Tomorrow sees the release of Crowbar’s new album, Sever the Wicked Hand, on eOne (you can pre-order a physical copy here or a digital copy here, and watch an EPK for the album here). To celebrate, Crowbar main man Kirk Windstein offered to tell MetalSucks readers fifteen things they did not already know about him. And far be it from us to say “no” to Kirk Windstein! And so, enjoy a rare intimate look into the mind of Kirk Windstein, directly from the man himself…

15) I’m addicted to diet soda and sparkling water! I’m always drinking one or the other.

14) I like to wake up no later than 7:00 a.m.

13) I love Journey.

12) My first arena concert was Van Halen, “The 80′s Invasion,” on the Women and Children First tour.

11) Ace Frehley is the reason I play guitar.

Ten more things you didn’t know about Kirk after the jump!

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Oops! I recently popped a Woodroe when I was informed that Corrosion of Conformity, the COC that I knew and loved, will be playing the South by Southwest (SXSW) Music Festival this March.

Now, you may ask, why is this year of COC any different? Because they are stripped back down to the original three-piece of Woodroe “Woody” Weatherman, Reed Mullin, and Mike Dean, the same crusty trio I remember seeing up close and personal at the former Ritz Theater in Austin, Texas (which is now home to the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz movie theater) on tour in support of their hardcore-classic Animosity. That was the COC that used to be fucking dangerous. It was a show where you weren’t quite sure if you’d make it out alive. Seriously. It was back when Mike Dean looked more like a Dragworm who just stumbled in from nearby Guadalupe Street (“Dragworms” are Austin’s equivalent to homeless people) looking even more crazed and demented than Charles Manson in front of a television camera. This is the Animosity/Technocracy COC that I worshipped (minus Simon Bob Sinister on the latter EP). Nothing against Pepper Keenan, but I don’t even consider anything beyond this era to be COC.

This COC, along with D.R.I., The Offenders, M.D.C., The Fearless Iranians From Hell, and the Cro-Mags — that was the shit. Now get off my lawn!!

Anyway, time to relive my youth and to, hopefully, find more new metallic talent at this year’s SXSW. Here are some of the already announced metallish bands appearing at the world’s greatest music conference in addition to COC:

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This obviously doesn’t really have anything to do with the below story, but it still seemed somehow appropriate. Also, it makes me giggle.

You’ve known for some time that MetalSucks’ own Corey Mitchell is collaborating with Phil Anselmo on the legendary front man’s autobiography; hopefully you’re already familiar with Corey’s work not just via MS, but through his excellent true crime books, such as Savage Son and Pure Murder. If you’re not, you can check ‘em all out here.

Corey is now combining his various passions into one awesome event at 2011′s South by Southwest festival: Corey will moderate the fest’s “Reel Murder: From Crime Scene to Big Screen” panel, which will discuss “how murder has become big business in Hollywood.” In addition to Corey and Mr. Anselmo, panelists will include John McNaughton, who directed one of the most infamous true crime films ever made, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Ami Canaan Mann, daughter of filmmaker Michael Mann (Manhunter, Heat, Public Enemies) and director of the upcoming true crime film The Fields, and Hart D. Fisher, director of the serial killer thriller The Garbage Man.

The event will take place on March 15, and sounds like it’s gonna be a blast. You can get all the pertinent details here, and check out the official press release after the jump!

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YEP! The new Crowbar album — the band’s first for E1 — has a name now, Sever the Wicked Hand. It also has a release date — February 8. And, most importantly, there’s a new song, “Cemetery Angels,” now streaming at Noisecreep.

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[Like my colleague Vince Neilstein, I too feel compelled to share with you, the readers, some "under-appreciated gems" that deserve your attention and consideration for your personal "Best of 2010" lists. Some of these may have suffered from lack of promotion, or simply may have gotten lost in the shuffle amid higher profile releases. Hopefully this informal series will help rectify that -- and not give too much away in advance of the publications of the staff lists on December 16.]

Pantera, much like their cultural forebears The Beatles, assuredly will never reunite. Even if we could discount the untimely, cataclysmic death of “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott in 2004 at the hands of a mentally disturbed assassin whose very name doesn’t deserve repeating, the fractures that resulted in the band’s dissolution have only deepened with time, categorized by seemingly endlessly feuding between factions of the surviving members and their surrogates. This year’s expanded 20th anniversary reissue of Cowboys From Hell – coincidentally timed with a boxed reissue of John Lennon’s solo discography — provides a view of what we can expect as Pantera’s legacy matures and amplifies, namely that music industry machinery will take advantage of contractual opportunities while the estranged and quarreling factions collect deserved checks and dangle demos, live versions, and previously unreleased “vault tracks” (such as “The Will to Survive”) to disproportionately feed our insatiable hunger for more.

