I’m not gonna sit here and pretend that I never liked Tenacious D — fuck, dude, I loved Tenacious D. I watched their show on HBO, I bought their first album the day it came out in 2001, and I saw them live in concert. I thought they were great.

But then Jack Black way outstayed his welcome and his schtick got really tiring (Has he been funny in anything besides The Muppets and that one episode of Community recently?), and when I heard that the duo’s movie, The Pick of Destiny, was terrible, well, I never saw it. Or heard the accompanying album, for that matter.

And then I basically completely forgot about Tenacious D. until today, when The Laugh Button (by way of Metal Insider) alerted me to the fact that Black and partner Kyle Gass will release their third album, Rize of the Fenix, sometime in May. They’ve even released a clip of a new song, complete with lyrics acknowledging that, yes, no one liked Pick of Destiny.

I dunno. I’d love it if this turned out to be a great, funny album. I just think it’s one of those things that had its time, and that time has now passed.

Check out the song snippet below, then tell me whether or not I’m crazy. This is one of those arguments I’d really like to lose.

-AR

Akron, OH outfit If These Trees Could Talk are one of those bands whose style is really hard to pin down, but if you’ve ever enjoyed music by any of the following bands you’re absolutely gonna love them: Junius, Constants, Caspian, Mogwai, Dredg, Scale the Summit. They walk a blurry line between post-metal, shoegaze and space rock, creating dreamy atmospheres punctuated by shimmery distorted guitars and pocket-driven, laid back yet powerful groove. This band is fantastic, and anyone with an open mind is going to love them.

Give their brand new track “Barren Lands of a Modern Dinosaur” a spin over at RCRD LBL and see what you think. Their new album Red Forest comes out March 20th on Science of Silence Records. A limited vinyl edition of 500 copies is available for pre-order now, so get yours while you still can… they’re almost sold out.

-VN

There’s no sense in attempting to intellectualize why I like Shinedown so much. I just do, ya hear? I don’t know if there’s anything inherently better or smatter about Shinedown as compared to contemporaries Theory of a Deadsuck, Nickelsuck, Suckd and Suckturbed (even though I like to think there is), but Shinedown’s songs have just always had their way with me. They’re, like, really catchy and stuff. So there’s nothing guilty about my pleasure of reveling in the new song “Bully” by the best radio hard rock band in existence. Sure, the lyrics (as highlighted in the lyric video above) seem a bit juvenile coming from dudes well into their 30s, but at the least the message is positive instead of the endless whining and self-hatred peddled by other bands, and at least it doesn’t lean on a religious crutch for support.

“Bully” is available from iTunes and comes from the new album Amaryllis, out March 27th on Atlantic Records. Hopefully it’s as good all the way through as The Sound of Madness.

Woodstock, NY isn’t just the hometown of hippies, MetalGF, and 3; Sarah Fimm, who recently released her seventh album Near Infinite Possibility, hails from the Hudson Valley’s musical locus as well. I’d never heard of Fimm before I received an email touting her new video “Everything Becomes Whole” earlier this week, but I decided to give it a shot and found myself wanting more the second it ended. Sarah’s brand of hard rock would sound perfectly at home on modern rock radio but doesn’t come off as sounding trite or angsty like so many of today’s female-fronted rock acts. It just so happens that A Perfect Circle’s Josh Freese plays on the track too, and you can definitely hear the influence.

Near Infinite Possibility is out now, and I’m hooked. Order the CD here or download the MP3 version from Amazon.

Check out Sarah Fimm’s official website for more info.

-VN

Fishbone have come a long way since the late ’80s / early ’90s albums that endeared them to most of the people who will be reading this article. I won’t be offended if kids too young to remember Fishbone’s brush with hard rock / metal fame say “WTF is this crap???” and IDGAF if Sergeant D storms into the Vince Division in a fit of IMN rage. For the rest of us, Fishbone are still kicking out the fresh jams and it really doesn’t feel like they’ve lost a step at all despite a number of lineup shifts. They just released a new EP called Crazy Glue (buy here) and a new video to go with the title track. Warning: will get stuck in your head instantly.

Oh, and hey: go see this band live! Fishbone’s set at Download Festival 2006 was an unexpected highlight and I’d go see them again in a second. I JUST missed them at Brooklyn Bowl in November, but they’ve got a few tour dates left if you live in these cities.

-VN

I’m not hip, so before this past Friday, when Corey Mitchell alerted us to the existence of the below interview, I had never heard of St. Vincent (né Annie Clark). But I’ve listened to some of her stuff on Spotify now, and while it’s not really my thing, there is some pretty cool guitar work going on.

