Friday, March 25th, 2011 at 10:30am by Axl Rosenberg
Oh my gosh Lars Ulrich is such a dummy. All of the actors in the above scene from the upcoming HBO biopic Hemingway & Gellhorn (in which Ulrich portrays Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens) are looking in one direction, and looking in that direction in such a way that suggests that the focus of the scene is definitely over there, but Lars is looking in the other direction. HEY, IDIOT. SOMETHING IMPORTANT IS GOING ON OVER THERE. LOOK OVER THERE.
Friday, March 11th, 2011 at 11:30am by Axl Rosenberg
Speaking of heavy metal peeps and HBO: according to Deadline, Lars Ulrich has joined the cast of the cable network’s upcoming film, Hemingway & Gellhorn, which, in case the title didn’t give it away, “recounts the tumultuous romance and subsequent marriage of literary master Ernest Hemingway and up-and-coming war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, following them through the Spanish Civil War and beyond.” The movie is being directed by Philip Kaufman (Twisted) and executive produced by James Gandolfini (8mm). Clive Owen (The Rich Man’s Wife) is playing Hemingway and Nicole Kidman (Bewitched) is playing Martha Gellhorn, because nothing says “Spanish Civil War” like botox. David Strathairn (Simon Birch), Tony Shaloub (Men in Black II), Parker Posey (Blade Trinity), and now Ulrich round out the cast.
The diminutive drummer will be playing “Joris Ivens, the Dutch documentarian of The Spanish Earth.” Ulrich is actually Danish, but was apparently cast both because no one can tell the difference between the Danes and the Dutch, and because, like the real-life Ivens, he enjoys having ridiculous hair cuts.
So I guess the only question now is, “Can Ulrich possibly top his performance in Get Him to The Greek?” Personally, I think he should have made like Heath Ledger and died immediately after filming to ensure that his legacy remains unvarnished, but who knows, maybe now he’ll finally get the Emmy he so richly deserves?
Monday, February 21st, 2011 at 10:00am by Corey Mitchell
Round Two of Heavy Metal Blunders brings us, who else? Vince Neil! Yes, the official MS Mansion punching monkey got shipped off to the can last week. At this point, I don’t really care. But I did get a chuckle out of his girlfriend, Alicia Jacobs, who was concerned for her bank account, err… boyfriend. Jacobs claimed Neil was “not eating much other than peanut butter, Doritos and stuff like that. He had a baloney sandwich one day. It’s not optimal conditions.” I wonder what Razzle thinks about dem apples?
Combine first 4 ingredients in a small bowl. Sprinkle lemon juice and seasoning mixture on both sides of fish.Spray a wire fish basket with cooking spray; place fish in basket.
Grill fish, covered, over medium coals (400°F) for 7 to 10 minutes on each side or until fish flakes easily when tested with a fork. Remove fish and garnish, if desired.
Yield: 4 servings.
I wonder if Lars could follow such a recipe…..his drumming and general je ne sais quoi has me thinking he’s pretty much mentally retarded, but could that perhaps translate to wizardry in the kitchen?
I’m guessing Hetfield mans the grill at any band barbecues…
Wednesday, January 26th, 2011 at 12:00pm by Axl Rosenberg
So yesterday The Big 4 finally announced a U.S. show, but it caused as much weeping as it did celebration, ’cause fans were hoping for a full tour, not a single gig. Now Metal Underground tells me that Lars Ulrich was on KROQ-FM yesterday, explaining the decision. Here’s what metal’s most famous living midget had to say, with my own comments in bold:
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011 at 2:03pm by MetalSucks
We can’t believe that this is really happening. To paraphrase John McClane in Die Hard 2, “How can the same shit happen to the same band twice?”
