MetalSucks

Ever heard that Behemoth have breaks built into their set so they can run off stage and do some corpse paint touch-ups? To be fair, I’m not sure if the person who told me that was being honest or just joshin’ me, but it makes sense – the band definitely runs off stage from time to time, leaving the crowd to listen to pre-taped orchestral apocalyptic goodness.

True or not, it doesn’t change the fact that Behemoth absolutely crushed in their too-brief set on this past summer’s Rockstar Mayhem Yadda Yadda tour, or the fact that we were looking forward to seeing them do a proper headlining set. So now they’ve finally announced a tour – with Septic fucking Flesh, no less – and it’s hitting NYC the same night as the BTBAM/Cynic/Devin Townsend/Scale the Summit Orgasm Tour. I don’t know what rocket scientists set that up, but now metal fans in our area will have a tough decision to make. We are going to the Orgasm Tour, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish there were multiple mes, like in that awful Michael Keaton movie.

ANYWAY, here are dates for the Behemoth tour. We envy those of you who can make it.

Click to read more…

In no particular order…

Click to read more…

These are some of my favorite producers and mixers for heavy music… It’s a challenging genre, and these guys are great in my opinion.

Click to read more…

Not only is Behemoth’s Nergal a country singer with no sense of humor, but apparently he’s also a commercial star in his native Poland. I haven’t the foggiest idea what these clips are about or what’s being said in them, but they are automatically fucking hilarious by way of Nergal’s presence. Thanks to MS reader “Fersas” for sending them in.

All joshing aside, Behemoth’s Evangelion was undoubtedly one of the best metal releases of 2009 and it’s sure to make its way onto several MS staffers’ year-end lists.

-VN

A reader known only as “Fersas” sent us the below clip of a band called Wolverine. Despite their name, which would lead you to believe that they’re a metal band or at least a rock outfit, they in fact play country music.

And, oh yeah, Nergal is doing the vocals.

I really don’t like this music and I think the idea of a Polish country band is kind of ridiculous, but I’d be lying if I said Nergal’s vocals suck. He sounds like a poor man’s Nick Cave part of the time, but I can live with that.

Anyways, this was apparently recorded in 2000. Enjoy.

-AR

Full props to our bestest buds at Metal Injection for finding this pretty hilarious story.

So. I guess it’s Vice’s fifteenth anniversary, and to help celebrate, writer Chris Nieratko dug up a decade old, previously unpublished interview with a certain Behemoth front man. Now, Nieratko played a pretty mean-spirited trick on Nergal – whose first language isn’t English – but that doesn’t negate the fact that the results are fucking funny as hell.

Check out an excerpt:

Click to read more…

Shady times in Poland. We were a little bummed to begin with. Warsaw was coming up and we found out that Behemoth was playing in the same town as us. In their homeland. Ouch. When you get news like that your first feelings are, “Why bother with our show? Why not go hang out at their show?” That’s never a good idea. I remember when we were on the Dark Funeral/Naglfar tour in 2007 and we hit Phoenix, Arizona the same day as Behemoth and Job For a Cowboy. It seemed like a serious bummer, but somehow there were still around 200 kids at our show, which was on par for that tour. Same thing happened on this tour. There were like 400-500 kids at our show. I heard there were 2,500 people at the Behemoth show, but still, 400-500 kids made for good times.

The crowd was enthusiastic and other than the intense heat onstage, I thought it was great times. The promoter was super cool. The food spread he gave us was fit for an army. So many different kinds of everything. Meats, cheeses, breads, drinks, cereals, candies, fruits, yogurts, spreads, etc., etc., etc. His dinner was amazingly catered as well. So many different choices of pastas, meats, salads. The backstage area was huge. We were treated great.

Until the end of the night, that is.

Click to read more…

The entries for last week’s funny photo caption contest — for which the prizes were a copy of Every Time I Die’s new CD New Junk Aesthetic and a matching t-shirt — were spectacularly unfunny, for the most part. Here are a couple of the best entries. Despite the horribly un-PC nature of one of them… damn, that shit is gold!

\m/Eluveitie\m/ [for the second week in a row! congrats, dude]: “The boys’ pictures were spoiled as a sudden blackout rendered their dates – Lafonda, Laqueefa, Tonisha, and Lil Diamonique – invisible to the prom photographer’s lens.”

ohshitson: “the evolution of the metalsucks monkeys.”

This week we’ve got one killer package of three CDs from Metal Blade Records: Goatwhore’s Carving out the Eyes of God (MS review here), Behemoth’s Evangelion (endless MS praise bestowed here) and Valkyrja’s The Invocation of Demise (no MS review, but you can listen to the band here). Just come up with a funny caption to the below photo, and they shall all be yours.

Job for a Cowboy bassist Brent Riggs ended up being one of the most fun interviews we did at this year’s Rockstar Energy Mayhem Festival. For one thing, it may or may not come across in this transcript, but the dude has a really dry sense of humor that matches our own. For another thing, it seemed as though the dude barely wanted to talk about JFAC – he must have to talk about JFAC all the time, so it’s hard to blame him – but when the topics of weed and weightlifting arose, his eyes lit up like a little kid on Christmas, and he suddenly became quite garrulous. A man after our own heart.

JFAC’s new album, Ruination, is out now on Metal Blade. After the jump, check out our full chat with Brent Riggs.

Click to read more…

Behemoth vs. Winds of Plague; Poland vs. America; Corpsepaint vs. wigger hats; ugly men vs. hot chick; real metal vs. deathcore; substance vs. gimmick. Who won????

The answer, as well as more of this past week’s metal Soundscan chart positions and sales figures, after the jump.

