MetalSucks

Okay. I started SYL in 1993 after hearing Soul Of A New Machine. I saw Fear Factory open for Sepultura with Clutch, and I remember running around the venue telling everyone: “THAT is what I want to do, except with extra chaos…”

My creative process is directly tied to my emotional development. There are some folks that make music by picking up a guitar until they have a riff that is defined by the musical roads they choose to hone. They then sculpt it into that framework and voila, Metallica, Slayer, Priest etc. I think that’s awesome, and in some ways I’m envious of that. In many cases, if you mix that with tenacity and a certain amount of talent and luck, you can sustain a decent career.

That’s not how I create, again… as it is tied to life and circumstance, my music has generally been cathartic observations of what life presents, and each new record in many ways is a reaction to the one before. So in the most blunt of terms, I make music to better understand myself as I change.

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Today was Friday the 13th, but absolutely nothing bad happened to me. I mean, the night is young so shit could still go horribly awry I suppose, but all in all, I had a pretty good day – nay, I had a pretty good week. If only the same could be said for the world of metal. Here’s some disasters the plagued various musicians this week:

• Slash completed his decade-long indoctrination into the Metallica “Fuck Our Fans” Club.
• We’re not sure if Steven Tyler is still in Aerosmith or not, but we are sure that we don’t give a fuck either way.
• There was a lot of controversy over a really, really ugly painting.
• No can explain to me why I should care about Alter Bridge.
• Fear Faction ate s’more babies, released a new song.
• R.I.P. Jerry Fuchs.

And, oh yeah, some good news: MetalSucks is going to do a digital release of The Binary Code’s Suspension of Disbelief on December 15 for just five bucks! Get stoked.

Alright. I’m off to go hear Vince spin. Have a nice weekend everyone. Next week we have another extra, super-duper special surprise for you…

-AR

If you can tell me which of the following is the cover art for the new album by Fear Factory – or the baby-eating Fear Faction, or C&B Music Factory, or whatever the fuck we’re going to refer to them as from now on – then you care too much.

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It’s been a while since we’ve reported on the current Fear Factory drama because, well, it got boring re-hashing the same old shit over and over again just to get you guys all hot and bothered in the comments (whoops, did I just say that?). To summarize, in case you didn’t read this site missed out over the summer: Dino re-friends Burton Bell and the two start working on new music under the “Fear Factory” name, while Christian and Raymond — currently working on their Arkaea project — rightly object because Fear Factory is supposedly a four-way partnership. Lawsuits and public shit-talking ensue.

Last I checked a resolution between the two warring Fear Factions hadn’t been reached. So either the four men have settled, or Dino and Burton — let’s just call them the baby-eating Fear Faction — just don’t give a fuck. The baby-eating Fear Faction, along with latter-day FF cohorts Byron Stroud [Strapping Young Lad] and Gene Hoglan [Strapping Young Lad, Dethklok, every fucking band ever] — just announced that they have a new album called Mechanized coming out on February 9th via Candlelight Records (!?!).

The new song “Powershifter” has been making the Internet rounds all weekend; stream it below. Unsurprisingly, it sounds a lot like Fear Factory. I imagine some of you will love it and some of you will hate it; place me firmly in the “meh” camp. I loves me some Demanufcature and Obsolete, but 10 years later there are tons of metal bands out there that are way better, more interesting, and more worthy of my listening time.

-VN

I’m not just speaking in the general sense. I mean, in this video, he announces “I’ve got something for all you,” then lets one rip.

What do you think that smelled like? I’d guess half-digested babies.

-AR

Thanks to Manfred Nuggets for the link.

Extreme-kin Park.

(two out of five horns)

[Corey Mitchell (AKA "The Old Fart") is a best-selling true crime author, founder of the #1 true crime blog, In Cold Blog, and sad about the recent death of my friend and fellow true crime author, Dale Hudson. RIP.]

