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

…Max Cavalera recently revealed during a radio interview (video above) that he’s working on his autobiography with British journalist Joel McIver, who has previously penned such metal-themed tomes as The Bloody Reign of Slayer and Justice for All: The Truth about Metallica. The forward will apparently be written by Dave Grohl, who collaborated with Cavalera as part of his Probot project back in ’04.

Click to read more…

Everyone whose parents raised them correctly loves Gojira, and so everyone whose parents raised them correctly has been eagerly anticipating the band’s seemingly-forever-in-gestation Sea Shepherd EP since, well, seemingly forever.

But now it looks like we might actually be getting close to its unveiling! Last week we got to hear a new song, “Of Blood and Salt,” which features guest appearances from Meshuggah’s Fredrik Thordendal and Devin Townsend’s Devin Townsend; now Gojira’s guitarist/vocalist/mastermind, Joe Duplantier, has given an interview with Metal Hammer in which he reveals that Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe (who previously appeared on the group’s “Adoration for None”), In Flames’ Anders Friden, and some dude named Max Cavalera are all going to appear on the release, too.

Click to read more…

“Ooh no!”

“Macho Man” Randy Savage has perished. My father and I were actually at his first wedding, which is to say, we were at Summer Slam ’91. Vince and I are so bummed right now… I don’t think I can even go outside. I need to curl up with YouTube and remember a time when the “Macho Man” really did seem invincible.

We’ll never forget you, Mr. Savage.

Maybe this will cheer you up?

• We lied and said that Iwrestledabearonce were becoming a black metal band. Then, depending on your perspective, we either made it better or made it worse by debuting a new track from the band.
• We also debuted a stretched-out version of Hammerfall’s “Hearts on Fire.”
• Our list of the The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists continued.
• We spoke to Max Cavalera from Cavalera Conspiracy and Soulfly, Dean Herrera and Henry Selva from The Human Abstract, and the dudes from Noisear.
• We enjoyed a series of exclusive tour blogs from both The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley and Woods of Ypres’ Shane Madden.
• We gushed over Anaal Nathrakh’s Passion.
• We wondered why elitists find some deathcore bands acceptable and others unacceptable.
• We declared metal the winner in the war on grunge.
• We expressed our enthusiasm for Victory Records’ latest sign, Design the Skyline.
• We gave you a detailed analysis of the lyrics for the new Limp Bizkit single.
• We declared drinking to be for pussies.

Next week crack the top ten of our ongoing guitarists list, and, at least to the best of my knowledge, do not aid any bands in playing a prank on the public. And hopefully no one else we liked better than Fred Durst dies.

-AR

Max Cavalera is a name you’ve probably heard recently. His band, Cavalera Conspiracy, has been making waves in the metal world with their latest release, Blunt Force Trauma, and are currently on tour in the U.S. But here’s something you might not have known: he’s been at this for decades.

Max, along with his esteemed colleague and brother, Igor, made some of the most beastly and innovative thrash in the mid 80’s and 90’s in the highly influential, underground metal outlet, Sepultura (Portuguese for “grave”). Unfortunately personal differences in ’96 drew him away from the band. Upon relocating to the States, he focused his talents on a new project, the still-running Soulfly (English for “Mighty-Spirit-Mosquito”).

For years Max worked tirelessly with the group, releasing seven studio album’s and gradually building a cult following in the process. Now with a new band and his brother back at his side, the world is finally taking notice.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with the bearded bellower to get the skinny on the new album and see what he makes of his recent success.

Click to read more…

Alright, so Sepultura pretty much lost me after Chaos A.D. I am not a fan of Roots, nor of any of the Derrick Green-era albums that have been released thus far. And I don’t think I’m alone in having written the band off. Even if you like Roots, fifteen years is a long time for a group to release no albums of any real note. So I was pretty comfortable with the notion that Sepultura were just one of the many bands I love that had their moment in the sun and then more or less completely lost their way.

But then last week we were lucky enough to get hear a little bit of the unmastered version of the new album, Kairos, and you know what? It was pretty good! I obviously need to hear the entire thing in finished form before I can really pass judgment, but just based on the little we heard, I’d wager that this is easily going to be the best album the band has recorded with Green, and will almost certainly be superior to any Soulfly albums, as well as Cavalera Conspiracy’s Blunt Force Trauma (although CC’s Inflikted may still win the “Best Sepultura Album That’s Not Really a Sepultura Album” award). Some of it was downright Chaos A.D.-esque, which is, of course, terrific news.

