American Idol week 10

Wed The final 11 perform the hits of Motown Records

Thur Live results + one freak-out

Misery Index Goddammit, I just knew that this was coming after Randy Jackson’s shout out to Motown founder Barry Gordy a few weeks back.

Tyler-o-meter Waaaaay too nice to this gaggle of lames

*

To borrow a phrase from Idol judge Jennifer Lopez, let’s talk a bit. First, I reiterate that the purpose of Idol Remains is to examine American Idol through a Heavy Metal microscope. If metallists have an edge on other genre fans, it’s our ability to identify the genuine, the real, and the compelling. We’re not about only beauty, but reality, force, and truth.

Therefore, to us, the American Idol construct sucks donkey balls. True, the show ultimately suffers only a moderate shortage of skilled singers, yet Idol’s bombastic production, ramped-up human drama, and hollow, obtrusive promotional partnerships cannot mask its dearth of credibility. See, I could stand up in English class and fluidly read from Crime And Punishment, but as I have not faced the challenges of life in 19th century Russia, my performance is bound to the realm of recitation. Likewise, nearly none of these Idol sucks emote or express in any real way. They are karaoke singers, impersonators, and students of mimicry. Not artists. Not in this lifetime.

And there is no place for these phonies in modern music. Their ranks are already swelled by the physically gifted and socially fortunate: ambitious models, drugged-out jewel thieves, puggish reality stars, and sidelining actors. Enough.

And yet, week ten of Idol was all about opportunity. Opportunity for training-wheels singers to exploit the pinnacle of American hit-making. Opportunity for big bonerz music producers and Idol minnows to hijack secondhand glow from Detroit’s finest bygone moments. Opportunity for Motown to hawk its back catalogue. Opportunity for the TV to help our society to tweak our ethnic and political history. Opportunity for Idol producers to preemptively explain the fallacy of soul music sung by the privileged and soulless (Motown’s hits were cough “music for everybody”). Best of all, it was an opportunity for all of us to glory in the majesty of Motown: It is not about chops; it is about emotion, experience, and backbone.

Idol so clearly lacks all three. So, only this last and most beneficial opportunity was missed. How sad. This show sucks! Alas, your Idol Remains recap of doom:

Click to read more…

Kudos to longtime reader Kuranes for picking up on this \m/ tidbit: it appears that Google now thinks heavy metal is more important than those substances sharing the same name which are good conductors of heat and electricity. Just search Google with the simple word “metal,” as shown above, and see for yourself.

As Kuranes so eloquently put it, “IN YOUR FACE SCIENCE.”

\m/

-VN

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

This week, in honor of Labor Day, we asked our writers:

WHAT’S THE ULTIMATE HEAVY METAL BBQ MUSIC?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

Click to read more…

Most of the time metalheads seem to inadvertently make fun of themselves just fine by playing into their stereotypes, but for the rest of the time we’re lucky we have folks like comedy troupe Shit Baby Panic and stand-up comedian Steve Hughes to make fun of them (us) for us. Pointing out homophobia in the metal community is a pretty obvious target because it’s so rampant, but Hughes does a fine job of making anyone who’s ever called someone else “gay” in jest feel silly about themselves. To wit:

-VN

Thanks: Adam Muirhead

MS Maniac King Cheezit just sent us the following e-mail:

Dear the merry gentlefucks at Metalsucks,

I come to you as a fellow metalhead and enjoyer of the reefer. If you enjoy watching The Wizard of Oz while listening to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, then boy oh boy do I have a suggestion for you! I just got out of Avatar in IMAX 3-D while completely stoned out of my mind, and there was only one ingredient missing (for me) and that was the sounds of Gojira. What a perfect way to blend such beautifully heavy progressive metal such as theirs with the intensely spiritual creation from Jame’s Cameron? Can you imagine the power of “From The Sky” during the fight scene in the end, or…well I won’t make any more suggestions to protect from spoiling said experience for anyone else, but I highly suggest the mixture of the three. Any other crazy interesting ideas to mix metal and weed besides just going to a show? I’d love to know, now that I’ve discovered this gem of an idea.