More than two years ago, Winds of Plague’s then-keyboardist, Kristen Randall, took a picture of herself topless — and the picture subsequently found its way onto the internet (you can see it here). Since then, Randall has been replaced not once but twice with different young ladies, presumably because WOP need an attractive woman in the band at all times, lest their fans notice the band’s lack of talent. The gimmick has gotten so silly that following the announcement of Randall’s latest successor, Alana Potocnik (formerly of The Breathing Process and Abigail Williams) was announced, Vince joked that maybe someday she’d have leaked nudie pics, too.
Well, guess what? Now she does. They were apparently first posted at Is Anyone Up, but were sent to us by an anonymous reader. And because we’re mental midgets who still find both female and male nudity hilarious (don’t forget that we’ve posted pics of Rose Funeral’s Dusty Boles thrusty pole and Lars’ little Ulrich, too) we find them amusing. Needless to say, they’re NSFW.
There are three pics, but only one of them displays Ms. Potocnik’s face, so the other two could be fakes, but, uh, maybe not. In any case, we’re starting to wonder if Potocnik and Winds of Plague are doing this on-purpose; it’s just too big a coincidence that the female members of Winds of Plague keep enduring the same scandal. ‘Cause if they’re not doing it for the publicity, then, uh, well, that’s just sad.
Thursday, October 28th, 2010 at 1:30pm by Axl Rosenberg
The interwebs are all aflutter today because Dave Grohl has announced that his former Nirvana bandmate, Krist Novoselic, is going to make a guest appearance on the new Foo Fighters album — which is also being produced by Garbage’s Butch Vig, a.k.a. “The Dude Who Produced Nevermind.” This will mark the first time Grohl and Novoselic have recorded with one another since Kurt Cobain injected himself with enough heroin to kill an elephant, and then stuck a shotgun in his mouth, just to make sure that medical science didn’t get any bright ideas.
Look: I know Nirvana were cool, and I know that Cobain’s premature passing means they get to stay cool forever and ever and ever because the dude didn’t get to grow up to be lame like Billy Corgan and Chris Cornell, but I really don’t see any reason to get excited about this. Novoselic was never a songwriter; he was never even a particularly distinctive bass player. Cobain was Cobain and Grohl certainly beat the ever-lovin’ shit outta his drums, but Nirvana pretty much could have swapped out Novoselic for another bassist at any point and not missed a beat. This song isn’t gonna sound like Nirvana — you’d need to re-animate Cobain to make that happen — it’s just gonna sound like Foo Fighters. I’d wager that the bass lines won’t even be that special, since, like I said, Novoselic’s playing never had much discernible personality. So you’re not even gonna get the “What might that sound like?” curiosity factor that you might get from, say, Dave Lombardo filling in for Lars Ulrich at a Metallica show, or Duff McKagan joining Jane’s Addiction. Creatively speaking, this reunion doesn’t amount to much more than a gimmick.
All of that being said… I’ll take any excuse to post the below video of Novoselic hitting himself in the head with his bass at the 1992 MTV VMAs while Grohl taunts Axl Rose from the stage. This has to be one of the five proudest moments in MTV’s history, right?
Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at 3:30pm by Axl Rosenberg
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.
Wednesday, October 6th, 2010 at 12:00pm by Axl Rosenberg
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.
Wednesday, October 6th, 2010 at 10:30am by Axl Rosenberg
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:
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010 at 12:00pm by Axl Rosenberg
During a recent interview, Lars Ulrich stated that Metallica “did not take advantage of everything that [Jason Newsted] had to give.” Which strikes me as Ulrich being too hard on himself. I mean, really, you’re telling me that Jason Newsted’s talents can be better utilized than they were in this song?
I mean, that’s a classic right there! The first time I heard it, I was all, “Master of Whatits?”
