With Gingrich’s devastating Floridian loss, once again I feel justified for naming this hardcore festival news roundup column Pit Romney. Here’s what’s new…

Don’t sell the Midwest short, as Chicago-based fest The Rumble has declared much of its 2012 lineup, with classic headline acts Negative Approach and Murphy’s Law topping a bill with scene favorites Cruel Hand, Wisdom In Chains, and Harms Way along with curveballs like Coliseum and Sweet Cobra. Other announced acts are 100 Demons, Agitator, Beware, Everything Went Black, No Regrets, The Mongoloids, Rotting Out, Empire Of Rats, FocusedXMinds, The Killer, Argonauts, Rock Bottom, Wrong Answer, and Withdrawal. 2011 included big names like 108, Madball and the reunited DYS, so the pressure was on to match or top that and raise the fest’s scene profile. Also, this year its been moved up to April 27-28, with ticket info yet to be announced.

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One thing’s for damn sure: Coliseum know what they’re doing. They’ve been around long enough and they’ve seen parts of the world some of us (myself included) still dream of visiting; needles to say, the notoriety they’ve built up has been well earned. That worldliness, minus the pretentious undertones you might expect from a band as well traveled, is articulated quite well on their latest EP, Parasites.

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Last time I wrote about Louisville hardcore/rawkers Coliseum a commenter tough-guy by the name of Jesse Radon accused me of only having listened to their most recent album, House With a Curse, presumably because I referred to their music as a “blend of bluesy rock, metal and hardcore” (emphasis added). Hey, guess what Jesse? You’re wrong! I’m not claiming to be any kind of Coliseum expert, but I jumped on the bandwagon with No Salvation and I’m well aware of the band’s hardcore roots. It just so happens that I dig their later material (House With a Curse) more than their earlier stuff because, ya know, I’m a human being and I’ve got my own tastes. I love that they’ve slowed things down of late and let a lot more of their southern, bluesy influence show through in their music. They are also an incredibly fun live band. So, Jesse, I hope you’re enjoying the no-fun zone over there, wherever you are.

Coliseum’s newest album (actually an EP) Parasites came out yesterday. AP’s got the whole thing up for streaming as well as a track-by-track breakdown written by vocalist/guitarist Ryan Patterson. Give Parasites a spin… I dare you not to be hooked by their infectious bluesy hardcore riffing. And don’t forget about the live video they released of the EP track “Waiting (Too Late)” a few weeks ago.

Order Parasites here.

-VN

Cynic’s Carbon-Based Anatomy EP highlights this week’s release slate, while White Wizzard, Blut Aus Nord, Bloody Panda, Coliseum and more are also releasing new albums. Let’s take a look after the jump.

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I love Coliseum. Their blend of bluesy rock, metal and hardcore hits me in that sweet spot that just gets me going. And everything I’ve seen and heard about them as people suggests that they’re great dudes who simply love making music, are OK with the sacrifices they’ve made to do so and are extremely grateful for any success they’re able to achieve. Metal needs more dudes like these guys.

So I’m quite excited to hear that Coliseum have a new EP coming out, Parasites, on November 15th via Temporary Residence. The band posted a new song from the EP called “Waiting (Too Late)” on Soundcloud a couple of weeks back, and now they’ve released a live video for the song too, shot at the Twin Infinities art show on July 1, 2011. Unlike most live videos, I love the way this one is shot — it just feels so real. There’s no lighting, stage production or editing chicanery taking place here, just incredibly well-shot footage of Coliseum rocking out, right up in their faces.

Catch Coliseum on tour with Boris in the Midwest and Sourtheast U.S. later this month (dates here).

-VN

Thanks: Sean Reynolds

MS staffers have lives too, and as such we can’t always get to the record store the very day new releases come out. We’re guessing it’s the same for you guys, too, but that doesn’t mean you’re not interested in the week’s new releases, right? With that in mind, here’s Vic Vaughn on all the shit that came out yesterday including new records from Decapitated and Suicide Silence.

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Our number one homie Justin Foley is just completed a mini-tour with his band, The Austerity Program, and graciously offered to do a tour blog for us. We can never say “no” to Justin and wouldn’t much want to anyway, so we agreed! You can read his account of days one and two of the mini-trek here, day three here and day four here; the fifth and final day is below… enjoy!

