Not you after today

In the past few years, my group of friends has come to include a bunch of fancy-pants musicians-for-hire. They get majorly paid for backing gigs and session work cuz they execute on their instruments with nuclear precision. And it’s great hanging out with them for their big shot habits of picking up every check and throwing exquisite summer parties. You want that — we all do. But maybe you don’t have the time to, say, top your class at Juilliard or grind out a degree from Berklee. Hey, even if you did, you’d just as soon end up posting internet clips of yourself blasting through BTBAM runs and Hammerfall solos unless you move to West Hollywood and starve for two years. Meh.

Well, here’s good news! You can still get chicks horny and sound good enough for Youtube and hold up to passing scrutiny and possibly even land a gig in a million-selling metal band! Unlike violin, for example, guitar isn’t that hard to fake provided you master picking fast and good pitch on bends. To play Steve Vai, you’d have to match his regimen of 23 daily practice hours; for the following face-melters — ear-friendly, multi-leveled solos every one — all that’s required is like 23 total minutes. Let’s call it the Hammett Workout. Not everybody is “Under A Glass Moon” material, but just approximate these imprecise, jabby solos and I swear you’ll look cool! Check it:

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Allow me to shill for a beat before the weekend: If you haven’t already bought one of our new, limited edition shirts, go get yours now!!! They’re selling fast, and soon they will be the title of a God Forbid album. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Here’s some other fun stuff we did this week:

• Valient Thorr’s Valient Himself gave us the rundown on Fun Fun Fun Fest, The Red Chord’s Greg Weeks found the CFL fun and confusing, Intronaut’s Sacha Dunable talked about the best and worst drives in the U.S., and The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley is the latest to weigh in on free metal from Scion.
• We debuted new music from Murder Construct.
• We spoke to Pentagram’s Bobby Liebling and Christopher Drew from Nevershotnever and Eatmewhileimhot.
• We checked out the latest releases from Riotgod, Electric Wizard, Rimfrost, and First Blood and Killing the Dream.
• We asked you about old school bands you wanted to like but couldn’t.
• We joined Gene Simmons, Slash, and Dave Navarro in having NOH8 for gays.
• We laughed at both Kirk Hammett and the little girl he kicked.
• We also laughed at Sebastian Bach’s frail ego.
• We got really excited about the new single from The Human Abstract.
• We also got really excited about Decibel‘s new flexi disc series.

Have a nice, relaxing weekend gang. We’ll miss you muchly, but we’ll see ya Monday.

-AR

We’ve all had a good laugh at the expense of both Kirk Hammett and the child he kicked this week, but now Metallica have released a statement regarding the issue in an effort to put it to bed once and for all.

“In the whacky world of rock’n'roll, sometimes stuff happens which looks even weirder than it really is! And with context being vital in these situations, we just wanted to address something which happened on the tour the other night regarding a large beachball, a band member’s foot and a little girl. Some of you will have seen on Youtube (or read in some reports) that Kirk knocked a small child offstage by kicking a beachball at her. That little lady is the daughter of the stage manager and dressing coordinator, who are fortunate to travel as a family on this tour. She was thoroughly enjoying watching the beachballs drop from the rafters, Kirk was thoroughly enjoying kicking the beachballs off the stage and back into the crowd as has been done every night on the tour, and neither of them saw the other. The poor wee one happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She wasn’t hurt. She didn’t go ‘flying several feet into the audience.’ And Kirk and she remain good buddies. It’s very cool that everyone showed concern and support though, so we just wanted to say ‘it’s all good’ and thanks for asking.”

I think everyone basically understood that already, but there, now it’s official. Kirk Hammett does not hate little girls. Great.

And look, they even included a picture of Kirk and the lil’ tyke just to make sure we know that they are, indded, still “good buddies!”

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When I wrote about the recent Kirk Hammett kid-kicking incident earlier this week, I bemoaned the fact that the resulting video wasn’t “in slow-motion on a loop, so you can’t watch it and laugh over and over and over again without rewinding.”

