Gus G.’s Firewind, one of the like three power metal(ish) bands that I actually like, are gonna release a new album later this year, Few Against Many. Which means they’ve now performed some new tracks live. Which means the performances of those tracks have been filmed on someone’s cell phone. Which means you can check them out right now.

I’ve heard some good early buzz about the currently-being-completed Few Against Many, and these songs certainly pique my interest. Check ‘em out and see what you think:

“Wall of Sound”

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You’ve gotta feel for melodic death metal bands in 2011. They’re like the birdhouse builders of metal: sure, building a birdhouse isn’t an easy thing, and takes time to master your craft. But then after years of making quality birdhouses, suddenly Home Goods and Wal-Mart are shitting them out by the thousands, and people just go there to get them instead of to you, because they‘re cheaper and get the job done (the job here being housing birds). Then one day, here you are, a decent-enough birdhouse maker in a world that doesn’t care enough to spend money on handcrafted birdhouses, and you theoretically have to start over at 53, when all you were really good at was building birdhouses. So your options are make a half-assed attempt at another career, or continue being fairly good at making birdhouses in an ever-increasingly limited market. If you’re lucky, the economy will improve and people will arbitrarily decide that birdhouses are a thing at which to throw their money. But can you afford to bet on that kind of luck?

Crafting competent melodic death metal isn’t easy, either– let alone good melodeath — and if you’ve put enough time into your band, you have to stick with what you know. So, basically, Nightrage’s Insidious is an album that would have taken 2003 by storm that sounds perfectly fine now, just a little lifeless after years of its genre of choice being pounded into the ground. How many more times can we hear straight-up melodic death metal riffs with a lacquer of big-ass studio production and still be interested? Nightrage are fine at what they do, but before the inevitable melodic death metal revival of 2016, they need to be doing more to justify their existence.

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You know him and you love him; Gus G., mastermind and guitarist of Greek metallers Firewind, who also happens to be the newest addition to the band of some guy named Ozzy. We’ve got a Gus G. ESP Gus-200 Signature Series guitar to give away to one lucky MetalSucks reader who comments with our favorite answer to the following question:

What’s your favorite Ozzy guitar solo of all time, and why?

Firewind will be on tour in North America with Arsis, White Wizzard and Nightrage this October. Get a full list of tour dates here.

Note: Seeing Firewind live will not cause actual breaking of fire wind.

Hey, so remember last month when we told you that Firewind were doing a North American headlining tour with support coming from Arsis, White Wizzard, and Nightrage? Well, that tour has an itinerary now, and that itinerary is after the jump. No need to thank me, I get paid to do this.

In all seriousness: Besides a very small handful of dates last fall, this is the first time Firewind has visited this part of the world in quite some time, so I imagine there’s a reasonable amount of you who have never had the chance to see them live before. You should take advantage of this opportunity. Not only is Firewind fun (I don’t even really like power metal and I like Firewind), but this your chance to see Gus G. shred his brains out without an old man frog hopping around the stage and ruining it for everyone.

Also, Arsis! White Wizzard! Nightrage! Okay so I’ve never really been that into Nightrage, but still! Strong line-up.

And so, the tour dates…

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It has literally been years since we’ve done a new edition of “Board to Death,” the column in which we make fun of people on internet message boards, because we’re nice people like that. But last night Ozzy Osbourne’s intern made this announcement on the Ozzfest Facebook page…

…and while I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would care in light of the fact that there’s still The Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival featuring the Jagermeister Mobile Stage, Vans Warped Tour, The Rockstar Energy Drink Uproar Tour, Summer Slaughter, Slaughter Survivors, Slaughter Slaughter, The All Stars Tour, The Cool Tour (actually I don’t think that one is coming back but still), The Old People Doing Glam for the Sake of Nostalgia Tour, The Hellmann’s Dijon Mustard Extreme Grindcore Festival, and eighteen thousand other Ozzfests that aren’t called Ozzfest. But some people do care, and those people left inadvertently hilarious messages under this announcement.

I’m not gonna do screencaps for all of these, nor am I going to identify everyone by their full name, because it’s been seven whole days since someone last threatened to sue us and I’d like to see if we can make it as far as ten days. But obviously it would be very easy for you to just go to the aforementioned Facebook page and see who I’m talking about.

And on that note, here are some of my favorite comments…

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“Embrace the Sun” is my favorite song on the new (most recent I guess) Firewind album, Days of Defiance. It is that rarest of animals: a power metal song I love. “You can’t change the world, but you can change yourself” — that should be on a t-shirt or a bumper sticker or something. That shit is DEEP, man. I’m not being facetious, either — that is one of my favorite lyrics of 2010.

