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Last week was a big, big sales week for new metal releases, I’d imagine one of the highest cumulative tallies of the year so far. The #1 through #6 entries on the Top Hard Music charts could all be considered smashes in today’s relative terms, with Dream Theater, Anthrax and others making big splashes. Arch/Matheos, Vader and Wolves in the Throne Room also had nice debuts. Let’s look at the numbers:
Only five releases today, which is fine, because it’s my birthday and my college started classes back up yesterday. We still have a bunch of stuff coming out this fall to get excited about, but this week is highlighted by releases from Leprous and Atriarch, as well as ICS Vortex’s first solo album. To the reviewing!
Kids grow up so fast these days! I remember a time not that long ago when Black Tide vocalist/guitarist Gabriel Garcia was just some downtrodden, monosyllabic kid trying to rebel by wearing a t-shirt that said “VAGINA” on it. And now here we are, three years later, and suddenly he looks like Matt Heafy, Jr., with huge plugs in his earlobes and a giant sleeve tat.
Alas, while Garcia may look more metal than ever, his band is still not good, if last year’s “Bury Me,” and now their new video, “Walking Dead Man,” are any indication. But if you’ve been searching for the most popular mainstream metal album of 2003, then Black Tide’s latest, Post Mortem (Shouldn’t it be called Pre-Mortem? Os it that too prophetic?), should be right up your alley.
The “Walking Dead Man” video isn’t embeddable, but you can check out it by clicking on Mr. Garcia’s face below. Be forewarned: You’ll have to sit through an unbearable thirty-second preview of some movie where Jim Carrey adopts CGI penguins in order to watch it. So it’s like eating an appetizer of shit just to get a main course of diarrhea.
Post Mortem comes out August 23.
-AR
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:
And we’ll post dates for at least one of these tours as soon as we get ‘em.
-AR
So Revolver is getting ready to unveil their annual “The Hottest Chicks in Metal” issue, only I guess it’s “The Hottest Chicks in Hard Rock” now, ’cause, uh, use your imagination. But this year’s cover girl isn’t Cristina Scabbia or Maria Brink or Marta or Grace Perry or whomever is playing keyboards for Winds of Plague this week or one of those chicks from Eyes Set to Kill or any of the other obvious choices.
Nope, it’s Taylor Momsen, seventeen year old lead vocalist for The Pretty Reckless. She’s also been in some movies, like, uh, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Spy Kids 2. Here’s the cover photo, without all the writing n’ stuff on it, courtesy this porny celebrity gossip site:
I’d never heard The Pretty Reckless before, so I decided to check out some of their music in order to figure out if I needed to feel guilty about this just because it meant I was getting turned on by a teenage girl dressed like a prostitute in the window of Amersterdam’s Red Light District, or because her music sucks, too.
And it turns out her music sucks, too.
Having not heard a peep outta the Black Tide camp since they played Mayhem in 2008 — where vocalist/guitarist Gabriel Garcia gave us pretty much the worst interview in the history of MetalSucks — I kind of assumed that band was dunzo. And I don’t think it would have surprised anyone if they were — for one thing, the group did not turn out to be the grand-slam record sellers some industry peeps had hoped they’d be, and for another, they were like all of eight years old, so if they grew up and decided they liked hip-hop or country better than metal, or that they didn’t wanna be musicians at all, well, that would have been perfectly understandable.
But no! Black Tide are apparently alive and well. They have a new song, “Bury Me,” and, thanks to the hum-drum pace of this slow news day, I have listened to and am now going to write about said new song.
MetalSucks Maniac Steve Hamlin sent us the link to this 24 minute documentary, Heavy Metal Jr., which follows six tween boys and their band, Hatred. Inevitably, a few of you will criticize these kids for, I dunno, like Marilyn Manson or whatever. But you know what? If you do, you’re an asshole. These kids are keeping the dream alive, and clearly, they’re pretty committed. Also, I already like them better than Black Tide, or Bad 4 Good, or whatever adolescent metal band you wanna name.
Watch this when you can – all of it. It’s totally worth it.
-AR
We’re signing off early today here at the MS Mansion. There are bowls to be smoked, beers to be drank, and barbecues to attend in the waning days of summer. Enjoy your weekend! Meanwhile, some stuff that happened here this week:
Toodaloo!
-VN
We’re in the press area of the Rockstar Mayhem Festival, and Black Tide vocalist/guitarist Gabriel Garcia is wearing a shirt that says “VAGINA” in huge letters and chewing gum. When he sits down to talk with MetalSucks, he never even takes his backpack off. His answers to our questions are, to put it mildly, limited. He clearly has no interest whatsoever in talking to us.
Maybe it’s because he’s aware that we’ve written some not so nice things about his band before; maybe it’s because he’s anxious to get back outside in time for the Ladder Up an Ass performance; maybe the kid just hates giving interviews. In any case, Axl and Vince pretty much agree that this is the worst interview we’ve ever done. Check it out after the jump, and then make fun of us for failing to engage Gabriel, make fun of Gabriel for refusing to not be monosyllabic, and make fun of whomever the fuck else you like in our comments section.
