Our first Unsigned Band Promopalooza back in January was such a hit that we’ve decided to bring it back! Starting today and running through April 20th, the Blast Beat Network — the agency that handles online ad sales for MetalSucks, Metal Injection, Decibel, MetalUnderground.com, MetalInsider.net and a bunch of other awesome metal sites — is offering a special banner advertising package discount available only to unsigned bands.

We know it’s tough as an unsigned band, which is why we continue to bring you our Unsigned and Unholy and Readers’ Choice columns. So we thought we’d throw the smaller guys another bone by making banner ads on MS and the other Blast Beat sites affordable to anyone.

For $100, your 728×90 leaderboard ad (up top of the site) will be shown 50,000 times across the network. That’s less than what the record labels pay. To take advantage of this special deal, follow the instructions listed here.

Sooo… just thought we’d take this opportunity to remind you yet again that MetalSucks, with a special assist from The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley, will be presenting Heavy Metal Literature Night at at Hank’s Saloon in Brooklyn this Thursday, February 17. Members of God Forbid, Tombs, and, of course, this very website, will be doing readings from from some of metal’s greatest tomes, including Motley Crue’s The Dirt, Led Zeppelin’s Hammer of the Gods, Slash’s Slash, Marilyn Manson’s Long Hard Road Out of Hell, and more — kinda like what Will Forte does in the below video. Only we don’t make one of the biggest bombs of the year and get fired from Saturday Night Live at the end.

And, oh yeah, Vince is DJing!!! Come get st00pid with us. Thursday night. See ya there.

Steven Tyler’s review of “Idol Remains” on MetalSucks

You folks have all been closely following MetalSucks’ own “Idol Remains” column by Anso DF, right? They’re awesome, because they’re just like watching American Idol, without having to suffer through actually watching American Idol.

Here’s what the critics are saying about the column:

“I am, quite simply, in lust with Anso DF’s prose.”
-Satan Rosenbloom

“The anxious unpleseantness of awaiting the next ‘Idol Remains’ is akin to forced urine retention.”
-Axl Rosenberg

“I am intimidated by Anso’s great dancing and super bod. I finish reading ‘Idol Remains’ in in a state of conspicuous arousal.
-Vince Neilstein

The next “Idol Remains” will go live tomorrow afternoon; in the meantime, you can read Anso’s columns thus far here.

The above video (which I first saw on Movieline) is of Mad Men star Jon Hamm doing a reading from My Dad Was in ZZ Top, a new book by Conan writer John Glaser. The book uses allegedly “found” documents to tell the secret history of rock n’ roll — Hamm is reading a chapter about the secret origins of the Butthole Surfer’s moniker.

Sadly, Hamm will not be at the MetalSucks sponsored Heavy Metal Literature Night at Hank’s Saloon on Thursday, February 17 — but lotsa other cool people will be! Members of God Forbid, Tombs, and The Austerity Program will all be on hand to do readings from some of metal’s greatest tomes, including Motley Crue’s The Dirt, Led Zeppelin’s Hammer of the Gods, Slash’s Slash, Marilyn Manson’s Long Hard Road Out of Hell, and more; MS’ own masters of mischief, Axl Rosenberg and Vince Neilstein, will also be on hand to read and DJ, respectively.

Oh yeah, and, of course, we plan to get pretty drunk.

Even more details coming next week!!! Get excited!!!

Let’s class this bitch up.

On Thursday, February 17, at Hank’s Saloon in Brooklyn, we are going to be presenting (with some serious help from The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley!) Heavy Metal Literature Night. This will be like one of those classy book readings where intellectual types sit around drinking wine while people read aloud from beautifully written, deeply meaningful texts — only instead of intellectual types, the readers will be various members of the local metal community, instead of wine we’ll be drinking beer and whiskey and whatever else leads to terrible decisions in life, and instead of beautifully written, deeply meaningful texts, we’ll be reading from some of metal’s greatest tomes, including Motley Crue’s The Dirt, Led Zeppelin’s Hammer of the Gods, Slash’s Slash, Marilyn Manson’s Long Hard Road Out of Hell, and other books of that nature.

There will be booze. There will be music. There will be fun.

Mark it in your calendars. More details coming next week…

Gary Suarez isn’t the only MS staffer allowed to hastily swap cables between two iPods while New York City’s metal elite get their post-work-week happy hour drink on; this Friday (tomorrow!), February 4th, DJ Vince Neilstein will be clicking the ones and twos at Idle Hands Bar from 7 to 10pm.

