If there’s one lesson that we try to impart to our beloved readers here at MetalSucks, it’s that you should always use a fake name when sleeping with underage girls so their fathers/the authorities can’t find you later. But if there’s two things we try to impart to our beloved readers here at MetalSucks, it’s that being a metal musician blows a lot of the time. See, while it probably seems fun in theory to be in a band, it’s really, really hard to make any money playing music, which is why you see so many dudes hit their thirties and go “Fuck this, I am getting a job at the barber shop” or whatever. And in case you think “Oh, you’re bloggers, fuck do you know about being a professional musician?”, it’s worth noting that guys like Doc Coyle, Mark Hunter, and Eyal Levi have all said the same thing, and they’re all in bands that have been signed to large and reputable labels, and have done massive tours like Ozzfest, and all that other shit kids dream about when they dream about being in a band for a living.

So when I read some seventeen kid online saying “We are gonna try to get big before we have to go to college, but if we are good enough we wont go,” my first thought is, “See ya when you’re serving my kids Happy Meals in ten years!” And not just because I don’t know what decent college would ever accept a student who can’t even spell the word “won’t” correctly.

-AR

[via Stuff You Will Hate]

So, hey, I dunno if you guys heard, but earlier this month we put on this totally rad festival, The Metal Suckfest? No big deal, it was just twenty awesome bands in two days, whatever.

So ANYWAY, our brahs over at Metal Injection were there to film another edition of their awesome “Ask the Artist” series, in which they — duhskis! – ask a variety of artists one particular question… in this case, “What sucks about metal?” Check out the answers from the bands that played The Metal Suckfest — plus a couple of incredibly handsome non-musicians (cough, Vince and I, cough, cough) below:

And don’t forget that you can check out more awesome installments of “Ask the Artist” right here. DO IT!!!

-AR

The “Stop Online Piracy Act,” currently working its way through the U.S. Congress, would shut down the Internet as we know it. Don’t believe the misleading title; this bill wouldn’t just stop piracy… it would stop the Internet.

Here’s what the Washington Post wrote about it last week, via Demand Progress:

Imagine a country where the government is able to shut down Web sites at the slightest provocation, where elected representatives invoke fears of “overseas pirates” to defend the interests of domestic industries, and where Internet companies like Google must cave in to the demands of government censors or risk being shut down.

No, we are not talking about China, North Korea or Iran — we are talking about the United States, where legislators in both the House and Senate are attempting to push through new anti-piracy legislation by year-end that would benefit Hollywood at the expense of Silicon Valley.

…  The legislation is a ham-handed effort to shut down Internet piracy anywhere on the Web, but it confuses “piracy protection” and “censorship.” The bill also showcases a failure on the part of lawmakers to understand how the Internet works.

This is not being blown out of proportion; this is the truth. Sites like YouTube will be forced to go to unreasonably great length to police users’ contributions, and search engines like Google will have to drastically re-work their architecture to censor certain search results from appearing. A site like MetalSucks could be pulled down if a commenter decides to link to something we don’t have the rights to post, as innocuous as an album cover; it would be that easy. This bill would completely stifle innovation on the Internet, and would hamper the spread of innovation.

Yet the Stop Online Piracy Act and affiliated Protect IP Act actually stand a chance of passing through Congress. Send a letter to your local congressman by filling out the form here, which takes all of 15 seconds, telling them you oppose this legislation.

If you’re an Amazon Prime member but you’re not in any particular rush to receive that new DVD you just ordered, you can be rewarded for your patience in the form a $1 credit on Amazon’s MP3 store. Just select “FREE No-Rush Shipping” when you check out; you’ll receive your item in 5-7 days and you’ll get a $1 credit in the MP3 store when your item ships.

The credits must be redeemed by January 31, 2012, but from what I can tell there’s no limit to how many free $1 music credits you can accrue. So get your holiday shopping done early before there’s a need for rush shipping, then reap the benefits of plenty of free music for yourself, you Scrooge.

-VN

[Gizmodo, Amazon]

What are the top ten most overused words in extreme metal writing? The ones that make you cringe in embarrassment when you see them on the printed page or screen? The Number of the Blog’s new writer Rev. Will put together a top ten list of the worst offenders, excluding unavoidably essential terms like “riffs”, “solos”, “metal”, etc., and the results are not only dead-on but completely hilarious in Rev. Will’s satirical mocking.