Click to read more…

I listened to the new Skeletonwitch album, Breathing the Fire, last night, and guess what? It pwns. THAT’S RIGHT, BALLS666. I’M GOING TO SAY “PWN” AS MUCH AS I FUCKING LIKE. YOU THINK THAT’S WORTH KILLING ME OVER?!? COME AND GET ME, COCKSUCKER.

Here’s some other shit that went down this week:

• As the headline says, Daath’s Eyal Levi is MVP for the week.
• We enjoyed an exclusive mp3 from Weekend Nachos.
• We spoke to a surprisingly upbeat Nergal from Behemoth.
• Holy shit, Sammy O’Hagar almost liked the new Winds of Plague album. Almost.
• R.I.P. Les Paul.

I’m going to see District 9 now. Have a good weekend, everyone.

-AR

It’s been a doozy of a year for metal releases already, hasn’t it?

After the jump, the records I’ve been jamming the most so far that might or might not end up on my year-end Top 10.

Click to read more…

Where the hell does the time go? The year is more than half over already! Sheesh.

ANYWAY, here are, in alphabetical order, albums that have really knocked my socks off so far this year…

Click to read more…

You can really tell that Nergal loves his job. During our thirty minute conversation, the Behemoth frontman’s enthusiasm bordered on breathlessness when discussing Evangelion, the band’s ninth, and best, album. He was hopeful when subtly inciting wilder behavior from Behemoth audiences and deferential when praised. It would pollute the eye to indicate more than the major outbursts of laughter, but I was chuckling throughout the discussion, if only at Nergal’s undisguised joy. Needing little prompting, he oscillated between cheerful appreciation of his band’s success and mortally serious respect for good metal and its constituents. He deflated only momentarily upon mention of his political adversaries in Poland and their abuse of his rights (Nergal 1, Assholes 0). From a distance, our chat may have resembled a pitch meeting for a Curb-esque improvedy in which Nergal by day walks a puppy around the sidewalks of Santa Monica, pinching the bottoms of giggling old ladies and high-fiving homeless guys. And by night, his band is one of the best reasons to attend the Mayhem Festival and authors of this year’s heaviest, most violent record.

Click to read more…

It’s Friday! Glory glory hallelujah! Vince and I are at Mayhem today (all posts you read have been autoprogrammed to self-publish), and Behemoth is one of the bands we’re most stoked to check out, in no small part because we think the band’s latest, Evangelion, kicks so much fucking ass.

So here’s the new Behemoth video for “Ov Fire and the Void.” Mostly it’s your typical epically Satanic blackened death metal shit, but it has a cute girl in it (and some not so cute girls) and nudity and it’s been banned from YouTube (oooh scary!) and the song is sweet, so it has all that going for it.

Our own Anso DF just conducted an interview with Nergal; we’ll get that up as soon as the MetalSucks Mansion Monkeys are done transcribing it.

-AR

We’ve been rocking Behemoth’s Evangelion for a few weeks here at the Mansion; it has quickly found its way into our regular rotation. It deathier, br00tler, techier, and lots of other “ier” words I just made up than any prior Behemoth release, which must be why Vince and I dig it so much more than any prior Behemoth release.

Now the album is streaming, in its entirety, on the group’s MySpace page. You should listen to it. Not only is it awesome, but because its release is still more than a week away… or, at least, here in the US, where it comes out August 11 on Metal Blade (Nuclear Blast will release it a few days earlier, on August 7, in Europe).

Also, Nergal is apparently shtupping the Polish Britney Spears (I know, I know, who knew Brit Brit could get any stupider?), and while I’d like to judge him for that, I’d probably fuck her, too. So there’s that.

-AR

I can’t speak for the other inhabitants of the MS Mansion (especially Kip, who’s been cuddled away in the Wingerschmidt Wing for weeks now), but I, for one, am very much enjoying the new Behemoth record Evangelion. This shit slays, crushes, destroys, kills, insert your choice metal cliche adjective here and that’s what it does. The songwriting is great, and ultimately that’s what makes it good; but what strikes me most is the quality of mixing compared to past Behemoth efforts (that I’ve heard, anyway. Admittedly, I’ve never much listened to this band before, as ridiculous as that seems). The tones on this record are positively crushing. So upon a little Googling I was able to determine that it was Colin Richardson who twiddled the knobs to such delicious effect this time around — duh, should’ve known.

Check out the brand new track “Shemhamforash” currently streaming on Behemoth’s MySpace page. The album drops August 11th in the U.S. (and August 7th in Europe).

-VN

Quickly:

-AR

Behemoth, a.k.a. our favorite Polacks who aren’t Vader, have been added to three dates of the MetalSucks co-sponsored Summer Slaughter tour. Y’know, in case Suffocation, Necrophagist, Darkest Hour, Origin, Born of Osiris, and a plethora of other awesome bands wasn’t enough for you.

These are the Behemoth-sized dates:

07/05-Edmonton, AB @ Starlite Room
07/06-Calgary, AB @ The Whiske
07/07-Spokane, WA @ Knitting Factory

Of course, even if Behemoth won’t be on your local Summer Slaughter stop, it’s still a rad tour that you should check out. Get a full list of dates here.

-AR

When news of Ex Deo, the new band featuring Kataklysm’s Maurizio Iacono, first began to bubble this winter, I yawned. I’ve always thought of Kataklysm as a solid, serviceable but not especially interesting group, so the prospect of a side-project of a band I’m not especially into in the first place wasn’t all that appealing. But now that new tracks from the Ex Deo debut Romulus are starting to surface I’m being forced to reconsider.

This shit is epic!

Click to read more…