MetalSucks

Shame on me for having never heard of Australia’s Portal before. I just got their new album, Swarth (which apparently means “land covered with grassy turf”… metal teaches me a new word again!), last week, and it’s blowing my mind. I don’t even know how to describe it; it’s death metal, I guess, but it’s really pushing the limits of what “music” as a concept is. It almost reminds me of Hate Eternal, but that’s not really fair to Portal or Erik Rutan. They are just a really, really unique monster.

And I do mean “monster.” Like I said, this is really pushing the boundaries between music and noise. It’s just fucking evil, man. I’ll try to write a review one of these days, but in the meantime, I implore you to check out Portal on MySpace and buy Swarth for yourself – it just came out this week on Profound Lore.

And, oh yeah, apparently they wear costumes. Here they are doing the song “Glumurphonel” from their 2003 debut, Seepia.

For the time being it seems that Portal live shows are restricted to their native land, but they have been added to the already amazing Maryland Deathfest 2010 line-up, which will also include Converge, Eyehategod, Melechesh, Obituary, and grind gods Gridlink.

-AR

Why oh why are By Any Means Necessary still unsigned? Their three-song demo/EP or whatever rocked. I know they’re young, but so are half the bands out there right now. And most of them aren’t as good as BAMN (there’s an awesome abbreviation if ever there was one).

Hopefully this news will lead to good things, though: the band will be playing support for Divine Heresy and Gigan (featuring former members of Hate Eternal) on six tour dates next month. I’ve still never seen this band live, but if their shows are as good as their songs, I’d wager it’ll be a lot of fun – way more fun that, say, Divine Heresy.

By Any Means Necessary recently completed tracking for their new EP and are currently mixing those songs. Hopefully we’ll more updates on that soon; in the meantime, get tour dates after the jump, and please check these guys out if you can.

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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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All Shall Perish just released a montage of various live footage taken from their recent MetalSucks co-sponsored tour with Job For a Cowboy, Hate Eternal (until they dropped off), Animosity and Annotations of An Autopsy. Check out JFAC’s Jonny Davy’s exclusive MetalSucks tour blogs, then watch the live All Shall Perish br00tality unfold below.

-VN

Here’s some crappy quality fan-filmed footage of Job for a Cowboy performing a new song, “Constitutional Masturbation,” during their recent, MetalSucks co-sponsored trek with All Shall Perish, Animosity and Annotations of an Autopsy (and, all too briefly, Hate Eternal). It’s difficult to hear much with the poor audio quality, but that main riff does sound potentially crushing. In any case, there’ll be a new JFAC album within the next twelve months, so we’ll know soon enough.

Read JFAC front man Jonny Davy’s hilarious, MetalSucks-exclusive tour blogs here and here.

-AR

[via Blabbermouth]

We recently asked Job for a Cowboy vocalist Jonny Davy to write a tour blog for the band’s MetalSucks co-sponsored headlining trek with Hate Eternal, All Shall Perish, Animosity and Annotations of an Autopsy. Davy’s second entry is below; in case ya missed it, you can read the first edition here. Enjoy!

Theres that cute little hillbilly everyone loves.

I’m sorry that all my stories have to deal with being drunk. Our current sound guy is a little hillbilly. He obsessively talks about guns, hunting and fishing. He sleeps in the middle of the woods down south. Litterally. He jumps on a boat, smokes pot and goes fishing for 10 hours a day every weekend. He sits at home and guts the animals he’s hunt and shot down while drinking moonshine. Literrally. He introduced us to Wild Turkey 101. A bourbon with one hell of a powerful kick as it washes down your throat. Its already made Jack Daniels, Jameson and Jim Bean taste like mere diet soda. Well, about a week ago we were hopped up on the damned thing. Burping up flavors Turkey whiskey and stumbling around in our hotel room. Brent was drunk, he ended up attempting to make coffee through the toaster, which inevidably made the toaster short circuit and break. Charn, our drummer decided to throw a flower pot down the hallway and break the TV remote. Which is already annoying. Then, Bobby attempted to call for some late night Dominos pizza. They were closed, he broke the phone in anger. Our tour manager then spent the entire morning trying to wake us up by calling the hotel phone… which was obviously broken.

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We recently asked Job for a Cowboy vocalist Jonny Davy to write a tour blog for the band’s MetalSucks co-sponsored headlining trek with Hate Eternal, All Shall Perish, Animosity and Annotations of an Autopsy. Davy’s short but giggle-inducing blog is below. Enjoy!

ITS RAINING TEARS!

Well, another tour… Again, in the freezing cold. So far we’ve been lucky, no snow. No worries of “VAN FLIP/NO CARE/FIRST POST.” Well, Rutan’s kidney is fucked up, forcing Hate Eternal to drop off of our current tour. My only comment for Rutan is this: “Get better, fix you kidney and party on Wayne.”

