Every year in the summer I do the obligatory trek back home to Turkey. For most people, this is kind of a nuisance, but not that big a deal. However, I need to take at least two planes and cross the Atlantic to visit my family. This is why I usually go home onlyonce a year. Or whine at them to just come to me if they have to see me.

I grew up somewhere were we didn’t get many bands. I’m pretty sure that’s partly why I moved to a large city in the States. But when I found out that the Sonisphere Festival was hitting home sweet home, right when I was visiting, I took it upon myself to take my two youngest cousins and little sister. I figured it’s my duty to take them to their first metal show. We decided not to half-ass it. We’d stick it out from start to finish and see all five bands. One day of metal culminating in Iron Maiden. None of them had ever seen them. It was the most awful and awesome day.

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Remember that television commercial that Brent Hinds did for Atlanta dive bar Elmyr last month? It was a lotta fun, right?

Well, it ain’t got shit on the outtakes from the ad, which have just been released online. As is so often the case with something funny, the less I tell you about this in advance, the more you’ll enjoy it… so just watch.

It’s amazing that Hinds didn’t get an Oscar nomination for his performance in Jonah Hex, isn’t it?

-AR

Thanks to Newmerica for the tip!

Some sexy years ago, Vince and I met through a friend outside a Mastodon show at Starland Ballroom in smelly New Jersey.  Sure we hit it off, but moreover young scrappy Neilstein could clearly tell that one day I would save his life (hasn’t happened yet, as far as I know), we’d introduce each other to shittons of great music (has happened in spades), and we’d grow to be like-minded bitter NYC Jews together (happening every day).

The very first show Vince and I ever attended together was to see Sleepy Hollow’s own No Remission at legendary defunct Times Square haunt Siberia (Vince’s review of that show here).  We were both immediately impressed by this group of heady thrashsters who clearly took their roots from Death and Metallica but have certainly branched out over the years to evolve their own sound to new heights.

And now the band is poised to release a ferocious new full-length entitled Through Blackened Skies, and all you NYCers have a chance to help them celebrate said album at their record release show this Saturday at The Studio at Webster Hall (with Alekhine’s Gun, Arcane Malevolence, and Left In Ruins).

Go support local heaviness!

Visit No Remission on maispays

-KW

So how’s this for a new supergroup? Mastodon guitarist Brent Hinds, The Dillinger Escape Plan guitarist Ben Weinman, The Mars Volta drummer Thomas Pridgen, and and  former Jane’s Addiction bassist Eric Avery are apparently joining forces to create a new project. And while I’m always a little bit suspicious of mega-all-star-team-ups like this — for every Murder Construct, it seems like there are ten The Damned Things — it’s hard not to get excited by that line-up.

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Believe it or not, Axl and I don’t spend all day and night in front of our computers. So thankfully for us we have readers like Joe Caperon to fill us in on things we miss, like this German MTV interview with Mastodon at this past weekend’s Rock am Ring festival, in which drummer Brann Dailor and guitarist Bill Kelliher reveal that the name of Mastodon’s new album is The Hunter. Dailor revealed that the band had just finished tracking the record with producer Mike Elizondo before leaving for their current European festival tour.

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MetalSucks recently polled its staff to determine who are The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, and after an incredible amount of arguing, name calling, and physical violence, we have finalized that list! The only requirements to be eligible for the list were that the musician in question had to a) play metal (duh), b) play guitar (double-duh), and c) have recorded something in the past five years. Today we continue our countdown with Mastodon’s Brent Hinds…

Everyone knows Brent Hinds is a good guitar player; as the main writer of Mastodon and as the band’s outsize stage presence, the man’s guitar skills need no introduction. But, oddly, it wasn’t until I saw him play with rockabilly side-project Fiend Without a Face in Brooklyn last year, up close and personal in a venue that holds not more than a hundred people, that I was completely bowled over by the man’s guitar prowess.

You know when a couple of dudes are battle-rapping and every time one flings an especially impressive or cleverly worded diss at the other, all the spectators standing around watching erupt in delighted cries of, “Ohhhhh! Ohhh shit!!!”? That’s what it was like watching Brent Hinds slay the living shit out of rockabilly riff after rockabilly lead after rockabilly riff after snaky, wiry, buttery rockabilly lead, except that the delighted onlookers were just one person (me) and instead of saying “Ohhhh shit!” I did so inside my own head. But yeah, that. The dude was on fire. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing not ten feet in front of my eyes, fingers moving like masterfully guided buttons on a player piano, dancing and darting across the fretboard in ways I’d never before imagined. And with so much feeling, this man not impressing with metronome-breaking speed or nut-crushing brutality, but pure guile. He could do no wrong.

