I remember a time – seems like it wasn’t all that long ago, really – when Vince and I were pretty much convinced that they just put special drugs in the water in Sweden to help the human brain devise awesome metal. That country could do no wrong. We often spoke of taking a pilgrimage to Gothenburg, where we assumed that every garage would be full of kids in the earliest stages of becoming the next At the Gates, the next Dark Tranquillity, the next In Flames.

It’s good to be young and naive, but everyone eventually has to face the fact that the romantic ideals we so cling to as children must fall away as we enter adulthood. When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but then I grew the fuck up. Or however that quote goes.

And if you don’t agree with my stance on Sweden, then you haven’t seen the new Sonic Syndicate video.

Holy crap. Everything about that video is terrible. I don’t even care that the girl is cute, ’cause her taste in music is so awful I can’t imagine what our pillow-talk would be about. (“You like the color black? I like the color black, too.”) Even just sticking mics in the singers’ hands would have been a step in the right direction, ’cause then their arms wouldn’t have been free to do those big New Kids on the Block movements. Another thing that would have been a step in the right direction: making a video with a different band for a different song.

And in case Sonic Syndicate alone don’t make you wish Sweden had some brown people so we could declare war on them right now, there’s Audiovision:

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We’re back! Why fuck around? Let’s give away some shit.

Specifically, let’s give away a copy of Dark Tranquillity’s Where Death is Most Alive DVD. Spanning the band’s entire career, this two disc set includes an entire DT concert filmed in Milan in 2008, a 47 minute documentary about the band, a plethora of music videos, and a “live archive” featuring footage reaching back as far as 1991! This is a perfect refresher course on Dark Tranquillity up ’til now, before their new album, We Are the Void, is released on March 9 on Century Media.

All you have to do to win is identify the name of the band whose logo appears below, then shoot me an e-mail at axl AT metalsucks DOT net with your answer, your name, and your address. We’ll randomly select a winner from everyone who gets it right, and announce his or her name next week.

This week’s logo was suggested to us by MetalSucks uber-Maniac Mark Moritz-Rabson…

-AR

The Latin phrase Humanae Vitae means “of human life,” and Wikipedia tells me it’s the title of “an encyclical written by Pope Paul VI and promulgated on July 25, 1968.” So does “humanae” just mean “human?” My sixth grade Latin fails me, but that seems like a reasonable assumption.

In any case, “Humanae” is the title of a new song by Swedish death supergroup Laethora, and can be streamed here. It comes off the band’s new album, The Light In Which We All Burn.

I really dug Laethora’s last outing, 2007′s March of the Parasites, so I have high hopes for this one. Laethora shares a member with Dark Tranquility (guitarist Niklas Sundin), but don’t sound nearly as melodic or polished as that band; Jonatan Nordenstam’s vocals always make me think of that scene in the John Carpenter version of Village of the Damned where the dude passes out on top of his grill and and they find his charred body cooking. I don’t wanna say the band is “blackened” because that word has connotations of its own, but I do think “charred” works. Everything about this music just feels bleak and cancerous.

Check out the song here. The Light In Which We All Burn comes out April 27 on The End.

-AR

An e-mail I received from long time reader Seveword earlier today:

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