MetalSucks

Vince really likes Buckcherry, but I’ve never gotten into any of their songs that aren’t the big hits – namely, “Lit Up” (a.k.a. “the one about cocaine”) and “Crazy Bitch” (a.k.a. “the one about fucking”). Like so many bands that hoped to be the Appetite-era Guns N’ Roses of the late 20th/early 21st century, Buckcherry always just felt like they were trying way too hard to prove what a bunch of bad-asses they are. GN’R never actually used the words “cocaine” or “heroin” in a song – Buckcherry’s biggest hit finds them shouting “I LOVE THE COCAINE! I LOVE THE COCAINE!” In case anyone doubted that they were the real deal. Puh-lease.

So. Former Buckcherry bassist JB Brightman has a new band, Black Robot, and – no shock here – it’s readily apparent that they want to be AC/DC. If you’re one of those people who unironically loves retro-hard rawk that has no sense of originality whatsoever, then you will probably dig this band. And whatever you do, stay away from Loudermilk and Manmade God – bands that actually make excellent, original hard rock.

And, hey, guess what? Black Robot covered Clapton’s “Cocaine!” How original! How shocking! What a bunch of bad-asses! Now I can finally burn my copy of Appetite for Destruction!

Barf.

-AR

Scott Weiland’s been out of Velvet Revolver for quite some time now, and there’s still no word on their search for a new singer. I had assumed that they hadn’t announced anyone because they just couldn’t find someone famous enough. I mean, let’s be real – they’re not gonna hire some unknown. If they did, they’d fail to be a supergroup – they’s just be Slash’s Snakepit III. As it stands, Slash doesn’t know Dave Kushner’s name (he repeatedly identifies his co-guitarist as “Dave Kirshner” in his autobiography), and he’s known Kushner since they were kids; what the fuck would he do with an unknown singer?

I guess there must be some other issue, though – ’cause Corey Taylor, front man for Slipknot and Stone Sour, recently revealed that he tried out for the spot:

“I had a meeting with those guys, we did some demos together, and it just didn’t work — for whatever reason… It was just really cool. It was one of those things where it’s like I could have got to jam with legends, man, in my opinion. But, you know, it was cool, and I still know those guys, I still hang out with them, and I still have nothing but respect.”

So I gotta wonder why this didn’t work out. Taylor’s voice is comparable to Weiland’s, he’s well-known, he’d probably bring in some young kids who might otherwise not give a shit about Guns Without Rose, and he’s a very charismatic and entertaining band leader. So did his personality just not gel with that of the dudes in VR? Were they worried that with two other bands, he was already over-committed? Did Roadrunner (the label that distributes both Slipknot and Stone Sour) put the kibosh on the whole thing, as they allegedly did when Taylor almost replaced John Bush in Anthrax? We might never know, but I find the whole thing pretty curious.

Weigh in with your thoughts on Taylor as the new Axl Weiland below. And while you’re pontificating, enjoy this bootleg video of Taylor performing “It’s So Easy” with Slash. It might be the closest we ever get to seeing  a Taylor-fronted VR.

-AR

I love playing ths game. The famed Metallica + GN’R + Faith No More run would have to be close to the top of my list. Soundgarden supporting Spoonman. Motley Crue supporting Too Fast For Love. King’s X on the Dogman tour, for sure… check out this performance [sent in by Shane Gillis] of the title track from that incredible record, filmed on the short-lived Jon Stewart show no less.

If you had a time machine that could take you back to any one specific tour (but ONLY one), who would you go see?

-VN

So not only is Rose and whatever four to sixty-two musicians he’s calling “Guns N’ Roses” these days really returning to wreak more havoc upon Canada, but it looks like one of the tour stops will be Montreal.

Anyone remember what happened the last time GN’R played Montreal?

The above news report is completely correct, of course. The rioting was caused by the injuries sustained by James Hatfield (NOT Hetfield), and not because after Hatfield sustained said injuries, Axl Rose failed to play a complete show. Sure sure.

Anyway, dates after the jump. Here Today… Gone to Hell, which is about as close to an official fan site as GN’R has these days, says the band currently consists of guitarists Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal, Dj Ashba, and Richard Fortus, bassist Tommy Stinson, drummer Frank Ferrer, and keyboardists Dizzy Reed and Chris Pitman. Hey, some of those dudes have actually played on a Guns N’ Rose record!

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Depending on who you believe, Axl Rose has been directly or indirectly responsible for four riots during the course of his career, and two of them were in Canada – one in Montreal and one in Vancouver.

So the news that Rose may announce Canadian tour dates (or at least a date) this Monday is somewhat unsettling.

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With Velvet Revolver on what is starting to look like a permanent hiatus, Slash has been off recording a Santana-style all-star solo album with lots and lots of famous collaborators. It’s actually kind of a brilliant idea, and you wonder why he didn’t do that instead of Slash’s Snakepit Mach 2, a fun band that was really never gonna pay off for him.

Now Slash has announced his first solo offering: a two-track Japanese (and thus “internet,” whether Saul Hudson likes it or not) single called Sahara, which will offer both that song, with some Japanese dude I’ve never heard of on vocals, and… a re-recording of “Paradise City” with vocals by Cypress Hill and Fergie.

