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At this point, is there really anything we need to tell you about the Mastodon/Opeth/Ghost tour other than “It’s happening?” We know you’re gonna go; you know you’re gonna go; you’re going.
Dates are after the jump. You’re welcome.
Axl wore his most vile death metal shirt in an attempt to avoid being selected as a juror in this great City of New York, but lo and behold, his plan backfired and he was chosen anyway. So it’s been the Vince party over here since Wednesday with plenty of help from all of our most excellent contributors — special big ups to Anso DF for pitching in extra! Here’s what went down:
We’ll be back next week for Axl’s triumphant return to the blogosphere. See you then.
-VN
I’m running out of ways to praise Mastodon for the quality of their music videos. It goes beyond the fact that, since they’re on a major label, they presumably have access to larger budgets than most bands — because I don’t think their latest, ”Dry Bone Valley” (Is that a euphemism for sex? I feel like it’s a euphemism for sex.), could really have cost that much money. It’s just that someone in Camp Mastodon is keeping his or their eye or eyes on the ball and churning out awesome clips that people will actually watch and discuss.
And sure, “Bone” isn’t quite as cool as the one they released in September for “Curl of the Burl.” But it’s still a majillion-gillion times better than, say, the new Iced Earth video, which so won over my heart I didn’t even feel inspired to make fun of it.
I can’t embed the video right now, but you can see the Tim Biskup-directed ”Dry Bone Valley” by clicking on the below screen cap. The song appears on The Hunter, which is out now on Reprise/Warner Bros.
-AR
Last week, rumors started swirling that there was gonna be a North American tour with Mastodon, Opeth, and Ghost, and, oh hey, wouldn’t cha know it, on Thursday, Mastodon’s Troy “Everyone in This Band’s Name Starts with the Letter ‘B’ Except for Me” Sanders confirmed it during an interview with a Belgian radio station, telling them –
Last week Vince posted the above totally epic picture of Trivium playing foosball against Ghost, and while we all had a good chuckle at the time, what we didn’t realize was that the stakes of the game were actually incredibly high. See, the winners got to go open for Mastodon and Opeth, while the losers had to open for.. Asking Alexandria. Brutal, right?
A source tells us that Trivium were incredibly confident in their foosball skills, but, alas, it may have been hubris: they lost, and do, indeed, now need to go be on a tour where they are not only going to be playing support for Asking Alexandria, but will find Dir En Grey, I See Stars, The Amity Afflication, and “Shitstain on the Ass of the Universe” alums Motionless in White as their tourmates. You know things are bad when the band you’re most stoked to be on tour with are Dir En Grey, for the simple reason that at least they don’t speak English, and will therefore most likely not bother you.
I’m not going to post dates for this wretched hellspawn of a trek, but you can get ‘em here if you really need to. Meanwhile, that awesome sounding Mastodon/Opeth/Ghost tour is still technically just a rumor, but we’ll post more details as we get ‘em.
-AR
video via Metal Insider
Today is the last day of regular posting on MetalSucks for the remainder of the year. We’ll still have some posts now and then — our annual Heavy Metal Hanukkah contest starts next week, we might have a series of cool new guest blogs from an old friend for you, and, of course, if there’s any major breaking news, we’ll cover it — but most of your regularly scheduled programming is going on hiatus while we enjoy the holidays.
But until we’re back, have fun reviewing our top stories from this week, won’t you?
Thanks for another sucky year, gang. See ya in 2012!
-AR
After posting our own year-end lists for 2011, we asked you, oh ye MetalSucks faithful, to tell us what you thought the best metal album of the year was. And the winner by a landslide was The Devin Townsend Project’s all-star spectacular, Deconstruction, which got more than twice as many votes as its nearest competitors, Revocation’s Chaos of Forms and Protest the Hero’s Scurrilous. (Kind of amazingly, Mastodon’s The Hunter got one vote. ONE. Sheesh.)
We’d like to congratulate MetalSucks readers for once again demonstrating excellent taste. Now we can all stop arguing about what sucked so bad about 2011, and start arguing about what’s going to suck so bad in 2012!
And don’t forget to read our latest interview with Mr. Townsend himself, which was just published an hour ago right here.
