Yesterday, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross were nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Original Score for their contribution to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo*; it’s their second nomination in as many years and would seem to suggest that the duo will probably get a second Oscar nod, too, although it’s not clear yet if they’ll be able to repeat the success of last year’s The Social Network. Still, pretty crazy to see the guy who once sang “I wanna fuck you like an animal” being all respectable n’ shit.

And since he is Mr. Respectable now, Reznor has granted a long interview to The Hollywood Reporter, a trade mag which I can’t imagine would have been interested in him even just a few years ago. But it’s a fun read, and they got some pretty good dish out of the dude — like the fact that he has no idea where his Grammy statuettes are:

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Alright, I’ll admit it: I’m a lazy guy.

I’m the kind of person who will take a job and work as infrequently and minimally as possible (were you wondering why Part 3 took so fricken’ long after Part 1 and Part 2?). I use a lot of big words on my applications and key phrases like “people-person” and “success-oriented” (second to only to the ever popular “failure-oriented”). In other words, I’m a music journalist through and through.

In the music world we lazy, uninspired writers love to curmudgeon bands for being similarly lazy … and of course, uninspired. Sitting atop our glorious thrones of self-granted influence, we, with all our forum-crawling, shit-kicking expertise criticize what we probably couldn’t do any better ourselves.

But the fact is, there are plenty of decent — and even very good — bands that are more than happy to spend an entire career ignoring our occasionally constructive criticism. After all, not every band has to break new ground to be worth your time. But what happens when groups really do take such jabs to heart?

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Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (not really at all) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

We haven’t done one one of these all summer, but we came up with a fun one for this week:

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME AND PLAY ANY METAL BAND/MUSICIAN SOME OF THEIR MUSIC AND/OR SHOW THEM PHOTOS/VIDEOS OF THEMSELVES FROM THEIR FUTURE (OUR PRESENT), WHO WOULD IT BE AND WHY?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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I’m cynical about the Soundgarden reunion for the reason I’m cynical about most reunions, which is to say, I’m not sure the band has it in them to make a new record that will live up to all the expectations. But usually that concern doesn’t/shouldn’t apply to a reunited act’s live show — I mean, all they have to do is show up and play their classics and everything should be hunky dory, right?

Thing is, I’m not sure Chris Cornell’s voice is what it used to be. I had the (dis)pleasure of seeing Audioslave twice, and once his voice sounded fine, and once it sounded like shit, and while that was eight years ago already and maybe he was just having an off night or whatever, I’ve heard tell that these days he sounds not-great more often than he does great. And that could, obviously, be a serious detriment to the band’s concerts. I mean, I don’t doubt that Kim Thayil and company can still play their asses off, but if Cornell can’t do songs like “Outshined” justice, well, then, really, what’s the point?

(I’m not saying the singer is the most important member of the band, by the way. I’m just saying it would be weird to be sitting there, wishing that “Fell On Black Days” was an instrumental number.)

But I guess we’ll find out, ’cause the band is doing their first North American tour in almost a decade-and-a-half this summer. There are only four dates right now, but more should be announced soon.

Get the dates after the jump, and then let us know whether or not you’re stoked for these shows in our comments section.

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Soundgarden continues to be one of those legendary bands that defies pure pigeonholing.  Sure, they rose to the top against the early 90s grunge backdrop, but could you really call them “grunge”? Lest we forget that way back when, they were often touted as the forerunners of “alternative metal” (whatever that means), in addition to grungesters.

SIDEBAR: Remember when “alternative” was a genre? Nowadays when people say they are into “alternative” music (and yes, it does happen every once in a while), I feel compelled to inquire “alternative to WHAT???”  Back then the genre label actually meant something, but today everything just seems to be the alternative to everything else.

From the beginning, the band’s songs were sludgy enough, but always had at least a tinge (usually a boatload) of melody, largely thanks to wailer Chris Cornell but also to the inventive guitar stylings of Kim Thayil.  Add the proto-rumblings of bassist Ben Shepard and thumping pocket-chop grooves of drummer Matt Cameron, and we had a truly unique rock n’ roll band that created their own sound. Five albums strong, Soundgarden broke up in 1997.

After some recent unfortunate solo Cornell material and plenty of rumors of reunion, the reformed Soundgarden finally played a couple of shows last Spring & Summer (the first of which under the anagram pseudonym Nudedragons), and it was recently announced that they will release a live album entitled Live on I5 on March 22nd (tracklist here).

Furthermore, just this past week it was mentioned on their website that the band has written some new material and hopes to release a new album later this year (!) ….