Saturday, May 21, 2011
New York City

Back at home after the whole thing is over.  Here’s one of the many things that no one ever tells you about when you think that you want to be in a band: some time not too long after going out on some sort of tour, you should set aside a few hours with a bucket and a bunch of rags and then just wipe all of your equipment down.  I spent the better part of Saturday afternoon doing just that and boy, the water in that bucket gets nasty quick.  What lives on the floors of these clubs that we go see bands in?  What calls those puddles of stale beer its home?  What foul creature sneaks into venues late at night and hides stage monitors deep in its own crevices, so that they are bathed in the funk of the undead?  Well, the amps are clean anyway.  Sitting back in the practice space, ready to make more music.

I figured I’d take the last of these entries to talk about the best case scenario for playing a show.  Thursday night is a good enough example of that. We were third out of four.

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Our number one homie Justin Foley is currently doing a mini-tour with his band, The Austerity Program, and graciously offered to do a tour blog for us. We can never say “no” to Justin and wouldn’t much want to anyway, so we agreed! You can read his account of days one and two of the mini-trek here and day three here; the fourth day is below… enjoy!

Providence, Rhode Island

We are in the capitol of the smallest state in the US, the Ocean State.  Tonight’s venue is nestled into the downtown, combining an art gallery with a restaurant with a bar with a place for bands like us to play.  Charming little city you got here, Rhode Island.  Nice place; you should keep it.

Funny thing that we’re playing P-town tonight.  A few years back when we put out our first record, we didn’t understand too well how this whole ‘marketing and promotion’ thing worked with records.  So, rather than put out some materials that talked seriously about how important our artistic vision was and how we were for fans of this band and influenced by that scene, we chose instead to make up some bullshit story about how we were suing our record label because they wouldn’t allow us to issue patents on our song.  I don’t know what we thought we were going to accomplish by this, but we thought it was a fun little goof and that no one would actually believe it.

Wrong.  Turns out a bunch of people were mad about some assholes from New York City that no one had ever heard of loudly broadcasting legal action against the beloved label that put out records by Cave In and Botch.  Man, the things people will send to a total stranger over email… it’s just unkind.

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Our number one homie Justin Foley is currently doing a mini-tour with his band, The Austerity Program, and graciously offered to do a tour blog for us. We can never say “no” to Justin and wouldn’t much want to anyway, so we agreed! You can read his account of days one and two of the mini-trek here; the third day is below… enjoy!

Wednesday, May 18, 2011
New York

Philadelphia, PA last night, aka Quaker City.  We arrived in town with hunger in the belly and a bit of time to kill.  This second thing nearly killed us.  Thad and I never have time to kill; work, family, odd projects, people who need setting straight on the Internet – all of these things consume more time than we have and so things like leisure and friendships are usually left unattended.  And so, an hour or two after getting ‘the best vegetarian cheesesteak in Philly’ (it wasn’t bad – the bread’s the key thing) we had a few hours to burn.

We got a couple of beers (in daylight!  I mean, that’s straight up “Theatre of Pain” decadence right there) we ambled over to catch an early showing of Takashi Mike’s 13 Assassins.  Coliseum had seen it recently and said it was like ½ as good as Thor which means they thought it was awesome.  (The band is completely bonkers about Thor.)

Thad and I settled in to a theatre sparsely populated by seniors and the unemployed and were soon completely assaulted by the film.  I’m not going to spoil the movie for those who haven’t seen it, but it was pretty obvious that the whole thing was written backwards.  Basically the cinematic equivalent of a good Helmet song: here’s the gigantic riff that we’ll kill them with at the end, so what else do we need to put in the song to get to that riff and make it destroy?  Props to the movie also for giving us our theme for the trip: TOTAL MASSACRE. (Sometimes “massacre” isn’t enough.)

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Our number one homie Justin Foley is currently doing a mini-tour with his band, The Austerity Program, and graciously offered to do a tour blog for us. We can never say “no” to Justin and wouldn’t much want to anyway, so we agreed! Below please find his musings on the first two days of the mini-trek…

Monday, May 16, 7:43 AM
New York City

It’s early.  It always takes me a few hours to get to bed after playing, as the electricity of it needs a bit of time to bleed from my system ,at least enough for sleep to take hold.  Since we got back to the house pretty quick last night I just stayed up until 3 or so doing dumb shit like paying my bills.  Then, when my daughter was up at 7 I leapt up to get her.  So, yeah, now she’s watching the end of Elmo’s World and I have hit that “whut the fuuuuck” thing that happens when you’ve gotten 3 and a half hours of sleep and got the whooole day ahead of you.

Last night was us playing our New York residency, a little music box venue called Union Pool.  I like the place a lot – it’s a small enough venue with a bit of a weird theatrical feel to it: little light bulbs frame the stage for black-t-shirted bands like us.  We always have to play Tetris with our amp setup and barely manage to figure it out each time.

