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Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (not really at all) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

Following the not-necessarily-logical-but-certainly-MetalSucksian conclusion that we need to counteract our recent Albums That Will Fuck Your Face Off in 2012 series, in which we preview some albums coming out this year about which we are totally stoked, this week we asked our writers:

WHAT ALBUM WILL HIT YOU IN THE FACE WITH A LIMP DICK IN 2012?

Which is just a silly way of asking:

WHAT IS YOUR LEAST ANTICIPATED ALBUM OF 2012?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump!

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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 took us a while to get industrial pioneers Ministry in the Decibel Hall of Fame — classic case of the classic lineup hating each other’s classic guts. But enterprising staffer Chris Dick finally convinced the infamous “Book Club” (Paul Barker, Bill Rieflin, Chris Connelly) to sit down together and reminisce upon the bad old days alongside polarizing ringleader Al Jourgensen, and now we’ve got a satisfyingly blunt, insightful and acrimonious history of The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste.

I seem to recall lobbying for The Land of Rape and Honey and/or Psalm 69 when Team dB was debating the apex of Ministry’s long run. Near the end of this HOF, Rieflin wisely notes that Mind is a transitional record between the two. Literally, yes, duh, but he’s underscoring how all over the place it is; and yet, it really does boast some of the most powerful hybrids of Ministry’s “phase B” and “C.” (“A” being the “Everyday Is Halloween” era, which we’ve all tried so hard to forget.) Honestly, though, I feel like this is an outfit that never quite captured a start-to-finish stone-cold classic. They admit as much in the piece, as the Book Club straight up obliterates the record’s penultimate industrial/hip-hop hybrid “Test” (Al’s idea). It’s much harder to fuck with “Thieves,” “So What” and “Burning Inside”—although Al certainly tries with the latter.

The good-times HOF is in the Skeletonwitch issue, obvs, but you tell us: Which Ministry album is at the top of your personal Hall of Fame? (Filth Pig will not get your knuckles smacked in this classroom.)

-AB

Yeah, you could just order Decibel’s November 2011 issue, which also features Alice Cooper, Machine Head, Chimaira, Brutal Truth, and an awesome Anaal Nathrakh flexi disc — but why not just get a full subscription to ensure that you never miss an issue?

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…

I’m digging the Skeletonwitch cover this month, but Chance Garnette looks like a younger version of this guy. THERE IS NO FUCKIN’ PUMPKIN ICE CREAM IN YOUR FUCKIN’ FUTURE.

Luckily, House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects never come up in J. Bennett’s comprehensive and revealing cover story on Athens, Ohio’s premier metal outfit (although Appalachian Death Ride sound promising—thanks, Wikipedia!). The blackened thrash quintet has been refining their (witch)craft over the last half-decade while dealing with annoying member turnover. Now Forever Abomination is poised to be their breakthrough; we’re obviously in their corner either way, seeing as how SW made their stamp on the Flexi Series just a month earlier.

The ’Witch headline a Halloween rogues’ gallery in November, including a Call & Response with Alice Cooper, an amusingly acrimonious HOF on Ministry’s The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, features on Goreaphobia and Exhumed, and a new Flexi with Anaal Nathrakh dressing up to deconstruct the Specials’ “Man at C&A.” And as always there’s plenty more razor blades embedded within. Subscribers will have the issue within the next three weeks, the rest of you can order it here now.

-AB

Yeah, you could just order Decibel’s November 2011 issue, which also features Machine Head, Chimaira, and Brutal Truth — but why not just get a full subscription to ensure that you never miss an issue?

