MetalSucks

Photo by Greg Aiello

On Friday night, Vince and I saw Living Colour live for what I think must have been the seventh or maybe eighth time. And it’s a testament to the abilities of this band that, in a day and age when so many groups are seemingly just going through the motions, we’ve really never seen the same Living Colour show twice. These dudes just seem to come from another time and place – an era when a live performance wasn’t about doing a note-for-note recreation of your albums so much as it was about creating a unique experience for the audience. In that regard, Living Colour still delivers in spades.

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Mr. O’Grady answered the question “WHICH LIVING COLOUR SONG HAS YOUR FAVORITE VERNON REID GUITAR SOLO?” with a very long, detailed, and well thought-out missive on “Cult of Personality;” for his troubles, he wins a free pair of tickets to tonight’s Living Colour show at the Highline Ballroom here in NYC.

Toxteth tells me he’s never seen LC live before; man, is he in for a treat! Toxteth, if you see us at the show tonight, feel free to buy us a beer. Thanks.

Read Toxteth’s essay-sized answer after the jump.

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Living Colour, one of the best live bands on the planet right now in pretty much any genre, are playing the Highline Ballroom here in NYC tomorrow night, and we just came upon a pair of tickets to give away! We’re gonna make this real simple because we have less than 24 hours to unload these babies, so all you hafta to do to win is:

TELL US WHICH LIVING COLOUR SONG HAS YOUR FAVORITE VERNON REID GUITAR SOLO, AND WHY

We’ll read through all the answers and choose a winner in the morning. The tickets will be at will-call under your name. The only requirement to enter is – duh – that you have to live in NYC, or near NYC, or be willing to get your ass to NYC by 8 pm tomorrow night, when the show starts.

This contest ends on Friday, October 30 at 6 am EST.

The show is nearly sold-out (actually, by the time you read this it might be totally sold-out) and is sure to be killer, so definitely go ahead and give it your best shot! And don’t forget that Living Colour’s awesome new album, The Chair in the Doorway, is out now on Megaforce.

Good luck everyone…

-AR

I know exactly two people who will be really really excited that Vince Neil is working on a new solo album: me and Axl. Woot woot!

Some time in 1993 Axl dubbed me a tape; on one side was Living Colour’s Stain, and on the other side Vince Neil’s first solo record Exposed. My life was changed forever. While my namesake hasn’t managed to hold onto much any credibility in the years since, Exposed still holds up thanks in no small part to the guitar wizardry of the indomitable Steve “Jew from the Bronx changed my name to be a rockstar” Stevens.

While I’m not sure who’s even in Neil’s solo band at the moment (Keri Kelli?) I’m certain it isn’t Stevens, making this record circumspect from the getgo. Not that there aren’t other good guitar players out there but let’s face it, Neil’s a complete hack who definitely needs song written for him ala Ozzy, nahmean? So let’s (as in me and Axl) just agree to be cautiously optimistic about this one.

Here’s Neil w/ Stevens performing “Look In Her Eyes” in Chicago in 1993.

-VN

It’s one of the best albums of the year, and less than 3,000 of you purchased it in its first week of release. C’mon, kids. What’s a copy gonna cost you? Like ten bucks? You can afford that. Just don’t go see whatever shitty movie is opening this weekend and spend the money on this album instead. It’s totally worth it.

Here’s the band performing the track “Bless Those” at Waterloo Records in Austin, Texas recently:

And just for shits n’ giggles, here they are covering “Crosstown Traffic” at the same in-store:

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Luckily for Five Finger Death Punch, being total assholes who completely lack any musical talent isn’t hurting their record sales: their new album, War is the Answer, is apparently going to sell to somewhere between 35,000 – 40,000 copies in its first week of release… and that’s just here in the U.S. That probably sounds like a lot of units moved, and you’re right. It is a lot of fucking units moved. To put it in perspective with the sales of some awesome albums that came out this week…

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Last Tuesday was a huuuuge week for new metal releases. Megadeth, Black Dahlia Murder, Shadows Fall, Living Colour, Dying Fetus, Porcupine Tree, Every Time I Die, Thrice and Ace Frehley all released new albums, and all charted in the Top 200! After the jump, let’s look at where they all ended up.

