OH, happy day! Seems like we’re still gonna have to wait all the way until the fall to hear Dysrhythmia’s new record, but an announcement posted on the band’s Facebook wall Tuesday tells us that Dysrhythmia are stirring from their hibernation right now:

Happy new year, all. We are excited to announce we will be working with Profound Lore Records, for the release of our next album! Recording will commence this Spring with Colin Marston, with a projected late Summer/ Fall release date. We’re gonna do our most to make this the best Dysrhythmia yet.

So that’s obviously great news. The band was previously on Relapse, and while while we’re not sure what caused the split, Profound Lore is great label too. Dysrhythmia have been performing a couple of new songs live over the past several months of which high-quality footage is available, and the band released a demo called “Running Towards the End” this fall, which you can stream below:

Pumped.

-VN

You can’t blame me for being wary of a solo project by Kevin Hufnagel, the guitarist for Dysrhythmia and the revived Gorguts. To kneejerk cynics like yours truly, it spells disaster: a clusterfuck of riffs and solos too noodly for either of those bands would be saying something. And the other end of the spectrum could be worse: an acoustic project that’s 40 minutes of empty, gnarled arpeggios reverberating off of nothing but the listener’s dwindling patience. Good guitarists left to their own devices run a higher risk of getting lost so far up their own asses that their spines snap like popsicle sticks. So thank our goddamn lucky stars that Hufnagel (a man who’s name seems to be destined to be shouted by Jerry Lewis) chose to instead make a beautiful album filled with lush, amorphous textures in Transparancies. A far, far cry from the dissonant prog/avant-metal of his most well-known bands, it’s just shy of forty-five minutes of densely textured abstractions that wander back and forth through emotional residencies, but never definitively landing in one. But it’s the ambiguousness that drives Transparencies, often reaching for a point that may or may not be there.

Click to read more…

The good news is, the always jaw-dropping instrumental prog metal outfit Dysrhythmia (featuring bassist Colin Marston, who was named #15 on our list of theTop 25 Modern Metal Guitarists) have released a demo for a new song, entitled “Running Towards the End.” And the great news is, they are giving away that demo for free. Download it right here. Like all Dysrhythmia, it will take ten or twenty listens to full grasp every nuance of the song, and like all Dysrhythmia, those ten or twenty listens will be highly enjoyable.

Hopefully this means we’ll get a new Dysrhythmia album in the not-too-distant future, too.

Do some forward-thinking here, then partake in a group hug in our comments section below.

-AR

[via East of the Wall's tweet]

Trendy Internet meme aside, there is really no other way to describe Dysrhythmia than “a lot like Dysrythmia;” they’re that singular in their sound.

So kudos to Invisible Oranges‘ Cosmo Lee (as always) for recognizing the band’s incredible talent and calling our attention to this high-quality footage of two brand new songs (the same ones captured at Union Pool back in March), shot at the sweaty show at the Silent Barn in Queens, NY that Kip W. and I attended this Spring. Drummer Jeff Eber’s parents were there too; talk about support, I’ve seen those two at every NYC show the band has played. The Silent Barn, as endearing as it is, ain’t exactly no high class joint (“brothel” would be a lot more accurate). Awesome!

In case you missed it, we named Dysrhythmia bassist Colin Marston as #15 on our list of the Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists. Those bass skills you see in the above video? Not even his primary instrument.

No word yet on a follow-up to 2009′s excellent Psychic Maps, but the rumor mill says 2012 is a good bet.

-VN

MetalSucks recently polled its staff to determine who are The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, and after an incredible amount of arguing, name calling, and physical violence, we have finalized that list! The only requirements to be eligible for the list were that the musician in question had to a) play metal (duh), b) play guitar (double-duh), and c) have recorded something in the past five years. Today we continue our countdown with Colin Marston from Krallice and Behold… The Arctopus…

Colin Marston is one of the youngest guitarists on our list, and his primary creative outlets (Krallice, Dysrhythmia, Behold…the Arctopus) haven’t yet reached the legendary status of so many of the other bands graced by the other 24 inductees. But in terms of his stylistic breadth and the scope of his abilities, Marston is in a league of his own.

