Whether you think Avenged Sevenfold are the best thing since UYI-era Guns N’ Roses or you think they’re a bunch of total flaming Labontes, you’re gonna appreciate this video for what it is: one of the best moments of young Miguel’s life that he’ll cherish forever and ever and ever. Miguel went to see Avenged Sevenfold in Puerto Rico this past weekend and brought with him a sign that said “My wish is to play drums,” then worked his way all the way up to the front so the band would see it. Not only did the band see it, but M. Shadows decided to invite Miguel up on stage to play a song with the band, “Second Heartbeat,” as chosen by Miguel himself. Even more awesome than the fact that the band allowed this go down at all is the fact that Miguel totally nailed it — on someone else’s kit, in front of over 10,000 fans, with Avenged fucking Sevenfold… not one mistake! A hearty golf clap is in order.

-VN

Portnoy (left) with Tom Morello, John goddamn Sykes, That Metal Show host Eddie Trunk, and Doug Pinnick of King’s X

There are days when it seems like ex-Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy is underachieving (cough Adrenaline Mob), but the wider view reveals a hard-working guy who cares greatly about quality music. His mistakes are mistakes (singing on DT records, 12-stepper lyrics, AX7), and his post-DT career so far is basically frantic, low-confidence base-covering, but hey that’s the reality of a messy break-up. You get a little crazy and scared. But with time and patience, Portnoy will land another Images And Words-sized creative success. This is my belief.

So imagine how smugly right I feel about that belief when it was announced Monday that Portnoy is pairing with hungry, mega-talented ace John fucking Sykes (Blue Murder, Whitesnake). Bonerz!
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Okay, so my headline probably makes this story sound a little weirder than it actually is. But only a little bit.

Everyone remember Brian Haner, a.k.a. “Guitar Guy” or “Papa Gates?” He plays guitar for Jeff Dunham (yes, that Jeff Dunham), occasionally releases his own not-very-funny comedy videos, and, perhaps most interesting to metal fans, sired Brian Haner, Jr., a.k.a. Avenged Sevenfold’s Synyster Gates, a.k.a. the twenty-third top modern metal guitarist.

So now, perhaps enjoying the extra time in the spotlight his son’s fame has afforded him, or perhaps just looking for an excuse to spend some quality time with the fruit of his loins, Haner the Elder has recruited Haner the Younger to appear in his latest music video. Which is for a song called “Blow-Up Doll.” And is about a man and his blow-up doll. And the two Haners pass one another with their respective blow-up dolls on their way to their respective seedy motel rooms, in which they will fuck those blow-up dolls. And those rooms are right next to each so other.

So, yeah, there’s no weird subtext there or anything.

What a great bonding moment this must have been for the Haner family. “Son, I wrote a song about making love to an inanimate object, and I’d really like for you to be in the music video!” “Okay, pop! That sounds great! Count me in!”

-AR

[via The PRP]

Is producer Mike Elizondo a weird match for Mastodon? Do you foresee Mastodon jamz with funky beats and cloying catchphrases? Is this pairing the result of label meddling, artist contrarianism, and/or ambition? Will Elizondo grapple with the Mastodon sensibility or is he a mute concession to a returns-hungry record label?

Mastodon’s triumphant 2009 album  Crack The Skye was helmed by Brendan O’Brien, a super hands-on producer. Far from the type to cover his face with a newspaper and fall asleep at the mixing board, dude will play on your jam, co-write it, and arrange it. He gets up in there. It’s like having an extra band member who can play instruments that require study and who owns a studio.

So, it may mean something that Mastodon’s forthcoming fifth album will be produced by a maker of vacuous pop music for Alanis Morissette, Pink, and Maroon 5. A hip hop beat button-pusher! A bass player!! Well, that’s Mike Elizondo, whose recent track record includes timeless greats Switchfoot and Avenged Sevenfold. That’s the guy charged with shepherding the next Mastodon classic. That’s him above left!

-ADF

I get kinda bummed when we hafta write about tours with no dates yet, because it seems like kind of a cocktease — what’s the point of getting excited when you don’t even know if the trek is coming to your town yet? — but these two tours both seem pretty noteworthy. And so:

• Avenged Sevenfold will headline this year’s Rockstar Energy Drink Uproar Festival. Sevendust are also on the tour. And I’m going to pretend that that’s the entire line-up. Yep, just A7X and Sevendust. Two of the best modern pop metal bands touring together, with no one else. What a great bill!
• Firewind are FINALLY gonna do a proper North American headlining tour, with Arsis, White Wizzard, and Nightrage in tow. Not only am I stoked that Firewind are actually touring, but I think it’s really cool of them to have a diverse range of acts as their support. I bet these shows will be a lotta fun.

