(BTBAM photo credit: Andrew Lipovsky)

Here’s a fun little tidbit to get the metalsphere salivating this afternoon: The Number of the Blog is reporting that MetalSucks-fave multi-instrumentalist Keith Merrow is teaming up with Lamb of God drummer Chris Adler and Between the Buried and Me axeman Paul Waggoner on a new side project. I contacted Keith this morning for comment, and here’s what he had to say about it:

As of right now, it’s a very casual collaboration. We have 3 or 4 song ideas we’ve tossed around over the past few months, and they are all really cool. Very different from any music you’d hear from each of us, individually. All of us are pretty busy these days, but this is a collaboration that we are all really excited about!

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Few modern prog rock acts are as compelling as Woodstock’s 3. They’re top notch musicians, of course, but they’re also great songwriters who never get bogged down in showing off their skills with their instruments or naval gazing — they just make great music, period. If you already know the band, than we presume you already have October 11 marked in your calendar as the day that Metal Blade will release 3′s latest, The Ghost You Gave to Me; and if you somehow don’t know 3 yet, will, now is a great time to educate yourself!

MetalSucks is proud to premiere “React,” a new track from the aforementioned The Ghost You Gave to Me. Check it out below, celebrate its awesome awesomeness in our comments section, and then go here to pre-order the album in a variety of formats prior to the October 11 release date. We promise you will be glad ya did!

[this streaming promotion has ended]

Summer is slowly but surely slipping away, and with that comes the eventual end of BBQs, pool parties, and muggy basement shows. While autumn is a pretty rad season, most of us are trying in vain to hold onto the last remnants of summer in any way we can. For some, that’s freezing the fuck out of one’s self at the beach. For others, it’s using up the dregs of BBQs past from the back of the fridge in an effort to pull together some sort of  “last hurrah!” smorgasbord. For me, it’s blasting crust and grind as loud as my car stereo will allow, windows down, scaring the bejezzus out of the townsfolk as I zip by. For some reason, grind just calls to mind summer for me, and I find myself in this situation year after year as the leaves start to turn. Currently on heavy rotation is Defeatist’s new album Tyranny of Decay and yes, my friends — it’s been hitting the proverbial spot.

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Sergeant D. wrote about this Australian deathcore band Endworld on Stuff You Will Hate over the weekend, and he theorizes that “they saw the Defiler ‘Cryomancer’ video and tried to copy it as closely as possible, with hilarious results;” I think that declaration is actually a massive wad of diseased spit in Defiler’s face. Defiler are fucking terrible, but this band is worse; in fact, this band is so bad that I feel like I owe other band deathcore bands an apology for even lumping Endworld into that genre. Oceano don’t deserve to be compared to this drek.

Truth is, Endworld probably just accidentally started a whole new genre: Amateurcore. ‘Cause never mind that whomever directed their video couldn’t even get a static shot of a cell phone in focus — the band can’t seem to jump in unison (which is, like, one of the most important aspects of being a successful scene band), the drummer looks like someone made him drink a bottle of NyQuil right before they started shooting, and, well, don’t even get me started on the vocalist.

Make sure you head over to Stuff You Will Hate to read Sergeant D.’s full analysis; his observations are fare more clever than my own…

-AR

In case you somehow still doubt that Dave Grohl rules…

Apparently the Westboro County Church, that bastion of all that is right in the world, decided to protest outside of a recent Foo Fighters concert in Kansas City, because, uh… I guess the Foo Fighters have a particularly large homosexual audience? I’m not saying that’s the case, I just can’t for the life of me figure out what made the Foo Fighters a special target for these lovable ragamuffins.

ANYWAY, the Foo Fighters decided that the best way to respond to the protest was to… well, just watch…

I wann give Dave Grohl a hug. Can someone please arrange that? I’ll be quick, I promise. Just one big bear hug and I’m done.

You can also check out a news report on this blessed event here.

-AR

Thanks to everyone who e-mailed us about this!

