MetalSucks

Vince comes home Sunday! Next week he should be blogging regularly again. (Anything you’ve read from his this week was written in advance of his trip.) Hoo-ray!

While you continue to pine for his return, The Number of the Blog has now posted part two of their interview with the man, the legend, the beard, Vince Neilstein. And by the way, the interview was conducted by deseee, and not, as I mistakenly said earlier this week, by groverXIII. Sorry, Number of the Bloggers.

While you’re there, you can suggest a question to ask moi for a future interview with the same site. I’m sure you can guys can think of some absolutely fucktarded shit to ask me, can’tcha?

-AR

To call Burzum’s new album, Belus, “controversial” would be an understatement. The metal community seems divided between those who love it, those who hate it, those who think Varg Vikernes doesn’t deserve due consideration because he’s a bigoted asshole, those who recognize he’s a bigoted asshole but think he’s talented anyway (like our own Sammy O’Hagar), and people who just don’t give a shit one way or the other. This record’s place in metal history is consequently already secured; regardless of what you think of Vikernes, he’s pretty much achieved the highest possible goal any artist can aspire to, which is to have people consider and discuss his work.

But no one has considered and discussed his work quite like this.

Click to read more…

If you miss Vince’s regular contributions to MS while he’s away (and who doesn’t… sniff, sniff), then don’t fret: you can tide yourself over by reading this interview that The Number of the Blog recently conducted with the right honorable Mr. Neilstein. TNOTB, you may recall, is the site that recently took on Ziltoid as a writer. Hey, we all do shit for traffic sometimes.

ANYWAY, Zilty isn’t the one who conducted the interview (that would be his fellow MS reader/TNOTB founder groverXIII), so you shouldn’t let that deter you from reading it. And Vince has some good tips on running a website, how much actual work goes into it, how we’re not really stoned all the time, etc. Check it out here.

-AR

It would appear as if Sergeant D’s days at Metal Inquisition are over. His last post on Metal Inquisition was dated February 23rd while contributions to crunkcore powerhouse blog Stuff You Will Hate are ongoing.

Sad face.

But at least Sergeant D went out on a high note (ha) with the above fantastic photoshop job. There is so much going on in this collage that I don’t even know where to start. Are the events of September 11, 2001 being glorified by insinuating Dimebag was somehow involved? Is the eagle sad about Dimebag’s death? Is everyone just really fucking stoned?? WTF??? I want answers.

-VN

I just saw this as part of the “If CHUD Ran the Movies” series and it made me giggle…

Check out more hot photoshop action here. If you like movies and don’t read CHUD, you’re a loser.

-AR

Full credit to The Deciblog for finding this gem.

Some brilliant person has started a new Facebook page called Any Picture Can Be Improved By Adding Immortal To It. If you don’t understand the premise of the page, you must be a Hinder fan.

At the time of this writing there are already fifty pages (!!!) of photos – far too many for me to get through – but here are a few of my favorites:

Click to read more…

No, this isn’t an article about boobies. Sorry.

Sergeant D. recently conducted an interview with Born of Osiris for Substream, and, as is often the case, there was a chunk of the interview that the magazine didn’t run. The Sarge has now posted that chunk at Stuff You Will Hate, and while some of it is over my head (Did you know that Johnny Plague apparently wears a lot of puffy vests? Yeah, me neither.), I did appreciate the revelation that BOO drummer/primary songwriter Cameron Losch has dabbled in rap music:

Sergeant D. compares him to Andy Samberg’s “Blizzard Man” character from Saturday Night Live, which I think is going too far. Blizzard Man’s lyrics are more authentic. “How’d I get so good at killing bitches/Well, nobody knows?” Seriously? There a lotta gangstas on the rough streets of Palatine, Illinois, aren’t there?

Read more at SYWH.

-AR

WOW. In the “I did not see that coming category” is Arsis mainman James Malone’s list of “The Top Five Records that Influenced Starve for the Devil,” which was published last week on The Deciblog. I would have expected to see some thrash, some death metal, and some hair metal, but really never would have guessed at least three and possibly four of the albums Malone selected. And if you’re one of those nitwits who was so offended that Malone plays a pink guitar in the “Forced to Rock” video, than you should call 911 right now and make sure the ambulance has already arrived before you start reading the list, because you’re definitely gonna choke on your own tongue.