“OUR GOAL FOR 2011 – LET’S MAKE A RECORD.

Over the past few months, we’ve been busy jamming, writing and hanging out together – exploring the creative aspect of being Soundgarden. It feels great. We have some cool new songs that we are going to record very soon. Thank you for all of the support!

Loudest of Love, Ben, Chris, Kim and Matt”

We shall see.

-KW

Announced with fanfare in the opening minutes of New Years Day 2010, the return of Soundgarden was supposed to redeem Chris Cornell’s tarnished legacy in the aftermath of the Timbaland-produced bomb Scream. Unfortunately, the grunge superstars have to-date spent their so-called reunion trying to sell repackaged collections of previously released music sprinkled sparsely with studio outtakes and ultimately playing fewer concerts than I can count on one hand.

We’ve yet to get a clear answer as to why this has been the case (theories: Matt Cameron’s Pearl Jam obligations, Kim Thayil’s obsessive compulsive beard maintenance), and the latest announcement that an old live concert is being put on CD only makes matters worse. As a longtime devotee, I pretty much feel cheated.

Seemingly, Cornell recognizes that the fans want to see the guys on tour, which is perhaps why he’s decided to offer up the next best thing and go out on the road by himself for a cross-country series of acoustic “Songbook” dates. It makes sense, and he can probably sell some of those live Soundgarden CDs along the way. Some press release blather and the list of dates are below the cut.
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Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (sometimes) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

For the last “Question of the Week” we decided to counterbalance all these year-end “best of” lists with some good old fashioned negativity:

WHAT IS THE SINGLE WORST ALBUM YOU HEARD IN 2010?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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One of these men will not be on the new Kyuss album. Guess which one?

Kyuss Lives!, the ridiculously monikered Kyuss non-reunion which replaces Josh Homme with some dude no one has ever heard of, are apparently “thinking of doing another record,” according to this interview with vocalist John Garcia. I object to the use of the word “another” because in case these dudes haven’t noticed, they’ve never made a record before, but I’d like to think that the phrase “thinking of”* means “it’s not written in stone yet,” “there’s still time to stop the madness,” and “we said this to gauge the reaction of fans, possibly as represented by an incredibly smart, exceedingly handsome Jewish blogger from New York.”

So, assuming that Garcia was, indeed, trying to get a message to me to see what my thoughts were, I’d like to now respond by saying: I don’t think this is a good idea.

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For whatever reason, I just haven’t gotten that excited about the Soundgarden reunion yet. Maybe it’s not “real” enough for me at this point; maybe when the band finally does a proper tour and I’m holding the ticket in my hand, I’ll suddenly be really, really stoked. Or maybe Chris Cornell has just pissed away all my good will towards him, and I’ll never care.

Whatever. Point being, I had no intention of checking out the band’s performance on Conan earlier this week, until I read Shane Mehling’s assertion on The Deciblog that guitarist Kim Thayil is so “fucking old” that “looks like Kim Thayil’s dad.” Say no more, Mr. Mehling. I love a good laugh at other people’s expense. Curiosity piqued!

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The interwebs are all aflutter today because Dave Grohl has announced that his former Nirvana bandmate, Krist Novoselic, is going to make a guest appearance on the new Foo Fighters album — which is also being produced by Garbage’s Butch Vig, a.k.a. “The Dude Who Produced Nevermind.” This will mark the first time Grohl and Novoselic have recorded with one another since Kurt Cobain injected himself with enough heroin to kill an elephant, and then stuck a shotgun in his mouth, just to make sure that medical science didn’t get any bright ideas.

Look: I know Nirvana were cool, and I know that Cobain’s premature passing means they get to stay cool forever and ever and ever because the dude didn’t get to grow up to be lame like Billy Corgan and Chris Cornell, but I really don’t see any reason to get excited about this. Novoselic was never a songwriter; he was never even a particularly distinctive bass player. Cobain was Cobain and Grohl certainly beat the ever-lovin’ shit outta his drums, but Nirvana pretty much could have swapped out Novoselic for another bassist at any point and not missed a beat. This song isn’t gonna sound like Nirvana — you’d need to re-animate Cobain to make that happen — it’s just gonna sound like Foo Fighters. I’d wager that the bass lines won’t even be that special, since, like I said, Novoselic’s playing never had much discernible personality. So you’re not even gonna get the “What might that sound like?” curiosity factor that you might get from, say, Dave Lombardo filling in for Lars Ulrich at a Metallica show, or Duff McKagan joining Jane’s Addiction. Creatively speaking, this reunion doesn’t amount to much more than a gimmick.

