Firewind’s headlining tour of North America with Arsis, White Wizzard, and Nightrage begins in just a couple of weeks, and that’s a great line-up and I’m excited to go…

…only we just got a press release saying that Jim Malone won’t be touring with Arsis. Here’s a statement from the man himself:

“Due to professional and personal commitments I am unable to tour with Arsis at this time. For the upcoming tour with Firewind, rather than drop off the tour entirely, we’ve decided to hire live musicians, some of whom have long been associated with my band.  I have given Nick [Cordle, guitarist] and Noah [Martin, bassist] my blessing and am certain the lineup will be great. My sincerest apologies to anyone who is annoyed or disappointed by my absence. Please go and support Arsis and check out some of our new songs, which they will be playing every night!”

With all due respect to the other members of Arsis, that idea seems, well, totally bizarre to me — like, if Megadeth were to announce a tour without Dave Mustaine bizarre. Jim Malone isn’t just the key creative element in Arsis — he’s been the only constant in the band since its inception. In short, Jim Malone IS Arsis. And we don’t even know who these “live musicians” are! Is it someone awesome? Just some random dudes standing on stage? WHAT THE CRAP IS HAPPENING HERE?!?!

I’ll be kinda curious to see this Malone-free Arsis, but, mostly, I’m pretty bummed out by this news.

You can get tour dates here. Below, watch a video of Cordle discussing the tour, which, as kind of a way to appease us fans I s’pose, includes pre-production demos of some new material… which, in all fairness, sounds pretty frickin’ sweet.

-AR

SECOND UPDATE: It’s official. Just got the press release. Hoo-ray!

UPDATE: Longtime MS tipster Saul Hudson just sent the below screencap from Noah Martin’s Facebook page. So I guess it’s true! Original story follows after the jump.

Click to read more…

Some good bands have lost members in the past few days. We could devote a post to each of them or be insensitive dicks about it and just do one big post.

Guess which one we chose?

Click to read more…

For reasons I’m not entirely clear on, Soilent Green will no longer be playing all of the dates on the “In Thrash We Trust” tour with Death Angel, God Forbid and Light this City. That would be a serious bummer (not that Death Angel and God Forbid alone shouldn’t be enough to get your ass out of the house, but the more the metaler), but luckily Arsis are stepping in to save the day on those select dates. Affected shows are as follows:

June 04 – St. Louis, MO @ Pop’s
June 05 – Columbus, OH @ Alrosa Villa
June 06 – Mokena, IL @ The Pearl Room
June 07 – Detroit, MI @ Harpo’s
June 08 – Toronto, ON @ Opera House
June 09 – Montreal, QC @ Foufounes
June 10 – Quebec City, QC @ L’Anti
June 11 – New York, NY @ B.B. King Blues Club

The MetalSucks posse will be at the June 11 show, if anyone wants to buy us some beer, some weed, or some hookers.

If for some reason you’re not listening to Arsis, you should definitely check out their latest, We Are the Nightmare (read Vince’s rave review here). And while you’re at it, why not check out our interview with Arsis bassist Noah Martin? You’ll like it, and it will make us happy.

-AR

…but luckily the band is okay. In a statement, front man Jim Malone tells fans:

“Everyone’s fine. Hard to believe this happened during the day, but the road is solid ice. The trailer flipped, broke loose of the hitch, and is now stuck in a snow bank. Better the trailer and not us. We’re waiting to get it towed, since it’s unusable. It’s lodged in ice and we can’t get to our gear, but we’re sure it’s all smashed. We need to assess the situation and see how much of our gear still works before we can say anything about finishing out the rest of the tour. We can’t afford to buy a new trailer at this point. Again, we apologize to our fans. We’ll have an update soon.”

“We’re going to try to find a room up the highway in the next small town. Hopefully we won’t have to fight off inbred zombie cannibals… like we need that right now. We are all super pissed that this has happened just as we were getting back on this tour. This sucks a lot of dinosaur dick – and that’s a lot of meat!”

Mostly we’re glad that the band is okay, ’cause obviously this could have ended a lot worse. We hope they can get back up and running and out on the road ASAP.

In the meantime, you can check out our interview with Noah Martin here.

-AR