This doesn’t really have anything to do with metal, but I found it kinda funny so I’m running with it.

A Scottish band called Found has released what is, at least as far as I’m aware, the first-ever edible 7″ — more specifically, a 7″ made from chocolate. According to Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci  (who came up with a headline far superior to my own):

“The first attempt was to pour chocolate over a pressed record, but the music created by the chocolate record was backwards. Instead they poured chocolate into the record mold, and presto, an edible single.”

I don’t know nearly enough about, like, science n’ shit to understand how this could possibly work, or what the band’s fans are supposed to do if they actually wanna keep the record, be it because they like the music, or because they think it’s gonna be a collector’s item, or whatever. (How easily would this thing melt? You’d have to at least keep it refrigerated, I’d imagine.)

I would, however, like to suggest that metal bands start trying this gimmick to sell their own shit. Of course, they would not necessarily have to use to chocolate. Here are some examples of what I think would be good cuisine-to-band matches:

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Like everybody, I got a good laugh from CBS L.A. news correspondent Serene Branson’s gibberish-packed meltdown/report from the Grammys in February (watch it here). But unlike most, I understood exactly what she meant by “heavy burtation.” It may have been seizure-induced mouth mutiny, but it’s a term that I wish existed back in 1998 when I interviewed Fear Factory frontman Burton C. Bell about their then-new, very burtatious record Obsolete. Over twenty minutes, I lauded his icy clean singing, his dystopian themes, and his big-balls performances on side B’s smashing (and alliterative) openers, “Hi-Tech Hate” and “Freedom Or Fire” (best FF jam ever, here). I pointed out that his vocals bound and accented the album’s ripping single-note riffs, mushrooming chords, and uber-violent snare drum. I blabbed at length about Obsolete’s intra-album dynamics, i.e. the way its snappy, pressurized first half sets up the crush and dispersal of its second half. But what a waste of breath, cuz here in 2011, we have a term to express all of those things: Heavy fuckin’ Burtation.

-ADF

Get heavily Burt-ated with Burton C. Bell & Fear Factory on tour starting June 1 in Tempe.

So 70,000 Tons of Metal, the most metal cruise EV-AR, has now ended — but that doesn’t mean the fun is over. We’re gonna have a couple more Tons of Fun for you during the week, starting with the below video, taken during the cruise, of Testament’s Alex Skolnick, Exodus’ Tom Hunting, and Death Angel’s Rob Cavestany doing a karaoke version of The Eagles’ “Lying Eyes” onboard the ship.

Yep. We’re being totally serious.

We first saw this amazing video over at Metal Insider; they also have clips of karaoke performances from members of Fear Factory, Sodom, Ensiferum, Tyr, and Swashbuckle. So head on over to Metal Insider if you wanna see some of your heroes embarrassing themselves in the name of fun.

Also, our bro-bros at Metal Injection were actually on the cruise, giving constant live updates. Go here if you wanna read all about their adventures, or if you just wanna look at pictures of MI’s resident female, Noa Avior, in a bikini.

-AR

I interviewed Joe Payne once, and as far as I could tell from our brief time together, he’s a nice guy, so I feel bad making fun of him.

But I’m gonna do it anyway.

The former Nile bassist has spent the past three-odd years in Dino Cazares’ Divine Heresy, a band I assume we will never hear from again. I know there was never an official break-up announcement, and for all I know, the other members of the band do not believe DH to be dead. But let’s be real here — with all due respect to Tim Yeung and company, Dino IS Divine Heresy, he’s the reason anyone ever paid attention to Divine Heresy, and without him, there is no Divine Heresy.

And right now, Dino is preoccupied with Fear Factory. And I don’t foresee him not being preoccupied with Fear Factory for some time to come. So even if Divine Heresy ever do return, it most likely will not be anytime soon. Especially since Divine Heresy aren’t even listed on Century Media’s artist page right now (the band released both of their albums through that label), which is probably not a good sign of new music to come.

And this fact makes the statement Payne released to Blabbermouth last night baffling:

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Dude windmilling in the jacuzzi as some band plays behind him. Jacuzzis = metal.

