This month of mega-releases continues with the latest offerings from Alestorm, Isis, A Pale Horse Named Death, and more. Get the deets on each and everyone of ‘em from our man Vic Vaughn after the jump!

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• Aliases, the new band featuring SikTh’s sickly talented guitarist Pin, have a new album called Safer Than Reality coming August 15th via Basick Records. Check the new song “What’s Left For Us?” above, courtesy MS reader Luke Friebel (of Picture It In Ruins).
• Obscura guitarist Christian Muenzer — who many of you thought should’ve been included in our Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists list — has a new solo shred record called Timewarp. Stream it in full at Christian Muenzer’s Bandcamp, then come back here and tell us how much we suck for not including him on our list. (Thanks: Tim Meyer)
• A Pale Horse Named Death are streaming their entire new album And Hell Will Follow Me at Metal Insider. We premiered a track from the album a couple of weeks back, and I gotta say, this record is really, really good. It’s a grower, for sure. It’s the best of Type O Negative’s moodiness and Alice In Chains’ alt-doom all rolled into one extremely depressing package.

-VN

Of course when you set out to make a list like, say, the one we’re doing right now, of The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, you are bound to piss a lot of people off — that just comes with the job.

But I always find it hilarious HOW those people get pissed off. For example, this week I saw a lot of complaints that the guitar players we’ve been selecting aren’t “modern.” And I can’t believe we have to fucking define the word “modern” for some of you idiots, but apparently we do. So:

So… which one of you jackasses would like to call up Alex Skolnick or Vernon Reid or Adam Jones and let them know they’re antiquated and obsolete? ‘Cause I saw Testament and Living Colour and Tool live just last year, and I would not want to make that call. Just because those dudes have been playing this game for awhile doesn’t mean their best days are behind them.

My point simply being: I don’t care if you hate our choices. That’s fine. But at least try to hate our choices based on an argument that makes sense, y’know?

And on that note, here are other ways we entertained ourselves this week:

• We debuted new music from A Pale Horse Named Death and Oakhelm.
• We checked out the latest releases from From Exile, Godstopper, and Cruachan.
• We wondered which is better, old music or new music?
• We philosophized about Google’s new cloud service.
• We fretted that metal may soon be blamed for terrorism.
• We got excited about The Faceless’ new demo.
• We bemoaned the current state of In Flames.
• We wept because Dave Grohl is not going to be on the new Mastodon album after all.
• We enjoyed a vegetarian cooking lesson from a dude in corpse paint.
• We questioned the logic of the new Avenged Sevenfold video.

Next week we unveil numbers fifteen through eleven on our guitar player list; the average age of those five musicians is thirty-one, whereas the average age of this week’s selections was forty-two. So maybe you can go back to being upset because you think they suck, not because you think they’re too old to be “modern.”

-AR

And Hell Will Follow Me is a sad, sad, sad album. One can only speculate on the source of the album’s lyrical themes of death, despair, drug use and depression given A Pale Horse Named Death mastermind Sal Abruscato’s (also of Life of Agony) affiliation with Type O Negative… but again, one can only speculate. The music is certainly reminiscent of Type O — dark and moody — although it’s decidedly less gothy and more rocky. In more ways than one I’d liken it to Type O meets Alice in Chains; the music has that same sort of depressing, yet churning AIC plod, and Abruscato’s voice certainly calls Staley’s to mind at times.

Sal’s partner in crime on And Hell Will Follow Me is Matt Brown, sound engineer extraordinaire and guitarist of fellow NY band Seventh Void. Matt knocked it out of the park here; this album sounds excellent. Type O drummer / Seventh Void bandmate Johnny Kelly plays drums.

Listen to album track “Serial Killer” below; it’s about as upbeat and rocky a track as this album has to offer. Stream “Heroin Train” over at SkullsNBones for another taste of the album.

I’ve been so caught up in the Unsigned and Unholy thing lately that I’ve left a few signed bands on the table that are well-deserving of the ears of MetalSucks readers. So, without further ado:

• Chickenhawk: I wasn’t expecting much from a band named Chickenhawk, but these guys completely rip. They’ve got the post-hardcore-meets-metal vibe of bands like Converge, Cancer Bats or Kvelertak, so if those names mean anything to do you ought to check them out right quick.
• Primitive Weapons: These Brooklynites just signed to Shinebox Recordings, and they’d actually make a good touring match with Chickenhawk; they’re a little bit noisier and a little less rock/metal-y, but no less talented.
• A Pale Horse Named Death: New band featuring ex-Type O Negative / Life of Agony drummer Sal Abruscato, another Brooklyn boy, collaborating with producer, engineer and musician Matt Brown. The result is a band that has sonic elements of the aforementioned (more so Type O than Life of Agony) but has its own brand of dark melancholy too.