If you’ve ever wanted to hear Dio’s “Holy Diver” transformed from one of metal’s most powerful anthems into a hair metal-style sad sack power ballad complete with Casio keyboards and a synth violin so shitty it wouldn’t have been considered fit to be the ringtone on the cell phone you owned in 1999, then you are going to fucking love, love, LOVE Axel Rudi Pell’s The Ballads IV.

On the other hand, if you actually have decent taste, you will probably think that this album, y’know, fucking blows.

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Norwegian black metal is a genre whose history is fraught with controversy and full of murder and church burnings and all other manner of awfulness.  So, naturally, Norway has now given twenty of its diplomats “a black metal crash course,” according to this report:

“The objective is to show Norwegian culture in all its diversity. In the musical field, it goes from (Romantic music composer) Edvard Grieg to black metal,” its deputy head Steinar Lindberg said, adding he hoped to repeat the experience.

“In Italy, Japan or France, young people are learning Norwegian to decrypt the lyrics. Black metal is an export product and it’s important that future diplomats are interested in it,” he added.

Of course, I’m only kidding about the looming shadow of some assholes from twenty years ago being a good reason not to teach this stuff to Norwegian diplomats. Really, I guess Norway deserves a pat on the back for being so chill. So, y’know, three cheers for Norway.

On a semi-related note, my favorite part about the article where we found this story is that they opted not to use a photo of a member of Emperor or Mayhem or Enslaved, but, rather, a picture of Ronnie James Dio, who was neither Norwegian nor a black metal musician. Oh, the mainstream media. So lulzy when they try to cover metal!

-AR

Thanks to everyone who e-mailed us about this.

When I heard about the Dream Theater-shaped hole in the life of drummer Mike Portnoy back in September, I wanted to pitch him on my long-gestating idea to form a killer Jellyfish cover band. I bet he’d be into it cuz of his Jellyfish super-fandom (he has cited 1993′s Spilt Milk as a top ten favorite album); and he’s a pro at pulling together all-star jams, like his awesomely fun tributes to The Who, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin with guys like Paul Gilbert, Jason McMaster, and Dave LaRue; and lastly, The Ghosts At Number One (that’s my vote for our band name) could serve as a totally non-cynical tribute to another hardcore Jellyfish fan, the late Dimebag Darrell Abbott. And what better way to hip headbangers to irresistible non-metal jams? How could Mike say no to that? Can I call him Mike?

But, shit, while I was dicking around, gobbling drugs, and failing to corner, pressure, and/or threaten Portnoy about the Jellyfish idea, he teamed with qualified musicians he knows who actually, like, realize their ideas. Even if those ideas aren’t so great. Symphony X singer Russell Allen talks about Adrenaline Mob, one of Portnoy’s new bands:

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And we can’t believe you’ve been gone a year already. Metal can never replace you.

The Revolver Golden Gods Awards will air on VH1 later this month (or something… I know we got a press release but I was too lazy to read it), and it will be interesting to see that, because I was there, but I didn’t actually see very much of the show. I saw the schmuck from Asking Alexandria drop his mic two seconds into “Youth Gone Wild,” and I saw some of Avenged Sevenfold’s performances with Duff McKagan and Vinnie Paul, and I saw enough of Chris Jericho performing “For Whom the Bell Tolls” to consider throwing myself over the balcony and ending the awards in spectacular fashion (sometimes, sacrifices must be made for the greater good). But by and large I was too busy snorting coke in the bathroom with a girl who fucking swore to me that it wasn’t a herpes sore that lying bitch! to be bothered.

So one thing I had absolutely no idea even transpired was the below montage paying tribute to the five guys who died in the past year that are relevant to the readers of Revolver, which is to say, not Phil Vane or Frankie Sparcello.

But I shouldn’t be a jerk about it, it’s really a very touching video.

-AR

[via Metal Underground]

RoCkStArBaSs100 introduces himself to the internet. He loves metal — anything from Rob Zombie to Children of Bodom to Dio. Also, he plays bass — at first he thought that he couldn’t actually play it for you in this video because it’s too loud and his parents will scold him, although he eventually gets bold enough to bust out “Holy Diver” for you.

A lot of metal fans take themselves really seriously, so I think it’s cool that RoCkStArBaSs100 does some silly, tongue-in-cheek videos like this one where he announces that he is a “Professor In Metalology.” In the banter segment, he mentions that he rearranged his room and warns against reading The Dirt because it “talks about a lot of bad stuff.”

