I have two qualms with Baroness’ Blue Record: 1) It came so highly rated — a perfect rating from Decibel, 4 1/2 out of 5 horns from our own Axl Q. Rosenberg, and some asshole whose name pokes fun at a tequila entrepreneur named it his number one album of 2009 – that it wasn’t hard to feel a little underwhelmed by it after a while, and 2) It was a little short. Now, the latter isn’t a huge complaint — better to be compact than bloated — but Blue Record‘s brevity holds it back from being the sort of masterpiece some thought it was (like, you know, me). I still think the album is a magnificent piece of work, but it feels like it’s closer to “almost there” than “made it.” Baroness sounded as if they were reaching for something more ambitious, brushing it with their fingers but not yet able to grasp it. If they had a great album in them, it’d most likely be next.

And it is. Yellow & Green, the band’s latest (and yes, the dual colors denote a double album), is bold and sprawling. Whereas Blue falls just short of greatness, this record provides just enough to get there. It’s densely packed and carefully assembled, widening the band’s already-considerable aggregate of influences while still sounding uniform. Baroness never seem out of their comfort zone on Yellow & Green, even if they’re wandering further outside of it than ever before. That’s because the band have finally grown into the shoes everyone’s been insisting they wear and stride in them daringly and confidently. They’re the Stephen Strasburg of sludge/doom: they showed a lot of promise, then one day were called up and performed pretty much exactly as you’d expected them to. This album is their perfect game.

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Length of time can be an odd thing. For instance, I recently watched M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender (because… I honestly don’t know why. I was feeling too good about my life? Eating a bowl of refried beans, hot sauce, and a potent laxative would have been too inconvenient?), and despite it being around ninety-three minutes long, I was shocked to look up and see it was 9:30 and not well past midnight when it was over. With horrid acting, a thoroughly punchable little kid as the lead, and some of the most convoluted and choppy plotting this side of Dune (without the aid of early Virginia Madsen, probably one of the greatest things mankind has ever done), I found myself trapped in a void of timelessness, an endless middle section of Zack Snyder’s trademark fast-slooooow-fast sequences (which Airbender rips off pretty shamelessly toward the end).

In contrast, I was in the same realm during Phobia’s Remnants of Filth, except it wasn’t a thrill ride on par with listening to a tax attorney talk about his or her day, but a proper album’s worth of songs that run just under twenty minutes. Good grind does this well, which is why Phobia have been around in some form as long as they have. Remnants of Filth is dense but never a slog, a fully-realized collection of ideas rattled off at a rapid clip.

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Sludge, maybe more than any other genre in metal, benefits from aging. But not like a fine wine (partially because that’s a huge fucking cliché) and more like a bottle-conditioned beer. Sure, it’s pretty decent a little while after it’s bottled, but given enough time, it’ll bloom into something else altogether that leaves the original brew in the dust. Though there’s plenty of reason to be angry in your early 20s, there’s something to having a few decades under your belt, having seen some shit with sleeves of faded tattoos and a perpetually sad and lost-looking leathery face that just fits sludge’s MO just fine (by this line of thinking, the next eyehategod record will be the best thing they’ve ever done). And it’s why 16’s Deep Cuts From Dark Clouds works so well: it’s grown-up anger bowling over a generation of New Jacks. With all the charm and poise of indigestion, the band present a concise and effective slab of sludge metal. No frills, no surprises, and no bullshit.

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Layne Staley only recorded six studio albums in five years — and yet his inimitable voice influenced an entire generation of singers. To commemorate his death ten years ago, members of the MetalSucks staff will be discussing their favorite Staley performances throughout the day.

Though I’m certainly not in the minority, one of my favorite aspects of Alice in Chains was the vocal interplay between Jerry Cantrell and Layne Staley. Though the former was a better singer in a traditional sense, Staley’s vocals held all the personality: gravelly, pained, often soulful, and always effective, there was a reason he became the band’s focal point.