Fergie.

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Aaaaannnnddd my heart is broken.

Blabbermouth reports that Independiente and the Domino Recording Company are suing Guns N’ Roses for ripping off two songs by Ulrich Schnauss for the song “Riad N’ the Bedouins,” which appears on the band’s forever-in-the-making flop of epic of proportions, Chinese Democracy. Now, a new law suits against Axl Rose and GN’R is filed approximately once an hour – Rose has even blamed said law suits in the past for being part of the reason for CD’s delay (as if) – so, normally, this would not be news.

Except that I’m 99.9% positive that Schnauss is correct, and he was ripped-off.

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If Velvet Revolver’s second album, Libertad, had a bed, it shat all over it. The sales would have been considered top-notch for your average metal band, but for mega super duper rockstars likes Guns Without Rose, it was bad enough for their major label to promptly drop them.

There’s a few reasons this might have occurred. Personally, I think that VR’s debut, Contraband, was good but not great, and I think once the curiosity factor (with regards to a supergroup) had passed, the band was kind of doomed. Being a major success means doing crossover business (e.g., attracting people beyond the hardcore fanbase that would’ve bought the album even if it was by Slash’s Snakepit 3), and I know a lot of people who bought Contraband, went “meh,” and then never bothered to check out Libertad.

But even if we assume that Contraband really was Appetite’s second coming, the band released a shit first single that impressed absolutely no one. And I seem to be the only person in the world who actually thought that Libertad was superior to Contraband. So it’s possible that being creatively lackluster is why the album undersold.

Keeping all of this in mind, here’s Matt Sorum basically saying that Libertad sucked, and that it’s all Scott Weiland’s fault:

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Sebastian Bach, who is perpetually the most entertaining former rock star in all of hair metaldom, is going to be on yet another fucking reality show – this time VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club, where former “stars” purportedly go to shed some weight, but actually go because their parents didn’t love them enough, causing them to have no sense of self-worth whatsoever if they’re not constantly in the spotlight. Although a VH1 reality show strikes me as a pretty dim spotlight. But whatever.

Bach will be joined by that dude who knocked up Britney Spears, that chick from Charles in Charge I always used to think about while jerking off, crackhead Bobby Brown, and a bunch of people I’ve never heard of.

I guess the last time I actually saw Bach up close was in 2006 when he was hanging from Axl Rose’s nuts all over the world, but in all honesty, the guy looked like he was in pretty good shape. I mean, I’m sure his liver is failing and his septum has been burned-through with coke, but he wasn’t fat or anything. If anyone has seen him more recently and can tell me I’m wrong, please do so. Nothing would make me happier than to learn that Baz had pulled a Brando.

Celebrity Fit Club will start airing in February 2010, by which time I will most certainly have forgotten about it.

-AR

I found the following quote from a recent interview with Gene Simmons to be (inadvertently) hilarious:

“This is electric church, and no one on that stage — me or anyone else — wears the makeup and platform heels by some kind of birthright. This ain’t Europe; just ’cause your dad was king doesn’t make you the king. You’ve got to earn it. And when you defile KISS, you should be thrown out.”

Gene is referring to dudes like Ace Frehley, Peter Criss and Vinnie Vincent, of course. But I have to wonder what he thinks they did that was worse than this:

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I don’t know how I missed this, but Bruce Springsteen turned sixty yesterday. SIXTY!!! And while The Boss obviously isn’t metal, he is really awesome. And far be it from me to miss an opportunity to post a video from my youth.

So here’s Springsteen doing The Beatles’ “Come Together” with a certain Hero Long Since Dead for the 1994 Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame Induction of Elton John. For those of you who don’t remember, this really did seem cool fifteen years ago.

-AR

We make fun of L.A. Guns quite a bit, mostly because, well, they’re really worth making fun of. For one thing, they’re one of those bands where there’s actually two different versions of the band touring around, claiming to be “L.A. Guns;” the version that doesn’t feature founding guitarist/namesake Tracii Guns hired a dude named – no shit – Stacey Blades as their guitarist. Plus, Tracii is the “Guns” in “Guns N’ Roses,” but quit the band before they got signed, and has spent most of his career trying to prove that he could have been Slash, if given the shot. And they’re one of those bands that claims they were never hair metal even though there’s really no other way to categorize them. So, yeah, they’re pretty silly.

They’re also one of the better hair metal bands of their era, even if they never made it that big in the scheme of things. On Friday night during some drunken rambling about Kix and Love/Hate and whatever other wussy bands crossed our Peroni-soaked brains, a friend and I started reminiscing about the song “Over the Edge” from Hollywood Vampires. I don’t know how the song holds up in the whole pantheon of songs that were cool when you were a kid but aren’t cool anymore, but I still have fun listening to it from time to time.

All I could find for a embedded video was this rip from the Point Break soundtrack. Since Swayze just died, I figured, y’know, fuck it.

