It’s funny to me how modern pop music is basically just re-hashed early/mid ’90s dance music ala La Bouche, Bizarre Inc., Everything But the Girl, etc. Apparently this group LMFAO makes a living on these recycled beats, kinda like the Black Eyed Peas and Katy Perry do… um, ok, if you say so! It’s what the kids are listening to.

Decrepit Birth drummer Sam “Samus” Paulicelli decided to have a little fun at LMFAO’s expense and recorded a drum cover of “I’m Sexy and I Know It.” I love this drum cover — it’s fun — but I LOVE LOVE those pants Samus is wearing. I’d like to see him wear those at a Decrepit Birth show. So br00tal, so tr00!

Warning: there are some gratuitous shots of a dude flopping his dick n’ balls around behind boxer briefs… technically not NSFW, but gross nevertheless.

-VN

Thanks: Fuzzy Dunlop

Alas, this has already been taken down, but here’s a screen cap if you wanna check it out. Note Mr. Hetfield’s occupation as listed below:

Pretty brilliant, right? I can’t believe Wikipedia changed it!

-AR

[via The Metal of Honor]

Does anyone happen to know if Fred Durst believes in Underpants Gnomes or anything like that? I ask because I’m starting to notice an amusing little pattern: the vocalists for truly, irredeemably moronic bands often seem to hold ridiculous conspiracy theories in high regard.  ’Cause first we learned that Frankie Palmeri from Emmure believes in UFOs and Bohemian Grove and shit like that, and now Korn’s Jonathan Davis has apparently written a song about how President Obama is a member of the Illuminati, a.k.a. “the bad guys from that one really bad Tom Hanks movie.”

Click to read more…

We’re live! Enter your question into the comment box and it’ll be entered into a queue. Axl and Vince will get to as many questions as possible. Login using your Facebook or Twitter account if you like… or not, up to you.

Last year’s first annual Metalliance Tour had a sweet line-up — Helmet, St. Vitus, Crowbar, Kylesa, Red Fang, Howl, and The Atlas Moth — and it’s looking like this year’s edition will as well… although, holy tonal shift Batman, y’know? According to Lambgoat, the bill this year will consist of Devildriver, The Faceless, Dying Fetus, Job For A Cowboy, 3 Inches of Blood, and Impending Doom, six bands who are obviously way, way different from the groups that played last year.

But who cares? There’s literally only bad band on the bill — Impending Doom — and if they play first, they’ll be easy to miss anyway. The rest of this bill is a total beast.

Only a few dates have gotten out so far, but more are sure to follow. So, for now:

Click to read more…

Would the Protect IP Act / Stop Online Piracy Act help business or kill innovation? From Mashable, via BusinessInsurance:

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is stirring up a lot of controversy in the tech world. Companies that rely heavily on copyright protection call the bill piracy protection; those that rely on user-generated content call it censorship.The bill strengthens the U.S. Justice Department’s power to go after websites that host disputed copyright material — and could make sites such as YouTube and Tumblr that host such user-generated content liable for copyright violations.

AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga delivered a letter to members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives last month that argues SOPA “pose[s] a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation’s cybersecurity.” They later ran the letter as a full-page ad in The New York Times.Meanwhile, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) support the bill.

If you’re as confused by the nitty-gritty of this act as we are — how would it help? how would it hurt? what would it actually do? — then I highly recommend you check out this very informative infographic that explains everything in a very easy-to-understand format. To be clear, sites like MetalSucks would probably cease to exist if these acts were to pass. Learn more about the bill here, including contact information for your local congresspeople.

-VN

Thanks: Muhammad Saleem

Just because the big boys on record labels have stopped releasing albums for 2011 doesn’t mean the unsigned world has come to any sort of slowdown whatsoever. Let’s take a look at three of my recent favorites after the jump.

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Because we have a video of a lady belly dancing to Orphaned Land.

Enjoy:

-AR

Thanks to Andrew Robbins for the clip!

Sometimes the least “metal” photos make for the best captions, as was the case with last week’s contest; those foil masks were ripe for the punning. The Slipknot refs were too obvious, so this complete nonsequitur made me laugh the most:

• Jim: “The TV reception in their house was the fucking bomb.”