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High on Fire’s last album, 2010’s Snakes for the Divine, was like a long night drinking cheap beer: starts out strong, has a lot of cool moments here and there, but after a while, it feels bloated and sluggish, and despite a strong finish, doesn’t have enough transcendent moments in between to justify the massive abdominal pain, dry mouth, and heightened photosensitivity at work the next morning. And while Snakes may not have literally given me stomach discomfort, the filler-to-killer ratio was tipped a little to far toward the former to live up to the mighty standard the band have set for themselves. Fortunately, a couple of years and a Sleep reunion later, they’ve rebounded in epic fashion with De Vermis Mysteriis, an embarrassment of Lovecraftian riches simultaneously dark, pummeling, and catchy. It’s an album of sludge-punk peaks and smoky psychedelic valleys. Even for a band as esteemed as High on Fire, it’s a career high point.

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MetalSucks recently polled its staff to determine The Top 25 Modern Metal Drummers, and after an incredible amount of arguing, name calling, and physical violence, we have finalized that list! The only requirements to be eligible for the list were that the musician in question had to a) play metal (duh), b) play drums (double-duh), and c) have recorded something in the past five years. Today we continue our countdown with Meshuggah’s Tomas Haake…

I have two drummer-related memories when it comes to Meshuggah. The first is from talking with a drummer friend of mine after he first discovered them (he was a fairly late convert to the band). And him being a drummer, when Tomas Haake came up, I mentioned how I thought he really wasn’t that great due to his what I took to be his very simplistic playing. His face registered shock, like I’d told him that Atreyu were one of the great death metal bands or Al Gore had been president for the last eight years. “Actually, he’s doing a lot of really complicated stuff, especially with his feet,” he replied. And I took him at his word — seeing as he actually plays drums and I just know enough to sound alright when drunk at someone’s house if they have a drumkit in the basement — but continued to think what I thought.

But for about a year after that, every time I threw on some Meshuggah, I paid attention to what Haake was doing, and, good God, was I ever fucking wrong.

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When blackened thrash gets it wrong, you get an uninspired mishmash of its two root genres that exists solely to remind you of how much better it could be. But when it gets it right… muah! The ominousness of your early Darkthrone albums gets a testosterone boost from your Exodus LPs. But while some bands tend to focus on the highly-refined threads of technicality between the two genres (see: Absu), some of my favorites from the last few years have played on the influence of punk and hardcore in the roots of both black and thrash metal. And the latter is on excellent display on Aura Noir’s latest, Out to Die. There’s not a whole lot of atmosphere or contemplation in the album’s 32 minutes and 37 seconds, just a shit-ton of top shelf riffs and attitude. Considering the pedigree involved, that’s not necessarily a surprise. But what is sort of out-of-the-ordinary is that there are moments that, when not delivering blows to your solar plexus, actually approach something resembling fun.

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MetalSucks recently polled its staff to determine The Top 25 Modern Metal Drummers, and after an incredible amount of arguing, name calling, and physical violence, we have finalized that list! The only requirements to be eligible for the list were that the musician in question had to a) play metal (duh), b) play drums (double-duh), and c) have recorded something in the past five years. Today we continue our countdown with Cynic’s Sean Reinert…

While Cynic were never really a band you could reliably hang a genre on, the changes they made between their massively influential debut and their succinct, decade-plus-later followup were still significant. On Focus, the band still had bits and pieces of their death metal lineage intact, from chunky riffs to snarling backing vocals. Traced in Air, however, found them discarding any pretense they had about being a death metal band, drawing upon their previously outlier elements and building a new prog-metal foundation with them. Obviously this wasn’t as drastic a change as it may sound — Cynic are still undeniably Cynic — but more of a tightening of previously loose bolts. The reason, perhaps, that the band maintained tethers from their future to their past — aside from using Vocoder since T-Pain was still in grade school — was drummer Sean Reinert.

