This weekend marked another year passing for yours truly, and what a madcap decadent pleasurable birthday it was :-)))))))

Some MS staff highlights from my rockin party:

1)  Sammy O’Hagar tried to fellate Higgins and got a faceful of frosting!  CAKE frosting, you dirty bird….

2) After “eleventeen” whiskeys Gary Suarez donkey punched a zebra.

3) Anso DF flew in on the wings of a transsexual angel.

4) Axl Rosenberg is still disgruntled.

5) I puked in the bathroom ten minutes before my band played.

6) Vince Neilstein insisted that he and MetalGF want to go on a bender with my lil old lady mama & me and put hot dumps in each other’s mouths….  I suggested the Hells Pleasure Metal Fest instead.

7) A tin man screamed loudly for an extended period of time and a scarecrow took a hit of weed.

Audio pleasure after the jump————>

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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.

This week we say farewell to the season by posing the question:

WHAT WAS THE METAL ANTHEM OF THE SUMMER?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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Pain — which, in case you didn’t know, is the Peter Tägtgren project that isn’t Hypocrisy — have a released a new video, for the track “The Great Pretender,” and… well, it certainly held my interest! The obvious joke would be to call it Reservoir Mascots. I think there’s probably a metaphor there about guys dressed in animals costumes, pretending, etc., but I’m not even gonna read that much into it because mostly it’s just silly and fun. My point being this isn’t the greatest video ever made, but it at least makes you wanna watch the whole thing, which is more than I can say for most metal vids!

Pain’s new album, You Only Live Twice, comes out June 21 on Nuclear Blast.

-AR

Last week, MetalSucks mega-hunk Axl Rosenberg and I spoke to producer and Hate Eternal frontman Erik Rutan (interview coming soon!). He gabbed at length with us, and I was super-pumped when he stated that his goal was to eschew uber-precise metal production and embrace the human vibe of older records. I love that! Perfect is perfectly boring. Rutan is the ru-Man! See what I did there?

In this spirit, we take hats off to Hypocrisy’s Peter Tägtgren, also a producer and frontman, whose stomping new Pain jam “Dirty Woman” instigates another nascent extreme metal movement: Rock! Yes let us all rock, even the most grizzled, frowny underground metal purists (cough Axl) alongside party-hardy crotch boys (like me)! And let us pack videos with writhing underwear chicks (knockerz!), a misbehaving and ignored drummer (funny cuz it’s true!), fire (hot!), and a suspiciously chummy pair of man-sized animals (fuck it, sure!). You might be rolling your tr00 eyes at me right now, but I’ll laugh last when a few months from now Nergal from Behemoth returns to the stage with a flying splits off of a fiery drum riser. Suck it!

–ADF

Peter Tagtgren and Pain release You Only Live Twice via Nuclear Blast on June 21.

Admit it: this picture makes you SO FUCKING HAPPY.

Recently, my friend sent me a YouTube link to a Bee Gees cover group. Excuse me, tribute band. That is the proper way of addressing them, as Mark Wahlberg taught us in Rock Star. I don’t like the Bee Gees. I don’t like disco. Disco is kind of terrible. Disco blows dogs for quarters. Disco is never amazing, especially not when KISS attempt it. To say I was a little confused would be an understatement. But my friends aren’t totally clueless to what I listen to, so I gave it a shot. It turned out it was a heavy metal Bee Gees tribute band. Okay, it was a little bit awesome. Weirdly enough, it worked. I only like thin-voiced men screeching when accompanied by equally high-pitched guitars, and that’s basically what heavy metal “Stayin’ Alive,” was. I turned it off about halfway through because, well, I still have my limits, but it kind of makes you stop and go, “Huh!” Metal just makes everything sound better.

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With a new album, From Afar, in stores now, and a U.S. tour just about a month away, now seemed like a perfect time for a chat with bassist/lyricist Sami Hinka. New MetalSucks correspondent Joseph Strombladder got on the phone with the pagan metaller to discuss the process of writing the band’s music and lyrics, the differences between metal fans in the U.S. and abroad, making music videos, and more. Full transcript after the jump.

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