MetalSucks

I just read this on the ol’ Bmouth:

SLAYER guitarist Kerry King, a close friend of the late “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott (PANTERA, DAMAGELAN), had the legendary axeman’s guitar in the studio during the recording process for SLAYER’s new album, “World Painted Blood” (although he didn’t use it it during the sessions), still with the same strings that were on it the last time Dimebag played it. “The one thing that made me look at my lead playing a little differently was when Dimebag passed away,” revealed King. “Not that I’m going to fill Dime’s shoes because nobody can do that, but I paid more attention to my leads while recording this album. I wanted to make them more memorable in memory of Dime.”

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This Dave Mustaine talking about Megadeth’s recent tour with Slayer. I’ve added some emphasis:

“I’ve gotta tell you, the tour with Slayer was really, really cool. I saw Kerry [King]. Kerry was out watching us last night on two separate occasions, and although I didn’t get a chance to see [Slayer], it was really good to know that the ice is melting. I sent them over a couple of peace offerings on the way from Edmonton to Calgary and those guys had a nice trip on the way down in the bus — we flew.“

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Speaking of tough metal dudes and adorable puppies: Kerry King reveals in the August issue of Decibel that he used to show Akitas:

“I used to have the best Akitas on the West Coast for a while,” [King] enthuses. “I had a female that couldn’t  be beat for a six-week period. She just won everything. But I had the hardest time getting those bred, man. The female, I just couldn’t get her knocked up. I had her go to the best male in the country on two different heat cycles and just couldn’t get her pregnant. They’d breed; it just wouldn’t take. We tried artificial and everything.”

I had no idea you could artificially inseminate a dog. Kind of makes you wonder why there’s no Slayer lyrics about that.

In other news, I officially feel better about owning a bichon.

-AR

Blabbermouth tells me that Dave Mustaine has released yet another of those bizarrely cryptic messages (No, I’m not going to make the obvious joke) he digs so much:

“Today is the 9th of April and I have agreed to doing something last night that I am sure a lot of people are going to be very excited about, and something that I had hoped would one day lead to another one of the potential feuds going away for good, if not for a long while.

“I can’t confirm the band or the dates yet, and I have to go get my youngster up for school. Rest assured, as soon as we are ready to announce it, you will be one of the first to know.”

Man, Mustaine loves his teases, don’t he?

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Is “Psychopathy Red” the best Slayer song of the post-Seasons in the Abyss era? I s’pose that’s open to Jaeger-fueled debate – I’m still kinda partial to “Disciple” myself – but any way you cut it, it certainly does rule, and serves, to my mind at least, as example number 8 gazillion why Slayer are so vastly superior to so many of their peers.

So. Saturday, April 18 is Record Store Day, which, in case you don’t know, is pretty much what it sounds like – a day meant to “celebrate” (a.k.a. “get shoppers into”) record stores, or, more specifically, independent record stores. Slayer’s contribution to the day: a limited to 5,000 pressings only 7-inch vinyl of “Psychopathy Red.” A press release gives more details:

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Look: I don’t want to play into any kind of imaginary, percevied rivalry between Ozzy Osbourne and Dio-Sabbath Heaven and Hell. They are two separate entities. There’s no reason one has to be “better” than the other. Who cares, right? I mean, all parties involved are getting older and closer to death, which means that people will kinda naturally start to talk about their legacies, but so what if Ozzy’s next big project is some terrible sub-This is Howie Do It variety show on Fox while Black Sabbath are making what I’m 99.9% sure is going to be an album so rocking you’ll have no choice but to rape the neighbors’ cat? I mean, it’s totally irrelevant to the conversation, right?

Anyway, here’s the album cover for H+H Music Factory’s The Devil You Know. Yes, that giant eyeless demon appears to be holding someone who was not only crucified but stuck with hundrerds of additional nails. Yes, somewhere Kerry King and Larry Carroll are pissed they didn’t think of it, first.

The Devil You Know will be released on April 28. A first single, “Bible Black,” should be coming soon.

-AR

So it’s a slow news day. I mean we’ve gotten some press releases but nothing really exciting.

So a-sniffin’ around YouTube I did go, and I found this pretty cool footage of Kerry King playing three songs with Pantera on two separate occasions.

First up is a rendition of “Raining Blood” from 1989.