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Wizard Rifle — Portland, Oregon’s noodly math rock duo with a serious fetish for stoner-doom fuzz — are fucking great. They sound like the Big Business-ified Melvins fucked a baby into Shellac and then hired Matt Pike as their au pair. Or maybe not exactly that. But the band invite that kind of hyperbolic simile, in that their music is a fantastic amalgamation of years of genres that have crisscrossed eachother. But it’s less an exercise of superfluous name-checking than an interesting box of records congealing into one heavy-ass piece of vinyl after a house fire . Influence leap-frogging is a hard game to play, but Wizard Rifle play it incredibly well on Speak Loud Say Nothing, their debut on Seventh Rule. By walking a fine line between endearing and cloying, they manage to find themselves, at worst, hard not to like. But at best, they’re a great scratch for whatever itch you may have, be it mathy angularity, weighty doom, or noisy stoner weirdness.

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There’s a moment pretty early in Napalm Death’s latest, Utilitarian, where I knew I’d love it. After “Circumspect,” an oddly effective mood-building track, “Errors in the Signals” kicks in with a fierce stop-start tech-grind riff. Then at the ten second mark, it becomes Napalm Death. You know what it sounds like: Danny Herrera brutalizing the drum kit just a notch faster than everyone else, Shane Embury and Mick Harris summoning a dervish of grind chaos while Harris and Barney Greenway try to out-shout one another, with Greenway sounding, as always, like his teeth have been gritted for so long that he has permanent lockjaw. It’s that “SHIT YEAH” moment that’s made Napalm Death stand out as long as they have (they’ve been a band in some form or another longer than I’ve been alive), even despite a laughably inconsistent lineup until relatively recently. And that’s the best thing about Napalm Death now: spazzy grindcore kids may worship the barely-reined chaos of Scum while deathgrind bands get hard for Harmony Corruption, but late period Napalm Death belongs to, well, Napalm Death. And around ten seconds in to “Errors in the Signals,” even though there’s still 45+ minutes left in Utilitarian, you know what’s coming. You could argue it’s predictable. You could also argue that it’s a testament to the fact that it’s pretty impossible to get sick of Napalm Death. Most bands with their track record may sound winded; the guys who made Utilitarian sound as vital as they ever have.

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Not enough can be said about the miraculous change Goatwhore made on 2009’s Carving Out the Eyes of God. A relatively small tweak — the inclusion of the occasional hummable thrash riff — suddenly opened the band up: instead of a cold, perfect-to-a-fault killing machine, they became a well-functioning doomsday device. From there, they just spat out a series of surprisingly well-crafted songs. Not much has changed on their latest, Blood for the Master, but not much needed to: Goatwhore’s latter-day appeal rests in perfecting a model then wringing as much as they can out of it. After seeing dozens of once-mighty bands stumble over tone-deaf prog or ill-used pop songwriting, staying the course could be the best decision they’ve made. If it ain’t broke, just keep reappropriating Exhorder riffs to maximum effect.

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I haven’t really been on board with Lamb of God actively since As the Palaces Burn. I’ve kept up with them, but after a few spins (especially with their last two albums), I’ve been disinterested. The familiar Lamb of God sound is there, but the appeal isn’t. It’s not bad music, just sort of… existent. And for a band often hailed as one of the torchbearers of modern metal, that’s not enough. True, they aren’t the same scrappy bunch of Southern longhairs that made the weird, dark groove metal of New American Gospel – nor should they be — but for me, that didn’t excuse reasonably inoffensive metal on cruise control. But after a while, I recognized that it could simply be me and my relationship with LoG fandom, and chocked it up to a “no offense, but this isn’t for me anymore” frame of mind.

Regularly, here is where I would say, “But Lamb of God’s latest, Resolution, restores my faith in their ability to slay motherfuckers like a hybrid of Ted Bundy and Genghis Kahn,” or something less caffeinated and hackneyed. But I’m stopping short of that, because there’s still that slickness Lamb of God added around the time of Ashes of the Wake that doesn’t sit well with me. That being said, this is the first album where I feel like they’re comfortable in their role as a well-funded major label act. Sure, the production is slick, and there are a few bizarro-radio singles here, but more importantly, the music sticks while still being thoroughly Lamb of God. The songwriting may be a little more streamlined, but there’s also more underneath it than there had been as of late. Perhaps Resolution is not the bridge upon which old and new LoG fans can high-five eachother — if such a thing is even in the cards — but a little more of a warm welcome than I’ve come to expect from them.

