Imperial State Electric
TBA
Label – TBA
Release Date – February/March

Nicke Anderssonn has been in more bands, side projects, and collaborations than, uh, Dave Grohl. I’m sure there’s a better comparison, but I can’t think of one right now, so Dave it is.

Anderssonn has done everything from producing bands to founding labels to drumming for Entombed and basically one-man banding the hilariously named Death Breath. Not to mention Supershit 666, his power-trio collaboration with Backyard Babies’ Dregen and Ginger Wildheart that resulted in an EP under the name. (What can I say? I have the maturity level of a teenage boy. Silly names get my attention.)

Amongst all his endeavors, though, The Hellacopters is probably my favorite. Gritty, basement punk with a melodic metal edge. I’ve literally spent months hunting down everything I could possibly find from them, and I’m pretty psyched that his newest project, Imperial State Electric, has shades of that band. Especially since I was quite self-righteously pissed off when they broke up in 2008. Yes, I’m still grouchy about it.

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I don’t hate Soulfly as much as some people — in fact, I quite enjoyed 2005′s Dark Ages, and that Greg Puciato sections of that one song from the last album — but I can’t find a nice thing to say about the album art for the band’s upcoming eighth full-length, Enslaved. It looks lo-fi, but not in a cool way, like the cover Terrorizer’s Hordes of Zombies. And why are the edges blacked out? And why are the edges on the left side more blacked out than the edges on the right side? It just doesn’t seem like that much thought went into this thing.

Enslaved comes out March 13 on Roadrunner. It has some pretty cool guests on it, like Cattle Decapitation’s Travis Ryan and Dez Fafara from DevilDriver (and, uh, Coal Chamber), so it should really go without saying, but if the music on the album is good, then it really won’t matter what the cover looks like. Although the band’s new bass player is the dude who used to be in Static-X, so that doesn’t bode well, does it?

-AR

Last week Vince did his Woodward n’ Bernstein thing and, discovering that Nuclear Blast’s German webstore listed the new Meshuggah album under the title Koloss, deduced that the album was actually titled Colossus — because “koloss” is German for “colossus.”

And he was so close! In fact, the album is actually just called Koloss. They’re tricky, that Meshuggah!

ANYWAY, the album’s cover art has now been unveiled, and while at first glance I’m not entirely sure I understand what’s going on, I do know that a) I want to study it further, and b) I’m feeling a little intimidated by it. In other words, it is the perfect visual representation of Meshuggah’s music. Check it out:

Koloss comes out March 27 via Nuclear Blast.

-AR

Here’s some not-at-all shitty news: Unsane are releasing a new album, Wreck, on March 20 via Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label (album art above, duh). And right about now, you can probably feel the blood rushing to your sexual organs, but get ready for a full-on orgasm: the band is doing a tour with the Melvins, and will release a split 7″ with ‘em, too, on which Unsane will cover a to-be-announced Melvins song, and the Melvins will cover a to-be-announced Unsane song.

The split is only going to be available on the tour, so if for some reason you needed even more incentive to go check this shit out, well, there ya have it.

Tour dates are after the jump; hopefully Unsane will debute some new music to Wreck our ear drums real soon.

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[UPDATE: The new release will be a full-length, not an EP. -Ed.]

Once the dust settled, the excitement of brand new music wore off and everyone had time to digest and evaluate Between the Buried and Me’s 2011 EP The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues, what did you guys think of it? I know a couple of people who swear it’s one of their favorite BTBAM releases to date, but I never could sink my teeth into it the way I did with some of BTBAM’s past material. To me it felt kinda like stock BTBAM, Colors Part III, and didn’t really offer anything new in the way of artistic progression. Not that BTBAM will ever release something bad — taken in a vacuum, Hypersleep would’ve been great — it’s just that it never really tickled my funny bone and got me all excited, ya know?

I bring up Hypersleep because BTBAM are apparently now writing the second album in the Parallax series (I didn’t even know it was gonna be a series! sweet!).