And we’ll post dates for at least one of these tours as soon as we get ‘em.

-AR

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

The Revolver Golden Gods Awards will air on VH1 later this month (or something… I know we got a press release but I was too lazy to read it), and it will be interesting to see that, because I was there, but I didn’t actually see very much of the show. I saw the schmuck from Asking Alexandria drop his mic two seconds into “Youth Gone Wild,” and I saw some of Avenged Sevenfold’s performances with Duff McKagan and Vinnie Paul, and I saw enough of Chris Jericho performing “For Whom the Bell Tolls” to consider throwing myself over the balcony and ending the awards in spectacular fashion (sometimes, sacrifices must be made for the greater good). But by and large I was too busy snorting coke in the bathroom with a girl who fucking swore to me that it wasn’t a herpes sore that lying bitch! to be bothered.

So one thing I had absolutely no idea even transpired was the below montage paying tribute to the five guys who died in the past year that are relevant to the readers of Revolver, which is to say, not Phil Vane or Frankie Sparcello.

But I shouldn’t be a jerk about it, it’s really a very touching video.

-AR

[via Metal Underground]

Remember the adorable video for Pantera’s “Cowbells Is My Name,” where they had those kids pretending to be the band? Well, “So Far Away,” the new video from Avenged Sevenfold (featuring the twenty-third best modern metal guitarist, Synyster Gates) is kinda like that, except it takes itself way, way, way seriously.

It also does not adhere to the rules of logic. Let’s see if we can try to figure this out:

• There are five kids, who presumably grow-up to be Avenged Sevenfold.
• In their garage while they rehearse, there are only four kids, apparently because M. Shadows wasn’t jamming with his friends at that point, or was excused from rehearsals since he’s the singer, or whatever.
• At both the :22 second mark and the 2:06 mark, four of the kids dissolve into the band today, including the kid who is clearly supposed to be The Rev. So, in other words, according to the world of this video, Kid The Rev  morphed into another band member prior to Adult The Rev passing away. Either that, or another member of the band used to play drums and then switched instruments, although that’s really not clear from this clip.
• Then, when the band is playing the song in the present in their rehearsal space or whatever the hell that room is supposed to be, there is no one playing drums, despite the fact that the song features drums. This is either meant to be a tribute to The Rev, or a message to current drummer Arin Ilejay that he’s not yet worthy of being in an Avenged Sevenfold music video.

I get that the band is trying to honor their fallen brother, but, really, this is just silly. And there was an easier-than-easy fix, too, which would have been to just have five kids, and when they dissolve into their adult versions, remove one of them. That would have made sense, and it would have added an extra sense of melancholy to the proceedings. But I guess that would have taken too much thought on director Wayne Isham’s part.

Good song, though.

Let’s pretend for a moment that Avenged Sevenfold don’t dress like a bunch of clown-faced goons that fell off the back of a truck carrying clothes rejected from Hot Topic. Let’s also pretend that they don’t indulge in ridiculous stage names that make ICP’s Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent Jay look like members of Mensa. Finally, let’s agree that music should be judged on its merit alone, not on a band’s tweeny fanbase. There… so how do Avenged Sevenfold actually sound?

Now the shut the fuck up and RECOGNIZE: Synyster Gates (aka Brian Haner Jr.) is a ridiculously good guitar player.

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Teenagers are always doing stupid, embarrassing shit in public, especially the ones who listen to metal. One of the most popular (and potentially humiliating) things a kid can do is enter their high school’s talent show, in particular if they make the mistake of playing a metal song in hopes of impressing their peers. For example, when I was in 9th or 10th grade, I was in a horrible band that played a Black Flag song in front of our school. Nobody thought it was cool, they just laughed at us. Thank god Youtube didn’t exist then, like it does for these dumb kids who embarrassed themselves by trying to be cool in front of their peers.

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It should surprise no one that Axl and I are huge Avenged Sevenfold fans — they’re only one of the best pop metal bands of the past decade! Duh. People who call Avenged Sevenfold gay are gay.

So we’re pretty excited about the fact that there’s a new A7X song called “Not Ready to Die” on the webernets today, released concurrently as a single with the new Call of Duty DLC video game. The band has been posting a series of cryptic message via their Twitter account over the past few days… I can’t be bothered to fill in the blanks, especially given the fact that the riddle has already been solved in the form of today’s new song, but you can take a look at those messages here.