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Wormed
TBA
Label – Willowtip
Release date – TBA

Wormed are a part of an elite cabal of metal bands that release a smattering of demos and EPs, follow them with one staggering full-length, then drop the mic and head home (see also: Weakling, Demilich, Repulsion). But if a certain band whose name rhymes with Shmynic reminds us of anything, it’s that it’s entirely possible for your band to reconvene and pick up where you left off (or if you’re a band that rhymes with Shmynic — I’m talking about Cynic here — you pick up as if you’d been making albums all along and have your second record sound like an immaculately evolved version of your original self). And although Wormed haven’t been gone as long as the previously mentioned bands, they haven’t put out a full-length since 2003‘s Planisphaerium, a century and a half in internet time. But that album was both of and incredibly ahead of its time, so it’s highly improbable that their upcoming second offering won’t be at least interesting, if not a full-on sci-fi tech-death masterpiece.

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You can’t blame me for being wary of a solo project by Kevin Hufnagel, the guitarist for Dysrhythmia and the revived Gorguts. To kneejerk cynics like yours truly, it spells disaster: a clusterfuck of riffs and solos too noodly for either of those bands would be saying something. And the other end of the spectrum could be worse: an acoustic project that’s 40 minutes of empty, gnarled arpeggios reverberating off of nothing but the listener’s dwindling patience. Good guitarists left to their own devices run a higher risk of getting lost so far up their own asses that their spines snap like popsicle sticks. So thank our goddamn lucky stars that Hufnagel (a man who’s name seems to be destined to be shouted by Jerry Lewis) chose to instead make a beautiful album filled with lush, amorphous textures in Transparancies. A far, far cry from the dissonant prog/avant-metal of his most well-known bands, it’s just shy of forty-five minutes of densely textured abstractions that wander back and forth through emotional residencies, but never definitively landing in one. But it’s the ambiguousness that drives Transparencies, often reaching for a point that may or may not be there.

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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

I’ll just come out and say it: what a shit year, huh? Natural disasters galore (up in my little corner of New England, we had a tornado, earthquake, and late-October Nor’easter that left everyone without power for a week, all in the span of a few months) following a brutal summer that included a “heat dome”; continued economic misery compounded with heretofore unseen governmental ineptitude due to partisan gridlock/higher-than-normal choad ratio in elected office; the death of The Last Great American Entrepreneur, Steve Jobs or the canonization of child labor enthusiast/capitalist sociopath Steve Jobs, depending on your perspective; new blockbuster Nickelback and Evanescence albums; and the continued existence of Dancing With the Stars, Fox News/MSNBC, Kardashian-related programming where none of them are naked, and of course, the Twilight franchise, which has made the GDP of a small country where emotionally vapid teenagers don‘t fuck each other. If you didn’t wake up a few mornings hurling your alarm at the fresh sunlight sneaking into your room, you had it lucky and were most likely in the minority.

Or perhaps I’m being dramatic. Or it’s certain I’m being dramatic. But even metal, at least on the surface, had less than a banner year. Morbid Angel violently shit the bed with their new album, as did Metallica. Limp Bizkit returned and Korn not only continued to exist but, with Skrillex’s assistance, provided dubstep with a pretty sweet shark-jumping moment. Even Jeff Hanneman got a FLESH-EATING VIRUS from a SPIDER BITE, which was bad enough without mainstream media outlets condescendingly pointing out how “metal” that was. But there were bright spots, as there always are. Hell, Autopsy, Exhumed, and Brutal Truth all put out excellent, peerless albums despite the noticeable handicap of being in the soccer dad demographic now. Perhaps we — and by “we,” I mean “I” — focus too much on the negative. But while theoretically the night is darkest before dawn, perhaps there will never be another dawn, and we have an eternity of endless night with a moon as black as sack cloth and boiling seas and lambs opening seventh seals and so on awaiting us. Here’s this year’s soundtrack to that possibility.