Thank you,

King Cheezit

Now, I actually hated Avatar. I know everyone loves it, but I was stoned outta my skull when I saw it, and I was still as bored as fuck. They really should have called it Avatard.

But His Majesty has a point: what are some good ways to mix metal and weed, besides just going to a show?

Click to read more…

I’ve spent plenty of time in this space discussing the myriad connections between classical music and heavy metal, a topic I always love falling back on when skeptics peg metal as a low-class art form (i.e. my relatives: “You do what for a living??”). Now the New York Times has given me some more cannon fodder by arguing that jazz and metal are artistic cousins, and since my family takes the New York Times as the bible and listens to NPR jazz broadcasts like they were State of the Union addresses I’ll be well-armed next time Aunt Sadie scoffs at why I’m not a lawyer or banker like all the other nice Jewish boys.

Jazz stages and metal stages are places where a certain kind of experimentation happens: brainy and cabalistic, with a hint of a smile. Both increasingly depend on educated virtuosos. In both genres you can develop curious harmonic worlds, warp the tempos, brush against folkloric or conservatory music, play many notes very speedily and engage sturdy American grooves or a more studied system of fitting odd-number beats into even-number meters. Pat Metheny, jazz guitarist, meet Paul Masvidal of Cynic; Jeff (Tain) Watts, jazz drummer, meet Tomas Haake of Meshuggah. Both forms seem to have a neatly divided audience: maybe two-thirds respectfully fixated on the music’s past, one-third concerned about building paradigms for the future.

And so on and so forth. Read the article at the fit-to-print website of the New York Times, and thank Suckalo Mark Moritz-Rabson for sending this one in.

-VN

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…

MetalForJesus.org

I could list the ways in which this site is awesome / mind-blowing, but that would just ruin the fun. Here’s a sample:

God bless your site. I found some songs by Children of Bodom on my 14 year old sons IPOD. I cried after reading the songs lerics online. Thank you for providing an alternative to secular metal. Please pray for my son Daniel. I love him so much.

Have a look, and be sure to click into some of those deeper pages… pure gold.

-VN

[Thanks: Bradley Z.]

No, not really… but you’d think so based on the Canadian pop duo’s new “metal” t-shirt design (above).

Part of me wants to like this t-shirt because it looks cool. Kudos to the designer for that. But the other part of me wants to say, “Man, fuck that.” The co-opting of metal culture, particularly the aesthetic, is not something that metalheads take lightly. I’m no member of the fashion police, but I think it’s fair to say that any Tegan & Sara fan wearing this shirt would be doing so ironically; “Haha, it’s Tegan & Sara but it *looks* metal. Get it?” That irony is a slap in the face to those of us who take metal seriously. I can’t speak for Tegan & Sara themselves — for all I know they could be cranking Gojira at 11 as I type this — but the likelihood of most of their fans being able to name one Metallica song outside of “Enter Sandman” (if that), let alone the name of one metal band new on the scene in the past 10 years that didn’t play at Bonnaroo, Coachella or <insert hipster festival here> is pretty damn unlikely. And something about that makes it seem rather unfair of them to bite off a hunk of metal culture for their own good.

Full disclosure: I loved Tegan & Sara’s 2004 mini-hit “Walking With a Ghost.” Fantastic song. But metal it is not.

So let’s keep apples to apples. Look; if one Tegan & Sara fan picks up a Carcass record because of this shirt, then mission accomplished. But it still rubs me the wrong way. What do you all think?

-VN

Of all the vintage videogame systems, the original Nintendo always had the best music. And something about it seemed to lend itself well to metal; there are plenty of websites offering metal-reinterpretations of classic NES music (among them the excellent Metroid Metal) and Horse the Band even took to calling their style “Nintendo Metal” for a while. But as far as I can tell there haven’t been any metal bands — or at least any good ones — that have done an admirable job of creating original Nintendo-based material.

