My TV is inextricably tuned to the nerdiest of all channels — when I’m loungin’ it’s all about Discovery, Sci Fi, A&E, Animal Planet, the Science Channel, etc. My current obsessions are A&E’s scintillating artificial drama Storage Wars (Yuuuuuuuup!) of which there’s seemingly an endless pit of episodes, and Animal Planet’s Orangutan Island, a serial drama about a group of orphaned Orangutans living together on a 100 acre island in Borneo (seriously, check this shit out, they’re basically human!). A&E’s kinda been going off the deep end lately, though; their success with Storage Wars has seemingly emboldened them to scrape the bottom of the barrel of trashy, niche cultures with new shows like Shipping Wars and Pit Bulls and Paroles. Does anyone actually watch that crap? I like my niche culture CLASSY, thank you very much, which is when I fire up an episode of Hoarders from my DVR.

To be fair, Mike Portnoy definitely isn’t a hoarder — more of an OCD collector of the highest order, with everything organized perfectly. But holy crap, look at all that stuff!!! For a guy who admits to bringing 5 iPods on the road with him, I wonder how often he actually touches those CDs anymore? The real reason for any music dork to watch this Sabian-filmed video, though, is of course to ogle at Portnoy’s personal drum room — tons and tons and tons of goodies, of which he explains them all. Worth the 8-minute watch, for sure.

-VN

[via Metal Injection]

When I got on email from Cephalic Carnage / Job For A Cowboy bassist Nicholas Schendzielos about a new jam video he’d posted, I expected some kind of metal music dorkery to be contained therein. What I got was something entirely different, no less interesting, and a helluva lot more fucknuts:

So, uh… that was interesting! Strangely, I find myself wanting more; hopefully he makes these into a series or something.

From one bearded guy to another, I can totally relate to Nick on the whole sandwich dilemma: sandwiches are the most difficult food to eat because shit’s ALWAYS getting stuck in the ‘stache! Worst.

-VN

What happens when a former engineering and robotics student from a prestigious university who also happens to be a metalhead decides to combine his two loves into one? A behemoth of a musical instrument that just might be the most metal instrument ever made, both literally and figuratively. Watch:

-VN

Thanks: Jesse Z.

Like Powerglove, Bit Brigade is a band that takes video game music and makes it rockin’. Of course, Bit Brigade don’t wear fun costumes, and they’re less metal than Powerglove — but their latest achievement (see what I did there?) is so impressive, you gotta give them props.

During last week’s video/arcade/PC /tabletop gaming event, Mag Fest, a dude named Noah McCarthy played an entire Mega Man II speed run… while sitting on-stage with Bit Brigade, who played the game’s entire score live, presumably in real-time. Holy shit, that is nuts. It’s also probably a colossal waste of time. But as nerd, I can’t help but be impressed.

Check out video of the blessed event below; it’s 44 minutes long, and I don’t blame you if you can’t make it through the whole thing, but it’s worth at least watching some of it…

-AR

[via Topless Robot]

I’ve never gotten into Doctor Who, but if you have, maybe you’ll enjoy this? It’s a mash-up of the long-running British sci-fi series and — duh — the cover of Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction. And the best part is, for today only, it’s just ten bucks. Get one here.

Speaking of Appetite parody tees: we’ve got a few of the MetalSucks “Appetite for Deconstructions” shirts left, too. Order one before they’re gone… foh-evah!

-AR

[via Topless Robot]

Seems like we’ve been hearing about the pending launch of Bandhappy for ages now… and it’s finally here! The website, created by Periphery drummer Matt Halpern, offers a platform for artists and students to connect one-on-one for video lessons on a variety of instruments in real-time, as well as the ability to archive those lessons for future review. Here’s just a small sampling of artists who are giving lessons through Bandhappy culled from a quick perusal of the site: Tosin Abasi, Chris Adler (Lamb of God), Francesco Artusato (All Shall Perish), Jason Bittner (Shadows Fall), Evan Brewer, Stef Broks (Textures), Dino Campanella (Dredg), Dave Davidson (Revocation)… and the list goes on. Check out the full list of artists currently signed up right here. Impressive, right?

