MetalSucks

Honestly, I was never that excited about Them Crooked Vultures, for the simple reason that supergroups are anticlimactic nine out of ten times (and the fact that Queens of the Stone Age haven’t made a record I’ve wanted to listen to more than once since Songs for the Deaf didn’t help). Still, I was open to giving the band a shot.

Then I heard their first single, “New Fang.”

When Gary Suarez described this band’s music as “seriously generic and geriatric classic rock,” he wasn’t kidding.

Click to read more…

Canadian stoner metallers Priestess were way too cool for their alma mater RCA Records, for whom they released only one album — 2006’s Hello Master — before being dropped. The album undoubtedly underperformed by major label standards, even with that nice sync fee they got for the inclusion of “Lay Down” in Guitar Hero III. Fitting then that stoner stalwarts Tee Pee Records have picked up Priestess to release their next album Prior to the Fire in February of 2010. Tee Pee’s roster includes a lot of acts just a tad too like wayyy stooooned ouuut maaaan for this site’s tastes, but with the release of Iron Age’s stellar thrasher  The Sleeping Eye earlier this year and the announcement that Priestess have joined their ranks, things are looking a bit heavier at the Tee Pee camp.

Priestess have a new song called “Sideways Attack” up on their MySpace page. Me rikee… it’s a bit more up-tempo than a lot of the material from Hello Master and the production is super-dry but tight, not unlike that of Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf.

Priestess performed in NYC this week twice at the CMJ Music Marathon… if you were there, kindly fill us in.

-VN

Did anyone see South Park last night? I watched it in a drunken stupor but I think I enjoyed it. It was about rasslin’.

Speaking of which: while my childhood dog was named after Lex Luger, I haven’t watched wrestling since roughly 1992. But apparently Maylene and The Sons of Disaster have recorded a new song for the Jeri-Show Tag Team, whomever the fuck that is. Maybe these dudes know.

ANYWAY, the aforementioned Maylene have been interviewed by the WWE, which I think will excite some of you – if nothing else, they’re a pretty cool band. The video interview isn’t embeddable, but you can watch it by clicking on the photo below.

-AR

If you’ve never seen Suffocation live, well, you need to. Not only do they kill, but Frank Mullen is one of the funniest fucking front men ever.

I haven’t gotten to listen to the band’s new live album (actually recorded in ‘05), The Close Of A Chapter: Live In Quebec City, yet, so I don’t know it captures Mr. Mullen in all his gallows humor glory. But the record is now streaming right here, and even if all it does it showcase what a powerful live act this legendary death metallers are, well, that’s reason enough to give it a listen.

The Close Of A Chapter: Live In Quebec City comes out October 27 on Relapse.

-AR

Any time a press release comes in from Prosthetic Records announcing a new band signing, the link is always worth clicking. Take Norway’s Mantric, who despite their home country are perhaps the farthest thing from black metal imaginable. I’m really, really digging what Mantric have posted on their MySpace page; this is metal that’s cerebral, proggy (but not shreddy), jazzy, challenging and still accessible. Some of you might be excited to know that the band features ex-members of Extol. Color me psyched for their Prosthetic debut which is being mixed by Tue Madsen and is due out in February.

Oh hey and look at that slammin’ new MySpace design (part of which you’re looking at on top of this post)? It was hand-drawn by the illustrious Jesse Zuretti of MetalSucks faves The Binary Code. In case any of you guys out there who are in bands are looking for a spiffed-up new MySpace design.

-VN

Thanks to Adam for giving us the heads up that Pelican’s new album, What We All Come to Need, is now streaming on the band’s MySpace page. And… that’s really all I have to say about that. I kinda just wanted an excuse to post my favorite clip from Scarface. Sammy O’Hagar will have a comprehensive review of the album soon.

What We All Come to Need comes out October 27 on Southern Lord.

-AR

I’m not really a big Mudvayne fan, but I know a lot of you are. So it seems like my bloggerly duty to tell you that the band is streaming a new song, “Beautiful and Strange,” on their MySpace page.

And it sounds, y’know, like Mudvayne. If you like Mudvayne, I imagine you’ll like this song. If you don’t, I doubt this will win you over. At first I was like “Oh, listen to those drums, this is heavy!”, but then the song calmed down and just became a regular Mudvayne song. Not great, not terrible.

“Beautiful and Strange” comes from the band’s self-titled album, which will be out December 22. The cover art apparently looks awesome under black light.

-AR

Thanks to Kye for the tip!

Axl is the sole inhabitant of the Mansion today, but I wrote up a few posts for him ahead of time so he doesn’t have to rely on content from the Monkeys, who, to be honest, have been turning in a shoddy performance lately.

Today I am en route to a wedding in Rochester, NY. Gag. Not the wedding… the wedding will be a swell, fancy affair. The city… yuck. Weather.com tells me lows are going to be at or near freezing with snow showers, while TheFuckingWeather.com tells me simply “It’s Fucking Cold.” Thanks. FUCK.