So I’m not going to say anything about shots of dudes staring out pensively at I’m not sure what, or the champagne, or Gus G. sitting on… is it rooftop? Is that a rooftop he’s sitting on?

Whatever. Awesome song. Days of Defiance is out now on Century. You should get it.

-AR

[via Metal Injection]

An anonymous reader sent me the below video, and I didn’t look at the title before I clicked the link. So my first thought was that the band in the clip was Sonic Syndicate. (My second thought was, “Edsel Dope is in Sonic Syndicate now?”) This band is not Sonic Syndicate, though — they’re called Amaranthe, because there’s nothing more metal than purple flowers. But can you blame me for my mistake? Like Sonic Syndicate, Amaranthe play terrible re-swede that makes me wish the members of In Flames had never been born; like Sonic Syndicate, Amaranthe clearly have more interest in fashion than originality; and like Sonic Syndicate’s last horrendous video, this was directed with sleek Hasbro movie visuals by Patric Ullaeus.

Anyways, this is something of a super group. Drummer Morten Løwe used to be in The Arcane Order, and plays on the new Mercenary album, which is not as bad as I thought it would it be but isn’t very memorable, either; clean vocalist Jake E. Lundberg (the Dope-y looking one) was in Dream Evil (although after Gus G. left the band — in other words, after I stopped paying attention to Dream Evil); and female vocalist Celine Dion, of course, previously appeared in the movie Titanic, where she starred as the iceberg that sinks the ship. I don’t know why I needed to tell you that these people have done other things during their careers, I just thought I should point it out before some smart-ass in the comments section did.

-AR

FEATURING MEMBERS OF FIREWIND, THROUGH THE EYES OF THE DEAD, TESSERACT, BISON B.C., BONDED BY BLOOD, HAARP, THE UNGUIDED, AND ANNEX THEORY

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 second 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.)

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So Yahoo! has Ozzy Osbourne’s personal list of the Top Ten Metal Albums of 2010, and it may or may not surprise you to learn that it’s a really, really interesting mix of terrible and brain dead. (By the way, if you don’t like MetalSucks articles where I can really, really, really angry about something of less than no importance, then you should stop reading now.)

Okay so check out his list, and then I’ll tell you my thoughts. And before we begin, I should point out that it’s theoretically possible Ozzy didn’t actually choose these release, but, rather, than one of his handlers did it for him. But since it’s being labeled as “Ozzy’s list,” I am going to treat it as though it were written by Ozzy.

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This past Saturday was the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert-led joint “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in Washington, D.C. And the good news is, metal got its props: While Cat Stevens — who now goes by the name Yusuf Islam — was performing “Peace Train,” Colbert marched out with Ozzy Osbourne and Gus G. and interrupted the performance. I don’t why the other musicians currently in Ozzy’s band, bassist Blasko and drummer Tommy Clufetos, weren’t invited, but The Roots ended up performing the missing members’ duties, which is pretty cool…

…except that Ozzy sounds, uh, not so hot. And I actually feel guilty for criticizing his performance; I’m glad metal got represented at all at the rally, and I can certainly get behind Ozzy putting his star wattage behind the cause.

But holy CRAP does he sound really, really bad. Worse than usual, I think.

Go to 1:46 if you wanna see what I’m talking about. Approximately eleven seconds later, his voice cracks like he was me at my Bar Mitzvah. Ouch.

-AR

[via Metal Injection]

I know what you’re thinking: “Axl got in a room with Gus G.! He must have asked him all about Ozzy and Scream, right?” Actually, no. When I interviewed Gus G. in August, it was, of course, impossible to forget that he was Ozzy’s guitar player — for one thing, he was in town to do Ozzfest, and for another, he was staying at one of the nicest hotels I’ve ever seen, in a suite bigger than the apartment I grew up in, and I had to fight with paparazzi just to get inside the hotel.

But as you know if you read this site regularly, while I’m thrilled that his gig with Ozzy has gotten him lots of extra attention, I’m not really that interested in Scream, and as I understand it, Gus didn’t really have anything to do with the writing of that album anyway.

So while the topic of Ozzy naturally came up during the course of our conversation, what I really wanted to discuss was Days of Defiance, Firewind‘s absolutely epic new — and arguably best — album yet. And, of course, Gus was only too-happy to oblige me.