-AR

So Vince and I were talking the other day about this question that both of us have wondered about from time to time, and since then I haven’t stopped thinking about it. So here it is: DO ANY OF YOU GIVE A FUCK ABOUT LYRICS IN METAL?

Is it just the sound of the voice and how it works with the sound of the music, or is it also what the vocalist is saying that matters to you? I’m going to take a guess and say that fans of hardcore and straight edge bands really do care about the lyrics because the bands are representing the ideals and beliefs of their respective communities. But what about in death metal, black metal, or any other genre of metal? When you listen to Necrophagist or Cannibal Corpse or Suicide Silence, can you comprehend what they’re singing about, and do you even care? Is it what they’re singing about, or is it more what it sounds like with the music, or both?

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I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve actually learned a lot from metal. For example, when I was a kid, I heard Axl Rose use the word “cunt” in the song “Bad Obsession” and subsequently asked my dad, “What’s a cunt?” To which he responded, “Your mother’s sister.” And I instantly knew exactly what a cunt was.

Metal continues to educate me every day, and this morning has been no different. Marduk have a new song, “Phosphorus Redeemer,” streaming on their MySpace page, and while I initially thought the title was just a nonsense combination of two words, it turns out that Marduk didn’t invent the phrase. Amazing!

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If you read this site regularly, you’re already aware that I’m a huge Chimaira fan. In fact, I pride myself on knowing way too much about them.

I guess I haven’t officially reached stalker status yet, though, because until I read this interview with Chimaira lead guitarist Rob Arnold, I had no idea that the dude had another band – The Elite.

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MEGADETH, RUST IN PEACE

Ok, I was like, what, eleven when this shit came out? More like thirteen when I discovered it. Back then, Dave Mustaine was almost like a political figure as far as metal goes. Who knows how I’d look at his role now, but back then, he was a hero.

And then there was the songwriting. Nobody was writing music as creative as them. Listen to the guitar breaks in songs like “Five Magics” or the entire masterpiece, “Rust in Peace.” Nobody was writing stuff like that, and for the time, I felt like the lyrics actually meant something. And the solos – try playing a Marty Friedman solo when you’re thirteen. Try playing one now. The dude is/was/ and will forever be untouchable.

This band meant the world to me back then. I’m not crazy about the new directions the band has gone in, but that doesn’t diminish that they changed my life back when I was younger. I always felt like their rival bands were playing it safe, and that Megadeth was taking all the musical risks. I definitely think that this would be the musician’s choice for those of us who are and were still into real metal with real songs. Not just shred wankery.

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According to Blabbermouth, Elton John plays on the title track to Alice in Chains’ forthcoming Black Gives Way to Blue, which is described as “a heart-stirring tribute” to late vocalist Layne Staley.

Apparently John’s contribution comes solely in the form of piano playing and not vocals, which must be why Vince made no note of it when he reported on the album’s listening party (although he did make note of the “melancholy piano” and the lyrics “I remember you,” which he suspected at the time was a tribute to Staley); at the same time, I can’t believe they’ve kept the collaboration with John a secret this long.

So… anyone wanna get pissy about this? Honestly, like our friend Eyal Levi, I need some non-metal sometimes, and vintage Elton John often hits the spot. Plus, this isn’t the first time he’s worked with a near-metal band:

Black Gives Way to Blue comes out September 29.

-AR

This past Saturday night, Vince and Axl bought tickets to hipster-douche fest All Points West with the express purpose of seeing Tool and Tool only. There was a serious and very visible divide in the crowd – namely, other metalheads vs. people who think Interpol is cool  – and your MetalSucks editors were privy to some pretty funny dialogue as a result:

1. “I think they’re called, like, ‘Tools?’”
2. <robot voice>”Intergalactic, planetary. Planetary, intergalactic.” </robot voice>
3. Beat-boxing.
4. “Gogol Bordello are awesome.”
5. “Please don’t block my view of the stage.”
6. “There won’t be any moshing. Look at all that mud! No one wants to get dirty.”
7. “Where are the fried Oreos?”
8. Scowling at Axl’s Slayer shirt.
9. Scowling at Vince’s Paganfest shirt.
10. “What’s that smell?”

No matter; Tool kicked major ass anyways. It’s like there’s an unspoken agreement between the band and their fans: “You bring the weed. We’ll bring the lasers.”

Here’s Tool at All Points West on Saturday night, performing with special guest drummer Frank Ferrer of Guns N’ Roses fame.

-AR & VN

I’ve gotten multiple e-mails from peeps about this interview The Eagles of Death Metal front dude Jesse Hughes just gave to the Montreal Mirror.

Now, I should preface this by saying I’ve heard very little of TEODM’s music, and what I hear didn’t do anything for me. But, clearly Hughes is a funny guy.

But the statements everyone is harping on seem kinda… well… shrug. Read for yourself:

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Last week, Elise at Reign in Blonde wrote a piece entitled “TOP 5 SONGS I WOULD PROBABLY USE AS MY STRIPPER SONG.”

Improbably enough, this led to a stoned think-session where I came up with a list of the top five songs I would probably use as my own stripper song. ‘Cause I know you all wanna see me strip so badly.

Okay, here we go:

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