So recently word got out that Trent Reznor is not only going to be scoring, but will apparently also be acting in, a retarded-sounding new movie called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, from the same idiot who brought you Wanted. (And please allow me to take a moment to give credit where credit is due, something too many of our fellow bloggers/web journalists/whatever fail to do — Badass Digest, and no one else, originally broke this story. It’s a huge scoop, and they deserve a pat on the back.) And a lot of fans — like me! — were, well, concerned about that project, to say the least.

But Trent, ever the diplomat and not dipshit, has taken a moment out of his busy schedule to confirm the story on the Nine Inch Nails forums — and clear up a few things. I’ll post his full statement at bottom of this post, but here’s the Reader’s Digest version:

• Yes he’s acting in the movie but it’s just a cameo, not a leading or even supporting role.
• The whole thing was supposed to be a surprise, but now that’s ruined.
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is gonna be awesome.
• He’s working on new music for How to Destroy Angels.
• He’s also working on new Nine Inch Nails music.

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Hey Trent Reznor: You just won the Oscar! What are you gonna do now? Are you going to Disneyland???

“Fuck no! I’m gonna jump on the vampire bandwagon, that’s what I’m gonna do!”

Yep yep. According to Badass Digest, Academy Award winner Trent Reznor will not only score, but will also act, in the upcoming movie adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which is about exactly what you think it’s about. Reznor will apparently play the vampire who kills Lincoln’s mother, thereby setting the future president (he’s being played here by 29 year-old Benjamin Walker) down his path as a, uh, y’know. Vampire hunter. Talk about giving new meaning to With Teeth! (I had to get it outta my system. Please disregard.)

Okay, so as regular readers are aware, I’m usually Pro-Reznor all the way. But this is a terrible fucking idea, for a number of reasons:

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Yes, that’s correct: last night, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won the Oscar for Best Original Score for their work on The Social Network. That’s not really a surprise — they’ve been winning awards for their score pretty much since the movie came out back in October — but still, I doubt that anyone ever really thought that this dude would some day win an Academy Award:

In any case, mazel tov to Reznor and Ross — their score really is quite brilliant, and they deserve a pat on the back.

You can download The Social Network score or just six bucks here. In case you didn’t see it last night, enjoy video of Reznor and Ross’ acceptance speech after the jump.

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If you’re reading this, then presumably the headline enticed you and you already know what you’re getting into. So why waste time? Here are some funny/interesting ways in which metal and Hollywood are currently overlapping:

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So yesterday, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross got an Oscar nomination for their score for The Social Network. I didn’t write anything about it because a) I was too busy fuming that somehow Christopher Nolan didn’t get a Best Director nod for Inception, and b) it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Reznor and Ross would be nominated, so it didn’t really feel like news. Still, it will be great if a few weeks from now we can start referring to the Nine Inch Nails mastermind as “Oscar winning composer Trent Reznor.”

But, no, the much more interesting cinemetal story to break this week is that Slash — who announced the formation of Slasher Films, a production company devoted to creating “edgy contemporary horror fare with a nod to the thrillers of the ’70s and ’80s,” back in October — has now started to discuss his first potential projects as a movie producer. From an interview that Entertainment Weekly conducted with the guitarist at the in-progress Sundance Film Festival:

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Yep — The Social Network cleaned up at the Golden Globe Awards last night, surprising no one, and one of its shiny new statues was for the score, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. You can watch a really, really shitty-quality clip of their acceptance speech below.

Even though I thought that The Social Network was overrated as a film, it’s hard for me to begrudge Reznor and Ross their success, ’cause the score is really fantastic. And it will be pretty funny if/when these guys take home the Osar next month; as Vince put it, “So many old goths will be so pissed!”

While you wait for that to happen, Amazon is selling the score for just five bucks, so you should go ahead and download that if you don’t already have it. There’s also a pretty lengthy, and totally fascinating, segment on how Reznor and Ross did the score on the DVD and Blu-ray release of the movie; basically, Reznor dicks around for an hour, and then Ross takes said dicking around and turns it into music. Kind of amazing.

-AR

The Social Network has been winning pretty much every critics’ award available to it, and seems poised to score big at the Oscars, too; and the score has made composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Golden Glob Nominees, and we may yet find them thanking the Academy on February 27.

