire, large vines, and blimps. That’s how the Nazis kept the Jews from escaping the camps, it’s how the U.S. keeps prisoners at Guantanamo, and, most tragically of all, it’s how we’ve kept our staff from fleeing for cushier jobs at Hit Parader and Circus.

Century will release Dystopia on October 18.

-AR

So I sat down to whack off to this new August Burns Red porno, and guess what?

THERE’S NO FUCKING SEX IN IT!!! Just some homeless kids doing homeless kid stuff. And it’s not even like the music was sexy. There’s no wah pedal or anything. What a waste of time.

-DN

It was really nice of Wednesday 13 to let his nephew who spray paints custom t-shirts for tourists on the boardwalk to design the cover for his new album, Calling All Corpses, but I wonder how it will go over with his fanbase? I mean, the “Till Death Do Us Party” gag is kinda funny, but these are people who expect a higher level of wit from the Murderdolls frontman — y’know, something more along the lines of “Look What the Bats Dragged In” and “Morgue Than Words.” I just don’t think this will live up to their oh-so-high standards.

Calling All Corpses comes out October 11. Wednesday 13 will be doing work to support the album until Joey Jordison is ready to make another Murderdolls record.

-AR

All Pigs Must Die: even after a decade of band names evoking countless forms of violent death, dying fetuses, every disease in a medical dictionary, and hundreds of creative methods of vaginal demolishment, that name sticks out. It reminds me of how Pig Destroyer got their name: wanting to go with the most confrontational moniker they could conjure, they went from Cop Killer to Cop Destroyer to Pig Destroyer. But whereas that band has a paper-thin veil of vagueness as to what their moniker means — me, I thought they were a Mike Patton-y or Devin Townshend-esque squiggly omni-metal band until I actually heard them — All Pigs Must Die don’t fuck around. If your uncle is a cop, you can’t wear their shirts to cookouts (and as an added bonus, if your older sister is a vegan, you can’t wear their shirts to her solstice gatherings). And with a name with all the subtlety of a bottle of Old English being smashed over your face, it’s pretty easy to tell what they sound like: hardcore. Serious fucking hardcore. And I can’t tell if their name is so appealing because their brand of annihilation is so alluring, or if their brand of annihilation is so appealing because it’s attached to that name. All I know is I can’t stop saying it, or at least find reasons to say it as often as possible.

Click to read more…

It’s been over two months since the new Gojira song “Of Blood and Salt” crushed our nuts into peanut brittle with promises that the long-awaited Sea Shepherd EP would finally soon see the light of day, and still we’ve got bupkes as far as a potential release date. Even so, that the EP eventually comes out seems a formality at this point; we know the recording is done, and since the band is self-releasing it and donating all the proceeds to Sea Shepherd (the anti-whaling organization seen on Whale Wars) there’s no record label red tape to navigate through. That doesn’t make the waiting any easier for us, but “soon” seems promising at this point.

Of much greater import is what will happen to Gojira in the long term now that their U.S. deal with Prosthetic Records has ended, and, if I’m not mistaken, their European deal with Listenable too. Gojira are free agents, and as one of the most talked-about and beloved metal bands of the past several years they’ll have their pick of the label litter.

It’s been three years since The Way of All Flesh was released; what in the F is taking so long to announce a new deal? Word through the grapevine is that Gojira are asking for hella money upfront and that a few labels have already balked at such a hefty advance. So, oh faithful MetalSucks reader… with which record label will Gojira end up??? I’ve tried to include realistic choices so some labels are omitted; for example, I love the bands on Seventh Rule but I don’t think there’s any possibility Gojira will sign there… and likewise, Tooth & Nail won’t suddenly decide to break secular.

You guys have been e-mailing us all week about Pop Chart Labs’ “Periodic Table of Heavy Metals,” so I’m basically writing about it to make the e-mails stop. It’s a funny idea, but the execution doesn’t do much for me, and I don’t what the fuck Grand Funk Railroad are doing on here. I mean, why don’t they just give Jethro Tull a Grammy for Best Metal Performance?

Click on the image below to see it big big big, or order one here.