As of today, Bandhappy is fully functional. Whether you’re a teacher looking to expand your student base or a student looking to connect with your hero, sign up and give it a shot. You can view the teacher tutorial here, and the student tutorial here to learn a bit more about how the platform operates from each side.

Coming later this week, we’ll publish an interview I did with Matt Halpern about Bandhappy; his motivations for creating it, the challenges he’s faced and continues to face in building it out, and his goals for the platform.

-VN

Unexpect’s Fables of the Sleepless Empire is a good album that got lost in the shuffle that was 2011. It’s also an example of the risks of self-releasing a record, showing that record labels do still serve a purpose in an age where distribution is available to everyone.* It’s not that bands aren’t capable of doing on their own all the things record labels normally do, it’s just that many of them don’t have the time, inclination or expertise to do so. When there’s no marketing staff to set up cool exclusives and contests, no publicist to pester magazine writers and bloggers like us, no one to coordinate the filming of a music video, etc., those things tend not to happen at all. For every Cormorant — a band that’s totally on the ball and has done quite well independently — there’s an Unexpect, a good band that doesn’t get the attention they deserve. It doesn’t help that they didn’t tour on this record, either.

Thankfully blogs like The Number of the Blog don’t need no stinkin’ publicists to pester them about Unexpect. Check out this video of Unexpect bassist ChaotH being awesome on the bass to a backing track of their own song “Words” from Fables of the Sleepless Empire. This guy is incredible; IMNs and ponytail betas should be slobbering all over this band.

-VN

*(inb4 someone calls me a hypocrite for saying record labels are important when I’ve allegedly said the opposite in the past. I’ve always maintained that the industry as a whole serves a critical function; what I dispute is that record labels [as opposed to managers or other important players] need to be at the financial center of that equation anymore).

Check out this video of Blotted Science drummer Charlie Zeleny (also of Behold… The Arctopus, Jordan Rudess, and more) playing an 8-minute drum solo while climbing up the floors of a Brooklyn building in one continuous take (!!!). At first I was all “Come on, really? Corny,” but he totally sells it… really cool concept:

Now check out this video of Charlie’s bandmate Ron Jarzombek explaining his “12-tone system” approach to writing music. These kinds of videos give fodder to trolls who argue that this style of theory-based writing and technicality are too scientific and take the “soul” out of metal. I beg to differ; much like a chef can enhance his kitchen concoctions with an extensive understanding of ingredients and their qualities, a  songwriter can use this sort of knowledge of the scientific underpinnings of music theory to help construct better, more cohesive songs. It’s certainly not necessary — I, for one, often just throw a bunch of food and spices together in the kitchen to see what happens, and it usually comes out quite delicious — but there are definitely times I wished I knew a bit more about what’s what. Check out the video, which I think even those of you who aren’t musicians will appreciate:

-VN

Guitar dorks: check out this JamPlay.com interview with MetalSucks-deemed #1 Modern Metal Guitarist Dave Davidson. There’s lotsa great stuff in here; Dave’s musical education, his influences from jazz (Pat Martino, Wayne Krantz) to metal (Marty Friedman, Jeff Waters) to contemporaries like Emil Werstler, the history of Revocation, the new record Chaos of Forms and more. There’s lots of sage advice for guitarists, and we even learn how Dave got his rockstar name (hint: he wasn’t born with it!).

As a reminder, we’re offering MetalSucks readers free one-week trials at JamPlay.com, where you can take online lessons with Davidson, Tosin Abasi, Emil Werstler and more. Click here to sign up.

-VN

As I type this, I have just finished editing Dave Mustein’s interview with Ron Jarzombek regarding the new Blotted Science EP, The Animation of Entimology. And Mr. Mustein deserves a pat on the back or a lollipop or something, ’cause it’s a great interview and I learned a lot from it, and I hope you all read it when we run it (possibly even later today).

Please allow me to entice you with one of the cool things I learned: Jarzombek wasn’t a death metal fan until he saw Cannibal Corpse’s in-studio video for “Frantic Disembowelment,” the instrumental [Yeah, there are vox on the album. This is why you shouldn't write blogs at 2 am, kids! -AR] track from Cannibal Corpse’s 2004 release, The Wretched Spawn. That video, he says, demonstrated for him that it takes real skill to play death metal.