Idle Hands boasts the slogan “Bourbon. Beer. Rock.” which should be enough to sell you on the bar’s general awesomeness; where else in Manhattan can you sip a fine glass of Jefferson Reserve whilst jamming to the grooves of Meshuggah? Nowhere; nowhere at all, I tell you. You also never know who’s gonna show up at Idle Hands; just in the last week alone I’ve seen members of Charred Walls of the Damned, Coheed & Cambria and God Forbid palling around, and it’s become a go-to after-show hang for touring metal bands playing NYC.

So join me during happy hour tomorrow, from 7-10pm, as I provide you with the opportunity to do just that. There will be some happy hour specials TBA, but those usually end at 8 so get there early.

Idle Hands is at 25 Avenue B (between 2nd and 3rd streets), located downstairs through a separate entrance under the very fratty Billy Hurricane’s.

-VN

Yep, we played a Ground Hog Day’s prank on you. Yep, we were actually posting here yesterday. Yep, we’re gonna re-post all those stories on the regular page right now for you idiots who didn’t figure it out. (Seriously, there was an ad for the other site right on the side of the page all day. It had Bill Murray and everything. You worthless stupid fucking idiots.)

It’s cold as fuck. Luckily, that cocksucker didn’t see his shadow yesterday. Hopefully this shit is almost over.

Happy Belated Groundhog Day,

Axl, Vince, and Everyone at MetalSucks

This week is your last opportunity to take part in the January Unsigned Band Promopalooza, in which we offer all those of you in unsigned bands the chance to advertise on MetalSucks — and the rest of the sites in the Blast Beat Network, including Metal Injection, Decibel, MetalUnderground.com, SMNnews.com, Metal Insider and more — at a discounted rate not offered to anyone else at any other time!

To take advantage of this special deal, read the two-step instructions here. The offer ends Friday, so get in while the going’s going.

In April of last year we gave the site a pretty big visual overhaul. We (and you, for the most part) were pretty satisfied with it, but there were a few pieces of functionality that didn’t quite work as we intended. So we’ve listened to your feedback and made a few small changes:

• changing from the Featured Stories slider to a smaller but more visible sub-navbar with five “Featured” stories showing at once so the most recent music and video premieres and breaking stories are always up top. the site header has been made significantly smaller in height to accommodate this change.
• converting the two vertical rails in our sidebar to a single, wider column
• highlighting post Authors (and giving them avatars) so you don’t send hate mail to Axl when Sergeant D writes about some emo band
• calling more prominence to our most recent Reviews, Interviews and Blogroll
• bringing back the popular “Subscribe to Comments” feature (this should be up by Monday)
• installing AJAX commenting (finally!) so pages don’t refresh when you post a comment
• making it easier to Tweet or Like a story with inline buttons below each article headline

We know there is an issue with commenting while logged into Facebook; the comments do go through, but you’ll receive an error message. This will be fixed shortly.

As always, we really value your feedback, so tell us what you think of the new design in the comments. Yes, we are corporate whores.

- Vince and Axl

Here at MetalSucks we like to throw a bone to unsigned bands as often as possible, since we know it’s a continual struggle to get the word out there. Our Unsigned and Unholy and Readers’ Choice columns hopefully go towards proving that we care about the little guys too.

The Blast Beat Network — the agency that sells banner ads on behalf of MetalSucks, Metal Injection, Decibel, MetalUnderground.com, MetalInsider.net and a bunch of other awesome metal sites — would like to extend that offer to include banner ads as well. For a limited time, they’re offering unsigned bands the opportunity to have ads on all the sites in The Blast Beat Network at a special unsigned band discount that’s less than what the record labels pay!

For $100, your 728×90 leaderboard ad (up top of the site) will be shown 50,000 times across the network.

To take advantage of this special deal, follow these instructions: Step 1) Send a payment of $100 to paypal [at] blastbeatnetwork [dot] com. Step 2) Email your banner — 728×90 pixels, jpg or gif only, maximum of 70k file size — to info [at] blastbeatnetwork [dot] com, along with the URL you’d like the banner to point to (your band’s MySpace page, Bandcamp, store, etc). That’s it! You’ll receive a confirmation email once the campaign is live.

-Axl, Vince, and Everyone at MetalSucks

In case you didn’t know, MetalSucks is in Facebook and MetalSucks is on Twitter. Won’t you be a doll and like/follow us? We like to be liked.