Amidst the frenzy into which the metal blogosphere has erupted over the forthcoming new Cormorant album, it’s easy to forget that this band is still unsigned. Perhaps intentionally so. As you may remember, band mastermind Arthur von Nagel penned a series of columns for MetalSucks about self-releasing, how to conduct your band’s business, and the music industry in general. I’m surprised that Relapse, Prosthetic, Profound Lore or some other label hasn’t swooped in and picked up Cormorant by now… or maybe they’ve attempted to, and Cormorant just aren’t interested.

In any case, Cormorant are doing just fine on their own; “Junta,” the first song to be released from their new album Dwellings (mind-blowing cover artwork here), is now streaming over at NPR. It’s a 9-minute epic about the violent opposition to the 2009 pro-democracy rallies in Guinea, and it has all the musical touchstones you’d expect from Cormorant following their last album Metazoa, upped to the next level; post- and black metal in a progressive framework that’s spacey, expansive, and hypnotizing. Stream it here, and stay for the interview with von Nagel.

Dwellings comes out on December 6th and can now be pre-ordered directly from Cormorant.

-VN

It seems like there’s a new supergroup announced every week now, but few such projects get us excited the way news of Argonauts did. The outfit — which features original Dillinger Escape Plan vocalist Dimitri Minakakis, Burnt by the Sun guitarist John Adubato, East of the Wall bassist Brett Bamberger, and legendary drummer Dave Witte from Municipal Waste, Burnt by the Sun, and eighteen bajillion other awesome bands — made their live debut at GWAR’s GWAR-B-Q over the weekend, and now, of course, fan-filmed videos of the quartet have emerged. They’re not the highest quality, but they do kinda-sorta give you a sense of how the band might sound. And, if nothing else, they show why Bamberger is one of the most fun bass players to go see live — not only is he an amazing musician, but he goes totally apeshit on stage.

More clips after the jump!

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…Linus Klausenitzer, who has been touring with the band since Jeroen Paul Thessling quit back in July. Klausenitzer is also a member of a band I’m not familiar with, Noneuclid. But since I saw Obscura when they toured with Devin Townsend and Children of Bodom post-split with Thessling earlier this year, and I have no recollection of there being a damn thing wrong with the bass, and his playing in the below video statement certainly seems impressive, I am ready to give Klausenitzer my full endorsement.

And now seems like a good time to remind you that Obscura will be playing Day Two of The Metal Suckfest on Saturday, November 5, along with Cynic, The Red Chord, A Life Once Lost, Scale the Summit, Fight Amp, Rosetta, Ultrageist, and two more awesome bands that we have yet to announce; Day One will feature Municipal Waste, God Forbid, Today is the Day, Howl, Black Tusk, Magrudergrind, Ramming Speed, Prime Evil, and two more bands TBA. Tickets are on sale now!

-AR

A thirty second sample of “The View,” one of the songs on Metallica and Lou Reed’s upcoming Lulu, is now available for streaming (below). And while it is, of course, horribly unfair to judge an album based on thirty seconds, I am now fully prepared to say that this record is going to suck.

The short description of the sample would be this: horrible, generic Metallica riff that sounds like any number of the horrible, generic riffs the band has made their name playing for the past fifteen years or so; Lou Reed doing spoken word poetry; Hetfield in full-on “Yea-AH!” Elvis mode singing; jaded blogger going back to sleep.

I don’t know if I’m even gonna have the energy to listen to this entire record. Life is too short for me to keep putting up with this crap just because Metallica were my favorite band twenty fucking years ago. Maybe their intentions are pure, but it doesn’t matter; clearly, we just have different visions for what we want out of the band. So let’s just call it “irreconcilable differences,” agree to share custody of Slayer, and finalize the divorce, alright?

Metallica/Lou Reed – “The View” (30 Second Sample)

Lulu comes out November 1 on Warner Bros.

-AR

[via Amazon... thanks to everyone who e-mailed this to us this morning.]

Ahhh, the Autumnal transition is finally upon us and here in New York the newfound chill in the air has already created a different vibe almost immediately.  No more mugginess, the putrid garbage in the streets isn’t melting into various layers of stench, and hooded sweatshirts are being pulled out of the deep recesses of closets left and right.

We here at MetalSmells are excited to invite you to relish with us the arrival of our favorite season, and remind you to enjoy it while it lasts.  Before too long the icy edge of winter will be shivering our broken collarbones and fiery libidos, so if you’re gonna fall, best get on that right away. 

