(from DougORama.net)

King’s X frontman and bassist Doug Pinnick is truly a metal warrior. At 61 years old he’s still battling it out in the trenches, be it with his main band or one of his myriad side projects, touring all over the country and writing music day in and day out. Even more impressively he’s happy as a clam, extremely humble, and grateful for all his success: “Living month to month like the average person isn’t fun, but hey, that’s quite a life. No one ever guaranteed that I would be rich doing what I do. I’m lucky enough to do it and be able to continue to do it and get paid for it. That’s great. I don’t think a lot about what I do or where I’ve been.”

Anyone who’s seen King’s X live knows how positive and inspiring Doug is, and thankfully he was the same way when we chatted on the phone last week. We talked about the upcoming King’s X “First Church of Rock and Roll Tour,” the meaning behind its name, Doug’s side projects (he’s working on a new solo record and a project with Eric Gales), the future of making a living as a musician, and what keeps him going in life on a daily basis.

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First, a little backstory. Back in 2006, Darkest Hour was making the promotional rounds for their latest disc, Undoing Ruin. I was working for my shitty college paper, doing a show preview for DH’s show in Omaha, Nebraska and emailed Kris requesting an interview. He called me five minutes after I sent the email. That’s how cool of a guy he is.

Besides being one hell of a nice dude, Kris is an extremely talented musician, and his new project, A Cancerous Affair, has completed their lineup and is starting to produce what will most definitely be some killer tunes.  Check out my interview with Kris below.

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Cannibal Corpse have been the face of death metal for almost twenty-five years. Since their debut full-length Eaten Back to Life was released in 1990, they’ve dominated the scene with their brand of in-your-face brutal lyrics and slamming death metal. They’ve also managed to make a name for themselves as one of the most commercially successful death metal bands on the planet. Metal Blade will release their latest offering, Torture, on March 12 — you can pre-order it here.

I  recently spoke with bassist/founding memeber Alex Webster about the new album and the band’s upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary, as well as tons of other Cannibal-related activities. Read our full chat after the jump!

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It’s funny. It seems like whenever I’m lukewarm on a blockbuster act, there comes along a different band that does their thing in a deeper, less entry-level way. Example: When I heard At The Drive-In’s Relationship Of Command, I felt like that energy was what Rage Against The Machine had been driving at. Same for Minus’s Jesus Christ Bobby and Converge. Or here’s an obvious one: Lacuna Coil and Evanescence.

Likewise, Blessed By A Broken Heart’s 2009 album Pedal To The Metal is what I’d hoped for from Avenged Sevenfold: A reformed metalcore band’s full-bore arena jamz no fucks given. Blessed, their name a vestige of their frowny past, still rocks the occasional breakdown, but mostly new album Feel The Power (out today) grafts high-level riffing to the sugary vibe of Journey and the pro-party platform of Andrew WK, like a perkier, shred-based Lostprophets for Christ. I phoned up singer Tony Gambino to talk all about Power, the mental stamina it takes to endure tr00 metal attitude, partying, the ’80s, and their rift with Century Media.

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Here’s a totally accurate chronology of my Lacuna Coil fandom: I heard a killer LC jam on the radio and was awed by singer Cristina Scabbia. Then I saw a band photo and got awestruck this time by Scabbia the woman. Then once fourth album Karmacode came out in 2007, my awe umbrella’ed out to include the songwriters of Lacuna Coil and, upon 2009’s Shallow Life, also their producer Don Gilmore.

But here’s where I’ll get all Oprah: Though a huge fan of Scabbia’s voice and a forged-by-nature respondent to her wealth of physical charms, I find the most awesome Scabbia is not the singer or the super-fox; she’s most awesome at being a bud, an honest dude, and a great chat. When we connected last week to talk about Dark Adrenaline, the once-delayed sixth Lacuna Coil album (out tomorrow), she effortlessly plowed through abstract questions and hasty analogies, and totally got the vibe of my persistent nagging about sales, producers, and artistic integrity. It was awesome!

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Shoegaze black metal on an extreme ayahuasca trip is probably the best way to describe Alcest. Meandering tales of a strange lands no one has ever been to, at least not in this life. Haunting melodies that linger in the mind long after the song ends. The juxtaposition of soft, often unsure-sounding vocals, with the decisive and harder tones of the music itself. It’s an experience, to say the least.

