Last month,  A389 Recordings celebrated their eighth anniversary by inviting a ton of awesome bands — including Eyehategod, Integrity, and Pulling Teeth, playing THEIR LAST SHOW EVER — to come destroy the Sonar in Baltimore. And if that sounds like a blast and you’re suddenly very depressed that you couldn’t be there, well, we have the next best thing for ya — killer pics of the show, courtesy of MetalSucks’ own Alyssa Lorenzon.

After the jump, check out the latest round of Alyssa’s amazing photos — including shots from Pulling Teeth’s final performance ever!!!

Click to read more…

Newt may seemingly have Mitt on the ropes right now, but that’s no reason to hold up your Pit Romney coverage! Here’s the latest update on the hardcore festival season…

After a 2011 announcement that didn’t exactly thrill me, United Blood seems to have rebounded for 2012, if this initial lineup is any indication. Big names like Agnostic Front and Ringworm stand out, as do pleasant surprises like New Lows and Power Trip. I count five bands that were part of the 2011 initial lineup announcement: Backtrack, Bitter End, Fire and Ice, Naysayer, and Stick Together. The rest of the list is rather robust as well: Beware, Break Away, Dead End Path, Free Spirit, Harms Way, Lockdown,Outcrowd, Soul Search, Suburban Scum, Take Offense, Tough Luck, United Youth, Wisdom in Chains, and Xibalba. Weekend passes are on sale here and here, and with March 30-31 as the dates, you probably want to snag those tickets sooner rather than later.

Click to read more…

And now, another installment of the hardcore festival news round-up known as Pit Romney!

Over the weekend, the folks behind Seattle’s Rain Fest made their initial line-up announcement, being the first of the Spring/Summer season’s crop to do so. In addition to performances from 2011 fest alums Losing Skin, Oblivion, Rotting Out, Wisdom In Chains, Wreck, and Xibalba, 2012′s iteration will also boast sets from Backtrack, Clarity, CodeXRed, Cold World, Dead End Path, Earth Control, Expire, FocusedXMinds, Incendiary, Soul Search, Strain, Trapped Under Ice, and Twitching Tongues. So far a solid lineup, though noticeably missing legacy acts or headliners. (Last year’s fest featured 7 Seconds, for example.) Another round of acts will be revealed February 15, at which time the 3-day passes for this May 25-27 event will go on sale.

Click to read more…

INTRO BUST

Everybody knows that Hatebreed is by far the most popular hardcore band in the history of the planet, but not everybody knows that they are beyond a doubt the best hardcore band of all time. I can feel the butthurt starting already, but lettuce be srs, brahs: no other hardcore band has consistently dropped album after album of brutal mosh jams. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a step through history and prove it! In more-or-less chronological order, I will go through the bands who some might say hold the title of “best hardcore band of all times” and illustrate why Hatebreed is #1.

Go!

Click to read more…

Rot In Hell
As Pearls Before Swine
Label – Deathwish Inc.
Release date – February 1, 2011

Thanks to artists like Integrity and Ringworm, Cleveland has a hardcore legacy that spans the globe. Indeed, Rot In Hell manage to follow that tradition an entire ocean away. Still, you’d never guess the Innsmouth, UK group’s geographic origins given their ferocious devotion to the downright devastating metallic Holy Terror sound. Their upcoming full-length As Pearls Before Swine, due out in February on Converge frontman J. Bannon’s Deathwish Inc. imprint, will make that crystal fucking clear. Two of its tracks are currently streaming at the Deathwish site. “Traitor’s Gate” is virulent, furious Clevo-core, while the blistering pit beast “Coyotenia” benefits from some beauteous metallic soloing amidst the sonic tsunami.

Given their recent Niu 12″ (recorded live in concert off the soundboard) for A389 Records, it’s only fitting that Rot In Hell are part of the label’s Seventh Annual Bash, a one-night event at Sonar in Baltimore headlined this year by Integrity, whose latest LP The Blackest Curse came out on Deathwish last year. Also on the January 22 bill are Drop Dead, Haymaker, and The Love Below, among others. The flyer is below, and you can buy tickets here.

Click to read more…

Word of who was gonna be on the bill for this year’s Scion Rock Fest, the totally free annual metal super-show, got out yesterday — hell, Wormrot even decided to just go ahead and confirm their presence at the festival. So in that regard, the official announcement of this year’s fest is a little anti-climactic.

Until you realize, holy shit — there really is gonna be a free festival with Morbid Angel, Obituary, Death Angel, Municipal Waste, Agalloch, Wormrot, Kvelertak, Atheist, Black Breath, Nails, Fuck the Facts, and tons more awesome bands. That is a fact about which one ought never to complain.