Well I guess our number one homie, Rob at Metal Injection, wanted to get me an early Hanukkah present, ’cause he has now made such a video.  And it is every bit as uproarious as I was hoping it would be. Rob even added sound effects and multiple angles!!! This might be the best film of the year. Someone let me know how I can go about submitting it for an Oscar in the “Best Documentary Short Subject” category.

-AR

I haven’t seen Metallica live since 2006 (and after watching them do Master of Puppets live in its entirety, I’m honestly not sure I ever need to see them live again), but I guess these days they end their shows by dropping giant black balloons from the roof. And at a show in Australia this past Thursday, there was a little kid behind one of the balloons on the side of the stage, and Kirk Hammett kicked the balloon, and, well, the little kid pretty much got kicked into next week. Metal Insider has fan-filmed footage of the incident, which you can check out below. Unfortunately, it’s not in slow-motion on a loop, so you can’t watch it and laugh over and over and over again without rewinding.

Now, I don’t think Hammett deserves take any flack for this, as, clearly, he did not see the little kid, who was about half the size of the balloon and therefore completely hidden from Hammett’s point of view. Also, I’m amazed that security allowed anyone, let alone a little kid, get so close to the stage.

But this video is still pretty funny. I mean, I hope the kid is alright. But I’m still gonna laugh at this, and so should you. And I bet Hammett will never, ever kick one of those balloons again, lest there be another small child behind one, or maybe a puppy, y’know, so the internet can REALLY have a chuckle.

-AR

Remember how that slowed-down Justin Bieber track inspired our very good friend D.X. Ferris to slow down C.O.C. and D.R.I.? Well, now Cosmic Hearse have, rather brilliantly, slowed Metallica’s Ride the Lightning down to 33rpm. And guess what? It actually sounds AWESOME. Like, I’m listening to “For Whom the Bell Tolls” right now, and it’s blowing my mind.

It’s so awesome that it makes wonder what other Metallica albums would sound good at this pace. Having heard this, I wouldn’t be surprised if all the pre-Black Albums releases sounded good this way, but wouldn’t it be crazy if Death Magnetic suddenly sounded killer at 33rpm?

This is seriously really, really good, and you should go download it from Cosmic Hearse before Lars Ulrich makes them take it down.

-AR

Thanks to Pick-Axe Bobby for the tip!!!

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

For no particular reason whatsoever other than we thought it would be fun, this week we asked our writers:

IF YOU COULD HAVE BEEN PRESENT FOR THE CREATION OF ANY SINGLE METAL ALBUM, WHICH ONE WOULD IT BE AND WHY?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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In 1997 there was this girl that I was really into. I don’t even remember what her name was now, but I remember being very excited when I finally found myself at her place with just the two of us for company.

“Hey, wanna hear something awesome?” she asked me. The correct answer in that situation is obviously “Yes,” and so she walked over to her stereo and hit “play.” And this is what came out of the speakers:

The song ended and I figured out some excuse to leave and I left. Later I wondered if the girl really liked the song (she certainly seemed to) or if she played it knowing it was awful because she couldn’t think of a polite way to reject me, but it’s a moot point: I will never know how my relationship with that girl might have played out, all because she had to go and be the first person ever to introduce me to Limp Bizkit, and, more specifically, Limp Bizkit’s terrible covers.

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The reason all the hair-metal autobiographies have been disappointing is because the best hair metal band, Motley Crue, did it first, and did a really killer job (treating it like an oral history told from lots of different  perspectives = master stroke), and so there was really no place to go but down. Bret Michaels’ autobiography never actually materialized, Slash’s was good but not great, Steven Adler’s sucked, I only know one person who read Bobby Blotzer’s,  and now all the Motley Crue guys are dipping back into that pool for a second or even third time, only without each other because after thirty fucking years they still haven’t figured out that the unit is stronger than each individual. At this point I think it would take everyone who ever worked on Chinese Democracy, including Axl Rose, all banding together to make a The Dirt-style Roshomon piece if anything is even gonna BEGIN to compete with The Crue’s initial tome.

