Protest the Hero’s studio update vids rule, and everyone else’s studio update vids drool. End of story. But I’ve already professed my love for PtH’s cinematic brilliance here and here with updates #1 and #2, respectively, of the recording of their new album. So enough of that.

In this update we get to see Rody tracking some vocals (man, that guy can sing his balls off), Tim’s naked body (his balls, mercifully, are tucked between his legs mangina style), nude watermelon smashing and beer-bonging (balls) and Tim’s beard (balls balls balls). I’d say this band has a healthy obsession with balls. Oh, and a guest female vocalist (no balls)! We also get to hear some clips of new music; hooray!

-VN

Thanks: Hayden Nease, Suraj Patra

And things like this are why I will forever argue that the Internet has done way more good than bad for the music industry. Stem tracks available to the public; cheap recording/editing technology; the ability to instantly spread anything. Tell me that the benefits of videos like the above — by actively involving fans with the band’s music in a very tangible way — don’t make up for any potential money lost by Protest the Hero due to pirated music, and I’ll tell you you’re wrong.

And not for nothin’, I really dig this guy’s acoustic rendition of “Sequoia Throne.” Well done, dude.

-VN

Thanks: Nick Briggs

I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating: I absolutely adore the fact that Protest the Hero actually put a ton of effort into making their studio videos funny / interesting / awesome instead of just stitching together a bunch of clips of dudes recording. Not only did the guys have to spend time shooting extra footage just for these videos, but someone had to have the ideas, someone had to execute them (and presumably do multiple takes to get it right… like those excellent basketball scenes!), and someone had to edit them all together in a way that makes sense. Like their music, everything is well thought out. Much respect. It’s also great to know that some dudes still actually have fun doing this shit, ya know? Because after all, metal is funny. Metal sucks.

Here’s the second studio video. It features footage of Luke Hoskin and Sir Beardy McBeardstein Tim Millar recording guitars for their upcoming album Vince Neilstein Just Splooged All Over Me, out early 2011 on Vagrant Records.

-VN

At what point does it become no longer acceptable to use “Protest the ____” as a headline for any story about Protest the Hero? Certainly not today.

These Canadians seem to have a particular knack for creating interesting video content on the web, be it their myriad stellar music videos, this summer’s pre-production video or the series of studio webisodes they started rolling out this past weekend. Their music videos have always put the band’s sense of humor on full display, and the first of these studio vids is no different. Where so many bands release boring clips that aren’t entertaining to watch, don’t let you hear any new music or both, PtH’s first studio webisode has plenty of footage of the dudes laying down tracks (bass and drums) and lots of the expected “band dudes goofing off” stuff that you’d expect from one of these, only it’s put together in a way that’s actually funny for people other than the band members themselves.

Expect more PtH worship on MetalSucks as the autumn grinds on culminating in the supposed “early 2011″ release of their next album. Apparently you’re all as excited as I am about it.

-VN

Protest Studio Pupdate 1 from Luke Hoskin on Vimeo.

The last time Protest the Hero came out with a new album was in early 2008, a little more than a year into the life of this site. At the time I raved about Fortress endlessly, and it ended up as #2 on my year-end list for 2008 topped only by Gojira’s The Way of All Flesh [side note: so many awesome records came out that year!]. It’ll be interesting to see how the MetalSucks Maniacs at large react to my pending coverage of Protest the Hero’s next record, which they’re supposedly working on right now. Our site’s readership has grown a ton since early 2008 and the amount of vitriol spewed our way in the comments section has vastly increased for better or worse. Back then our readers seemed to mostly support my penchant for prog wankery and really got behind Protest the Hero too; would it be the same these days?

The knock on PtH always seems to be that people don’t like their vocalist Rody Walker. I happen to think that he’s the icing on the cake, a truly unique vocalist that really brings something extra to a band full of amazing musicians. Whereas most bands of amazing musicians simply get a dude to scream over what they’re playing — so that people whose attention spans are too short to pay attention to an instrumental band won’t lose interest — Rody Walker really adds something to the formula, and what the other 4 dudes do is all the better for it. He’s a really talented vocalist too, and PtH certainly wouldn’t be the same without him.