And so it almost — almost – makes sense that St. Vincent is apparently a metal fan, with a special fondness for the one and only Dimebag himself. (She also apparently likes Maiden.)

And then I found twenty bucks.

-AR

[via MTV, or I guess MTV Hive, whatever the fuck the difference is.]

Not Seth Putnam

One mind-blowing aspect of Devin Townsend’s Deconstruction album is its coterie of guest personnel. A who’s-who of pivotal screamers, the list includes that awesome dude from Gojira, legendary super-stud Ihsahn, and extreme metal’s loveliest alto, Tommy Rogers from Between The Buried And Me. And though Townsend rightly rushes to downplay the distraction/sketchy motives of high-profile guest contributions, it’s exciting as shit for metal fans to have those guys — plus studz from Meshuggah, Cynic, and Gwar — all in one place.

Likewise, I super-hail Chino Moreno and his 2005 Team Sleep record, which finds the Deftones frontman enlisting the non-metal voices and pens of Helium’s Mary Timony and Rob Crow of Pinback (above). Each sings awesomely on at least two of the self-titled album’s jamz (e.g. “Our Ride To The Rectory” with Crow here). Just like Townsend’s gang on Deconstruction, Crow’s and Timony’s presence legitimizes the album (ie. busy, inspired aces wouldn’t appear on some hack shit) and helps it to achieve a specialness, like the NBA All-Star game or the time I ate a pizza that a bag of Cheetos had spilled onto (aka Cheetzza©). Best of all, it makes me feel in sync with another human being (Moreno) who happens to ass-worship Timony and Crow and um Moreno. It’s like finally somebody put my needs first when making an album!

Okay here we are at paragraph three, so I bet my editors would like me to deliver on the headline’s promise :) Speaking of Team Sleep MVP Rob Crow, you love the dude cuz he’s awesome (see also: Optiganally Yours’ Exclusively Talentmaker!), and cuz he’s metal (see: his non-serious doom metal project, Goblin Cock), and cuz on his new solo album He Thinks He’s People, he offers an affectionate tribute to Seth Putnam, the recently deceased Anal Cunt mainman and author of history’s best song titles. Check it out and chuckle after the jump!

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It’s no secret that non-metal singer Ryan Adams is a metal fan. And I have a cousin who is so enamored of Adams that he has sent me multiple e-mails trying to persuade me to attempt to add Adams to the line-up for The Metal Suckfest, possibly to perform his kind-of-but-not-really metal album, Orion, in its entirety. Alas, I did some investigating, and we would not be able to afford the SWAT team it would take to protect Adams from the crowd.

ANYWAY, perhaps as part of this campaign to get Adams on the MSF bill, that very same cousin sent me the below mp3 of Adams recently discussing metal on NPR. It’s brief and worth a listen, not just to hear what Adams has to say about his own metal fandom, but for the reveal I have now spoiled in the headline. Which I guess isn’t really too shocking, ’cause, seriously, what’s more metal than A Walk to Remember?

MANDY MOORE LOVES VOIVOD

Apparently this isn’t the first time Moore’s love of the Canadian outfit has come up in conversation, so, uh, shame on me for not following her career more closely.

-AR

In all honesty, I had never heard of The Bailey Hounds before out pals at Metal Insider posted the below video of the alt-country outfit doing an acoustic cover of Pantera’s “The Great Southern Trendkill” earlier today. That probably has something to do with the fact that I don’t listen to a lot of alt-country, or really any alt-country at all. But said acoustic cover is really pretty good…

…except it isn’t really a cover so much as a complete reinterpretation, which is to say, it uses the lyrics from that Pantera classic and really nothing else. That’s not a criticism; “Trendkill” is the title track from what might Pantera’s least melodious album ever, and I have no idea how one might ever do a straight-forward translation of the song on acoustic instruments anyway, unless maybe you were just went all John-Belushi-in-Animal-House and smashed the guitar against a wall. In fact, the only song from that album that jumps out as me as an even semi-obvious choice for non-electric treatment is “Floods,” but maybe that woulda been too obvious for these Bailey Hounds fellas.

ANYWAY, check out the performance below, and then cry blasphemy or have some appreciation for sumthin’ a lil’ bit different from our usual fare in the comments section below.

