Two new Cloudkickers albums were supposed to be released this coming Tuesday, November 22nd, but Cloudkicker maestro Ben Sharp has decided to release them early because of “certain shipments making their way to my door ahead of schedule, [and] I just don’t see any point in waiting until the 22nd.” So awesome — Ben Sharp is just that kinda guy who doesn’t GAF about no stinkin’ release dates!

I haven’t listened to either Let Yourself Be Huge or Loop yet in my haste to get this post up, but according to Heavy Blog is Heavy‘s Alkahest who has, “Both Let Yourself Be Huge and Loop emphasize the more mellow side of Cloudkicker, with most of the music taking an acoustic style, melding together Cloudkicker and main man Ben Sharp’s once separate BM Sharp project.” Sounds pretty rad to me… acoustic Cloudkicker is still Cloudkicker, and I’m pretty excited to hear what this other side of Sharp’s mind sounds like.

Stream Let Yourself Be Huge here and stream Loop here via Cloudkicker’s Bandcamp, where you can also purchase the albums digitally for any price of your choosing and order them on CD, along with a poster or t-shirt if you so desire.

-VN

Thanks: Jonathan Delarosa

While we were busy palling around with Municipal Waste, God Forbid, Today is the Day and the rest of the excellent bands that played Day 1 of the Metal Suckfest on Friday, we heard some great news from an act that would’ve felt at home on the prog-centric lineup of the Suckfest’s second day: Ben Sharp, aka Cloudkicker, will be releasing not one but TWO new records on November 22nd.

Cloudkicker is one of our favorite up-and-coming instrumentalists and is as prolific as anyone in metal; his last full album, Beacons, came out just one year ago. From Cloudkicker’s Tumblr:

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I’ve always enjoyed hearing demos and unreleased song ideas. It’s fun to hear the riffs and melodies that full songs come from, and it’s especially interesting to learn about how songs you’re already familiar with evolved over time into the forms that you find familiar.

Got-Djent.com tells us that the following three Cloudkicker song ideas come from June 2008, March 2010 and June 2010 respectively. In this context and order it’s also fascinating to witness how Ben Sharp’s songwriting evolved over time from “djent” into “Cloudkicker.” The ending riff of the third clip below should ring a bell for Cloudkicker fans:

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Of all the buzzed-about solo instrumental acts to hit the scene since cheap recording technology and the Internet collided in a giant explosion of output, Cloudkicker seems to be one of the most universally lauded. Sure, everyone’s got access to said technology and the Internet, but it’s the songs that make the act, silly, and Cloudkicker’s got tons of ‘em. Cloudkicker is also a safe bet to put on in situations where you want something heavy but you’re surrounded by non-metalhead friends, i.e. at a party, in the car, etc., making him — Ben Sharp, that is — a real favorite of this here writer.

The latest new Cloudkicker jam posted on Got-Djent.com doesn’t appear to be from a new album, but who knows; Sharp could just be teasing us, as it’s been something like 9 months since Beacons was released (an eternity in solo instrumentalist time). It’s an entirely acoustic jam, and frankly it really isn’t metal at all, but it’s entirely consistent with the Cloudkicker sound — Cloudkicker’s Cloudkickerness, if you will, or haeccity — and it’s not difficult to imagine this song arranged with electric instruments. Stream “It’s inside me, and I’m inside it” below.

It’s inside me, and I’m inside it. by Ben Sharp

-VN

Well, here was a fun e-mail to get from the reader known as Strapping Young Lad:

I grew up on Long Island on a horse breeding farm called Fast Break Farms. We’re pretty small; we usually only have enough room for about 10 horses. My parents were looking for a name for their new racing horse, and I suggested Cloudkicker. My parents loved it, and thought it was cute (?!). We’ve also had one horse named In Flames (who, much like the band, started off promising but sucks now) and another named Shagrath (Shaggy for short). I’m trying to get my parents to name all of our new horses after metal bands… I think it would be pretty sweet!”

We agree! So we asked SYL to send us some pics of the horses in question, and, yay for us, he obliged!

Cloudkicker

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This is probably old news to you if you spent the time between Christmas and New Year’s parked in front of your computer like we most certainly did not, but for the rest of you; Cloudkicker — aka Ben Sharp, recipient of many MetalSucks’ writers Best of 2010 lists — has released a new song called “You and Yours.”

As usual, the song is available for free on Cloudkicker’s Bandcamp page. I’m continually impressed by just how prolific Sharp is; an EP, full-length and bonus song all in one year is pretty damn impressive. Of course, his status as an unsigned home-recording musician and self-professed hobbyist in the Internet age makes this all possible, but while it’d be just as easy to turn out piece of crap after piece of crap “You and Yours” is up to the high standards that Cloudkicker fans have come to expect.