The thing about Ministry is, sure, they were innovative, and sure, their live show has a lot of cool lights and effects and shit, but I think their music gets real boring real fast. It falls under the category of “too much of the same too quickly.” To give a recent example: Remember that single “Lies, Lies, Lies” from 2006′s Rio Grande Blood? Catchy fucking song, but I was shocked to learn that it’s just barely over five minutes long — ’cause it’s just the same thing, over and over and over again, and consequently feels like it’s an hour. And their whole catalog is basically like that. I remember when Al Jourgensen insulted Trent Reznor as just some Ministrwannabe back in the day, thinking, “Well, if you ever write a song as good as ‘Head Like a Hole’ or ‘Hurt,’ you might sell that many records, too.”

That being said, you do have to give Jourgensen and company their spot in history… and director Douglas Freel’s new documentary about the band,  Fix: The Ministry Movie, does look like a lot of fun. Besides covering the project’s entire history, it features interviews with Reznor (!) and Maynard James Keenan, who, in the trailer below, is, I think, but I’m not positive, is making a reference to the abandoned Tapeworm project he had with Reznor.

ANYWAY, here’s the trailer. The movie is gonna be doing four screenings (at least so far) this month and next month across the U.S.; get the screening schedule after the jump.

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I am not cool, but it occasionally appears that way cuz my incidental awareness of cutting-edge music. There’s a simple reason for that, one which I share with tons of other fortunates out there: I have an older sibling. She’s cool. She dated cool guys. Those cool punk and alternative and goth guys stopped at nothing to get within sniffing distance of her bod; as such, most found it worthwhile to cultivate the kid-brother endorsement.

The astute dudes recognized that the way to my heart is through my headphones and funneled a lot of free tapes (!) and CDs my way. (One particularly smitten Doc Martens aficionado worked at local college radio and hooked me up with my own evening time slot when I was 15.) My sister and I hardly got along, so my input on her suitors was never solicited, much less heeded; I thank her for neglecting to mention this fact to all those hornballs whose awareness of interesting music exploded my horizons.

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Trying to keep up with the changes at a music festival is like trying to herd a pack of rabid cats. The South by Southwest (SXSW) Music Festival is the biggest musical kitty corral of them all. That’s why you have me here to help you make heads or tails of all your SXSW metallic/hard rock/punk rock/experimental/etc. needs.

There have been plenty of line-up changes since my last SXSW music post over a week ago. First on the list is the welcome news that NOLA-sludgekings eyehategod will team up with doom metal pioneers Pentagram to close out the conference on Saturday, March 19 (both bands will be going on after midnight, so, technically, they are playing on March 20) at the Scoot Inn. They’ll be joined by a stellar group of bands including Cough and Naam.

Other notable additions include YOB, Slough Feg, and Zoroaster.

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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…

So, Immortal and Absu are doing a six-city quickie on this side of the pond in February — pretty cool that it’s not just the usual “three exclusive dates in Manhattan/Brooklyn” deal, but venturing into metal-friendly winter wastelands like Baltimore, Chicago and Denver. (I’m not saying anything positive about Pittsburgh ever, much less the week before the AFC Championship.)

Anyway, it doesn’t take a lazy, jaded music “journalist” like yours truly to reinforce the notion that the only thing better than seeing an amazing band who rarely plays the States is seeing an amazing band who rarely plays the States for free. And not just for free, but free after winning a completely arbitrary lottery contingent on you buying something! That’s just the opportunity that Immortal, Decibel and Nuclear Blast are offering for the following stateside six-pack:

2/19 – New York, NY – Gramercy Theatre (16 & older)
2/20 – Baltimore, MD – Sonar (all ages)
2/21 – Pittsburgh, PA – Mr. Small’s Theatre (all ages)
2/22 – Chicago, IL – Bottom Lounge (17 & older)
2/24 – Denver, CO – Summit Theatre (all ages)
2/26 – San Antonio, TX – Backstage Live (all ages)

Go here and snap up a copy of our Black Metal Hall of Fame Issue, featuring a six-page oral history on Immortal’s 1999 classic, At the Heart of Winter. You’ll be entered in a drawing to win two spots on the guest list for any one of the aforementioned gigs. There will be one winner per show, and said winner cannot opt out for the cash equivalent. Note: If you’ve already purchased the issue, you’re automatically eligible to win tickets.