Go to The Deciblog to read Malone’s entire list. I don’t wanna give too much away, but I will say one of the more surprising releases on the list was Walking with Strangers by The Birthday Party Massacre, who Malone calls “One of the better bands to come out in the last seven years or so.”

Arsis Starve for the Devil is awesome, by the way, and is out now on Nuclear Blast!

-AR

For those who may’ve missed the constant plugs in our comments section over the past few weeks, everyone’s favorite hater-for-the-sake-of-hating Ziltoid is now lending his scribbling skills to the MS Maniac GroverXIII-helmed metal blog The Number of the Blog.

Let me repeat that: Ziltoid is blogging. Get your haterade out, Suckalos and Suckalettes.

Apparently the day we let Ziltoid run MetalSucks was just the tip of the iceberg as far as learning about ridiculous bands he thinks are cool such as \\\Maytag. Since it’s a slow news day today, I decided to mosey on over to Number of the Blog to see what old Zilty is up to. The very first Ziltoid-penned post I stumbled upon is about how the Pokemon video games are metal.

Let me repeat that: Ziltoid thinks Pokemon is metal. Pokemon is the tr00est of the tr00, the kvltest of the kvlt, the ultimate standard of metal superiority (because Zilty only listens to the very best music) to which we should all aspire.

Lap it up, kids.

-VN

Remember last year when the geniuses at Metal Injection discovered that Google is surprisingly well-educated about metal? Well, they’ve now discovered that Yahoo! Answers has a thing or two to say about a thing or two, too:

Even though this is pretty funny, let’s try to keep the homophobic remarks in our comments section to a minimum, okay kids?

-AR

Our email inboxes have been flooded with links to a leaked version of the new Burzum album, Varg Vikernes’ first after 16 years of imprisonment, and the near unanimous opinion is that it sucks. But it seems like our readers aren’t the only ones sharing these behaviors and sentiments; Earache boss Digby Pearson posted the above from his Twitter account yesterday, as noticed by Second Period and re-posted by Invisible Oranges. Props to his hilarious use of hashtags!

Click to read more…

In a triumph of e-nerd high fivery, an Internet campaign launched earlier this month to garner a simple (but delicious) dill pickle more Facebook fans than Nickelback reached its goal last Friday and now stands at more than 1.45 million fans. Metal Insider’s Bram Teitelman goes inside the bun for the report:

Since Roadrunner is Nickelback’s label, and fellow Roadrunner band Killswitch Engage is temporarily without frontman Howard Jones, we think the pickle should replace All That Remains’ Phil Labonte for the remainder of the tour. I for one would pay good money to see Dillswitch Engage. Seriously, who doesn’t like Vlasic rock? I mean, what’s the dill-io with Howard Jones anyway? Roadrunner is stating that the tour will continue with Labonte, but it seems like the band has gotten themselves into quite a pickle. They should totally be relishing this tour, but suddenly things aren’t kosher.

Bravo Bram and bravo Internet. What’s Nickelback got to say about all of this? Hopefully they aren’t half sour.

-VN

A website whose sole purpose is to compare the brutality of moshpits, one on one, seems like a pretty good idea. And it is!

The only problem with the appropriately named CompareTheMoshpit.com is that the comparing never actually amounts to anything; you choose one photo over the other, the page refreshes with two new moshpit photos, repeat. You can view how many “wins” each photo has by looking at the “Mosh Pits of the Day” section, but it’d be way cooler if there were a ranking system similar to the one on the old HotOrNot.com. And then there’s the fact that at its core this website is just a front for GigJunkie.com, designed to get you to “get off your arse and find a real moshpit” and search for shows in your area.

But beggars can’t be choosers… looking at pictures of brutal moshpits all day is still pretty fucking fun. Head on over to CompareTheMoshpit.com and get you some.

-VN

The other day Reign in Blonde reported that Meshuggah’s ObZen (among other albums) was available for only $5 as part of Amazon’s 100 Albums for $5 promotion, but today we can do you one better; The LimeWire Store has an entirely free download of the song “Combustion” from Meshuggah’s new live album Alive, which came out yesterday. Take that, blonde lasses!

I know what you’re thinking; isn’t LimeWire a P2P service that’s illegal free anyway? I thought so too, but I guess they’ve moved onto bigger and better things as implied by the word “Store” in LimeWire Store.