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Deathcore’s meteoric fall from subgenre of a subgenre to a word on par with “pedophile” in metal is almost comic in nature. Though this is by no means its first year of existence, it is its first year of prominence. While the violent shift in attitude could be attributed to the “everything popular sucks” mindset, it can also be contributed to the fact that, with such prominence, deathcore bands are already starting to get lazy. But either way, at a recent stop in Providence, RI, the Metal Sucks co-sponsored Job for a Cowboy/All Shall Perish/Animosity/Annotations of an Autopsy (sadly, no Hate Eternal on this stop, and my best wishes to Erik Rutan) tour, no band was willing to be tagged with the label, no matter how firmly they resided at the intersection of Death and ’Core. And despite the fact that deathcore may be old news in the metal blogosphere, there was no shortage of enthusiasm for it, reserved especially for the show’s headliners.

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By now you may have heard that Hate Eternal have been forced to drop off their slot on the MetalSucks co-sponsored trek with Job for a Cowboy, All Shall Perish, Animosity, and Anatomy of an Autopsy, because guitarist/vocalist/producer/all around main dude Erik Rutan is in the hospital.

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This past spring, the opportunity presented itself for me to do a phoner with Steve Austin, mastermind for Today is the Day. Since I a) think Today is the Day is brilliant and b) knew that Austin had recently started his own label, Supernova Records, I jumped at the chance. And when I called him, I thought I was gonna get the usual ten to fifteen minute chat full of the usual B.S.

Boy was I wrong. Not only did Austin stay on the phone with me for close to an hour, but he answered every question with a level bridge-burning honesty not usually found by even the most hardcore of the most hardcore. It should go without saying that Steve’s opinions are his own and not necessarily those of MetalSucks, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find the dude fascinating. After the jump, read his thoughts on pretty much any and every topic under the sun.

And, uh, oh yeah: this is easily the longest interview we’ve ever done. Fair warning.

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The MetalSucks posse and Decibel Magazine are psyched to present one of this fall’s sickest touring lineups; Job For a Cowboy, Hate Eternal, All Shall Perish, Animosity and Annotations of An Autopsy. Woah; even if you’re not a fan of every single band on the bill, that is one hell of a lineup and surely there’s at least two or three bands you can get down with. We’re also giving away one free pair of tickets to see the tour in each city! That’s 29 free pairs of tickets the fine folks at Metal Blade are offering up to you; at the price of free, how can you refuse?? Five lucky fans will also get a poster autographed by members of Job For a Cowboy. Click here to enter.

Check out this nifty widget as well, which features audio and video from every band on the bill. Listen to / watch it here, embed it on your MySpace page, Facebook page, blog, or just stare at it ’cause it looks purty. Your call. See you in the pit!

Our always reliable pals over at Metal Injection posted this delightful Job for a Cowboy viral video:

MetalSucks is co-sponsoring JFAC’s fall tour with Hate Eternal, All Shall Perish, Animosity and Annotations of an Autopsy. Get a complete list of tour dates after the jump.

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MetalSucks is jizz-in-our-pants excited to announce that we’re co-sponsoring this fall’s nationwide tour with Job for a Cowboy, Hate Eternal, All Shall Perish, Animosity, and Annotations of an Autopsy. Now, if any two of these bands were touring together, it would already be worth the price of admission and then some – but with all five bands, it’s THE can’t-miss extreme metal tour of the season.

Job for a Cowboy. All Shall Perish. Animosity. Annotations of an Autopsy. These bands are the future of death metal. And then there’s Erik Fucking Rutan’s Hate Fucking Eternal. The Elder Statesman. The Fucking Man Himself.

Get excited about this one, boys and girls. It’s gonna melt your face off.

Get a complete list of tour dates after the jump, and stay tuned to MetalSucks for more info as we get it…

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Congrats to MetalSucks reader “In all seriousness,” who wins copies of Shai’s Hulud’s recent Misanthropy Pure, Fate’s Vultures and Hatchet’s Awaiting Evil for coming up with the following winning caption to last week’s Funny Photo Caption Contest:

“Sarah Jessica Parker Bares All for Vanity Fair.”

Well said! This week we’re giving away another awesome three-pack from Metal Blade Records: Hate Eternal’s Fury & Flames, Soilent Green’s Inevitable Collapse in the Presence of Conviction, and another copy of Fate’s Vultures. All you have to do is come up with a funny caption for the below photo and post it in the comments. Get crackin’.

MetalSucks is thrilled to be able to debut an exclusive clip from Cannibal Corpse’s forthcoming DVD Centuries of Torment which comes out July 8th on Metal Blade Records. In this clip we get behind-the-boards insight from producer (and MetalSucks fave) Erik Rutan (ex-Morbid Angel, Hate Eternal), who produced the band’s 2006 record Kill.

Centuries of Torment drops July 8th; pre-order it here.