There isn’t a signature Colin Marston guitar sound or style. Instead, Marston expertly adapts his talents to fit the project in question. On one end of the spectrum is Byla, the ambient guitar duo that Marston shares with Kevin Hufnagel; the project is all about abstraction and texture. On the other end is Behold…the Arctopus, a band that thrives on over-the-top virtuosity, deployed in the wackiest of ways – and let’s not forget that Marston executes all of Behold…’s atonal tone rows on a 12-string Warr guitar, which means he’s essentially shredding on two instruments at once. Somewhere in between those two poles is Krallice, in which Marston’s guitar lines intertwine with Mick Barr’s, creating ever-shifting harmonic patterns that tickle the ears like few black metal bands do. No matter what the guitar idiom, Marston has mastered it. No wonder that Luc Lemay asked him to join Gorguts as bassist. By the looks of the live footage from Gorguts’ 2010 mini-tour, it would seem like Marston’s fitting in just fine.

Click to read more…

On Friday night I got to see Dysrhythmia not only play their first show since August, but also debut some new shit for a packed room at Union Pool in Brooklyn. And if you’re jealous that I was there and you weren’t, and that I got to hear some new Dysrhythmia and you didn’t, well, you oughta be.

Lucky for you, the always-reliable Joshua James (a.k.a. (((unartig)))) was there to video the show, and he got some great footage of two new songs. So now you can be a little less jealous. I still breathed the same air as Colin Marston’s awesome haircut and you didn’t, so I still win.

-AR

Colin Marston of Behold… The Arctopus, Krallice, Gorguts and Dysrhythmia is one of those incredibly talented dudes who does it all and makes my jealousy bones fill with tension. Aside from being an incredibly accomplished guitarist and bassist and a member of FOUR (!) sweet bands that are all active, he runs his own studio in Queens, NY where he and his Newsted have recorded, produced and mixed countless metal albums. Whatever assclown is on the cover of your favorite guitar magazine this month, he probably isn’t half as talented and versatile as Marston.

The Deciblog has premiered a video of Marston taking Scion A/V on a tour through his studio, and since we delight in this kind of nerdery and know you will too we figure it’s highly worthy of a re-post. Colin talks about his guitars (look at that Warr!), his amp setup, how his studio is set up and his thoughts on the digital vs. analog recording debate. I recommend full-screening this video for maximum dorkery.

-VN

FEATURING MEMBERS OF GOD FORBID, AT THE GATES, DISFEAR, MACHINE HEAD, BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME, THE OCEAN, JUCIFER, THE BINARY CODE, HULL, DYSRHYTHMIA, INDIAN, AND DARKEST ERA

For 2010, we decided to do something special as part of our regular end-of-year festivities here at MetalSucks — namely, ask musicians from across the vast spectrum of the metalsphere (or, in a few cases, the almost-metalsphere) what their favorite albums of the year were. Death metallers, thrash metallers, black metallers, stoners, grinders, and djenters alike graciously contributed lists to MS, and we’ll be running them in groups of ten to eleven musicians at a time twice a day for the rest of the week.

After the jump, check out the sixth group… we hope you enjoy seeing what some of metal’s heaviest hitters were into this year as much as we have!

(And please note that these are musicians and that they, um, have a lot on their minds. So some of ‘em named albums that actually came out last year. Please don’t freak out.)

Click to read more…

I was catching up on my Deciblog today when I came across the below video for “And Clash and Clash of Hoof and Heel,” by Sailors with Wax Wings. The outfit is apparently a side-project for Pyramids’ R. Loren, so I now have to admit that although our friend Corey Mitchell is a Pyramids fan, I really don’t know much about the band and can’t comment on them. But I can say that between the quality of the below song and the list of guests who apparently appear on the Sailors with Wax Wings album (including but not limited to Katatonia’s Jonas Renkse, Swans’ Ted Parsons, My Dying Bride’s Aaron Stainthorpe, and Colin “Best Haircut EVER” Marston from Krallice, Dysrhythmia, Gorguts, Behold… The Arctopus, and a million other bands), I plan to check this record out ASAP.

As for the video itself, well… it’s pretty bizarre. I kept expecting there be some kind of “twist” or whatever, but, nope. Just pure, unadulterated strangeness. Still, I was never able to take my eyes off of it… I find it oddly compelling. Hypnotic, even. And, like I said, I dig the music.

Check this out, then weigh in with your thoughts in the comments section below.

-AR

To the MetalSucks Maniac known as “Sacajewea,” we would like to say the following: YOU ARE A FUCKING RETARD. It’s incredible how retarded you are, you stupid fucking idiot mongoloid half-wit retard.

