(“My Ivy League education taught me how to over-analyze the Norwegian church burnings into Oblivion!”)

I’m not a metal isolationist, and I’m all for seeing our favorite genre given exposure in mainstream media outlets; just the other day I praised Pitchfork’s Brandon Stosuy for doing a great job in bringing metal back to the famed indie snob publication, and I’ve said that I think it’s pretty cool that NPR is getting into the metal game. But Sasha Frere-Jones’ recent black metal focus piece in the New Yorker made me want to punch a wall.

I’ve always had a problem with Frere-Jones’ writing; it’s my personal belief that music critics should spend more time writing about the actual MUSIC than the cultural events and historical significance surrounding it. Frere-Jones’ articles generally read like pretentious college history papers that prove made-up theses for the sake of proving made-up theses instead of any kind of analysis of what’s going on inside the notes, what’s being played. But let’s leave that aside for now and take this most recent article at face value; it stinks anyway.

Click to read more…

A few weeks ago, I saw Ghost live for the first time. And towards the end of the show, the band covered “Here Comes the Sun,” and I sent out this tweet, in which I declare their version of the song superior to that of The Beatles. I fucking love The Beatles, I’m not knocking them, but I have really never liked that song. It will surprise no one to learn that I have a hard time relating to the lyrics.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that Ghost have actually recorded and released the cover, as a bonus track for Opus Eponymous. So now everyone can hear it! It’s a great example of how to do a cover correctly, and that Replicants cover of The Cars’ “Just What I Needed,” the changes to the music completely change the entire mood of the piece and seem to give the lyrics new meaning.

Check it out:

Ghost’s Opus Eponymous is out now, and despite what Grim Kim believes, no, I do not think that they are the new Liturgy.

-AR

Thanks: Clint Kaio

Maybe next week we’ll finally stop making fun of Morbid Angel for thinking that Illud Divinum Insanus was a good idea, but then again, probably not. As long as videos like this one exist, the lulz shall continue!

Speaking of lulz, here’s what else we did this week:

• We completed our list of The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists!
• We debuted the new Children of Bodom video.
• We also debuted new music by Sepultura and Isis.
• We introduced a new column by Landphil from Municipal Waste and Cannabis Corpse, and had a special edition of “Rigged” by Forbidden’s Steve Smyth.
• We spoke to Matt Henderson from S.O.S.
• We checked out the latest releases from the aforementioned Morbid Angel as well as Nitro and Wildestarr, and Kuldvas, Adam Emanon, Surachai, and Undying.
• We enjoyed seeing you not enjoy this Lady Gaga/Judas Priest mash-up.
• We assured our parents that metal isn’t getting too mainstream.
• We had our annual laugh at the most recent Gathering of the Juggalos infomercial.
• We got ready for the monotony of Metallica Monopoly.

And hopefully next week no legendary bands will release anything that’s completely unlistenable. ‘Til then, dear friends…

-AR

An actual e-mail I received from my mother this morning:

From: Rosenberg
To: Axl Rosenberg
Subject: Black metal
Date: June 7, 2011 10:17:43 AM EDT

Hi,

Yesterday’s Times Art section has another review of black metal (Liturgy). What’s happening here? Is metal going mainstream?

Yes, somebody please tell her: WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE?

-AR

IDK much about black metal (I stopped being interested in 1995 when I’d read all the gossip on Usenet about Euronymous getting killed) but if there are more bands like LITURGY, maybe I should get back into it?? What other bands should I check out if I am into these guys????

Again, I fully admit I don’t know much about this stuff so feel free to correct me but I was always a big fan of 90s post-rock/math-rock/etc like Orthrelm, Trans Am, Panasonic, and Don Caballero and I kind of feel like this is what Steve Albini would do if he was commissioned to do a BM record?? Like, what if he got Demon Che to play with Darkthrone? How sweet would that be?!?

Click to read more…

Rather than devoting a whole post to each of the many new tracks released by metal bands today, how ’bout bringing them all together the way Axl does with his cinemetal round-ups? A good idea, you say? Alright, let’s get to it.

Our besties at the Deciblog are streaming a brand new Liturgy track called “High Gold.” I’ve never been able to get into Liturgy; though I appreciate that mainman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix is well-educated in music and is trying to do something outside the box (so to speak), I’ve always felt it was way too far outside the box to be considered metal, or even listenable. Their first album was so full of ambient noise I could barely find the actual songs. But if the new track is any indication, it seems as if they’re taking cues from their Brooklyn brethren in Krallice and focusing more on the black metal side of their sound this time around… and on making actual songs. “High Gold” is catchy, in a good way, and tighter than I remember the band being too; check it out here.