- The MS dudes

Because we don’t always agree on shit here at the MetalSucks Mansion, and because I didn’t get my say in Vince’s column, I’m gonna throw in my two cents about some albums that weren’t on Vince’s “Best of ‘08 So Far” list that I would have included:

• Genghis Tron – Board Up the House. Except for Nachtmystium’s new album, this is still the best thing I’ve heard so far this year. Read my review here.
• Made Out of Babies – Ruiner. Holy shit does this album rule. My review is coming up real soon, but everyone should either pre-order a copy or just be prepared to buy one when it drops on June 24.
• Jarboe/Justin K. Broadrick – J2. Like a less industrial Jesu. Gorgeous, aching, awesome. Read my review here.
• Hate Eternal - Fury & Flames. Erik Rutan makes discordance into an art… again. Easily his best work since the Morbid Angel days. Read my review here.
• Origin – Antithesis. The ten minute epic mindfuck of a title track alone means you need to either own this album or beat yourself in the face with a hammer. Read my review here.
• Meshuggah – Obzen. And on the 8th day, God created Meshuggah. And He saw that it was good. Read Kip’s review here.
• Virgin Black – Requiem: Fortissmo. Read My review here.

Believe it or not, I still haaven’t heard this fucking Harvey Milk album everyone is going on about. I think I’ll go do that now.

-AR

Look: after nearly 20 years of making brutal death metal, Deicide ain’t exactly trying to reinvent the wheel. So while “The Beginning of the End,” the opening track of their latest offering, Till Death Do Us Part, is kind of surprising (it’s a slow, moody instrumental, as foreboding as the title would suggest, that is unsettling and in no way beautiful, like the negative version of the intro to every American New Wave album this century), everything after is exactly what you’d expect from these fearsome Floridians. Chuck Klosterman once suggested that the reason the Sunshine State spawned so much awesome death metal is because constantly being surrounded by old people makes one think about death all the time; maybe all that ponderin’ of the great beyond also makes these dudes desperate to maintain their youth, and so they just keep making the same album they did in 1990 over and over again.

In any case, it’s a moot point, ’cause like AC/DC before them and Children of Bodom after, the fact that they’re usually pretty good slides them from the “boh-ring” column to the one labeled “dependable.”

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After I interviewed Deicide skinsman Steve Asheim a couple of weeks ago, I went back and listened to The Stench of Redemption for what must have been the first time in like a year. And you know what? The album still slays, and it just made me even more excited for the release of Deicide’s latest, ‘Till Death Do Us Part, which hits shelves April 28 in Europe and May 13 here in the States.

So now the band has made the title track avail as a free download on their MySpace page. And you know what? When Asheim told me that “A lot of people thought that Stench was too melodic and I think ‘Till Death has definitely tweaked that,” he wasn’t kidding. This track just relentlessly pummels, dude; Asheim’s drums are the aural equivalent of getting the shit kicked out of you by a drunk biker outside a bar you had no business being in in the first fuckin’ place. I’m saying it’s a good song.

It’s only April and it’s already turning out to be an awesome year for death metal; after new releases by Hate Eternal, Origin, and Arsis, ‘Till Death should be the next release on your “must own” list.

-AR

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It’s a cold winter night (technically morning) in January. Somewhere in a warehouse in the bowels of Brooklyn, Axl and Vince have infiltrated director David Brodsky’s set for the new Hate Eternal video, “Bringer of Storms,” in order to nab an interview with the death metal God known as Erik Rutan. Hate Eternal are having one hell of a day – after a personal loss and a vehicular mishap, they just barely made it to their gig in Manhattan that night to play a killer, if abbreviated, set, and now they’re doing this video shoot until six or seven a.m. before they have to squeeze back into their van and start the long haul to Baltimore (which is geographically closer to where they started their day than it is to where they’ve ended it!) for another show tonight.

Surely, the dudes in Hate Eternal would have every right to be in terrible moods, and trying to grab the dude for a ten minute interview in between set-ups should be cause enough for the monstrous demon Rutan to reign death down upon our intrepid reporters. But Rutan and company actually turn out to be a group of down-to-earth, soft-spoken, incredibly nice guys, and their fearless leader – he who was part of arguably the best line-up Morbid Angel ever had, he who has produced already legendary albums for the likes of Cannibal Corpse, Vital Remains, Goatwhore, Six Feet Under, Through the Eyes of the Dead, Demiricous, The Absence, and Pain Principle, he who has persevered with his labor of love, Hate Eternal, in spite of every seemingly insurmountable obstacle thrown in his path – is only all too happy to indulge these puny fanboys with their precious interview.

Above, check out the clip for “Bringer of Storms,” directed by David Brodsky. It comes off of Hate Eternal’s new album, Fury and Flames, which hits stores February 19 on Metal Blade.

After the jump, check out the complete transcript of Axl and Vince’s interview with the mighty Erik Rutan.

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I love “Where the Slime Lives,” because it actually sounds like slime.

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Don’t forget that Erik Rutan’s Hate Eternal have a new album, Fury and Flames, out February 19. We’ll have an interview with Rutan later this week…

-AR