Now glam’s ugly twin, thrash, has started to catch on that there’s an interest in these books. And they don’t seem to be following the same pattern as cock rock. Sure, Dave Mustaine went first, but no one seems to really believe a word of his book, and it’s certainly not a definitive snap-shot of the time and place the way The Dirt is for the Strip in the 80′s. And I obviously have a lot of faith in Phil Anselmo’s upcoming collaboration with MetalSucks’ own Corey Mitchell, but Pantera weren’t purely thrash, and weren’t around for the Big Four’s heyday.

So. Now Noise Creep says that Kirk Hammett is doing his autobiography. (The news actually originated in an interview with Ultimate-Guitar, but I can’t find it. If anybody does, drop me a line.) There’s no word on which lucky writer will score that coveted “with” credit, but here’s a choice quote from Kirk:

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So I know it’s unusual for us to post at 1 a.m., but I just got done watching the long-overdue return of Metalocalypse, and presumably a lot of you just got done watching it, too, so we might as well get talkin’ about it while our thoughts are still fresh.

Personally… I loved it. The show hasn’t lost any of its satirical punch (the Facebones sexual harassment video should be shown in every office in the world), the writers continue to prove that they can sustain a story for the extended format, there was an abundance of quotable lines (My personal favorite: “Don’t forget, keep the fifteenth open so you can deposit your sperm into my vagina with your penis.”), and, oh yeah, Kirk Hammett utilizing decades of personal research to cameo as a dong.

Awesome. Totally awesome.

And the teaser for next week promises a skewering of rap metal bands. I can’t even tell you how excited I am for that.

Alright. Weigh in with your thoughts on the episode below. Hopefully you were all as satisfied as I was.

-AR

Yesterday I praised whomever came up with the moniker for The Acacia Strain’s upcoming “To Catch a Predatour” trek with The Red Chord and The Contortionist as a genius; today I know that it was Mr. Vincent Bennett, vocalist for TAS. For the band’s new, David Brodsky-directed video for “The Hills Have Eyes” is a parody of the infamous “news program” that outs kiddie fuckers (or, at least, would-be kiddie fuckers) on camera. And so, Mr. Bennett, I say again: YOU ARE A FRIGGIN’ GENIUS.

My other not-so-deep thought about this video is that it’s a million times better than that one The Malloys made, where Metallica are performing a very poorly written and produced song about a clogged toilet for the inmates of San Quentin. Maybe it’s “cooler” to go film at a real maximum security correctional institution where the inmates might get loose and rape Kirk Hammett at any moment, but Kirk has been getting raped by Hetfield and Ulrich for three decades anyway, so who really gives a shit? I’ll take Matt Pike (not that one, this one) as a reporter over Robert Trujillo droppin’ a deuce any day.

“The Hills Have Eyes” comes offa The Acacia Strain’s latest and greatest, Wormwood, which is out now on Prosthetic.

-AR

People sometimes ask me why I spend so much time writing about Limp Bizkit if I hate them so much, and I really don’t have a good answer. I think it’s probably not dissimilar from the way my dad is always watching programs about the Nazis on The History Channel, even though he and his family just narrowly escaped from zee Germans with their lives — you wanna understand the monster that committed these atrocities, y’know?

And so with that in mind, I braced myself and listened to Limp Bizkit’s latest, “Walking Away.” And for most of the song, I was like, “Oh, great. A terrible alt-rock power ballad.” ‘Cause, y’know, I really thought we were finally done with those after Puddle of Mudd mercifully disappeared. In fact, the song is just so generic and lame that I wasn’t even gonna write about it; I was gonna save all my vitriol for the Gold Cobra review Vince tells me I absolutely must write (And “take seriously.” I have no fucking idea how to take a review of Limp Bizkit seriously, let alone write a serious review.).