Still, I was curious what Newsted thought of Ulrich’s apparent admission of guilt. Here’s what Newsted told me*:
Monday, September 13th, 2010 at 12:20pm by Axl Rosenberg
If my father had utilized reverse psychology when I was a kid, there’s a good chance I would never have latched onto metal; as it stands, his anti-metal stance was probably a big part of the genre’s appeal when I was younger. But now that MetalSucks is what Vince and I do full-time, he’s doing his best to be supportive. For example, he has only ever sent one text message in his entire life. It was to me, and it read as follows:
“Metallica riot see news”
Frickin’ adorable, right? Still, it’s not as though I expected my dad to start listening to Metallica. I mean, he’s probably heard …And Justice for All more times than Lars Ulrich has just from having me blast it around the house when I was a teenager, but I don’t think he can tell the difference between Metallica and The Offspring (I know for a fact my mom can’t).
So I was more than a little surprised when my old man e-mailed me a link to the below video and asked “Know the group?”… because he actually dug the music!
Unfortunately, I had the unenviable task of explaining to my father all about Burzum and Varg Vikernes’ long history of, uh, political idealism, thus promptly ending his too-brief relationship with the first metal band he’s ever actually enjoyed. Oh well. Maybe I can slip him the new Enslaved album or something…?
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 5:00pm by Axl Rosenberg
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.
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?
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 3:30pm by Axl Rosenberg
MetalSucks Uber-Tipster Hetal Bhatt sent us a link to this article from Rolling Stone:
It’s been six years since the Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster hit theaters, but the band is still sharing its reactions to the movie, which chronicled the band’s bitter in-fighting and visits to a therapist while working on St. Anger. Their impressions? Not good. “Every time I see Noel Gallagher he quotes lines from that movie back to me,” Ulrich told Australia’s Herald Sun. “That thing has taken on a life of its own. I had to live that shit for three fucking years! The whole thing was a mindfuck. I am aware a lot of other musicians seem to have lived a lot of those moments. They weren’t necessarily stupid enough to film them like we were and share them with the rest of the world.”
In case ya didn’t hear, Jonah Hex shit the bed at the box office this weekend, getting trounced by the third film in a kiddie franchise, the fifth film in a different kiddie franchise, a movie based on a thirty year old television series, and a movie with Lars Ulrich in it. I’m sure the Mastodon dudes are humbled to know that the Metallicats can still school them.
ANYWAY, a friend of mine actually did see the movie and gave me a little report. He asked that I not use his name, since he wants to be spared the embarrassment of admitting that he actually paid to see this drek. So I’m not going to tell you his name. It does not rhyme with Rank Friley.
Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 1:30pm by Axl Rosenberg
So we had a lot of fun laughing about that Big Four photo yesterday, and then last night on the Metal Injection Livecast (download it here), we had a good chuckle over this second picture, in which Dave Mustaine makes his feelings about James Hetfield perfectly clear:
But I guess some clever publicist or manager was on-hand for this shoot, and saw this picture being taken and was all, “Fuck, this could be a real problem, we better make sure that we get another one where it doesn’t look like these two hate each other.” And that publicist or manager was correct. If Mustaine can play nice with Kerry King, he should be able to suck it up and play nice with Hetfield, too. (And let’s not forget that Scott Ian is no Mustaine fan, either.)
Thus, we also get this picture, which is better insofar as Hetfield is not standing so far away from the rest of the group, but is not better insofar as it is still hilariously awkward:
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 10:00am by Axl Rosenberg
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?
Last month is was announced that Marilyn Manson and the young girl who lets him sodomize her, Evan Rachel Wood, would be co-starring in a retro slasher flick called Splatter Sisters, but other than it having some kind of road movie element, we actually weren’t told very much about the project. Now MTV has spoken to director Adam Bhala Lough, and gotten some details:
“It’s about two 18 year old beautiful drifter girls who go on a murderous rampage across California, killing scores of teenage boys. And they’re under mind control by the leader of this death metal band, this underground death metal band,” [Lough] said.
The death metal band leader in question is Lars, which is Manson’s role. He’s not just a rocker though. Lars also knows how to swing a sword! “There is a lot of samurai shit in [the movie] too because Lars is a samurai,” Lough said. “There is a lot of decapitation, a lot of arms getting chopped off, blood gushing, but in the beautiful way of a Japanese samurai film.”
