I don’t hate Soulfly as much as some people — in fact, I quite enjoyed 2005′s Dark Ages, and that Greg Puciato sections of that one song from the last album — but I can’t find a nice thing to say about the album art for the band’s upcoming eighth full-length, Enslaved. It looks lo-fi, but not in a cool way, like the cover Terrorizer’s Hordes of Zombies. And why are the edges blacked out? And why are the edges on the left side more blacked out than the edges on the right side? It just doesn’t seem like that much thought went into this thing.

Enslaved comes out March 13 on Roadrunner. It has some pretty cool guests on it, like Cattle Decapitation’s Travis Ryan and Dez Fafara from DevilDriver (and, uh, Coal Chamber), so it should really go without saying, but if the music on the album is good, then it really won’t matter what the cover looks like. Although the band’s new bass player is the dude who used to be in Static-X, so that doesn’t bode well, does it?

-AR

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Bedlam of Cacophony’s Neuroleptic.

Metal is essentially a modernist musical style. Since its very beginnings, metal has expanded what we think of as music by deconstructing – or outright doing away with – the schema we use to evaluate it. Metal bands constantly rub up against the limits of volume, speed, melody (or lack thereof) and other variables that all music engages in some way or another.

Even within a genre known for its pursuit of extremity, Neuroleptic, the debut album by Orange County’s Bedlam of Cacophony, stands out by hyper-extending pretty much every convention there is. Speeds alternate between grindcore fast and doom slow without notice. Riffs change quicker than your ears can process them, when they occur at all (much of the guitar playing is of the tap-heavy Psyopus variety). Sizzling distortion abuts clean fusion guitar tones. You’d be hard pressed to find two adjacent measures in the same time signature. Drummer Nate Cotton sounds like his kit is constantly exploding; three guest vocalists, including Cattle Decapitation/Murder Construct’s Travis Ryan, saddle the album with an intense case of multiple personality disorder. Hooks? Grooves? Tonal centers? All done away with. Neuroleptic blows by like four colliding tornados and dares you to keep up.

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This doesn’t really have anything to do with metal, but I found it kinda funny so I’m running with it.

A Scottish band called Found has released what is, at least as far as I’m aware, the first-ever edible 7″ — more specifically, a 7″ made from chocolate. According to Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci  (who came up with a headline far superior to my own):

“The first attempt was to pour chocolate over a pressed record, but the music created by the chocolate record was backwards. Instead they poured chocolate into the record mold, and presto, an edible single.”

I don’t know nearly enough about, like, science n’ shit to understand how this could possibly work, or what the band’s fans are supposed to do if they actually wanna keep the record, be it because they like the music, or because they think it’s gonna be a collector’s item, or whatever. (How easily would this thing melt? You’d have to at least keep it refrigerated, I’d imagine.)

I would, however, like to suggest that metal bands start trying this gimmick to sell their own shit. Of course, they would not necessarily have to use to chocolate. Here are some examples of what I think would be good cuisine-to-band matches:

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I couldn’t care less about MMA and couldn’t pick “superstar” Josh Barnett out of a lineup of a dozen other Affliction-wearing muscle-bound goons, but I can tell you this: the lineup of Mr. Barnett’s Japanese Benefit Fit show is completely unfuckwithable, it’s for a great cause (all proceeds will go to the Red Cross), and for that I feel compelled to stand up and offer the man a hearty clap. If I lived in the L.A. area I’d definitely be going.

The show will take place on Thursday, May 26th at the House of Blues in Hollywood and will feature All Shall Perish, Animals as Leaders, Cattle Decapitation and Abysmal Dawn, as well as local acts Internal Corrosion and Thrown Into Exile. Like I said, unfuckwithable. Even better, the show is ONLY $15; tickets are on sale now at www.hob.com and www.ticketmaster.com.

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FEATURING MELISSA AUF DER MAUR AND MEMBERS OF WATAIN, CATTLE DECAPITATION, FORBIDDEN, VANISHER, HOWL, THE CONTORTIONIST, DISEMBODIED, EVOCATION, AND ROSALINE

For 2010, we decided to do something special as part of our regular end-of-year festivities here at MetalSucks — namely, ask musicians from across the vast spectrum of the metalsphere (or, in a few cases, the almost-metalsphere) what their favorite albums of the year were. Death metallers, thrash metallers, black metallers, stoners, grinders, and djenters alike graciously contributed lists to MS, and we’ll be running them in groups of ten to eleven musicians at a time twice a day for the rest of the week.