But then at the 3:18 mark, I was caught totally off-guard — ’cause Wes Borland takes a guitar solo. I pinched myself, but I wasn’t dreaming; I looked out the window, but I had not somehow missed the start of the Apocalypse; I had the MetalSucks Mansion Monkeys run a quick lab test on my weed, but someone hadn’t mixed it with a stronger hallucinogenic. There really is a guitar solo in a Limp Bizkit song now.

Granted, it’s nothing that anyone with ten fingers and five minutes to practice couldn’t play, but still… it seems like just yesterday that Hetfield and Ulrich were able to bully Kirk Hammett into not taking solos because they might “date” St. Anger, and here we are, and Wes Borland is taking a motherfucking guitar solo. What’s next for Bizkit — blast beats?

-AR

[via The PRP]

Hey Suckfaces, the Big Four live in Sofia, Bulgaria concert/movie thingy has encore showings tomorrow in select markets and you should totally go! It’s the most fun ever. Even if you’re lukewarm on a band/the bands, the theater-going experience is novel and pretty easy to like. It’s communal (like a concert) and comfortable (good for old people who listen to the Big Four). Plus, the little things: set breaks are excised; the audio is that Live Aid quality which disguises not even the smallest flub or shortcut, almost sickeningly real; close-ups of guitar shredding abound; and mosh pits are way more fun in a movie theater.

But if you just can’t make it to this exciting cinema-concert event cuz you’re in jail still from the Lakers celebration parade or you’re a piteously ugly John Bush fan or whatever, here’s what you’ll miss:

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Tonight is the first of the European Big Four shows, and sixteen of the seventeen musicians that now comprise those bands all gathered in one room and put their differences aside long enough to snap this picture (click on it to make it enlarge… heh heh, he said “enlarge”):

Should we over-analyze the reasons why certain people are standing near one another, or far apart, or how they’re standing? Well, this is MetalSucks, ain’t it?

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So we had a lot of fun hanging out Nevermore’s Jeff Loomis last night – definitely a very laid back and humble dude, considering that he could probably kill us all with his guitar playing. Attendees included MetalSucks’ own Anton OyVey and Antonin Skullia, Esq., as well as Empyreon drummer Frank Godla (who, despite one of my poorly phrased tweets, has not replaced Van Williams in Nevermore.). When we weren’t passing my iPhone around, enjoying the entries for the Nevermore/MetalSucks “Create Your Own Conspiracy” contest (it ends Friday and there is definitely a front runner already – so enter now if you’re gonna!!!), it should surprise no one to learn that significant portion of the evening was devoted to music dorkery; so while I can’t remember exactly how it came up, at some point Mr. Loomis recommended we all check out MasterTracks18, a YouTube user who has uploaded literally hundreds of individual tracks from various well-known songs spanning different genres – metal and hard rock being primary amongst them.

Of course, it’s all pretty fascinating; you could lose hours of your day listening to all of these. I’ve only listened to a handful myself so far, and I already feel like I’m about to lose hours of my day listening to these. I’m sure all you instrument nerds can are gonna love really getting into the nitty gritty of the various tracks, but even if you’re not an instrument nerd… it’s just a really, really awesome look behind the curtain, so to speak.

You can check them all out at MasterTracks18′s YouTube page, which now, for legal reasons, is segueing to page for MasterTracks19. But in the meantime, here are just a few of my favorites…

“Crazy Train,” Guitar Track

Some more after the jump.

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Is it possible that Lars Ulrich is such a douche chill that he won’t even put on his own socks? I mean, we know that the midget is a drummer with absolutely no relationship to his own feet (rimshot!), but I assumed he would, at the very least, have some desire to give the appearance of being above the age of three. But not so, says Contact Music:

The US heavy metal drummer is so demanding, he even likes to have a member of road crew put his socks on for him, according to the band’s singer, James Hetfield.

Speaking no Norwegian TV, James – who is joined in the band by Lars, bassist Rob Trujilo and guitarist Kirk Hamett – said: “For high maintenance and demanding it’s a tie for first place between Lars and Kirk.