Burton C. Bell has remained pretty quiet on the whole Fear Factory situation up until now, but the good folks at  Rock My Monkey have finally gotten him to open up and do some shit-talkin’ of his own. It’s an audio interview, but Mr. Blabbermouth has transcribed some key portions…

…which I’m not even going to re-print here. Because it’s mostly anti-climatic. But I’ll give you the short version: Bell’s side of the story is that during the mixing of the Dino-less FF offering Transgression, Christian Olde Wolbers started having an affair with the band’s manager, Christy Priske. And I guess things got pretty serious, ’cause the two are married now. Bell found Wolbers and Priske’s shitting where they eat as “completely unacceptable,” and things got worse when Priske, Wolbers and Raymond Herrera allegedly brought Bell some new business arrangement which he also disliked. And then things really fell to shit: Bell says he refused to work with Priske, Wolbers and Herrera refused to let her go and refused to reunite with Dino, and now we have all this fun mud slinging in a public forum.

But here’s the part of the interview I actually found really interesting, and this part I will re-print verbatim:

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I don’t know if Willie Gardner is officially associated with a band known as The Douche Lords or not, but he has their name in his e-mail address and sent me a link to the band’s MySpace page this morning.

Why is this band of interest? As it turns out, they were Dino Cazares’ first band (In case ya haven’t figured it out by now, that’s Dino above).

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I’ve gotten a few e-mails today from people asking me where Vince is. Well, the truth is, Vince can’t write because he’s ill. And he’s quitting the site. No, really, he quit. We didn’t fire him. Swear it. We stand by that statement.

Here’s some other shit that happened in the world of metal this week:

• We’ve heard the new Alice in Chains album, and it is good.
• Gwar’s Oderus Urungus answered some of your questions, and will answer more in the future.
• John Bush is coming back to Anthrax because Dan Nelson quit. Oh, wait, no he didn’t. Yes he did. He probably didn’t, though.
• We spoke with Poison the Well’s Ryan Primack and Sunn O)))’s Greg Anderson.
• We checked out the latest releases from He Is Legend, Magrudergrind, Novembers Doom, and Clutch.
• Unfortunately, the 10th Annual Gathering of the Juggalos really is a real thing.
• Baby-eater Dino Cazares must be stopped!!!

Alright. Time to go buy a vaporizer of my very own. See ya Monday.

-AR

Anthrax may have stolen this week’s metal gossip thunder, but we’re always happy to re-hash old feuds for entertainment’s sake here at MetalSucks. The latest news had Dino Cazares taking a shot at drummer Raymond Herrera’s playing abilities, while Burton Bell has for the most part taken the high road and remained mum. Herrera and Christian Olde Wolbers both fired back this week, and here’s Wolbers’ latest:

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Oddly enough, the baby sandwich is not the poorly Photoshopped part of this picture.

This is Ray Herrera from a recent interview*:

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Divine Heresy get a lot of somewhat undeserved hate: calling the band out for not being very good would be like calling this writer out for not hitting .458 for the Dodgers. This isn’t to say that the band necessarily deserve defense; in fact, I can’t imagine a solid argument for their existence. But their brand of technical nu-deathcore works surprisingly well, in that it’s not so much awful as it is awfully bland. And while perhaps it’s not fair to commend a band for not being as terrible as they could be, it’s not fair to decry them for not being amazing. If you were expecting them to be a slightly edgier Fear Factory, Bringer of Plagues, their latest album, delivers exactly what you’d think: 42 minutes (strangely enough, to the second) of surgically precise mechanical riffs, big yet terribly obvious grooves, pretty bad nu-metalcore vocals, and nothing particularly memorable.

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It’s raining in New York today. AGAIN. At least it’s warm; it’s been fucking rainy and cold for all of June (seriously… hoodie weather in June??). I feel like I’ve been cheated out of an entire month of summer. Fuck the world.