Everyone sing with us now:

IT’S THE MOST WON-DER-FUL TIIIIIMMMMME OF THE YEARRRRRR…

Yes, today is the day when (most of) the MetalSucks staff unveils their picks for the best albums of the year, and then you all freak out because your favorite album didn’t make anyone’s list, or didn’t make enough lists, or wasn’t in the right place on the lists, or whatever it is that you somehow think invalidates your taste, your intelligence, and your life, even though these are just opinions. HOO-RAY!

So enjoy the lists, enjoy the debates, enjoy the trolling, enjoy the flaming and the fighting, but most of all, just try to have fun and not give yourself a fucking aneurysm, alright?

-Axl, Vince, and Everyone at MetalSucks

NYC’s metal scene is literally exploding at the seams. There are so many great local bands playing shows on a regular basis that on any given night you’ve got to make some pretty hard choices about where to get your headbang on. We try and highlight some of our favorite local bands on MetalSucks from time to time, but frankly it’s just not possible to keep up; seemingly every month there’s another fantastic band that’s as good or better than any number of “signed” acts from around the U.S. or the world, only they’re not that well-known outside of our city’s borders.

That’s something we hope to change with our brand new compilation, NYC Sucks. Volume 1, containing 14 songs by as many bands, will be released on January 18th, and Volume 2, containing 13, will be released on February 22nd. We’ve included a few smaller signed bands that we feel are an integral part of the scene, but for the most part all the acts on these compilations are not signed. Both compilations will be available for download right here on MetalSucks, will contain high-quality 320kbps MP3s, and will include a PDF of digital liner notes with information about all the bands. And because the whole point of this thing is to spread the word of all the great bands we have around here, both volumes will be available completely for free. Send ‘em to your friends, put them up on torrent sites, submit them to .rar Mediafire blogs… just spread the friggin’ music by any means necessary.

Volume 1: (Jan 18)
1. East of the Wall
2. Made out of Babies
3. Tiger Flowers
4. Black Anvil
5. Naam
6. Batillus
7. Meek is Murder
8. The Binary Code
9. Castevet
10. Hung
11. Wizardry
12. Pyrrhon
13. Mutant Supremacy
14. Incendiary

Volume 2: (Feb 22)
1. Wetnurse
2. Tombs
3. Moth Eater
4. Hull
5. The Austerity Program
6. Defeatist
7. Goes Cube
8. Krallice
9. Empyreon
10. Abacinate
11. ikillya
12. Atakke
13. The Ghost in Black and White

After the jump, the cover for Volume 2. The covers were designed by the very talented Jesse Zuretti.

Click to read more…

To the MetalSucks Maniac known as “Sacajewea,” we would like to say the following: YOU ARE A FUCKING RETARD. It’s incredible how retarded you are, you stupid fucking idiot mongoloid half-wit retard.

We send this message because in October of ’09, Sacajewea left a comment on the very first post we ever wrote, saying he was “Just here to dig up the past;” then he left another comment, just this past June, which read:

“I did it twice. Fuck I’m retarded. If anyone sees this please find me in a recent post and tell me how retarded I am.”

On December 26, 2006 — a date that will live in infamy — we did what professionals call a “soft launch” but we just call “the day we first posted on this blog.” Our slogan was “Smart About Metal,” a play on the slogan for Film Comment magazine.

We had these two stupid South Park caricatures that Axl made at his then-job when he was bored. (Axl forgot until just now that he had a really long goatee in ’06; Vince still had phantom Jew ‘fro, where some days he can feel it, man!) We only posted once or twice a day, throughout the week, pretty much when we had time/interest. We didn’t use tags. We often didn’t post graphics or videos. Our headlines weren’t capitalized. We interviewed members of Stuck Mojo and Twisted Sister, because that’s who we could get interviews with. Believe it or not, we tried to get an interview with God Forbid… and we failed.

Basically, we had no fucking idea what we were doing.

We can’t believe that this is our 10,000th post. We can’t believe we’re still doing this almost four years after we started. We can’t believe that so many of you are reading it. Seriously: WE WERE ONLY FUCKING KIDDING.

So…

Thanks to Kip (who has been here longer than anyone besides Vince and Axl!), Sammy, Gary, Anso, Satan (the MetalSucks contributor and the deity), Sergeant D., Bob, Leyla, Corey, Urbandale, Dave, Matt, Ferris, Dallas, Eyal, Sacha, Paul, Bulb, Arthur, Anton OyVey, Rich Hallford, David Bee Roth, Van Arseface, Mike Pattongill, Angela Gossowski, Joey V., and everyone else who has ever written for us… MetalSucks would not be where it is if not for all of you.

