“Somebody get me a goddman second band!!!”

Paul Romanko is now the only member of Shadows Fall who doesn’t have a side project — or, if he does, he hasn’t gone public with it yet. What’s that about? I’m sure he has no recollection of this whatsoever, but back in my lowly fanboy days, before I was a super-cool blahger d00d, I had beers with Romanko, and he was a totally cool guy! And he had no B.O. problems that I noticed. So how come no one wants to play with him? Let him in the sandbox, damn it!

While you ponder that completely meaningless question (I mean for all I know the dude is just enjoying his time off and has no desire to be in a second band), feel free to head over to Noisecreep and check out the song “Shades of Grey,” the new song from Dead of Night — a.k.a. the side project of Shads’ guitarists Matt Bachand and Jon Donais (ex-Unearth skinsman Derek Kerswill plays drums, making this somewhat of a NWOAHM supergroup).

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In a recent editorial on Invisible Oranges, Cosmo Lee (and yes, it was actually Cosmo who wrote this one… I triple-checked!) used the recent success of High on Fire as a case study to discuss why metal fans hate it when their favorite bands become successful. Cosmo posits three theories and they’re all on point (as usual), but I’ll let you check out Invisible Oranges for that because that’s not really what I’d like to discuss today. I’d like to explore when the fuck High on Fire suddenly became such a big deal.

I’ve never been a huge High on Fire fan, but I haven’t got anything against the band. To me they’ve always been a sweet bonus, that band that’s opening on tour with a bigger, cooler band — “Ah, nice, High on Fire’s on that tour… cool, we get to see Matt Pike rock the fuck out with his shirt off!” — but they didn’t really warrant much attention individually. No doubt, the band has a rich history (hi Sleep) and had a core of die-hard fans, but by and large they lived in the underground. They were always that band that were either a) supporting a bigger band, or b) playing in small, cramped sweaty bars.

There’s a ton of hype around their new album Snakes for the Divine which had a HUGE first week with almost 9k copies sold but, by and large, isn’t all that different from their past work. All of a sudden they’re on the cover of Decibel right out of the gate, with a snake-adorned Matt Pike wearing more makeup than a 50 year-old stripper. And they’re on their own headlining tour of decent-sized legit venues, selling them out across the country. Make no mistake about it; like Cosmo points out, High on Fire are a big band now. They’re in the mainstream metal consciousness.

So when did this sudden transformation happen?

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Our bro-bros at Metal Insider have the exclusive debut of the new Burning Human video, “Tormented Minds.” Lucky bastards.

The video was apparently banned by MTV, because, uhhh, I’m not really sure. Nothing about it strikes me as being particularly offensive. Oh well. Another great call from the geniuses at Headbanger’s Ball.

Click on the screencap below to check out the video.

-AR

Some of you seem to find it shocking that we actually read your comments (and often reply to e-mails, for that matter). To which I say: why the fuck else would we even have a comments section? We love to read the comments. To wit:

• Daisy May Tinklepants accused us not once but twice of giving positive reviews to artists who granted us interviews. I guess poor David Bee Roth didn’t get the memo when he interviewed and then reviewed Believer. In any case, both of those interviews were actually offered, not granted, but we appreciate the conspiracy theories.
• disappointed called us “dickless jew faggots” because I apologized for a swine flu joke (but not really). We don’t mind being called “Jew faggots,” but to suggest that we have no penises is just uncalled for. Also, the word “Jew” is generally capitalized, you wide-set vagina’d Goy retard.
• teaches of peaches says that no one cares about Dallas Coyle’s column “The Hard R” now that he’s not in God Forbid. Comments left by 114 other people would suggest otherwise, but just to be safe, Dallas is joining the latest touring incarnation of Sha Na Na so that he can continue to write for us.
• Revealing themselves to be the anti-Matt McChesneys, the dudes from YEAH! Destroyer spent more time writing for the site this week than anyone on the MetalSucks staff did. Whatever keeps them from playing music…
• Cahiers du Cinema contributor CrapMcPoopin announced that he’s leaving us for our friends at Metal Insider. Then he left 13 more comments over the course of the week.
• Conduit is having a hard time reconciling the fact that we like “commercial crap” and “random bands from Europe/elsewhere.” Sorry, Conduit. But, yeah, we liked the most recent Slipknot album. Shrug.
• Ricky doesn’t like the fact that Dope are basically paying us to talk shit about them. Ricky, have you spoken with Daisy May? ‘Cause in reality, we only hate Dope because they won’t grant us an interview.