I have no idea what the titles were the for the songs we heard, but the band has already performed one called “Seethe” live, and have now debuted the title track in concert, too. You can check out the latter below. I don’t think the crappy quality of either this nor the “Seethe” footage is demonstrative of what we heard last week, but hopefully it will at least whet your appetite for more.

Kairos comes out later this year on Nuclear Blast.

-AR

[via Metal Underground]

Two days late but not two dollars short, I figure ya’ll might like to know how all the albums that came out last Tuesday (April 12th) fared sales-wise, even though I think we can all agree that album sales aren’t the be-all-end-all measure of a band’s success. So without further ado, here’s how the new Between the Buried and Me, Foo Fighters and Red Fang albums sold last week.

Also, Dave Grohl is a very rich man; in addition to the ginormous debut of his new Foo Fighters album, seemingly every Foo catalog album made a return back onto the charts this past week.

Right, the numbers:

Click to read more…

Below is fan-filmed footage of Sepultura performing a new song, “Seethe,” during a recent live show. The quality isn’t that great, but the song actually sounds kinda, I dunno… promising? It’s definitely not awful. But then again, I don’t think post-(Max) Cavalera Sep has ever been awful… it’s usually just kinda boring.

But I guess we’ll see! Kairos, the band’s new album, will be out later this year on Nuclear Blast… and it would actually be kinda funny if it ended up being superior to Cavalera Conspiracy’s recent Blunt Force Trauma.

Your thoughts, my very good friends?

-AR

[via Metal Underground]

If you’d've told me in 1993 that some Swedish metal band that sings about Viking lore would sell more records than Pearl Jam 18 years later, I’d've called you crazy. Shit, if you’d have told me earlier this year that Amon Amarth would sell more records than Pearl Jam I’d've called you crazy. But that’s exactly what happened this past week. Sure, the Pearl Jam release in question was a reissue, but still; how unlikely is it that Amon Amarth, of all bands, have one of the strongest metal debuts of 2011 so far, strong enough to net them #1 on the Hard Music chart — selling roughly 14x the number of copies The Haunted’s new album did (in the U.S.) — and to beat out the enduring monolith that is Pearl Jam? Pretty fucking unlikely, and pretty fucking awesome too. Slow and steady wins the race, I suppose… 13 years and 8 albums in, Amon Amarth have broken through.

No doubt, it’s all due to this 10-year old Amon Amarth fan (WARNING: severe metalhead overload alert!).

Whitesnake (!), Within Temptation, Cavalera Conspiracy, Becoming the Archetype, Obscura and The Haunted also cracked the Top Hard Music Top 100 in their first week of U.S. release; those releases and other notable charting albums after the jump.

Click to read more…

Biggest and best metal release day of 2011 so far? It certainly seems that way. New records from Amon Amarth, Becoming the Archetype, Blackguard, Cavalera Conspiracy — are you kidding me? there’s still more? — Goes Cube, Havok, Mercenary, Obscura and a Between the Buried and Me best-of comp (with a brand new release coming next week!) all officially come out today. If you’re a devoted metalhead with varied tastes you better have saved up, else you’ll be very, very poor come tomorrow.

Vic Vaughn takes a look at all those release — and yes, EVEN MORE — after the break.

Click to read more…

So I’m listening to the stream of the new Cavalera Conspiracy album, Blunt Force Trauma, as I type this, and…some of it is  pretty good, and some of it is just fine. None of it is terrible, so that’s cool, but there’s really only one song that I love — “Torture.” It’s the second song on the album, but it should have been the first — it makes me wanna kick someone hard in the nuts, as opposed to the actual album opener, “Warlord,” which just kinda makes me wanna tap my foot while I do busy work.

What happened? I listened to Inflikted again over the weekend to make sure I wasn’t remembering the band’s debut in a sunnier light than it deserves — and I’m not. Inflikted is awesome. It’s basically everything you’d ever want from a modern day Sepultura album. It’s overflowing with piss n’ vinegar. But only occasionally do CC seem to reach the same level of I AM GOING TO BREAK YOUR FUCKING JAW-ness on BFT. It feels like too much Soulfly seeped into this one.

Headbang here, then let me know if I’m crazy or what in the comments section. Roadrunner will release the album fo’ reals tomorrow.

-AR

Readers, I have failed you.