Speaking of Immortal (horrible transition alert), you won’t be seeing their 1997 platter Blizzard Beasts in a dB HOF anytime soon, but you just may see it in our blog’s recurring Wednesday morning column, “Justify Your Shitty Taste.” I contributed a defense of Ministry’s Filth Pig this week — an album that I’m pleased and confounded to find that people actually tolerate 15 years later — and next week we’ll have our first contribution from a musician. Maybe someday— who knows — we’ll actually get a musician to defend his own album.

-AB

Regardless of whether or not you have shitty taste, you should check out the February 2011 issue of Decibel – or, better still, just go ahead and get a full subscription to ensure that you never miss an issue!

Anyone else relieved that Avatar didn’t win Best Picture last night? Not that the Oscars matter any more than any other award in the scheme of things, but, seriously. I’m over it with the blue cat people.

ANYWAY, the movie that did win, The Hurt Locker, is notable to metalheads primarily because the film implies that its protagonist, SSG William James (Best Actor nominee Jeremy Renner), is a metalhead – or, at least, a really big fan of Ministry. When the audience first meets James, he’s blasting “Khyber Pass” by Ministry, and two other Ministry songs, “(Fear) Is Big Business” and “Palestina,” are also used during the course of the movie.

Some may find this offensive – you could argue that metal is, once again, being used as short hand for “something’s seriously wrong with this dude,” as is the case in so many films – but here’s what I think is really interesting about it: some of the biggest criticisms against The Hurt Locker are that it is (allegedly, at least) apolitical; it doesn’t take a stance on the war in Iraq, it just portrays some of the soldiers fighting over there. But Ministry are anything BUT apolitical, and one listen to their music gives away their stance on the issue at hand. Did the filmmakers realize this when they selected that particular band’s music to be in the movie? It’s hard for me to believe it was just an arbitrary decision…

-AR

Poor Joey Jordison must get bored when he’s not busy with Slipknot; besides Corey Taylor and Clown, he’s easily the most visible member of the band, even when they’re on hiatus (as they are right now). This is extra-amazing when you consider the fact that, unlike Taylor or Clown, he doesn’t really have a side-project: the one he started, Murderdolls, released one album in 2002, did a whole bunch of touring behind it, and then promptly broke-up. (MD vocalist Wednesday 13 recently hinted at a possible Murderdolls reunion, but that doesn’t actually seem to be happening.) But Jordison constantly manages to stay in the spotlight, be it through producing gigs (3 Inches of Blood’s Fire Up the Blades) or, more often, guest spots with other well-known bands: he recorded some drums for Otep’s House of Secrets (as though Otep didn’t sound enough like Slipknot already), toured with Ministry, and did a few tour dates with Satyricon before a couple of their members got arrested on a kiddie-sex charge and that trek was canceled.

And now it’s been announced that Jordison will spend the spring and summer playing for Rob Zombie.

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We just received the following press release here at the MetalSucks Mansion. I don’t usually like to just cut and paste press releases, but in this instance I feel like I need to do so in order to make my point. So:

Ministry’s Uncle Al Jourgensen is apparently in the Christmas spirit, having created a Christmas video “card” for you and his fans that is also his very first solo project.

Al and good buddy Mark Thwait (Mission UK, Peter Murphy, Mob Research), collaborated on “It’s Always Christmas Time,” a tribute to friend and band mate Paul Raven (Ministry, Killing Joke, Mob Research) on the two-year anniversary of his passing in 2007. With Christmas less than two weeks away, it’s Al’s way of spreading his very own brand of holiday cheer.