“They need what they need, ‘Oh – my shoelaces are the wrong colour’, or, you know. It’s different, we all operate differently.

“I feel better when people are away from me and I can get into my own space; then Lars – he likes people plugging in his earphones, putting his socks on, all of this stuff.”

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Do people really compare Reb Beach’s guitar playing to that of Kirk Hammett a lot? I’ve never heard that fucking comparison in my life. I think you know how many hours of my life I’ve wasted sitting around stoned and contemplating metal to a ridiculous degree, and never in any of the many, many conversations I’ve had with friends about the guitar playing of Kirk Hammett or Reb Beach has the other musician’s name come up. I’m not even sure what the comparison would be, other than they’re both shredders. They play completely different styles of metal, and I don’t recall Beach ever being as fond of the wah pedal as Hammett.

My point being, I have no idea why Classic Rock Revisited asked Reb Beach to compare his playing to Hammett’s, but they did. And Reb Beach, as it turns out, is no Kirk Hammett fan. A transcript of Beach’s answer, courtesy the fine folks at Blabbermouth, follows:

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Cosmo Lee has really outdone himself this time. Invisible Oranges has Metallica’s two-song Megaforce demo – their first recording with Cliff Burton and their only one with Burton and Dave Mustaine – for free download.

If you’re a metal dork – and I assume you are if you’re reading this site – this is a must-have. Not only is it a glimpse at a legendary band in one of their earliest incarnations, but it’s also a chance to compare and contrast early versions of two ‘Tallica faves, “No Remorse” and “Whiplash,” with their final incarnations. Here’s a sample of Cosmo’s analysis of “No Remorse”:

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Howard Zinn, Zelda Rubinstein, and J.D. Salinger all died within twenty-four hours of another. That’s crappy on all fronts, but right now I’d like to concentrate on Salinger.

On the one hand, it’s very sad that he’s dead because I happen to think he was a brilliant writer; on the other hand, it’s not like he’d written anything in a long, long, long time anyway, so it doesn’t feel like we’re really losing anything; on the other hand, his son Matt was one of the frat douches in Revenge of the Nerds and played the title role in the straight-to-video live-action Captain America movie, which is to say he and Mr. Salinger’s other remaining kin folk will almost certainly sell away his father’s ideals ASAP. Look for Catcher in the Rye 3-D, starring Zac Efron as Holden Caufield, to hit screens sometime in 2011.

Now that that’s off my chest, here’s a recap of what happened in the metal world this week:

• We definitely spoke to Lamb of God’s Chris Adler and think we spoke to the guy who may or may not actually be Andrew W.K.
• Eyal gave us a recap of NAMM, and The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley told us how he got into metal.
• Norway finally caught up with the nu-metal trend.
• The Insane Clown Posee have made multiple feature-length films. Gee, I wonder how we didn’t know that?
• Footage of a new Cynic song!!!
• Also, this.

Alright, it’s fucking freezing as fuck out there, but I’m gonna try and get my ass out and enjoy what’s left of my youth anyways. If you live in the NYC area, don’t forget that The Austerity Program play this Sunday January 31, in Brooklyn at Public Assembly (70 N 6th St) with White Suns, Immanent Voiceless, Daniel Malinsky. This your chance to thank Justin for all the awesome writing he did for us, or to tell him off for all the terrible writing he did for us, depending on your perspective.

See ya Monday!!!

-AR

Suckalo Adam Ellsworth sent us the below photo of a painting a friend made for him. That’s a good friend – the painting is apparently an EPIC 30” x 30” without the frame. It portrays, in Adam’s words, “Dave Mustaine fighting a manticore with James Hetfield’s face while Vic Rattlehead cuts off Kirk Hammett’s hair in the background.”

And there’s the Metallica/Megadeth feud summed up in a nutshell. A beautifully rendered, absolutely haunting nutshell.

If Dave Mustaine doesn’t make that the cover of the next Megadeth album, then he must be high.

-AR