Our brothas and sista at Metal Injection are having a grand ol’ time on the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise, which by now you’ve surely heard about: a 4-day cruise from Miami to Cozumel and back featuring close to 50 metal bands on three stages, many of them playing more than once. You can imagine the scene… lots and lots and lots of black t-shirts.

MI’s Rob, Frank and Noa are posting regular liveblog updates from their voyage by continuing to add updates to this page. Among some amusing highlights:

• Check out this video of the scene before the storm. So many black t-shirts!
• Nevermore and Sanctuary both fucking killed it. Says Noa, “It was great seeing Jim [Shephard] with a bass in his hand instead of quarters for the slot machines.”

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Yesterday, Sergeant D. posted a Metal Edition of the classic parlor game Marry, Fuck, or Kill, and you guys responded, uh, enthusiastically, surprising no one. And because we’re equal opportunity offenders — don’t forget that this is the site which posts leaked naked pictures of women and men alike — we decided that today we should post a metal d00dz edition.

So we sat down with the Mansion’s resident feminist, Leyla Ford, and presented her with some hot metal d00dz for a new game of MFK. Check out the results after the jump…

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Scorched-Earth Policy
TBA
Label – Self-release
Release date – Spring 2011

Back in 2001, my first taste of Slipknot’s then-forthcoming sophomore album, Iowa, was a two-minute piece of “The Heretic Anthem.” The snippet was found on a wee little mini-CD from Roadrunner Japan alongside similarly abridged jams by Fear Factory, Ill Nino, Bat Cave, Sepultura, and, uh, Cairo, among others. The weird thing is that this CD5-shaped Reader’s Digest of macho gruntcore — clearly designed for overhead play at Japan’s CD superstores — stayed in heavy rotation at my place for months. Crazy, right? But you can see how, once distilled to its 120-second essence, no song could overstay its welcome or commit an unforgivable gaffe — even Ill Nino’s! And listening to them all was like taking a healthy bite of twelve different pizza slices, some undercooked, most boldly similar, and totally fun! Even Ill Nino’s!

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Since the dawn of time over 9,000 years ago, man has achieved progress only by questioning himself, putting even his most basic assumptions to the test of rigorous, unforgiving critical analysis. Once upon a time, we believed that the sun revolved around the earth, all matter was made of four basic elements, and that Brujeria really were Mexican drug traffickers, but thanks to the tireless efforts of great thinkers like Galileo, Hobbes, and Hume, now we know better. In the same spirit of fearless intellectual honesty, I ask the readers of MetalSucks the following: which is the best, BLACK METAL or DEATH METAL???

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They’re all touring with Daath! Not all at once, unfortunately. In two separate groups. But still! These are good bills.

The U.S. tour will see Chimaira headlining with Impending Doom, Daath, and This or The Apocalypse providing support.The Chimaira/Daath bill alone is enough to get my money. When those bands toured Europe together last year, I was jealous of the Europeans. Now I’m jealous of people who live in Poughkeepsie, which has never happened before and may never happen again.

Europe, meanwhile, gets a Fear Factory headlining run with Daath and High on Fire. Those aren’t three bands you’d necessarily expect to see touring together, but they’re all bands of a certain quality, and that’s what makes this tour cool. When I criticized the line-up for Fear Factory’s U.S. tour earlier this year, a member of one of the supporting bands e-mailed me to a) call me a dick, and b) ask who I thought Fear Factory should be touring with. Well… THIS is who I think Fear Factory should be touring with. THIS is an exciting tour. I’m not even a Fear Factory fan, and I’d go to this.

So if you’re in a position to go to either tour, do it. Buy some merch. Give Eyal a high-five. It’ll be fun.

Get dates for both tours after the jump.

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Playing jokes on Winds of Plague is funny. Playing jokes on whoever happens to be occupying the carousel wheel of interchangeable female keyboardists for Winds of Plague at any given time is even funnier.

The latest shenanigan comes from Periphery tour manager Justin Gosnell who decided to mess with current WoP keyboard seat-warmer Alana Potocnik on their summer tour with Fear Factory. It started with a picture of Justin’s spread ass cheeks set as the wallpaper on Alana’s phone, and since I don’t wanna ruin it for you I’ll just say it progressed from there. Watch:

I’m not sure I can get behind Justin’s claim that this is “the best tour prank of all-time,” but it’s a pretty good one. Supposedly some kids at the show thought it was real and it to WoP’s Wikipedia page, although it’s since been removed. Nice work!