Enter Dr. Zilog, the two-man Florida outfit that composes original metal using the actual sound-card from the original NES. Smoke a bowl to this shit and CRANK it, remembering the glory days of yore when things were simpler. Maybe magic mushrooms would be more appropriate.

-VN

An oldie but a goodie from The Onion:

“I remember a time not long ago when the Devil Horns were reserved for only the most righteous of person, deed, or riff,” Grand Elder Lemmy Kilmister said. “To see someone throwing the horns to his mate at the launderette because the clothes dryer came to a full stop just as he finished reading his copy of Circus… It breaks my heart.”

Touche.

-VN

Black t-shirts are as metal as it gets. Since the dawn of time*, metalheads have been donning black concert tees as a uniform; all other clothing, hair styling and accessorizing is pretty much secondary and unimportant as long as you’ve got a black t-shirt on. MetalGF constantly makes fun of my stacks of black t-shirts**; other than my gray Mastodon tee and a white Tool shirt, my entire shirt wardrobe is pretty much black. But you know what? I’m getting damn sick of it. It’s time to bring some color back to the metal palette and there’s no color better or more metal than… WHITE.

Click to read more…

Hey, it ain’t no secret — metalheads are a bunch of rowdy motherfuckers who like to party hard and make the most of the live show experience. Some booze it up, some get high, some do both, and some do God knows what — and I’m sure there are a percentage that go the straight edge route, too. So what’s your preferred method of intoxication for the live metal experience? Share your crazy metal party stories in the comments.

n

Since the readers of this site (and metalheads in general) are predominantly dudes, the illustrious MetalGF suggested an interesting poll on the matter. How do your significant others feel about your love for metal? I am genuinely curious. Girls and gays should feel free to chime in on the matter as well, as we’d love to hear your side of the story.

You may know MetalSucks contributor Corey Mitchell from his awesome day-by-day coverage of this year’s SXSW festival or his recent “Old Fart CD Reviews” column. But it turns out that the San Antonio-based metalhead is not just a writer for a hack blog, but a real, live, published author. His latest book Pure Murder has just hit the shelves, and Corey’s been kind enough to answer some questions for us about murder, metal, and how the two relate. Click through to read the entire fascinating interview

Tell us about your book Pure Murder.

It is the true story of the brutal murders of two teenage girls, Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Pena, 16, who were abducted, raped, strangled, and stomped to death by a group of six teenage boys in Houston in 1993. The girls were running late for their curfew and decided to take a shortcut through a public park when they stumbled across a gang initiation.

It is also the story of the struggle experienced by the parents of the girls and their fifteen-year legal odyssey that continues to this day. In fact, one of the six killers, Jose Medellin, is scheduled to be executed this August.

Click to read more…

Kind of in the same vein as Brian Posehn’s “Metal by Numbers,” but hilarious nonetheless. Muppets = funny.

-VN

[Thanks: MetalSucks reader bucketochicken]

It’s a sad state of affairs indeed when a line like this is actually news, from producer Tue Madsen about recording The Haunted’s new album:

“No click tracks, no triggers, no faking it… just good old making music the way it used to be back when you had to actually be able to play your shit to do it.”

Metal production itself has become a pretty sad state of affairs. Pro Tools has been both a blessing and a curse to the recording profession. The benefits are obvious; increased fidelity (though this is debatable), unlimited tracks and buses, precision mixing through advanced automation, and the ability to record as many takes as you’d like until you get it right. But it’s a double-edged sword; some might argue that these assets actually remove the “human” element from the recording process. After all, no one is perfect every time.

Which brings us to Madsen’s statement. What exactly qualifies as “faking it”? This is where the lines get very blurry. I, for one, do believe in click tracks — they make the performance tighter and make editing later in much, much easier. But what about triggers? Just about every metal band these days uses drum triggers (Roadrunner Records is even rumored to have a “triggers only” policy.). Are triggers cheating? If you argue that they are, then how is running an electric guitar through an amp and distorting the fuck out of it NOT cheating? What about mic’ing an amp with three different mics and recording each part multiple times for that “wall of sound” guitar effect, as most metal bands these days do?