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After listening to Psycho’s female blowtorch, Penny Torture, and Ava Inferi’s haunting distaff elemental, Carmen Susana Simões, I realized it’s time we just chill and admit that women are all-around better at this metal-singing thing.

Is this mad exaggeration? It feels like that when I’m away from an MPEG player, but then I listen to those two radically different bands, to Psycho’s primal-scream old school death or Ava Inferi’s doomed-out, gothy whatsit, and it feels I’m not over-reaching, I’m underselling.

And it’s not just two superior releases (Ava Inferi’s Onyx and Psycho’s Pain Addict Pigs). It’s just become impossible to ignore the fact that females are not only doing equal or better work in the same genre jobs as male counterparts, they’re also making metal records that go places no male on Earth — none, nada, zip-ol-lina — could go. That 2011’s best metal so far — Subrosa’s No Help for the Mighty Ones — is an almost all-femme effort of relentless pan-genre awesomeness only adds arsenic and new lace to my argumentative cake.

All of which may have the reader thinking, “You do realize, you silly person, that you’ve just written off the work of one half the human race.”

To which I say, “Yeah, well, I guess I’m pimping a little irony here, since that’s business as usual with women and the metal press. But irony aside, please bear with me.”

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Allan Horrocks and Andee Connors run Aquarius Records in San Francisco, CA. It’s the best record store in the country, especially if you don’t live right next to a record store and especially if you like metal. I interviewed them a few months back for the ongoing Taco Riff series, and figured they’d have a good take on all of your holiday shopping. I called them up to get their wrap up on their favorite metal of the year. Although they took notes on what they were going to say, they ignored them entirely almost as soon as we began.

Before we begin, you should sign up for their bi-weekly (now becoming weekly) mailing list of favorite new releases. It’s mindblowing.

We started with me trying to type what they said, but they were going way too fast.

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Well, here’s a story that should make everyone happy: It looks like next year may see the release of a new Dio song — the last one the legendary vocalist got to record before he passed away earlier this year. It’s not official yet, but Dio guitarist Craig Goldy tells Classic Rock:

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With the holidays right around the corner — and all the best of, greatest hits and holiday comps that come therewith — this past Tuesday was the last big date for new album releases in 2010, though there are still a few stragglers coming down the pipe. The world of hard rock and metal made a big showing last week, with new releases from Underoath, Dio, Cradle of Filth, Oceano, Gwar, Helloween, Volbeat and a smattering of others making the Soundscan charts. Rankings, sales figures and commentary after the jump.

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Christmas cards — actually, just all holiday cards in general — tend to be pretty stupid. They either feature some generic design, like a Christmas tree or a snowflake or Santa or whatever, or otherwise they’re a picture of the sender and his or her stupid ugly family. What a colossal waste of paper.

Of course, I wouldn’t be too cranky about it if someone sent me a Dio-themed Christmas card. And now they make such a thing, so you should buy ‘em instead of wasting time on the aforementioned picture of your family, who I don’t give two shits about.

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For its season opener in October, VH1′s That Metal Show dedicated a broadcast hour to hailing the late Ronnie James Dio (view episode here). With access to the MTV vaults, TMS dredged up some old interview clips of RJD being totally cool and very metal. The first of them didn’t need much unearthing, though, ‘cuz it was from Dio’s last public appearance back in April at the Golden Gods thang. On my first viewing, I immediately got a lump in my throat, and was about to get downright blubbery when my attention was derailed by something totally amazing: Me! On the television! Well, really just my neck and head, bobbing stalkerishly beyond RJD as he cuddles on-air with TMS host Eddie Trunk and the other two. Lolz. Even in death, the man continues to ram fun into my life.

And fun can be similarly rammed into yours cuz Dio’s new/old live set is streaming freesies right here. It comes from remastered BBC tapes of a 1983 show (promoting Holy Diver) and a longer set from 1987 (Dream Evil), each at historic Castle Donington in England. Tasty. And and and Tuesday brings the release of the little-ballyhooed but potentially mind-shattering Heaven & Hell live set from last year’s Wacken Open Air. I say “potentially” because no advance copy has arrived for me yet cough cough. I’m a TV star now and, yeah, and I do not like to be kept waiting. I’ll be in my motherfucking trailer.

-ADF

Dio’s sexcellent double live album Dio At Donington UK is out now on Niji Entertainment. Heaven & Hell’s Neon Nights: 30 Years of Heaven & Hell, Live At Wacken comes out Tuesday.