After the jump, check out the third group… we hope you enjoy seeing what some of metal’s heaviest hitters were into this year as much as we have!

(And please note that these are musicians and that they, um, have a lot on their minds. So some of ‘em named albums that actually came out last year. Please don’t freak out.)

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“BIG PANTS WASTE PRECIOUS FABRIC”

Step into my Nocturnus time machine and take a magical journey with me into a time long, long ago, an excursion into a world that scarcely resembles our own. In this world — we’ll call it Moshtopia — hardcore kids are known for wearing giant, baggy pants, not skinny jeans; there are people under 30 that know who Black Flag is; and metalcore bands worship Krishna, not Christ. This is not a fanciful episode of Jojo’s Bizarre Adeventure fan fiction, my friends, — it is the strange and wonderful world of mid-90s hardcore!

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Pizza pizza.

The best description of Domino’s pizza I’ve ever heard came from our friend Jason, who said, “It doesn’t taste like pizza, it tastes like an English muffin with tomato sauce.” And I’ve only eaten at a Little Caesar’s once that I can recall, but my impression of it was more or less the same as my impression of Domino’s (or Pizza Hut, for that matter). Maybe I’m spoiled because we have a lot of good pizza here in New York, but I’ve never been able to understand why anyone would prefer to have McPizza over any number of other Italian dining options.

But I gather (he said with his nose held high in the air) that these places are very popular within the white trash populace — a.k.a., Kid Rock’s bread n’ butter. So when I read the following on MediaPost.com (by way of Metal Insider), I thought, “Gee, that is a brilliant fucking idea.”

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It’s a rare that a supergroup ends up being more than the sum of its parts — and yet, miraculously, such is the case with Murder Construct, a new deathgrind outfit featuring Cattle Decapitation’s Travis Ryan on vocals, Exhumed/Phobia/Impaled’s Leon del Muerte on guitar and vocals, Intronaut/Uphill Battle’s Danny Walker on drums, Bad Acid Trip’s Caleb Schneider on bass, and Fetus Eaters/Watch Me Burn’s Kevin Fetus also on guitar. With a pedigree like that, your expectations for the band are pretty high. And guess what? Murder Construct do not disappoint.

But don’t take our word for it — give the group’s debut album a listen in its entirety below. Once you’ve felt its awesome power, you’ll wanna pre-order it here. Relapse will release the album next Tuesday, November 23. Enjoy it, fuckers!

Photo credit: Taija Lynn for Brooklyn Vegan.

Last Saturday I attended the California Blood Tour in San Francisco, featuring Son of Aurelius, Burning the Masses, Knights of the Abyss, Devourment, and Cattle Decapitation. I had mixed expectations of almost all the bands on the tour, but many of them ended up being proven wrong.

First up were Son of Aurelius (most of you probably know them by now, since we’ve done quite a few articles on them). They opened with a shreddy, breakdowny intro song that even incorporated power metal vocals, so I think a lot of the crowd were a little confused. But once the band started playing songs like “Myocardial Infarction” and “A Good Death”, the crowd warmed up to them, spawning some of the biggest pits of the first three bands. They definitely wowed me. Even though they had a different vocalist for this tour, he still performed admirably, and their mix was fantastic; both shredding solos and brutal breakdowns were perfectly audible. Great opening band for this tour.

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When all is said and done with The California Blood Tour currently criss-crossing the nation, the poor lads in Knights of the Abyss are going to be remembered not for their live shows but for a series of hilarious and embarrassing viral videos filmed on the road.

It seems as if Cattle Decapitation have taken to hazing their opening act; whether it comes from a place of brotherly love or genuine malice we can’t say for sure! The first incident, you may remember, featured a vicious bitch-slap bestowed upon KOTA’s guitarist Brian McNulty by Cattle Decapitation’s tour manager after the latter over-indulged and missed the second night of the tour. The latest hijinx occurred after Cattle Decap got fed up with Knights of the Abyss’s bass player always leaving his bass out, a big no-no when you’re on tour. So they decided to kidnap the bass, make a piñata out of it and… yep, jizz all over it:

If you’re Knights of the Abyss all of this may be a bit humiliating, but here we are talking about a band we probably wouldn’t be talking about otherwise; a couple of would-be fans are sure to click that there MySpace link I just posted. So I were Knights of the Abyss I’d keep doing stupid shit on tour. Get the remaining dates of the tour (which also features Devourment, Burning the Masses and Son of Aurelius) here.