As someone who pumps out 3-5 (sometimes more) written pieces about metal five days a week, yeah, I’m totally guilty of almost everything on this list! Some of the words included are fairly obvious (“brutal”, “Slayer”), while arguments for others that aren’t obvious at all have been articulated so well they put me straight into shameful facepalm mode. Oh well… I never claimed to be a great writer anyway, just some douchebag with an opinion.

-VN

The holy grail of music listening is almost here: soon enough we’ll be able to listen to all of our music from the cloud, anywhere, any time. We’re not quite there yet; I give it five years before full-scale cloud penetration really takes hold. But with today’s news that Apple’s iTunes Match has finally gone live we’re one step closer.

Quick recap: iTunes Match is a service that dovetails with Apple’s new iCloud service. In a nutshell, it scans your iTunes library for all music files (even ones you downloaded from other services, torrents, .rar blogs, or files you’ve ripped in shitty quality). Without you having to upload any files, iTunes Match then grants you access to ALL of those songs in 256kbps quality, directly accessible on Apple’s servers from any computer (Mac or PC), iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. iTunes Match won’t work for music that isn’t available on iTunes so it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s still pretty dern cool and I’m frankly quite surprised that record labels haven’t tried to sue this thing into oblivion. The service costs $25/year.

Future, nice to meet you. This is gonna be fun. If Apple ever launches a Spotify-like all-you-can-eat streaming service it’s all over.

-VN

“I’m listening to _________. What should I drink?”

A simple concept with hilarious results, Drinkify is the solution to all of your music-listening beverage needs. It’s amazingly accurate, too. For example:

• The Revocation: “4 oz. Rum, Fucking Rum, 4 oz. Red Bull, 8 oz. Red Bull. Combine in highball glass and serve. Stir vigorously.”
• The Slayer: “8 oz. Blood, 8 oz. Wheatgrass juice. Combine in shaker and strain into cocktail glass. Serve. Stir vigorously.”
• The Metallica: “4 oz. Captain Morgan Spiced Rum. Serve neat. Garnish with maraschino cherry.”
• The Morbid Angel: “8 oz. Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey, 8 oz. Coco López, 1 oz. Tequila Oro. Combine in shaker and strain into cocktail glass. Serve. Stir quickly. Garnish with straw.”

Try it out for yourself at your next party. Blood sold separately.

-VN

Thanks: metalgf

Dear Nardwuar: please come work for MetalSucks. That is all.

-VN

As you hopefully know by now, we teamed up with our very good friend, Mr. Rodney Githens of Vertebrae 33 and Metal Band Art, to host a booth at New York Comic Con last weekend. And we had a blast! We can’t wait to do it again next year.

And now we have a video run-down of the event from our other very good friends over at Metal Injection, which you can and should check out below. They interviewed the great Richard Christy, metal artist extraordinaire Chuck BB, and, oh yeah, they got me offering to give James Hetfield a rusty trombone. Check it out:

-AR

Man oh man, am I ever jealous of the dudes at Metal Injection. While Vince and I (and, of course, our friend Rodney Githens from Vertebrae 33 and Metal Band Art) were manning our booth at this past weekend’s New York Comic Con, Injection co-heads Rob and Frank were at a roundtable with Mike Judge, a.k.a. the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill, Office Space, and a ton of other stuff that’s made you snarf over the past twenty years. And, of course, they asked all the best questions — which is to say, they got Judge to spill on whether or not there would be metal videos in the series’ upcoming re-launch, and to discuss his own metal fandom. Suh-weeeeeeeet. Click on the below screen cap of Judge talking about metal subgenres to watch the whole interview, which, needless to say, is pretty damned great.

Beavis and Butt-Head finally returns to MTV on October 27. Check out a trailer for the new season here.

-AR

… so we put a Bandcamp on your Facebook, so you can Bandcamp while you Facebook!

About fucking time. Perhaps inspired by the recent Spotify/Facebook integration and the half-a-dozen or so Facebook apps for bands, Bandcamp has finally released a Facebook Bandcamp app that allows bands to add a Bandcamp tab with embeds from their Bandcamp page directly into their Facebook profile.

Bandcamp is the best platform currently available to bands for streaming and selling digital music and Facebook is the best social networking tool, so a union of the two makes perfect sense. More and more bands that send us material for review are including Bandcamp links, and I hope even more start to hop on the Bandcamp bandwagon now that Facebook integration is possible. Bandcamp is where it’s at. My mind is blown every time a band sends us a MySpace link.

