I don’t usually take requests, but when I do they’re from bands on independent music retailer VICTORY RECORDS — in this case, it’s death metal standouts CARNIFEX! Vocalist Scott hit me up on Twitter and asked if I would review their latest album, and I was more than happy to oblige since I’m a big fan of theirs!

Not sure how many of you were around back in the day, but these guys have actually been going strong since 2005, and they have a new album called Until I Feel Nothing. I’ll get into more detail about the record itself, but before I do that I have to I have to touch on what IMO makes this band something truly special: their innovative marketing and merch!

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Hollywood Undead’s “Hear Me Now” (lyric video above) is a terrible song, but I understand why white kids from Westchester or Toledo or wherever people go to raise children they don’t love would like it; it has angsty lyrics,  a strong hook, and rapping that is very slow and caucasian, and therefore non-threatening. It’s one of those pieces of music that I personally can’t stand, but the appeal of which is not a complete mystery to me.

On the other hand, if someone told me they enjoyed Jonathan Davis from Korn’s new remix of the song, I would be totally baffled, and my first instinct would probably be to submit them to shock therapy or something like that.

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The holy grail of music listening is almost here: soon enough we’ll be able to listen to all of our music from the cloud, anywhere, any time. We’re not quite there yet; I give it five years before full-scale cloud penetration really takes hold. But with today’s news that Apple’s iTunes Match has finally gone live we’re one step closer.

Quick recap: iTunes Match is a service that dovetails with Apple’s new iCloud service. In a nutshell, it scans your iTunes library for all music files (even ones you downloaded from other services, torrents, .rar blogs, or files you’ve ripped in shitty quality). Without you having to upload any files, iTunes Match then grants you access to ALL of those songs in 256kbps quality, directly accessible on Apple’s servers from any computer (Mac or PC), iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. iTunes Match won’t work for music that isn’t available on iTunes so it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s still pretty dern cool and I’m frankly quite surprised that record labels haven’t tried to sue this thing into oblivion. The service costs $25/year.

Future, nice to meet you. This is gonna be fun. If Apple ever launches a Spotify-like all-you-can-eat streaming service it’s all over.

-VN

I’m not hip, so before this past Friday, when Corey Mitchell alerted us to the existence of the below interview, I had never heard of St. Vincent (né Annie Clark). But I’ve listened to some of her stuff on Spotify now, and while it’s not really my thing, there is some pretty cool guitar work going on.

And so it almost — almost – makes sense that St. Vincent is apparently a metal fan, with a special fondness for the one and only Dimebag himself. (She also apparently likes Maiden.)

And then I found twenty bucks.

-AR

[via MTV, or I guess MTV Hive, whatever the fuck the difference is.]

I mean, who hasn’t, right?

Well, today is our lucky day, friends! ‘Cause that’s just what this group, Porkka Playboys, did, thus generations of untapped artistic desires. And don’t be too scared by the fact that they’re naked; you don’t actually have to see their peens or anything like that.

But wait! It gets stranger! ‘Cause they also covered Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”… entirely while sitting in a small car.

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Seth Putnam was one of metal’s great provocateurs and most colorful personalities. That’s why, even if you were never a huge Anal Cunt fan — and I profess, I am grateful to AxCx mostly for serving as my introduction to Scott Hull — Putnam’s death this past June feels like a profound loss to the community. Not many people will ever make an impression the way that guy did.

Now Realpse is getting to release a tribute to the man, the myth, the legend, in the form The Old Testament, a collection of demos, 7″s, EPs, and other assorted Anal Cunt rarities. And two tracks from that compilation — a seven-and-a-half minute demo which is apparently AxCx’s first, and a song called “Riverbottom Nightmare Band” — are now available for your listening pleasure over at The Deciblog. I’m not really gonna try to describe the music for you, because if you know Anal Cunt, you already have some sense of what to expect, and if you don’t, well… you just kinda need to listen, because Putnam and company were truly one of a kind and no words can really tell you what you’re in for. This shit was, uh, unique. Yeah, let’s say “unique.”

Headbang here. The Old Testament comes out November 22 via Relapse.

-AR

Talk about a band that refuses to let down their fans: GWAR have missed the bare minimum amount of shows since the untimely passing of guitarist Cory Smoot (a.k.a. “Flattus Maximus”) a couple of weeks ago — and those shows were cancelled only so that the band could attend Smoot’s memorial service in Virginia this past Friday. Those dudes are troopers, huh?