So it should shock no one to learn that, in a recent interview with The New York Times, Reznor revealed that he and Ross will re-team with The Social Network director David Fincher to score Fincher’s next movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

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We’ve known for awhile now that Atlanta’s From Exile were working on a Nine Inch Nails covers EP; we’ve even gotten to hear a sample of the band’s version of “Ruiner,” which, I wrote in September, “promises that these covers will most certainly not be rote re-recordings of the original.”

Well, now the band has released a preview of another NIN cover, “The Great Below,” and this sounds so little like the original (from 1999′s The Fragile) that I’m not even sure I would have recognized it if I didn’t know what it was. Which is awesome! I’ve long said there’s no point to doing covers if you’re not gonna put your own spin on it, ’cause you’ll never be able to just top the original. And this sounds pretty killer:

There’s still no official release date for the EP, but it will be available for free download (!!!) sometime this spring right here. The band is also playing a gig at the Earl in Atlanta this Friday night; get details here and go if you can. I’ve never seen these dudes live, but I have to assume they rule.

-AR

The Golden Globes, in case you don’t know, are the film awards handed out each year by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which is exactly what it sounds like. They’re considered to be second only to the Oscars in terms of prestige, which is wholly ridiculous, since a) as opposed to the awards handed out by the various unions (e.g., the Director’s Guild, the Screen Actor’s Guild, etc.), they are almost never a good indication of who will win an Oscar, and b) there’s only like eighty-something people on the HFPA and you’re allowed to throw them parties and buy them things, a.k.a. bribe them to vote for you.

Still, it’s hard to be mad that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have received a nomination for “Best Original Score” for their work on The Social Network. I thought the movie was pretty disappointing overall (this was the most accurate review I read of the movie), but I think Reznor and Ross’ score is pretty brilliant.

Their fellow nominees include Hans Zimmer for Inception (the score for which is going to show up multiple times on musician’s year-end “best of lists” here on MetalSucks, believe it or not), Danny Elfman for Alice in Wonderland, Alexandre Desplat for The King’s Speech, A.R. Rahman for 127 Hours. I have no idea what their chances of winning are, and, again, these awards are pretty meaningless… but it would be pretty funny if they ended up at the Oscars eventually.

You can see the full list of nominees here if you’re interested.

-AR

12 looped seconds of “Checkmate,” one of 70-something songs from the Chinese Democracy sessions that will probably never see the light of day.

A couple of weeks ago Eyal wrote a great installment of “Jumping Darkness Parade” in which he asserted that “the only thing you can trust is for a person to be who they are, not who they tell you they are.” Past behavior is always the best indicator of future behavior.

And the past behavior of Axl Rose tells us that if we ever get a follow-up to Chinese Democracy, it won’t be for a very, very long time. It was four years in-between the release of Appetite for Destruction and Use Your Illusion, nearly two of which were spent just recording the latter albums, and all signs point to Axl being the source of the long wait; then it was SEVENTEEN more years before the release of Democracy. Even if you consider that Axl and all the various incarnations of GN’R didn’t start working on that album until roughly 1995, and the that recording was allegedly (finally) completed circa 2006, that’s STILL eleven years. Based on this information, I have worked out a mathematical formula for how long it will take Axl to record each subsequent Guns N’ Roses album, which is as follows:

TIME IT TOOK TO RECORD THE LAST ALBUM + NINE ADDITIONAL YEARS = TIME IT WILL TAKE TO RECORD THE NEXT ALBUM

According to this precise formula, if Axl Rose’s Rock N’ Roll Circus enters the studio to make a follow-up to Chinese Democracy in 2011, then the album will be released in 2031. By that time, Axl will be almost 70 years old, Dj Ashba will be almost 60 years old, and Slash will theoretically be 66 but, let’s face it, will more likely be dead (or, at least, still searching for a suitable replacement to take Scott Weiland’s spot in Velvet Revolver). There probably won’t be a MetalSucks in 2031, there almost certainly won’t be a record industry, and there definitely won’t be a Best Buy for Axl to con into carrying a record he has no intention of properly promoting. And I can’t for the life of me figure out who would fund such an endeavor anyway.

And yet Dj Ashba has the audacity to “promise” fans that the next album “won’t take as long” to record and release:

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On the recommendation of a couple of my best enemies, I finally listened to Nine Inch Nails‘ The Fragile from start to finish.