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Be sure to check out the brilliant documentary Get Thrashed: The History of Thrash Metal, now out on DVD. The biggest revelation is that, according to Dave Mustaine, Dave Mustaine invented thrash. The below video is his direct transcribed quote starting at 3:33 (half of Satan???):

“The sad thing, and this is really strange, when Kerry [King] was playing with Megadeth I showed him a lot of my style. Kerry’s a good guitar player, for rhythm he’s great. In Metallica, I was the only guitar player and a lot of that rubbed off on James [Hetfield]. And in Megadeth it was all my guitar playing and hired hands who learned what I was doing.

So, out of all of this, and this is totally gonna sound arrogant and I’m sorry but I am just telling you the facts, I’ve affected three bands out of the Big Five.

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Every metalhead knows that Kerry King likes to talk shit like he’s being paid by the insult, but isn’t Tom Araya supposed to be the more even-keeled one? The dude who brings his family to the Grammys and thinks it might be time for Slayer to call it a day and openly admits that he’s a practicing Catholic who doesn’t believe Slayer’s anti-religion message so much as he thinks it’s just a great theme for evil sounding metal?

Well maybe Tom is tired of King getting all the attention, because in a recent interview with Stormbringer Webzine, he took a page from his longtime bandmate’s playbook and slammed Metallica’s latest album, Death Magnetic:

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If you’re not familiar with Continuum’s 33 1/3 book series, you should be. Each entry is written by a different music critic and/or journalist, and each one is devoted to the study of a single, seminal album. There’s a wide range of types of music covered by the series – everything from the Beastie Boys to The Velvet Underground – but metal hass, up ’til now, been criminally unrepresented. There are entries for albums by Guns N’ Roses and Nine Inch Nails, but those aren’t metal bands in the strictest sense and, obviously, both groups have been wholly accepted by the mainstream; there was a book covering Sabbath’s Master of Reality recently, but, weird though it may be, at this point Sabbath are pretty much as accepted and unrebellious a metal band as we’re likely to get.

So D.X. Ferris’ recently release tome on Slayer’s Reign in Blood is the series’ first honest to God (or honest to Satan?) book covering a metal album. And it’s an AWESOME read – fascinating, intelligent, informative and insightful, you’re likely to blow through it record time, and then feel depressed as you realize you’ve reached the last page. Ferris not only takes a critical look at the album, making astute observations and pointing out little musical nooks and crannies you might have never noticed even after your gazillionth spin of the classic record, but he also managed to interview everyone and anyone who was involved with the album – from the band members themselves to producer Rick Rubin to engineer Andy Wallace to cover artist Larry Carroll and a few hundred other people I’m forgetting about – as well as loads and loads of musicians and artists who are fans of the album (Henry Rollins, Tori Amos, Gary Holt, and Paul Romano among them).

After I wrote this blog about Slayer and their continuing relevance in the metal world back in June, Ferris actually e-mailed me basically just to say “thanks” for the shout-out to his book. I asked him if I could shoot him some interview questions, and luckily for us, he agreed. After the jump, read what Ferris had to say about the process of putting the book together, things he learned about both Slayer and Reign in Blood while working on the book, and the state of Slayer today.

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Metal Blade has signed infamous Massholes, Overcast. Overcast are of some interest because their singer, Brian Fair, went on to front a little band you may have heard of called Shadows Fall, while their bassist, Mike D’Antonio, eventually joined some group called Killswitch Engage (the band’s other members, presumably, went on to get day jobs). That makes Overcast one of those bands that is kind of a retroactive supergroup, like the line-up of Megadeth that had Kerry King for all of ten seconds, or one of those glam bands like London or Hollywood Rose, whose various members went on to form Motley Crue, GN’R, and L.A. Guns.

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Here’s a passage from D.X. Ferris’ just-released contribution to the 33 1/3 music book series. Ferris’ entry concentrates on Slayer’s Reign in Blood:

“By ‘92, almost every band from ‘86 [specifically Metallica, Anthrax and Megadeth] was missing some crucial element that once made them great. Except Slayer…

“Slayer held it together. Slayer kept their fans in the game. A Slayer album arrived every few years, no matter what you were doing in life, no matter what you’d been listening to. And they were all, at least, pretty darned good.”