-AR

Thrice aren’t metal or really even close anymore, yadda yadda, we’ve already been down that road. Last time I posted about Thrice a number of you commented that you were fans, and a few even mentioned discovering the band when we extensively covered their Alchemy Index album suite back in 2007/2008. And so:

Thrice’s new album Major/Minor is streaming in full at AOL Music (still a thing). It continues along the same fork in the road Thrice suddenly swerved onto starting with 2005′s Vheissu, which is to say it’s more like edgy / heavy indie rock than it is the post-punk / screamo the band built their foundation on. This is certainly nota bad thing; I’ve enjoyed some modern-day Thrice even though Artist in the Ambulance is still “it” for me. And I’m enjoying Major/Minor. Some of these songs are super-catchy; I’m on my second full listen and I’m already humming along with the melodies.

Major/Minor comes out today and is available for purchase on CD, Vinyl and Mp3 at Amazon. Thrice will kick off a headlining tour with Moving Mountains and others on September 30th. Dates follow:

Click to read more…

Look, let’s not kid ourselves. There is good pop music being made, and a new totally generic, soundalike metal band seems to form every hour. So we can’t really sit atop our high horse and scream “METAL IS SUPERIOR TO POP MUSIC!” because while we may ultimately enjoy metal more than pop, there is an undeniable amount of garbage being produced by both genres.

That being said…

This video, by The Axis of Awesome, is, indeed, awesome. It explains, in a very plain and easy to understand way,why so much pop music seems generic. And even though, as I was saying, the same rule applies to plenty of metal, well… you can still probably use it as a retort the next time your idiot friend/parent/teacher/whatever smack talks metal while extolling the virtues of total crap.

-AR

Thanks: Jonathan Votypka

I’ve given Ryan Adams some shit in the past, but he seems to have a knack for doing good covers of metal songs. His version of Alice of Chains’ “Down in a Hole” is pretty good(although nothing beats the original, save for maybe AIC’s own Unplugged version of the song), and yesterday he performed an acoustic cover of Iron Maiden’s “Wasted Years” on BBC Radio 2, which is also not too shabby.

My first thought was that “Wasted Years” is probably one of the only Maiden song which kinda lends itself to an acoustic rendition, but then I remembered that Billy Corgan’s generally-unlistenable Zwan (calling themselves Djali Zwan for some reason) did an acoustic version of “Number of the Beast” for the generally-unwatchable movie Crank, and that was pretty tolerable, too. So maybe Maiden songs are just that good.

-AR

[Adams' recording via Metal Insider]

I know this Jon Lajoie is in no way, shape, or form, metal, but I saw it on No Clean Singing, and it made me laugh so hard I watched it twice in a row. And you know how I hate laughing.

No joke: I’ve been sitting here debating about which event I absolutely do not care about to write up next — A new Kittie song? Camp Kill Yourself kills themselves? Rose Funoral: still a thing? — but this is one-hundred-gazillion percent better than any of those stories, so I’m posting it instead.

“Fuck toast/I don’t need to cook my bread/And fuck coasters/I use a little plate instead” might be the single best lyric of the year, in any genre. There are dudes who could spend literally their entire lives trying to come up something that good, and never, ever succeed.

-AR

I am not alone in my love of Germany’s Guano Apes, although it was 2000′s Don’t Give Me Names and not their 1997 debut that got me hooked. I must respectfully disagree with Sir GroverXIII of The Number of the Blog about the new Guano Apes album Bel Air, though: it rules!

Truth be told I didn’t even know Guano Apes had reunited and released a new album until I got a press release trumpeting the 1 millionth YouTube view of the video for the new song “Oh What A Night,” but there it is: the band that wrote the ridiculously catchy anthem “Big in Japan” is even biggerer in their native Germany. Bel Air hit the European market on April 1st via Columbia and June 21st in the U.S. via The End so it’s essentially already old news across the pond, but man, they picked up right where they left off with catchy alternative hard rock.

After the jump, the official music video for the groovalicious, new wave-y “Sunday Lover”:

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This doesn’t really have anything to do with metal, but I found it kinda funny so I’m running with it.

A Scottish band called Found has released what is, at least as far as I’m aware, the first-ever edible 7″ — more specifically, a 7″ made from chocolate. According to Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci  (who came up with a headline far superior to my own):

“The first attempt was to pour chocolate over a pressed record, but the music created by the chocolate record was backwards. Instead they poured chocolate into the record mold, and presto, an edible single.”

I don’t know nearly enough about, like, science n’ shit to understand how this could possibly work, or what the band’s fans are supposed to do if they actually wanna keep the record, be it because they like the music, or because they think it’s gonna be a collector’s item, or whatever. (How easily would this thing melt? You’d have to at least keep it refrigerated, I’d imagine.)