You may be familiar with guitar whiz/Carvin-endorsee SHRED SEAN from our earlier interview with him, guest spots with bands like Into Eternity, his solo work, or as the lead guitarist for Blessed by a Broken Heart. Sean clearly possesses a work ethic that would put a sharecropper to shame, because it doesn’t stop there. The latest addition to his resume is a DIO cover/tribute, featuring his bro Alan Tecchio of Watchtower, Hades, and some other bands I don’t know about. Only MetalSucks has the industry clout to bring you this EXCLUSIVE TRACK!!!

Shred Sean and Alan Tecchio – “Rainbow in the Dark”

Shred Sean and Allan Tecchio – Rainbow in the Dark

This is a DIY Garageband recording, so please don’t get all butthurt about the snare sound or whatever trivial detail you want to bitch about in a futile attempt at “sounding like you really know what you are talking about.” Nobody will think you are cool.

Check out Shred Sean on MySpace and look for some exciting news from Blessed by a Broken Heart soon!

-Sergeant D.

With dollar signs in my eyes, I have seen the next great supergroup: Heaven & Hell with Phil Anselmo as their new singer. I mean, I don’t think that’s actually gonna happen, but I think it would sell a lotta tickets.

Anselmo did, however, join the band on-stage at the Dio tribute performance at the High Voltage Festival in London this past weekend. According to Metal Insider, even guest vocalist Glenn Hughes “was surprised by the Superjoint Ritual mastermind’s unscheduled appearance” during “Neon Knights.” I hope this very not-good fan-filmed footage isn’t the only record that exists of the performance — hopefully something pro-shot, or at least some photos, will appear online soon.

-AR

Buried in a press release about Whitfield Crane doing a guest gig/Dio/Peter Steele/Paul Gray multi-dead-musican tribute show with Costa Rica’s Sight of Emptiness* was this awesome news from Mr. Crane:

“It’s ON — UGLY KID JOE is back. We are talking about doing shows next year, in addition to studio time. I’m stoked.”

I don’t know what’s up with burying reunion news in press releases about other shit, but all I can say about this particular reconciliation is: YES!!! (Note: Apparently this news has been on the band’s MySpace page since May. I’d like to thank every one of you fuckers who e-mails me every day to tell me about your friend’s awful unsigned band, to tell us to post about something we’ve already posted about, or to express anger over my hatred towards Parkway Drive for not making any mention of this news. Sheesh.)

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Fuck taking a photo together. What we all really wanna see is The Big Four jam, dude. For one thing, it would just be cool to see all those dudes rocking out together, maybe on a jam of some old metal classic that everyone could find mutually agreeable (if ever there was a time to pay tribute to Dio…). For another thing, since the number of people in the world who ever actually got to see Mustaine play with Metallica or Kerry King play with Megadeth is roughly equivalent to the number of people who actually paid to see Jonah Hex this weekend (e.g., almost no one), it would be terrific wish fulfillment.

Of course, it will probably never happen, because God forbid everyone put their egos and bullshit aside to do anything too cool. So for now, we’ll have to settle for Scott Ian helping to sing one chorus of “Peace Sells” with ‘Deth. ‘Cause, y’know. When I think great singing, I think Scott Ian.

Skip to the 2:40 mark for fifteen whole seconds of crossover dreams come true.

-AR

[via Blabbermouth]

Yesterday we wrote about Dio’s public memorial service, which took place this past Sunday; unfortunately, since no one from MetalSucks was actually in the area and able to attend, all of our info was second-hand. But those magnificent bastards at Metal Injection sent the great Johnny Orlando Jr. to cover the event and have filed the below exclusive report.

Mostly it’s interviews with Dio fans who are, generally speaking, somber and sincere if not necessarily hyper-articulate (see the quote in our headline), but the best parts come towards the end – first when Mr. Orlando Jr. interviews one of the protesters that was pictured in our article yesterday and actually gets him to participate in duet of a song I won’t spoil for you, and then when he interviews Dio’s biggest fan, who… well, just watch, I promise it’s totally worth it:

By the way, I estimated that there were 75 protestors at the event, a number I pulled directly from my anus; those of you who were there say it was far, far less. Needless to say, that information makes me very happy, so thank you for sharing. How far less, though? Did anyone even see Fred Phelps there? The fact that Johnny interviewed a guy who was also photographed by the AP makes me think there really must have been, like five or ten protestors. Either that, or this dude is just an attention whore, and will be joining Dio in Hell just as soon as his God can send him there. Vanity is a sin, dude!

-AR

Dio died. Isis broke-up. Bret Michaels is back in the hospital. And I just used Dio, Isis, and Bret Michaels in one thought-stream, which, I’m sure, offended somebody.