But it’s perfect weather for Swallow the Sun music, which always hits that dark, gloomy spot for me when the weather turns south (north?). I’m listening to the new track “These Woods Breathe Evil” from their forthcoming record New Moon (out November 10th in the U.S.). Or, I was listening to it yesterday when I wrote this… but I may be listening to it now… and if I hadn’t mentioned the whole Rochester thing you would’ve just assumed I was actually listening to it now. When is “now” anyway? Is it when I’m writing the post, when I hit “publish” (by which time the song might actually be over) or when you read these words? Or neither? Does it matter? Does anything matter? Woah. Meta.

Stop intellectualizing and go enjoy the new Swallow the Sun track, you sillies.

-VN

I really liked Fight Amp’s last album, Hungry for Nothing. But I’m a shitty fan, ’cause I didn’t even realize that the band has a new album, Manners and Praise, coming out on Translation Loss on October 26.

But I’m aware now! The band is streaming a new song, “Bad Listener,” on their MySpace page. And, hey, guess what? It’s pretty rockin’. Definitely worth checkin’ out, especially if grungy, punky noise rawk is your thing.

And just because, here’s the band’s video for “Late Bloomer,” off of Hungry for Nothing. Awesome, awesome song.

It’s really fucking good. I just thought I should go on record as saying that since we haven’t covered this album at all to date.

For what it’s worth, the album sold 3,300 copies in the U.S. in its first week of release, good enough to net a #162 ranking on the Soundscan charts. Kind of amazing for guys that look as ridiculous as these guys do.

Stream the title track from All Shall Fall on Immortal’s MySpace and revel in its grimness and frostbitten-ness.

-VN

The Red Chord’s new album, Fed Through the Teeth Machine, is every bit as brutal and baffling as its title would suggest. And I mean “baffling” as a compliment, by the way. This band has zero interest in doing anything besides whatever the fuck they want to do, and they’ve yet to run out of steam. Fed Through the Teeth Machine will continue to cement their reputation as innovators – leaders, not followers, of the genre. If they even fit into one genre. Which, really, they do not. This is very much still the band that made Fused Together in Revolving Doors, even if the line-up is different.

Our Broman Polanskis* at Metal Injection are now streaming a brand new track off the album, “One Robot to Another.” It’s actually one of my favorite songs on the record. So please stop reading this now and go listen to it.

Still here? I said GO LISTEN TO THE FUCKING SONG, dick.

Fed Through the Teeth Machine comes out October 27 on Metal Blade. I’m gonna try and get a review up before the end of the week.

-AR

*Full credit to Ben Apatoff at Metal Injection for coming up with that. The man is truly a comic genius.

It’s called “Hang Him High” and it’s currently streaming on Hypocrisy’s MySpace page. It comes off of Hypocrisy’s forthcoming album A Taste of Extreme Divinity, out November 3rd in the U.S. and October 23rd in Europe, an album I’m now even more excited for than I already was.

Is it me, or do the first :40 or so sound a helluva lot like Cannibal Corpse’s “Evisceration Plague”? Especially that guitar doodly-doodly thing. But no matter, the chorus is all its own and the song kills anyway. Totally digging this.

-VN

At some point during the recording of Earthsblood, God Forbid announced that they had covered Muse’s “Stockholm Syndrome.” Since then, we’ve actually gotten a stupid amount of e-mails from people asking us when it was going to be released. And we really didn’t know. (I know we’re tight with some of the dudes from God Forbid, but it’s important to remember that we’re not actually in God Forbid, even if we sometimes air guitar to “The End of the World” and fantasize that we are.)

Well, the song is finally available as a single on iTunes. An it’s good! Muse are already one of the most metal non-metal bands out there, and GF completely succeed in turning the track into something metal as fuck. The guitars rip and Byron Davis screams in jjjuuuussssttt the right amounts. If you’re a God Forbid fan, it’s totally worth the buck it’ll cost you. And as a bonus, remember that it might be the last official God Forbid recording to feature Dallas Coyle (who handles most of the vocals, in addition to his usual guitar duties) ever.

For obvious reasons I can’t/don’t want to post the cover here, but below you can check out the video for Muse’s original, in case you’re unfamiliar with it.

-AR

Right here. Do it! It’s easily one of the best albums of the year. Decibel gave it a perfect score, fer Chrissakes. Now go check it out. And later this week we’ll have an interview with Jacob Bannon, and then our official review.

Axe to Fall comes out October 20 on Epitaph.