I would, however, like to suggest that metal bands start trying this gimmick to sell their own shit. Of course, they would not necessarily have to use to chocolate. Here are some examples of what I think would be good cuisine-to-band matches:

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…so says Australian charter boat operator Matt Waller, who has experimented with different types of music in underwater caged speakers, and found that sharks would get all zen and mellow when he blasted AC/DC.  In the future, Waller plans to try out tunes by Zeppelin, the White Stripes, and Ozzy.

The funny thing is, none of those are too br00tal……something tells me a little Gojira might make the great whites seriously hungry for flesh.

Read the full article here.

Thanks to Jessica V. for the tip!

-KW

Accuse The Last Nova of not being metal and you’ll be correct. So if you’re offended by the presence of a little sugary hard rock in your morning dose of br00tal-O’s, kindly skip to the next post.

San Francisco hard rockers The Last Nova play the kind of nu-metal-riff-inflected hard rock that was popular in the early-mid aughties; if bands like Depswa, Systematic, Dark New Day or Alston mean anything to you then you know exactly what I’m talking about. No rapping, DJs or samples, but that little bit of nu-metal guitar tonality and radio rock friendliness, and, in many cases, really good vocalists, as is the case with The Last Nova (dude reminds me a lot of Alston’s Kobie Jackson).

In case you couldn’t tell, I think The Last Nova write really catchy hard rock songs that could smoke most of what’s on hard rock radio today (heyo Seether). So if you’re like OG MetalSucks reader Sammy and usually dig this kind of stuff, check it out.

-VN

Every once in a while, I listen to, and enjoy, non-metal music. Currently, I’m being treated to the dulcet tones of The Best of Earth, Wind, and Fire, as my gentleman friend is attending their show soon and rubbing it in my face that I won’t be able to go. Bah, they got nothing on The Ohio Players. Hands up: who also thought “Love Rollercoaster” was an original RHCP song? Yeesh, I know. In my defense, the original came out a decade before I was even conceived.

Anyways, I also enjoy a lot of dance-y, electronic pop. Yes, I am a Lady Gaga fan. And I’m not the only metalhead with thinks so, either. She falls in that category of “Things metal folk like that you never would’ve guessed.” Like cute pictures of kitties, and Disney movies.

I was awake when Gaga’s new album came out at midnight (har har, my sister sent me a message when it was two minutes ‘til), so I bought it. I knew there was a song on it called “Heavy Metal Lover,” and I know that Gaga’s boyfriend is actually a metal fan. But reading the lyrics sealed the deal: not only did Lady Gaga write an ode to us metalheads, but she is one of us metalheads (one of us, one of us).

Check out some of the song’s lyrics if you don’t believe me:

Click to read more…

Since Dead Letter Circus have been in the news lately — they just signed to Sumerian Records and they’ll be touring with Intronaut and Animals as Leaders this Summer — I thought I’d take a moment to get ya’ll familiar with their maximum rockage. They’re Australian, which is why you likely haven’t heard of them despite one EP and one album release since their inception in 2005, and to be honest they’re not really metal at all. So if the lack of growled vocals, chugga-chug or sweep-picking bothers you, probably best to stop reading right now.

For the rest of you fans of good music, let’s listen to some of the bands choice cuts. Dead Letter Circus remind me a lot of Karnivool, and not just because the two bands share a home country; their rock-based sound is steeped in hard-driving rhythms, delay-soaked atmospheric guitars and soaring vocals. I’d also throw Dredg and A Perfect Circle into the influences pile, so if those bands mean anything to you then Dead Letter Circus will likely resonate.

Here’s “Big” from their 2010 full-length This Is the Warning:

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*shels is a band we haven’t written much about here at MetalSucks, mostly because… I honestly don’t have a good explanation. We’re just dopes I guess.

But Heavy Blog is Heavy has alerted me to the fact that the band has a new album coming out this summer called Plains of the Purple Buffalo (see how the above cover art makes sense now?). They’ve already released the first single, “Vision Quest,” which you can stream below.

Like the headline says, it ain’t metal — but it’s still extreme. HBiH compares it to “Clint Mansell’s epic film scores” (Requiem for a Dream, Moon, etc.), but it actually reminds me more of This Will Destroy You and Sleepmakeswaves, two other extreme-if-not-metal bands we love. Seriously, if you need a little chill time, you’re not gonna do much better than this.

Plains of the Purple Buffalo comes out June 27 via shelsmusic.

-AR