You can RSVP for the event here starting tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy the finalized poster:

-AR

Stephen Kasner, the extremely gifted artist who has done work for, amongst others, Justin Broadrick, Isis, Sunn O))), and integrity, has fallen on hard times, and needs your help. He’s apparently a very private guy, so the particulars of his medical condition are not being publicly disclosed, but he has released the following statement, which our friend Rich Hall brought to our attention via Invisible Oranges:

“Stephen Kasner has recently been diagnosed with some serious medical issues. Like many artists who lack the benefit of medical insurance, he pushed the situation aside until it became unavoidable. Emergency care has been initiated, but he is not out of the woods yet, and his continued care is extremely necessary – hence this call for aid to friends, admirers of his art, and comrades alike.”

Now here’s how you can help:

• You can make a PayPal donation to kasner@stephenkasner.com. If you take a screenshot of your donation and e-mail to Invisible Oranges’ Cosmo Lee at invisibleoranges at gmail dot com, Cosmo will enter you in a drawing to win a hardcover edition of Kasner’s book Works: 1993 — 2006, which you can also check out here.
• You can purchase some Kasner’s work — Lee says that Kasner “has two stores, a main one and one for his Blood Fountains musical project.”  So there are albums and album art and posters and silk screens and books… you get the idea.

Obviously this is a very worthy cause… we’re sending out good thoughts to Kasner, his friends, and his family, and strongly encourage you to donate today, if it’s just a few bucks.

-AR

Steven Blush’s American Hardcore: A Tribal History is one of the great rock n’ roll history books. And now it’s bigger. Originally published in 2001, the Feral House book nails the golden age of old-school hardcore, from the movement’s inception to the watershed year 1986. The book inspired a documentary, the 2006 film American Hardcore. The movie is a must-see that has inspired as much griping and controversy as the book.

Click to read more…

“BIG PANTS WASTE PRECIOUS FABRIC”

Step into my Nocturnus time machine and take a magical journey with me into a time long, long ago, an excursion into a world that scarcely resembles our own. In this world — we’ll call it Moshtopia — hardcore kids are known for wearing giant, baggy pants, not skinny jeans; there are people under 30 that know who Black Flag is; and metalcore bands worship Krishna, not Christ. This is not a fanciful episode of Jojo’s Bizarre Adeventure fan fiction, my friends, — it is the strange and wonderful world of mid-90s hardcore!

Click to read more…

Image from J. Randall’s blog. I’m assuming he made this; the car model is actually called the “Hako.”

Hey, remember yesterday, when we told you about that free EP that Magrudergrind are giving away in conjunction with Scion? Well Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s J. Randall apparently isn’t too happy about Magrudergrind associating themselves with the corporate entity — or any metal band associating themselves with the corporate entity.

In a recent blog, Randall criticizes Integrity for failing to live up to their name “w/ their recent Scion showcase at the ROXY,” and then takes Magrudergrind to task for working with Scion, too: “Heres a band that was to ‘punk’ to give Relapse a record but is down to float a fuckin’ ‘SCION’ logo on the front of their album cover? WTF?” Randall doesn’t even think Scion is getting anything out the deal:

Click to read more…

Unless you count current metalcore bands with a wiggerish slant (Emmure, Winds of Plague, Acacia Strain, etc.), the genre of nu-metal is all but dead. Once a nearly-unstoppable juggernaut of Kikwear pants, eyebrow piercings, and chinstrap beards, today it is but a dessicated husk, barely clinging to life. At its peak, nu-metal filled the airwaves coast-to-coast, but these days you’re most likely to hear it on a beat up boombox in the corner of a windowless basement printshop or third-rate auto parts store on the outskirts of town.

While the tastes of fickle music consumers may have changed, nu-metal has never sounded better. Many kids these days are too young to have experienced this unique genre the first time around, so I figured I would share some of nu-metal’s best artists that fly a little under the radar of current tastemakers — I’ll skip the big names that we all know (Korn, Kid Rock, Bizkit) and focus on the unsung heroes. And mark my words, you’ll see indie rockers ironically listening to hed(pe) within the next few years!

Click to read more…

I’ve never met Matt Fox in person, but reading his answers to this all-too-brief interview I recently conducted with him via e-mail, I really, really want to. Fox comes across as intelligent, funny, and, as his band’s name would suggest, a knowledgeable and opinionated sci-fi geek; in other words, he comes across as exactly the kind of dude I’d wanna be friends with.

Shai Hulud’s latest cock punch of metallicized hardcore, the excellently titled Misanthropy Pure, hits stores today via Metal Blade, and if you haven’t heard it yet, well, you need to: it’s a vicious, wholly unique entry into a genre that seems to be growing more tired by the day, an album that genuinely doesn’t sound like anything else on the market right now. Above, watch Shai Hulud’s David Brodsky-directed video for the title track; after the jump, check out Matt’s thoughts on the writing process, the metalcore genre, and, of course, all things sci-fi.

Click to read more…