When ex-Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy announced an unlikely collaboration with John Sykes (above left, the guy who wrote Whitesnake’s huge album), it was easy to be of two minds: On the one hand, Portnoy had reactivated the long-dormant Sykes, which is awesome; but, jeez, the Portnoy-Sykes affair also set a roadblock before any potential reunion of Blue Murder, Sykes’ awesomely awesome supergroup with drummer Carmine Appice and farty Tony Franklin. That’s a bummer.

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I like doing MetalSucks, in part, because I really do learn something new each and every week. You know what I learned this week, for example?

FUCK VAMPIRES.

Here are some other things we learned this week:

• The dudes in Lazarus A.D. like MetalSucks.
• Swamp Thing and Indian have awesome new music coming out.
• The Human Abstract’s A.J. Minette and Travis Richter know a lot about music theory, Mr. Big’s Eric Martin knows a lot about Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and Vicious Rumors’ Geoff Thorpe knows a lot about line-up changes.
• The new Rotten Sound album is choice.
• Earache Records is a good label.
• Kittie are bad at making music videos.
• TesseracT are tardy to the djent party.
• Joey Belladonna still can’t sing.
• Rites of Darkness III is gonna be a great festival for bands no one has ever heard of.
• Losing someone you admire still sucks.

I’ll be flying solo for much of next week as Vince and Kip head down to Austin for SXSW and I stay behind to ensure you are as irritated as possible. Won’t you come back and learn some more with me?

-AR

When I was very young, I remember having an intensely heated argument with my mom over who sang, “Wild World.” I insisted it was Mr. Big while she tried in vain to tell me it was a cover of a Cat Stevens song. Of course, she was right. But she should’ve known better than trying to reason with a smart-ass eight-year-old.

My mom has never spoken to Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam, and probably never will due to his lifestyle and beliefs. I, however, did get to speak to Eric Martin lead singer of Mr. Big. So I still win.

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If you don’t understand what that headline is a reference to, you’ve probably got the intelligence of the average fan of said band. And you probably believe in real-life transformers, characters from Street Fighter and the planet Nibiru.

Elsewhere, Deicide had a solid first week while Motorhead and Crowbar had solid second weeks on the Soundscan charts. Let’s check those out and see what else was poppin’.

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Once again, the only hard rock and metal albums shifting units* are classics, red state rock, and greatest hits packages. Just look at this screen cap from this week’s Top Hard Music chart:

With all due respect to Avenged Sevenfold, Times of Grace and All That Remains — the only bands with newish albums on that list with some level of modern metal legitimacy (whether you like those bands or hate ‘em) — the above screen cap is proof that album sales are not just tanking, but taking a vertical nosedive straight into oblivion.

In any case, all wasn’t lost last week. Motorhead and Crowbar made decent debuts, while Red continued their dominance. And, uh… Mr. Big.

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It was a long weekend, and seemingly eight thousand fucking bands all decided to put out music videos while we were away. Let’s check ‘em out and see if any of them are decent, shall we?

First up we have a video for “Larvae” by Portal. This band pushes so many envelopes they were all offered jobs at the post office, so I’m disappointed they couldn’t come up with a more innovative video. This clip is seriously boring as fuck, as I have no idea what’s going on. Which is how some people feel about Portal’s music, I guess. So, in that regard, this video is a success!

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Guitarist Paul Gilbert is a renaissance man, a master of performance, composition, rhetoric, and ahem playing guitar with a drill. He’s the creator of blinding shredgasms as part of Racer X (“Scarified”) and of one of history’s most charming singles in Mr. Big (“Green-Tinted Sixties Mind”). But as a self-proclaimed man on a mission, Gilbert’s passion is to put play back in guitar player through both his teaching (at GIT) and his riotous and bizarrely informative columns (in Guitar Player, Guitar World, Total Guitar, Total Fucking Guitar, and Guitar Out The Yingyang). Meanwhile, Gilbert and fellow Pittsburghian Freddie Nelson are responsible for United States, a scrappy, infectious melodic rock record that, if not for the mind-mangling fretwork, would be claimed happily by Cheap Trick, Jellyfish, U2, and Stone Temple Pilots as their own work.

After the jump, Gilbert speaks about Nelson, rocking the young people of Italy, Mr. Big’s conquest of Japan, plagiarizing L.A. Weekly, why not to study sight-reading, the joys of singing, and The Chicken Heart.

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I think I’m pretty knowledgeable when it comes to hair metal and cock rock, but I honestly couldn’t discuss any Mr. Big song that isn’t “To Be With You.” Apparently I’m not alone: the band has 124 songs currently on iTunes, ten of which are really just “To Be With You;” six of those ten take spots as the band’s ten most purchased songs. In other words: when Billy Sheehan dies, this song will be mentioned very close to the top of his obituary.

ANYWAY, the band is apparently reuniting for some shows in Japan, a.k.a. the only place where most hair metal musicians are still considered stars. I’d express jealousy that the bands Japanese fans will get to indulge and us Americans will not, but I honestly don’t give a shit; somebody call me when the two versions of  L.A. Guns finally reconcile.

-AR