MetalSucks

These are some of my favorite producers and mixers for heavy music… It’s a challenging genre, and these guys are great in my opinion.

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Axe to Fall, Converge’s once-again excellent new album, is yet another stylistic shift: the majority of it is devoted to the band playing harder and more technically than they have in their post-Jane Doe era, while the closing two songs finding them venturing further away from their comfort zone than they ever have before. But even though guitarist Kurt Ballou darts all over the fretboard more than usual, vocalist Jacob Bannon changes nothing about his performance, from the breathless rambling on opener “Dark Horse” to his trademark pterodactyl-like shriek over the course of the album. But this isn’t to say that he’s in a state of creative stasis while the rest of the band moves outwards: Bannon’s hellacious scream is just as much a part of Converge’s uniqueness as is Ballou’s nimble riffing. Bannon’s work on Axe to Fall is as savage as it’s ever been, and once again adds weight and disturbing depth to the album’s metallic hardcore-fueled chaos.

Jacob Bannon’s place in metal, hardcore, and—for better or worse—metalcore is massive, with his trademark vocals incalculably influential and lyrics favoring the abstract over the melodramatic. Even outside of Converge, Bannon manages to be prominent, with a successful visual art career and running hardcore label Deathwish Inc. A surprisingly normal sounding (at least in terms of how he sounds on record), introspective guy, Bannon comes off as both wise about the metal and hardcore world while still impressed by and interested in it. In a lengthy interview with MetalSucks, he discussed the musical and lyrical intricacies of Axe to Fall, his approach to artwork in comparison to his vocal work, and people’s changing attitudes toward heavy music as they age.

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First of all, for our non-Chosen readers: groyse metsie is Yiddish for a bargain. Don’t say I never taught ya nuthin’.

So. For the month of October (or “Rocktober,” as some clever marketing types are dubbing it), Earache is offering a whole bunch of truly righteous albums from their catalog for download on iTunes at a retardedly low price: $5.99 in the U.S., £4.49 in the U.K., and 4,99EUR in Europe. (The press release tells me that “prices may vary in other regions.” Ha-ha.) Now, I know that most of us music snobs don’t like iTunes because the audio quality isn’t as high as it could be, and there’s a better-than-average chance that a lot of you own most of these albums anyway. But if you can get past the whole “IT’S NOT AS GOOD AS FLAC! Snort snort” thing and/or for some reason DO NOT already own most of these albums, it’s a really, really killer deal.

A complete list of available albums after the jump. At least six or seven of these are classics, and nine or so are still awesome and could be classics, so they’re totally worth the six bucks or whatever.

And then one of them is by Oceano.

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As one of the chief riff providers for swaggercore titans Every Time I Die, Andy Williams takes pride in making the discordant into catchy. For a perfect example of this, look no further than the band’s latest (MetalSucks-approved) album, New Junk Aesthetic. Distilling the band’s decade-plus essence into a tight half hour, it’s a satisfying mix of thunderous heaviness and easily the most appealing material the band have put to tape. But while he’s often overshadowed by vocalist Keith Buckley’s relentless wiseassery, it’s his and Jordan Buckley’s Skynard-by-way-of-Dillinger-Escape-Plan guitar work that make the band stand out and ultimately worthwhile.

A self-described “chatty Cathy,” Andy Williams was remarkably frank and refreshingly earnest in a recent interview with MetalSucks on the eve of the release of New Junk Aesthetic. Among other things, he discussed why he can listen to the new album and none of the band’s other material, his thoughts on the new Converge record, the changing landscape of the scene he came up in, and life over at ETID’s new label, Epitaph.

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Noisecreep have unveiled their list of the Top 10 Death Metal Debut Albums (although the list is in no particular order), courtesy Friend of MetalSucks, Carlos Ramirez.

And for once, I don’t actually have any complaints. The list is pretty good.

That being said, I’m sure you folks will find something to bitch about, so… have at it!!!

-AR

New music that might tickle your pickle…

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If anyone watched the Oscars this year – and I don’t know why anyone would have, but I did – you might remember that the most inadvertently hilarious moment was when Hugh Jackman, at the end of a huge song n’ dance number, shouted “THE MUSICAL IS BACK!” My friends and I spent the rest of the telecast shouting that very phrase at random, usually inappropriate moments – e.g., the video montage of dead people, Kate Winslet crying because she still has to go home and fuck Sam Mendes, etc. – and if my girlfriend really drags me to see this piece of garbage movie this weekend, as she’s been threatening to, I plan to shout “THE MUSICAL IS BACK!” every time I get bored. Rude? Yes. Funny? To me it is, and I’m a a narcissist, so fuck the rest of the audience. Also, the movie is not going to be good anyway, so fuck anyone who cares.