After the jump, read what Gus had to say about the creation of Days of Defiance, how he writes his guitar solos, Firewind’s lyrical content, dealing with all the extra attention he’s gotten since joining the Team Ozzy, and more.

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…when I interviewed Gus G. a couple of weeks ago, he told me that the band was working on putting together a North American headlining tour for the fall. Well, the good news is, that tour is now booked; the bad news is, it’s only four dates. I’m completely speculating, but I imagine this has to do more with Gus’ ongoing commitments to Ozzy than it does anything else. Hopefully he’ll get another reality show or something soon and Firewind can tour more.

But if you’re in a position to go one of these gigs, you should. The band hasn’t played here since they toured with Arch Enemy (I think it was Arch Enemy… feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) in 2008, and these sets will obviously be way longer than those ones were, seeing as the band is headlining.

And – BONUS! The Absence and Powerglove will be doing support. I don’t think it’s any secret that we love The Absence — in fact, we’re streaming their new album right here! — and I like that there’s some real diversity on this bill. I think these shows are gonna be a lot of gun.

Here are the four dates, via Firewind’s MySpace page:

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I’m not, generally speaking, a huge power metal fan, but I love Firewind, and I love their new album, Days of Defiance. Does that mean that Firewind are a very, very good power metal band, and my tastes in the subgenre are highly discerning, or does that mean that Firewind are a very, very bad power metal band, and they appeal to me because they’re so unlike most of their peers?

I don’t know and I don’t care. You could call this “poopy metal” and I’d still listen to it. The music kicks all kinds of ass, Gus G. is the man, and for all the silliness and melodrama usually associated with power metal, it features the single most pithy lyric I’ve heard so far this year, in the song “Embrace the Sun”: “You can’t change the world, but you can change yourself.” Maybe that sentiment seems cheesy, but when I first heard it, I was like, “Whoa. That is some mind-blowing shit. And if we all changed ourselves, we’d change the world, man!!!” And I wasn’t even high when I heard it!

Here’s the newly released cover art for Days of Defiance, which comes out October 26 on Century. It’s pretty much exactly the cover art you’d expect for a new release from this band, but that doesn’t make the music it contains any less rockin’.

And I’ll have an interview with Gus G. soon.

-AR

I interviewed Gus G. this past Friday. He’s such an incredibly nice and talented dude, and the new Firewind album, Days of Defiance, is so friggin’ rockin’, that mid-interview I started to feel really, really guilty that I don’t like Mr. G’s Ozzy debut, Scream. Then again, it’s not really Gus’ fault that the album is perfectly serviceable but totally generic, since he didn’t write any of the material — take one listen to Days of Defiance, and you’ll know that if Gus G. had written the album, it would be 1,000% better.

So. Here’s the new video for Scream’s second single, the de rigeur power ballad, “Life Won’t Wait.” It’s indicative of all of Scream in that it’s a totally fine, and completely unspectacular, song. And, duh, my favorite part is the Gus G. guitar solo. But, really, I wanted to post it to make sure you know that Firewind’s Days of Defiance comes out October 26 on Century, and that the first single from that album, “World on Fire,” is available for download on iTunes right now. And it’s way better than this:

-AR

The nicest compliment anyone can seem to muster about Scream is that it’s Ozzy’s best album this millenium, which is like saying that the genocide in Rwanda wasn’t the worst human rights atrocity of the twentieth century, because only a million people were massacred. Really, the best thing to come of this album is that it’s bringing Gus G. to the attention of a lot of people who might otherwise never know him. Gus is on the cover of Guitar World now, and that makes me really, really happy.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that the mediocrity of Scream will turn people off to the point where they don’t check out Firewind, or one of the other eight-hundred bands with whom Gus has played. I sincerely hope that doesn’t happen. And it wouldn’t have happened, I think, if Gus has been able to contribute to the writing of Scream. And he tells Metal Insider that, knock on wood, if there’s another Ozzy album and he’s the guitar player to be on it, Ozzy wants him — and the other members of the band — to contribute more:

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Since resident film guru and music video dissector Axl Rosenberg is still out of the office, lemme try and break down the new Ozzy video for “Scream” Axl-style.

I’m pretty sure Axl would be excited that this is an actual music video made with a high budget as opposed to the usual band-in-a-warehouse type deal, but I’m also pretty sure that he’d think the animation and CG effects are really cheesy. He’d then compare the animated characters in the video to specific characters from really famous movies I’ve never heard of or seen, and he’d get pretty pissed about it in that snarky, cynical way that only Axl can. There’s no way he’d let such a good opportunity to rag on Ozzy’s age pass by, so I’m gonna go out on a limb and say he’d definitely call attention to the fact that Ozzy looks like he’s about to be blown over by all the wind in that final scene. And I’d hope that he’d note how Gus G. barely gets any face time in this video, and parts of his [awesome] guitar solo are obscured by fucking explosion sounds for chrissakes. And he’d probably throw in some reference to the Ozzy / Zakk Wylde / Gus G. fracas for good measure.

