MetalSucks

So the other day I was walking down 34th Street, and who did I see, Torah in hand, davening outside of a DMV Express but MetalSucks’ own esteemed Rebbe Anton Mofo’n Oyvey! Now obviously I didn’t want to disturb the man during his holy time, so I figured I’d catch up with him at the synagogue in the East Wing of the MetalSucks Mansion for our regular Shabbat dinner.

But then I realized that both Scion Rock Fest AND South by Southwest are coming up this week, and……could it be that Metal’s Most Brutal Rabbi will be hitting the road and rocking out with Vince & I for one or both of these adventures?!?

Come to think of it — Vince did tell me to buy a plane ticket to Columbus, Ohio for Scion and another ticket BACK from Austin, Texas 10 daze later without making mention of how we would be getting from one to the other. “We’ll figure it out”, he said, in typical Vinzian fashion.

Hmmm, I wonder…

Jews in Space? Nah — Heebz on the HIGHway!!

-KW

Based on the e-mails we’ve gotten today, it would seem that a lot of you are frickin’ CRANKY that we’ve made no mention of the fact that Dark Tranquillity are working on a new album, Into the Void. So here’s part 1 of their in-the-studio video series. The album will be out sometime in February or March on Century. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it will sound like European melodic death metal. But I could be wrong. It could be a rap metal album. That would really throw people for a loop, eh?

-AR

So I’ve been living in the UK for about four months now, and have managed to take in quite a lot of this “culture” thing they’re so fond of over here. I’ve been to nine countries, eight major metal festivals, and a handful of cities in Ol’ Blighty itself; I’ve gate-crashed hotel parties in Norway with the drummer of Swallow the Sun, stage-dived into a sea of muddy grind freaks in the Czech Republic, gotten roaring drunk with Wolves in the Throne Room in the Netherlands, met Gaahl’s boyfriend in France, gotten lost in Rome, watched Electric Wizard blow an amp in Manchester, lost my mind to Eyehategod at Hellfest, seen Manowar (‘nuff said there) – and that was just the first couple months. Between all the metal, mud, bruises, whiskey, calimocho, hard cider, and terrifying Czech liquor (Becherovka and Fernet are no fucking joke, even if it is Kevin Sharp and Danny Herrera pouring you a shot), I realized that, somehow, something was still missing.

To my immense chagrin, I had yet to take that all-too-necessary pilgrimage up through the Black Country and into the Unholy Land itself – to Birmingham, England. Every metaller worth his leather (and several million other music fans besides) knows exactly why this unimpressive, coal-smudged city matters so much. Birmingham is the ancestral home of heavy metal. Everything – whether it be doom, black metal, powerviolence, or even the plague that is deathcore – everything came from here. The famed Mermaid Pub provided a fertile breeding ground for extreme metal, nestled as it was in a dodgy part of town where the cops ignored the punkers and longhairs milling around out front as the early rumblings of a deadly new sound thundered away upstairs The city itself was the original stomping ground of the dirty sexy hard rock’n’roll of Led Zeppelin, the NWOBHM gods in Judas Priest, the crusty proto-grind of Sore Throat, the scummy grindcore forefathers of Napalm Death, the industrial noise terror of Godflesh, and the one and only BLACK FUCKING SABBATH.

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