One thing that could have made this drek at least mildly watchable would have been an egregious use of Entombed’s “Wolverine Blues.” Not that this is my favorite Entombed song by any stretch of the imagination – in fact, the tie-in with the Marvel mutant seemed random at best back in the day – but, y’know, I’m grasping at straws for anything that would make this movie feel less like a mouth raping. Think about it: every time Wolverine gets angry, every time something explodes, every time something dramatic happens – this song starts to play:

THE MUSICAL IS BACK!!!

-AR

This coming Monday the entire MetalSucks staff will each release Top 10 lists for the entire year in metal of 2008. Get psyched! Things have been slowing down here at the MS Mansion as the holidays approach, but we still found ways to keep it fun this week:

• Axl Rose finally did some press to support Chinese Democracy… but as usual, there’s an asterisk.
• We debuted a new, exclusive Daath track — a medley of Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel and Dying Fetus covers.
• We interviewed members of Clutch, Bison B.C., Dir En Grey, and Fear Factory / Arkaea.
• Job For a Cowboy’s Jonny Davy blogged about urination and hotel trashing, while Darkest Hour’s Mike Schleibaum’s guest blog claimed that Entombed’s Uprising and Morning Star are two of the most underrated albums of all time. Oh, and The Haunted’s Peter Dolving blogged about sleep.
• Gojira’s Joe Duplantier orders you to stop the killing of baby seals but apparently has no problem with ripping New York City a new arsehole.
• Meshuggah + Cynic + The Faceless = The Erection Tour of 2009.
• The metal industry lost a kindred soul. R.I.P. Adrian Bromley.

[In addition to writing and performing in New Wave of American Heavy Metal pioneers Darkest Hour, guitarist (and BS degree in Social Work!) Mike Schleibaum also writes for his own informative and funny website Ask The Dude. The dude himself contacted us about writing a guest blog for MetalSucks, and somehow in between his various other activities that actually, ya know, pay the bills, he somehow found time to do it. We hope he'll be a regular contributor whenever time allows. Let us know what you think. -Ed.]

The Underrated: Entombed

Like many fellow dudes who have dedicated their lives to moshing hard and jamming heavy metal I find myself continuously on the hunt for new records that can make me feel the way I did the first time I heard Metallica’s Master of Puppets, At the Gates’ Slaughter of the Soul, or Pantera’s Vulgar Display of Power. As age and experience wear away at me I find that sadly this feeling is harder and harder to obtain. I mean let’s face it, a good seventy percent of modern metal is total bullshit (and I think that’s me being nice since I know a few people are going to read this). Not only has the genre been raped by the mainstream and watered down by the internet, its safe to say that every Tuesday more and more “death metal” or “heavy metal” records hit the street here in the USA that have less and less to offer the genre and us listeners than ever before. I believe that metal actually doesn’t suck, and there are great metal bands out there who for whatever reason didn’t get the attention they truly deserve. The following is one dude’s opinion. I do not claim any of it as absolute truth but, if I can use this printed space for nothing more then to turn at least one more dude out there onto a record that has touched my life, then it was time well spent.

With that in mind let me turn the focus to one of my all time favorite metal bands, Entombed. Now there are some of you out there who just read this and are thinking, “Fuck this guy, Entombed is not underrated, they are known as one of the pioneers of Swedish Death Metal.” And to you dudes I say, “I know, but just hear me out.”

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In theory, Amon Amarth are worth loathing: they’re thematically about as dopey as a band can get and as anyone who’s seen Headbanger’s Ball in the last 2 years can attest to, they’re prone to synchronized headbanging and often appearing shirtless though clearly a decade or so past their physical prime. So then why are Amon Amarth worth our time? The answer, obvious to anyone who’s ever heard Amon Amarth, is the bottomless gauntlet of riffs that the band endlessly takes gargantuan swigs from, sounding both lush and emotive as well as skull crushingly heavy. And for those that have fallen for the band’s dopey big riff attack before, there’s little to dislike on Twilight of the Thunder God, their latest. Though some things have shifted slightly, very little has changed, and the album is a little-to-no bullshit slab of brute melodic death metal in a time where melodic death metal has been seemingly sucked dry and left for dead. Amon Amarth are still Amon Amarth, and there is absolutely fucking nothing wrong with that.

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