Eyal Levi from Dååth, Levi/Werstler, and Audiohammer Studios has obviously been in this business for some time now, and he’s learned a thing or two about a thing or two. This week, he imparts ten lessons about the music biz — and life in general — to you, our beloved readers, once a day, two installments at a time. You can read the week’s first two lessons here, and the week’s next two lessons here; check out lesson numbers three and four below!

#5: EVERYTHING GETS OLD

My favorite dickhead line about dating is, “Show me a super hot girl, and I’ll show you the guy that’s tired of fucking her.” Other variations include “…tired of putting up with her” or “…tired of dealing with her shit.” Any way you say it, the point is that no matter how great something is at one point in your life, you will eventually need something else that’s bigger and better  (i.e., The Next Step). In my opinion, it’s the same phenomenon as when your brain stops registering physical stimulus if you repeat it enough (try scratching an itch for too long to see what I mean). Anything you do long enough without variation will not get you going anymore. Mark Lewis and I even have some theories about how this relates to sound and mixing. But that’s another article…

Is there anything that’s now normal to you which once was just a fantasy? Look at your life. Is there anything you have now that at one point was just a dream? Is there anything you can do now that you couldn’t even imagine doing at one point in time? I’m sure there is. Big or small, I’m sure there is at least one thing in each of your lives that fits the bill. Again, is there anything in your life right now that you almost or do take for granted which you would have killed for in the past?

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In b4 butthurt BM nerds realize a hot azn girl made this and they can’t decide whether to rage or white knight

U mirin? Follow her Tumblr!

-Sergeant D.

Sergeant D. celebrates diversity every day at Stuff You Will Hate.

The Metal Suckfest is this weekend!!! And in case you’re not familiar with, or are somehow not sold on, the twenty incredible bands we’ve booked to play THE party of the year, we have scoured YouTube for recent live footage of ALL the artists playing the fest… so you can have a little taste of the madness we have in store for ya! You can see clips from all the bands playing on Friday, November 4 here; and check out clips of all the bands playing on Saturday, November 5 below.

And don’t forget: TODAY and TODAY ONLY, ALL TICKETS TO THE METAL SUCKFEST ARE JUST $25 EACH with no added fees, regardless of whether you buy tickets online, or just walk up to the box office at the Gramercy Theatre. So if you don’t already have your tickets, make sure you take advantage!!!

And now, without further ado, enjoy concert footage of all the bands playing Day Two of The Metal Suckfest!

CYNIC

More after the jump!

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An artist named Alex Pardee made the above print, and I don’t think that there would be anything especially remarkable about it… if not for the fact that it’s entitled Captain Kirk Cobain.

Now, I think enough time has passed that making jokes about how Kurt Cobain was killed by Courtney Love himself is perfectly permissible — but it would be really swell if those jokes could be, y’know, funny. Because the whole gag here is that the names “Kirk” and “Kurt” share two letters. That’s the kind of joke Dane Cook would make. Sheesh.

Cry outrage or something else in the comments section below. If you’re really so inclined, you can order one of these prints here for the low low cost of $65 + shipping & handling + never ever knowing the touch of a woman again.

-AR

[via Badass Digest]

Trapped Under Ice, Big Kiss Goodnight (Reaper)
Baltimore isn’t the first city that comes to mind when talking about hardcore. Yet the brisk, fulminant rise of Trapped Under Ice compels us to take notice of Charm City. You don’t listen to Big Kiss Goodnight; you benchpress it, each of the thirteen cuts a document of Justice Tripp’s eyes-wide-open rage. More to do with NYHC than that of nearby D.C., Trapped Under Ice appear to be the long-awaited spiritual successors to Madball’s empire. The issues Tripp covers certainly aren’t the exclusive domain of his hometown; they’re the same problems countless young Americans are struggling with today, where politicians’ inability to govern leaves an entire generation saddled with no foreseeable future. On “Victimized”, when Tripp shouts “The American Dream is a lie / That’s why I say ‘I was born to die’” you know he believes it. So do the band’s followers.

(4 out of 5 horns)

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Broward Palm Beach published an interview with Scott Ian today, in which they discussed with the Anthrax guitarist, amongst other subjects, illegal downloading. And Ian’s comments seem to have created an uproar on the band’s Facebook page. (Although the band obviously saw it coming a mile away — they humorously noted that “This post will get no negative comments” when they linked to the interview.) And since we love a good argument, and this particular topic is obviously of great interest to us all, it seems worth discussing what Ian had to say on the matter.