-AR

Axl and I were joking the other night that we might have invented the phrase “still a thing” as applied to bands/people/trends that seem to have vanished from view but are apparently not just still around but quite popular. Only fitting then that the theme of this week’s Top Hard Music Soundscan charts is “still a thing.” I mean, the molasses-like state of inertia fixed upon modern hard rock radio and the associated bands over the past decade is just astounding to look at; nothing has changed in ten years.

Since there weren’t any notable metal debuts last week to crack the Top 100 aside from those in the Top 10, this week let’s look at all of numbers 1 through 10 on the Top Hard Music chart. Prepare to be astonished and baffled by the “still a thing”-ness of every single band.

Click to read more…

Just last week we were talking about White Arms of Athena, a Texas prog metal outfit we’ve been fans of for years who just signed with Prosthetic Records. Since we figure many of you may’ve missed the premiere we did last year when the band was still unsigned, we figured we’d give you another chance to sample Astrodrama with another exclusive track preview. And since many of you pay attention to what we write and probably do remember last year’s premiere, we figured we’d choose a different song that’s never been heard before by anyone that isn’t the band / the label / us / etc. Mostly we chose this track because it’s got Vince’s name in the title, but the song is pretty darn good too.

Astrodrama comes out on August 16th and is available for pre-order here for just 10 bucks.

[this streaming promotion has ended]

Ludicra broke-up, so THANK GOD we still have P.O.D., right? I mean, I just don’t know what the world would have done without a Christian rap metal band. We might have had to resort to listening to, like, Verdi or something. Yucky.

Of course, I am kidding. I was ready to pour bleach into my ears about two seconds into P.O.D.’s new single, “On Fire,” but then, around the forty-one second mark, vocalist Idunnohisname Andidontcareenoughtolookitup made some reference to Rage Against the Machine, and I had to turn the song off. P.O.D. in any way comparing what they do to what RATM do/did is right up there with Limp Bizkit making a Slayer reference in terms of completely wrong and misguided correlations.

Anyways, if you can make it further than I did, you are hardened, tough son of a bitch. And if you actually like this song, then, by all means, please feel free to kill yourself.

-AR

Since we haven’t written about All Shall Perish in like forty-eight hours, it seems worth mentioning that the band has a new, David Brodsky-directed video, for the song “There is Nothing Left.” It’s really just a performance clip, but it’s an above-average performance clip, and Brodsky’s use of negative space is certainly a lot stronger than, say, that of whomever directed this piece of crap. Plus, the song slays, so that’s never a bad thing!

All Shall Perish’s This is Where it Ends is out now on Nuclear Blast. You can read our interview with guitarist Ben Orum here, and/or our interview with other guitarist Francesco Artusato here. We’ll also have a “Rigged” column from Francesco soon, so keep checking back for that!

-AR

In June, Into Eternity announced that they’d FINALLY have a new single out in July, and, well, it’s July, so now the new single is out. It’s called “Sandstorm,” and you can listen to and/or purchase it here. It’s the first time the band has released new material since 2008, which is like an eternity (no pun intended) in metal years. And according to an e-mail from guitarist Justin Bender, the tune “was written the day the U.S.A took out Osama Bin Laden, and is inspired by the events that transpired,” so it can help you get your ‘Merica on, too (somewhat ironic given that IE are a Canadian band, but whatever).

Click to read more…

Ludicra have posted the following message on both their official website and Facebook page:

“Ludicra has officially disbanded. It’s been a great and rewarding ride. We would like to thank all who’ve supported us and been involved.”

And that’s it. That’s the end of Ludicra. (I guess I should add, “at least for now.” In this day and age, I don’t think one should ever discount the possibility of an eventual reunion.)

Over at Invisible Oranges, Cosmo Lee writes that “I feel as if a friend has died,” and while I’m not as massive a diehard fan as Lee is (he says they’re his favorite band), I do understand the sentiment; this sucks, and it’s hard to find any words which will express its suckage in a meaningful way. The group just released an amazing album, The Tenant, last year, and that record made multiple year-end lists here at MetalSucks, including  Vince’s, Satan Rosenbloom’s, and Grim Kim’s – in fact, the latter two writers both named it the best album of the year. Ludicra weren’t just still artistically viable — they were still artistically vibrant.

I’m glad the band is going out on such a high note, but that’s just about the only aspect of this news I’m glad about. What a major, major bummer.

Let’s remember them in the best way possible:

-AR

Thanks to everyone who e-mailed us about this.