What about “fixing” errant drum hits of an otherwise pristine performance? Vocal overdubbing? Sequencers?

Lots of folks argue that all this should be done away with and that recording should be live with the band members all standing in a room together to get the “true” sound. But it gets tricky here, too. Because the minute you plop a mic in front of an amp or a drum, that mic shapes the sound to something different than what it actually sounds like to stand in that room. And so does the mixing board and other cabling. There is no such thing is a “true” recording.

So where does that leave production for metal in the year 2008? Triggered, cut, layered and fake? I say why the hell not.*

-VN

*Just turn the bass up, please. Bass players have been getting the shaft mix-wise for years.

A press release came into the MetalSucks Mansion a few days ago about this heavy metal ballet called Memento Mori, and I kind of skipped it over… but man, this shit is just too intriguing not to post about. According to the press release:

Performances of Memento Mori are scheduled for May 23, 24, and 25, 2008, at the Baruch Performing Arts Center in New York City.  The material includes three world premieres – one from Negura Bunget, one from Funeral, and a new song from NYC’s own black / death / folk metal band, Gwynbleidd. Gwynbleidd will be performing their material live during the production. The company will also be performing to Celestiial, Japanische Kampfhoerspiele and Arsis (as seen on MTV2′s Headbanger’s Ball). Seating is limited and tickets will go fast.

Curious? Read on:

BALLET DEVIARE has established an international following with their powerful performances infused with contemporary heavy metal music. This is not your mother’s ballet, but “a soul-entrancing interpretation of art otherwise on the decline,” according to Todd DePalma of Stylus Magazine.

I mean, how could you not be at least a little intrigued by the prospect of little ladies in tu-tus tip-toeing around to blast-beats and sweep-picking? I certainly am. Didn’t you guys get the memo? — ballet is metal. A hipster in Williamsburg told me so.

-VN

This is another one of those “jesus christ, the Internet is amazing” moments (Thanks to MetalSucks reader Leo L. for the tip). Yes, there is actually a website called MetalMommies.com, and yes, it’s for moms who like metal and was started by a mom who, oddly enough, loves metal (from Mommyville, New Jersey. Where else?). And though the forum has a whopping total of 28 posts, I’d imagine that once metal mommies worldwide get wind of this site they’ll be well on their way to rocking the cradle. From the mission statement on the Metal Mommies MySpace page:

Life changed 3 years ago when my daughter was born. I met tons of other mom’s [sic] but none of them were really like me. I am a fan of metal! I decided to start Metal Mommies so other mom’s [sic] like me could have an online community. A community where you can talk about your love of metal music but also talk about your kids. The website is in the works. I am planning on a April 1, 2008 launch date. I will keep you all posted.

That says it all, doesn’t it? Stay tuned for the prospective May launch of Metal Daddies, hosted by infamous MetalSucks commenter Sammy. It’ll be like a Dream Theater show; all sausages.

-VN

Cripples shouldn’t get so drunk before they leave the house. But despite my lack of gravity-confidence, I wasn’t missing this fucking show. After hearing about half of Between The Buried And Me‘s riconkulous new album, Colors, I knew I had to take the opportunity to see the live show – broken shoulder/Halloween or not; who gives a fuck? Get wasted and go…see…METAL.

So last Wednesday (All Hallow’s Eve), this guy imbibed a half bottle of whiskey and headed out to brave the not-so-creepiness. I’m sure in many crevices of the city evil-doers and maniacal mischief-makers must have been tearing it loose, but thankfully I avoided too much nonsense and rolled up to the venue about 10 minutes before BTBAM was to go on.

Click to read more…

This band is my second favorite discovery of the last year, after these guys.

Earlier this Spring, five other people and I saw Apiary tear the Tap Bar at New York’s Knitting Factory to SHREDS, and my conception of what perfectly dissonant metalcore should be hasn’t been the same since.

The band’s precise, angular attack is extremely energetic, and not only incorporates straight-up metal influences but punk and thrash as well, and the amount of creamy dissonance the guitar players throw in almost warrants a new genre in itself.

Click to read more…