Things are moving incredibly fast for TesseracT right now: rumors started to circulate that they had a new vocalist on August 22nd, and now just a little over two weeks later they’ve already released a pre-production track with said new vocalist, ex-Sky Eats Airplane singer Elliot Coleman. The track is brand new and serves as the background music for a U.K. tour trailer the band’s label, Century Media, posted on YouTube. Check it out:

The same, but different… Coleman’s voice isn’t markedly different than his predecessor Dan Tompkins’, but it’s different enough to stand out. In other words, Coleman’s addition to the band shouldn’t mean TesseracT’s music will change much, but he definitely adds his own character.

If you haven’t done so already, check out my recent interview with TesseracT bassist Amos Williams on the vocalist swap, the band’s rise to success and their future plans.

-VN

Chthonic, Monstro and Saviours have the big metal releases of the week. Let’s take a look at those and a couple of others after the jump.

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photo by Mark Latham

Leading independent music retailer VICTORY RECORDS released a free sampler via Facebook over the weekend (free, that is, in exchange for a “like” on the social network, of course). And like any label’s sampler, it has some good stuff (Jungle Rot, Ringworm, Pathology — I guess I like Pathology now?) and some bad stuff (Design the Skyline, Dr. Acula, Emmure). But the real reason to download it is a demo of a new God Forbid song, “Where We Come From.”

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September 27 is the biggest metal release date of the fall, quite possibly all of 2011: Mastodon, Machine Head, Dream Theater, Textures, Warbringer and Rwake top an excellent slate of new records that’ll leave metalheads scraping for pennies under their couch cushions. Listening to all those new releases at once is gonna be a chore, but hey, there are worse problems to have. A total First World Problem.

Mastodon have made September 27th’s listening marathon one song lighter by releasing another track from The Hunter over the weekend, the third they’ve put out so far. “Spectrelight” should give old-school Mastodon fans cause to celebrate; this song is all about the mosh and the big, burly riffs and leaves the band’s recent shift towards the progressive behind (for now). I can already see this jam nicely sliding into the band’s live setlist right after “Blood & Thunder,” keeping audience energy to the max.

“Curl the Burl” and “Black Tongue” are the other two songs to be released so far from The Hunter; check ‘em out, then tell us how you think “Spectrelight” compares.

-VN

Thanks: Joe Caperon, Mr. Jon

It’s true! The summer is over. Sad. We’re closing down early today to enjoy the long Labor Day weekend. That also means we won’t be here Monday. We hope everyone has a great, Axel Rudi Pell-free weekend!

While you await our return, here’s some fun stuff we did this week:

• We wrapped up our interview with Amos Williams from TesseracT, and spoke to Tom Niemeyer from The Accüsed, too.
• We checked out the latest releases from Diamond Plate and Odyssey.
• We concluded our celebration of 31 Days of Faith No More.
• We debated which band was worse, Skip the Foreplay or Design the Skyline.
• We were sad to learn that Metal Blade has also pulled out of Spotify.
• We wondered if Latinos are born to mosh.
• We declared djent to be pop.
• We watched Jack White lick the Insane Clown Posse’s ass.
• We learned to write a breakdown from a deck of cards.
• We continued to be baffled by the popularity of The Devil Wears Prada.

Okay, time to go get fucked up. See ya Tuesday!

-AR

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Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (not really at all) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

This week we say farewell to the season by posing the question:

WHAT WAS THE METAL ANTHEM OF THE SUMMER?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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Nickelback isn’t racist!

-AR

[via The Chive]

Marilyn Manson and Shia LaBeouf have released “Born Villain,” the LaBeouf-directed video for the title track from Manson’s new album, which also may or may not somehow relate to the documentary of the same title that LaBeouf made about the making of that album and L.A. street art. ‘Cause, y’know, nothing screams “L.A. street art” like Marilyn Manson in a recording studio. (The video is NSFW, of course, because Manson still thinks he can shock people into liking him, even though no one over the age of fetus would ever find this shocking. And, really, there’s nothing offensive in here, besides the terrible song.)