-KW

This news will surprise no one who has been following the polls, but Justin Gosnell has won our third annual “Run MetalSucks for a Day” contest by an incredible landslide. He’ll run the site this coming Friday, September 23, all by himself, with no help from us!

We’d like to congratulate Justin and thank him/pity him in advance for doing our job for the day! YAY, JUSTIN!

Make sure you come back here this Friday to see what Justin cooks up for all the Suckalos…

-Axl & Vince

via WWTDD

So much of this week ended up being devoted to the Big Four that I honestly don’t wanna think about any of those bands again for at least the remainder of the year. So to wrap this shit up, here’s everything Big Four-related we did this week:

• We live snarked the Big Four show at Yankee Stadium.
• We went to an Anthrax press conference.
• We went to the Metal Masters clinic and saw Phil Anselmo jam some Pantera with various Big Fourers.
• We debated the merits and demerits of Anthrax’s Worship Music.
• We listened to Lars Ulrich on Howard Stern.
• We had fun at the expense of Dave Mustaine’s faith.
• We had a Big Four edition of Show Us Your Metalsucks.
• We helped Metal Injection with their Big Four-themed Livecast.
• I also made an appearance in Metal Injection’s Big Four video recap, which you MUST watch because a) it’s awesome and b) I’m so handsome!

Tomorrow marks the twentieth anniversary of the release of Guns N’ Roses’ double-disc opus, Use Your Illuision. It seems like public perception has soured on these albums over the years — even Axl Rose and Slash have accused them of being bloated and over-produced — but I still love ‘em to death. For one thing, seeing as they ended up being the last proper studio albums of original material from the actual Guns N’ Roses (not Axl Rose’s solo group or whatever),  I’m glad that the band basically included every song they had written up ’til that point here. And for another thing, I love the diversity of the records — that they didn’t just end up being Appetite for More Destruction. Maybe the Illusion albums ended up being a failed experiment, but I still, to this day, find them to be a pretty exciting experiment*.

So. Since we didn’t do a “Question of the Week” this week, and I wanted to do something to commemorate this anniversary, I thought we’d play a fun game that Vince and I (and a lot of our other friends) used to play in the past: whittling these two mammoth albums down to one collection. Geffen Records actually did that themselves in 1998, releasing a twelve-song single volume version of UYI that, if you ask me, had a pretty strange selection of songs on it… but it’s an entertaining time waster to see if you can do better.

There are no rules to the game, other than a) all the songs on your track list have to come from the Illusions albums (duh), and b) it all has to fit on one CD (roughly 80 minutes), despite the fact that CDs are now obsolete. I’ve included my own personal version after the jump… I’ll be more than a little excited to see all of yours as well.

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A veritable force within the pantheon of doom, the mighty YOB have recently unleashed their most focused album to date, Atma. Once again, they do not disappoint, offering the listener a soul-crushing, transcendental experience of balls-heavy doom/sludge. YOB possess that rare triple-threat quality of producing consistently excellent recordings, performing flawlessly live, and bringing forth an intelligent, complementary aesthetic to their music. I caught the band on their recent US tour with Dark Castle, which if you missed, means you receive an F in life. The band is about to head across the pond to Europe with Dark Castle and Kongh, captivating new audiences and destroying speakers along the way. I

had the chance to catch up via e-mail with YOB founder Mike Scheidt, where he gave his insight on the band’s growing popularity, working with Scott Kelly, and YOB’s unique inspirations. So spark up some hash, put Atma on your speakers, and enter the devastating world of YOB.

Click to read more…

In case Chimaira’s upcoming headlining tour with Revocation, Impending Doom, and Rise to Remain isn’t enough for you, The PRP is now reporting that the band will also headline a second leg of that trek almost immediately after the first leg concludes — and this time support will come from Unearth, Skeletonwitch and Molotov Solution. As much as I love Chimaira and Revocation, that’s actually a way, way stronger line-up; I’m not really a Molotov Solution fan, but Unearth and Skeletonwitch are both great, and greater than great in a live setting. So I feel pretty confident that these shows will just be absolutely annihilative.