And it’s easy to see why this video impressed him so much that he ran out and hooked up with Alex Webster. I’m sure plenty of you have already seen this clip, which is obviously not at all new, but it’s so awesome that it’s always worth watching again. Seriously, Webster, drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz, and guitarist Pat O’Brien all deserve major props for this shit right here.

Kiler, killer, KILLER.

-AR

We don’t ordinarily post a whole lotta YouTube covers on MetalSucks (other than the occasional it’s-so-bad-it’s-good laughingstock material) because, well, you can visit YouTube for that. But the story of Ordinance’s cover of Soilwork’s “Stabbing the Drama,” featuring drummer Alex Rudinger (also of Threat Signal), tugged at my heart strings, so I thought I’d share.

A few months back Threat Signal had some gigs in Ontario, Canada. Bjorn Strid happened to be in the area, so they decided to do a live cover of the song with Strid on vocals. Since Alex had already gone through the trouble of learning the song he figured he may as well record it, and instead of playing over Soilwork’s original recording he just asked his buddies in his other band Ordinance to contribute on their instruments as well:

I really enjoy watching Rudinger’s performance; it does such a great job of highlighting just how nuanced a drummer Soilwork’s Dirk Verbeuren is. Loving all the cymbal inflections. Dirk’s got great hands (that’s what she said), and so does Alex.

After the jump, some live footage of Threat Signal and Speed Strid performing “Stabbing the Drama”:

Click to read more…

“It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” – Abraham Maslow

TL;DR – A software company lets you sound like you can play bitchin’ guitar.  Periphery fans may wring their hands, but Brian Eno probably wouldn’t care.  Justin thinks it’s fine as a toy but uses the expressed complaints as a way to hate on Autotune.  Also, Van Canto is terrible.

Axl tweeted a link to an interesting article the other day from the Heavy Blog is Heavy about a piece of software by 8Dio called “Progressing Metal.”  This program makes you to sound like Meshuggah without having to go through the trouble of playing a guitar.  Instead, you just plink something into a keyboard, run it through the magic bits and, presto, you’re Fredrik Thordendal.  Sorta.

This freaks some people out.  The accompanying blog post, for instance, ponders a question: is this just too much?  Like, if some guy can sit down at his computer with a whole lot of patience and a software program and, some time later, pop out the next Chaosphere, then… well, something bad, right?  Because that seems… unfair?

Click to read more…

Michael Winslow is probably best known as the guy who makes funny noises in the Police Academy movies (winner of more Oscars than any other franchise in history), but I prefer to remember him as the “I’ve lost the bleeps, I lost the sweeps, and I lost the creeps” dude from Spaceballs. However you remember him (assuming you remember him at all), there is no denying that he made a solid career for himself out of the world’s best party trick, which is more than you can say for most people!

I mention him now because Metal Injection found [via the AV Club] some super-sweet footage of Winslow doing a couple of Led Zeppelin covers, which you can check out below. Even though it’s very (very, very, very) easy to make Winslow into a punchline, there really is no denying that this is pretty cool.

More Led Zep after the jump. And as a bonus, I’ve included some old footage of Winslow doing Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” too.

Click to read more…

I like Paul Wardingham for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that he’s a really good player. But I also like to hold him up as an example of the following: 1) not all solo multi-instrumentalists play “djent,” 2) not all solo multi-instrumentalists just masturbate on their instruments without any regard to actual “songs.” Listen to “Assimilate Regenerate” in the playthrough video below; there’s a discernible verse riff, a discernible chorus riff which repeats, a distinct bridge, etc. Which isn’t to say that a huge chunk of this song isn’t one giant progressive tangent — it is — but even that’s got structure and, in the end, returns to the A/B section that kicked things off.

Wardingham is a beast. I definitely hear the “Scar Symmetry with shred instead of vocals” comparisons, and that’s fine with me.