The load-in for an event like this is always some low level of absurd.  Four sets of guys, all dressed pretty much the same way, all wheeling and carrying amp after amp after amp into a not-so-big room, all to be stacked on top of/behind/in front of one another and quickly rearranged when it’s some band’s 26 minutes to play their music.  Certainly some rational observer would look at it all and say “why don’t you all just take the best collection of those boxes and just all play through that?”  For some reason, rational observer, it just doesn’t work like that – and I say this as the band that is about the worst offender of the “lbs of heavy shit per band member” rule.  And so we all politely and determinedly got our piles of gear in and sort of settled.  The sound guy bit his lip as it all unflolded.

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Yes, this is TAP’s actual equipment, and yes, it is awesome.

Hopefully by now all MetalSucks readers are familiar with The Austerity Program, whose guitarist/vocalist, Justin Foley, has written some great articles and conducted some amazing interviews on our behalf over the past couple of years. He also introduced us to the idea of the Taco Riff, a concept that still seems really confusing to a lot of people, but resulted in some really fun articles nonetheless. (Go here to read everything Justin has ever written for us.)

You know what else is fun? Seeing The Austerity Program live. I actually think they’re like five times as heavy (and they’re definitely ten times as loud) in a concert setting, and Foley’s front mannerisms have a kind of Baptist preacher quality to them, which makes their shows a whole different experience from listening to their records. If you’ve seen them before you’re probably already stoked to see them again, and if you haven’t, well, you should get on that.

Here’s your shot — the band are doing some dates in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island in April and May, including a bunch with the always-amazing Coliseum. This is “as close to a tour as we get this year, we think,” the band says, so do not squander this opportunity.

Also, to our fellow New Yorkers — apparently the setlist for the 4/22 show is gonna be completely different from the setlist for the 5/15 show, so you should go twice, ’cause it will be a completely different experience each time. Also ’cause I told you to.

Here are dates…

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I always forget just how awesome Louisville’s Coliseum are. Just this past June I published a piece saying how good these guys are (and so did Axl), and here I am doing it again. Shame on me. May this be a lesson both to me and to you… Coliseum fucking rip. I hereby vow to be a more devoted Coliseum fan.

MS reader Roger Johnson sent in a link to We Have Signal, a live music series filmed at the Bottle Tree Cafe in Birmingham, AL. We Have Signal filmed some live footage of Coliseum’s get-yer-blood-pumpin’ hardcore n’ roll set when they rolled through Birmingham recently, and got some face-time with the band members as well. This footage makes me wish I caught them on their most recent tour; they melted my face off at the New England Metal & Hardcore Fest in 2008, and it’s high time I saw them again.

-VN

I whole-heartedly echo Axl’s sentiment that there is way too fucking much good music coming out right now, “an annoying over-abundance” if you will. How am I supposed to listen to it all? And ’cause Axl and I are linked at the hip, I too have not yet had a chance to sit down with Coliseum’s latest, House With a Curse, which comes out on June 22nd via Temporary Residence.

Stereogum premiered the ripping track “Blind in One Eye” a few weeks back, and now the band are offering a free download of “Everything to Everyone” on SendSpace [via Metal Insider]. So far, they’re two for two; both songs are doozies. Coliseum’s brand of raw punk meets blues rawk and metal isn’t necessarily unique — bands like Doomriders, Scissorfight, Kvelertak and Chambers come to mind — but they’re damn good at it, and listening to these tracks you get the sense that they mean it.

Download “Everything to Everyone” here, and pick up House With a Curse when it comes out on June 22nd.

-VN

OH MY FUCKING GOD, THERE ARE SO MANY GOOD BANDS PUTTING OUT NEW MUSIC IN THE COMING MONTHS. This is beyond an “embarrassment of riches;” we’re really just about at the saturation point of “an annoying over-abundance of good music.” How the fucking fuck is one person ever supposed to listen to all this shit and actually have time to digest it properly? If I cut eating, bathing, sleeping, grooming, reading, writing, watching TV, going to the movies, acknowledging my family and friends, feeding or in any way taking care of my dog, or doing anything that involves walking away from my stereo out of my schedule, I might have enough time to listen to everything. The amount of “you might dig this” e-mails from Vince alone are overwhelming, and that’s not counting all the shit labels, bands, and you guys send me. Hol-ee crap.