And next week we’re gonna try to really piss you cats off.

-AR

There are a few phrases that tweak the highly attuned sensors of professional music journalists. The one that frequently sets off the bullshit detectors is “highly anticipated debut.” Debuts, by their very nature, are seldom anticipated by anyone not in a band, working for a band or related to or fucking a member of the band. (And in the case of the latter, the anticipation is mainly along the lines of “Now maybe they’ll please just shut up about how the record’s coming out soon.”) The entire rest of the world is unlikely to be anticipating a debut because they don’t know anything about the band in the first place… because, after all, this is their debut we’re talking about.

In the case of Burning Human, however, a considerable amount of slack should be given to their describing their own studio debut album as “highly anticipated.” Why? Because after nearly a decade and a half of forming the band, these guys finally got around to releasing a full-length studio album. Burning Human was founded in upstate New York way back in 1995 and, based on the strength of a pretty rad demo tape (Death is Mercy), looked to be ready to take on the death metal world. As you may have realized, they did not (although drummer Jason Bittner hasn’t done too poorly for himself in Shadows Fall) and they split up in 1997, coming back together for the inevitable Reunion Nobody Asked For in 2007.

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Actually, we don’t have to pirate our own articles. Plenty of other websites do that for us, often without giving us credit or linking back to us. Once upon a time someone even accidentally included one of our bylines in their cut and paste job. Said “writer” apologized but then went on to shamelessly rip us off many more times, which was nice, because it shows his apology was sincere. You know who else tried to pass off someone else’s work as their own? The guy who went on to shoot Dimebag. So good company you keep, fellas.

Here are other ethically questionable decisions people made in the metal world this week:

• Hasidim moshed, we made punny jokes.
• Matt Heafy and Paolo Gregoletto of Trivium asked fans to illegally burn and share the band’s music.
• We’re streaming God Dethroned’s entire new album until Tuesday; listen now! We also debuted new tracks from Animals as Leaders and Burning Human.
• Arch Enemy choose to re-record old material; we choose to stop talking about this project from hereon out (starting… now!).
• Tyson vs. Holyfield 3 Underoath vs. Avenged Sevenfold! We love this kind of shit.
• Some Russian high school black metallers headbanged for show and tell, and we pondered how to improve our corpsepaint skillz.
• The Dillinger Escape Plan’s Greg Puciato sounded off against President Barack Obama. You sounded off against each other.
• We looked at new releases from Chimaira, God Dethroned and Goes Cube.

Next week brings more contests, more interviews, more new music streams you won’t be able to hear anywhere else, and at least one confrontation with a singer Axl once gave a terrible review. Come back and read more. You know you want to.

-Vince and Axl

So this Burning Human record ended up being really fucking cool. Any time early press about a band loudly touts the fact that the band features a member of another more famous band (in this case drum-guru Jason Bittner of Shadows Fall) I’m naturally skeptical; but about 5 seconds of the new song “Tormented Mind” was really all I needed to convince me that Burning Human is completely capable of standing on their own as a brutal, crushing death metal band. Honestly, this is some of the finest straight up death metal I’ve heard since Bloodbath’s The Fathomless Mastery decimated my brain last year. “Tormented Mind” comes from their new album Ressurection Through Fire, produced by the legendary James Murphy (Death) and out on Koch/E1 tomorrow. Download it for no charge, guilt-free, below! Check out Burning Human’s MySpace page for an extra streaming track. Enjoy. [Click the below link to stream and download]

Burning Human – “Tormented Mind”

-VN