A very, very, VERY special thanks to Rosa Henriquez for the awesome photos. Now we’re that much closer to being like a real big kids’ website!
I think one of the things Slipknot’s fans love most about them is one of the very same qualities that their detractors so violently hold against them: their theatricality. I mean, these are nine dudes who dress up in matching outfits and wear “spooky” masks. The band’s members talk about death metal an awful lot, and, musically speaking, that influence is certainly present. But aesthetically, they belong to a line of bands like Kiss and Motley Crue. They’re showmen.
As Vince has already explained, we were at Mayhem Fest yesterday, and in the coming days we’ll have a full review, photos, interviews with everyone from Mastodon to Machine Head, and all that good stuff.
But really quickly, I just wanna talk about the highlight of the day’s activities – an incredible performance by a supergroup going by the moniker Ladder Up an Ass (And yes, it’s “an Ass,” not “the Ass” or “Your Ass” – it’s a non-specific ladder and a non-specific ass.). Because while some members of the band seemed to think it was a one-off performance, no one ruled the possibility of more surprise appearances on upcoming Mayhem dates. And if you go to Mayhem in the coming weeks and happen to hear that Ladder Up an Ass are playing, YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST DROP EVERYTHING AND GO SEE THEM.
Back in January I wrote a fairly lengthy piece about the advance marketing campaign that Interscope Records was running for teenage metal band Black Tide. In short, based on the number of FedExed advance records (5 in varying configurations), press releases (13 to date) from high-powered publicists, and the general sense of manufactured-in-a-marketing-meeting hype surrounding the band, I declared that Interscope was frivolously throwing away money towards hopes that could never possibly be realized. The post stirred up quite a few comments, including one from guitarist Gabriel Garcia himself.
Today, the first-week sales numbers for their debut record Light From Above have been revealed; according to the Soundscan report that just it my inbox, the record shifted 11,357 copies, enough to land them at #73.
Now, I hate to say “I told you so,” but I told you so.
[Better late than never. This is the 6th and final installment of new MetalSucks contributor Corey Mitchell's reporting from South by Southwest 2008 in Austin, TX. Be on the lookout for more show reviews in the future from Corey. - Ed.]
BLACK TIDE/AT ALL COST/IN THIS MOMENT/JASTA @ RED 7 PATIO – Saturday, March 15, 2008 – 2:20 P.M. – 6:00 P.M.
Not feeling any older despite tossing back a few too many rum ‘n Cokes the night before, I ventured out one last time for my final metal fix of the 2008 SXSW Music Conference. Once again, I was headed toward another free show over at Red 7. The sun was scorching hot, not a cloud in the sky, and I was semi-interested in seeing teenage sensations…
BLACK TIDE
Okay, I’m sure you know all the hype. Every band member under the age of twenty, ridiculously good looking, led by frontman 14-year-old Gabriel, and signed to Interscope Records. It all sounds a little too Light of Doom-ish for my taste. In fact, it’s enough to make you wanna puke. But, again, I approached their set with an open mind, and again, I was pleasantly surprised.
In the early 90s, Steve Vai assembled, wrote all the music for, and produced a band called Bad 4 Good, consisting of members no older than 17 and often as young as 12 or 13 (which makes the semi-nude photo of the band, above, that much creepier). The most notable member, I suppose, was lead singer Danny Cooksey, a child actor best known for playing Arnold and Willis’ precocious little white brother on Diff’rent Strokes, Eddie Furlong’s GN’R lovin’ buddy in Terminator 2, and, of course, the bad ass rebel on the cult classic shitcom Salute Your Shorts.
Even with Vai’s involvement, this band sucked hard, and the irony of a bunch of kids under the age of 18 releasing a single called “Nineteen” should be lost on no one (were they dreaming of what they might do when they eventually turned 19?). By the time the band broke away from Vai and changed their name to Mother’s Milk, no one gave a shit about them anymore, if anyone gave a shit in the first place. After the jump, check out a Bad 4 Good EPK and the video for “Nineteen.”
By now you’ve no doubt heard of Interscope Records’ latest priority, the teenage metal band Black Tide. You may have missed their Ozzfest fiasco, in which they got bumped from the Jagermeister-sponsored second stage because they had members under 21 (their youngest is 14), only to be added to an early spot on the main stage. Either way you’ll be hearing a lot about them very soon; Interscope is making sure of this by spending an assload of cash on them. They bought the band a pricey spot on Ozzfest, they’ve sicked high-powered publicists on us for months (10 press releases to date! — no disrespect meant to these good folks though, as they’re great people and we know they’re just doing their job) and even FedExed us a watermarked CD that we can’t even play (these are themselves expensive to manufacture) a full month and a half before the album’s release date (Priority Overnight! what’s the rush, dudes?), all for a very, very young band.
It seems as if Interscope is pushing an old-school campaign to new-school fans. And when it boils down to it, the square peg won’t fit in the round whole.