I feel obligated to tell you that there’s another new Cavalera Conspiracy song out (“Thrasher,” below) because it’s the Cavaleras, but I’ve listened to it three times trying to find something to say about it, and then I was like, “Oh I wanna listen to Chaos A.D.,” and then I just put Chaos A.D. on.

It’s not that I hate the Cavalera Conspiracy song or anything, it’s just that none of what we’ve heard so far socks me in the bread basket the way Inflikted did (when it was like “HOLY SHIT THESE BOYS CAN STILL WRITE SEPULTURA SONGS AFTER ALL!!!”), and, besides, like I said, I have access to Chaos A.D. And Beneath the Remains. And Arise! I should find some quality time with Arise real soon, it’s been awhile.

C&C Music Factory’s latest, Blunt Force Trauma, comes out March 28 on Roadrunner. Despite the fact that none of the songs we’ve heard so far have fucked my face off, I am going to listen to it all the way through at least once.

-AR

We were just talking with some industry insiders about how music videos still matter, despite the current attitude to the contrary of too many big wigs. An awesome video can still capture the fans’ imaginations and do wonders for a band’s image, and the music video is most certainly not dead — I know because I get like a gajillion e-mails about music videos each and every week.

But if peeps seem more apathetic about music videos these days, it’s because so many of them suck an egg. It’s not even about the fact that budgets are ever-shrinking as the labels strive to stay alive in the modern market — I’ve seen film school students take a few hundred bucks and make something awesome, so never forget that ingenuity and creativity > money.

But when the most thought you could possibly be bothered to put into your video amounted to, “Let’s have The Cavalera Brothers and their bandmates, Not The Cavalera Brothers, grimace into the camera, and intercut that with some pretty typical live footage,” well, you might as well as showered multiple Third World Countries with pamphlets that read FUCK YOUR HUNGER AND YOUR MOTHER, TOO. Because feeding just one starving child would have been a better use of the money it took to make this crappy video.

Cavalera Conspiracy’s new album, Blunt Force Trauma, comes out March 29 on Roadrunner. If the music sucks, I’m gonna fucking riot.

-AR

[via Noisecreep]

I wasn’t so hot on “Killing Inside,” which was the first official tack debut from Cavalera Conspiracy’s new album, Blunt Force Trauma; but now the band has released the title track, and it’s wwwwaaaayyyyy better. It basically starts off like an old Sepultura song, which is FANTASTIC, but even when it gets more modern and Gothenburgy, it’s still really, really cool. Check it out below and see what you think.

Blunt Force Trauma comes out March 28 via Roadrunner.

-AR

Cavalera Conspiracy are giving away a new song, “Killing Inside,” for free download here (you gotta give up your e-mail address to get it, natch). It’s the first song we’ve heard from the Cavalera brothers’ eagerly anticipated new album, Blunt Force Trauma, and… I think it’s kind of a bummer.

Correction: half a bummer. Everything from Marc “Why the fuck is he wearing that backpack?” Rizzo’s guitar solo onwards is exactly what I want from CC — which is to say, it sounds appropriately like old school Sepultura, with plenty of thrash elements and lots of awesome shredding. (I may not like that Rizzo was once in Ill Nino, but I can’t fault his skills as a musician.) But the first half of the song is incredibly meh. I hate to sound like the typical lugheaded metal fan, but the shit needs to be faster and more vicious — even the superior second half doesn’t hold a candle to anything on the band’s debut, Inflikted. The riff that powers “Killing Inside” is slow and redundant and kinda reminds me of the riff from the Murderolls’ “Dead in Hollywood.” Which I doubt is what Max and Igor were going for.

Download the song here, and then let us know what you think in the comments section. Blunt Force Trauma comes out March 29 on Roadrunner; I’m holding out hope that this song isn’t representative of the quality of the remainder of the record.

-AR

Cavalera Conspiracy have released the cover art for their new album, Blunt Force Trauma, and all I can say is: What the fuck is this shit?

And don’t say “Oh, it’s a continuation of the visual style from Inflikted.” Yes, I know it’s a continuation of the visual style from Inflikted, but guess what? That album cover sucked, too.

I know it’s ultimately the music that matters most, and I’m optimistic that the music on Blunt Force Trauma will be cool… but I likes me some cool album art, too.

-AR

So Max Cavalera has been running around saying he wants to do the Sepultura reunion, but it ain’t gonna happen because Andreas Kisser is a dick, or, no, wait, Paulo is a dick, or, really, your mom is a dick and it’s all her fault that the reunion isn’t happening. And up ’til now, to the best of my knowledge at least, the remaining Sepulturians have kept their mouths shut about all of Max’s smack-talking.