The conversation begins when the interviewer congratulates Ian on the first-week sales of Worship Music; Ian concedes that those numbers were great for 2011 (especially by metal standards, I might add), but also feels confident that the number would have been even higher in the days before illegal downloading. “It’s a double-edged sword,” Ian says, “because on one hand it’s like, ‘Woo-hoo, we did great,’ but then it’s also like, ‘Yeah, but how many other people stole the record, and you should have sold 150,000 copies this first week?’” He continues:

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Behold Plant Vochestra, the best metal side-project since Ladder Up An Ass!

Like Ladder Up An Ass, Plant Vochestra also happens to feature two of the lovable goons in The Red Chord, along with Between the Buried and Me vocalist Tommy Rogers. The Red Chord played a hometown one-off at the opening date of the Saints and Sinners tour featuring BTBAM this past weekend, setting up the glorious return of this legendary yet reclusive band. Performing live for the first time in several years, Plant Vochestra treated the audience to a wonderful set of the dazzling musicianship and vocal acrobatics you’d expect from a trio consisting of Rogers, Greg Weeks and Mike “Gunface” McKenzie. Courtesy of Metal Injection, here’s their big hit “Surf’s Up Dude.”

-VN

The older I get the last attached I become to material possessions. It all started when I moved three years ago and had the epiphany that lugging multiple gigantic boxes of CDs around with me for life was pointless when I could enjoy all that music just the same on one device the size of a small book. Since then, getting rid of shit has become something of an obsession; it’s gotten to the point where I’m actively and constantly trying to get rid of all but the stuff I really need in my day-to-day life. Only problem is that I’m way too sentimental and can’t bare to part with certain items (like the signed Brian Schneider baseball that’s sitting on my desk! wtf do I need this thing for?). But I’m getting there, slowly and surely.

Back in my less curmudgeonly days I surely would’ve drooled all over my keyboard at the news of the above Ziltoid puppet, available through Devin Townsend’s UK webshop. I admit, it IS pretty fucking cool, so while I don’t feel like I need yet another item that’ll sit on a shelf collecting dust that won’t stop me from buying it as a gift for a fellow DT lover and item collector. If you’re a girl, maybe this would make a great holiday gift for your metalhead guy; imagine all the sexy-time role play fun you can have with this! Actually… yuck.

-VN

[via Heavy Blog]

Our pals at Invisible Oranges just posted “Contrary Pulse,” a track off the upcoming Leviathan album, and boy, is it creepy. It’s not like Wrest (Jef Whitehead) has ever been much for kittens and rainbows (after all, this is the man that brought you such delightful USBM gems as “Fucking Your Ghost in Chains of Ice” and “Requiem for a Turd World”), but with this, his hitherto unexpected new effort, he’s really upped the ante. True Traitor, True Whore (Profound Lore) is genuinely nasty. You’ll feel dirty listening to it, and not in a sexy way.

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Before getting through this article on Metal Insider I had to Google who Feist is (she’s the one who did that “1234″ song that was in the iPod commercials a few years back). I’ve got a big thing for light, female-fronted pop with a little bit of soul (Sara Bareilles, Alice Smith, Adele, Sia, etc), and Feist isn’t really doing anything for me… BUT nevertheless I’m still pretty tickled about the idea of a Mastodon + Feist collabo. Here’s a comment from Feist via Hitfix after her and Brent Hinds had a run-in when the two performed on the same edition of the UK show Later… With Jools Holland:

“Brent [Hinds] and I were nodding at each other, and he’s like, ‘Nice riff,’ and I’m like ‘Nice tone.’ So backstage I’m thinking about letting these two worlds collide, how they should collide, so I’m like ‘How about Metals [Feist's latest album] meeting metal?’” Feist explained, saying she sort of pitched a split record to Mastodon. “Brent was like, ‘Well, I do like that “Bad in Each Other” song, I could see that.’ Maybe now I will look into learning to cover ‘Oblivion’… or anything off [The Hunter]. That album’s amazing.”

I have no idea what a Feist / Mastodon collaboration would sound like, but seeing as both artists are not just still relevant but both in their primes, I know this: it’ll kick the shit outta LuLu as far as left-field collaborations go. It’s all just talk right now and it’ll probably never happen, but it’s fun to think about listening to a way lighter Mastodon with a female singer.

-VN

Y’know, whatever the problem is between The Haunted singer Peter Dolving and Watain, I’m gonna go with Watain. I don’t know what set him off, but Dolving said Watain is overrated (read here). Okay fine, dude’s got his opinion. He also seems to think Watain is corny and totally scoffs at their vibe. I get that, too. But I don’t think it’s cool to kinda float it out there that maybe somebody somewhere should fight the dudes of Watain. And good guys, guys that we like, don’t all slyly suggest that other guys are neo-nazis. I mean, as I read Dolving’s words, I half-expected the Leezar to claim that they have STDs.

