Axl has blathered quite a bit in recent months about the awesomeness of the new Die Miserable album from Canadian death-grind-punk-whozit-whatsit-galore band Fuck the Facts. It’s left me quivering in the fetal position a few times, too, so we figured it was high time we found out what the band had to say about it? Read on for all the facts you could ever want to fuck from the band’s guitarist/founder Topon Das and vocalist Mel Mongeon.

Click to read more…

Kenneth Thomas, in a tunnel.

If you care about heavy music and still believe that art should trump commerce every time, you owe it to yourself to check out Blood, Sweat & Vinyl: DIY in the 21st Century. I’ve written about Kenneth Thomas’s music documentary in these e-pages before. After watching the film a second time, I’m even more convinced of its importance as both a document of bands that you rarely (if ever) got to hear from outside of the concert hall, and argument for the importance of underground music makers, making music underground. Thomas chose to keep the focus tight, centering on the musicians, artists and label heads associated with three independent labels that are doing things their own way: Hydra Head, Neurot Recordings and Constellation. While there are certain characters that emerge as the spiritual ballast for the film – Aaron Turner of Isis & Hydra Head, Steve von Till of Neurosis & Neurot, and Efrim Menuck of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, in particular – the overwhelming sense is of a giant inter-connected family of passionate people, united by nothing other than a desire to pursue truth and clarity through music.

Aside from a couple off-camera giggles during an adorable scene with Justin Broadrick (Jesu/Godflesh), Thomas himself doesn’t show up in his film. So we figured we’d find out what the director had to say about his opus.

Click to read more…

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Komondor’s A Giant Is Coming and the Giant Is Going to Kill You.

Ever wondered what the fuck that thing is jumping over a hurdle on the cover of Beck’s Odelay? Wonder no more: it’s a komondor, a kind of dog first bred in Hungary to guard livestock. Why a sheep or goat would respond to a barking mop with anything but mocking laughter is beyond me, but give credit where it’s due: that dreadlocked mutt has been featured on two great albums now, the aforementioned Odelay back in 1996, and now A Giant Is Coming and the Giant Is Going to Kill You by Kingston, NY-based noise-rockers Komondor.

Click to read more…

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Unmothered’s self-titled debut.

For the two of you who are big fans of Austin’s incredibly bitching metal band Lions of Tsavo, Unmothered is what happened to guitarist/vocalist Matt Walker after he left Lions of Tsavo post-Swarm of the Unholy. For the rest of you, just know that Unmothered are an incredibly bitching metal band from Austin. And they’re releasing their eponymous debut EP for free. If you still aren’t convinced that you need to download this pronto, it’s probably because you’re bugged by Unmothered’s name due to some severe childhood abandonment issues. Unmothered can’t help you there. But they can help cure your case of All-Metal-Sounds-the-Same-Itis and Unable-to-Headbang Syndrome.

Click to read more…

The Accüsed turned thirty this year. What did they do to commemorate the milestone? Did they reissue one of their early crossover classics in a five-CD box set format with four hours of throwaway demo tracks? Nope. Did they play The Return of Martha Splatterhead in its entirety on a lifeless reunion tour? Not a chance. Did they switch up their sound in a bid for relevance? Hell no. Ever the black sheep of the Pacific Northwest extreme music scene, The Accüsed celebrated by playing the smallest, least-traveled markets they could find in the region, as part of their “Backwoods Bloodbath Tour 2011.”

You could see that approach as either a humble “thank you” to the small towns that supported The Accüsed while they cut their teeth back in the ‘80s, or a “fuck you” to the notion of a self-congratulatory victory lap. Maybe it’s both. Legacies are for dead men anyway. And if the affability of the band’s guitarist Tom Niemeyer is any indication, The Accüsed have a whole lot of life left in ‘em. Nevermind that Niemeyer is the lone remaining original member of the band. The Accüsed will keep on going as long as their murderous mascot Martha Splatterhead has more work to do. And she always has more work to do.

We talked to Niemeyer about the evolution of the band, his horror obsession, and how he stays motivated after so many years.

Click to read more…

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Wizard Smoke’s The Speed of Smoke.

I have neither the proper subwoofer nor the proper, y’know, glassware to fully appreciate the bong resin-saturated heaviness of Wizard Smoke’s second album, The Speed of Smoke. To my totally non-high ass though, listening to this album is every bit as enjoyable as burning a fatty, and totally holds up without one.

