Ten years ago today Death mastermind Chuck Schuldiner died of a brain tumor. It’d be hard to argue that Schuldiner didn’t have a massive influence upon all the metal that followed after Death; while Death may not have ever achieved close to the mainstream metal notoriety that Metallica and Pantera did, I can’t think of any single other band that had such a huge impact upon everything that followed.

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of Schuldiner’s passing, NPR metal king Lars Gotrich collected eleven metal musicians and asked them to write about their favorite Death song and what it means to them. Among the musicians that penned brief pieces for NPR are three former members of Death (Paul Masvidal, Gene Hoglan and Richard Christy) along with members of Baroness, East of the Wall, Revocation and more. They’ve included streaming audio of their song picks, too; Death is definitely going to be soundtrack this afternoon.

Check out the Relapse Records webshop for all things Death.

-VN

Italian prog metal maestros Ephel Duath are really just an Italian prog metal maestro, singular — the band has gone through something like 1,864,093 line-up changes since 1998, with guitarist Davide Tiso being the only constant. Do hardcore Ephel Duath fans consider that a total bummer, or do they not care? Regardless, this news should make them happy: their new line-up promotes Ephel Duath to a full-fledged supergroup.

For the band’s next release, Tiso has recruited Karyn Crisis (from, y’know, Crisis) to handle vocal duties, Steve DiGiorgio (Death, Testament, Obscura) to play bass, and Marco Minemann (Necrophagist, Kreator) to beat the drums. Holy shit, that’s an interesting collection of musicians, isn’t it?

Minemann is about to start recording drums for the band’s next EP, which will come out in 2012 via Agonia Records. And, clearly, it just became one of the more anticipated releases of next year. So there’s something to be excited for.

-AR

Rarely do we just cut and paste press releases here at MetalSucks, but this is obviously a special circumstance, and you should know all the details without any of our usual editorializing. And so:

James Murphy, former guitarist of both Death and Testament, As well as founding member of the death metal band Disincarnate, has had a relapse of the  brain tumor that sidelined him back in 2001. Murphy stated that the tumor had returned but that it was a non malignant and that it was being treated pharmacologically. Unfortunately, those medications have serious side effects that have left him unable to work. The option for different medications is available, but at a cost of over $1000 a month, and he needs a minimum of 6 months of medication for treatment to be effective. With his medical expenses extremely high and James not being able to work due to the side effects of the current medications, the metal community is being asked to come together and help one of their brothers and donate to help him beat this once and for all.

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Friendly reminder: as of RIGHT THIS SECOND, the legendary Richard Christy from Death, Iced Earth, Control Denied, and, oh yeah, The Howard Stern Show, is at the MetalSucks/Vertebrae 33  booth at New York Comic Con signing copies of Charred Walls of the Damned‘s ridiculously rocking new album, Cold Winds on Timeless Days, which is out NOW on Metal Blade Records. He’ll be there ’til 7 pm, so there’s still time for you to hop on a bus, subway, or in a cab and get your ass down there — we’re booth #2625. Myself and/or Vince are also there now, and will be there tomorrow and Sunday, too, and we may have some other special guests in store for you yet. So come on by, pick up some free swag courtesy of Indie Merch and Metal Blade, hang out, whatever. It’ll be a blast! Get all the details here.

And now, some other fun shit we did this week:

• We premiered a new live recording of Death’s “Leprosy” and new music from Trapped Under Ice.
• We spoke to Grutle Kjellson from Enslaved, Rex Brown from Kill Devil Hill/Pantera/Down, producer Shane Frisby, and Skateboard Marketing’s Munsey Ricci.
• Valient Thorr’s Valient Himself occupied Wall Street, GWAR’s Dave Brockie gave us the blow-by-blow on the NFL, and Eyal Levi from Dååth and Levi/Werstler and Audiohammer Studios got all Pacino-in-Heat on us.
• We checked out the latest releases from Warbringer and Årabrot.
• We continued The Countdown to The Metal Suckfest and launched a contest in which you can win some sweet swag and a meet and greet session at the show.
• We watched some inter-Emmure drama unfold.
• We begged Sasha Frere-Jones from The New Yorker to stop writing about metal forever.
• We enjoyed the use of Nine Inch Nails in the new trailer for The Avengers.
• We got excited about Cynic’s new line-up + song.
• We celebrated the best Dragonforce cover ever.

Have a terrific, relaxing weekend everyone. See ya Monday, if we don’t see ya at NYCC!

-AR

Few musicians will ever leave as lasting a legacy in the metal world as the late, great Chuck Schuldiner, whose singular vision manifested itself in the form of Death, a project which truly helped create and shape death metal for all time. On October 25, Relapse Records will celebrate this  this legendary institution with a reissue of Individual Thought Patterns, the band’s fifth studio album, now newly remixed by Death mastering engineer Alan Douches, remastered, repackaged, and featuring tons of newly unearthed and previously unreleased demo and live tracks. This version of Individual Thought Patterns is an absolute must-own not just for fans not just of of Schuldiner and Death, but of metal in general.