We send this message because in October of ’09, Sacajewea left a comment on the very first post we ever wrote, saying he was “Just here to dig up the past;” then he left another comment, just this past June, which read:

“I did it twice. Fuck I’m retarded. If anyone sees this please find me in a recent post and tell me how retarded I am.”

On December 26, 2006 — a date that will live in infamy — we did what professionals call a “soft launch” but we just call “the day we first posted on this blog.” Our slogan was “Smart About Metal,” a play on the slogan for Film Comment magazine.

We had these two stupid South Park caricatures that Axl made at his then-job when he was bored. (Axl forgot until just now that he had a really long goatee in ’06; Vince still had phantom Jew ‘fro, where some days he can feel it, man!) We only posted once or twice a day, throughout the week, pretty much when we had time/interest. We didn’t use tags. We often didn’t post graphics or videos. Our headlines weren’t capitalized. We interviewed members of Stuck Mojo and Twisted Sister, because that’s who we could get interviews with. Believe it or not, we tried to get an interview with God Forbid… and we failed.

Basically, we had no fucking idea what we were doing.

We can’t believe that this is our 10,000th post. We can’t believe we’re still doing this almost four years after we started. We can’t believe that so many of you are reading it. Seriously: WE WERE ONLY FUCKING KIDDING.

So…

Thanks to Kip (who has been here longer than anyone besides Vince and Axl!), Sammy, Gary, Anso, Satan (the MetalSucks contributor and the deity), Sergeant D., Bob, Leyla, Corey, Urbandale, Dave, Matt, Ferris, Dallas, Eyal, Sacha, Paul, Bulb, Arthur, Anton OyVey, Rich Hallford, David Bee Roth, Van Arseface, Mike Pattongill, Angela Gossowski, Joey V., and everyone else who has ever written for us… MetalSucks would not be where it is if not for all of you.

Thanks to everyone in the music industry who has helped us over the years, even as they must have been secretly hoping we would van flip.

And of course, thanks to all the MetalSucks Maniacs, Suckalos, annoying people who can’t use the “search” function, and dudes that have sent us death threats. We can’t tell you how grateful we are that you read our site. Thank you thank you thank you.

Now, with a complete lack of humility, Axl and Vince present their ten favorite MetalSucks posts of all time. Enjoy.

Click to read more…

A remarkable number of people I’ve told about this Friday’s pending Cynic / Dysrhythmia / Intronaut tour stop in NYC have greeted me with quizzical looks of “Really? THIS Friday? Cynic?” which is pretty crazy because the tour’s been announced for months, Cynic are playing Focus in full, those support bands are killer and… come on man, really? You’d rather see Torche and Boris in Brooklyn that night? I mean, those are mighty fine bands too… but c’mon! Well, whatever, the Bowery Ballroom will surely be sold out and it’s gonna be a helluva night and you’re gonna miss it. Too bad for you.

I mention this right now not just because I’m excited for Friday but because Sacha “Blogronaut” Dunable wrote up a fun post for Decibel in which he lists and discusses the four best things about touring with Cynic. I won’t give away Sacha’s bag o’ tricks, but I will tell you that if you know what a Steinberger guitar is you’ll find the post very funny.

While we’re on the Intronaut tip, check out their new song “Elegy” over at Invisible Oranges; it’s highly worthy of the hand gesture after which the blog hosting the song is named.

-VN

So Vince and I checked out Gorguts, Portal, and Krallice (and, yes, some of Bloody freakin’ Panda) last night… needless to say, it was an all-around excellent experience. I’m gonna try and get a review of Portal’s performance up later today, because I think they specifically deserve some attention, so unique is their stage show. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t show Gorguts and Krallice some love, too, ’cause those bands kill.

The good news/bad news of the evening was that Gorguts mainman Luc Lemay announced from the stage that while he and the rest of the group’s current line-up (which includes Dysrhythmia’s Kevin Hufnagel on guitar, Krallice/Behold… the Arctopus’ Colin Marston on bass, and Origin’s John Longstreth on drums) are working on a new album (as expected), they won’t hit the studio until “late fall” or “Christmas,” which means this release obviously won’t see the light of day ’til 2011.

But they did perform a new song, which, for now, is simply called “Number Three;” and they’ve been performing it this entire tour, I guess, ’cause our buddies over at Metal Injection have some righteous footage of the band playing it in Boston earlier this week. Check it out:

Gorguts, Krallice, and Portal all play Philly tonight and Maryland Deathfest this weekend. You absolutely should not miss them.