So, the latest advance album I have had absolutely no time to actually listen to is House with a Curse, the latest from Coliseum. But Stereogum is giving away a download of a new song off the album, “Blind in One Eye.” So maybe you guys can listen to it and tell me what I’m missing. In the meantime, I’m gonna go whine some more and then stab myself in the ears.

Download “Blind in One Eye” here. House with a Curse comes out June 22 on Temporary Residence.

-AR

It’s been a while since our bro-bros at Metal Injection posted any solid live footage, but now they’re kicking off the new year with a plethora of sick clips featuring Skeletonwitch, Municipal Waste, and Coliseum.

Here’s a sample… Skeletonwitch doing “Fire from the Sky.” I think this footage does a pretty good job of conveying why Skeletonwitch are one of the most fun live bands out there right now:

Head over to Metal Injection for more excellent footage of Skeletonwitch, plus Municipal Waste and Coliseum!

-AR

With Christmas nearly upon us, and “Best of 2009″ lists thankfully behind us, many people are hoping to ride out the rest of the year quietly without getting into arguments with their respective families. Due to the obligations of the holiday season and a general desire on the part of folks to do fuck-all, the final week of a given year typically doesn’t offer music lovers much in the way of live shows, unless you’re the type of degenerate willing to pay an inflated ticket price to watch a band play a truncated set with drunken, amateurish New Year’s Eve revelers hellbent on making monumental asses of themselves. And while I have every intention of honoring my New Year’s Eve tradition of locking myself in my panic room with a case of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey and several tins of Vienna Sausages, it would be impossible for me to pass up the chance to catch Coalesce, who are headlining a rare, one-off date on December 30th at Club Europa in Brooklyn, NY.

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What’s better than great music? Great music for free, of course! And we know you downloading motherfuckers agree with us, because you’re always e-mailing us about leaks n’ shit.

So why not download something that will neither a) make you feel guilty for stealing nor b) possibly condemn you to a life of living in a cage and being anally gang raped in the shower?

Deathwish have a new sampler, entitled MMIX, which they are making available for free download. And there’s some pretty cool artists on it, including Coliseum, Doomriders, The Hope Conspiracy, Converge’s Jacob Bannon, Pulling Teeth and Trap Them (who Vince and I don’t get but I know a lot of people really dig so I guess I should give them another chance).

After the jump, get the complete track list and download links.

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At the beginning of April, just as genre-bending metal masters The Red Chord were kicking off a tour with Converge, Genghis Tron, Baroness and Coliseum, we were given the opportunity to e-mail bassist Greg Weeks some questions. Of course, we jumped at the chance.

And then we never heard back.

At the time, we assumed that Greg had decided our questions were just too stupid to answer (and who could blame the dude?); in fact, there was another culprit at fault for Greg’s delayed response.

After the jump, find out why it took Greg so long to get back to us, and read his thoughts on such incredibly relevant political topics as why no producer will work with the band more than once, touring with Disturbed, and the current state of large beards in metal. For, surely, this interview proves our journalistic integrity.

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After a nice long, hot shower and a little grub it was time to head back downtown. The nightcap for my full Day One of metal would be…

VVEREVVOLF GREHV/COLISEUM/GENGHIS TRON/MUNICIPAL WASTE/HIGH ON FIRE @ EMO’S ANNEX, Thursday, March 14, 9:00 P.M. – 2:00 A.M.

Yes, I’m sure you see the name Emo’s up there. Don’t fret. Emo’s in Austin is a longstanding hardcore/punk/metal institution that has existed long before the incredibly pussified musical genre that co-opted its name emerged. In fact, the venue is so revered that it did not limit itself to only two stages this year – it had its usual indoor stage, a smaller lounge stage, and a third stage across the street on the corner of the infamous Sixth Street in a giant tent called Emo’s Annex.

I showed up around 8:45 p.m., paid $13 to get in (…to hell with SXSW badges!), missed opening act Mala Suerte, and grabbed a makeshift seat close to the temporary stage. While listening to some guy hit on a chick by saying he “smoked out” with Enslaved, I was curious to see one man setting up gear on stage. That man was…

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Photos from yesterday’s Motorhead show at Stubb’s and Relapse Records showcase at Emo’s Annex featuring High on Fire, Municipal Waste, Genghis Tron, Coliseum and Vverevvolf Grehv. And Jamey Jasta hangin’ out at the show. Click on the thumbnail to see a full-size picture. Also, a short video clip of Genghis Tron after the jump!

Motorhead:

Vverevvolf Grehv:

Click through for photos of Genghis Tron, Coliseum, Matt Pike and Jamey Jasta + video of Genghis Tron!

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