Amongst the plethora of awesome bonus materials included on the new reissue is an entire live set that Death — then consisting of Schuldiner, drummer Gene Hoglan, bassist Steve DiGiorgio, and guitarist Craig Locicero — performed in Germany on April 13, 1993. MetalSucks can’t even find the words to express how proud we are to be debuting the first song from that set, the classic “Leprosy” which you can check out below. Play it loud, play it proud, and then pre-order the Individual Thought Patterns reissue right here.

[this streaming promotion has ended]

I was just talking with a friend earlier this week about how much I miss Howard Stern. See, I used to wake up to his voice each and every morning while we were living together before he left me for that bitch Beth Ostrosky before he made the move to satellite radio, which, to this day, I do not have. As it stands, it’s literally been years since I’ve heard Howard’s show.

And I miss Stern all the more now that I’ve gotten to listen to the interview he did with Lars Ulrich this past Tuesday. It’s a great interview, even if it requires you to ignore Stern’s over-appraisal of Ulrich’s drumming skills. (The funniest part of The New York Times‘ review of yesterday’s Big Four show: “Rhythmically, [Slayer] swung, unlike Metallica, whose rhythm often grew unstable and plodding.”] There’s lots of juicy gossip in here, including how Ulrich is self-taught (shocking!) and had to take drum lessons for six months in-between Kill ‘Em All and Ride the Lightning, how he stole Dave Mustaine’s woman, how his wife left him, and how Hetfield isn’t exactly a social animal. Bonus: the great Richard Christy (Charred Walls of the Damned, Death, Iced Earth) — a drummer with, like, a gajillion times more skill than Ulrich — even gets to chime in.

Here’s part one…

…and you can listen to the rest after the jump.

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Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli…

By now you know that our latest Decibel tee pays direct homage to Chuck Schuldiner’s unfuckwithable Death. Here are a few words with the shirt’s designer, gnarly underground visual artist Aye Jay .

What inspired you to pitch a Death-themed Decibel shirt?

My friend Aaron Horkey — who is much more of a metal authority and much better artist — got me reading the mag, so I was inspired to get into contact. I’ve done a series of comedy-meets-metal/punk T-shirts with Shirts and Destroy (think Larry David + Motörhead = Larrydavhead), so when I started talking to Decibel, it only seemed natural to make a shirt along those same lines, especially since the letters are so similar between the two. Also, I thought it would be funny to have the reaper reading the mag, ’cause what is he really gonna read in his downtime? Rolling Stone?

What is it about the Death logo that makes it iconic so many years after the fact?

Much like the band, the logo is timeless, raw and knocks the brain around a bit. My only regret is not getting the spider webs from the older version of the logo in there.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out After Oblivion’s Vultures EP.

It is part of Music Criticism 101 to hold up originality as a virtue. Even if a band doesn’t possess any of it, a positive review of said band will often acknowledge why the band’s other qualities make up for their lack of originality. That’s all fine and good, but we can all think of plenty of bands that embrace a well-established sound so fully and energetically that it makes tired clichés relevant again.

My new favorite rehash metal band is Bosnian-Herzegovinaian quartet After Oblivion. These guys sound like Death. A whole lot. They acknowledge it in their press materials; they even played Death tribute shows to gear up for the writing/recording of Vultures. And in many ways, Vultures feels like a tribute EP. The band’s Chuck Schuldiner is singer/guitarist Adnan Hatić, who screams in that same parched upper register of late-era Schuldiner, and solos with a similar mix of elegance and shred. Rhythm guitars work in the Arabian modes and harmonies of Symbolic-era Death. Listen closely and you’ll hear bass slides that recall Steve DiGiorgio’s fretwork on Individual Thought Patterns. The similarities are uncanny.

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A song can be like the Kennedy assassination: Your first knowledge of it is an event, so you can’t help but forever remember the moment when it came barging into your once-perfectly sane life. The song changes you a little and takes on an aura (or whatever) that stirs you physically for years. It’s a personal thing, but as a confident professional, I’ll limb out and share one: Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is.” That song was the end of innocence for me; music was no longer purely magical, a series of neat sounds emitting from a crappy clock radio. To my young ears, music had grown horns, all malevolent, capable of harm and cynicism, darkly powerful, and unwilling to compromise. As such, I can instantly recall the view as I stared down at the now-menacing clock radio as I would a dog that had mauled my face unantagonized. This song, I thought, makes life fucking horrible. I eagerly await the day that radio programmers extract the dagger from my nards by cutting it from rotation. Permanently.