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Living Colour performing their new single,”Behind the Sun,” on WYNC’s Soundcheck this past Friday.

Getting to spend nearly an hour on the phone with Vernon Reid was another huge fanboy moment in my life. The band’s debut album, Vivid, was one the first cassettes (!) I ever purchased on my own, making Living Colour one of the first bands I ever listened to that weren’t introduced to me by my parents. Today, more than twenty years later, the band is releasing their fifth studio album, The Chair in the Doorway (Megaforce). The fact that it’s no less powerful or brilliant than Vivid made talking to Reid even more exciting, because my love of the music he and his band make isn’t at all rooted in nostalgia (read my review of the record here).

As you’ll see from the following transcript of our chat, Reid doesn’t exactly think in linear terms. There were definitely moments when I had thoughts such as “Why is he talking about Pokemon?”, for example. But he always comes back around to his original point, leading to many “Oooooohhhhh! I get it now!” moments in the conversation. And given the dude’s music, that makes perfect sense: while Living Colour is ostensibly a traditionalist hard rock band, they’re still constantly and thinking outside the box and trying to navigate unexplored terrain.

After the jump, check out Reid’s thoughts on the writing and recording of The Chair in the Doorway, the meaning of that album’s title, the joys of interacting with fans through the net, and more.

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Are Living Colour feeling doubtful about their own identity? The band’s first studio album in six years, The Chair in the Doorway, deals largely with questions of self. “Gonna strip it all away,” vocalist Cory Glover repeats over and over again during album opener “Burned Bridges.” “I am the role I play,” he declares on “The Chair,” before wondering “Who am I today?” On “Out of My Mind,” he talks about “losing myself” and “shedding my skin.”

If Glover and his band mates – guitarist Vernon Reid, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun – really are feeling doubtful about themselves, they’re being neurotic for no reason. The Chair in the Doorway cements the band’s identity as one of the best American rock bands of the past two decades.

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On Thursday night Vince and I got to go see Living Colour perform their soon-to-be-released new album, The Chair in the Doorway, in its entirety, for an audience of maybe fifty people in a small rehearsal space in Brooklyn.

Needless to say, it was friggin’ awesome.

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Where the hell does the time go? The year is more than half over already! Sheesh.

ANYWAY, here are, in alphabetical order, albums that have really knocked my socks off so far this year…

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Last week, Elise at Reign in Blonde wrote a piece entitled “TOP 5 SONGS I WOULD PROBABLY USE AS MY STRIPPER SONG.”

Improbably enough, this led to a stoned think-session where I came up with a list of the top five songs I would probably use as my own stripper song. ‘Cause I know you all wanna see me strip so badly.

Okay, here we go:

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I’m auto-setting this post to go up at 11:30 am, because I will not actually be in front of a computer at 11:30 am – I will be doing a phoner with Vernon Reid. Rarely do I get nervous about conducting interviews, but this is definitely one of those times when I’m right on the verge of just having a total fanboy moment.

A lot of my man-crush on Reid has to do with seeing Living Colour live. When this band wants to decimate a room, they will decimate it. You’re talking about four dudes who, against all odds, are still as energetic on-stage now as they were two decades ago, and who understand the concept that a concert can, and should, be more than just playing note-for-note renditions of their songs. I hesitate to call Living Colour a “jam band” because I don’t want you to get the impression that they’re Phish or whatever, but they do a lot of jamming on-stage, and because they’re all so incredibly, ridiculously, almost unfairly-to-other-bands talented, it’s always just as invigorating as watching them rip in to “Cult of Personality” or “Love Rears its Ugly Head.”

So. There’s a new LC album, The Chair in the Doorway, coming out September 15 on Megaforce. And a new LC album means a new LC tour.

I implore you – if you’ve never seen these cats live before, you must must must go. It really is just a mind-blowing experience. Seriously: they’re doing two shows here in NYC, and Vince and I fully plan to go to both of them. They’re that good.

Dates after the jump.