I’m sure Smoot continues to loom large in the band’s mind, though. Case in point: Metal Insider reports that this past Thursday, November 9, during a performance in Portland, OR, the members of GWAR spontaneously ripped off their masks and held up Smoot’s guitar to honor their fallen bandmate. Check out video of that performance below; it’s kinda weird to see GWAR break character like this, but, obviously, the occasion called for it…

The band’s ongoing tribute to Smoot continued on Saturday, when they announced plans for both the Smoot Family Foundation and some Smoot memorial shows via their Facebook page:

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The other day I posted about Misery Signals guitarist Karl Schubach’s new project Solace without realizing it was Schubach’s project; d’oh! But that should speak to the strengths of Schubach’s songwriting, and it only reinforces my desire to hear new Misery Signals. I was never into Misery Signals before 2008′s Controller, but with that album I found a modern metalcore record that not only held my interest on repeated listens but put the band’s own fresh stamp on a sub-genre that had peaked a couple of years earlier. And now it seems like we’ll finally be getting a follow-up four years later.

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…Max Cavalera recently revealed during a radio interview (video above) that he’s working on his autobiography with British journalist Joel McIver, who has previously penned such metal-themed tomes as The Bloody Reign of Slayer and Justice for All: The Truth about Metallica. The forward will apparently be written by Dave Grohl, who collaborated with Cavalera as part of his Probot project back in ’04.

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So hey, remember last week when we heard that rumor that Machine Head were planning a North American tour with Suicide Silence, Darkest Hour, and Rise to Remain? Well, it wasn’t a rumor at all, and now dates for the tour have been announced. You can get ‘em after the jump.

And, like I said when word about the trek first got out, it’s a really good bill. Machine Head, Darkest Hour, and Suicide Silence are all a lotta fun live, and I’m itching to see some of MH’s new Unto the Locust material performed before my very eyes. I’m not a fan of Rise to Remain, but I haven’t seen them in concert, so for all I know, they put on a good show, too. And even if they don’t, well, they go on first so you can just get there a little later or whatever.

And now, the promised tour itinerary…

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On Sunday, September 11, 2011, Jeff “Jeffmetal” Sayers, bassist of Nebraska’s long-running “no coast powerviolence” band Wasteoid, passed away in Lincoln.

I asked Metalsucks to write this piece not so much as a eulogy, even though Jeff was a friend of mine and will be dearly missed. It’s not really national music news, either, as only a fraction of you even know who this band is.

Instead, my memorial is to share Wasteoid — and Jeff’s — other work with the uninformed.

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The news that New Zealand progressive death metallers Ulcerate signed with Relapse earlier this month was bittersweet. On one hand I love Willowtip Records, and the dudes who run that label are probably bummed Ulcerate have decided to leave, but on the other hand Relapse is a bigger label that will offer Ulcerate a great shot at breaking new ground. Ulcerate deserve every bit of that shot; their January 2011 album The Destroyers of All is a churning, visceral, crusher of atmospheric (!) death metal very likely to make my year-end list. Stream it in full on Spotify if you haven’t heard it yet.

But where one door closes another one opens: Willowtip have announced the signing of a death metal band perhaps even more fucked up and brutal than Ulcerate, Madrid, Spain’s Wormed. MS reader Dan Wolfson tipped us off to this band’s existence earlier this year, and I’ve been passively anticipating new Wormed music ever since. The band promises a new 2012 release which will be about the end of the world via alien invasion — apparently all of their lyrics are sci-fi themed — because, ya know, I can totally understand what this dude is saying:

01 Uncoloured Plasma Orifices Transported by phlegeton

02 Undeciphering The Inquantificability by phlegeton

Wormed. Get ready.

-VN

Read this quote from Stu Pflaum, co-founder (with famous rapper Talib Kweli) of independent hip-hop label Element 9 [via the 10/25 Lefsetz Letter]:

Since [Talib Kweli's] release went live on Spotify we’ve streamed the album over 70K times. I know what skeptics will say; our revenue from those streams is about $7. Who cares? Our web traffic has more than tripled in terms of site visitors & discussion… we’re getting real-time feedback from listeners on which tracks they favor and are able to adjust our marketing accordingly with most of our budget still intact. The group & the album have a legitimate buzz now.

Totally nails it. It’s not about the dollars and cents, but everything else that comes along with Spotify that makes it such a great tool for artists, and for their labels too. This benefit is hard to measure in dollars, but as it turns out is the case with the Spotify/Facebook integration the value can now be approximated — and it’s staggering! So what’s behind Sumerian’s decision to leave?

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Igor Cavalera: still not in Sepultura anymore.

The guy who took Igor Cavalera’s place in Sepultura has parted ways with the band, and been replaced with a new drummer who, sources confirm, is also not Igor Cavalera. New Not Igor joins a proud tradition of musicians such Dave Kushner and Fatty Ding Dongs Van Halen, who nine out of ten fans will not care about unless he turns out to be the guitar player’s son.

[Note: New Not Igor is not Andreas Kisser's son. - Ed.]