Sigh. It was a lonely feeling facing off with the awful choir reprises and pug-faced pseudo-silk of middle-aged Foreigner. But I would rebound years later, when local college radio unleashed upon me Death’s “Suicide Machine,” from their Human album.

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IMO the most important part of being a true metal fan is knowing your roots. There is nothing worse than a newjack poser who doesn’t know or care about the older bands who paved the way for the generations after them. For example, IMO you can’t consider yourself a real fan of Avenged Sevenfold without also being a fan of Pantera and 18 Visions/Velvet Revolver. I mean I love A7X but obviously they are pretty much just taking what those two bands did, only doing it a lot better. On the other hand, it also sucks when someone gets older and they stop liking stuff. I mean if you like Suffocation then you should also like Devourment, right?? But contrary to what you would expect, older metal fans do nothing but hate on newer bands.

Which one is right?? The younger fans, full of energy and enthusiasm, but unaware of the shitty bands that people used to like?? Or the jaded, bitter has-beens, with seemingly endless knowledge of irrelevant, music that nobody really cares about anymore??????

In this post I will do my best to tackle this topic and answer the question of which is better, NEW MUSIC or OLD MUSIC. I know it’s hard to compare things from different eras, but I think it will help all of us grow as metal fans!!

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As you are no doubt aware, metal is constantly being scapegoated for violent acts, be it attempted suicides, high school shootings, college shootings, or political assassinations. And soon we will no doubt be able to add another heinous crime to that list — namely terrorism.

See, with Osama bin Laden out of the way, one of the big questions on everyone’s mind is: “Who’s gonna step up and be the new leader of Al-Qaeda?” And one of the leading candidates is Adam Gadahn, né Adam Pearlstein (yep, another guy giving Jews a good name!), an American currently living in Pakistan who not only used to write for the death metal zine Xenocide, but also had his one one-man metal band, Aphasia. After converting to Islam at age seventeen and eventually fleeing the country after he assaulted the head of his mosque, Haitham Bundakji, he went to Pakistan, and was apparently intimately involved with the creation of bin Laden’s terror videos.

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Teenagers are always doing stupid, embarrassing shit in public, especially the ones who listen to metal. One of the most popular (and potentially humiliating) things a kid can do is enter their high school’s talent show, in particular if they make the mistake of playing a metal song in hopes of impressing their peers. For example, when I was in 9th or 10th grade, I was in a horrible band that played a Black Flag song in front of our school. Nobody thought it was cool, they just laughed at us. Thank god Youtube didn’t exist then, like it does for these dumb kids who embarrassed themselves by trying to be cool in front of their peers.

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Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli…

Transcribing sucks. I mean, I know, having a job is great, and having that job entailS working for a metal magazine and not flipping burgers or being the fourth president of Egypt is even better. Interviewing legends and/or friends and colleagues of legends is by far the best part about working for a metal magazine, but — this can’t be stressed enough — transcribing the resulting exchanges sucks. We’ve yet to program Decibot to handle this most mundane of tasks, and intern slavery is more enticing in theory than practice.

The thing is, I’m not complaining about my job here — I’m complaining for Chris Dick, who doesn’t even complain at all about this stuff. He’s the mastermind behind our March cover story, an authoritative 12-page oral history of Death, which is available now. This band is, without question, our top three Hall of Fame white whales, and since Chuck Schuldiner’s passing has rendered such a piece impossible, Chris did the next best thing: interviewing 16 of Chuck’s ex-bandmates, two former producers, Borivoj Krgin from back-in-the-day tape-trading lore, and even Chuck’s folks. We’re talking 11 hours on the phone with sources, for an unedited word count of 21,000. That’s a fucking novella right there, people. So, check this thing out — if you’re not already a Chuck fan, it’s hard to imagine anything but newfound slavish devotion after absorbing this monster.

As far as last week’s Hall of Fame contest goes, congratulations to last week’s winner, Phil Freeman, who will receive a free six-month subscription to Decibel. You can tell us if you think The Jesus Lizard’s 1991 noisestepiece Goat deserves a place in our hallowed Hall of Fame.

-AB

You can buy the March 2011 issue of Decibel here, but the only way to ensure that you never miss a Hall of Fame entry is to subscribe to Decibel, so how about you get off your ass and do that?

Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli…

I know, I know — we’ve (ab)used this space in past weeks to toot our own devil horns, re: the Decibel Flexi Series. (And frankly, we’ll probably continue to, at least until ESPN The Magazine trumps us by including monthly dong shot Polaroids, or until Revolver… uh, forget it.) That said, we have something pretty inarguably special in line for the March issue: not only a sprawling oral history on Death, but the mighty Revocation taking to plastic to cover “Pull the Plug” from Chuck and company’s 1988 classic Leprosy. This is the first instance—hopefully far from the last—of a band recording a track specifically to coincide with a Decibel cover, and as you can hear here, the Boston-based death-thrashers knocked it out of the park.