Those are pretty much my sentiments exactly – in fact, they echo something I wrote way back in February of ‘07 (by the way, that might sound like I’m implying that Ferris ripped me off, but I’m not – I’m just sayin’ great minds think alike is all). I know lots of people hate hate hate Slayer’s post-Seasons in the Abyss output, including 2006’s Christ Illusion – but I’ve just never really understood that. The band has been consistently making good thrash for almost three decades now, and that’s why I always get behind them.

So I’m more than happy to report that band is working on some new shit, Kerry King tells Total Guitar:

“We’re supposed to have [a new album] ready at the end of the year! There’s been talk of all kinds of odd things, because the record industry changes every day. We’ve talked about maybe putting out a couple of songs from an upcoming record through iTunes, so we can play something new on the Unholy Alliance III tour. You know, that’s not so far outside the realm of possibility. As far as how much we’re gonna get done by the end of the year? I have no idea.

“Jeff [Hanneman, guitar] has a couple of things. I’ve got ideas that I’ve never finished, so I wanna get back to working on those. Some of them are really cool. I haven’t recorded anything yet because I want to finish the songs first — I like them to have a beginning and an end before I demo them.”

As Rob at Metal Injection pointed out, it’s good to hear that these old dogs are willing to try some new tricks, in terms of how they get their music to the masses. New albums by Metallica, Anthrax and Megadeth are usually iffy propositions, but a new Slayer album? I can’t help but get excited by the idea.

-AR

P.S. Ferris’ book on Reign is really, really fucking good (and I’m only on page 39). I had a really hard fucking time finding my copy, but if you can track one down, it’s totally worth the eleven bucks.

A big big thanks to MetalSucks Maniac* TedTedPoleyPoley for sending us this clip of Slayer’s Kerry King and ex-Megadeth axe master Marty Friedman jamming on some classic riffs for a Japanese television show.

I know there’s a certain amount of Kerry King backlash amongst our readship as of late, but, c’mon, you gotta admit: this is pretty cool. Also, Friedman remains my favorite lead guitarist for Megadeth. And not just ’cause he’s Jewish.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/5n9fpNRGFyw" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

-AR

*Like that? I just came up with it. Seriously. Some people say I should be a writer.

I really did think that Marilyn Manson and Slayer’s Kerry King would start talking shit about one another at some point during their tour together, but I guess they found a couple of things they have in common: they both hate Jesus, or at least pretend to hate him for media attention, and they both pride themselves on being evil. So I guess they managed to see past the fact that one is more or less a known homophobe and the other wears make-up.

ANYWAY, here’s footage of King playing guitar for Manson during a rendition of the latter’s “Irresponsible Hate Anthem” in LA this past Saturday night. I would have liked to see Manson try his hand at “Angel of Death” – I don’t think he could do any worse than Araya at this point – but I have to wonder if this will lead to a full-on cash-in guest spot on Manson’s next album. King hasn’t done one of those since that song with Sum 41 or Blink 182 or Matchbox 20 or whoever the fuck it was for Spider Man, so he’s due.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/xGll3o571nk" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

-AR

 
So Slayer won the Best Metal Performance Grammy for the second year in a row last night, this time for the song “The Final Six,” which comes off of last year’s re-release of 2006’s Christ Illusion (got all that?). Tom Araya made a typically schmaltzy acceptance speech, but I much prefer what Kerry King (who called “Eyes of the Insane,” the song that won last year, “one of the poorest representations of us on the record”) had to say about the award after the first time the band won:

“I thought [that winning the Grammy] was cool for my dad because, you know, he’s proud, but for me the fucking Grammys, I think the vote process it’s not tainted but it’s not correct because it’s not by somebody who knows about every kind of music they’re voting for. I think there is probably 25, 40 percent of people who actually have an idea of what metal is and I think they’re 60, 75 percent of people who pass the category and say, ‘Metal, Slayer, heard of them, cool.’ I’m glad they did it, you know — hey, it gives me something cool to say, ‘Yeah, I won one of those.’ Not a lot of people in the world can say that. From that aspect it’s cool, but I’d rather have awards that educated metal fans voted for.”

So I’d say King has the right attitude about the awards.

After the jump, watch a fan-made video for “The Final Six” and the official video for “Eyes of the Insane.”

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