-VN

Back in 1993, music had not yet been ruined by the internet. Since information traveled through word of mouth and the postal system, it was much easier for a band to seem mysterious and larger than life than it is today, when you can see Jesse “Ripper” Owens’ Twitpics of him flying model airplanes with his daughters or whatever. The most notable example of that is, of course, the Norwegian black metal scene, but that never held much interest to me. For me and my friends who grew up on the West Coast listening to Suicidal Tendencies and Ice T, our cherished mythological metal band was Brujeria, and their 1993 LP Matando Gueros (literally means “Killing Honkeys”) was our version of Transylvanian Hunger.

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It was a while ago now that Axl dug up Ill Bill’s Unauthorised Biography Of Slayer, a surprisingly detailed history of Slayer delivered entirely in rap. But like all metalheads, Ill Bill has a little bit of trouble keeping his love of all things heavy in one place. Check out this jam by Ill Bill’s posse, Non Phixion, titled ‘The CIA Is Still Trying To Kill Me’, featuring members of the Deftones and Fear Factory. Yes, it does have that boofheaded-guitar-riff-over-hip-hop-beat thing that made nu-metal suck, but the whole first verse is peppered with references to classic metal bands and albums. The shout-outs aren’t exactly harde to pick, but at the very least it’ll put a smile on your miserable face, so quit yer whingin and check this out:

-Crack Hitler

Can you imagine if everyone to whom we give endless amounts of shit followed Dino’s example? We’d have Rose Funoral cards and Tommy Lee faking his own death and Fred Durst pulling a Billy Madison and pics of Joey Belladonna with his twig and berries tucked back. That’s the kinda world I wanna live in. I believe we can make it happen if we try.

ANYWAY, here’s some shit we did this week:

• We did a second installment of Cooking Contaminated.
• We’re streaming new tracks by Son of Aurelius.
• Eyal gave us a Daath studio update.
• We spoke to Max Cavalera and Ratt’s Bobby Blotzer.
• We suckered Decibel‘s Andrew Bonazelli into writing about the Metal Mets for us.
• We checked out some new German cheese metal releases.
• We called out David Draiman.
• We watched some great music videos, some awful music videos, and some really awful music videos.
• We made fun of the most annoying little kid in the world.
• We were sorry about Abacabb breaking up, but really happy about BOOBS!!!

Speaking of Eyal and studio updates: on Sunday I’m flying down to Atlanta to visit Daath in the studio. If you never hear from me again, assume I’ve been lost amidst a cloud of ATL purp smoke and awesome metal. But what a way to go!!!

-AR

We’ve given Dino Cazares a lot of shit on MetalSucks. And I know he’s read at least some of it. And I’ve been operating under the impression that he had no sense of humor about it whatsoever. But, hey, I’m happy to see that I was dead wrong.

These photos were taken by MetalSucks Maniac Ben Alden (right) and his friend Sam (left) at a Fear Factory show at Northern Lights in Clifton Park, NY on Friday night – and I give Dino major, major props for participating in their creation:

More photos, and Ben’s explanation of how this all went down, after the jump!

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Our friend Amy Sciarretto from Noisecreep reports that Birmingham City University (in England, not Alabama) is naming an award after everyone’s favorite heavy metal grandpa: the Ozzy Osbourne Development Award “will be bestowed upon the student that makes the most significant progress on their degree in the Media and Communication/Music Industry degree.” I assume that the Osbourne family donated a nice chunk of change to get the award named after him, but this doesn’t really make that much sense to me. For one thing, I don’t know if Ozzy has really shown any musical development in, oh, the last hundred years or so, and as much as I admire a lot of his past work, you’ll never convince me that the bulk of the credit doesn’t lie with his collaborators – especially given that the dude doesn’t actually play an instrument. And beyond that, fuck has Ozzy got to do with media and communication? If we’re talking about his work with various reality shows and what have you, well, then, shouldn’t the award be named after Sharon, since we have her to thank for Ozzy’s wonderful non-music endeavors.