Jam “Not Ready to Die” above. It sounds like Avenged Sevenfold, so while A7X fans will surely enjoy it I wouldn’t expect any haters to suddenly be converted.

-VN

Thanks: Christopher Russo

The Foo Fighters are #1 for the 2nd week in a row; I have yet to hear Wasting Light but everything Dave Grohl puts out is quality and the two songs I’ve heard so far are both slam dunks. Conversely, Hollywood Undead are #2 for the second week in a row; can’t win ‘em all, I guess, but at least they’re not #1.

Elsewhere Winds of Plague, Periphery and Loaded had solid debuts, while pretty much any band that was on Revolver’s Golden Gods Awards show experienced a nice little sales bump. Numbers after the fold.

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Avenged Sevenfold and Vinnie Paul, “Mouth For War”

Matt Cerone over at MetsBlog.com does these daily “the least you should know” wrap-ups after every game, which this season have essentially all boiled down to “they sucked.” In that spirit, here’s an abbreviated report from the Revolver Golden Gods Awards in L.A., which Axl and I had the privilege of attending and which, unlike the Mets, most definitely did not suck. We had a rip-roaring good time and got rip-roaringly drunk before realizing that oh yeah, this is L.A. and you have to fucking drive home. What a nightly buzzkill, literally! Thanks, Axl, for driving my drunk ass home.

The least you should know about the 2011 Revolver Golden Gods Awards before we have time to properly recap the event:

• Avenged Sevenfold were easily the most popular band there; most kids at the show were wearing their shirts. Their performance was fantastic and even converted a few industry non-believers I spoke with; in addition to a “hit and run” set of the band’s most popular songs, they played “It’s So Easy” with Duff McKagan and “Mouth For War” with Vinnie Paul (video above).
• Alice Cooper played very early in the night but rocked nonetheless. (video after the jump)
• Vince Neil: not sober.
• Asking Alexandria frontman: definitely not sober yet. Lost his mic under the drum riser 10 seconds into “Youth Gone Wild” with Sebastian Bach (video after the jump).
• Sebastian Bach: still awesome.
• Sebatian Bach to Dave Grohl, upon running into him backstage: “Hey! Dave Grohl!” [hugs]
• Rammstein vocalist Till Lindemann was hilariously hitting on every woman in sight, including L.A. metal sorta-celeb Metal Sanaz.
• Other backstage celeb sightings: Dino Cazares (who Tweeted “where’s the baby?” at us), Dave Navarro (who still looks 20 years old), Rob Zombie, Alan Robert of Life of Agony (mega-cool dude), Taylor Momsen, Pat Smear, Taylor Hawkins, Sasha Grey, Jenna Haze, Steven Adler, dude from Puddle of Mudd, William fucking Shatner, the ghost of Dime.
• Black Veil Brides winning “Best New Band.” Lulz!

Fun videos after the jump! More extensive coverage coming soon.

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Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (sometimes) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

This week’s query was suggested by reader Yevgeniy Reznichenko:

IS ELITISM IN METAL A GOOD THING OR A BAD THING?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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Brian Haner, a.k.a. “Guitar Guy” or “Papa Gates,” is the father of Brian Haner, Jr., a.k.a. “Synyster Gates,” of Avenged Sevenfold fame. Like his son, the elder Haner is a guitar player — currently, I’m told, he’s rocking out with… Jeff Dunham. Yep. The dude with the puppet. Awesome, I know.

ANYWAY, Mr. Haner has now made “Saturday,” the one-bajillionth viral response to Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” It really is amazing how quickly this shit happens today; “viral” almost doesn’t do it justice. And all this “Friday” nonsense has happened so very fast that I’m afraid I’m already over it.

So while I appreciate, in theory at least, Papa Gates’ dark sense of humor, and the fact that he’s probably cooler than most dads (or more pathetic, maybe, depending on how you look at it I guess)… well, frankly, this is about as funny as you’d expect from a dude who spends his time working with Jeff Dunham.

-AR

Thanks to Carlos B. for the tip.

After listening to Psycho’s female blowtorch, Penny Torture, and Ava Inferi’s haunting distaff elemental, Carmen Susana Simões, I realized it’s time we just chill and admit that women are all-around better at this metal-singing thing.

Is this mad exaggeration? It feels like that when I’m away from an MPEG player, but then I listen to those two radically different bands, to Psycho’s primal-scream old school death or Ava Inferi’s doomed-out, gothy whatsit, and it feels I’m not over-reaching, I’m underselling.