Click to read more…

Banner Designed by Cysquatch

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

This week, we have our first ever reader-suggested QOTW, coming from MetalSucks Maniac Cougar Party:

WHAT BANDS DO YOU HATE THAT YOU HAVE SEEN LIVE MULTIPLE TIMES BECAUSE THEY ARE ALWAYS OPENING FOR SOMEONE YOU LIKE?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

Click to read more…

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out the latest from Deafheaven.

Black metal is a music of destruction, but not as an end in itself. Just as devastating fires are necessary to maintain the evolution of a forest, the outsized musical gestures and inflammatory rhetoric of black metal are aimed at razing the world so that we may begin anew. Strange, then, that it’s only been in the last five years or so that we’ve seen black metal sprouting so many new branches. It’s a sad irony that a music so opposed to orthodoxy should be so concerned with notions of purity.

San Francisco’s Deafheaven are one of a growing legion of young American black metal bands (also including Krallice, Velnias and Liturgy) whose music captures that duality perfectly. There’s plenty of violence in the outpouring of blastbeats and guitars on their self-titled demo (briefly introduced by Vince here), but the violence feels transformative, baptismal, even comforting. Deafheaven’s arcing guitar harmonies lead to conventionally beautiful places; they even fly directly into the sun for the major key flashes of “Daedalus.” It says a lot that the acoustic instrumental “Bedrooms” feels totally at home among the beautiful carnage that surrounds it. It’s just as emotionally complete as the louder tracks.

While Deafheaven’s music shares surface characteristics with the classic black metal sound, this demo is so distanced from Mayhem and Immortal as to be another kind of music entirely. It engulfs rather than tramples, shimmers where so much black metal rattles. These descriptions alone do not make Deafheaven good or bad. But they do amount to an important shift in aesthetic values, one that makes black metal more listenable without taming its spiritual thrust. It’s a shift that has clear predecessors in Weakling, Wolves In the Throne Room and Agalloch. Do Deafheaven offer a take on this strain of black metal that the others don’t? Not really, though they do streamline the sound a bit. Do they offer that same feeling of cleansing that I get when I listen to the aforementioned? Oh, yeah.

(3.5 Horns Up)

-SR

Download Deafheaven’s demo over yonder.

As someone who came up in the 90s West Coast hardcore scene (see my post “5 Things I Miss About 90s Hardcore” for some especially ridiculous memories), I first came across Dave Astor when he was playing drums for Locust. I saw them back in 1995 with Man Is The Bastard at the Velvet Elvis in Seattle, and they blew me away. Back then, it was almost unheard of for hardcore kids with short hair to play blast beats, and while I kind of lost interest in them when they became The Locust, got scene hair and just generally became completely lame, they were definitely ahead of their time. Dave apparently agreed with me, because he quit to join the excellent Cattle Decapitation, then moved on to his current band Pathology.

Their new album on Victory just dropped, and it’s honestly one of the best straight-up, no-frills death metal records I’ve heard in a long time. With veterans like Dave and Matti Way (Disgorge, Liturgy, Cinerary) on board, their experience and craftsmanship really comes through. I know that 99% of MS readers will write it off because I like it, but this is one of the rare instances where they might actually be missing out on something they’d enjoy. It’s by far their best, combining melodic parts that somehow aren’t retarded with brutal slamz that will have you moshing around your room in seconds.

Dave is a man of few words, so I can’t say this is the most in-depth interview I’ve ever done, but he’s real nice and the Pathology record slaps, so pick it up on iTunes ASAP!

Click to read more…

Ims goings tos puts hallucinogenics ins thes eggs this mornings. Shhhhhs. Don’t tells Axl ands Vince! I wants thems tos bes surprised. I wants thems tos say, “Whoas! Whats wrongs with mys eggs?!?” Ands thens I ams goings to gets thems tos dos somethings embarrassing, ands I ams goings tos takes a picture! Ands we wills laughs. Has has has!!!

-NC

Alcest’s new album, Écailles De Lune so relaxing to listen to… it’s like an aural tongue massage. Even when there’s screaming, it’s, like, the most mellow screaming ever. In fact, I’m making a MetalSucks Mansion Monkey rub my shoulders while we crank it right now. He offered to add the tongue massage part, but even I have standards.

ANYWAY, I’ve never seen Alcest live before, but I’ll get my chance in the spring, when they come to North America for a string of dates. I expect it to be the most chill show I attend all year. There’s also gonna be a string of various excellent bands playing support: Velnias, Liturgy, Clad In Darkness, Woe, Monarque, and Have A Nice Life

Dates after le saut:

Click to read more…

Even though metal seems to have (re?)infiltrated the mainstream as of late, I’m still always surprised when I open my NY Times in the morning and see a feature on a metal band. When that feature includes a half a page above-the-fold photo of Immortal, I am outright shocked.

