MetalSucks

According to Lambgoat (who MS tipster Kye says “are about as reliable as my dog when it comes to news”), trouble is a brewin’ in the He Is Legend camp. Says Lambgoat:

Word on the street is that Wilmington, North Carolina group He Is Legend has disbanded. This could very well be the reason that singer Schuylar Croom was available to fill in for Dallas Taylor on the current Maylene and the Sons of Disaster tour. In any case, this news is unconfirmed, so don’t call your mom just yet.

He Is Legend supported their latest album It Hates You (which our own Anso DF awarded a four-out-of-five horns rating) with just one tour, and there’s nothing currently listed for the future on their MySpace page. At this point any reports of the band’s break up are purely rumors, but there is certainly cause for speculation. We encourage any MetalSucks readers with insider knowledge on the situation to email us at news [at] metalsucks [dot] net.

-VN

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

With the help of a time machine, I want to travel back to 2007 when I saw He Is Legend play live in support of their troubled sophomore album Suck Out The Poison. Such a record at first evaded my comprehension, as should an intermittently great melody record that manages to do absolutely nothing else right. After the slickly produced, flawlessly arranged, and powerfully executed debut I Am Hollywood, Suck was more easily characterized by its failures, from free-hand, impactless production by a bewildered Steve Evetts (E. Town Concrete, Symphony X) to singer Schuyler Croom’s most aggravating collection of overwrought imagery and affected rasping. Gone was the crisp, shimmery He Is Legend sound, and in its place lay this coil of turds, this raped corpse of I Am Hollywood, an avenging of its immediacy and neatness with corny Southern rockisms, petulant croaking, and cardboard dynamics.

Anyway, on that groggy summer evening, He Is Legend took the stage, revealing the visual counterpart to their sonic transformation; they now resembled a Black Crowes cover band – no longer emo-haircut types – and, from the stage, my facial expressions during the first song must have been hilarious: blank non-recognition (huh yet another opener?) to perplexity (wait, this sounds familiar) to shock (oh that’s them wtf?). And if Suck’s uniform is a ratty denim jacket and Pabst Blue Ribbon tee, then a sport jacket and $260 jeans adorn It Hates You, their third album. It’s both the band’s heaviest and most ethereal record, a progressive and aggressive album that (thank balls) repeats none of Suck’s mistakes, save for Croom’s penchant for the melodramatic. Still, his successes are numerous and triumphant, and, like I Am Hollywood, Hates isn’t ashamed of its populist tendencies, its confident and careful melodies and propulsive rhythms.

Click to read more…

Voivod and He Is Legend both released new songs this week on their MySpace pages. There is no common theme here other than that I dig the new stuff from both bands and that they’re both worthy of ya’ll’s attention. And since it’s Friday, the MetalSucks Monkeys are cranky and aren’t coming up with any clever headlines or puns.

The new Voivod sounds pretty much like Voivod; it’s the last album that will feature contributions from the late guitarist Piggy, and the band claims it’ll be their last effort ever. The new He Is Legend is easily their best and most focused work yet… I’ve listened to this song at least 5 times already this week.

Voivod releases Infini on June 23rd via Relapse Records (pre-order here) and He Is Legend drops It Hates You July 21st on Tragic Hero (pre-order here).

-VN

After the antics of the first day of the festival, I felt more than ready to get into day two with a healthy dose of music from the beginning. Unfortunately, that was not to be so for me, as at the time I thought I would be continuing on after SXSW into further ridonkulousness, all the way to a family vacation during Spring Break in Mexico….and today was the day that my renewed passport was meant to be FedExed to the flophouse where Vince and I were crashing.

When I had returned to said flophouse the night prior and to my surprise found an open couch in the living room right by the front door (where I was told FedEx homeboy would appear bright and early), I figured it prolly made the most sense to sleep right there on the ground floor as opposed to the stank upstairs sweat lodge where I would be sure to miss any sounds of door knocking.

Sadly, no FedEx arrived in the morning as promised — I was actually awoken by a phone call from Vince around noon wondering where the hell I had ended up last night. After a couple more hours my passport finally arrived, at which point I had to wait at least another hour for a cab to take me down to the action.

HOLY SHIT.

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When news of the new band Zero System surfaced — featuring two members of North Carolina’s Bloodjinn — I was naturally curious, as Bloodjinn’s This Machine Runs on Empty was one of my favorite records of 2007. So I went straight to the source, emailing their singer Joel Collins to get the scoop, and he agreed to answer some questions about the new band, the old one, and what its various members are up to on all fronts. The interview, after the jump.

Click to read more…

Before ya’ll go crying that Uncle Vince has gone Christian, you should know that I haven’t listened to the lyrics of the new He Is Legend demos on their MySpace page yet. But lyrics be damned (haha, get it?), the music of the new He Is Legend demos is surprisingly good. The North Carolina-based band seems to have moved away from anything resembling metalcore and moved in a more dynamic but still heavy direction, something way more interesting than their previous material (which I also thought was pretty good at the time, though certainly derivative of Killswitch Engage). Multiple layers of lush guitar layering, a varied vocal attack, and even dissonance give way to some pretty big choruses… and while metal purists are most certainly going to cry foul, they can go fuck themselves. This is good stuff.

The demos are presumably for a new record that will see the light of day sometime this year. The Vince Neilstein pick of the three song lot s “Everyone I Know Has Fangs.” Check it out. Pretty good.

Press folks at Solid State Records, feel free to quote me on that; “He Is Legend: Pretty good!”

-VN