Okay. That all sounds fair enough. But then I watched the actual video in question:

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So the nominations for the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards have been announced. The nominees for “Best Metal Performance” are slightly less embarrassing than usual – I’m assuming because the popularity of metal is on the rise, so some bands with actual talent are enjoying the spotlight. Here they are:

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Nachtmystium’s Black Meddle, Pt. 1 was one of the best albums of 2008, ending up at the top or near the top of most MS staffers’ top ten lists that year. So, naturally, Nachtmystium fans everywhere have been asking the question, “Hey, where the fuck is Black Meddle, Pt. II?”

Well, hey, guess what? The band has issued an update to that very query on their MySpace page:

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Metal Legacies is an ongoing memorial to extreme music pioneers who kicked the proverbial bucket way too soon.

[MetalSucks contributor Corey Mitchell managed Eric Powell's band, 16volt, from 1996-1998. He asked Powell to write about his friend and bandmate, Raul Raven, for the Metal Legacies series.]

by Eric Powell

Life. It goes by too fast and comes at you too slow. When you are 14, all you want is to be 16 so you can get the keys to the car and just drive, just drive wherever — fucking freedom. It seems like those two years take forever. You count the milliseconds waiting for your ticket out of hell. Then you blink your eyes and all of a sudden you wonder what happened to your twenties, then your thirties, and it’s all a flash. Those two years you waited for the keys to a car, barely a blip. You look back at all the days and at all the scars, and mostly at the memories, now rich with texture and variance, they blur together weaving a sort of out-of-body, self propelled storyline that hopefully ends with some kind of impact.

At some point in our lives we hopefully realize that everything we do counts for something. A never ending chain of events both understated and exaggerated, and our choices link together to write a tangled, barely understandable life story. We hopefully get to a point where our experience with time develops a conscience — a self-aware state where we appreciate all that we missed and we miss all that we didn’t.

Some are born lucky, falling into a calling early, riding it like a well built clipper attacking uncharted seas, often a rough ride, but the ride never lets them down. It’s a single threaded path holding true to itself, a line drawn by our own internal and elusive drive. These lucky few charge ahead with no rules, saber in hand, slashing and gnawing effortlessly through what seem like goals in life, but come off as merely happenstance.

You can apply this babble to the chosen few who get to play music for a living, who get to tour for a living, who make it into the “club” — a silent brotherhood of merry thieves living on the outskirts of society, in the lounges of tour buses and in the dirty back stage areas of outdated concert venues. Gathering in dark hallways to share stories of their battles over catered liquors and fruit plates, duty free cigarettes, and handheld HD video cameras, a broken generator, a sprained wrist, an amp exploding, Roman candle fights in the middle of Montana. So much that can never be spoken. Things left to the moments and events that will never be uttered, the code keeping everyone’s skeletons secret to only the lucky bastards who get to live and witness the real deal. It all falls under the banner of “Rock and Roll,” right?

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This new song from the Greatest Horror Director of All Time is actually called “What?” As in, “What? Is that Al Jourgensen singing?”

But, no, seriously. Is that Al Jourgensen singing? ‘Cause if it ain’t, he should sue.

Rob’s new offering, Hellbilly Deluxe 2: Noble Jackals, Penny Dreadfuls, and the Longest Fucking Title Ever Given to an Album Not Recorded by Fiona Apple, comes out November 17.

-AR

Thanks to Jonathon Edwards for the tip!

Let’s face it: Ministry without Paul Barker just isn’t the same. Nothing on Houses Of The Mole, Rio Grande Blood, or The Last Sucker offered the thrills and low-end chills of albums like Psalm 69 and Filth Pig. As a longtime industrial music fanatic, I am sick and fucking tired of being let down every time Al Jourgensen puts out new music. His latest outing, the positively plebeian cash-in Sex-O Olympic-O, should never have been released under the Revolting Cocks name. Enough is enough! The time has come for Hypo Luxa and Hermes Pan to hug-it-the-fuck-out!