You can get dates for the first leg of the tour (with Revocation, etc.) here; only two dates for the second leg are available right now, more will be announced soon. In the meantime, those dates are…

11/17 Poughkeepsie, NY – The Chance
11/25 Ft. Lauderdale, FL – Revolution Live

-AR

Anticipation is building for Animals as Leaders’ new album Weightless, set to come out on November 8th via Prosthetic. Sure, it’s only their second album, but so much has changed since 2008 when Prosthetic Records convinced Tosin Abasi to quit his job in a coffee shop and record a solo record. For one, Animals as Leaders are way more popular now; they’ve started a movement. But Animals as Leaders are also now a full band; 8-stringer Javier Reyes and drummer Navene Koperweis have been playing with the band live, and I fully expect their contributions to be felt and heard on the new record.

Above, watch live footage shot in Vienna of a new song the band has been playing live recently called “Isolated Incidents,” by the far the clearest and best footage I’ve seen yet of the many versions on YouTube. There are some great “shred’ shots of Javier and Abasi’s hands, although unfortunately our view of Koperweis is obscured.

After the jump, multi-camera footage of “CAFO” from the same show:

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Yeah, I know. Worst headline ever. Sorry. I’m trying here, I swear.

ANYWAY, writing about “Cuts,” the new Tiger Flowers song which just premiered on Noisecreep, our pal Carlos Ramirez asserts that “If the folks at NFL Films had any guts, they’d license out a track from Tiger Flowers. The New York City noise mongers specialize in the kind of music that would fit perfectly with their slow-motion montages of violence and glory.” Well put, Carlos!

A rough version of “Cuts” appeared on MS’ very own NYC Sucks compilation earlier this year, but now the better, remixed and remastered version is out in the world. You should definitely check that shit out here, especially if razor-sharp chaos is your thing. (Carlos compares it to Jesus Lizard, Helmet, and Botch — which is apt and flattering.) It will be on the Tiger Flowers EP, which comes out on September 20th as a digital release only, and which is an all-around face ripper that NEEDS to be on your radar.

-AR

There are a number of ways record labels are attempting to combat sinking profits from an outdated business model: some have chosen to sue illegal downloaders, some have chosen to launch personal attacks at vocal bloggers, and some have even decided to look to the future by embracing new technology (!). Others simply turn to national cocaine distribution.

According to the Smoking Gun [via Metal Insider], members of a narcotics ring that sent large amounts of cocaine and cash back and forth across the U.S. in music “road cases” arranged pickups and deliveries at the offices of Interscope Records:

Department of Justice prosecutors this week provided defense lawyers with shipping records detailing “pickups and deliveries” made at Interscope’s Los Angeles office by a cargo firm that was used to transport the music cases, which were alternately stuffed with kilos of cocaine and upwards of $1 million in cash.

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During our Big 4 Live Snark on Wednesday, we reported that during Megadeth’s set, Dave Mustaine told the crowd he needed neck surgery, and had been in a hospital as recently as Tuesday; in fact, not only was there a rumor on Monday that Megadeth were gonna miss the show, but word around the campfire was that Exodus had even been approached about possibly taking ‘Deth’s spot should the Davester have to drop out. (Fans offended that Exodus and not Testament were approached should keep in mind in that Gary Holt was already playing with Slayer anyway, so, y’know.)

Now Rolling Drone has scored a non-scoop by getting Mustaine to say in print that which he already said at the concert: he needs neck surgery. So, in case you didn’t believe him the first time he said it, now you should believe him because he told the magazine that gave St. Anger a positive review.

The interesting part of the interview, though, is Mustaine’s claim that G-O-D fixed it so he didn’t have to miss the Yankee Stadium show despite his neck issues:

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Century Media and Metal Blade now have more company in the room: Prosthetic Records is pulling out Spotify, according to an article at L.A. Weekly that includes quotes from Prosthetic owner E.J. Johantgen.

Before you all get uppity on me, I actually think Johantgen has some good reasons for deciding to pull his artists from Spotify, certainly the most well-reasoned I’ve seen yet. That doesn’t mean I agree with his final decision, but they’re good reasons nonetheless and should be discussed. So:

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