UPDATED:
Hey, so you what did you guys think of the idea I posited last week for a new band ranking system? Thanks to Jason from IKILLYA for pointing out the existence of NextBigSound.com, a cool site that aggregates a lot of the data I suggested be included in the ranking, namely social network stats and other Internet metrics. While NextBigSound allows account holders to enter their own Soundscan data, I’d love to see all those things — along with torrents, merch sales, etc — combined into a single chart that’s published once a week and accessible to the industry, much like Soundscan is now. The grand picture is so much bigger than album sales now more than ever, and I think that needs to be reflected in the main chart people analyze. For the most part, it seemed like you guys were into the idea even if you questioned its feasibility.
Anyway, this week is pretty depressing sales-wise. One look at the top six records on this week’s Current Hard Music chart should make any metalhead cry. Since there weren’t many notable new albums released last week and you surely don’t wanna just read about Nickelsuck, I also included numbers of some older albums from earlier in 2011 that are experiencing holiday sales bumps.
-VN
Thanks: Andrew McCann
I am a goofy stats and numbers geek and have been ever since I was a kid, starting when I created my own NFL board game using an NFL Strategy football field and hundreds of 1974 Topps Football cards with plays printed on the back.
Yesterday, I was reading the comments in the compilation of our Year End Top 15 lists and stumbled across “You”‘s request that someone should tabulate and collate our lists. This, of course, appealed to the stat geek in me.
In addition, another reader named “Agschwarzer” created the internet meme you see up top.
So, I was curious. What did the writers at MetalSucks like the most in 2011 and, more importantly, did we completely ignore Mastodon?
Earlier this month, Vince wrote about Mastodon’s love of Feist, and the apparent desire of both artists to collaborate together in some way; at the time, Feist even claimed that Brent Hinds had expressed interest in covering the song “The Bad in Each Other,” from her recent album Metals, while she might cover “Oblivion,” from Mastodon’s Crack the Skye.
Well, hey, guess what? It looks like something along those lines might actually happen. During a recent interview (video above), Troy Sanders said that both artists are attempting to get together a split 7″ for the 2012 edition of Record Store Day, which takes place in April. Metal Insider has helpfully transcribed the relevant portion of the interview in case you are somehow too much of a fat ass to watch a thirty second clip:
We generally use the Reviews category at MetalSucks to highlight lesser known bands that we feel could use the exposure instead of slapping an “official” but ultimately subjective and arbitrary rating on albums and bands we already cover on the site ad nauseam. But sometimes once a big album comes out we kind of forget about it; once the press releases, new track premieres, music videos and random tidbits stop coming at a breakneck pace and the record label is less focused on producing that big first week sales number, suddenly there’s a lot less to post about and certain records get lost in the fray of whatever’s new that’s come along since. Today I want to briefly reviews two of those albums, Animals as Leaders’ Weightless and Mastodon’s The Hunter.
Before getting through this article on Metal Insider I had to Google who Feist is (she’s the one who did that “1234″ song that was in the iPod commercials a few years back). I’ve got a big thing for light, female-fronted pop with a little bit of soul (Sara Bareilles, Alice Smith, Adele, Sia, etc), and Feist isn’t really doing anything for me… BUT nevertheless I’m still pretty tickled about the idea of a Mastodon + Feist collabo. Here’s a comment from Feist via Hitfix after her and Brent Hinds had a run-in when the two performed on the same edition of the UK show Later… With Jools Holland:
“Brent [Hinds] and I were nodding at each other, and he’s like, ‘Nice riff,’ and I’m like ‘Nice tone.’ So backstage I’m thinking about letting these two worlds collide, how they should collide, so I’m like ‘How about Metals [Feist's latest album] meeting metal?’” Feist explained, saying she sort of pitched a split record to Mastodon. “Brent was like, ‘Well, I do like that “Bad in Each Other” song, I could see that.’ Maybe now I will look into learning to cover ‘Oblivion’… or anything off [The Hunter]. That album’s amazing.”
I have no idea what a Feist / Mastodon collaboration would sound like, but seeing as both artists are not just still relevant but both in their primes, I know this: it’ll kick the shit outta LuLu as far as left-field collaborations go. It’s all just talk right now and it’ll probably never happen, but it’s fun to think about listening to a way lighter Mastodon with a female singer.
