MetalSucks

Vince brought the shits back with him from Egypt and in the past twenty-four hours I’ve been hit with a cold so bad that I’m probably gonna go to sleep right around the time I hit “publish” for this post. So before I pass out, here’s a run-down of what we did while Vince was playing Camel jockey:

• We spoke to Mutiny Within’s AJ Jacobs and producer/mixer Kevin Antreassian.
• As I Lay Dying’s Nick Hipa discussed fate versus free will on L O S T.
• We premiered “The Last Horse” by Tiger Flowers.
• We checked out new releases by Xasthur and Borknagar and read a book by Andy McCoy, too!
• Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy is recording with Avenged Sevenfold; black is white, up is down, cats love dogs.
• The new Bullet For My Valentine song makes a lot of people angry, either ’cause you had to tweet about it just to hear it or simply because it exists.
• One thing MS Suckalos seem to agree upon: Jake E. Lee was not Ozzy’s best guitar player.

Okay, NyQuil time. See ya Monday!!!

-AR

This is yet another story I probably don’t have to write, given that the sheer number of reader e-mails I’ve received about it suggest that you all know already. But in case you somehow haven’t heard, the headline says it all: Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy will play drums on the new Avenged Sevenfold album, filling in for recently deceased drummer James Owen “The Rev” Sullivan.

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Whenever people talk about modern metal production, the conversation inevitably turns to drum triggering. People always tell me that they think it’s bullshit and that they hate drum triggering, that they think it’s cheating. They’re wrong, and I’m going to tell you why.

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It’s not that I think that the members of Napalm Death and Dream Theater have a limited musical palette. Quite the contrary; I’d imagine the musicians that make up these particular bands probably have very diverse tastes.

Still. If I found out that Alex Webster listened to a lot of Roni Spektor, I wouldn’t expect a collaboration between the Russian chanteuse and the death metal legend, y’know?

So. Tom Fassnidge sent us this video of Napalm Death’s Barney Greenway teaming up with some of the dudes from Dream Theater to cover Metallica’s “Damage Inc.” It’s an old video – lookit Barney’s hair!!! – but neither Vince nor myself had ever seen it before. And it’s pretty awesome – look at how much fun Petrucci and Portnoy are having! And, yes, I know that DT have covered entire Metallica albums live in concert before. But it’s the “WHAT THE FUCK IS A MEMBER OF NAPALM DEATH DOING UP THERE?” of it all that makes this video truly worthwhile, in my opinion at least.

Extra bonus: for those of us who find James LaBrie to be a big gaping vagina, we now get to see what DT might be like with singer who isn’t a eunuch.

-AR

Most Dream Theater fans consider the band’s peak to have spanned the era starting with 1994’s Awake and extending through 2002’s double-disc opus Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (excepting 1997’s bland and boring Falling Into Infinity). I’d actually argue that the band’s “golden” era extended one album further through Train of Thought, unquestionably the band’s heaviest offering ever, if not just because of the good songwriting but for the fact that this was the last album on which the band pushed themselves forward. Since then (Octavarium, Systematic Chaos) Dream Theater have settled into cruise control, pumping out decent but ultimately unspectacular prog metal albums that don’t so much tread new ground as walk confidently atop terrain already explored. The band’s latest, Black Clouds and Silver Linings, continues in this vein; it’s the third album in a row to show little to no musical progression (isn’t this supposed to be “progressive” metal?) and as such ends up feeling mostly same-sounding and… meh. Still, it’s hard to knock anything Dream Theater do too heavily; the band already indelibly changed the metal landscape once, and anything they do warrants at the very least a rating of “pretty good.”

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Even before we were an “industry type” (I think we can safely call ourselves that now), I loved the fact that Roadrunner Records posts their staffers and some of the artists “best of” lists every year; these people work at/with one of the biggest metal labels out there, so it’s pretty interesting to see what they were grooving on from year to year.

The 2008 lists are on Roadrunner’s website now. Here are some highlights:

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No… no, there isn’t. Even in those rare moments when he’s just playing a simple beat he’s so deep in the pocket it’s fucking ridiculous.

Apparently this comes from a DVD called Drums of Thought, which features Mike’s Drum-cam footage from Dream Theater’s Train of Thought recording sessions.

-VN