This week we’ve got copies of Rammstein’s “Mein Land” single on both vinyl and CD to give away to one winner. These were only distributed in Europe from Universal Germany, so they’re something of a rare item in the U.S. The CD has a pop-out flap of all the guys on surfboards (pictured here along with the 7″), per the imagery in their official “Mein Land” video; zexy! Rammstein’s retrospective album Made In Germany: 1995-2011 comes out on December 13th and can be pre-ordered here. To win, leave a comment with the funniest caption to the photo below (sent in by MS reader Harley Tallent). Remember to use a real email address (or post it along with your comment if you’re using FB Connect / Twitter etc).

photo by Metal Chris from DCHeavyMetal.com

It’s no secret that this guy gets down with reality tv from time to time.  Some of those shows are so intriguing, so trashy, so entertaining…..and some are just terrible.

VH1 crapfest Why Am I Still Single?! falls in the latter category, pitting a subpar alpha female matchmaker named Siggy & her lame team of “experts” (save for the twin blonde vanities…..twins, Max — boioing!) against New York City’s most socially inept daters.  I gave up on this show early on, but couldn’t help but be intrigued when ads for a recent episode boasted that one dater (contestant? victim? social pariah? what do you even call folks who go on these shows anymore???) was a heavy metal dude looking for love.

Well it turns out that dude is Bröhammer guitarist James Danzo and despite the consensus on the show that he’s a great guy, this earnest yet slightly rough-around-the-edges axe-slinger still gets predictably put through the ringer by the matchmaker’s crack(head) team.  Watch as James is reprimanded for his awful table manners by Siggy and her “expert etiquette coach Patricia” and given a new haircut by the buxom style twins….

I have it on good authority that going on reality tv yielded positive results for ol’ James — our boy has learned aplenty and can hopefully turn his newfound recognizability into dating gold.

And his band rocks!  Check them out on TheirSpace.  The bassist is a close personal bröbröcop who I’m told is hung like a donkey.

Bröhammer plays Brooklyn’s most metal venue Saint Vitus Bar tomorrow night (Friday 12/9) w/Mortician, Legionary, Blessed Ofal, and DeMilitiA….

-KW

photo by Daryl Darko

Aaron Gregory of Giant Squid wears so many hats that he’d easily clear out a headwear shop. He’s a former fish store owner, a student, a scuba diver, a graphic designer, and the guitarist and vocalist of Giant Squid. Gregory and his bandmates, including his partner Jackie Perez Gratz (also of Grayceon) recently released Cenotes, a more than worthy follow to the critically acclaimed album The Ichthyologist. Cenotes is also a key component to a storyline Gregory is creating for a graphic novel. Gregory’s fascination with the sea started when he watched Jaws as a kid. It scared him shitless, but changed his life. The new father discussed his aquatic fascination and Giant Squid’s new album recently with MetalSucks.

Click to read more…

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…

Decibel Deleted Scenes time. We couldn’t quite cram this into the splattered entrails of January’s Cryptopsy HOF, but Adrien Begrand compiled some stirring None So Vile testimonials from the technical death metal legends’ peers. Here are those musicians’ choice cuts on our latest inductee.

John Longstreth (Gorguts, Origin)

“Slit Your Guts”—what an amazing death metal song, right? That screamy, shrill intro piece—it sounds like they were paying homage to a drill press. The stop at 0:25, the solo is beautiful, the opening lyrics are “Pardon, please…” Holy cow, what went wrong with these guys? Some sort of rotten black brilliance was causing some serious torment in these dudes’ heads. How else could it be written? Definitely a poignant and early representation of how nail-biting, nervous and strung-out death metal would come to sound. A definite influence for me and Origin. Thank you for this song and album! Congratulations, gentlemen! You deserve it!

Click to read more…

“Why did you choose ___ as your favorite album of 2011?”

“Where is the MetalSucks Mansion?”

“Why do you jock Spotify’s nuts so hard?”

“What’s the meaning of life?”

