Alright, so I don’t know if anyone remembers this — hell, I didn’t remember it until I did search of the MS archives — but more than three years ago, Korn “guitarist” Munky announced the formation of Fear and the Nervous System, a new supergroup featuring Bad4Good‘s Brooks Wackerman and, INCREDIBLY DISAPPOINTINGLY, Faith No More’s Billy Gould.

So. I’ve actually been listening to a LOT of Faith No More for the past week. I couldn’t figure out the origin of the sudden, uncontrollable urge to just put my FNM on “shuffle” and revel in its genius, until I realized it’s almost the one year anniversary of last summer’s glorious FNM reunion shows in Brooklyn. My brain is funny like that; it always recalls anniversaries, even if I’m not consciously aware of them.

And now Fear and the Nervous System have actually released a song, “Choking Victim.” And it’s fucking terrible. So my week has now been like the equivalent of Billy Gould taking me to a secluded private getaway for a long, romantic weekend, and then, right be fore we leave, spitting in my eye, grabbing me, shoved my nose directly into his ass, and farted.

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Believe it or not, folks still buy CDs. I know… I’m shocked too. But the weekly Soundscan numbers released by Neilsen actually do include digital downloads too. I know what you’re thinking… people still pay for music? I s’pose so. Here are the most recent week’s charting hard rock and metal releases, with my own snarky commentary, natch. Check those tags down yonder for a list of covered releases.

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Bad Religion are like the Slayer of punk; for the most part they release the same record over and over again, and that’s just the way the band’s fans want it. If Bad Religion ever tried to “branch out” or “experiment” I’m sure they’d be met with strong rebellion, which is kind of ironic given the supposed punk ethos the band’s fans live by (same for Slayer… but I digress). Really though, would we want it any other way? Just as you want your new Slayer record to sound like fuckin’ Slayer, all you really want from a new Bad Religion album is for it to sound like good ol’ Bad Religion, which is to say full-throttle four-chord punk songs with catchy, anthemic choruses, layered “ooo ahhh” vocal harmonies and Greg Graffin’s highbrow socio-political lyrics.

I mention this, of course, because Bad Religion’s new album The Dissent of Man comes out next Tuesday, September 28th.

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1994 was a year of great musical discovery for me. Like most youth, my main sources for music were MTV and the radio, but with majors rolling in dough and taking chances that’d be deemed suicidal in today’s record industry climate those media were actually pretty decent ways to find new music. Since my recently inherited MetalSucks Time Machine 1988 Honda Accord has only a tape deck, I raided the tape collection that I still have at Mama Neilstein’s apartment and uncovered a mix that I’d compiled by sitting next to the radio with my finger on the “record” button. Listening back to my mix there were some surprising strikes that proved even at that age I knew what I was doing — songs by Down, Corrosion of Conformity, Pantera, Killing Joke and more — and yeah, some misses too that I won’t bother to enumerate here (ok, I’ll give you one: Presidents of the United States of America. LUMP!). But can you imagine hearing a band like Corrosion of Conformity on mainstream, primetime radio in 2010? Hard to imagine there was ever a time.

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As one of the chief riff providers for swaggercore titans Every Time I Die, Andy Williams takes pride in making the discordant into catchy. For a perfect example of this, look no further than the band’s latest (MetalSucks-approved) album, New Junk Aesthetic. Distilling the band’s decade-plus essence into a tight half hour, it’s a satisfying mix of thunderous heaviness and easily the most appealing material the band have put to tape. But while he’s often overshadowed by vocalist Keith Buckley’s relentless wiseassery, it’s his and Jordan Buckley’s Skynard-by-way-of-Dillinger-Escape-Plan guitar work that make the band stand out and ultimately worthwhile.

A self-described “chatty Cathy,” Andy Williams was remarkably frank and refreshingly earnest in a recent interview with MetalSucks on the eve of the release of New Junk Aesthetic. Among other things, he discussed why he can listen to the new album and none of the band’s other material, his thoughts on the new Converge record, the changing landscape of the scene he came up in, and life over at ETID’s new label, Epitaph.

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Just because it’s short doesn’t mean it can’t kick your fucking ass. Eighteen and a half minutes after I started listening to their new album Bearing & Distance (Level Plane Records), it ended; so I simply listened to it again.

Through those 18 minutes and the course of 15 tracks — 5 of which are under a minute and the longest of which is 2:08 — California’s Ghostlimb proved that they’re doing something really fucking cool and different. I can’t quite put a finger on their entire palette of influences because there’s a really strong hardcore flavoring, and frankly I just don’t have the musical vocabulary to go there. But fuck it, at the risk of making myself look really stupid and non-versed in the history of punk and hardcore (this is true), I’ll try: Minor Threat, Bad Religion (on coke), Paint It Black, and even NYC’s Wetnurse, but with big, clear production Matt Bayles would be proud of and a whack-you-in-the-nuts metal sensibility that’s also hard to place. Think a faster, non-stop alcohol-fueled Bronx, blending anthemic punk chord progressions through highly overdriven Marshalls and some dude passionately screaming his fucking lungs out on top of it as if he had a fist shoved up his ass and singing these songs was the only way to get it out.

Find out for yourself and check out Ghostlimb on MySpace.

-VN

(four out of five horns)