ANYWAY, the video. It is, of course, a work of pretentious douchechillery like no other. Manson often attempts to seem smart and profound by making obvious references to works of art that any ninth grader would be familiar with, and now he’s got LaBeouf doing the same thing — the Disturbia star tells MTV that ”The song has all these references to ‘Macbeth’ and all this Shakespeare and heavy theology, so we tried to make Manson’s ‘Un Chien Andalou’ macabre ‘Macbeth.’” Which is fucking irritating, for the following reasons:

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A cool thing about this three-day weekend is that if, say, a ballz-awesome Dutch occult rock band premieres a song from their forthcoming follow-up to possibly the best shit ever (this album), then dudes like us will have a bonus day to just take drugs, listen to it on repeat, do nothing else. And hey not to blow your mind, but that’s precisely what is happening: The Devil’s Blood just released a spooky teaser for their not-out-for-two-months album The Thousandfold Epicentre (up there) and and and debuted its tits-awesome title track (down there). Man, this wknd is awesome already. I’m gonna just go leave my car by the emergency room.

The Devil’s Blood – The Thousandfold Epicentre by Ván Records

-ADF

The Devil’s Blood releases The Thousandfold Epicentre on November 11 via Ván Records. You want it.

That’s right, kids: On Tuesday, September 13 — the evening before The Big 4 show at Yankee Stadium — MetalSucks is teaming up with our pals at Metal Injection, Metal Insider, and Metal Army to throw a massive Big 4 pre-party at our favorite bar, Idle Hands. As you can see from the poster above, there’s gonna be $4 drafts starting at 7 pm, and you should really and try and get so drunk so as to be still drunk at the show the next day, ’cause four bucks is approximately 1/1,000th the cost of a beer at Yankee Stadium.

And to make the whole affair that much more fun, John Jospeh from Cro-Mags is DJing! And a little birdie told me there may some other very special guests may be on hand. So whether you’re coming to NYC specifically for the event, or you’re just looking for an awesome hang to get the party started a little early, Idle Hands is the place to be the night before the show.

Get more details from Idle Hands’ website. See ya there!!!

-Axl & Vince

Earlier this summer, I declared Axel Rudi Pell’s The Ballads IV an early contender for worst album of the year; the entire thing is atrocious, but the prime offender is a cover of Dio’s “Holy Diver” so truly and unforgivably terrible that if you told me that ARP actually hated Dio and intended the recording as an insult, I’d believe it.

And now Noisecreep is streaming the song, so you can hear it for yourself.

Just be forewarned before you listen — I recently played the song for a friend, and this was her reaction:

So, y’know, be careful.

The Ballads IV comes out September 27 on SPV.

-AR

You guys know that really good band that got fucked over a bunch of times over their last few tours in recent memory? Well, somehow, it actually happened again. I received the following unfortunate email from The Ocean’s Robin Staps:

 ”Today is a shit day. Our upcoming US tour just fell apart. We had been confirmed for weeks for a direct support slot on a good 6-weeks US tour in October and November, and yesterday it was decided that this tour is now being postponed to late November into December. We are not available at that time because we have tours booked in Europe for months. Our flights to the US have already been booked for weeks, and we’ve been left high and dry again… somehow we’re just not lucky over there it seems!

If anyone has a tour to offer us between October 9th and November 20th, we’re all ears :-) Hope we can still make it over somehow.”

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Long-time MetalSucks readers know that Axl and I have an unnaturally high level of love for Sevendust. If you’ve got a problem with that kindly stop reading this post now and spare us your butthurt claims that Sevendust aren’t “metal enough” for a metal blog.

So, it seems as if Sevendust might be getting ready to hang up their cleats for good, or are at least considering it. This wouldn’t be surprising if I believed it were actually going to happen… which I do not.

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Loutallica, or whatever the heck they’re calling the Metallica/Lou Reed collaboration, have unveiled the album art for their forthcoming release, Lulu. And based on the e-mails we’ve been getting from you peeps, you all think it’s terrible.

Truth is, I don’t really think it’s that bad. It’s obviously a little heavy handed with regards to the album’s lyrical themes, but it’s not as though the covers of Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets were so subtle or anything.  It looks like something that would have come out on Sub Pop in the 90s is all. I mean, if I saw it on a display at the Virgin Megastore (R.I.P.) circa ’96, I probably would have thought “Hm, wonder what that is?”, and then never bothered to find out.

But I think the sooner everyone gets it into their heads that this album is most likely not going to sound very metal, the less disappointed they will be with the final result. By which I mean, we should all feel disappointed because it sucks in general, not because it’s not metal.

Lulu comes out November 1 on Warner Bros. My kidding aside… wouldn’t it be awesome if it were good? It would be so awesome.