And it’s not just two superior releases (Ava Inferi’s Onyx and Psycho’s Pain Addict Pigs). It’s just become impossible to ignore the fact that females are not only doing equal or better work in the same genre jobs as male counterparts, they’re also making metal records that go places no male on Earth — none, nada, zip-ol-lina — could go. That 2011’s best metal so far — Subrosa’s No Help for the Mighty Ones — is an almost all-femme effort of relentless pan-genre awesomeness only adds arsenic and new lace to my argumentative cake.

All of which may have the reader thinking, “You do realize, you silly person, that you’ve just written off the work of one half the human race.”

To which I say, “Yeah, well, I guess I’m pimping a little irony here, since that’s business as usual with women and the metal press. But irony aside, please bear with me.”

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I had a math tutor in high school who was, to put it mildly, way creepy. He spent as much time trying to get me to talk about the hot girls in my class (many of whom he was also tutoring) as he did teaching me anything, and he was always excited to attend events he was way too old for — like this one time he somehow wrangled a ticket to the MTV Video Music Awards, and it was like, “Dude, you are old, gray, and bald. You should not be at the fucking MTV Awards. I’m sixteen and I don’t wanna go to the MTV Awards.”

I mention it because the last time I saw Avenged Sevenfold, when they were touring behind their self-titled album, I felt like that dude. I freely admit to being an A7X fan, and the band put on a good show and I was happy to see them, but I looked around and Vince and I were the oldest people there by, like, a lot. It was fucking embarrassing. I could practically hear the scene kids whispering, “Hey, who invited the fucking olds?”

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I was thinking the other day about how some bands make a lot of money even though they always get bad reviews and it seems like nobody likes them. Like how everybody is all “I H8 DEATHCORE/METALCORE;;;ALL THE BANDS SOUND THE SAME;H8 U SUISIDE SILENCE;;H8 U ATTACK ATTACK,” and then they are like “U SHOULD LISTEN TO THIS BAND BECAUSE THEY ARE DOING SOMETHING REALLY ORIGINAL AND UNIQUE” and link to some obscure band I have never heard of. I guess it is cool to be original if you are OK with being a poor artist, but sometimes I think it’s stupid to be “original.” I think it is smarter to wait until someone else invents something, then after they make it popular, copy them (only do it a little better so you get more popular than the band who invented it).

I am going to list some bands who were stupid, because they were the ones who invented something that other people copied — metalcore, djent, and other popular styles of metal. Most of these bands were really good, but because they were one of the first bands to play that style of metal, nobody liked them and they didn’t make any money. I feel bad for them, but I want to share their stories here so you don’t make the same mistakes they did!!

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Well, here’s an anticlimactic conclusion to a dramatic story.

Avenged Sevenfold have announced that Arin Ilejay, formerly of the Christian band Confide, will be taking Mike Portnoy’s spot behind the drum kit for their upcoming tour dates. The announcement does not say that Ilejay is a permanent member of the band, but I’d imagine if he kicks ass on the tour, they’ll scoop him up. I mean, they have to give SOMEONE the gig eventually, right?

Honestly, I’d never heard of Confide until just now, but I’m not encouraged by this music video:

So that sucks.

Ilejay was apparently recommended by A7X’s drum tech, Mike “The Sack” Fasano, who has previously hit the skins for such illustrious acts as, uh, Warrant. Which almost makes me wonder why they didn’t just hire him, but whatevs. They probably felt like since they lost a Reverend they needed a Christian, and, voila, Ileljay got the job. Yeah, that’s a completely logical explanation, right?

Anyways, I guess we’ll see how this pans out…

-AR

So 2011 is officially underway! I mean, we’re two full weeks in — time to stop accidentally writing “2010″ as the date on shit, y’know? We started to preview some albums we’re stoked about, and will continue to do so next week. In the meantime, here’s some other fun crap we did this week:

• The Human Abstract’s A.J. Minette continued his discussion regarding the merits of creative limitation.
• We debuted new music by Deicide, Ulcerate, Owen Hart, and Roger Miret.
• We also reviewed the new Owen Hart album.
• We played a metal edition of “Marry, Fuck, Kill” with both chicks and d00dz.
• We checked out some awesome pictures from Vince and the metalgf’s vacation to Amsterdam and Paris.
• We joined the Scotty Griffin Fanclub.
• We confirmed that Tool are the coolest band ever.
• We felt bad for Mike Portnoy.
• We were upset by Wrest’s arrest for sexual assault and domestic battery.
• And while it was news to us until we heard it from Rush Limbaugh, we were apparently responsible for the Tucson shootings.

Next week brings more debuts, more interviews, and more general Suckitude. See ya then.

-AR