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Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (not really at all) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

Inspired by the ongoing disaster that is Lou Reed & Metallica’s Lulu, this week we asked our writers:

BESIDES METALLICA AND LOU REED, WHAT IS THE WORST COLLABORATION BETWEEN A METAL BAND/ARTIST AND A NON-METAL BAND/ARTIST? AND WHAT IS THE WORST ONE YOU COULD POSSIBLY IMAGINE IN YOUR WILDEST NIGHTMARES?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump!

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David Coverdale: Powerhouse rock singer. Demanding band leader. Cocksman. These are the facts once, now, and always, each evident immediately in his band Whitesnake’s shocking 11th record, Forevermore. But there is more to Coverdale. He lives in a really tall house in Lake Tahoe that, at the time of our chat, was partially snowbound. He is aggressively friendly. He swears magnificently. Oh, and the dude has paired with Blackmore, Sykes, Vandenberg, Vai, and Page. That’s an Ozzy-sized resume and David Lee Roth-league results. So you get that it’s both fun and stressful to gain entry into CoverdaleLand for a few minutes. Still, it was all laughs as Coverdale entertained my inquiries into the muscular songwriting of Forevermore, the bombast of Slip of the Tongue (as captured live in this summer’s Live At Donington 1990 DVD-CD set), his voice health, and the “snakes” of Whitesnake axemen.

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Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (sometimes) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

This week’s query was suggested by a reader identifying himself simply as “Andy” –

WHICH MODEL OF GUITAR IS THE MOST METAL?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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As one of the chief riff providers for swaggercore titans Every Time I Die, Andy Williams takes pride in making the discordant into catchy. For a perfect example of this, look no further than the band’s latest (MetalSucks-approved) album, New Junk Aesthetic. Distilling the band’s decade-plus essence into a tight half hour, it’s a satisfying mix of thunderous heaviness and easily the most appealing material the band have put to tape. But while he’s often overshadowed by vocalist Keith Buckley’s relentless wiseassery, it’s his and Jordan Buckley’s Skynard-by-way-of-Dillinger-Escape-Plan guitar work that make the band stand out and ultimately worthwhile.

A self-described “chatty Cathy,” Andy Williams was remarkably frank and refreshingly earnest in a recent interview with MetalSucks on the eve of the release of New Junk Aesthetic. Among other things, he discussed why he can listen to the new album and none of the band’s other material, his thoughts on the new Converge record, the changing landscape of the scene he came up in, and life over at ETID’s new label, Epitaph.

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I understand that Twiggy Ramirez re-joined Marilyn Manson because the money’s right, but I guess that Manson has to get something out of it, too – and it would appear that the payoff for him is some sense of nostalgia for a time when he was much, much more famous. In an interview with Rolling Stone last Friday, he revealed:

“The turning point for me was when I went to see Led Zeppelin’s reunion show, and I saw Jimmy Page and Robert Plant look at each other for a moment, and they probably said, ‘Holy shit, we wrote ‘Stairway To Heaven.’ I wanted that look again… I want to look at Twiggy and go ‘Holy shit, we wrote ‘The Beautiful People.’”

When giving interviews, I think it’s a good rule of thumb to never, ever, under any circumstances, mention Led Zeppelin and your own band in the same breath, unless maybe you are/were a member of, say, The Beatles or The Stones or some shit. ‘Cause “The Beautiful People” was a big big hit in its day and I like it and all, but “Stairway,” it ain’t.

In response to Manson’s statement, ousted Manson member Tim Skold revealed that he would be re-uniting with his old band, Shotgun Messiah, because he was inspired by “that look that Steve ‘Sex’ Summers gets when he looks over at Kristy ‘Krash’ Majors during a Pretty Boy Floyd show.”

-AR

This is an unbelievable personnel roster:

Jeff Beck

Jimmy Page

John Paul Jones

Keith Moon

(and some dude named Nicky Hopkins on piano, who recently became my new hero)

Sure, the tune itself is sparse, but any recording by a group like this deserves a few listens, if even simply to imagine the magnitude of the awesome talents combined. I just wish they’d recorded a whole album, or at least one extended jam. Oh well.

-KW

JEFF BECK – “Beck’s Bolero”, from Truth (1968)