With 2012’s Les Voyages De L’Âme, Alcest founder and main man Neige delves further into this world he’s created. The record, the title of which translates to “The Journeys of the Soul,” pushes the listener deep into the atmospheric, dreamland of the mind. Though it seems like a kind of grandiose concept; a living, breathing world that exists beyond our comprehension as introduced to us via Alcest, the bottom line is simple; euphoria. Like I said, extreme ayahuasca trip, right? Though the yearning and bittersweet aches of the music are at the foremost, euphoria and the feelings of contentment, of bliss, are the key factors that Neige aims to communicate. He was kind enough to take a quick moment and talk to me about just how he thought up this world and why the melancholia in his music should really be construed as joy and celebration rather than sadness or mourning.

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In the scramble for stability in today’s panicky music business, one casualty is honesty. That’s totally understandable and a lot like life: Who among us has never prioritized coolness over self? In other words, always waiting patiently is the temptation to impress, not express. And that tips the first domino in a chain of intellectualization, as artists predict and reinterpret novelty, and the individual voice joins the chorus.

This is not an issue for Holland’s The Devil’s Blood, authors of recent memory’s purist, most vital album, The Thousandfold Epicentre (out today on Metal Blade). At its center lies a heedlessly honest relationship between frontman Selim Lemouchi and his sister, singer Farida. But the heart that pumps The Devil’s Blood is Selim (known simply as SL), the guitarist, composer, and visionary behind Epicentre, a masterful, vivid, and warmly fluid occult rock album that’s as commanding as the most ear-unfriendly, bombastic black metal epic.

That makes sense coming from a fervent Satanist whose Eindhoven home is decorated by inverted crosses and blood-encrusted altars (view here). And when I phoned SL at that home, our conversation began guardedly with business talk about the launch of The Devil’s Blood in America and the imminent clamor of a stateside tour. But soon we were chuckling about our sisters, about having fun, about making movies, and about a potential EP to come.

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Well, this is probably a first for MetalSucks: an interview exclusively about another website. But Bandhappy isn’t just any website; as we’ve been telling you for months (first by “Run MetalSucks For a Day” contest winner Justin Gosnell), Bandhappy is a new platform that offers students and teachers — many of whom are famous metal musicians — the opportunity to connect directly for one-on-one, personalized video lessons, and also provides a platform for setting up in-person lessons while on tour. It’s a really robust platform that brings all the different parts of the equationinto one convenient hub, and Bandhappy founder Matt Halpern — who also happens to be a teacher himself and the drummer for Periphery — recently took some time to chat with me about Bandhappy, what it took to get it going, what makes it unique, and what to expect from it now and in the future.

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photo by Daryl Darko

Cormorant describes themselves as a “100 percent self-funded labor of love.” Despite success they’ve eschewed labels, sold their own merchandise and taken as much time as needed to record. The San Francisco four-piece recently released Dwellings, which ended up on numerous year-end lists and earned critical praise. Guitarist and founding member Nick Cohon says the band’s success – both as an independent business and a musical group —is based on a combination of hard work and intuition. Cohon works full time as a project manager for a commercial electrical company specializing in solar installations.  But music is his passion, one he tackles with inspiration and business acumen. He talked to MetalSucks about the profits and perils of DIY publishing and falling asleep to death metal.

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Long Island’s This Is Hell has been plugging away since 2004, building a fanbase over four heavy albums and hundreds of live shows worldwide. Given the slew of reunions in just the past year, a hardcore band actually staying together seems an extraordinary feat, some sort of rare bird to be studied or dissected. In this interview, conducted last year just prior to the release of their latest album Black Mass, I asked founder and songwriter Rick Jimenez about the band’s more metallic sound as well as his thoughts on the nostalgic “reunion culture” of hardcore today.

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Comic book author Matt Fraction is a music fan and a metal guy. He’s written alloy-plated, ferocious, and long-haired characters, including Iron Man (he was consulted for the Iron Man 2 movie), the X-Men, Punisher, Thor, and  – wait for – Iron Fist. His Iron Man work won him an Eisner Award, and he still gets down and dirty.

Fraction also works on the indie level, despite his high-profile gig writing mega-crossovers like the recent Marvel event, Fear Itself. His smaller-press work includes crime story Last of the Independents and the vampire bloodbath 30 Days of Night.  His creator-owned book, Casanova, recently returned to the racks, continuing his offbeat tale of espionage and intrigue.