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Samothrace
TBA
Label – 20 Buck Spin
Release Date – mid-2012

Certain bands will always stay with you, almost as if the sounds they create and share stick to your bones, get caught in your lungs, or make nests in your atria. Semi-outlandish description, maybe, but there aren’t many other ways I can convey the way Samothrace made me feel upon first listen. My heart nearly stopped from excitement when I learned that a new album was in the works, and the grin on my face must’ve been of the shit eating variety. Between you and me, quite frankly, I think I pissed my pants.

If you’re already familiar with Samothrace, you know that their catalog isn’t especially vast — they’ve only release one full length, Life’s Trade, and that was years ago. Bearing this in mind, after some time passed without hearing any news from this ensemble, I was getting worried we’d never be graced with a new chapter of their infectious, droning ambiance. Thankfully, they’re not ready to leave us quite yet, giving listeners another opportunity to invite a healthy dose of crippling heaviness to inhabit both their eardrums and arteries.

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Photo by Johan Lindstrand, The Crown

A few months ago, The Crown announced the return of screamer Johan Lindstrand, making theirs the first of some awesomely exciting late 2011 reunions. Soon to follow were At The Drive-In (read here), He Is Legend (here), and Refused (here), all acts sharing few aesthetics but linked by total awesomeness, undefinability, daring, and unexhausted creative potential. So it’s cosmically just that these rad, singular bands have heeded the voices ordering them back from the light at the end of the tunnel. Bonerz for all!

Back in September, MetalSucks got up in the face of Crown guitarist/producer Marko Tervonen to talk about their new album plans and stuff, and he revealed that around six songs were written. And today a pair of those songs are mentioned by Lindstrand in his report on Thursday’s rehearsal, the band’s first since his return:

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Hypno5e
Acid Mist Tomorrow
Label – Season of Mist
Release date – early 2012

Hypno5e kind of made an impact on the U.S. metal scene when they were support on the Metal as Art tour way back in the winter of 2009/2010, but they’ve made very few waves since then. That’s about to change. Hypno5e were on the tiny label Overcome Distribution, and they haven’t even released an album since 2007, but they’re now on Season Of Mist. Their next release, Acid Mist Tomorrow, is scheduled to come out this year.Check out the title track from the new album below:

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When Meshuggah released a brief message last week announcing the release date of their new album, I don’t think anyone even stopped to think that the album’s title might be hidden within:

After a long time of deep soul searching and intense wrecking of the psyches, the new album is finally done. Soon you will meet this colossus that will pulverize your being. Welcome to the other side on March 27.

But then came an email from stealthy MetalSucks informant Ashley Lee linking to a page in Nuclear Blast’s German webstore showing an album by the name “Koloss” — “Colossus” in German –  set for release on March 23rd (releasing an album on Friday in Europe and the following Tuesday in the U.S. is still par for the course these days despite many record labels’ willful ignorance of the existence of the Internet). Here’s the English translation of the text on the NB Germany page:

Exclusively at NUCLEAR BLAST mailorder! The limited edition ”colossus” digipakincluding bonus DVD MESHUGGAH plus the magic cube! Limited to 500 bundles!

So, that begs the question… what the fuck is a magic cube??? Color us interested.

-VN

Adimiron
K2
Label – Bakerteam Records
Release date – January 2012

If writing about a new Gojira album ain’t happening here (the point of this exercise is to expose metal bands on the rise), then I suppose Italy’s Adimiron will do. But maybe that’s a little unfair to say — based on snippets alone, the Roman four-piece sounds loads more interesting than anything I’ve heard from those Frenchies to the north.

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In the absence of actual new music or substantial information of some kind, I find it kinda hard to get psyched up about the announcement of an album release date in all but a few special cases. But there have been a number of big release date announcements and rumors in the past few days, so I figured I’d lump ‘em all together and, as if you expected anything else, share my thoughts, hopes and dreams for each. Here we go:

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Alice in Chains’ 2009 comeback album, Black Gives Way to Blue, was a huge risk — replacing a band member as important as Layne Staley is never easy, let alone replacing a band member who was so important and who passed away. But the band pulled it off with flying colors (or, at least, flying blacks and blues). BGWTB‘s awesomeness has nothing to do with sentimentality; it’s still a killer listen more than two years after its release.