Revocation “Pull The Plug” by Decibel Magazine

Hopefully it’s a harbinger of more brutality to come, as their third LP will be out on Relapse this summer. Anyway, a super-limited number of advance copies have just been made available; it’s the easiest way to secure a flexi unless you’re already a Decibel subscriber. If you want to check out what you’ve been missing, all the flexi tracks are streaming right here.

-AB

You can buy the March 2011 issue of Decibel here, but the only way to ensure that you get these awesome flexi discs is to subscribe to Decibel, so get off your tuchus and do that.

In brief: Relapse is offering a free sampler for download to anyone who goes to their Facebook page and hits that little ol’ “like” button. As you can see from the track list below, there’s a ton of good shit on it, including new songs from Abysmal Dawn, Red Fang, and Noisear, plus some remastered Death, plus great stuff from Baroness, Revocation, Cephalic Carnage, Dying Fetus, Misery Index, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Brutal Truth, Murder Construct… the list goes on and on. This could very easily be the soundtrack for your New Year’s Eve partying.

Go here to download the sampler. Happy fucking new year.

-AR

I really never know what to say at times like this, other than that the world is a poorer place for Chuck not being in it. We miss ya, dude, and we’ll be cranking Death and Control Denied all day.

Share all your best memories and thoughts about the legend in the comments.

-AR

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Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (sometimes) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which means we’re taking off early today and won’t be back ’til Monday. We’re sorry to leave non-American readers high n’ dry, but PLUS ONE FOR FREEDOM, MOTHERFUCKERS.

ANYWAY, in honor of the holiday, we decided to do a special Turkey Day-themed QOTW designed to make you feel all warm and cuddly inside:

WHAT (IN METAL) ARE YOU THANKFUL FOR?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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It’s October, and Halloween season is officially here. This week, on the TV front, there’s been talk of rebooting The Munsters series. Again. It seems redundant for any of number reasons, including but not limited to: It’s been done before, and in this era of Hot Topic, you don’t need the Munsters to get a look at some video footage of a goth girl. But anyhow…

The talk of the Munsters relaunch reminded me of the Marshall Act. Passed by a Democrat-dominated Congress in 1987, it required all metal and crossover bands to cover composer Jack Marshall’s Grammy-nominated Munsters theme. Approximately three of every ten working metal crews recorded a cover of it over the next six years.

To commemorate the season of the witch, each week between now and the end of the Samhain, MetalSucks will spotlight one metal version of the Munsters theme. Our inaugural version is by Anacrusis.

The St. Louis also-rans were way ahead of their time. They blended thrash-, melodic-, tech-, and prog metal into a mix that holds up surprisingly well. Bill Metoyer (Slayer, the Accused, DRI) produced the band’s last LP, and Death’s Chuck Schuldiner personally invited the group to support his band. Anacrusis singer-guitarist Kenn Nardi recalled recording their version of the most riffolicious TV tune:

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I’ve already expressed my love of Levi/Werstler’s Avalanche of Worms (read my review here) so many times I’m running out of synonyms for “awesome,” so let me just put it this way: it’s one of the best albums of 2010 thus far. And as much praise has been heaped on Emil Werstler – whose day job is playing lead guitar for Daath – he deserves more. If you love great guitar playing, you need to hear this record, and then you need to bow down before Werstler with a cry of “I’m not worthy!” He is, simply put, the man.

Emil recently took time out from the writing and recording of the new Daath album – which, if all goes according to plan, will be out in the fall – to answer some questions for MetalSucks via e-mail. After the jump, learn how he started playing guitar, how he first hooked up Eyal Levi, his secrets for writing a great guitar solo, how he thinks the lessons of AOW will spill over into the new Daath release, and more.

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In the last few years, something seemed to happen and I barely noticed. Suddenly, I’m no longer the young kid at the show. I’m one of the guys hiding out by the bar. I’m not crowd surfing, not covered in sweat with my shirt off, and I’m certainly not moshing. I’m also not randomly yelling “Slayer!”, but that seems to span all demographics. I became… (gulp)… an adult. I don’t know what the range is in the ages of the followers of MetalSucks, but I’ll assume that it’s a mix of younger and older metal fans. I am 29 years old, but I still feel relatively young and energetic considering my opening salvo. I’m the youngest member of my band, and younger than a good majority of my friends in bands and the industry.

With that said, I think there comes a time for all metal heads, and probably all adults for that matter, when you look at what is popular amongst the true youth culture (16-24), and you feel as if not only do you not relate to it, but it feels alien, as if it’s creation was not meant for your consumption (which it wasn’t) – and it also seems inferior to music that you grew up with. I’m only 29, and I’m already having “back in my day” moments. It kind of scared me, and I began to wonder if I was being obtuse and a little too set in my ways, or if my analysis was accurate.

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