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The most recent album by Jane’s Addiction, 2003′s Strays, was a big-budget, big-production heavy rock record that kinda flopped despite its awesomeness. Since those distant days, Jane’s members have flirted with a full reunion (momentarily counting longtime hold-out Eric Avery as a returned member), with ex-Guns N’ Roses/current Velvet Revolver bassist Duff McKagen (he came and went within weeks), and with total futility (via singer Perry Farrell’s lame project The Satellite Party, featuring his wife and Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt).

So, along with my fandom, Jane’s has my curiosity about their new stuff — not just for the abovementioned travails, but also ’cause the album is a Rich Costey production (Mastodon, Muse, Cave In) and is the beneficiary of creative goosings by TV On The Radio dude Dave Sitek. I don’t care about TVOTR, but I’ve surmised that a dose of noisy post-rock might be good medicine for trio of moribund freak-rockers whose attempted return to glory was a safe, anthemic rock radio record. And now I see that my diagnosis is accurate, so far: Just listen to their thunderous, cacophonous new jam “End To The Lies” and its nipply new video (above, NSFW; audio only here). The jam is on fire! Turn it up!

-ADF

Jane’s Addiction’s fourth album The Great Escape Artist is out August 23 on Capitol Records.

Sheesh you are getting old…  The best years and achievements are clearly behind you, and it’s time to give in to the slow ride downhill to mediocrity.

Right?

Hmmm…..let’s hope not.

Regardless of what’s ahead, it’s important to keep remembering where you came from, how your experiences have shaped you, and what to learn from them for the future. Duh.

Case in point: three of our very favorite bands are currently recording new albums, and while the jury may be out on how awesome said follow-ups will be, we have ample opportunity to look back at the past and think about what solid foundations have been built to make way for a healthy and expansive evolution…

Or the new albums may just all suck.  Who fucking knows?

-KW

Is producer Mike Elizondo a weird match for Mastodon? Do you foresee Mastodon jamz with funky beats and cloying catchphrases? Is this pairing the result of label meddling, artist contrarianism, and/or ambition? Will Elizondo grapple with the Mastodon sensibility or is he a mute concession to a returns-hungry record label?

Mastodon’s triumphant 2009 album  Crack The Skye was helmed by Brendan O’Brien, a super hands-on producer. Far from the type to cover his face with a newspaper and fall asleep at the mixing board, dude will play on your jam, co-write it, and arrange it. He gets up in there. It’s like having an extra band member who can play instruments that require study and who owns a studio.

So, it may mean something that Mastodon’s forthcoming fifth album will be produced by a maker of vacuous pop music for Alanis Morissette, Pink, and Maroon 5. A hip hop beat button-pusher! A bass player!! Well, that’s Mike Elizondo, whose recent track record includes timeless greats Switchfoot and Avenged Sevenfold. That’s the guy charged with shepherding the next Mastodon classic. That’s him above left!

-ADF

Mastodon have announced the titles of two songs which will appear on their new album, and based on both the number of e-mails we’ve received about this announcement and the amount of reporting I’ve seen elsewhere on the internet regarding the announcement, I guess this is news. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I love Mastodon. But there’s really no information to be had from song titles, so I don’t see what the big frickin’ deal is.

But if you care and you haven’t heard, the titles are “Blasteroids” and “All the Heavy Lifting.” So there. Let yourself get carried away by your imagination of how those tunes may sound.

More newsworthy, methinks, is that the band has recorded a cover of Z.Z. Top’s “Just Got Paid,” which will appear on the soundtrack for this summer’s sure-to-be-terrible and sure-to-be-a-massive-hit, Transformers: Dark of the Moon. I’d rather hear some original music from the band than a cover, but you’ll never hear me complain too much about any new Mastodon, even if it is on the soundtrack for a movie that has even less chance of being good than the last movie with which Mastodon were associated.

Also news that I don’t think we knew before (but please excuse me if we did and I somehow missed it): the band’s new album is being produced by Mike Elizondo, who has previously worked with everyone from Dr. Dre (he apparently played bass on Eminem’s Dre-produced “The Real Slim Shady”) to Jay-Z to Fiona Apple to Pink to Maroon 5. And this is interesting because if you were hoping Mastodon’s next offering would be a return to their heavier sound of yore, it’s safe to say that you can now go cry into your pillow.

Here’s the original “Just Got Paid” by Z.Z. Top, in case you’ve somehow never heard it before Here’s Mastodon’s Z.Z. Top cover, which is apparently old… oh well, now you have even less reason to care about Transformers.

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Of course when you set out to make a list like, say, the one we’re doing right now, of The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, you are bound to piss a lot of people off — that just comes with the job.