But there they, the chosen visual representation for an article on black metal and, in particular, the black metal symposium that took place at Public Assembly in Brooklyn this past weekend.

Click to read more…

This past weekend was “The Blackened Weekend” here in NYC, a 3-night series of metal shows put on by the same folks behind the Mastodon / Neurosis show a couple of winters back and the Pig Destroyer / Brutal Truth / Repulsion joint this past summer. Krallice headlined Friday’s show with support from Liturgy, Malkuth and Orphan, while Black Anvil teamed up with Skeletonwitch to destroy the very same venue (Brooklyn’s Union Pool) on Saturday night. Last night’s weekend-ending show was the grand poobah of The Blackened Weekend headlined by the grand poobah of doom supergroups, Shrinebuilder. The band put on an energetic show to a packed house at Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge — a curious choice of venue for a metal show but by no means a bad one — that, as expected, highlighted elements of all of the band-members’ respective “other” bands in the best possible way.

Friday night’s Krallice show was a rager — Union Pool was packed to the gills and even spawned a moshpit, a rarity for these types of shows. Though I had some difficulty with Krallice’s recent release Dimensional Bleedthrough, the band absolutely smoked live and proved that their show-stealing set at last winter’s Scion Rock Fest wasn’t an anomaly. Check out some fan-filmed footage from right up-front below; I doubt anyone’s going to sit through all 20 minutes, but at least watch a sample or let the audio play in the background while you go about your morning routine. The audio quality is even pretty decent.

-VN

Krallice | NYC @ Union Pool | Friday 13th November 2009 from (((unartig))) on Vimeo.

Friendly reminder: our own Vince Neilstein will be DJing “Heavy Metal Happy Hour” this Friday the 13th at The Arrow Bar in Manhattan (Ave A and 5th St., downstairs). All drinks are 2-for-the-price-of-1 from 6pm-9pm, and Vince will be spinning the best of 2009′s metal offerings. At least for the first two hours, after which he’ll surely break down and start playing Ratt and Skid Row. Come on down and get your drink on, and since your inhibitions will be lowered feel free to tell Vince how much his taste in metal sucks.

Afterwards, there are THREE killer metal shows taking place in NYC. There’s the Krallice/Liturgy joint at Union Pool. Hung are headlining a bill that also includes Ikillya and Devil to Pay at Ace of Clubs. Hecate and The Austerity Program are performing with Rise of Because, Theologian, Chaos Majik and Statiqbloom at S.I.R. studios as part of the two-day Apex Fest III. Yowza! So many choices. But Heavy Metal Happy Hour with Vince is the obvious choice for your early evening activity!

Pretty big week here at the MetalSucks Mansion. We laughed, we cried, we fired someone, we rocked out with our cocks out. Here’s a rundown of the highlights:

• We debuted a new song by The Devin Townsend Project, a new video by Skeletonwitch, a new song by Javelina, and the cover art for Sigh’s new album.
• Horse the Band’s Lord Gold blogged about Nawlins and cocaine, God Forbid’s Doc Coyle gave us an exclusive statement about that whole cup throwing incident, Dallas Coyle is giving away music for free, and Daath’s Eyal Levi talked about a run-in with the Polacks and drum triggers.
• We spoke to Dethklok’s Brendon Small, Converge’s Jacob Bannon, Gojira’s Joe Duplantier, and Liturgy’s Hunter Hunt-Hendrix.
• We checked out new releases from Baroness, The Red Chord, Skeletonwitch, Immortal, Vains of Jenna, Vampire Mooose, and Javelina. Also, some asshole really likes Oceano.
• We’re sponsoring the incredibly awesome Tyrants of Evil North American Tour 2010 with Arch Enemy, Exodus, Arsis, and Mutiny Within!

Alright. I’m going to see Where the Wild Things Are now. I’m fairly certain that it is going to make me weep like Gary Suarez. See ya Monday.

-AR

Photo by Ben Shapiro

With its intertwining, trebly guitar lines, smeary blurs of percussion and peculiar chanted interludes, the debut full-length Renihilation by Brooklyn’s Liturgy was one of this year’s more intriguing black metal releases. In sound, it split the difference between the buzzing rawness of early Ulver and Krallice’s recent experiments (Krallice’s Colin Marston produced the album). And while one could easily be satisfied by the overwhelming, majestic crackle of the “Pure Transcendetal Black Metal” on Renihilation, just as important to the effect is the transcendentalist philosophy of Liturgy’s leader, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. As you’ll see by Hunt-Hendrix’s answers, graciously composed while the band was on the road, Liturgy is a band consumed by ideas as profound as its music.

Click to read more…