-VN

[via TNOTB]

Last week we tipped you off to a striking similarity between the intros of Mastodon’s Hunter track “Creature Lives” and the Steve Miller Band’s classic “Threshold / Jet Airliner.” Coincidence? Intentional nod to a personal favorite of one or more of the Mastodudes? Until the next time we speak with a member of Mastodon we can only speculate, which could take a while seeing as we just spoke with guitarist Bill Kelliher.

But what is the Internet for if not useless and reckless speculation? Especially with Mastodon, a band whose ambitious progsterpieces are the source of endless Internet rambling and LOST-ish conspiracy theories; they’re the Pink Floyd, or better yet the Tool, of this era.

To that end, MS reader Ryan H. has unearthed another sound-alike — again with song intros — this time between The Hunter‘s “Dry Bone Valley” and Metallica’s “Damage, Inc.” Metallica’s intro is a whole lot longer, but Ryan H. is right on the money that these two intros sound alike. It could be that both bands just decided to create eery swell-like sound effects with EBows or whatever, but it could also be… so much more! I’m pretty sure if you play both songs backwards and sync them up with one another that there’s some kind of secret message to be decoded that simultaneously unlocks all the secrets of the universe and bestows upon us a map to a hidden Dharma Initiative station. What do you think???

-VN

Yeah my headline is a little misleading. But it got your attention I bet!

ANYWAY, last week, Lamb of God vocalist Randy Blythe came to the conclusion that his Twitter account just wasn’t enough to express himself fully (which is understandable — dude tweets a LOT, and he’s really funny with that shit, too). And so he started his own Tumblr blog, called Randonesia. And while the first few posts he did were, in his own words, “just me figuring this thing out,” his most recent entry, published earlier this week, is an in-depth discussion of one of those topics which is incredibly important, but somehow seems to be rarely discussed in public: album sequencing.

Click to read more…

Even though this isn’t an official entry into our “Rigged” series, I thought it fit quite nicely so here ya go!

-KW

Since Mastodon’s new album The Hunter came out earlier this week it seems like a good time to share two very interesting tidbits regarding the album.

First up we’ve got a “remix” of “Curl of the Burl.” Umm… yeah, let’s call it a remix! I can’t say where I obtained this very special track for fear of castration, but man, it’s great. Click to stream:

Mastodon – “Curling Your Burling”

Next up we have a tip from reader “inhumanrampager,” who claims to have discovered striking similarities between the intros of Hunter track “Creature Lives” and the old Steve Miller Band classic “Threshold / Jet Airliner.” Listening to these two intros side by side, I can’t disagree with Mr. Rampager; knowing the Mastodudes love classic rock as they do makes the idea of this being an intentional “tribute” even more likely. Take a listen and see what you think:

Click to read more…

I love Michael Angelo Batio, and I do so without a shred (ha!) of irony. The former Nitro axeman has made a career out of playing completely ridiculous guitars in completely ridiculous manners; he’s like the Harlem Globetrotters of metal, a never-ending “web gems” reel of guitar acrobatics.

There’s nothing about this clip of Batio’s “tribute to Metallica” that requires four guitars to be played ambidextrously. Everything he plays could be executed fairly easily on just one guitar, the way, ya know, Metallica does it (with some looping pedal action, perhaps, which he uses anyway). Also not at all needed: switching guitar necks for show. But that’s what makes Batio, and this clip, so great: everything about them are completely, entirely unnecessary, including the very existence of this “tribute” itself. So why not have some fun with it and push things completely over the top? Metal needs more clowns like Batio who don’t take themselves too seriously.

I <3 Michael!

-VN

I am a totally cool, mature person with cool, mature tastes. Which is why this video of a cute metal dude named Eric Calderone playing the Harry Potter theme did absolutely nothing for me. Nothing. Nope.

Amongst his repertoire of theme songs are the Pirates of the Caribbean, Stars Wars, and Castlevania. He also does a mean Rick-Roll. I know there are about a million and ten metal versions of various things online (and a certain band called Powerglove), but this guy managed to charm me so he gets a post.

Hah! He also does Guile’s theme from Street Fighter. Sir, if you do Dhalsim’s, too, we can be best friends forever.

-LF