Plus I thrash the logic that Watain would best harness their evil potential by becoming white-collar business jerks, with all the schooling and networking that suggests. First off, why is he so sure they aren’t working on a weather machine or subliminal Manchurian Candidate stuff? Second, Dolving’s logic is half-baked, right? I mean, why doesn’t Dolving become a high-powered executive to wield his agenda on everybody? Oh right, cuz he’s a musician. Musicians make music.

-ADF

Watain’s awesome 2010 album Lawless Darkness yielded the awesome “Reaping Death” single whose b-side is an awesome Bathory cover (above!).

Yeah, you read that right: some dude calling himself “Mighty Mike” mashed-up two classics that, on the surface, have absolutely, positively no business whatsoever being smushed together. And yet, this must be one of the best mash-ups I’ve ever heard. It works so well, my mind is just reeling right now.

Check out the epic awesomeness below.

Imagine-a-jump-john-lennon-vs.-van-halen by jackstanleywp

-AR

[via Badass Digest]

As I type this, I have just finished editing Dave Mustein’s interview with Ron Jarzombek regarding the new Blotted Science EP, The Animation of Entimology. And Mr. Mustein deserves a pat on the back or a lollipop or something, ’cause it’s a great interview and I learned a lot from it, and I hope you all read it when we run it (possibly even later today).

Please allow me to entice you with one of the cool things I learned: Jarzombek wasn’t a death metal fan until he saw Cannibal Corpse’s in-studio video for “Frantic Disembowelment,” the instrumental [Yeah, there are vox on the album. This is why you shouldn't write blogs at 2 am, kids! -AR] track from Cannibal Corpse’s 2004 release, The Wretched Spawn. That video, he says, demonstrated for him that it takes real skill to play death metal.

And it’s easy to see why this video impressed him so much that he ran out and hooked up with Alex Webster. I’m sure plenty of you have already seen this clip, which is obviously not at all new, but it’s so awesome that it’s always worth watching again. Seriously, Webster, drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz, and guitarist Pat O’Brien all deserve major props for this shit right here.

Kiler, killer, KILLER.

-AR

You asked, we listened: you said that the “fees” added to the ticket price of The Metal Suckfest were too much, so for today only we’re eliminating ALL ticket fees! As if that weren’t enough, we’re discounting the ticket price by an additional $5 for a grand total all-in ticket price of just $25 per day!! Considering a lot of big metal tours with only four bands cost $25 or more and we’re giving you TEN awesome bands per day, we think that’s a pretty fucking sweet deal!

But the deal only lasts until midnight tonight (Wednesday, November 2), so be sure to jump on it now. Tickets are available at this link; to cash in your discount, select the number of tickets you want from the “Discount Offer” menu after selecting the same amount in the “Full Price Ticket” menu. See you Friday!

So, hey, remember that picture of Tom Cruise playing a hair metal dude in the upcoming Rock of Ages movie, and how unsettling it was?

Well, this shit will scar you for life.

See, Harrison Ford and his wife, Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart, dressed up as hair metallers for Halloween this year, and, uh… yeah, this might be worse than the last Indiana Jones movie:

In other news, I’m going to pour acid in my eyes now.

-AR

[via WWTDD]

Congrats to reader Charles Madison. He correctly identified last week’s logo as belonging to the band Zagharos, and for his troubles, he wins  five CDs from MS Mansion Archives. Invisible oranges up for Charles!

This week we have another ridiculously great prize for you cats, courtesy of Relapse Records: two, count ‘em two, copies of Set the Dial, the new album from Black Tusk. The band is scheduled to destroy this Friday at The Metal Suckfest (tickets on sale tomorrow for just $25!), and I can’t even tell you how stoked I am to get to hear some of these new tunes live. So either get off your ass and order a copy, or enter this contest and keep yer fingers crossed!

All you gots to do to win is identify the name of the band whose logo appears below, then shoot me an e-mail at axl AT metalsucks DOT net with your answer, your name, and your address. ALL ENTRIES WITHOUT AN ADDRESS WILL BE DISQUALIFIED. From everyone who gets it right, we’ll randomly select one winner and announce his or her name a week from today.

This week’s logo was suggested by reader  Erick Sierra… thanks, Erick!!!

-AR

Eyal Levi from Dååth, Levi/Werstler, and Audiohammer Studios has obviously been in this business for some time now, and he’s learned a thing or two about a thing or two. This week, he imparts ten lessons about the music biz — and life in general — to you, our beloved readers, once a day, two installments at a time. You can read the week’s first two lessons here; check out lesson numbers three and four below!