-VN
…I would have ordered the deluxe edition of The Hunter.
-AR
[via Metal Injection; comic by Garrett of Peanut Butter on The Brain]
News flash: radio rock still sells. While most readers of this site will probably be disappointed to see the HUGE numbers sold by this week’s #1 and #2 Current Hard Music chart-toppers, there’s better news elsewhere in the form of debuts from Skeletonwitch, Charred Walls of the Damned and a ton of other bands you see listed down below in the “tags” field. Click through to learn more.
The release year is winding down. Aside from new Megadeth and Animals as Leaders records, I think we’re pretty much done with bigtime new albums until 2012.
The #1 record on the Current Hard Music chart last week came from a band whose music it’d be a stretch to call “hard.” Click through to find out who it was. Blessthefall, Misfits and Wayne Static had solid debuts, while a number of last week’s releases jumped off the second week cliff. All that and more, right here:
Happy birthday, Reign in Blood! We love you. You don’t sound a day over one.
Here’s some other things that happened this week which are worth celebrating:
Now go crank some Slayer.
See ya Monday.
-AR
Last week we tipped you off to a striking similarity between the intros of Mastodon’s Hunter track “Creature Lives” and the Steve Miller Band’s classic “Threshold / Jet Airliner.” Coincidence? Intentional nod to a personal favorite of one or more of the Mastodudes? Until the next time we speak with a member of Mastodon we can only speculate, which could take a while seeing as we just spoke with guitarist Bill Kelliher.
But what is the Internet for if not useless and reckless speculation? Especially with Mastodon, a band whose ambitious progsterpieces are the source of endless Internet rambling and LOST-ish conspiracy theories; they’re the Pink Floyd, or better yet the Tool, of this era.
To that end, MS reader Ryan H. has unearthed another sound-alike — again with song intros — this time between The Hunter‘s “Dry Bone Valley” and Metallica’s “Damage, Inc.” Metallica’s intro is a whole lot longer, but Ryan H. is right on the money that these two intros sound alike. It could be that both bands just decided to create eery swell-like sound effects with EBows or whatever, but it could also be… so much more! I’m pretty sure if you play both songs backwards and sync them up with one another that there’s some kind of secret message to be decoded that simultaneously unlocks all the secrets of the universe and bestows upon us a map to a hidden Dharma Initiative station. What do you think???
-VN
I saw Mastodon perform material from Crack the Skye three times during that album cycle, and the vocals were, frankly, cringe-inducing each and every time. I understand that live performances won’t always be perfect, but I generally expect singers’ performances to be at least vaguely steady and in the same key as the rest of the song. So listening to Mastodon’s The Hunter, one of my major concerns was that there was no chance the band would be able to duplicate the vocal performances live.
But the band performed “Curl of the Burl” on The Late Show With David Letterman last night, and the vocals actually sounded pretty good! I mean, not like Dio-good or anything, but definitely not distractingly bad. I hope they sound this good when I see them in concert next month; this is a level of quality I could totally live with.
The Hunter is out now on Reprise/Warner Bros. You can get tour dates here.
-AR
[via Metal Underground]
I’m officially making the switch from the Top Hard Music chart to the Current Hard Music chart for the purposes of this column. While it’s interesting to see what classic Metallica and Aerosmith albums are charting and I still may occasionally reference the former, the latter chart paints a much clearer picture of the modern metal landscape by opening up more room for new records that sell less than classics, allowing a larger number of relevant new releases to place in the Top 100.
This chart has a slightly different way of tallying new releases, where sometimes they appear as having already been on for one week before official release — I’m still sorting through precisely what that difference is — so occasionally the chart positions are a little mixed up. But this only comes into play much farther down the list and this chart still provides a good gauge of relativity.
Now, onto the releases: as you all no doubt know, Mastodon and Machine Head were the biggies last week, and both did quite well — but the album that ended up at #1 is also a debut, and none of us saw it coming. Sebastian Bach, Warbringer and Maylene & The Sons of Disaster fared well in Week 1, while new records from Rose Funeral, Textures, Suffokate, Rwake, Brutal Truth and many, many more also appeared in the Top 100.