-VN

Thanks: Matt Cooper

Those instruments don’t set themselves up, ladies and gentlemen; where there’s a big metal show there’s also a crew of roadies doing all the tough work behind the scenes. Vice Magazine has put together a documentary mini-series called On the Road, which they’re releasing in bite-sized chunks of 10-minute episodes, to pay tribute to these heroes and celebrate “the travelling rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.” The first six episodes are hosted by Jesse Hughes of The Eagles of Death Metal, and the series promises that “it bares all the scars and secrets of the road and a few surprises along the way.”

Of the three episodes released so far, Episode 2 should be of most interest to MS readers. Episode 2 features interviews with several metal notables on the Revolver Golden Gods Awards black carpet and some pretty outrageous stories from longtime Megadeth and Motorhead roadie Jef Hickey. Did you know that R&B great Luther Vondross used to have his toilet seat FedEx’ed to each location before his arrival? True story, and Jef was the one who had to install it nightly. Watch Episode 2 above and follow the full series here.

-VN

[UPDATE, 1:29pm EDT: Metal Insider has posted an MP3! Click here to listen and scroll to the bottom.]

[UPDATE, 1:06pm EDT: Welp, looks like the video's been pulled. Sorry folks.]

If you’re like most sane metalheads you did not like the Metallica / Loud Reed track “The View,” the first song to be released from their forthcoming LuLu collaboration. While I wouldn’t say that Lou Reed’s vocals were the only thing folks didn’t like about “The View” I’d say that they certainly didn’t help the cause. Don’t get me wrong, I love some Velvet Underground stuff but this just… doesn’t work. So what would “The View” sound like without Lou Reed? Internet to the rescue, via Metal Insider:

I can’t see anyone jumping into the ring to say this song totally fucking rules man one way or the other, but taking Reed’s vocals out of the equation certainly takes the edge off. At worst it sounds like a b-side from Death Magnetic and at best it’s a nice little 2-minute dittty about James Hetfield’s desire to be a table.

-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…

Some day I will visit Japan and I will experience the unlimited fresh sushi, crazy candy, bullet trains and bizarro baseball games that fine country has to offer. Maybe I’ll be able to experience some live music there, too. WTF, Japan, seriously!?

-VN

Thanks: Daniel Davis Snyder

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

I’ve read enough “Cry Now, Cry Later” columns in Decibel to know that if J. Bennett and I ever met we’d be instant besties, or more likely I’d wanna be instant besties and he’d be all “psshhh… get off my nuts, lowly blogger.” Dude’s writing makes me jealous on a regular basis, and he’s got great taste in metal too. His latest pièce de résistance is an entry in The Deciblog‘s “Justify Your Shitty Taste” series, in which DB writers are challenged to defend formerly indefensible and widely loathed albums: today’s mission, Cave In’s only major label child, Antenna.

Click to read more…

For the latest edition of their ongoing series “The Fix,” our number one homies over at Metal Injection got Michael Amott and Sharlee D’Angelo to pick out some of their favorite videos, including clips from Fates Warning, King Diamond, Savatage, Queensrÿche, and Crimson Glory. Check that shit out below, ’cause it’s, like, way entertaining.

Don’t forget that Arch Enemy is currently headlining the North American Khaos tour, which we’re proudly co-presenting with  Full Metal Jackie. Support comes from DevilDriver, Skeletonwitch, and Chthonic. You can get dates here.

And, of course, you can and should check out more episodes of “The Fix” over at Metal Injection.

-AR

Guns N’ Roses not-quite-complete video trilogy from the early 90s — “Don’t Cry,” “November Rain,” and “Estranged” — remains infamous twenty years after its release, I imagine because –

• The videos were INSANELY popular at the time. I think at least one of them played every hour on the hour on MTV.
• They are, of course, completely ridiculous.

So this comic strip version of the “November Rain” video, which was posted recently on Funny or Die, is really taking a cheap shot at an easy target. It’s not news, for example, that the dude overreacting to rain and jumping through the cake makes no sense.

Still, as far as easy targets go, this is a pretty funny one.

Go here to check it out, then pray for comic versions of “Don’t Cry” and “Estranged” in our comments section below.

-AR

[via Badass Digest]

If the three bands name-checked in our headline aren’t enough to pique your interest, that’s not all: The Phoenix Born of Fire, Volume 1 compilation — put together by weekly New England arts mag The Boston Phoenix — also features free downloadable tracks from Ramming Speed (appearing at The Metal Suckfest!), Motherboar, Razormaze, Acaro, and a number of other Boston-area metal bands. Stream or download the whole thing for free on Bandcamp. Who knows, you may even discover a new band.

-VN

Thanks: Zack Wells