All of that being said… I’ll take any excuse to post the below video of Novoselic hitting himself in the head with his bass at the 1992 MTV VMAs while Grohl taunts Axl Rose from the stage. This has to be one of the five proudest moments in MTV’s history, right?

-AR

So in case the animation style didn’t immediately tip you off, Metalocalypse co-creator Brendon Small directed the video for “Black Rain,” the new old Soundgarden song that was recorded during the Badmotorfinger sessions and has nothing to do with the painfully mediocre Ozzy album of the same title.

Thing is, the video features a cameo (actually multiple cameos) by Dethklok and Charles Foster Offdensen, that “band”‘s manager/lawyer/CFO. And while that’s a good way to lure in young ‘uns who maybe love Dethklok but don’t remember Soundgarden, it strikes me as being wildly out-of-place — I mean, I don’t think the Dethklok dudes would be Soundgarden fans. Even if they found the music br00tal enough (which I don’t think they would), I imagine that Chris Cornell’s consistently, uh, questionable artistic decisions would be enough to warrant extreme violence from Nathan Explosion and the gang.

Yep. I’m speculating on the feelings and aesthetic criticisms of a cartoon band. Just another day here at MetalSucks.

ANYWAY, potential character inconsistencies aside, this video is pretty cool. Check it out below, then let us know if you think Dethklok would dig Soundgarden or not in the comments section.

“Black Rain” will appear on Soundgarden’s new greatest hits collection, Telephantasm, which comes out September 28.

-AR

A couple of weeks ago the newly-reunited Soundgarden played their first show in almost thirteen years in Seattle under the name “Nudedragons” (which, in case reading and thinking aren’t your kind of thing, is all the letters from “Soundgarden” re-arranged). Needless to say, a lot of bootleg footage from the gig surfaced within hours of its completion, but we never posted any ’cause… well, I really don’t know why. I can’t even think of a bullshit excuse. We just didn’t, okay?

But last night reader Keith Brown e-mailed me the below link to pro-shot footage of the concert with the simple message that you see in the headline (Keith advises that you imagine those words being said “in a fanboy squeak”). And he’s not wrong. Hey, I’d love to catch a Soundgarden reunion show, even if I question Cornell’s reasons for getting involved…

-AR

Ever seen Woody Allen’s Zelig? It’s a pseudo-documentary about a guy who immediately assumes the traits of whomever he’s with at the moment; put him in a room full of Chinese people and he’ll turn into a Chinese man, move him to a room full of Hasidim and he’ll suddenly appear to be Hasidic, and so on and so forth. It’s a(n obvious but still pretty funny) metaphor for a guy with no personality of his own.

Now, consider Slash. Guns N’ Roses folklore tells us that Slash is not the best judge of his own material, and often wanted to scrap some of Guns’ best songs; and, unfortunately, evidence suggests that this folklore is fact, and that Slash is a pretty ho-hum songwriter. Axl Rose has his legitimate insanity and over-sized, not entirely comprehensible artistic vision, but all Slash really seems to have is a desire to be like his heroes in Aerosmith and AC/DC, which is to say, a legacy act and purveyor of catchy but fairly middle-of-the-road rock. Consequently, a lot of the pressure on Slash-penned songs in the post-GN’R era is not just on the guitar playing of the Artist Formerly Known as Saul Hudson, but on the performances of whatever singer he’s working with at any given moment. Slash songs can be like underwritten roles in movies that way; you need the best character actors available to give them some personality, or they risk becoming boring.

Slash has personality (or at least persona) to burn, and it’s no shock that on Slash, his first solo record, he keeps up his up his end of the bargain in the guitar solo department. Despite the fact that he was never a revolutionary musician, Slash was always a very distinctive musician; a lot of people play the way he does, but no one sounds quite like him. But it is kind of a shock that on this, the album which is supposed to be a distinct and unique artistic statement outside the confines of his collaborations with various bands, Slash has very much allowed himself, like Zelig, to blend in with whomever was in the room at the moment.

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Soundgarden reunion rumors have been flying around almost as long as Soundgarden have been broken up. (And in case you lost count, this Friday will be the thirteenth anniversary of the break-up. Someone will have been born and bar mitzvahed in the time since Soundgarden were last together! Egads!) Chris Cornell pretty much let the cat out of the bag that the band is reuniting back in January, and now they’ve announced that they’re headlining Lollapalooza in August. (Unfortunately, the rest of the line-up for that festival is pretty blech, especially from a fan of half-way decent rock; there’s Social Distortion and, uh, that’s it. If the artist on the bill I’d be most excited to see that isn’t Soundgarden is Erykah Badu, well, that’s a festival I won’t be attending.)