While making the rounds to promote his various projects, Fraction has emerged as a creative force who’s worth paying attention to even if you’re not into super-powered, gun-wielding badasses. After a he made Thrasher and Guns N’ Roses references on his Twitter feed, we thought might be an interesting guy to talk to about metal, comics, creating, and art. We were right.

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Photos by Brian Schroeter

Sitting opposite Devin Townsend, I am able to witness firsthand his mid-day queasiness (credited to a crummy breakfast), the way conversation causes him to perk up in little plateaus, and his determination while outlining his plans for the coming years. He’s excitedly building something, I observe, with this string of late-year shows in small markets serving as launch ramp to a bigger viability. It’s incredible, but this metal guy — despite boasting an 18-album discography over 16 years, including four Devin Townsend Project records that make up the exquisite Contain Us boxset — is fixed on a greater achievement: more autonomy.

Which is wild if you think about it. Townsend — the sole artist on his own Hevy Devy Records, a eight-tool studio whiz, and a frequent genre-buster now at a peak in popularity — appears to be the most creatively and commercially unbound musician ever in any genre. In his own studio and enlisting his peers, Townsend can make any project fly, be it puppet opera (Ziltoid The Omniscient and its planned sequel) or a prog-metal-Quadrophrenia-on-peyote theatrical epic (this year’s masterful Deconstruction) or sweet Anneke van Giersbergen-voiced pop metal (2009‘s Addicted, the forthcoming Epicloud project).

So what more does he want? The clue lies in DTP’s one-album-per-night shows back in November, and a massive event this Fall called The Retinal Circus: He’s steadily setting foundations for a bigger live show with a bigger budget, in reference to which his term is “absurd” (a word he pronounces “ob-zurd,” though it’s unclear whether that’s a product of Canadianism or just the way “homage” is said by certain people “oh-mazhe” and by others “Ah-mej”). But why, in these uncertain times, is Townsend forsaking modest aims for risk? We might surmise that he’s not satisfied to perform only parts of sprawling epics like Deconstruction and Ziltoid, nor to sub in backing tracks for his orchestras and choirs. To us, he could be metal’s most ambitious madman or a joker set on his own destruction. He probably wants nothing more sinister than to have shitloads of fun.

For the moment it’s a bit vague. What becomes clear over the course of our talk is that he is an entertainer and a liberator, a spirit-guide on a tour through the heart of a metal guy’s frantic consciousness. To this end, he is fortifying his fanbase. Hours after our talk, Townsend will display this onstage, loudly describing his suit’s odor as that “of a thousand ballbags,” bolting stage-right and out around the crowd to rock in the face of a 50-ish spectator seated mid-venue, and segueing regularly into and out of instrumental passages with self-reducing quips (“I’m a fucking dink! Go!”). He’ll dole out mid-show bro-fists, press forehead-to-forehead with front-row fans, and call his song “Life” his “gayest ever.” After the show, as cymbals are still ringing, Townsend will hop right down off the stage to greet and pose with all concertgoers. He’s friendly and sincere to each. He’s got plans for them.

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Boy oh boy, do we have a real treat for you today, kids: a video interview with legendary death-grind pioneers Repulsion, which was conducted by the metal community’s current number one patron, Scion A/V. Members Matt Olivo, Scott Carlson, and Marissa Martinez walk you through the band’s history, which if you’re not familiar with it… well, it has to be one extreme music’s most fascinating stories pretty much ever. The band only has ONE album, 1986′s legendary Horrified, and yet they’ve managed to be one of the most influential acts in the history of the genre. And here they pledge not to ruin that legacy with a reunion album, which oughta make you breathe a sigh of relief.

Check out the interview below, and then sing Repulsion’s praises in our comments section.

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.

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(Photo borrowed from MusicPlayers.com)

They say “never meet your heroes.” I don’t think they say anything about interviewing them.

For decades now, Steven Wilson and his many projects have been consistent sources of inspiration and joy to music lovers, audiophiles, and regular people alike. Like many musical masterminds, Mr. Wilson prefers to let his work speak for itself, but that isn’t to say he’s ever been short for words. In the intimate 20 minutes I had to speak with him it became clear that there was far more to the scruffy, bespectacled man in the blurry photos than I’d been led to believe. Steven is a relentlessly thoughtful and honest individual whose words deserve every bit as much attention as the impressive music he creates.

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“Hey Nikki? You’re on with Vince Neilstein.”