Luckily, we did manage to have some fun this week:

• Sick of it All’s Lou Koller is counting down his top ten hardcore albums, As I Lay Dying’s Nick Hipa is counting down to the end of L O S T, Batillus’ Fade Kainer is counting down ’til the band can get the fuck outta the studio, Agenda of Swine’s Pete Benumb is counting down to MDF, and Cynic’s Paul Masvidal is counting down to achieving a higher level of being.
• We spoke to Steve Joh from Century Media, Tara Johnson from Disembodied, Emil Werstler from Daath and Levi/Werstler, and Travis Stever from Coheed & Cambria.
• We checked out the latest release from Rosetta.
• Sergeant D. has new slamz 4 u.
• The best music video ever of the week is by… Goldfrapp?
• There are plenty of things we’d rather do than listen to a new Attack Attack! song.
• Endorsement of the new Avenged Sevenfold single = flame war.
• You guys are still arguing about my Korn review. Seriously?
• I’m still upset about John Bush leaving Anthrax again. Seriously.
• We used to love Sweden, but we had to kill it.

And hopefully no one awesome will die or break-up next week.

-AR

Everyone has already come forth to pay tribute to Dio (totally appropriate) or talk about the time they met the man and what a class-act he was (also appropriate), but soon people who never really knew him will start to say they were his best friend (like that time Marq Torien claimed he and Layne Staley were best buds), or try to re-write history (I can’t believe Vivian Campbell hasn’t made a statement yet), and bands will start covering Dio and Dio-era Sabbath songs for no better reason than it’s an easy way to get the crowd on your side. Dio was an incredibly talented musician – it’s amazingly inspiring and almost impossible to believe that his voice was still in such amazing shape, or that anyone actually managed to stay cool and not sell-out for that long – but the meaning of his passing goes beyond even that; although he died of cancer and not old age, his death signals that metal’s founding generation is getting older, and that, like my family’s table the past few Thanksgivings (fewer and fewer members of “The Greatest Generation,” more and more people who won’t a remember a time when we didn’t have the internet), the landscape is going to look increasingly different in the coming years as the Dios begin to disappear and the Hetfields become the elder statesmen and the Adlers become the seasoned veterans and the Mansoors become the young bucks. Dio’s death has, for lack of a more sensitive term, subtext; it’s for this reason that, with all due respect to every member of the metal community who passed away between December 8, 2004, and May 16, 2010, the loss of Dio has had a greater impact on the headbanger populace than any since Dime was murdered.

And the way you can tell is because those deaths not only struck a chord with us, the metal faithful, but have managed to become news outside the realm of heavy music as well. I found out about Dime because my mother called and woke me up and frantically told me to turn on the radio because “a famous heavy metal guitarist from a band I think you like was killed;” likewise, yesterday I was in therapy when my shrink asked me, “Didn’t a very famous heavy metal singer pass away this week?” (My shrink is roughly the same age as Dio, and also of Sicilian descent; he was tickled when I told him the story of Dio’s grandmother and the birth of the horns, as his family used to use the same symbolic hand gensture for the same purpose.)

And so it is that two of the most noteworthy pieces written about RJD’s passing have come from media venues not traditionally known for their metalocity.

Unfortunately, while one of those pieces is incredibly awesome, one of them is incredibly lame.

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If there’s one thing our friend Carlos Ramirez loves to do, it’s compile a list which is almost guaranteed to tick people off; I mean, we love to make silly lists, too, but for reals, Carlos does one every fifteen minutes or so. He once showed me a list of the best lists of the best lists; that’s how much the man loves those things. He actually argues with his wife about who gets to do the grocery list. Now that’s passion, people.

Because we all suffered a horrible loss yesterday*, Carlos has now compiled a list of the “Top 10 Dio Songs” for Noisecreep. These are really just Dio songs – none of his work with Elf, Rainbow, Sabbath, or Other Sabbath (sorry, “Heaven and Hell”) to be had here – which should lessen the flame wars somewhat. Still, some of you will find plenty to get butt-hurt about, I’m sure.

Check out the list here, and then, LET THE NEEDLESS ARGUING BEGIN!!!

-AR

*Actually, three great loses – legendary manager Debbie Abono  and drummer Joe Markowski also passed away yesterday, although that news was overshadowed by word of Dio’s demise. Reader \m/Eluveitie\m/ e-mailed me today to bemoan the lack of justice in the world – “Yet Durst Lives???” Sad but true.