Thanks to everyone in the music industry who has helped us over the years, even as they must have been secretly hoping we would van flip.

And of course, thanks to all the MetalSucks Maniacs, Suckalos, annoying people who can’t use the “search” function, and dudes that have sent us death threats. We can’t tell you how grateful we are that you read our site. Thank you thank you thank you.

Now, with a complete lack of humility, Axl and Vince present their ten favorite MetalSucks posts of all time. Enjoy.

Click to read more…

You voted for him, and tomorrow, Crack Hitler has complete control over MetalSucks for 24 hours. It should be fun! Check back tomorrow to see what he’s come up with.

Meanwhile, we’ll be outside enjoying the nice weather tomorrow. See ya Monday!

-Axl & Vince

As regular readers of this site are aware, we rarely just cut and paste press releases. But Behemoth and Metal Blade released the following statement yesterday afternoon, and it’s important that everyone read it, and there’s really no editorializing to be done. So here’s the full release, unedited:

BEHEMOTH leader Nergal has just found out he needs a marrow transplant to fight the sickness he has recently been diagnosed with (leukemia). In light of this he wants to remind everyone about the need to be on the marrow registry. The more people get tested and donate, the more of a chance for life there is for him and people in the same situation.

BEHEMOTH and Metal Blade would like to thank everyone for their support and well wishes during this difficult time. The best thing we can all do right now is learn about the marrow donation process, not only help save one of metals leaders, but to also help save countless others out there struggling with the same disease.

To learn more about how you can register to donate marrow check out: http://www.marrow.org/

Fans wanting to help out, register for the marrow program, or have questions on running a marrow drive may contact the organization Music Saves Lives by email at iCare@musicsaveslives.com or visit Music Saves Lives at http://www.musicsaveslives.org/

Music Saves Lives is the bridge between music, entertainment and important life-saving causes. We bring a simple concept; connect the music and entertainment, we all love, to a life saving community action. MSL has focused efforts on blood donation and the marrow registry, reaching out by sharing facts, educating and empowering. We educate about the importance of simple life saving actions they can participate in. These simple actions, like donating blood, running a blood drive, and registering for the marrow program to save those with leukemia, all connect back to the community.

A couple of years ago we celebrated/mourned the release of Metallica’s Death Magnetic by turning ourselves into MetallicaSucks for a day, and having each member of the MS staff contribute a review, as well as other Metallica-related shenanigans.

We had a lot of fun doing that (and watching you all argue about it), and have wanted to do it again for some time… but rarely is an album as highly anticipated as Death Magnetic released.

But tomorrow, Iron Maiden’s The Final Frontier comes out in North America, and if the fifteenth (!) studio album from one of metal’s most legendary bands doesn’t qualify as “highly anticipated,” well, nothing does.

So we’re doing it again! Tomorrow will be all Maiden, all the time. We’ll have multiple reviews of The Final Frontier, so you can see that, no, we most certainly do not always agree here at MetalSucks; in addition, there will be lots of other Maiden-related goodness… including an AWESOME interview that The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley conducted with the legendary Derek Riggs!!!

So get stoked… for tomorrow, MAIDENSUCKS!!!

-Everyone at MetalSucks

After completely selling out of almost every size, our Completely Unreadable MetalSucks Hoodies are now back in stock! We’ve also re-stocked all sizes of all of our t-shirts too, so be sure to order yours today.

Of course, once you’ve gotten yours in the mail, send in a fun/funny photo of yourself donning your new MS gear and we’ll post it up on the site and send you a bunch of cool shit in the mail for free. It’s all part of our ongoing Show Us Your MetalSucks contest. Good deal!

We at MetalSucks are high-powered metal journalists, and we often use our clout to attract expert testimony on taco riffs and the 167/8 time signature. Even so, I am awed that Allyson B. Crawford from BringBackGlam.com has partnered with the MetalSucks L.A. desk on a hard-hitting exploration of the Ten Most Essential Glam Metal Records coming next week exclusively to MetalSucks. For real, me and Allyson make Frost/Nixon look like Rachtman/Bach as we demolish myths and mine truths about the poofiest, spandexest, must-havest hair rock records.

And there’s more! Yes, the DF/B. Crawford face-off is a mere spritz of the hairspray madness of the MetalSucks week-long spotlight on hair/glam/sleaze/crotch-metal. It starts next Monday and that gives you seven full days to go see your cousin’s boyfriend Troy for an eight ball to snort right off your screen. Oh, and to answer your first question: Yes there will be BulletBoys.

-ADF