-VN

So Cattle Decapitation are on tour RIGHT NOW! with Devourment, Knights of the Abyss, Burning the Masses, and Son of Aurelius (get dates here). And I guess Knights of the Abyss guitarist Brian McNulty, uh, overindulged, and consequently missed the second date of the tour. That’s obviously pretty early in the run, too early for leeway, and so Cattle Decapitation’s tour manager, who outweighs McNulty by over a hundred pounds, was tasked with carrying out the chastisement. Watch video below, courtesy those mad geniuses at Metal Injection.

So Cattle Decap’s TM seems like a really nice dude who is reluctant to administer corporal punishment — still, he smacked McNulty right proper. I bet that dude never misses another show again, no matter who his band is opening for.

-AR

As someone who came up in the 90s West Coast hardcore scene (see my post “5 Things I Miss About 90s Hardcore” for some especially ridiculous memories), I first came across Dave Astor when he was playing drums for Locust. I saw them back in 1995 with Man Is The Bastard at the Velvet Elvis in Seattle, and they blew me away. Back then, it was almost unheard of for hardcore kids with short hair to play blast beats, and while I kind of lost interest in them when they became The Locust, got scene hair and just generally became completely lame, they were definitely ahead of their time. Dave apparently agreed with me, because he quit to join the excellent Cattle Decapitation, then moved on to his current band Pathology.

Their new album on Victory just dropped, and it’s honestly one of the best straight-up, no-frills death metal records I’ve heard in a long time. With veterans like Dave and Matti Way (Disgorge, Liturgy, Cinerary) on board, their experience and craftsmanship really comes through. I know that 99% of MS readers will write it off because I like it, but this is one of the rare instances where they might actually be missing out on something they’d enjoy. It’s by far their best, combining melodic parts that somehow aren’t retarded with brutal slamz that will have you moshing around your room in seconds.

Dave is a man of few words, so I can’t say this is the most in-depth interview I’ve ever done, but he’s real nice and the Pathology record slaps, so pick it up on iTunes ASAP!

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Everyone’s favorite vegan death metal band, Cattle Decapitation, are gonna start writing their new album at the end of this year, which is great news ’cause, well, they’re motherfucking Cattle Decapitation.

Also great news: that they’re gonna do a headlining run, “The California Blood Tour,” before they start that process. (The name is a reference to the point of origin for the bands on the tour — they’re actually playing all over North America. A little confusing, but whatever.)

ALSO great news: that they’re taking some really cool bands with them on the trek, including the Sergeant D.-beloved Devourment and Burning the Masses, as well as MetalSucks favorites Son of Aurelius. (Knights of the Abyss, who I don’t know as well as I probably should, are also on the bill; Slaughterbox and Condemned will play select dates.) This will be SOA’s first time playing outside their general West Coast vicinity (at least as far as I know), and I can’t express how excited I am to finally see them live. And with Cattle Decap! Pinch me, for I must be dreaming.

Here are dates…

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It might only be the beginning of 2010, but artist and Monstrosity vocalist Mike Hrubovcak is already stoked to know that the metal-minded artwork he’s done for the likes of Decrepit Birth, Braindrill, Rumpelstiltskin Grinder, Aurora Borealis, and Azure Emote (another criminally underrated, Hrubovcak-fronted band) will be featured in an upcoming Hollywood production with plenty of star power to go around.

Dream House, a Universal/Morgan Creek film helmed by Jim Sheridan and starring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, and Naomi Watts, will hit theaters in 2011 and has a plot that’s fitting enough for Hrubovcak’s artwork: a family (Weisz and Craig) move into a new home to find out about a brutal slaying there earlier in its history, while the neighbor (Watts) is the only person able to lend any hint that the husband who allegedly killed his wife and children there may not be dead. Not only is it great exposure for Hrubovcak — who works as a graphic designer for an “adult novelty” company by day, as an artist using oil, airbrush, and photo manipulation for some of metal’s most brutal bands (with cover art to match) by night, and still finds time to participate in Monstrosity, Vile, and a host of other projects — but it’s great for metal. Where else can metalheads hope to see artwork from gruesome metal bands at the movies?