Here’s what happened this week:

• More arguing ensued over our 21 Best Metal Albums of the 21st Century… So Far list. You bitched and moaned to the tune of 444 comments (and counting) about the #11 pick of Deftones’ White Pony — just as you did last week with the debatably metal Tool (#12) and System of a Down (#14) picks — and then when we finally announced more trve/cvlt/br00tal albums you approved of (#10 Opeth, #9 Gojira, and #8 In Flames), comments were few and far between by comparison. You people are fucking morons. Especially Ziltoid.
• Rumors flew about the resuscitation of Headbanger’s Ball in 2010 with Jose Mangin as the host.
• More shit-talking between the two sparring Fear Factory camps provided us with endless amusement. We wondered aloud whether or not FF should be considered nu-metal.
• Shinedown’s Brent Smith claimed to have insider knowledge of a Soundgarden reunion, to which Axl — and possibly but not definitely Soundgarden’s own Ben Shepherd — took offense.
• We spoke with Scott Kelly of Neurosis and Vinnie Fucking Paul.

We out. Stay tuned in a couple of hours for our #7 Best Metal Album of the 21st Century… So Far. I’ll be at tomorrow night’s Black Anvil show at the new Duff’s location in Brooklyn if anyone wants to come out and hang. See you next week for more shenanigans!

All this Fear Factory brou-haha got me huntin’ for Fear Factory live videos this morning… and I found this performance of the band at Bizarre Festival in 1998 performing “Edgecrusher.” Obsolete must have literally just come out. Watching this, I’m reminded of that fact that Fear Factory were totally nu-metal; I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing (that’s for ya’ll to argue about)… I’m just sayin’.

-VN

“Will someone please tell Dino that his lunch has arrived?”

Holy shit. This is officially my favorite feud of the year.

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Sometimes we don’t want to face the truth about a certain situation. But sooner or later, you always have to be honest with yourself, or face a big ol’ ass whoopin’.

The reunited-but-not-really Fear Factory, which features original members Dino Cazares and Burton C. Bell but NOT Christian Olde Wolbers or Raymond Herrera, has apparently had to cancel not only what was to be their debut performance in Spain last night, but an entire German tour due to the ongoing legal battle over the band’s name.

Really, you have to wonder how the fuck it got this far that the group booked an entire tour without anyone checking if they had the legal rights to the name. Here’s my best guess about how the conversation between Dino Cazares and Burton C. Bell must’ve went:

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Quick re-cap: first original Fear Factory members Dino Cazares and Burton C. Bell announced they were teaming up with non-original Fear Factory member Byron Stroud and never-a-Fear Factory member Gene Hoglan to start a band that would not be called Fear Factory.

Several weeks later the band announced that they would be called Fear Factory.

Now our pal Anso DF at Hipsters Out of Metal! is reporting that original Fear Factory drummer Raymond Herrera told some radio show that nu-Fear Factory can’t be called Fear Factory no’ mo’:

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Twenty days ago it was announced that Burton C. Bell and Dino Cazares would be joining forces for a new project with Gene Hoglan and Byron Stroud; at the time, I wondered why the hell what is basically a Fear Factory reunion wasn’t going to be called Fear Factory.

Well, turns out it will be called Fear Factory.

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Baseball season officially got underway and New England Metal and Hardcore Fest is coming up next weekend. Surely all is peachy in the world then, yeah? Not so much.

• Dave Mustaine feuded with a mystery band, then kissed and made up before we even knew it.
• Protest the Hero released a new video and gave us a bunch of tickets for their tour to give away.
• We spoke with Daath’s Eyal Levi and TAD/Tadgarden’s Tad.
• Kip W. gave us two recaps (Day 1, Day 2) of our booze-fueled SXSW journey.
• Fear Factory got back together… except not.
• Ya’ll argued about which Mastodon album is the best and whether Jesse or Howard was/is the better KsE frontman.
• Ya’ll argued even more about IWRESTLEDABEARONCE and Oceano.
• We got an exclusive red carpet report from Metallica’s Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

See you next week. New England Metal and Hardcore Fest!!

I was never a big Fear Factory person so someone please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but did anyone ever really care about any of the members of that band who weren’t Burton C. Bell or Dino Cazares?

I ask because after about a year of speculation that the original Factory would be reuniting, it’s been announced that, yes, Bell and Cazares will now be working together again – but as a new band with a different, still to be determined name.

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