The above line was actually uttered by someone on Motley Crue’s management/label/PR team when they connected me with Nikki Sixx for an interview this past Friday. PR girl chuckled at the absurdity of the moment while I became flush with embarrassment, and I’m pretty sure Nikki didn’t notice / didn’t care / was too confused to say anything back. And so began my 10-minute chat with Sixx about the Crue’s upcoming Las Vegas residency, the forthcoming Sixx A.M. acoustic album (now streaming here), Nikki’s in-the-works new books, and Rod Stewart.

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The Atlas Moth‘s new record An Ache for the Distance was a pleasant surprise, and it quickly become one of my favorites of the year after I first heard it this Summer. I was bummed I missed their show in NYC earlier this fall, and double-bummed their tour with Batillus and Kowloon Walled City this month didn’t touch the East Coast at all, so I jumped at the opportunity to interview guitarist/vocalist Stavros Giannopoulos. We talked about the new album, Stavros’ love of witch-house music, ignoring the haters and Internet trolls and Stavros’ love of anti-Emmure articles on MetalSucks. Our chat, after the jump.

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photos by Gabrielle Duplantier

November 12, 2011. I’m in Long Island City, heading towards Spin Recording Studios, where the mighty Gojira have recently begun recording their new album with producer Josh Wilbur. It’s a big deal because a) it’s Gojira’s first album in more than three years, b) the band has just announced that they’ve signed with Roadrunner Records, and c) Gojira fucking rules, and I’m a massive, massive fan.

I’m still a good block-and-a-half away when I hear it. It’s so incredibly LOUD and metallic, it almost sounds like machine gun fire — but it’s too rhythmic to be a weapon. I decide it must be a street performer, banging on some sheet metal or something… except that I can see the street all around me, and it’s completely deserted. If it is a street performer, he’s very well concealed, and is apparently playing to an audience of no one.

By the time I arrive at the front door of Spin Studios — a large, steel entrance — the sound has become deafening. And as I peek through the small, submarine-like door window, I finally see the source of the sound: it’s Gojira skinsman Mario Duplantier, drumming on the door like the thunder god that he is.

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The worlds of music and visual art often meet and intertwine in ways that allow us to appreciate each work, each medium, on an entirely new level. Thankfully, these marriages are plentiful in the world of extreme metal, and one stand out propagator of this union is Nader Sadek. Cairo-born and NYC based, Sadek has been a visual icon on the scene for years most noted for creating visually striking settings and costumes for bands such as Mayhem and Sun O))). With the help of a pretty heavy-hitting core band featuring Steve Tucker (vocals – ex-Morbid Angel), Flo Mounier (drums – Cryptopsy), and Rune Eriksen (guitars – Aura Noir, ex-Mayhem), as well as appearances by other notable musicians, Sadek’s album In the Flesh is nothing to shake a stick at, either. Quite the contrary, actually – the meticulous composition of each song coupled with the intensity lent by each artist involved in the making of the release could easily set it up as a contender for a spot on an “Album of the Year” list.

Still, Nader does not quite consider himself a musician; rather, an artist exploring various mediums to best portray a concept or an idea that’s been ruminating in that fascinating brain of his. A commendable stance, I think, and tell-tale of the level of talent and drive he truly possesses. Speaking with him, it’s very clear as well; his visions will not, under any circumstances, be quelled. While the theme of In the Flesh is humanities detrimental dependency on petroleum – an undeniably political issue that’s been (rightly so) argued over for ages — in speaking with him about the subject, it’s turned into an eerily poetic, as well as desperate, concept: the living in a seemingly never-ending fight over a substance derived from death and decay. Our daily lives fueled by the rotten remnants of civilizations past.

It would be interesting, to say the least, to see what kind of live show this ensemble would come up with. For those of you in New York City, imaginations can be put to rest in that respect. On Sunday, November 20 at Santos Party House, Nader Sadek will bring to life In the Flesh in a (free!) performance surely not to be missed. Please be advised that in a perfect world, one wherein I’m not a cubicle rat working 9 to 5 in an office hours away from the Big Apple, I would hop a bus to see just what he’s come up with for the event. Sadly, this world is far from perfect, and I’d like to be able to pay my rent this month. Thankfully, though, I got to talk with the artist about everything from his music, his art, his upbringing, video shoots, and man-made machines that consume food and produce, well… see for yourself.

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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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