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That would be free. Duh.

“Behind the Sun,” which until now has been streaming only on the band’s MySpace page, is now avail for download at no cost whatsoever. Go here and scroll down the page to get the track. It is truly righteous.

“Behind the Sun” will appear on LC’s latest, The Chair in the Doorway, which drops September 15 on Megaforce.

-AR

Three cheers for lame broadcasting jokes!

Seriously, though: this cover art suggests all kind of interesting things about the theme of the album. Is the chair metaphorical? Is mass media itself the chair? Fascinating that the dude and the chair themselves are without color (or colour, as the case may be). Living Colour tend to write lyrics that go beyond the whole “woe is me” bellyaching thing, so you know there was some purpose and thought put into this beyond “Oh, that looks cool.”

The Chair in the Doorway comes out September 15 on Megaforce. I cannot fucking wait.

If you haven’t done so already, check out an excellent new track from the album, “Behind the Sun,” on LC’s MySpace page.

-AR

Living Colour are streaming a new song, “Behind the Sun,” on their MySpace page. It’s our first sample of the new music that will appear on their forthcoming The Chair in the Doorway, which comes out September 15.

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Let’s cut the bullshit: there’s gonna be a new Living Colour album, The Chair in the Doorway, released September 15 on Megaforce Records.

A new Living Colour album is always good news, and this is now officially one of both mine and Vince’s most heavily anticipated albums of the year. Get very, very excited.

Here the band doing “Desperate People” off their debut album, Vivid.

Have I mentioned how much I FUCKING LOVE THIS BAND?!?!

-AR

Is Twitter the new Facebook (if Facebook was, in fact, the new MySpace)? MetalSucks isn’t gonna wait to find out, and has now officially joined 2008 by signing up for Twitter (follow us!). In case you’re over the age of 20 and not yet hip to Twitter, Twitter is a social networking site that’s basically just the “status update” section of Facebook with everything else stripped away. Users can update their profiles with short messages and links with quick updates about what they’re currently doing (140 characters or less), from a web interface or from their mobile phone. Musicians have begun dabbling in the world of Twitter, and, naturally, this provides loads of entertainment for us.

Aside from the obvious humor inherent in a bunch of br00tal metal dudes doing something that’s called a “Tweet,” some notable metal musicians are already ensconced in the world of Twitter. And what’s cool about it is that you know, at least until marketing department heads become hip to it, that you’re getting a direct link to the actual person. When Vernon Reid Tweets about the guy that designed his custom pedalboard, you know it’s him. When Fred Durst Tweets about a tattoo of Frankenstein he’s getting… uh, you know it’s him, for better or worse. Let’s look at what some notable quotables in the metal world are saying on Twitter:

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Of the MetalSucks Mansion inhabitants only Gary Suarez was (reportedly) man enough to attend the shit-hot Dillinger Escape Plan ticket (w/ new drummer!) at The Studio room of NYC’s Webster Hall on Saturday night, part of a brief 3-date East Coast DEP jaunt. While I was happily sleeping off the sedative effects of a 10-course outdoor Snow BBQ (that brisket… holy fuck!!), the video warriors of Metal Injection snuck in a hand-held video camera and captured 5 songs, among them a cover of hometown heroes Living Colour’s now-classic “Cult of Personality.” Unlike previous DEP cover experiments that sailed right over the heads of Warped Tour attendees not even born by the time F.U.C.K. came out let alone 1984, the hipper and older NYC audience lapped that shit right out of Greg Puciato’s bodyglove. Watch as the band tears the house down and Ben Weinman rips through Vernon Reid’s metal-jazz-gasm solo like Vince Neil through a new pair of jeans.

-VN

Headbanger’s Blog tipped us to the fact that video of Living Colour’s entire November 1 show at the Paradiso in Amsterdam can now be streamed for free (below). It’s not nearly as cool as the experience of seeing Living Colour live, but in case you’ve never had that opportunity (or, more likely, wasted that opportunity), this is the second best thing.

Seriously, this band rules, and I can’t say enough good shit about them. Check it out… it’s good for your health.

-AR