And, as usual, my enthusiasm is tempered with cynicism.

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So the Australian branch of iTunes has apparently uploaded thirty-second clips of all the songs from Slash’s forthcoming, self-titled solo album, and, of course, someone has uploaded all of those clips to YouTube. Gotta love the internet! So I thought we’d play one of our favorite games here at MetalSucks. It’s called “Let’s make premature judgments based on not very much actual music at all.” Listen to the clips in the video below, and then get my thoughts after the jump.

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…..how else can you explain the fact that less than one week after I urged Castrato Cornell to reunite the almighty Soundgarden it totally happened??

You’re welcome, Kim Thayil!

To celebrate, here’s a nice solo acoustic ditty from CC before he pissed all over himself with Scream:

CHRIS CORNELL — “Seasons”, from the Singles Soundtrack (1992):

-KW

Unless your New Years Eve revelry landed you in county lock-up or somewhere else without Internet access (or you just own an iPhone), you’ve likely heard the fantastic albeit unsurprising news that SOUNDGARDEN HAS REUNITED. Chris Cornell announced it precisely at the stroke of midnight (Eastern Standard Time) via his often bizarre and unintentionally hilarious Twitter account:

The 12 year break is over & school is back in session. Sign up now. Knights of the Soundtable ride again! www.soundgardenworld.com

So Soundgarden’s back together. What the hell does that mean?

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Los Angeles’ Hotel Cafe is a 165-person capacity venue, a seemingly unlikely place to find a world famous rocker with millions of record sales under his belt. And yet last Thursday it hosted noneother than Chris Cornell for an “intimate” sold out performance. As expected, YouTube has amateur footage of songs from the setlist, which included “Euphoria Morning” and Audioslave’s “Doesn’t Remind Me”, as well as covers of The Beatles’ “A Day In The Life” and John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Of course, the track that stands out the most for me was “Call Me A Dog”, a song from the Temple Of The Dog album. The project, a tribute to the late Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood, reformed somewhat during a recent Pearl Jam concert in L.A. The solo acoustic performance above (audio quality trumps video quality) is naturally much more subdued and somber, which helps to remind us all that Cornell is a gifted songwriter, even despite his misguided dalliance with Timbaland. With a reworked rock version of Scream in the planning, the former Soundgarden frontman might just earn back the respect of fans who balked at his attempt to mimic Justin Timberlake.

In other news, Timbaland’s upcoming Shock Value 2 album features vocal contributions from Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger and Chris Daughtry. Yeah, you read right…

-GS

[Gary Suarez is going hungry. He usually manages WHOLLY DIVER (a Dio tribute site) and the consistently off-topic No Yoko No. Say, why don't you follow him on Twitter?]

All this talk about Slash’s upcoming solo album has got me playing “Fantasy Velvet Revolver” in my head once again. Though I still hold out hope that Axl’s idea of having Perry Farrell front the band comes to fruition, I know in my heart that there’s probably a better chance of Scott Weiland rejoining the band, which is admittedly a pretty remote possibility. Remote like Siberia.

So looking through the list of vocalists purportedly gracing the axeman’s new record, I see a number of qualified albeit unlikely candidates to fill Weiland’s still-vacant spot. Yeah, it would be a heavy music lover’s dream to have Ozzy Osbourne sing for the band, considering the craptastic nature of his last few solo albums. Realistically, that would be an unholy managerial nightmare with the potential capacity to yield a catastrophic clusterfuck to put the legal woes of Black Sabbath and Guns N’ Roses to shame. Dave Grohl’s too busy counting his money and playing geriatric rock with his idols to commit to yet another band. These days, Alice Cooper and Lemmy Kilmister have the commercial drawing power of, well, Alice Cooper and Lemmy Kilmister, and maybe would shift a few more units than a Velvet Revolver fronted by an unknown (anyone remember Eric Dover or Rod Jackson?) or that dude from Spacehog. Don’t even get me started on Fergie.

One other name on that list, however, actually makes sense…

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The Starbucks Incident

Yes, I am going to continue to bitch about Slash. I understand that Slash is not Jimi Hendrix but this might be the single biggest betrayal to my formative years since Metallica released everything they’ve released from Load on, and I need to mourn.

So. Some lady says that the following singers are all on Slash’s new solo album, How Could Taking My Cues from Carlos Santana Possibly Go Wrong? I have added my own thoughts because that’s what we do around here. Click to read more…