-AR

I’ve just been bombarded with e-mails that Alabama-based label Acerbic Noise Development is in serious danger of going under. I’m not familiar with all the bands on this label, but the ones I am familiar with – like Dysrhythmia – are pretty awesome. And I’m sitting here now checking out some of the other groups on A.N.D. and they seem to have good taste. I am really, really enjoying Verse and Radiation right now, for example.

I hate to see a small label like this fall apart, especially when it seems like the people running it (and it appears as though a whopping two people are A.N.D.’s entire staff) are putting good music into the world. So while I don’t know if anything can actually be done to save the label at this point, I strongly encourage you all to check out their website, and/or the sites of some of their bands. If you can throw a little support their way, super.

A list of Acerbic Noise bands, with links to their web pages, after the jump.

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Prior to having my mind blown by Krallice at this past February’s Scion Rock Fest in Atlanta, I’d written off the NYC-based black metal quartet as Hipster Metal. Boy was I wrong. Anton OyVey and I stood in absolute astonishment as a band whose set we’d happened upon out of curiosity completely blew us away and stole the show of the entire day. That their brand new song has premiered on Stereogum doesn’t do much to dispel the “hipster” tag from much of their fanbase, but it doesn’t mean you should pay any less attention to them; Krallice are the real deal and they’re fucking fantastic. Besides which, I’m starting to doubt the very notion of “hipster metal” anyway; what about a band that writes music and lives together in the woods of the Pacific Northwest makes them any more genuine and qualified to write black metal than a band whose members grew up in the rough and tumble concrete jungle of 1980s New York? Both seem like perfectly genuine and inspiring influences to me.

Case in point: the 11-minute title track of their new record Dimensional Bleedthrough, out November 10th on Profound Lore. As Stereogum’s Brandon Stosuy says, “Such fucking riffs!”, and that’s exactly it. For those new to Krallice, the band features Colin Marston of Behold…the Arctopus and Dysrhythmia, Mick Barr of Orthrelm, Bloody Panda’s Lev Weinstein, and now full-time bassist/co-vocalist Nick McMaster. Stream the new track at Stereogum, then come on back here and tell us what you think.

-VN

It’s 4 pm, and right about now we’re either interviewing someone or other or watching Job for a Cowboy. Either way, I hope we’re having a fun time.

Here’s what happened in MetalSucks Land this week:

• We’re streaming Iron Age’s The Sleeping Eye in its entirety!
• Current Coheed & Cambria/former Dillinger Escape Plan drummer Chris Pennie discussed metal with us.
• Daath’s Eyal Levi is home for tour and very busy blogging for us.
• Our girl Grim Kim visited Birmingham, England, the birthplace of metal.
• We checked out the latest releases from Assjack and Dysrhythmia.
• It looks Ozzy has hired Firewind’s Gus G. to replace Zakk Wylde. And that got us thinking about the legacies of former Ozzy axe slingers Jake E. Lee and Joe Holmes.

Have a good weekend, everybody. I know I will.

-AR

Dysrhythmia are the Kevin Bacon of metal. The band’s connected to Behold…the Arctopus, Krallice, Spastic Ink and Gorguts within one degree of separation, Cannibal Corpse, Origin, Bloody Panda, The Red Chord, Orthrelm and Watchtower by another. Guitarist Kevin Hufnagel and bassist Colin Marston both have solo projects, and play together in the ambient guitar duo Byla. Try to draw a Dysrhythmia family tree, and you’d end up with a massive tangle of nodes and lines that resembles one of those three-dimensional diagrams of a complex molecule. Converted into notes, it would probably sound like the music on Dysrhythmia’s fifth album, Psychic Maps.

Click to read more…

This new Dysrhythmia track “Festival of the Popular Delusions” is easily the best new song I’ve heard all week. I dare you to prove me wrong, because you can’t. It’s irrefutable, like Chuck Norris Facts. This percocet ain’t hurtin’! But for real, this song is blowing my mind right now… not sure how Dysrhythmia has mostly slid under my radar all this time, but good God is this band the shit.

Check it out on Dysrhythmia’s MySpace page; the song comes from their new album Psychic Maps which drops July 7th on Relapse.

If ya got ‘em, pop ‘em.

-VN