But now guitarist Jerry Cantrell tells Rolling Stone that the band started writing their next album in 2011, and will be entering the studio sometime very soon. And having previously succeeded at such a monumental challenge means that the band is now faced with another, possibly even greater challenge: following-up the comeback.

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Sai Nam
TBA
Label – Reaper Records
Release date – Winter 2012

Wanting to close out 2011 right, I hit up New York’s Highline Ballroom for the almighty Cro-Mags’ annual end-of-year gig. I arrived at the venue earlier than anticipated, my curiosity piqued over the first act of the night: Sai Nam. A so-unlikely-it-just-had-to-happen collaboration between Mike Dijan (Breakdown, Crown Of Thornz, Skarhead), Lou Medina (Breakdown, All Out War), and Justice Tripp (Trapped Under Ice), the group played its debut show to a receptive if docile audience–save for a little boy who appeared to be Dijan’s son. As this past summer’s sick sick sick teaser track “Comeback” promised, Sai Nam’s set showcased a hard NYHC aesthetic deftly blended with Tripp’s rapid-fire vocals. I have little doubt that once people become familiar with the material, the crowd response will soon reflect the stage-diving pit mania of a TUI gig.

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Ides of Gemini
Constantinople
Label — Neurot Recordings / SIGE
Release date — May 2012

Much metal gains its extremity from lack of space: ear-bleeding guitars canvas the harmonic spectrum, drums fill every possible rhythmic nook, vocalist caulks the gaps with throaty sputum sealant. That totalness can get tiring, and it’s also pretty aesthetically limiting – maximizing speed, volume, denseness, etc. can blind a songwriter to the subtler, less traveled paths to intensity.

L.A. trio Ides of Gemini followed all aforementioned paths on their 2010 debut EP, The Disruption Writ. The EP’s four songs are all about space. Guitarist J. Bennett (who moonlights as a journalist for Decibel, Terrorizer and others) lays down imperial metal riffs swathed in so much reverb that they seem isolated from the rest of the world. Bassist/vocalist Sera Timms (frontlady of Black Math Horseman) layers her affectless voice in ghostly counterpoint, turning tales of spiritual discord into disturbing lullabies. Lethargic programmed drums rustle below like a big ol’ bag of bones. If something seems missing from Ides of Gemini’s sound, that’s exactly the point. Their accretion of small musical gestures inverts metal’s normal use of space. They imply terror without ever exposing it. Each song is an accumulation of outlines, a sort of sonic daguerreotype.

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No, not that Portal.

Here’s a pretty major lapse in my metal education: I somehow had no idea that there was a Cynic “off-shoot” project called Portal, which combines the talents of Paul Masvidal, Sean Reinert, guitarist Jason Gobel, bassist Chris Kringel, and vocalist Aruna Abrams. There’s even some demos already up on YouTube (like the one above), so really, seriously, total shame on me for not knowing about this. But, hey, I’m excited to learn about it now!

The group apparently demoed ten songs together seventeen years ago (!!!), and those songs will finally see the light of day in March, when Season of Mist releases The Portal Tapes. Here’s a statement regarding the release from Mr. Masvidal himself:

“I never thought this day would come. A couple demos we’d record after Focus, under the name ‘Portal,’ would develop a life of their own, and somehow become part of Cynic‘s larger discography. As an artist, it’s an amazingly unpredictable journey, to see these quiet labors of love, find their way, in their own time.”

The Portal Tapes come out March 27 in North America and March 23 in Europe, and the release will be limited to five-thousand CDs and just one-thousand vinyl copies. We’ll post pre-order info as soon as we get it so none of you miss out. If the aforementioned YouTube demos are any indication, this is definitely gonna be worth owning — which is not at all shocking.

-AR

[via The PRP]

Oh, Lars Ulrich, when will you ever learn? Metallica’s drummer has a special talent for saying things that a) make no sense and b) will almost certainly piss off fans, if not the moment he says them, than sometime in the future, when they turn out to be not at all true.