Click to read more…

Take this with a salt factory’s worth of grains of salt, because there are probably about fifty albums I have stored on my hard drive, waiting to evaluate, and there are many dozens of worthy contenders that I may never hear until it’s too late. But here are 40 albums from the first half of 2011 that’ve knocked my moocow slippers off so far:

Click to read more…

One of the things that I love most about underground metal is that so many diehard fans fulfill so many roles within the metal community. A lot of the kids that you see at the grind show are also in bands. The dude rockin’ out at the front might own a distro. That girl might run the screenprinting service where all the locals get their band shirts made. Another guy might be taking photographs for his blog, or promoting the show, or running a small label on the side. Extreme music requires extreme commitment.

Filmmaker Kenneth Thomas is one of those extremely committed folks. He’s a filmmaker with 15 years of experience, mostly in documentary work but also in producing music videos and EPK footage for Isis, Neurosis, Queens of the Stone Age and tons more. Back when he was living in Los Angeles, I would see Thomas at most every show I went to. Sometimes he had a film camera with him; sometimes he was just rockin’ out with everyone else. After five years of work, he’s just about to release his latest project, Blood Sweat and Vinyl: DIY in the 21^st Century.

Click to read more…

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Eschaton’s An Instrument of Darkness EP.

Two thoughts that I had while listening to An Instrument of Darkness, the boss two-song EP by Austrian black metal merchants Eschaton:

1) Maybe two songs are enough!

Think about how perfect a two-song release can be. It challenges the band to sum up its strengths in a far more compacted format than with a full-length, while still providing some element of contrast. The listener is rewarded with a release sans fat, and also some insight into what the band values about itself – I’d argue even more insight than you might get in an EP, which can often be a place to throw a bunch of stuff that a band didn’t think would fit on the new album.

Click to read more…

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Bedlam of Cacophony’s Neuroleptic.

Metal is essentially a modernist musical style. Since its very beginnings, metal has expanded what we think of as music by deconstructing – or outright doing away with – the schema we use to evaluate it. Metal bands constantly rub up against the limits of volume, speed, melody (or lack thereof) and other variables that all music engages in some way or another.

Even within a genre known for its pursuit of extremity, Neuroleptic, the debut album by Orange County’s Bedlam of Cacophony, stands out by hyper-extending pretty much every convention there is. Speeds alternate between grindcore fast and doom slow without notice. Riffs change quicker than your ears can process them, when they occur at all (much of the guitar playing is of the tap-heavy Psyopus variety). Sizzling distortion abuts clean fusion guitar tones. You’d be hard pressed to find two adjacent measures in the same time signature. Drummer Nate Cotton sounds like his kit is constantly exploding; three guest vocalists, including Cattle Decapitation/Murder Construct’s Travis Ryan, saddle the album with an intense case of multiple personality disorder. Hooks? Grooves? Tonal centers? All done away with. Neuroleptic blows by like four colliding tornados and dares you to keep up.

Click to read more…

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out After Oblivion’s Vultures EP.

It is part of Music Criticism 101 to hold up originality as a virtue. Even if a band doesn’t possess any of it, a positive review of said band will often acknowledge why the band’s other qualities make up for their lack of originality. That’s all fine and good, but we can all think of plenty of bands that embrace a well-established sound so fully and energetically that it makes tired clichés relevant again.

My new favorite rehash metal band is Bosnian-Herzegovinaian quartet After Oblivion. These guys sound like Death. A whole lot. They acknowledge it in their press materials; they even played Death tribute shows to gear up for the writing/recording of Vultures. And in many ways, Vultures feels like a tribute EP. The band’s Chuck Schuldiner is singer/guitarist Adnan Hatić, who screams in that same parched upper register of late-era Schuldiner, and solos with a similar mix of elegance and shred. Rhythm guitars work in the Arabian modes and harmonies of Symbolic-era Death. Listen closely and you’ll hear bass slides that recall Steve DiGiorgio’s fretwork on Individual Thought Patterns. The similarities are uncanny.

Click to read more…

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out four albums made by (mostly) solitary dudes.

Influential American art critic Clement Greenberg coined the term “post-painterly abstraction” to describe a movement of painters in the ‘40s and ‘50s that were abandoning traditional elements like subject matter and visible brush strokes, and instead exploring the flatness and two-dimensionality of the painter’s canvas – the things that make painting unique from other art forms. Greenberg would analyze the degree to which a painting laid these qualities bare, thus revealing a certain painterly purity and truthfulness.