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When I interviewed Phil Anselmo about his Housecore Records label back in March, one of the bands he was most excited about signing was Nawlins outfit haarp. Here’s what Mr. Anselmo had to say about the band… try to picture it in his drawl to get the full effect:

“…they’re definitely classified as ‘metal.’ But they transcend the genre. They come up with such different concepts and whatnot. They’re a very different, different band – kind of in their own category, I would say. They play slow, but to call them ‘a slow band’ is absolutely unfair. They’re crushing. They are resolute. It’s a beating. They’re fucking onto something.”

A few weeks later, Vince sang their praises in an edition of “Reader’s Choice,” too, calling haarp “a less technical and more straight-up American metal sounding version of SiKth.”

So by now, you surely wanna check these dudes out, right?

Here’s your chance: haarp are streaming a new song, “All, Alone,” right here. It comes off the band’s new album, The Filth, which was produced by — you guessed it! — Anselmo himself. And it certainly sounds like something he would dig/make.

So give it a listen, then let us know what you think. Housecore will release The Filth on November 23.

-AR

We’ve written about the classes of Aaron O’Keefe before; the guy is an Ohio music school instructor who teaches his classes to perform songs by the various bands of Phil Anselmo — specifically, Down’s “Ghosts Along the Mississippi” and Pantera’s “Cowboys from Hell.”

The most logical next choice for one of Mr. O’Keefe’s classes would probably be a Superjoint Ritual song, but I guess someone decided that songs like “Fuck Your Enemy” and “The Knife Rises” were inappropriate for a bunch of kids, so we’re back to Pantera. In this instance, O’Keefe’s latest class has covered “Revolution is My Name.” It’s pretty great, even if you are guaranteed to crack up laughing when the singer begins “’68, and into the world born,” before starting to go on about the 70s and Vietnam. Some of these students are as young as twelve years old, which means they were born in ’98, not ’68.

Also kinda funny: The actual video for “Revolution is My Name” features kids impersonating the members of Pantera. I’ve always felt that the lil’ dude playing Dimebag did an especially dead-on impersonation. Here’s that clip, on the off chance that you’ve never seen it before:

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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.

While the free world breathlessly awaits the results of Decibel editor-in-chief Albert Mudrian’s NLCS bet with Exhumed frontman Matt Harvey — and even down 3-1, it’s way too early to start taunting the boss with “black black black black number ooooooone” — the rest of team dB has moved on to give you a Very Special December issue.

Yes, that’s one of extreme music’s most polarizing mugs on the cover. (You know what, let’s say “polarizing figure”; there’s nothing polarizing about Phil’s facial expressions, which all clearly fucking rule.) As usual, the man has a billion things going on. Sadly, one of them is not the fourth Down record (yet), although a new Arson Anthem slab and the 20^th anniversary of Cowboys From Hell are pretty sick placeholders. For a dude that’s been somewhat, um, contentious in interviews, Anselmo is crazy gregarious with our man J. Bennett. Like Mustaine or Lars, whether you love or hate the guy, he gives great copy. And I promise that the anecdotes about early Pantera — especially pertaining to Seagal-caliber bar pummelings — will do you right.

As for the rest of the issue, there’s plenty more radness that you can see for yourself on the cover, but one thing you can’t that I’ll spoil right now is Rod Smith’s review of the Amphetamine Reptile 25^th anniversary show. Shannon Selberg of the Cows is wearing mousetraps as earrings. ‘Nuff said. This fucker will be on newsstands next week, but we wouldn’t mind picking up our Secret Santa anal beads before Black Friday, so help us out by grabbing it early here.

Oh yeah, if you’re getting pumped about the Incantation Onward to Golgotha Hall of Fame shows that I’ve been babbling about the last month or so, the New York one just moved. It’s no longer at Rebel on November 20, but Club Europa, which evidently is here:

Europa Night Club
98 Meserole Ave. (corner of Manhattan Ave.)
Brooklyn, NY 11222

Shit will rule. Snap ’em up.

-AB

Like the man said, you can buy yourself a copy of the December 2010 issue of Decibel here. But we’ll love you better if you just go ahead and buy yourself a full subscription. Trust us, it’s totally worth it!!!

