MetalSucks

Thanks to everyone who downloaded the package of Graphic Novel [GN] songs last week. I’m happy most of you enjoyed the tracks. It’s cool to know people will take the time to check out the music with an open mind. I never said I was the best composer or song writer out there, but I feel I do have a style. I’m always doing my best to refine it. The older you get means the more experiences you have which means your music should evolve into something you can control, as opposed to letting it control you. These particular songs were all composed in a day. Through experimentation, trial and error, and plain passion, you got that download.

I’m working on getting a more professional studio going at some point. Let’s be clear: my recording skills are not my strong side. I’m no Misha Mansoor from Periphery, so I apologize for the (lack of) recording quality.

The songs for the [GN] project are just a color of the ‘voice’ I’ve been spending my whole career trying to perfect. Don’t worry metal heads, I still play metal, just now right now. Which brings me to the subject I’ve wanted to discuss here for a while.

The Evolution Of Deathcore And Why it’s Sweet As Hell

I know the response here for deathcore is a love it or hate it sort of thing. I don’t want to get into that. I’d like to talk about my feelings towards the genre. To say it simply: I fucking LOVE deathcore. I can’t get enough of it.

Seriously.

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Meet Senor Bivins. I read about him this morning on Sergeant D’s Stuff You Will Hate. Bivins posts lots and lots and lots of videos of himself on YouTube doing those vocal covers of deathcore songs that we find so amusing here at the Mansion. And the Sarge is pissed because apparently Bivins gets a lot of pussy from doing it – or, at least, he gets to take photos of himself standing next to semi-cute scene girls making obscene gestures:

It’s not clear to me whether or not he’s actually fucking these chicks or what. If he is getting groupies without even being in a band, then, well, I guess that’s a whole new scam and maybe someday Neil Strauss will write a book about him or something.

ANYWAY, even more interesting is this video of him defending deathcore as “not scene.” Check it out:

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This morning, I received the following e-mail from reader Parker Werley:

“How does a band get to earn the proud badge of having -core in their genre?”

That’s a pretty simple question, but it’s also kind of thought provoking. So I thought maybe we could explore it here a little bit. Because, honestly, I’m not sure that I know what the answer is.

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What the fuck is happening in the world of deathcore? Job for a Cowboy’s Genesis didn’t really sound like Doom, All Shall Perish’s Awaken the Dreamers didn’t really sound like The Price of Existence, Suicide Silence’s No Time to Bleed doesn’t really sound like The Cleansing, and all evidence suggests that Born of Osiris’ A Higher Place will not really sound like The New Reign. Whether you love or hate these bands, there’s no denying that they’re evolving at a rapid pace.

And it looks like we can add Arsonists Get All the Girls to the list. The band has a new song, “Saturnine,” currently streaming on their MySpace page, and while it retains a lot of the Sumeriancore elements we love about the group, it’s a pretty far cry from anything off of The Game of Life. And although all the line-up changes since that album’s release probably have something to do with that, I don’t think there can be any doubt that the band has a creative desire to stretch their wings, too.

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Congratulations to all 10,461 of you who have emailed us about Smashface, the new band featuring Chris Storey formerly of All Shall Perish; you’ve gotten your wish for a MetalSucks post. All Shall Perish are one of the few bands in the deathcore scene we hold in very high regard, and it bummed us out that Storey left. So it’s unsurprising then that Smashface is also top-notch shit. Where All Shall Perish were serious and earnest, Smashface takes a decidely lighter and humorous approach to their music, but it’s all good — the shred is on another fucking level as could be expected, and the composition is all there. Highly worthy of you checking them out right this moment.

BraveWords.com tells us that Storey is also playing shred for Adrian English, whose new record A.D.D. just dropped on the appropriately monikered Shredcore Records. Check it out on Adrian English’s MySpace page. This is more what you’d expect from a modern instrumental shred record… imagine what would happen if John Petrucci got in a room and jammed with the rhythm section of any band on Sumerian Records, and you’ve got the sound nailed. AKA it’s good shit!

-VN

MetalSucks, MetalInjection and BITPOM, in conjunction with EMI (which serves such labels as Century Media, Nuclear Blast, Earache, Candlelight, Season of Mist, Willowtip and Crash Music), are bringing metal to the masses with an extensive “March is Metal Month” campaign with independent retailers across the U.S.

During the “March is Metal Month” campaign, we’ll be running a series of 3 weekly “Show Us Your Metal” contests. To enter, take a picture of yourself at a record store doing something metal; throwing up the horns, making sweet love to a David Lee Roth Crazy From the Heat EP, posing in front of a Beyonce endcap in corpsepaint, buying something that costs $6.66, etc. Be creative! Send all submissions to news AT metalsucks DOT net along with your full name and address and “MARCH IS METAL MONTH” in the email subject line.

Congrats to Jake Kobrin who won last week’s prize, a ridiculously awesome Cynic box set, for the picture at left.

This week’s prize: Signed CDs and posters from Psycroptic and All Shall Perish, courtesy of Nuclear Blast. Send in all entries by the end of Tuesday, March 31st to win!