But apparently MS reader Damien doesn’t agree, or perhaps he was just bored and fiddling around with the instrumental versions of Fortress that the band released when he created the below mix of “Sequoia Throne” with Randy Blythe’s vocals for the Wrath track “Fake Messiah” laid over top of it. It’s a cool concept, and though I feel like the use of Blythe’s vocals in the chorus could use work (seems too sparse), I think it’s pretty well done.

-VN

Last week we offered up a four-pack of Metal Blade CDs including the latest from Woe of Tyrants, As I Lay Dying, Arma Gathas and Impious. In a bit of an unorthodox move, here is the winner I’ve chosen:

• Trux: “This is the first caption contest that I remember whose entries are all weak.”

Because seriously, every entry was weak. I barely mustered a chuckle while scrolling through them. So, for his candor and for calling a spade a spade, Trux wins the prize!

Earlier this year our own Anso DF reviewed the excellent guitar tab book of Protest the Hero’s latest opus Fortress, but now these fine Canadians have decided they’d like to allow you to play along to their first album Kezia as well. And they’ve bestowed upon us FIVE copies to give away. Just come up with a funny caption to the below photo [sent in by longtime MS patriot and Mansion neighbor Metal Mykee] and one copy shall be yours — remember to comment with a real email address (or include it with your comment if you’re using FB Connect).

Protest the Hero’s 2008 release Fortress was full of all sorts of epic win — it made #2 on my year-end list (topped only by Gojira) and generally excited prog freaks and fans of good music the world over. It’s gonna be a hard one to top.

But the show must go on, and Protest the Hero are gonna do their damnedest to out-do the un-out-doable. With writing for the new record now complete, pre-production has commenced, and this morning Metal Insider posted a video of the band laying down their pre-pro tracks and goofing around (as always). We get to hear some bits and pieces of new music which should be very exciting for any PtH fan… and predictably, they sound fan-fucking-tastic. Looks like guitarist Tim Millar has re-grown his stellar beard, and with any luck and dedication he’ll be able to make another run at the World Beard and Mustache Championship, to be held in Trondheim, Norway (M E T A L) in 2011.

Can’t wait for this record. Hopefully it’ll be out before year’s end.

-VN

I can’t keep all these fucking bands straight. Destroy the Runner and Haste the Day and Escape the Fate and Salt the Wound and blessthefall and Bleed the Sky and Scatter the Ashes and Clone the Fragile and Pierce the Veil and Remove the Veil and Kiss the Ass and every other “verb the noun” band – holy shit, guys, you gotta start coming up with names that will allow potheads like me to more easily distinguish you from one another. ‘Cause your music certainly ain’t doing the trick.

Although I do like Protest the Hero. And Poison the Well. And Swallow the Sun. So I guess there are exceptions to every rule. But still.

Wait… how did I get on this rant again?

Oh, yeah, Destroy the Runner.

So anyway, they broke up.

-AR

One of the dozens of things to dislike about Milwaukee is that it’s home to Hal Leonard, the publishers of history’s worst guitar tab book, Metallica’s …And Justice For All. I hate that goddamn book of lies. The authors of the alleged “note-for-note transcriptions” apparently are crotchety old uncles whose wedding band just celebrated their 10,000th gig. I mean c’mon! In my neighborhood, “Blackened” and “One” at minimum were mandatory learning, so even we knew something was rotten on the day we grabbed the tab book to compare notes: It turns out that the transcribers settled on ball-park estimation of metal’s greatest fucking guitar songs while also displaying a dazzling ignorance of distortion.