I’m tired of posting the same old high-charting consistent sellers (heyo Disturbed, Linkin Suck, etc) and I’m sure you’re even more tired of reading about them, so this week I’d like to focus on the Top Hard Music Albums charts with a special emphasis on debuts. This week’s notable sales numbers with my own snarky comments (natch) after the flip.

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Earlier this week I had a dream that I was working with Atreyu. I don’t know in what capacity I could possibly find myself “working with” Atreyu, since I’m not a manager, nor a publicist, nor a label rep, and they’re about as likely to end up doing a guest column here as I am to give the new In This Moment album a perfect 5-horn review, but, hey, the subconscious works in mysterious ways. Why did I have Atreyu on the brain? Was my mind trying to tell me “The glass is half-full?” Do I have  a hankering to re-watch The Neverending Story? Did I just ingest too many different substances that night? I’ll have to bring it up in therapy next week.

Here’s other shit that happened this week, some of which, believe it or not, is even more terrifying than the thought of working with Atreyu:

• Freddy Madball is counting down his favorite hard and heavy non-hardcore bands of all time, TesseracT’s Acle walked us through the history of djent, The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley spoke to Converge’s Kurt Ballou about Taco Riffs, The Red Chord’s Greg Weeks made some suggestions for losing NFL teams, Intronaut’s Sacha Dunable contemplated the ways in which technology has changed touring, Daath’s Eyal Levi wondered, “Is this it?”, and a wide array of metal stars previewed the just-begun NHL season.
• We spoke to Kirk Windstein from Crowbar/Down/Kingdom of Sorrow, Sean Z. from Daath, Daddy X and Dirtball from Kottonmouth Kings, and Yoshiki Hayashi from X Japan.
• We checked out the latest releases from Abysse and Deafheaven.
• We contemplated trancecore.
• As the headline says, we heard the worst thing ever.
• We reviewed the history of terrible Limp Bizkit cover songs.
• We had fun with misheard song lyrics.
• We bemoaned the signing of another re-thrash band.
• We applauded Slayer fans’ desire to help the physically disabled.
• We had yet another laugh at Winds of Plague’s expense.

We have a special surprise for you next week. I can’t promise you’re going to like it, but I can promise you’re going to have a strong reaction to it. See ya then.

-AR

It’s a good day to be a Phil Anselmo fan — not one but two of the prolific vocalist’s bands are currently streaming their latest releases. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to check out either of these yet, but I’m certainly curious about both of ‘em. So now we can all listen together and make up our minds as a community. Won’t that be fun? Shouldn’t cause any in-fighting whatsoever.

• The CD portion of Down’s new live CD/DVD set, Diary of a Mad Band, is streaming here. Down have never let me, uh, down before, and I don’t know why they’d start now, ‘specially since this is a live collection and they always kick ass and take names live. So I’m gonna go out on a limb and predict that this fucking rules. Also… yep. I’m listening to “Lifer” right now and it sounds pretty killer. I’m thinking this one’s a keeper.
• Arson Anthem’s full-length debut, Insecurity Notoriety, is supposedly streaming here prior to its October 12 release date on Anselmo’s own Housecore Records. I say “supposedly,” ’cause, at least at the time of this writing, the page ain’t working. Which is a real bummer, since I really dug Arson Anthem’s EP in 2008. But hopefully by the time you read this it’ll be working again so we can all flame on.

Once you’ve listened, politely or not-so-politely share your thoughts in the comments section below.

-AR

Kirk Windstein is one of metal’s busiest men; between his three bands — Crowbar, Down and Kingdom of Sorrow — dude’s got his hands full churning out down-tuned, gut-rumbling bad-assery constantly, and according to him that’s just the way he likes it. Unfortunately for Kirk his alcohol abuse problem forced him to take a break this summer as he sat out Kingdom of Sorrow’s 7-date Ozzfest tour to get healthy and sober.

Kirk’s recovery was the first topic we tackled in my phone interview with him last week; it turns out that Kirk did not enter rehab as reported but decided to lay off the booze on his own volition with the help of AA meetings and the assistance of his many bandmembers that’ve been through the process already. As of the day we chatted he was 48 days sober, sounding optimistic and energized about the prospect of turning himself around. We also chatted about all three of his bands, naturally: Kingdom of Sorrow are working on putting together a U.K. tour; Kirk was on his way to jam with Pepper Keenan on new material later that same day, and the band’s DVD chronicling their 2006 reunion run will finally see the light of day tomorrow; and last but certainly not least, Crowbar have a brand new record coming out soon through E1, and a live CD to follow closely after on Phil Anselmo’s Housecore label. Kirk also shed a little light (I said “a little”) on the reasons behind the Down DVD’s many delays, and shared his thoughts on the pride he feels when Crowbar are cited as an influence by today’s young metal bands.