It may be a new year on the calendar, but we’re still talking about the same stupid shit here at MetalSucks. Here’s where we focused our energies this week:

• Most awesomest metal festival EVARRR! Not to be confused with the most awesomest tours of early 2009.
  
• New music from Cannibal Corpse!!!
• Mastodon counted down to a new website while Trent Reznor counted down to giving away approximately 400 Gigs of HD concert footage for fans to tinker with.
• We questioned Drew Barrymore’s interest in metal and demanded she take off her shirt.
• We spoke with members of All Shall Perish and Job For a Cowboy.
• Mike Schleibaum declared The Crown’s Deathrace King underrated while Dallas claimed music critics are overrated.
• Can’t anyone make a decent heavy metal TV show?
• One Roadrunner Records staffer named MetalSucks.net the #10 best album of 2008.

Later, gators…

Last month my man Vince posted a video of Rusty Cooley shredding like no one has ever shredded before; then, yesterday, the dudes in All Shall Perish said in their interview with Sammy that Rusty “is, hands down, one of the best guitarists on earth.”

Well, I didn’t really know that much about Cooley, so I decided to do some homework and check out his band, Outworld, to see what he was like in a band situation where he’d have to play an actual song rather than just scales (at an admittedly super human speed). As it turns out, Outworld are pretty good – although I’m not over the moon about their vocalist, who I think borders on a parody of a good power metal glass-breaker. Still, I leave it to our beloved peanut gallery to have the last word…

Here’s Outworld’s “Warcry.”

-AR

Standing out in metal is difficult, considering that even the subgenres that splinter off from metal’s whole don’t take long to feel overcrowded. So in an era where bands increasingly have to earn their keep, All Shall Perish worked hard to definitively (and rightfully) make their mark in 2008 amidst the deluge of death metal. The band’s mesh of breakdowns and technical death metal forcefulness wowed many on their latest full length (Awaken the Dreamers) and during their copious touring (including one sponsored by us).

It was before their Providence show on that tour that vocalist Hernan “Eddie” Hermida and bassist Mike Tiner were kind enough to grant us an interview. They seemed to be guys with a good sense of humor about everything, not taking themselves (or anything, really) too seriously during the whole interview. With a dry, absurd wit later blown to bits by their fierce set that evening, the band didn’t seem to typify in person what their music may imply. They’re seemingly just dudes, albeit dudes that play in one of the chief death metal/ hardcore (but certainly not deathcore) bands out there. Eddie and Mike discussed their thoughts on deathcore and their insights into how they compose breakdowns, among other things.

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All Shall Perish just released a montage of various live footage taken from their recent MetalSucks co-sponsored tour with Job For a Cowboy, Hate Eternal (until they dropped off), Animosity and Annotations of An Autopsy. Check out JFAC’s Jonny Davy’s exclusive MetalSucks tour blogs, then watch the live All Shall Perish br00tality unfold below.

-VN

Here’s some crappy quality fan-filmed footage of Job for a Cowboy performing a new song, “Constitutional Masturbation,” during their recent, MetalSucks co-sponsored trek with All Shall Perish, Animosity and Annotations of an Autopsy (and, all too briefly, Hate Eternal). It’s difficult to hear much with the poor audio quality, but that main riff does sound potentially crushing. In any case, there’ll be a new JFAC album within the next twelve months, so we’ll know soon enough.

Read JFAC front man Jonny Davy’s hilarious, MetalSucks-exclusive tour blogs here and here.

-AR

[via Blabbermouth]

We recently asked Job for a Cowboy vocalist Jonny Davy to write a tour blog for the band’s MetalSucks co-sponsored headlining trek with Hate Eternal, All Shall Perish, Animosity and Annotations of an Autopsy. Davy’s second entry is below; in case ya missed it, you can read the first edition here. Enjoy!

Theres that cute little hillbilly everyone loves.

I’m sorry that all my stories have to deal with being drunk. Our current sound guy is a little hillbilly. He obsessively talks about guns, hunting and fishing. He sleeps in the middle of the woods down south. Litterally. He jumps on a boat, smokes pot and goes fishing for 10 hours a day every weekend. He sits at home and guts the animals he’s hunt and shot down while drinking moonshine. Literrally. He introduced us to Wild Turkey 101. A bourbon with one hell of a powerful kick as it washes down your throat. Its already made Jack Daniels, Jameson and Jim Bean taste like mere diet soda. Well, about a week ago we were hopped up on the damned thing. Burping up flavors Turkey whiskey and stumbling around in our hotel room. Brent was drunk, he ended up attempting to make coffee through the toaster, which inevidably made the toaster short circuit and break. Charn, our drummer decided to throw a flower pot down the hallway and break the TV remote. Which is already annoying. Then, Bobby attempted to call for some late night Dominos pizza. They were closed, he broke the phone in anger. Our tour manager then spent the entire morning trying to wake us up by calling the hotel phone… which was obviously broken.