But whatever. This piece of news got me thinking: what other awards could we name after heavy metal musicians? And so, after the jump, my suggestions for new university kudos monikered in honor of various other members of the heavy metal community.

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When you tune into the premiere broadcast of The Second Annual Revolver Golden Gods Awards tomorrow night on VH1 classic, you’ll see the final public appearance of our beloved Ronnie James Dio. You’ll also see Jerry Cantrell and Mike Inez of Alice In Chains, winner of roughly half of the meaningful awards, enjoying the metal community’s validation of their potentially dicey comeback effort, the magnificent Black Gives Way To Blue. You’ll see metal codgers like Rob Halford, Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, and Lemmy bathe in much-deserved adulation. You’ll also see potentially ho-hum performances pumped up by mega-drummers: Rob Zombie with Joey Jordison (in his debut performance), Fear Factory with Gene Hoglan, Brian Posehn with John Tempesta (and Brett Anderson girl call me srsly) and Slash with Dave Grohl.

But at a mere 60 minutes, the broadcast can’t capture all of the April 8 event’s super moments and silly gaffes. Here’s a few things you won’t see:

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I really only know Johnny Orlando, Jr., because of the work he’s done with Metal Injection, but plenty of people have told me I’m an idiot for not paying closer attention to him. And based on the below video, in which Johnny Orlando , Jr., Jr. asks members of Fear Factory, Misery Index, Revocation and Carnifex that all-important question: “Where do babies come from?”

Kudos to Burton C. Bell for trying to give the kid an honest answer, although Gene Hoglan’s response is clearly the best. Reader Xavier Luxenburg suggests that the absence of a certain guitar player is “confirmation” of his baby eating, but I think that dude actually likes ‘em a little younger than this kid.

-AR

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

The weather is beautiful out, it’s the weekend, and I have a ton of new albums to listen to. I’m gonna put some shit on my iPod, get stoned, go eat some ice cream, and crank some shit. It’s a rough life, but someone’s gotta lead it.

Before I do that, here’s a wrap-up of crap that happened this week:

• We spoke to Phil Anselmo, former Killswitch Engage/current The Empire Shall Fall vocalist Jesse Leach, and the dude who proposed to his girlfriend on-stage at a Fear Factory concert.
• We debuted a new column by Cynic’s Paul Masvidal.
• We’re streaming Unleashed’s new album, As Yggdrasil Trembles.
• Vince’s heavy metal road trip re-cap continues!
• We love Meek is Murder, and we’re not being sarcastic.
• Refused are reuniting! Well, they’re not, actually, but Far is!
• The end is nigh.

Okey dokey… sprinkles here I come! Have a good weekend everybody.

-AR

On Wednesday we posted a video of a dude proposing to his girlfriend on-stage at a recent Fear Factory concert. I really thought that that was the first and last time the subject would ever come up, but, lo and behold, yesterday afternoon I actually got an e-mail from the guy – his name is Charley Ray, as it turns out, and his fiancée’s name is Alexis – saying “I never thought I’d get ‘coverage’ on the proposal…. We had a good time and it was unbelievably cool that Fear Factory let me do that.”

Of course, such a marriage proposal is, um, unusual, to put it mildly, so I needed to know more. And Charles was cool enough to grant me a quick e-mail interview. After the jump, learn all the ins and outs of this most bizarre story.

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I’m barely mature enough to even be able to imagine someday proposing to a woman, but if I was going to imagine it, I don’t think the setting would be someplace really public where other people had to watch and applaud. And even if the setting were someplace public, I don’t think that public place would be on-stage at a metal show. And even if it were on-stage at a metal show, I don’t think I’d wear the shirt of the band whose gig it is. And… really, there’s just all kinds of wrong with this.

That being said, I don’t begrudge any couple their happiness, and I sincerely hope for the best for these kids. Also, I gotta admit, even as someone who doesn’t like Fear Factory, it was very cool of the band to allow a fan to do this.

If they get divorced, do you think he’ll wear a Divine Heresy shirt to the proceedings?

-AR

[via Blabbermouth]