Read the interview after the hop and skip.

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Axl and I traveled to Donington, UK for the Download Festival in 2006 and it was something of a life-changing experience. We hadn’t yet come up with the idea for MetalSucks, but I’m sure the experience of being part of such a huge metal event and the people we met there gave rise to the idea only six months later that perhaps there was a worldwide audience that thought about metal along the same lines as we did.

One of the highlights of that fateful weekend was Down, who made an unannounced but widely rumored appearance at 11am one morning on the main stage. Anyone who trekked out that early to take a chance, as we did, bore witness to a fantastic set by a now-legendary band that unbenownst to those in attendance would be captured for posterity.

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

There weren’t any real hot button topics this week, so we decided to just play a fun game that used to keep Vince and Axl occupied for many a lunch period when they were kids:

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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From left to right: Weatherman, Mullin, and Dean. Pic courtesy C.O.C.

C.O.C. is not only one of the best bands to come out of the old-school 1980s hardcore movement; technically, it’s at least five of the best groups to emerge from the scene. Over 28 years, every release – and later, every other album – has found the veterans with a new lineup and an all-new sound.

The band launched in North Carolina in 1982 as Corrosion of Conformity. In its first incarnation, the band played crusty, heavy, speedy hardcore. In 1984, the Eye for an Eye LP introduced the punk world to the group’s spiky skull mascot, one of the great extreme-music icons.

The lineup and sound reshuffled by 1985’s Animosity LP. The crossover disc was released on Metal Blade imprint Death Records, where they held their own against labelmates D.R.I. and the Ugly Americans. (The latter band featured singer Simon “Simon Bob Sinister” Bob, who would step as vocalist for C.O.C.’s 1987 Technocracy EP.)

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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

Kirk Windstein is a poet. Of this, there can be no doubt. Since Kingdom of Sorrow took over our site on Tuesday, Vince and I have decided we really, really wanna take a trip to New Orleans and just go eat with the dude (well, probably get high and then go eat with the dude). But secretly, I have aspirations of someday being able to pay the man to teach my children how to speak good. I can dream, can’t I?

Here’s some other shit that went down in the Mansion this week:

• We debuted a clip from The Haunted’s new DVD, Road Kill.
• We also debuted new music by Early Graves.
• We spoke to Stephen Carpenter from Deftones.
• Ken Sorceron from Abigail Williams doesn’t wanna talk shit about Winds of Plague, so instead he just left a comment on our site saying “it its embarrassing to once again see our name next to theirs on another metal news site.” Way to not talk shit, Kenny!
• We checked out a new release by Black Pyramid.
• Sergeant D taught us about the history of metalcore and screamo.
• We engaged in debate about the new Maiden song, the new Maiden setlist, and the old Maiden album art.
• The new Methods of Mayhem song is the worst thing ever.
• Rose Funoral finally spoke out about the Uno Incident.
• Vince thinks the BP oil spill is Korny.

Next week will bring some more streams, interviews with Max Cavalera and Bobby Blotzer, and more self-righteous rage over fairly trivial topics. ‘Til then…

-AR

First of all, and on a note completely unrelated to the rest of this story, I just wanted to thank everyone for their well-wishes on Monday – both the ones left in the comments section and the ones that were e-mailed to me. Luckily everything turned out okay, but your support really meant a lot to me.

Now, onto the matter at hand. Just yesterday, Kirk Windstein made us simulataneously hungry and horny in equal measures, and Jamey Jasta correctly asserted that a new Crowbar album “needs to come out THIS YEAR.” It’s been five very long years since Crowbar’s last release, Lifesblood for the Downtrodden, and while Mr. Windstein has certainly used that time productively (you’ll never hear me bitch about Down time), I think we can all agree that a new Crowbar record would really hit the spot just about now.

And – hooray! – Crowbar played in NOLA over the weekend, and debuted two new tracks. And while we still don’t know when that new Crowbar album will be coming, as any scientist will tell you, writing new songs is the first step to making a record. So the very fact that these tunes exist is probably a good sign. Here’s the first one…

…and the second one is after the jump.

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My top 5 artists/rock bands constantly change but right now I’d have to say these are them!

# 5 – Robin Trower

One of the greats!

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#5 – Nina Hartley

Any dude born before 1979 has beaten off to Nina Hartley for sure!

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