These are just a sampling of questions you can ask Axl and Vince tomorrow at noon when they host a livechat powered by ScribbleLive right here on MetalSucks. Just load up MetalSucks at noon and you’ll see a new post with a chat window embedded in it; you can also directly load this post and use the embed below. Ask any questions you have by filling in the comment box within the chat window (not the regular MS comments section), and we’ll do our best to get to as many as we can. Depending on how things go we’ll keep it open for 30 minutes to an hour. See ya tomorrow!

I completely missed the boat on Ancient VVisdom’s A Godlike Inferno before The Deciblog premiered the band’s new video, “The Opposition” (above), this morning. The song is SO DAMNED CATCHY that I immediately went to check it out on Spotify (listen here), and, yep, the entire record is this good.

The Deciblog describes Inferno as “an incredibly earnest and catchy album that celebrates Satan’s glory obsessively,” which answers my first question, which was “Are these dudes for real?” But the more I listen to Inferno, the less I care whether or not the whole thing is kinda goofy. Really, this is the kind of album which will almost surely get stuck in my head for days and days and days, and might have even knocked something off of my 2011 year-end list if I’d heard it earlier.

A Godlike Inferno is out now on Shinebox. Ancient VVisdom, along with Blood Ceremony, will play support on Ghost’s upcoming U.S. headlining tour, which kicks off in January, and which I am now twice as excited for as I already was. Get dates here.

-AR

Fishbone have come a long way since the late ’80s / early ’90s albums that endeared them to most of the people who will be reading this article. I won’t be offended if kids too young to remember Fishbone’s brush with hard rock / metal fame say “WTF is this crap???” and IDGAF if Sergeant D storms into the Vince Division in a fit of IMN rage. For the rest of us, Fishbone are still kicking out the fresh jams and it really doesn’t feel like they’ve lost a step at all despite a number of lineup shifts. They just released a new EP called Crazy Glue (buy here) and a new video to go with the title track. Warning: will get stuck in your head instantly.

Oh, and hey: go see this band live! Fishbone’s set at Download Festival 2006 was an unexpected highlight and I’d go see them again in a second. I JUST missed them at Brooklyn Bowl in November, but they’ve got a few tour dates left if you live in these cities.

-VN

Being a heavily geocentric, uncultured ‘Merican, I don’t actually know much about the BBC. But I always assumed it was cool, because a) John Peel, b) some really fantastic television programs like the original The Office and Sherlock, and c) everything just sounds better with a British accent. Seriously, the words “You have inoperable cancer, fartknocker,” sound elegant coming off of Dame Judi Dench’s tongue.

But I guess the BBC is just like everything else: shitty as often as not. ‘Cause yesterday we saw this BBC news report from 1994, basically implying that black metal is evil and a danger to our youth and blah blah blah, and now reader Charles Farmer has sent us the below documentary from 2005, which blames “extreme heavy metal music and its preoccupations with violence and satanism” for inspiring some assholes in Italy to commit a murder.

And hey remember when just like a paragraph ago I said that most things are equal parts shitty and not shitty? At some point, do you think people will come to accept that, so they can start behaving a little more rationality? Like, “Oh, yeah, well, these death metal people did some truly heinous shit, but so did those country music people over there, and those hip-hop people over there, that one really big Jon Lennon fan, and holy shit will one of them please get off of his or her ass and do something about Skrillex?”

Here’s part one of the documentary…

…and the rest is after the jump.

Click to read more…

How can you not love a band called Whores, whose music has been pitched as “sweet noiserock/pigfuck?” The answer is, you CAN’T not love a band called Whores whose music is sweet noiserock/pigfuck. Dirty, crunchy, bouncy, anthemic (we’re already dying to see these dudes live and scream “LLLLLLIIIIE TO ME UNTIL IT’S TRUE!!!”, and catchy as heckfire, Whores’ debut EP, Ruiner, is a must-have for fans of bands ranging from Eyehategod to Fight Amp. Just check out the below tune, “Tell Me Something Scientific,” and tell us we’re wrong.