There. How’d I do, Axl?

-VN

I tried to land an interview with Slash when his solo album came out, but, alas, it was not to be. (Must be ’cause of all the nice things I’ve said about him over the past couple of years.) But one of the things I wanted to ask him about were how involved, or uninvolved, he was with the lyrics on the album. Each song is sung by a different celebrity singer who would be perfectly capable of writing his or her own lyrics, and the few times Slash has tried to lyrics, the results have been pretty disastrous. (Remember “Be the Ball,” the Slash’s Snakepit song about pinball? Yeah, no reason you would, but did I mention it’s about fucking pinball?) But the lyrics to at least one song in particular – the Ozzy-crooned “Crucify the Dead” – seemed so Slash-specific, I thought he might have had a hand in them.

See, “Crucify the Dead” features such lyrics as “Your ego cursed you till you bled,” “Decisions past leave you alone,” “Someday you look back and you wonder why you let it all slip away,” and a reference to – CAPTAIN OBVIOUS ALERT! – “A loaded gun jammed by a rose.” So, y’know. It seemed pretty clear that the song was aimed at one of Slash’s former collaborators. And I don’t mean Rod Jackson.

Well, Ozzy has answered my question – kind of – in a recent interview with VH1 Radio:

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We’ve been wondering for a long time if Gus G. was actually gonna get to write anything for Ozzy Osbourne’s new offering, Scream, or if he was basically just a session player; we knew he came in fairly late in the process since Zakk Wylde had already done a bunch of recording for the album, but we hoped against hope that Gus would actually get to do something a little more substantial. The problem with the last however many Ozzy albums has been lackluster songwriting, and that hasn’t really been a problem for Firewind; it seemed like Gus could be just the shot of adrenaline Ozzy needed to pull a Megadeth and remind us all why we ever loved him so much in the first place.

But now Blabbermouth is exclusively hosting an EPK (that’s “electronic press kit,” in case ya don’t know) for Scream, and it contains the following quote regarding the song “Soul Sucker” from producer Kevin Churko:

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So unless you managed to stay away from a computer this entire weekend – and good for you if you did – you’ve probably already seen the line-up for Ozzfest 2010, which was unveiled this past Friday evening. While our source was right that this year’s incarnation of the tour would be scaled back – it’s only hitting six cities over the course of about a week and half – a whole lot of the bands we’d heard would be playing the fest aren’t. In fact, if you can’t quite consider it a stellar line-up, that’s probably only because so many great bands were already swept up by other big package tours; maybe I’m being too nice because a large chunk of the second stage consists of bands I really like or at least respect, my feeling is that if this line-up doesn’t send anyone running for tickets, well, it’s not exactly something to be scoffed at, either. My own thoughts on all the bands and artists after the jump… plus dates, natch.

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UPDATE: Metal Insider is now streaming the full song. It sounds like a Zakk Wylde-era song with fewer guitar squeals. Give it a listen here.

So for weeks the Ozzy camp has been making a big deal out of the fact that the Ozman’s new single, “Let Me Hear You Scream,” was going to debut on an episode of one of the various CSI programs; the show aired last night, aaaannnndddd… THE FUCKING SONG PLAYED DURING A PRISON RIOT SCENE, making it impossible to give a proper listen. In other words, if you tuned in and you’re not a CSI fan, you pretty much got screwed.

I don’t know why I’m surprised; heaven forbid that Ozzy do anything even remotely cool in the 21st century, right? And yet, I can’t help but be angry. Fuck, I didn’t even watch the show live last night (I knew it would surface on the net within hours) and I’m pissed. Let us hear the song, or don’t promote the episode as a chance to hear the song. It’s not complicated. Just don’t be a corporate dill hole for ten seconds. Jesus.

Anyway, here’s the clip from the show in which Gus G.’s guitar player was deemed less important than one of the dudes from L O S T shouting some nonsense. Watch it before Les Moonves’ lawyers yank it down. The consolation prize is that what I can hear isn’t all that impressive.

And hopefully the actual song will surface soon enough.

Scream, Ozzy’s latest, will be out June 15 on Epic.

-AR