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It feels a little odd reviewing stuff like the Pyramids/Horseback split and the new House of Low Culture release for a site with “metal” right there in the goddamn name. They aren’t “not metal” in the “they’re almost more of a shoegaze band” sense, but are aggressively unconventional in terms of even basic popular music construct. In fact, the only thing even slightly metal about either of these releases is less than two-and-a-half minutes at the beginning of Horseback’s only solo song on the aforementioned split. And theoretically, that’s fine: there’s no rule on the books that says being involved in heavy bands — as members of House of Low Culture have been and are — means you can’t take part in projects that are the antithesis of metal altogether. Or at least there shouldn’t be.

But these two releases pose a very interesting question: does a project’s mere existence in contrast to its creators’ most well-received work make it worthwhile? Or, in this case, does it make it even listenable?

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Who doesn’t love origin stories? Most people, because they’re usually clunky and slow the story down? Oh. Well, in some cases — or, in few cases — they’re fascinating, shedding light on a character or story you love, if not possibly outshining it altogether. And while Astomatous may not outshine the band some of them would join — nimble-fingered proggy black metal titans/objects of Sammy O’Hagar’s unending and slobbering adoration Krallice — they’re certainly a fascinating look into the past, as well as standing confidently on their own merits. In fact, despite being recorded five years ago — practically ancient in Twitter time — The Beauty of Reason, their sole release thus far (and available via their Bandcamp page), holds up unbelievably well.

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You’ve gotta feel for melodic death metal bands in 2011. They’re like the birdhouse builders of metal: sure, building a birdhouse isn’t an easy thing, and takes time to master your craft. But then after years of making quality birdhouses, suddenly Home Goods and Wal-Mart are shitting them out by the thousands, and people just go there to get them instead of to you, because they‘re cheaper and get the job done (the job here being housing birds). Then one day, here you are, a decent-enough birdhouse maker in a world that doesn’t care enough to spend money on handcrafted birdhouses, and you theoretically have to start over at 53, when all you were really good at was building birdhouses. So your options are make a half-assed attempt at another career, or continue being fairly good at making birdhouses in an ever-increasingly limited market. If you’re lucky, the economy will improve and people will arbitrarily decide that birdhouses are a thing at which to throw their money. But can you afford to bet on that kind of luck?

Crafting competent melodic death metal isn’t easy, either– let alone good melodeath — and if you’ve put enough time into your band, you have to stick with what you know. So, basically, Nightrage’s Insidious is an album that would have taken 2003 by storm that sounds perfectly fine now, just a little lifeless after years of its genre of choice being pounded into the ground. How many more times can we hear straight-up melodic death metal riffs with a lacquer of big-ass studio production and still be interested? Nightrage are fine at what they do, but before the inevitable melodic death metal revival of 2016, they need to be doing more to justify their existence.

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The moment that best defines Årabrot’s latest comes about 30 seconds into the album’s title track and opener, “Solaranus” (the album is technically called Solar Anus, but close enough). The song starts out with a sole Kylesa-esque riff with occasional drum accents, all fuzzed out and reliably solid. But then the band kicks in, and they follow along, with one noticeable exception: the focal point of the riff has gone from a nice, reliable stoner foundation to an offputting brown note, dipping slightly lower than what the song had set you up to expect. And at that moment, you’re torn: is the riff showing too much of its hand in trying to be revolting, or is it a brilliant subversion of expectations? It depends on your head space when you approach it at first, but then it coalesces. Like all good noise rock, it’s full of a sense of danger that things are going to go full-on off the rails and be impossible to listen to. It’s a struggle between what’s palatable and what’s offensive, and what percentage of one can coexist with the other. In the case of “Solaranus,” it leans harder toward the latter as the song goes on. But the track is the longest on the album, more than twice as long as most of the others. It sets a killer tone for the rest of the record, which seems catchy from there. Solar Anus will be an endurance test for some, but for lovers of abrasion, it’s a personalized Valentine. Granted, that Valentine probably has a picture of a woman shitting on some amputee’s chest, but affection’s affection.

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