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Rammstein are bona fide superstars now, huh? Last year I saw their first U.S. show in a decade at Madison Square Garden, and the concert sold out in like an eighth of a second or something ridiculous like that; then, earlier this year, Vince and I caught them again in New Jersey, and that show was sold out, too. And now the band has announced another North American tour, although by the time it starts, it will have been a year since the last one. But even if it had only been a week, I’d bet on Rammstein continuing to sell out every stop on the tour. And good for them! They might be their generation’s Kiss (except less, y’know, slimey) — they truly put on a show like no other.

In fact, even if you’ve seen them before, you’re probably gonna wanna see them again; that would be the case if they were doing the same exact show as last time, ’cause that show was that good, but now they have a ridiculous new stage and probably all kinds of new tricks up their sleeve. And if you haven’t seen them before… wow, wow, wow, you really, really need to. SO. MUCH. FUN.

Dates are after the jump…

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Maybe we shoulda called it MetaSucks?

ANYWAY, here’s some shit we did this week:

• The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley responded to Dr. Katrina McFerran’s study on teens, depression, and music. Then Dr. McFerran responded to Justin’s response. Then Justin responded to McFerran’s response to his response. Then I went permanently cross-eyed.
• We debuted new music by Keith Merrow’s Demisery.
• We spoke to Corey Lowery from Dark New Day and Eye Empire.
• We checked out the latest release from Astomatous and H20, Ringworm, Mindsnare, and Soul Search.
• We showed you some nice photos from both Day 1 and Day 2 of The Metal Suckfest.
• We counted down The Seven Most Metal Video Games Ever Made.
• We were bummed to learn that guitarists Rob Arnold and Matt DeVries are leaving Chimaira at the end of the year.
• We were even more bummed to see Chris Barnes shilling for used cars.
• We argued about the best metal albums of the 90s.
• We found something even worse than Lulu: LIVE Lulu.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I haven’t gotten blackout drunk in a week.

-AR

After years of waiting, Dark New Day fans finally got to hear the band’s second record, Hail Mary, this past August, along with an equally impressive B-sides collection. For those of us that had waited patiently the release of these two albums was heartily welcomed, but it also raised a number of questions: why’d it take so long, and why now? what went south with the record label? why do all of these songs sound so different?

There hasn’t been any press whatsoever surrounding Hail Mary‘s release — the band put it out quietly and independently through digital retailers (they’re on Amazon) — but bassist Corey Lowery, whose past bands also include Stuck Mojo and Stereomud, agreed to chat with me last week about all things Dark New Day. We also got to talking about Corey’s new band Eye Empire, an incredibly talented group who I cannot recommend enough to fans of Dark New Day and Sevendust.

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After months of “speculation” (by which I mean we all knew this was happening, but no one would officially confirm it), Black Sabbath announced today at a press conference at LA’s Whiskey A-Go-Go — where they played their first American show back in 1970 – that they are, indeed, reuniting for both a world tour and a new album… which will be produced by Rick Rubin. Rubin says the band has written half the album already, and that recording will begin in early 2012.

The above video montage, also heralding the reunion, appeared on the band’s website at 11:11 am PST. The video also reveals that the band will be headlining this year’s Download Festival… so now we know who two of the headliners will be. I wonder if the only reason Metallica are playing the Black Album in its entirety is because of Black Sabbath? If so, that’s pretty silly. And it makes me wonder if AC/DC, doing all of Back in Black, will be the third headliner.

We know from Heaven and Hell that Tony Iommi still has some good riffs in him; now I guess we just have to wait and see if they can make this cool without Dio or what.

Debate in the comments section below.

-AR

The way metalheads describe him, Lou Reed is some sort of excavated relic from the Paleozoic era. Yes, I know you don’t like Lulu, but for fuck’s sake, the guy isn’t just some hobo Lars Ulrich found on the street begging for change and warning the world about Y2K. Reed’s the rock and roll animal, man, responsible for some of the most interesting and influential music of the 60s and 70s. Being publicly ignorant of his contributions to rock music doesn’t make Lulu‘s detractors cool; it makes them look narrow minded.

So, in order to prevent you from coming across like a complete bonehead, here are a few Lou Reed fun facts for metalheads…

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We had a blast at The Metal Suckfest in NYC last weekend, but don’t worry if you couldn’t make it; earlier this week we shared Justina Villanueva’s photos from Night 1 (featuring Municipal Waste, God Forbid, Today is the Day and more) and today we’ve got Mariel “Tormentia” Pietrykoski’s photos from Night 2. After the jump, relive all the glorious metal brought down upon us by Cynic, Obscura, The Red Chord, 3, A Life Once Lost, Scale the Summit, Last Chance to Reason, Fight Amp, Rosetta and Ultrageist on Night 2.

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