#3: BE UNDENIABLE

I first saw Behemoth live when they toured with Suffocation sometime around 2004. I had only heard of them before that. Needless to say, this band blew me away. The sound was shit, as it always is at that club in Atlanta, but that didn’t matter. They came on stage and OWNED. I was captivated from start to finish of the set. And then I bought a shirt. That is such a rare occurrence that I remember it to this day. For me to go buy a shirt after seeing and hearing a band for the first time is not quite on the level of Haley’s Comet… but in the span of my own meaningless existence, it’s pretty remarkable. Anyways, Behemoth is now an institution in extreme music.

I remember the first time I saw Opeth on the Blackwater Park tour. I had kind of gotten into their music prior to that, but had not solidified my opinion on the band yet. When they finally played, I got this amazing feeling, as though I was watching something historical and religious go down. I had never seen or heard a band produce sounds and transitions and emotions that were so right and so on. I felt like people must have felt when they were first seeing the early metal bands in the 1970’s. I’m not exaggerating one bit. I was completely humbled and a fan for life. Obviously, the rest of the metal world eventually caught on.

Anyone here seen Muse live? I’m a sucker for great musicianship and songwriting, and Muse definitely have an ample amount of both. But that didn’t drive my loyalty towards them until I saw them live. Their show is easily one of the most incredible rock shows ever put on by any band ever ever EVER! To try and describe it will not do it justice. Just go see them. I saw them first in 2005, when they were playing small theaters. They are now headlining arenas. I guess enough people couldn’t deny their power.

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Woo-hoo! Sorry I missed yesterday, it was Halloween after all! And because it was my favorite holiday, I didn’t pay a heck of a lot of attention to the NFL. That and the I hate almost all of the teams, and my Redskins are completely sucking. Oh, how delightful it was going to be when there was every indication that the Skins were going to have a decent season. I was live-tweeting the Redskins games and writing a cool football column. But football is a fickle mistress, the Redskins suck (again), and these tasks have become somewhat less enjoyable. Oh well, that’s what happens when you let Rex Grossman mouth off about how the Skins “are gonna win the division”. But not every team sucks… I don’t hate all of them, and I have a job to do! So let’s get to the action!

The game of the weekend for me was the Baltimore Ravens vs. the Arizona Cardinals as the Ravens returned from the dead to erase an 18-point Cardinals lead behind Joe Flaco’s 51 pass attempts and Ray Rice’s career-high three TD’s. In the battle of the rookie quarterbacks, the Carolina Panthers and Cam Newton were out-lasted by the visiting Christian Ponder and the Minnesota Vikings after a potential overtime-inducing FG from kicker Olindo Mare missed horribly. Class points were scored by the always-humble Steve Smith as he blamed his critically stupid holding penalty on the official being a “70-year old man gimping down the sidelines.”

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The Metal Suckfest is this weekend!!! And in case you’re not familiar with, or are somehow not sold on, the twenty incredible bands we’ve booked to play THE party of the year, we have scoured YouTube for recent live footage of ALL the artists playing the fest… so you can have a little taste of the madness we have in store for ya! (The exception is Prime Evil, who are actually reuniting after being dormant for some time. So their live footage is from back in the day.) Today, we’re posting clips of all the bands playing on Friday, November 4; tomorrow, we’ll post clips of all the bands playing on Saturday, November 5.

And don’t forget: TOMORROW and TOMORROW ONLY, ALL TICKETS TO THE METAL SUCKFEST ARE JUST $25 EACH with no added fees, regardless of whether you buy tickets online, or just walk up to the box office at the Gramercy Theatre. So if you don’t already have your tickets, make sure you take advantage!!!

And now, without further ado, enjoy concert footage of all the bands playing Day One of The Metal Suckfest!

MUNICIPAL WASTE

More after the jump!

Click to read more…

For lovers of fun, today is like a holiday during which we celebrate the release of 14 new Steel Panther jamz. We can play fun Steel Panther video games (here), check out sexy behind-the-scenes footage (here), and of course, read and re-read the deep-probing MetalSucks Q&A with lead singer Michael Starr and lead bass player Lexxi Foxxx (here). All while rocking wildly to their second masterpiece Balls Out!

We shall do this loudly and in the face of every fun-impaired non-laugher who thinks it’s all-important that music be fancy and intellectucal as opposed to fun and awesome. Let those types shove sonic granola in their ears while the rest of us make oh-faces, execute heels-to-butt rock jumps, and rub drugz on our junk. Oh and speaking of which, today brings us the new lyric video for “7 Teen 17 Girls In A Row” (above) which features too many naked boobz for YouTube. Hooray! Bonerz up!

–ADF

Steel Panther’s sweaty, stinky Balls Out is $7.99 here and get the vinyl here!