But I always find it hilarious HOW those people get pissed off. For example, this week I saw a lot of complaints that the guitar players we’ve been selecting aren’t “modern.” And I can’t believe we have to fucking define the word “modern” for some of you idiots, but apparently we do. So:

So… which one of you jackasses would like to call up Alex Skolnick or Vernon Reid or Adam Jones and let them know they’re antiquated and obsolete? ‘Cause I saw Testament and Living Colour and Tool live just last year, and I would not want to make that call. Just because those dudes have been playing this game for awhile doesn’t mean their best days are behind them.

My point simply being: I don’t care if you hate our choices. That’s fine. But at least try to hate our choices based on an argument that makes sense, y’know?

And on that note, here are other ways we entertained ourselves this week:

• We debuted new music from A Pale Horse Named Death and Oakhelm.
• We checked out the latest releases from From Exile, Godstopper, and Cruachan.
• We wondered which is better, old music or new music?
• We philosophized about Google’s new cloud service.
• We fretted that metal may soon be blamed for terrorism.
• We got excited about The Faceless’ new demo.
• We bemoaned the current state of In Flames.
• We wept because Dave Grohl is not going to be on the new Mastodon album after all.
• We enjoyed a vegetarian cooking lesson from a dude in corpse paint.
• We questioned the logic of the new Avenged Sevenfold video.

Next week we unveil numbers fifteen through eleven on our guitar player list; the average age of those five musicians is thirty-one, whereas the average age of this week’s selections was forty-two. So maybe you can go back to being upset because you think they suck, not because you think they’re too old to be “modern.”

-AR

Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli…

And now, it’s the time of the week you’ve all been waiting for: the three-hour window your folks are out of the house, allowing you to jack off comfortably Decibel’s monthly Guess Next Month’s Cover and Win a Decibot Shirt Contest! I’m going to predict this will be the first “FIRST” to get the answer right —provided, of course, that the band/musician/farm animal we’re spotlighting is in fact typed out below the “FIRST.” Unless the first person who sees this types in “System of a Down,” just to be a dick/radical. That said, it’s been a few years since System of a Down proper existed — although who hasn’t enjoyed the “Five Serj Tankian Solo Albums Nobody Cares About/Bassist ‘n’ Friend Randomly Beating the Shit Out of Brent Hinds Era” — so they could ostensibly be rocking spiked wristbands now.

But no, it’s not System of a Down. There’s your hint.

-AB

Decibel’s June 2011 issue, which features Ghost, Killing Joke, Mastodon, Hate Eternal, Gorguts, Protest the Hero, Born of Osiris, and Scale The Summit is available here, or make your mama proud and just get a full subscription.

Well, this news is a real boner-killer.

Last week we got all excited because the above photo of Dave Grohl in the studio with Mastodon appeared online, and, of course, all of our minds went right to “DAVE GROHL IS GONNA MAKE AN APPEARANCE ON THE NEW MASTODON ALBUM!”

Alas, it’s not to be, says Rocksound.tv, who got official word from Camp Mastodon that “the Foo Fighters frontman popped into the studio to say hello – and not to record on the new album.”

So that blows.

Bitch and moan that everything doesn’t go exactly the way we want it to with us in the comments section.

-AR

[via The PRP]

So we’re now five axe slingers deep into out list of The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists. We predicted that the list would get a lot of you angry, and, no shock, it has. Funny thing is, reading the comments, as of yet not one of you has correctly predicted which guitar player is gonna be #1. So, just lettin’ you know… you may be even angrier in the coming weeks, or maybe you’ll be less angry, but so far, it seems like you guys just do not see it comin’.

While you chew on that, here’s some other fun things we did this week:

• We premiered new music from Hate Eternal, Arch Enemy, and Nader Sadek.
• We enjoyed a new episode of “Cooking Contaminated,” this one featuring King Fowley of Deceased.
• We checked out the latest releases from Benighted and Zubrowska.
• We wondered if Metallica and friends have gone too far in their quest for the Big Fortune.
• We checked out some *real* hardcore.
• We weighed Donald Trump’s claim that President Obama was the first drummer for Overkill.
• We wondered why talent can’t be passed down via genetics.
• We weighed, compared and contrasted multiple metal concerts showcasing female-fronted bands.
• We prayed for Kurt Cobain to rise from his grave and off Miley Cyrus.
• We wondered whether or not Dave Grohl is gonna be on the new Mastodon album.

And so, in conclusion… I am going to get a slice of pizza now.

See ya next week.

-AR

Last month Soundgarden announced the first set of dates for their forthcoming North American reunion tour; now they’ve released their full itinerary, and, in case my headline somehow failed to convey this, support acts, too.

Of course, cynical bastard that I am, my immediate concern is that if Chris Cornell’s voice is in poopy shape, these support acts could pretty much end up overshadowing what’s supposed to be one of the biggest reunions in years. Then again, Mastodon’s vocals don’t always sound so good live, either, so maybe it won’t matter. In any case, having this caliber of bands as the opening acts is a smart move on Soundgarden’s part — it could definitely bring in younger fans who are too young to remember SG from the their heyday, and it will definitely incentivize skeptical pricks like me into getting their ass to a tour stop.