-AR

Last week we offered up two month-long trial memberships to video guitar lesson website JamPlay.com. The new Disqus commenting system on MS has made it extremely easy to sort through the best and funniest comments (not that winners are based totally on comment popularity, but it helps). Here are this week’s winners:

• Shaun Reeves: “Look mom! Oreo people!”
• Jim: “Wolfgang decides to stop riding his dad’s coattails and joins Immortal.”

August is out of days on which to discuss Faith No More, but hey look we just can’t stop. Check us all into a clinic for FNM madness has overtaken us all. This August, as our Anso DF devoted 31 days of precious summer to documenting one FNM super-fan’s experience, the rest of MetalSucks’ staff and cherished friends stood aside, eyes closed, shaking their heads, and muttering: How could he disclude all Chuck jamz? Where is “Midlife Crisis,” a supremely newsworthy song? What, is he kidding with this Ansometrics?

Well, if we’ve learned absolutely, positively nothing else from 31 Days Of Faith No More featuring Anso DF, at least it’s now out in the open that we know a lot FNM super-fans. So we invited our pals — be they writer, editor, writer/editor, editor-writer, awesome band dude, “label fuck-o”, or person not named Anso DF — to write about a FNM jam’s importance and excellence and personal relevance. It’s everybody else’s turn now, commenters too! (Can some mellow dude write about “We Care A Lot” cuz none of us did! Jesus!) And now we call Faith No More back to the stage for freaking day 32 of 31 Days Of Faith No More featuring Anso DF.

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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…

A Queensrÿche Hall of Fame. This is happening. And I mean this is happening in the same way Jack Black meant this is happening when he punted Baxter off the bridge. Some-to-many of you may think this is happening in a “holy shit, Decibel is finally acknowledging this mind-blowing, flawlessly executed, classy-as-hell progressive masterwork,” and that’s what I’m looking for here. You will be very happy with Jeff Wagner’s comprehensive history of Operation: Mindcrime. Anybody who’s ever conceptualized and executed an ambitious, intricate, super-precise creative endeavor will be astonished at how these dudes maintained their integrity and vision throughout the process. Once in a (great) while, sincerity is a good thing.

Now here’s some stuff that Albert—who probably doesn’t trust me to go another paragraph without making fun of this band—wants you to know: “Silent Lucidity” is still shitty, and it’s not on this record. The “Queen of the Reich” video is completely fucking insane/amazing. Oh yeah, and the umlaut would’ve gone over the “r” or something in the whole damn magazine if it wasn’t for my world-class copy-editing eye. As you may have guessed by now, the Mindcrime HOF runs in the Mastodon issue, which actually makes a lot of sense now that I think about it. (I seriously hadn’t thought about it until now.)

-AB

Decibel’s October 2011 issue also features The Black Dahlia Murder, YOB, Today is the Day, Dimmu Borgir, Testament, and an awesome Skeletonwitch flexi disc. But why not just get a full subscription to ensure that you never miss an issue?

We’re not just one and done here at the MetalSucks Minister of Unsigned and Unholy Bands; when we feature bands as some of the best, up-and-coming unsigned artists we like to hear what they’re up to months or years after they’ve basked in the warm glow of MS’ readers love/hate. In this edition of Unsigned and Unholy we follow up on some of my past favorites, Dead on Both Shoulders, Burden and Picture It In Ruins.

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I don’t know why he this dude, who calls himself “Eddini” (like “Houdini,” only amalgamated with what I suspect is his real name, Eddie), doesn’t put on “The House That Jack Built” — that always puts me right to bed. But I guess folks appreciate his efforts anyway, ’cause this his tenth video.

ANYWAY, you obviously don’t have to watch all fifteen fucking minutes of this, but you should probably watch at least through the :22 mark, when he takes a swing of Sprite (’cause nothing makes you go to sleep faster than sugar) and then, for no apparent reason, talks about his ‘Tallica tee.

And the real punchline? He’s a Jesus freak! A comment he left below the video reads, “Thanks for all your warm and kind responces it’s what keeps me going YOU, and the Lord.” As long as you have God and YouTube subscribers, you can get through anything!!!

-AR

Thanks to the reader who sent this to me whose original e-mail I can no longer find in order to credit him or her by name.

The London riots last month were no joke to begin with but really hit home for us when the Sony PIAS warehouse, a storage facility for Basick Records and a number of other independent record labels, was burned to the ground and looted. According to The Telegraph [via Metal Insider], new evidence is showing that the operation was actually carefully planned by professionals, using the riots as a cover. From The Telegraph:

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