The one-man metal project has been a thing at least since Bathory’s glory days. In this edition of Freeloader, I’m subjecting albums by a few recent lonely metalsmiths to a Greenbergian analysis – as in, how well does each album expose the qualities unique to the one-man metal band?

Click to read more…

MetalSucks recently polled its staff to determine who are The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, 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 guitar (double-duh), and c) have recorded something in the past five years. Today we continue our countdown with Meshuggah’s Fredrik Thordendal…

We could have easily chosen Meshuggah’s rhythm guitarist, Martin Hagström, for this list. As the primary music writer on about half of Meshuggah’s songs from Chaosphere onwards, Hagstrom is equally responsible for Meshuggah’s deliriously complex rhythm schemes, which have largely defined the band’s music for nearly twenty years and more or less inspired the entire djent movement. In 2004, Guitar World threw up its hands trying to decide who was better, and inducted both guitarists to the #35 spot on the magazine’s list of 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists of All Time. Let’s not forget that Thordendal and Hagström also made seven and eight-string guitars cool again, after the scourge of nu-metal tainted the reputation of the extended range axe.

But there are a couple things that give Thordendal the upper hand.

Click to read more…

German grind merchants Vaulting have come along way since their deathcore-leaning, Street Fighter II-sampling early days (documented on this free 2007 demo). Over the course of two further EPs, Vaulting have grown more abstruse compositionally, while becoming more sonically potent – check the video they made for last year’s “We Are the Cavalry” for that rare tech-grind recording that sounds heavy and natural.

By the sound of this exclusive track “80 Gy” from their forthcoming album Nucleus, Vaulting have listened to a lot of Cephalic Carnage and Psyopus over the past year. The song sidesteps the silliness of the former and the crankiness of the latter, reaching for a place that tempers its spazzy fireworks with a unifying coldness of feel.

I’m guessing the title “80 Gy” means “80 Gray,” which is a specific dosage of radiation used to treat various cancers. That would fit with the album title “Nucleus” and roughly map on to the lyric “The back of the head already bald… It penetrates the skin, deeper, gilds the genotype” (that’s translated from the original German). As with all great grind though, Vaulting’s individual parts all merge into one big whooshing force.

[this streaming promotion has ended]

-SR

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Shadows by Embers.

Immediacy is probably my favorite part about being a music consumer in the digital age. One moment I don’t know that the Oakland black metal band Embers exists. The next, the band’s seven years of woodshedding and recording efforts have turned into 250 megabytes on my hard drive. That’s a great thing for a listener (and especially a critic), because it loosens the need to hear albums as discrete elements, rather than parts of a continuum.

The continuum is key for a band like Embers. Since their 2007 debut Memoria In Aeterna (available for free download on their Bandcamp page), Embers have written unabashedly romantic black metal epics that breathe and grow and gleam black over shifting landscapes. Their first record was perhaps over-ambitious; those persistent viola lines added little, and while there were plenty of hair-raising moments, the songs seemed alternately labored and rudderless. But like Opeth’s Orchid, Embers’ early material was admirable for its free-flowing approach to songwriting, if not for the songs themselves.

Click to read more…

MetalSucks recently polled its staff to determine who are The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, 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 guitar (double-duh), and c) have recorded something in the past five years. Today we continue our countdown with Colin Marston from Krallice and Behold… The Arctopus…

Colin Marston is one of the youngest guitarists on our list, and his primary creative outlets (Krallice, Dysrhythmia, Behold…the Arctopus) haven’t yet reached the legendary status of so many of the other bands graced by the other 24 inductees. But in terms of his stylistic breadth and the scope of his abilities, Marston is in a league of his own.

There isn’t a signature Colin Marston guitar sound or style. Instead, Marston expertly adapts his talents to fit the project in question. On one end of the spectrum is Byla, the ambient guitar duo that Marston shares with Kevin Hufnagel; the project is all about abstraction and texture. On the other end is Behold…the Arctopus, a band that thrives on over-the-top virtuosity, deployed in the wackiest of ways – and let’s not forget that Marston executes all of Behold…’s atonal tone rows on a 12-string Warr guitar, which means he’s essentially shredding on two instruments at once. Somewhere in between those two poles is Krallice, in which Marston’s guitar lines intertwine with Mick Barr’s, creating ever-shifting harmonic patterns that tickle the ears like few black metal bands do. No matter what the guitar idiom, Marston has mastered it. No wonder that Luc Lemay asked him to join Gorguts as bassist. By the looks of the live footage from Gorguts’ 2010 mini-tour, it would seem like Marston’s fitting in just fine.