Here’s the full tour schedule, including info on which bands are playing which sections of the tour, courtesy Metal Underground:

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Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli…

There’s been a lot of buzz about remaking The Crow with Bradley Cooper. Because, you know, nothing conveys goth-punk flair, existential angst and an unyielding appetite for vengeance like the frat guy who probably stuffed fans of the original into lockers. The producers should’ve just gone to Killing Joke mastermind Jaz Coleman. Not only would it at least be novel to see a 50-year-old Crow, but he’s been dressing the part for years.

In 1980, Coleman and his band were bloodthirsty rebels in spirit, not image. Their eponymous E.G. Records debut careened unpredictably between post-punk, metal, prog, disco and what we now know as industrial. Killing Joke influenced, well, pretty much everybody in the interior and exterior of Decibel and MetalSucks’ Venn diagram. (If you’ve never heard them, somehow, drop a jaw at the third paragraph of their Wiki page.) Add incendiary, prophetic, political screeds to taste, and you’ve got a recipe for a wicked Hall of Fame, appearing in our Ghost issue.

As usual, author Chris Dick went above and beyond to make this HOF one of the most thorough Killing Joke interviews ever; hence, we have reams of bonus content. Here’s a little bonus bloodsport to whet your appetite.

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I heard about, and then completely ignored, this photo album of Mastodon recording their new album. Why did I completely ignore it? Because I’ve seen bands record albums. It looks like dudes standing in a studio playing instruments. And unless you’re dealing with a band who haven’t recorded together in a very, very, very long time, well… that’s not too exciting. So these kinds of shots in and of themselves are usually not very cool.

Well, I’m an idiot. If I had looked, I might have seen this pic of Dave Grohl in the studio with the band:

Instead, I had to read about it on Heavy Blog is Heavy. D’oh!

ANYWAY, let us now analyze this photograph into, ahem, oblivion.

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Late last year we had the opportunity to see the amazing Brent Hinds walk his rockabilly and alley cat strut with not one but TWO bands in ONE night at Brooklyn’s intimate Union Pool, when his two side projects Fiend Without a Face (which also features Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor) and West End Motel hit the road for a brief East Coast run. My jaw hit the floor when I saw Hinds jam out those rockabilly rhythms and leads from up-close; it often gets lost in the behemoth that is everything about Mastodon, but good God, Hinds is a positively stunning player of inimitable prowess.

Good news for Fiend Without a Face fans who, like me, had a lot of trouble tracking down their only record; Rocket Science will release a two-CD set on June 7th featuring the lone self-titled Fiend Without a Face record and West End Motel’s brand new debut Don’t Shiver, You’re A Winner. Both bands actually pre-date Mastodon and provide a great look into Hinds influences; stream a Fiend Without a Face song here and a West End Motel song here.

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Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli…

It’s always a plus when a band has a distinct, imaginative visual presence and it’s not commonly referred to as their “shtick.” Then again, once you read our Ghost cover story, it should be clear that the Nameless Ghoul and his minions are perfectly content with the concept of … well, whatever “shtick” translates to in Sweden. Ghost and their debut LP Opus Eponymous are polarizing for a number of reasons—sonic resemblance to another infamously pale, made-up metal provocateur being the big one—but the band clearly places as much emphasis on message as music. The hooks are intended to get you under the tent for exposure to the really subversive stuff.

We had to go across the pond to get it, though, as the Nameless Ghoul leads dB scribe James Hoare through the corridors of London’s iconic St. Bartholomew the Great (known to viewers of endearing dogshit as a pivotal setting in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves). The resulting deconstruction of heavy metal as entertainment is alternately cynical and inspiring, but a great read allthe way through. Subscribers will have the issue within the next couple weeks, but the rest of you can pick it up today and get your bonus Gates of Slumber hot flexi injection.

–A.B.

Decibel’s June 2011 issue, also featuring Killing Joke, Hate Eternal, Gorguts, and Scale The Summit is available here, or be make your mama proud and just get a full subscription.

More than twenty years ago I was interviewed by The Daily Texan, the University of Texas school newspaper, for my role (along with my still best friend, Ray Seggern) as co-host of “The Metal Show” for KTSB (now KVRX), the student-run radio station. One of the quotes I made then that still holds true to this day was that 85% of heavy metal was “crap,” and that the joy in being a metal DJ was finding the other 15% of diamonds in the rough and sharing it with others.

If anything, the crap quotient is probably a bit higher these days, what with so many people of less than stellar skills having cheap access to means of production and simple ways of distribution. Unfortunately, the level of song-writing skill hovers around the same mark, as least on a per capita basis. In other words, more bands simply means more crap to sift through.

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