Check out “You and Yours” here; if history is any indication, there will be more Cloudkicker music on the way soon. Oh hey, and there’s a sweet new Cloudkicker t-shirt available too.

-VN

That sound you hear is Ben Sharp shitting his pants.

-VN

The Internet is a treasure trove of data just waiting to be spliced and re-assembled in new and interesting ways.

A recent feature added to Got-Djent.com gave users the ability to indicate their favorite bands on their own personal profiles, so the keepers of that site have taken that information and produced a map “where the proximity of two bands on the map indicates how much their respective fanbases overlap.” Fascinating. Check it out: (click to enlarge)

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The results are fascinating.

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Many of you already know and love Cloudkicker, a one-man instrumentalist whose amazing free ambient metal releases have taken the Internet by storm in 2010… the rest of you are really missing out. But do you know anything about Ben Sharp, the man behind the curtain? Precious little information about Sharp is easily discoverable online. Until now; while you’re used to seeing the zany antics of Rob Pasbani as Metal Injection’s on-camera personality, Frank Godla, usually the man behind the camera, tracked down Sharp for a rare on-camera appearance after seriously dorking out to Cloudkicker. And I mean seriously dorking out; I haven’t seen Frank rave about a new band so passionately, well… ever.

The interview is really interesting, too. Sharp is thoughtful and articulate and has a lot of interesting viewpoints on music as a professional vs. as a hobby, giving away his music for free online, his creative process, the possibility of assembling a live band, and how the title of the ]]][[[ EP is pronounced. Check it above, then check out Cloudkicker’s most recent full-length Beacons at Bandcamp, streaming for free or downloadable for however much you’d like to pay for it.

Alright. So all of yesterday’s entries from Vegas pretty much blew goats, and not only did the Peoria-area reader known as “chainchomp” leave a comment reassuring me that I was being punished, but he also admitted that not every band listed in his e-mail recommendation was good — but they all “get alot of hype here in good ol’ Pee-Town.” So today I’m rewarding his kindness and honestly but taking a stroll down to this so-called “Pee-Town.”

If I ever live somewhere named after urine, please end me.

Anyways, we’re off to the races. Yay.

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Will someone please sign this guy? Of all the one-man bedroom metal bands out there today (and good lord are there a lot of them), the number of emails we get about Ben Sharp — aka Cloudkicker — far outnumber the rest. And with good reason; Sharp puts out consistently good material that’s not derivative in the landscape of a micro-genre that thrives on derivation.

Not that Cloudkicker really needs a label, because he seems to be doing just fine on his own and gives all his music away for free anyway. His new album Beacons — his second already in 2010 — appeared on the Interwebs this week, and surprise, it’s free, but with a twist: for the first time ever he’s taking donations for a digital download of the album in the form of a “name your price” box. Of course “$0.00″ is a perfectly acceptable price to name, and you can essentially do that anyway by just steaming the whole thing on his Bandcamp page, but those fans wanting something more tangible can purchase a CD for $10 — or more if they so choose. Check it out right here.

It’s a pretty neat way to release an album. MS reader poll: if you’ve purchased Beacons, how much did you pay for it? BE HONEST.

-VN

Thanks: Josh S., Matan J.

I love it when budding musicians and bands give away their recorded music for free. Rather than trying to charge $10 (or however much) to collect money from the few diehard fans you have that are willing to spring some dough for your product, you make a potential fan out of anyone who’s willing to download the album for the price of a click and the time it takes to do so. Rather than selling 10 or 100 copies for money, your music reaches hundreds or thousands of people willing to give it a shot, people who will later come to your show or buy a t-shirt if they like the music enough. This, my friends, is smart business.

Enter Cloudkicker, the excellent 1-man band led by Ben Sharp, whose new EP ]]][[[ is currently available for free (along with the rest of his entire catalog). The punctuation-monikered EP only has 3 songs, but they're jam-packed with a variety of different instru-metal styles that fit together well into one cohesive whole. For the most part Cloudkicker lives in the ambient instru-metal realm but occasionally ventures into other territories. His music is lush, big and complex, but it's the kind of metal that doesn't make your head spin or require a lot of listening attention to enjoy. Think the instrumentation of Animals of Leaders with the musicality of Scale the Summit, but with dense layering similar to Jesu... and you're close to what Cloudkicker sounds like. Download ]]][[[ for free here.

-VN

Thanks: Peter Butter, Josh S.

These three bands have very little in common other than the facts that a) they are metal bands, b) they rule, c) I’d like to write about all of them today. Enjoy some completely new music today instead of arguing for the 16,989th time about Disturbed, Jesse Leach vs. Howard Jones, how shitty screamo-crunk is, or whatever the fuck the topic of the hour is, you fuckwads. Awesome new music after le jump.

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