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We recently asked Job for a Cowboy vocalist Jonny Davy to write a tour blog for the band’s MetalSucks co-sponsored headlining trek with Hate Eternal, All Shall Perish, Animosity and Annotations of an Autopsy. Davy’s short but giggle-inducing blog is below. Enjoy!

ITS RAINING TEARS!

Well, another tour… Again, in the freezing cold. So far we’ve been lucky, no snow. No worries of “VAN FLIP/NO CARE/FIRST POST.” Well, Rutan’s kidney is fucked up, forcing Hate Eternal to drop off of our current tour. My only comment for Rutan is this: “Get better, fix you kidney and party on Wayne.”

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Deathcore’s meteoric fall from subgenre of a subgenre to a word on par with “pedophile” in metal is almost comic in nature. Though this is by no means its first year of existence, it is its first year of prominence. While the violent shift in attitude could be attributed to the “everything popular sucks” mindset, it can also be contributed to the fact that, with such prominence, deathcore bands are already starting to get lazy. But either way, at a recent stop in Providence, RI, the Metal Sucks co-sponsored Job for a Cowboy/All Shall Perish/Animosity/Annotations of an Autopsy (sadly, no Hate Eternal on this stop, and my best wishes to Erik Rutan) tour, no band was willing to be tagged with the label, no matter how firmly they resided at the intersection of Death and ’Core. And despite the fact that deathcore may be old news in the metal blogosphere, there was no shortage of enthusiasm for it, reserved especially for the show’s headliners.

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By now you may have heard that Hate Eternal have been forced to drop off their slot on the MetalSucks co-sponsored trek with Job for a Cowboy, All Shall Perish, Animosity, and Anatomy of an Autopsy, because guitarist/vocalist/producer/all around main dude Erik Rutan is in the hospital.

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The MetalSucks posse and Decibel Magazine are psyched to present one of this fall’s sickest touring lineups; Job For a Cowboy, Hate Eternal, All Shall Perish, Animosity and Annotations of An Autopsy. Woah; even if you’re not a fan of every single band on the bill, that is one hell of a lineup and surely there’s at least two or three bands you can get down with. We’re also giving away one free pair of tickets to see the tour in each city! That’s 29 free pairs of tickets the fine folks at Metal Blade are offering up to you; at the price of free, how can you refuse?? Five lucky fans will also get a poster autographed by members of Job For a Cowboy. Click here to enter.

Check out this nifty widget as well, which features audio and video from every band on the bill. Listen to / watch it here, embed it on your MySpace page, Facebook page, blog, or just stare at it ’cause it looks purty. Your call. See you in the pit!

Lord knows we are completely sick of talking about Metallica here at the MS Mansion despite the fact that a Metallica post is automatically good for 50-100 comments and we love watching you all duke it out. But damn, the fact that Metallica’s Death Magnetic sits atop the Soundscan charts for the 3rd week in a row, having moved over 130,000 units this week and 500,000 units in its abridged first week (due to a Friday release date), is certainly worth breaking our self-imposed Metallica hiatus for. In other weeks this year 131,000 wouldn’t be enough to tally a #1, but that’s part of the game; this week’s #2 Demi Lovato (who???) shifted only 88,000 copies. And any way you slice it, 131,000 is a damn respectable number.

Apparently Metallica is still relevant. And apparently nearly 1 million people think Death Magnetic is good enough to pay for it. Shitty mixing job be damned.

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The chill of fall is in the air but the gossip mill never cools off at the MetalSucks Mansion. This week’s notables and quotables included:

• Original guitarist Peter Wichers returned to Soilwork and ex-At All Cost guitarist Mike Carrigan replaced Kris Norris in Darkest Hour; we rejoiced that great Soilwork music will once again be made and that Mike’s got a job. But the good was tempered by the bad as Christian Alvestam left Scar Symmetry and Spineshank reunited. There is no justice.
• Winds of Plague’s Kristen Randall showed the world her bewbs!
• We reviewed solid new albums by Into Eternity, Enslaved and All Shall Perish, and waxed ecstatic about Burst, Vince’s new proverbial wet dream.
• New videos from The Human Abstract and Amon Amarth are unbelievably epic.
• A scandal erupted involving the audio quality of Death Magnetic, alternate Guitar Hero mixes, and the now infamous “Better, Shorter, Cut” abridged edition.
• Vince & Axl [almost] reveal their true identities.

See ya next week.

As you’ve probably heard, All Shall Perish’s new album, Awaken the Dreamers, is slower and less brutal than its predecessors, Hate.Malice.Revenge and The Price of Existence – but it’s less brutal the way getting punched in the face is ultimately somewhat preferable to getting kicked in the nuts. This album is still heavy enough to make the listener feel like Billy Milano is sitting on his lap, and to bitch about its lack of br00tality is to be too close-minded for one’s own good.

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Our always reliable pals over at Metal Injection posted this delightful Job for a Cowboy viral video:

MetalSucks is co-sponsoring JFAC’s fall tour with Hate Eternal, All Shall Perish, Animosity and Annotations of an Autopsy. Get a complete list of tour dates after the jump.

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