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By all accounts, the Meshuggah / Cynic / The Faceless tour earlier year was exactly the masturbatory dude-fest it promised to be from the get-go. With a lineup like that, how could it be anything less than completely mindblowing? Before the show I had the opportunity to catch up with Meshuggah guitarist Marten Hagstrom. I asked him about the touring lifestyle, how the band’s sound has evolved and changed over the years, Meshuggah’s now near-legendary cult status, and one question that really got his goat about the hoardes of Swedish melodic death metal bands that have grown to popularity in recent years. Our chat, after the jump.

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My first Fuck Rolling Stone post on metal singers was such a hit I thought I’d dig back into the RS archives and stir up some more shit. So, I decided to re-read their summertime list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time (also here).

Thankfully, there are a few metallic (but mostly rockish) noteworthy icons; however, extreme metal is woefully ignored. Nonetheless, the list did include Jimi Hendrix (#1), Jimmy Page (#9), Kirk Hammett (#11), Kurt Cobain (#12), Johnny Ramone (#16), Tom Morello (#26), Thurston Moore/Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) (#33/#34), Joe Perry (#48), Ritchie Blackmore (#55), Vernon Reid (#66), Eddie Van Halen (#70), Adam Jones (Tool) (#75), D. Boon (The Minutemen) (#89), Glen Buxton (Alice Cooper) (#90), Wayne Kramer/Fred “Sonic” Smith (MC5) (#92/#93), Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine) (#95), Angus Young (#96), Leigh Stephens (Blue Cheer) (#98), Greg Ginn (Black Flag) (#99), and Kim Thayil (Soundgarden) (#100).

And, yet another reason why we here at the MetalSucks Mansion like to say “Fuck Rolling Stone!” — coming in at #86, TOMMY Iommi…yes, “TOMMY.” How the fuck do you not know the first name of one of the true legends of not only metal, but of rock guitars? Hmmmmmmmm….Please, clue me in.

IT’S TONY, YOU FUCKS!!!

Anyway, here is my stab at the best Metal Guitarists of All Time — and for a point of reference, my Old Fartness will be shining through here, as will my love for rhythm guitarists:

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Even now that Slayer are Grammy winners, I don’t think any metalhead really gives a flying fuck about the Grammys. But, what the fuck – here are this year’s nominees for “Best Metal Performance”:

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A few weeks ago I was offered the opportunity to sit down and talk with Ascension of Watchers and ex-Fear Factory frontman Burton C. Bell, a chance I jumped at right away. Bell was quite the gentleman, sitting through a long interview and answering my questions about the new Ascension of the Watchers album Numinosum (read my review here), his past career with Fear Factory, working with Al Jourgensen of Ministry, and a whole lot of other topics. The full chat transcript, after the jump.*

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As opposed to Ministry’s headline performance (read Axl’s review), Meshuggah absolutely fucking destroyed last night at NYC’s Irving Plaza. It seems like a good chunk of metalheads at last night’s show in NYC were there strictly for Meshuggah — after all, U.S. tours for the band are few and far between. Eight string guitars? Check. Forward head-banging? Check. Gut-wrenching, precision drumming? Double-check.

What is there really to say about Meshuggah that you don’t already know? They’re fucking awesome, they make your head spin, they are br00tal, yadda yadda. Cosmo Lee of Invisible Oranges (and lots of other mags you read) summed it up better than I possibly could, anyways:

Yet Meshuggah provoke a profound bodily response. People sway, nod their heads, or simply close their eyes. It’s trance music in the true sense. The key is Tomas Haake, whom only Vinnie Paul rivals in steely precision and groove. Meshuggah cut through the testosterone bullshit that “groove” in metal usually entails, and tap into something truly primal. Yes, they’re cerebral – but towards physical ends. Their sonic vice grips probably light up the same areas of my brain that addiction does. Like how certain psychedelic experiences weren’t possible before synthesized drugs, Meshuggah couldn’t have existed 30 years ago. They’re that rare band for whom today’s antiseptic, hyper-compressed production is perfectly appropriate.

See? MESHUGGAH!!!!

-VN