His latest verbal faux pas comes via an interview with Rolling Stone, in which he discusses the next Metallica album. Here’s the full quote, with my analysis to follow:

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What do you get when you take the two most talented dudes in Sevendust and put them in a brand new band? Call Me No One, a new project set to begin recording their debut this month and release it this spring. No disrespect to Lajon Witherspoon, who’s a great vocalist and performer, but I never got the impression he was too involved in writing Sevendust’s music. John Connelly does his fair share of writing in 7D, but the Sonny Mayo era stands as proof that he’s not nearly as dynamic a songwriter as Clint. As for bassist Vince Hornsby, well, dude makes the stage faces of anyone I’ve ever seen, but songwriting contributions = unknown. It’s not exactly a secret that Clint and Morgan are the talent axis of Sevendust.

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Pallbearer
Sorrow and Extinction
Label – Profound Lore
Release date – February 21, 2012

There are a few albums slated for release this year that I have been actively salivating over (Pilgrim’s Misery Wizard, that new full-length that Revenge have been teasing us with for what seems like ages, Drudkh’s new one, and the new Ride For Revenge LP that technically came out in 2011 but hasn’t shown up in my mailbox yet, so I’m counting it), but none quite so much as this one. Pallbearer are one hell of a special band, as many of us already knew and even more have recently discovered. On the strength of a simple three-song demo, this Arkansas collective took the world of doom by storm, racking up praise from fans and media goons alike. Their cover of Billie Holiday’s “Gloomy Sunday” (itself an interpretation of Hungarian composer Rezso Seress’ suicide song) was one of the most desolate things I’d ever heard this side of Warning, and the other pair of songs showed a startling amount of maturity and untouchable quality; this demo sounded better than 90% of proper albums released in 2010. Fans of the cleaner, more traditional elements of the doomed pantheon caught on quick, and the buzz around Pallbearer grew louder. Sporadic live gigs and rumors of recording kept anticipation high, until finally, it was announced that their debut offering would come courtesy of Profound Lore — and  then, the wait began. Luckily, one of the perks of this whole music writing game is getting to listen to records early (before they leak, even) which is why I only had to endure a few agonizing months of impatience before finding a download link to this creation in my email inbox… and brother, it was worth the wait.

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With 2011 now officially deader than Limp Bizkit’s album sales, it’s time for MetalSucks’ third annual new year preview — Albums That Will Fuck Your Face Off! As with previous years, we won’t be spotlighting all the great releases coming out this year, and we won’t be spotlighting any releases by better-known bands; the way we see it, you already know that groups like Lamb of God, Cannibal Corpse, and Gojira have new albums coming out this year, and there’s nothing we can really tell you about those releases that either a) we haven’t already told you or b) you couldn’t read in any other number of places.

So instead, various inhabitants of the MetalSucks Mansion will post short write-ups spotlighting albums by bands that, even if they aren’t exactly new or unknown, haven’t yet had their break-out release. We believe these albums could be those break-outs.

Look for these posts throughout the week. We hope you enjoy ‘em!

-Axl, Vince, and and Everyone at MetalSucks

A source close to the guitarist told me that Axel Rudi Pell was devastated when Loutallica’s Lulu came along and dethroned ARP’s The Ballads IV as the worst album of 2011. Axel had worked so very, very hard to take great songs like “Holy Diver” and turn them into unlistenable, maudlin mush — but who could have possibly foreseen the genius of Loutallica, who revolutionized the art of drek and took agony to a whole new level?

It was a heartbreaking loss, sure, but Axel Rudi Pell never lies down, never says die. And so, according to Metal Underground, ARP “ has announced that all the recordings for the new LP Circle of the Oath are finished and the mixing and mastering will be done this week.” He’ll have some stiff competition, sure — Emmure are back in the studio, and Limp Bizkit are threatening to release a new album which will make Gold Cobra sound like the first Ramones record — but ARP is confident that, yes, he can put out something an infuriating as Morbid Angel’s remix release. He’s even unveiled the cover art, so we can begin to anticipate the record’s shittiness now. He’s a giver, that Axel Rudi Pell.

Wow. So that looks like a terrible demo some kid would slip me outside of a power metal show I didn’t even wanna go to in the first place. Great work, ARP!!!

Circle of the Oath comes out March 27 on SPV/Steamhammer. I absolutely cannot wait to hear it.

-AR