Click to read more…

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Empty Crawlspace by Godstopper.

Go ahead and scoff at the suffocated production on Empty Crawlspace by Toronto band Godstopper. You’re losing out if you can’t get past the EP’s strangulated sonics. They’re partly the point, I’m guessing – those absent highs and lows smoosh everything into a compressed center, like we’re peering through a fisheye lens at the terrible things happening in the interior of this music.

And there’s a lot on the interior of this music. Godstopper’s Tumblr page shows reams of images of boarded up houses and masked or obscured figures. This music seeks to obscure, too. Dissonant sludge riffs cohabitate uncomfortably with Mike Simpson’s bell-clear vocal harmonies, spewing up sparks. Chiming major key guitars grind against gurgling bass lines. Nothing is quite right. Check out this video clip for “Clean House” for evidence.

Click to read more…

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Live to Get Rad by Pointbreakdown.

The 1991 action flick Point Break was built on incredulousness. The government does not normally infiltrate rings of criminals that rob banks to support their international surfing habits. Trained FBI agents do not jump out of airplanes without parachutes, and when they do, they die. A sassy Lori Petty would never, EVER fall for a zero-dimensional toolbag like Keanu Reeves, and as we all know from his many public battles with drug addiction, Anthony Kiedis can’t actually be killed.

Perhaps the viewing public that made Point Break a box office smash didn’t pick up the film’s inherent ridiculousness, but the millions of people that embrace it as a cult classic must have. Certainly the creators of Point Break Live, a theatrical version of the film that features a different Keanu drawn from the audience during each performance, get it. And Owen Thomas also gets it. He’s the man behind Pointbreakdown, a deathcore project whose every song is based around a dialogue sample from Point Break.

Click to read more…

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out three recent releases from Throatruiner Records.

Just because you’re offering your music for free doesn’t mean that presentation is unimportant. French label Throatruiner Records understands this better than most. Their press materials are thorough and totally professional, the bands they are all quality, they offer all of their albums for free download, and insist on awesome packaging to incentivize actual purchase. Since Throatruiner give us the goods gratis, we’re dedicating an entire installment of Freeloader to them.

As We Draw – Lines Breaking Circles

I washed my hands of “post-metal” long before Isis broke up. What began as a new way of writing songs, with process at the fore instead of structure, devolved into empty stylistic signifiers and soporific build-ups. As We Draw do it different. The French three-piece has some guitar atmospherics and climactic moments in common with yer Rosettas and Cults of Luna, but they offer a far more energized, varied take on post-metal than most of their contemporaries. The band uses its three-piece lineup smartly, making guitars subservient to the rhythm section on songs like “Shield” and “Draft,” pitting textured guitars in opposition to anchoring bass in “Shield” and “Drowned in Flames,” massing their vocals into gruff gang chants on “Sin of Addiction” and “Scum of the Earth.” Parts remind me of Cave-In’s Jupiter, parts remind me of ‘90s screamo. All reminds me of stuff I will listen to again.

(4 horns up)

Get it free here.

Click to read more…

Melvins’ January 28 show in Los Angeles was a victory lap within a victory lap. It was Stoner Witch night, the final installment of a month-long residency that found the still-relevant, still mindfucking metal crew play a different Melvins album in its entirety each night. It was also a high-profile sendoff to the outgoing Spaceland Productions, which announced they would cede the venue to new management and a new name (The Satellite) not long after King Buzzo and bassist Jared Warren banged their respective ‘fros for the last time.

The short first set was business as usual, including a helping of tunes from their 2010 chart-bottoming album The Bride Screamed Murder, and a killer sludgification of Flipper’s “Sacrifice,” committed to tape on Melvins’ 1992 platter Lysol. The place was packed and sweaty long before intermission hit, and it only got more so once Warren re-entered to begin the bassline to “Lividity,” Stoner Witch’s final track. My girlfriend opted to avoid heat exhaustion and moved upstairs to watch the festivities from behind a glass wall.

Click to read more…