If you’re a somewhat regular reader of this god-awful website, you surely know the respect and man-love both Axl & Vince seem to share for one Trent Reznor, and in absorbing their consistently laudatory analyses of Reznor’s music and savvy business decisions, I will admit I’ve been repeatedly intrigued along the way.  But until now my experience with the Nails was pretty much limited to a couple of their singles, most notably this (which I was always a huge fan of).

And now, having heard what many repute as the best NIN album, I can safely hypothesize that Reznor is a severely masochistic, battle-scarred, honest artist who isn’t afraid to let the pain come through.  The industrialicious musical style is not always my cup of Twinings tea, but there are certainly several solid grooves throughout, and the raw, candid nature of the lyrics offers a precious look inside a tortured soul who’s doing good with his suffering.  I’m not surprised one bit that so many people have connected so deeply with homeboy’s cannon (even though Pitchfork inevitably ripped The Fragile a new one way back when).

A couple of my fave lines from the (Right) album:

“I tried to save myself, but my self keeps slipping away…”

“All I do….I can still feel you.”

No doubt many of us can relate.

Say hello again to a couple of old-school NIN videos after the jump…

Happy Saturday!!

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In case you can’t tell by all the posting I’ve been doing about the soundtrack, I really wanna see The Social Network. It’s just like the story of how MetalSucks was created, only we didn’t go to ivy league schools, we’re not billionaires, and we haven’t sued each other (yet). How dare David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin steal our life story!

Speaking of our life story, here’s how we amused ourselves this week:

• We debuted new music by The Fucking Wrath.
• Intronaut’s Sacha Dunable wondered if America really has any talent, The Red Chord’s Greg Weeks discussed the NFL with Job for a Cowboy’s Charn, and Daath’s Eyal Levi taught us about proper etiquette for being a houseguest.
• We spoke to Eric Guenther from From Exile and the new Daath album.
• We checked out new releases by The Serpent & The Siren as well as Mutant Supremacy, Pyrrhon and Parasitic Extirpation.
• We found out that way more of you like nu-metal than we thought.
• We learned how to look like a hot metal chick.
• We bemoaned the latest batch of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees.
• We watched the new Cephalic Carnage video and now we’re afraid we’ll never get a boner again.
• We got excited about the first awesome tour of 2011.
• We declared Cradle of Filth to be a glam band now.

Have a good weekend, folks. See ya Monday!

-AR

Trent Reznor may have dissolved Nine Inch Nails, but the coolest rock star in pretty much the history of ever is still keeping plenty busy. Earlier this week, he released the score the co-composed with Atticus Ross for The Social Network, charging just three bucks for a download from Amazon for the for the fist 48 hours; shock of shocks, Deadline reports that it’s been the Amazon mp3 store’s top seller ever since. (As of this writing, the soundtrack is still available for a mere $2.99; it will go up to a whopping $4.99 later today. It’s not metal, but it is fucking great. Go get it.)

Meanwhile, /Film has a fifty-minute (!) audio interview with Reznor regarding the score, in which the always-loquacious goth idol gives some interesting insights into the music. You can stream or download it here.

And as if all that wasn’t enough to scratch your Reznor itch, try this: Remember how Trent wanted to do an HBO series based on his album Year Zero? I can’t blame if you don’t; that was more than two years ago. But lest we forget, the film and television business can move very, verrrrrry slowly. And so I was elated to see that the project is apparently still alive. Reznor tells the Los Angeles Times:

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I’m violating our usual posting schedule for the second time this week because this news is time-sensitive, and my fellow Reznorians will never forgive me if I don’t make them aware of this ASAP.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score for The Social Network is currently available at Amazon for three bucks… but only for forty-eight hours. After that the price is gonna rise to five bucks, which is still pretty cheap, but, y’know… these are tough times, so why not save the two bucks if you can? And I’m listening to this score right now, and it’s really great, so I don’t know why you’d hesitate anyway.

Also, if you want a higher-quality version of the soundtrack, you can now pre-order a CD, Blu-ray, or 180g vinyl here; all pre-orders come with an immediate download in your choice of format.

And as if all that weren’t enough, Reznor is holding a re-mix contest, natch. The grand prize winner gets a trip to LA to meet Reznor and Ross, and opening night tickets to see the flick. So that’s pretty sweet. The only hiccup is that the deadline is MIDNIGHT TONIGHT, so if you wanna enter, you had better get crackin’. Go here to get all the details and enter.