Well, no more:

Now, of course, you should never say never, but that seems to be pretty definitive, at least for the moment. Maybe if Max points the finger at Igor next, though, he can really make this happen.

-AR

So back in May, Max Cavalera blamed Andreas Kisser for our current lack of a Sepultura reunion. And while I took Max’s side at the time, Anso schooled me right proper just a couple of days later, proposing that Max might be, um, less than honorable. And now that Max is changing his story just seventh months later, it’s getting really, really hard not to think that Anso nailed it right on the head.

See, all of a sudden, Max is on an anti-Paulo Jr. campaign. Last week he told Revolver that Paulo was “the only musician that didn’t improve much” during the classic Sepult-era, even going so far as to allege that Paulo didn’t record any of the bass tracks on any Sep releases prior to Roots. I didn’t think much of it at the time; for one thing, I don’t think that Paulo is anyone’s favorite member of Sepultura, and for another thing, even though it might seem weird that Max is asserting that for roughly a decade the band has a bass player so untalented that he couldn’t record his album tracks and no one ever thought to replace him, I’m sad to say that I’ve heard stories like that before, so it actually seemed entirely plausible.

But now Metal Insider has brought it to my attention that Max is once again talking smack on his former bandmate, this time saying it’s all Paulo’s fault, and not Andreas’ fault, that there hasn’t been a Sep reunion. He tells Sonic Excess:

Click to read more…

So last night’s question was tricky — so tricky, in fact, that only one person got it right! Necro’s real name is Ron Braunstein, and, yep, he’s Jewish. And despite his name, Darkest Hour’s Mike “Lonestar” Carrigan is, indeed, half-Jewish. I was caught off-guard when I saw Igor Cavalera included in this article at The Gauntlet (where a picture of From Exile’s Eric Guenther, who is not Jewish, is used for the entry on Daath’s Eyal Levi, who is… but I digress), but some research unearthed that fact that the former Sepultura drummer apparently converted when he got married. His brother Max also married a Jew, although I don’t think he converted. In any case, that just leaves Poison’s C.C. DeVille.

I understand why people would think that C.C. DeVille (né Bruce Johannesson) is Jewish, given that he’s loud, from Brooklyn, and has a big schnozz — hell, I used to assume that he was Jewish — but, alas, he’s not. So mazel tov to reader Joe Caperon, the only entrant who correctly answered the question. Joe wins a mystery prize courtesy of Century Media, and a dreidel, courtesy of us. Go Joe!

Here’s the question for night three:

• What is the name of infamous metal-themed music retailer in Tel Aviv?

E-mail your answer to axl [at] metalsucks.net with the phrase “HEAVY METAL HANNUKKAH – NIGHT 2″ in the subject line. All entries should include your name and mailing address in addition to your answer, and are due by 5 pm tomorrow (Saturday, December 4) evening. Shortly thereafter we’ll announce the winner and post night 4’s trivia question. And while you don’t have to be Jewish to enter the contest, you do have to live in the U.S. We need to conserve moolah to get all the MetalSucks Mansion Monkeys their Hanukkah gifts!!!

-AR

Mazel tov to reader Noah Mezsick, who correctly identified the first night of Hanukkah’s trivia question — yes, Orphaned Land’s Kobi Farhi is the poor musician that I accidentally introduced to frum porn earlier this year. I hear he’s had nightmares ever since. I apologize, Kobi! In any case, Noah wins a mystery prize courtesy of Century Media, and a dreidel, courtesy of us. L’chaim!

Now… ONTO NIGHT SHTAYIM!  (I think that’s Hebrew for “two.” If I fucked up, well, oops.) Here’s the trivia question:

• Which of the following metal-affiliated musicians is NOT Jewish: C.C. DeVille, Mike “Lonestar” Carrigan, Igor Cavalera, Necro

E-mail your answer to axl [at] metalsucks.net with the phrase “HEAVY METAL HANNUKKAH – NIGHT 2″ in the subject line. All entries should include your name and mailing address in addition to your answer, and are due by 5 pm tomorrow (Friday, December 3) evening. Shortly thereafter we’ll announce the winner and post night 3’s trivia question. And while you don’t have to be Jewish to enter the contest, you do have to live in the U.S. What, you want we should go broke on shipping charges?

-AR