For the third year in a row, MetalSucks asked you, our beloved readers, to tell us why you hate the holidays in exchange for some cool prizes — and boy oh boy, did you guys ever let your anti-holiday vitriol flow. There were some great responses, but, alas, there can be only one winner — and that winner is Tyler The Scrooge, who posted the below outpouring of holiday hatred:

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Just ’cause we’re Jews doesn’t mean we can’t get a lil’ Xmas spirit in the MetalSucks Mansion! That’s why, for the third year in a row, we’re launching celebrating Jesus’ birthday in style, with our Antichrist Christmas contest. And this year, our pals at Relapse Records are hooking up the winner up in style with an awesome prize pack that includes the following CDs:

• Brutal Truth, End Time
• Zombi, Escape Velocity
• Indian, Guiltless
• Inevitable End, The Oculus
• Black Tusk, Set The Dial

Friggin’ sweet, right? Santa is jealous.

All you have to do to win is tell us why you hate the holidays. You can leave your answer in the comments section below, and make sure you register with a real e-mail address, since the winner will be contacted by e-mail.

Unfortunately, only readers who live in the U.S. are eligible. Because while Santa might have nine magic reindeer, all we have is the USPS.

All entries are due by New Year’s Day. We’ll announce the winners the first week of January 2012.

Good luck, and HO HO HO! MERRY ANTICHRIST CHRISTMAS!!!

-Axl & Vince

This week sees new releases by Believer, Between the Buried and Me, Indian, Last Chance to Reason, Pentagram, Red Fang, Young Widows and more. MS new release expert Vic Vaughn takes a looksee at each after the jump!

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[UPDATE: The entire album is streaming at Stereogum! Enjoy! -Ed.]

A friend recently described a band-to-remain-nameless to me thusly: “Relapsian-style beardo metal.” I instantly knew what he meant.

Indian, however, signed to Relapse as they may be, do not fit that description. More like “gnarly, filthy, hardcore-infused, proggy post-doom metal.” That’s a mouthful, but it’s the best I can do to describe Indian’s aardvark baby impaling brand of heavy. My description matters not, though, ’cause you can easily find out for yourself by streaming the new Indian track “Guilty” over at The Obelisk and “The End of Truth” right here on MetalSucks.

Both tracks come from the album Guiltless, out April 12th and available for pre-order here. Do it for the sake of those poor aardvark babies on the impaling block.

-VN

Photo credit: Anastasios Ketsios

I like doing MetalSucks, in part, because I really do learn something new each and every week. You know what I learned this week, for example?

FUCK VAMPIRES.

Here are some other things we learned this week:

• The dudes in Lazarus A.D. like MetalSucks.
• Swamp Thing and Indian have awesome new music coming out.
• The Human Abstract’s A.J. Minette and Travis Richter know a lot about music theory, Mr. Big’s Eric Martin knows a lot about Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and Vicious Rumors’ Geoff Thorpe knows a lot about line-up changes.
• The new Rotten Sound album is choice.
• Earache Records is a good label.
• Kittie are bad at making music videos.
• TesseracT are tardy to the djent party.
• Joey Belladonna still can’t sing.
• Rites of Darkness III is gonna be a great festival for bands no one has ever heard of.
• Losing someone you admire still sucks.

I’ll be flying solo for much of next week as Vince and Kip head down to Austin for SXSW and I stay behind to ensure you are as irritated as possible. Won’t you come back and learn some more with me?

-AR

When I think of what I want heavy music to sound like, Indian are pretty much it. Don’t let the kinda trippy (but awesome) album art fool you; this ain’t no boring psychedelic droney shit with recycled Mastodon riffs. “The End of Truth,” from Indian’s new album Guiltless (April 12, Relapse), is everything modern heavy music should be; creative, challenging, hooky in its own unique way (despite constant dissonance), and it’s overwhelmingly, monolithically crushing. Better yet, it does all of this at the [somewhat] relaxed pace of doom; it’s like Morbid Angel went and smoked an ounce of weed and came back just… a little… slower.

Have a listen to the aardvark baby impalingness of “The End of Truth” below. Pre-order Guiltless here.

[this streaming promotion has ended]

FEATURING MEMBERS OF GOD FORBID, AT THE GATES, DISFEAR, MACHINE HEAD, BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME, THE OCEAN, JUCIFER, THE BINARY CODE, HULL, DYSRHYTHMIA, INDIAN, AND DARKEST ERA

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 sixth 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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Earlier this week I had a dream that I was working with Atreyu. I don’t know in what capacity I could possibly find myself “working with” Atreyu, since I’m not a manager, nor a publicist, nor a label rep, and they’re about as likely to end up doing a guest column here as I am to give the new In This Moment album a perfect 5-horn review, but, hey, the subconscious works in mysterious ways. Why did I have Atreyu on the brain? Was my mind trying to tell me “The glass is half-full?” Do I have  a hankering to re-watch The Neverending Story? Did I just ingest too many different substances that night? I’ll have to bring it up in therapy next week.

Here’s other shit that happened this week, some of which, believe it or not, is even more terrifying than the thought of working with Atreyu:

• Freddy Madball is counting down his favorite hard and heavy non-hardcore bands of all time, TesseracT’s Acle walked us through the history of djent, The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley spoke to Converge’s Kurt Ballou about Taco Riffs, The Red Chord’s Greg Weeks made some suggestions for losing NFL teams, Intronaut’s Sacha Dunable contemplated the ways in which technology has changed touring, Daath’s Eyal Levi wondered, “Is this it?”, and a wide array of metal stars previewed the just-begun NHL season.
• We spoke to Kirk Windstein from Crowbar/Down/Kingdom of Sorrow, Sean Z. from Daath, Daddy X and Dirtball from Kottonmouth Kings, and Yoshiki Hayashi from X Japan.
• We checked out the latest releases from Abysse and Deafheaven.
• We contemplated trancecore.
• As the headline says, we heard the worst thing ever.
• We reviewed the history of terrible Limp Bizkit cover songs.
• We had fun with misheard song lyrics.
• We bemoaned the signing of another re-thrash band.
• We applauded Slayer fans’ desire to help the physically disabled.
• We had yet another laugh at Winds of Plague’s expense.

We have a special surprise for you next week. I can’t promise you’re going to like it, but I can promise you’re going to have a strong reaction to it. See ya then.

-AR

So right now you’re probably thinking 1) “Hey, assholes, the NHL season actually started last night so this can’t really be a ‘preview’ in the traditional sense of the word,” and 2) “Hey, assholes, at least one of these artists isn’t actually signed to Relapse Records.” And, yes, we know we’re a little late, but this is metal, so who the fuck is ever on time? And, yes, we know that at least one of these artists isn’t actually signed to Relapse Records, but most of them are, and the fine people at Relapse really did all the work in putting this together, so ppppfffffttttt.

So. After the jump, you can find previews of how the freshly-begun NHL season is looking for the favorite teams of members of 3 Inches of Blood, -(16)-, Buried Inside, Cephalic Carnage, Cretin, Dekapitator, Exhumed, Fuck the Facts, Gravehill, Hero Destroyed, Indian, Misery Index, Mortuous, Repulsion, and Toxic Holocaust. Enjoy!!!

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