Finally, I leave you with this interesting observation that Renn Brown made over at C.H.U.D.:

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In other news, Trent Reznor continues to be an awesome dude.

Back in July, Mr. Self-Destruct himself announced that he and his longtime collaborator, Atticus Ross, would be scoring David Fincher’s new film, The Social Network; now they’re taking pre-orders for that score (in a variety of formats, natch), and, at the same site, giving away five songs for free if you’re willing to hand over your e-mail address.

A statement from Reznor regarding the subject reads as follows:

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Back in July we found out that Trent Reznor and his longtime collaborator, Atticus Ross, were composing the score for the upcoming, completely awesome-looking drama, The Social Network; now the movie’s website is live, and there’s some weird, ambient, uh… well, it’s more like buzzing than music, but I know that some people are speculating that it’s part of Reznor and Ross’ contribution to the film. And while we can’t confirm this just yet, it certainly sounds like something Reznor might do. And if it is part of the score for the film, well… holy shit. I guess Reznor wasn’t kidding when he said that the film was really “dark.”

Check it out here and let us know what you think. The Social Network opens October 1 in the U.S.

-AR

[via C.H.U.D.]

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

There weren’t any real hot button topics this week, so we decided to just play a fun game that used to keep Vince and Axl occupied for many a lunch period when they were kids:

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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A lot of people think that the work of Aaron Sorkin is too treacly and stylized, and while I certainly understand that complaint, I tend think that, overrall, he’s one of the most entertaining (and certainly one of the most distinctive) writers out there these days. Everyone and their mother can quote A Few Good Men, Sports Night was one of the best series ever to get prematurely cancelled by a stupid network, and The West Wing won a shit ton of accolades for a reason. Sure, Studio 60 and Charlie Wilson’s War were a little on the meh side, but his 2007 Broadway play, The Farnsworth Invention, was engrossing and educational.

The Social Network, Sorkin’s script about the creation of Facebook, made The Blacklist (a Hollywood compilation of the most-read and most-enjoyed unproduced screenplays) a couple of years back, and the announcement that David Fincher — he of Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac, and Benjamin Button fame (to name but a few) — was going to direct the film was certainly reason to get excited about it.

More reason to get excited: Trent Reznor has announced that he’s been hired to score the film. From the official NIN website:

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Despite everything that’s gone on politically in America since 2001, the voice of Zack de la Rocha has been noticeably absent from the public debate. His less-than-amicable departure from Rage Against The Machine in 2000 halted that group for several years, and other than an EP from his One Day As A Lion project he has not released new music. Thankfully, his lack of creative output is not indicative of his dedication to human rights and civil rights, as his commitment to a new endeavor called The Sound Strike makes clear.

A reaction to Arizona’s odious, fearmongering and (in this writer’s opinion) racist legislation SB 1070, The Sound Strike is an effort to organize artists in a civil non-violent action against that state. What it amounts to is a boycott of Arizona by musicians, who vow not to perform in those states. A full list of the artists that have joined this can be found here, but the names that will matter to readers of this site include Nine Inch Nails, Rise Against and Joe Satriani as well as Rage Against The Machine and related projects like Street Sweeper Social Club. Now obviously this is a contentious issue, and I suspect more than a few of you prefer to keep your music and your politics separate. Still, these artists are taking a stand against what they see as an injustice, and even if you disagree with their positions or their choosing to boycott Arizona, you ought to respect their reasons. I encourage you to check out the above video, in which Señor de la Rocha explains his stance. Then, sign the petition and–if you’re in a band–you can add yourself to the list of artists participating in the Arizona boycott.

-GS

So Maynard James Keenan has said that Tool are working on their next album, and that “If it comes together” they may even play some new shit live this summer. I’m always totally down for some new Tool, so I won’t even say what we’re all thinking, which is “It might be nice to a get a new Tool album in under five years for a change.” I mean, we’d heard that Tool were in writing mode back in 2008, but whatever. It’s Tool. If they need that time to make the best possible record that they can, I’ll go along with it.

But a new Tool album was always a foregone conclusion; the band may very well break our hearts and throw in the towel one day, but we are (very luckily) not there yet.

So more interesting, in a way, is the news that writing has begun on a new album for A Perfect Circle. Not “more interesting” in a APC > Tool way, ’cause, come ON, that would just be a ridiculous argument to try and make. Interesting in the “Oh, cool, A Perfect Circle really aren’t done” kinda way.

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