-AR

When MetalSucks correspondent Angela Gossowski interviewed recent Sumerian Records signees Periphery last month she asked them about the word “djent,” a phrase that appears on some of the band’s t-shirts (pictured above). Guitarist / band-mastermind Misha Mansoor answers thusly:

It’s basically just a guitar sound. It’s not even a word I invented, but it has become synonymous with the band. It’s something we appropriated because of the way we play our power chords. If you play guitar and you play a power chord and you use four notes… you use a big power chord and you palm mute really hard, it makes it really metallic sounding. There are some guitars and amps and pick-ups that are really conducive to that sound, which I’m a very big fan of. So I started describing things that I liked as “djenty,” because they had that characteristic. Just like you would say ‘bright,’ ‘dark,’ or whatever. It just seemed to have caught on for some reason. I actually heard the term from Meshuggah. They’re the ones who coined the term as far as I know. But for whatever reason people have been associating it with us… So if you’re in standard tuning, for all you guitar nerds out there, it would be 0-2-2-4. Or if you’re in drop tuning like we are, it would be 0-0-0-2.

So, Djent. It’s a term I’ve been hearing more and more lately as a result of the fact that it’s a sound I’ve been hearing more and more lately. It’s a staple of the Sumeriancore sound. And I can 100% get behind it! (for now). Here are a few bands that our readers have sent in that I’d definitely classic as djenty.

• Fuge - Scott Bahash sent this one in and wants us to know that it’s “just some guy from Hungary who makes some tracks at home but they blow away any progressive/djenty bands.”
• CiLiCe – Sent in by BTK 666. “Better than Tesseract??” he asks. Maybe so.
• Haunted Shores – The instrumental tracks up on this band’s MySpace page were actually produced and mixed by Mr. Misha Mansoor himself. They sound damn fine, and damn djenty.

Djent djent djent!

-VN

There’s a lot of curiosity floating around with regards to Through the Eyes of the Dead’s new album, Skepsis. I loved their last release, Malice, but there have been quite a few line-up changes since then, and as a fan you’re never quite sure what that will do for a band’s sound.

But this bootleg footage of a new song, “Manifest,” is encouraging. The quality ain’t perfect, but it ain’t bad, and the song sounds like a rhino-stampede of heaviness. It has a good hook, too. This bodes well for the rest of the album.

Skepsis will come out next year (in January, maybe?) on Prosthetic.

-AR

[via Blabbermouth]

Nah, just kiddin’. It’s just a new Throwdown song! “This Continuum,” from the band’s forthcoming album Deathless, is streaming at Noiscecreep right now.

It’s really mean of me to keep poking this band for sounding so much like Pantera. For one thing, I’ve really enjoyed some Throwdown in the past; for another thing, I interviewed TxDx (do people really refer to them that way?) guitarist Mark Choiniere once, and he was a really, really nice dude. But, y’know. They do sound a lot like Pantera.

That being said, the chorus to this song strikes me as being kinda, well… Godsmack-y. Am I alone there?

Deathless comes out November 10 on E1.

-AR

We’ve barely covered UK prog-techsters Tesseract on MetalSucks — save for a hilarious “music video” shot by some Subway Sandwich employees rocking out to the band whilst cleaning up at night — which kinda blows my mind, because this band is freakin’ awesome and I’ve been e-following them for years now. They’re pretty much the best Sumeriancore band in existence that hasn’t yet been signed to Sumerian Records, though they definitely pre-date this now wide-spread* sub-genre name.

Tesseract haven’t even released a proper studio album yet but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one that follows this band on the Internet closely; people email us about them all the time. Apparently they’re doing some dates in their UK homeland next month, and though they’ve got a new song out there’s still no word on an album. Their new song “Lament” hit the UK radio earlier this week and summarily ended up on YouTube. Have a listen below, and if you’re lucky enough to live in the UK go see them live (dates on their MySpace page) and let us know how they are.

-VN

[Thanks: Jesse Z.]

*and by wide-spread I mean “only on MetalSucks.”

Alright, you brats, this is it. Baroness’ Blue Record comes out next Tuesday, October 13 on Relapse, but the band is now streaming the entire album right here.

The album is fucking great. I know I’ve said that a bunch of times, but really, it’s just an awesome rock n’ roll record. If it’s not at the tippy top of my year end list, it’s gonna be very, very close.

Now go listen.

-AR

Rejoice! After that sample medley he released last week, Devin Townsend has now unveiled a complete new song to the world! The title track from The Devin Townsend Project’s forthcoming Addicted is streaming right this second on Noiscreep. And, no real shock here, it’s a killer.

Like the rest of the album, the song features vocals by Anneke van Giersbergen, formerly of The Gathering. Her presence helps give Addicted a slightly poppier feeling that some listeners might have been hoping for; as Devin himself puts in an interview that accompanies the stream, some fans will probably hear the music and “be like, ‘The gay-o-meter is in the red, bro.’” It’s very political of Devin not to add, “Those fans are morons.” But, really, those fans are morons.

Stream the track here, then come back and let us know what you think. Addicted comes out November 17 on InsideOut Music.

-AR