You can’t, can you, you poor bastards? That’s okay, we still love you. So now we’ll give you another hot tip: go here to pre-order Ruineron 12″ vinyl in advance of its December 20 release via Brutal Panda, and go to Whores’ official Bandcamp page to check out another track from the EP, “Daddy’s Money.” And tell ‘em MetalSucks sent ya.

Whores – “Tell Me Something Scientific” by MetalSucks

Textures are masters of the slow build. If you’d never heard Textures before and “Consonant Hemispheres” was your first exposure to the band, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking these dudes are a bunch of softees based on the first minute of the song. But then things pick up a little… and then a little more… and then a lot more… and when you’re furiously headbanging by the time this song finishes you’re left wondering how the fuck they got from Point A to Point B so seamlessly. That’s the beauty of Textures, that’s what makes them so different and that’s why their American fans were so ridiculously excited when they came to the States for the first time ever this fall; they’re positively captivating and they construct songs in unexpected ways.

Check out this pro-shot performance of “Consonant Hemispheres” — one of my favorite tracks from Dualism — recently shot live on Dutch TV show. In case you haven’t heard Dualism yet, well, four MetalSucks writers liked it enough to place it on their Top 15 of 2011 lists so that should certainly tell ya something; check out a few tunes here. U.S. and Canadian fans can get 10% off in the Textures merch store through the holidays by using discount code “TEXTDECFTN.”

-VN

Italy-based label Frontiers Records released two of 2011′s awesomest glam metal records, Sebastian Bach’s surprising Kicking And Screaming and Forevermore by Whitesnake, one of this year’s very very awesomest (read here). So Frontiers was already hot when two Tuesdays ago Beggars & Thieves’ new record We Are The Brokenhearted came out. The jam I heard was sweet and holy fucking shit that’s Jake E. Lee doing the solo and and AND appearing in the funny “Right Now”-style video (above at 2:17, with cameos from members of Slaughter, King Kobra, Kiss, Keel, plus a lady with huge jammerz and Kevin Churko).

Lee’s appearance in the video falls in line with recent rumors of an imminent-ish return from near-invisibility with a new project, which is an exciting prospect turned mega-exciting by his great performance on this B&T song and his seeming good health. I’m always begging anybody who has ever been in Lee’s proximity for contact info and it looks like the B&T team is next on my list. Which is a relief in a way cuz I was contemplating asking Paul Gilbert to introduce me to his Racer X bandmate and onetime Badlands drummer Jeff Martin in hope that he has Lee’s number. That sounds like a longshot but it’s not even close to my most desperate gambit so far for an interview with the dude. Jake CALL ME.

-ADF

Get Beggars & Thieves’ new album We Are The Brokenhearted here.

I’d say I don’t get why Sexcrement don’t get enough love, but… well, it’s right there in the name, in that it is their name. Then again, it’s not exactly false advertising: their sole (for now) full length is called Genitales from the Porno Potty, and just look at the title of the EP above. But fecalphilia and secretion obsessions aside, they’re a great fucking band. And with loose, groovy, mid-paced death metal done right, XXX Bargain Bin, Vol. 1 sinks its hooks deep in you for the seventeen minutes it manages to stick around. Then it hurls some bus fare at the dresser and heads out, leaving you wanting more. They get the ratio of filthy to formidable right, in that they don’t feel the need to tone down the former to compliment the latter.

Though it’s technically just an odds and sods EP (two studio tracks, three live ones), it’s not a bad place to start with Sexcrement. The studio tracks (“Well Hungover” especially) show off the band’s tightness and relative polish, while the live tracks (and they’re a GREAT live band, by the way) are a well-documented expression of their chemistry. The riffs are fierce and the grooves are deep; it’s like a stench you can’t wash off (partially because you don’t want to). The thin coat of grime that seemingly covers everything gives it an alluringly dingy quality. In the end, XXX Bargain Bin, Vol. 1 may not be something you recommend to polite company, but deep down, you know it’s better than another squeaky-clean prog-metal album about Xibalba or whatever. It burrows deep, catering to your senses of both joy and shame. So, you know, a good fucking time. Now, where’s Volume 2?

-SO