Hrubovcak’s VisualDarkness website has a ton of samples of his past works in his portfolio to check out, but for the uninitiated, the man’s done artwork for bands like Chainsaw Dissection, Fecal God, and XXX Maniak – so you should pretty much know what to expect.

Hrubovcak took some time to talk with MetalSucks about an upcoming showcasing of some of his works, how he deals with having so much on his plate, and zombies. Oh, come on, you knew that was coming.

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I dunno, but we did. Thanks to longtime MetalSucks Maniac Mark Mortiz-Rabson for setting us straight.

The song is called “A Body Farm,” in case ya didn’t know.

-AR

Anyone following this year’s MetalSucks co-sponsored, Mayhem-headlined Blackenedfest tour should already know that this tour has been plagued from the start. First was the Marduk no-show (reportedly due to visa problems) followed by the Boise cancelation, then a message posted on Cephalic Carnage’s MySpace page this Monday announcing the band had decided to drop off the tour in Denver without any further explanation. The latest wrinkle is an exclusive, in-depth, first-hand report from Metal Injection roving reporter Justina Villanueva, who had been out on the road covering the entire tour for Metal Injection.

Reports Justina in her tour diary at Metal Injection:

I had my only Almost Famous moment of this tour in Denver, Colorado. We were not exactly in a descending plane but it definitely felt like we were. I watched Blackened Fest collapse within a matter of several hours. It wasn’t a short run of a tour but it’s demise was very short notice to the people involved.

Just after Withered left the bus to start their set, Cartel (tour manager) came onto the Cephalic/Withered shared mobile home to announce, “Guys, tonight might be the last night of the tour.” He started inquiring about who were the unnecessary people on the tour so he could free up bunk space. This included Sid, Leonard’s (Cephalic vocalist) son, and Chuck, Nick’s (Cephalic’s bassist) brother. Because we were in Denver, Cephalic’s home, the question at hand was easy to seal away: two free bunks. But, two free bunks doesn’t solve the extra 6 people still on Marduk’s money-swallowing bus. At that point in the night I knew one bus would be sent home and maybe some crew (most likely me too). But, I didn’t expect the actual outcome: a Mayhem only tour.

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We regret to inform you that tomorrow’s MetalSucks co-sponsored BLACKENEDFEST show (feat. Mayhem, Cattle Decapitation, Cephalic Carnage and Withered) in Boise, Idaho has been canceled. The entire Idaho readership of MetalSucks over the past month totals 695 people, but hey, if we can save even one of you a potentially long drive for nothing, it’s worth it. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

The MetalSucks co-sponsored Blackenedfest, featuring Mayhem, Marduk, Cephalic Carnage, Cattle Decapitation and Withered is currently underway and, from what I hear, absolutely slaying. As per usual, Metal Injection has been on hand to capture some excellent video footage from the shows. Here’s Cephalic Carnage doing “Kill for Weed” on the tour’s stop at this past weekend’s Maryland Deathfest; you can check out more videos from the tour right here. And get the remaining tour dates after the jump!!!

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Metal Injection reports that Mayhem have arrived in the U.S. without incident, which means that BLACKENEDFEST, the grimmest tour of the Spring, is set to kick off tomorrow night in NYC as planned! Says Mayhem frontman Attila Csihar:

“We had no problems whatsoever with immigration, and now we are very excited to de-consecrate the USA again after a decade of decay since our last tour here! Prepare to prove the falseness of all religions and inventing the order of pure fucking chaos! There is NO god but MAYHEM!!”

The spikey-armband-studded lineup also features Marduk, Cephalic Carnage, Cattle Decapitation and Withered. We suggest you view this handy Corpsepaint 101 primer before attending.

Full list of tour dates and links to buy tickets after the jump.

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Josh Elmore and Troy Oftedal of Cattle Decapitation were my first interview of the weekend at New England Metal and Hardcore Fest in Worcester, MA last month. The interview was serious but easy-going, as if I were just catching up with two old friends I hadn’t seen in a while — despite the fact that I’d never met either of them before. When the guys in Cattle Decap aren’t busy shit-talking bands who bail from their tour obligations, they’re super-chill guys; we spoke about the band’s new album The Harvest Floor, the critical response it received, being falsely pigeonholed as a bunch of crazy vegan militants, and the importance of having day jobs to balance life in a touring metal band. Our chat after the jump.
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