As part of their promotion with Meshuggah, LimeWire also has an exclusive interview with guitarist Marten Hagström. That’s two goodies for the price of none.

-VN

Can a simple dill pickle garner more Facebook fans than Nickelback? It’ll take 1,380,820 fans to make that happen, but I believe in the power of the Internet and the deliciousness of pickles. Facebook user Coral Cripps created the Facebook fan page “Can this pickle get more fans than Nickleback?” [sic] less than a week ago on Wednesday, February 3rd. The worldwide ire for Nickelback is so strong that as of this writing the group already has 240,095 fans. When I joind the group yesterday it only had around 70,000… the Pickleback is spreading fast!

What I’d really love to see is Nickelback getting involved by mobilizing their fanbase to counter the attack of the pickle. Hey Roadrunner, get on that! It’d be hilarious. Take the joke and run with it, ala Earache/Oceano style!

Pickles 4evr!!!

-VN

Cosmo Lee posted a fun piece the other day about band name pronunciations: “Let’s help each other out. Use English words and syllables to denote pronunciation, with all caps for syllabic stress. For example, Metallica’s bassist is Robert True-HEE-yo. Got it? Good.” Among the band names and metal personalities he explores are Marduk, Dan Swanö, Mikael Åkerfeldt and Peter Tägtgren. The European readers of Invisible Oranges are really helping out.

I’d like to add a couple more to the debate:

Necrophagist

Necro-FAY-jist? Neck-RAH-fuh-jist? Necro-FAH-jist?

Vader

VAY-der or VAH-der?

Are there any bands with awkwardly written (or foreign) names that you’re wondering how to pronounce? Posit your theories in the comments.

-VN

Yesterday I wrote a pretty harsh criticism of God Save RockandRoll, a new blog written by the wife of Atreyu’s Brandon Saller, Ashley Jean.

Well, I guess word got back to Ashley Jean in record time: as of this morning, she has removed her improper French translation of the phrase “God Save Rock and Roll” (why oh why didn’t I take a screen cap?!?!), and has responded to some of the things I said in my blog – without directly naming MetalSucks, natch. Here’s an excerpt:

Click to read more…

Almost a year ago our own Satan Rosenbloom interviewed Wolves in the Throne Room frontman Aaron Weaver. Ever the articulate and intelligent gentleman, Weaver shared his thoughts about black metal, the commercialization of music, the ideologies behind his band and a whole slew of other topics; it was definitely one of the more in-depth and intriguing interviews we’ve run in the history of this site.

Our Bro-jiras over at Decibel just posted an exclusive Wolves in the Throne Room video from Scion A/V. The video features in an interview with Weaver intercut with live footage of the band performing at last year’s Scion Rock Fest in Atlanta. Though the interview focuses on many of the same topics as our own chat with Weaver, listening to this man talk is never boring; the guy’s got so much to say and his outlook on life is so unique that I actually wish there was more interview footage in the nearly 17-minute clip.

Check it out over at Decibel.

-VN

Hails & Horns Magazine is now free. Starting with their Winter 2009 / 2010 issue (Municipal Waste cover), out now, Hails & Horns will be online for free in a digital format. Print versions of the magazine are still available for a fee.

As far as I know, Hails & Horns is the first metal print publication to offer its entire magazine online at all, let alone for no cost. Of the big dogs, Decibel offers the first several paragraphs of each feature article and full text of the reviews in the back of the mag, and Revolver offers none of their printed content online. It’s no secret that magazines make a very small portion of their money from subscription fees — the big bread-earner is advertising — so it’s not that shocking that a magazine would forgo subscription fees altogether. Some free magazines are quite profitable (see: The Onion, your town’s alt weekly arts mag [i.e. The Village Voice], etc). What remains to be seen is whether this (or any) magazine’s print advertisers are going to be down with the switch, and whether online readers have an interest in long-form magazine-style journalism and whether they want to read it on a computer screen.

Click to read more…

I was recently traversing these here interwebs, and happened to come across an interesting blog called What Fucked You? that has many, many, many downloads of entire albums from several genres — not too much in the “metal” realm (aside from Finnish doomsters Unholy or unless if you count Motley Crue’s first album…..which I most certainly do NOT), but a diverse blend of musics nonetheless.

Chiggity check checkit…

-KW