And the nutfucked thing is how Hal Leonard continues to sell this faulty piece of shit since fucking 1988. I pointed out its crappiness to HL in several curtly-phrased and progressively vulgar emails. Those went unanswered. One night, I helpfully grabbed a red sharpie to correct it with frowny faces and clusters of distraught question marks. That got me banned from Guitar Center. Then the worst happened: I began to doubt my own ear. After all, I reasoned, a lot of weed gets smoked in here; these “mistakes” in the tabs might’ve been the product of my imagination. But nay, the essence of Metallica riffs is embedded in my spine. I am right; these Justice tabs suck.

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I always really dig tours that match together a bunch of bands who don’t really fit into any one scene. When these kinds of bands are awkwardly placed on bills with a bunch of bands that don’t sound like them the end result is that die-hard fans of said bands don’t bother attending and those who do attend are completely uninterested. A great example of this phenomenon is the way Protest the Hero toured with one shit band after the next in support of Fortress; it wasn’t until they capped the album cycle with a headline run that I finally got to see them live.

Check out this recently announced Spring tour that groups together a bunch of such individual-minded bands: Coheed & Cambria, Torche and Circa Survive. How cool is that? All these bands sound totally different from one another but they’re united in their unwillingness to fit into any one scene. It’s a perfect fit, and for a change anyone that goes to see one specific band will probably end up digging the others too.

Coheed & Cambria and Circa Survive will both have new albums to promote, and while Torche won’t have anything new (that I’m aware of) it’ll be a great opportunity for them to spread their wings outside of their indie-metal centric fanbase. Have a look at the full list of dates after the jump.

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Holy crap, have we really not done one of these since September? Daaaaaammmmmnnnn. Time really does fly when you’re having fun at the expense of others.

Anyways, this particular stain made from shit is called Abandon All Ships, which makes even less sense than most band names these days. Abandon all ships? Why? Why the fuck would any navy in the world ever give that order? What kind of mass disaster could cause the abandonment of multiple ships? I’ve heard the expression “abandon all stations,” which makes sense – if they ship were going under, you’d want to tell everyone to abandon their stations and get the fuck out while the gettin’ the fuck out was good. But why the fucking fuck would you abandon all ships?

Anyways, Suckalo Matt Poulter saw these dudes open for Protest the Hero recently, and we sympathize with Matt’s plight. On the other hand, he says that PTH played Fortress in its entirety, so at least he got something out of the deal.

-AR

Protest The Hero’s impromptu dance video — filmed last year when the band’s van broke down en route to Salt Lake City, UT — was such a viral hit that the band’s decided to parlay their sexy moves into an official music video for the track “Limb from Limb.” This is like what, their 5th or 6th official music video from the Fortress record? God bless the Canadian government and their music subsidies!

I’ve always liked videos in which the band members play roles in a storyline. In the “Limb from Limb” clip, a rag-tag group of Village People-like sailors (the band) led by Captain Rody Walker arrive at a port for a dance-off against a boat full of well-kempt metrosexual sailors. Ain’t nothin’ professional dancers got on the Protest boys! After trading off one righteous dance move after the next, the two teams unite in dancitude and all is right in the world.

-VN

[This exclusive has now ended.]

Protest the Hero just finished up a massive 1.5 year touring cycle for their fantastic record Fortress, and they’ve celebrated with yesterday’s release of a live DVD/CD filmed in their hometown of Toronto, Canada. Guitarist / World Beard Championship competitor Tim Millar took some time out of his day to answer our questions, via email, about the new DVD, the success of Fortress, the band’s sudden popularity in the metal community, life on the road, and the next Protest the Hero record. Our questions, his answers, after the jump.

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Congrats to longtime MS reader “groverXIII” for winning last week’s funny photo caption contest. GroverXIII wins a signed copy of Bigelf’s Cheat the Gallows and a t-shirt from their recent stint on the Progressive Nation tour. Grover actually submitted two entries that deserved the win, so I’ll just go ahead and post both:

“Jeff was worried that they wouldn’t let him bring his girlfriend to the Gathering because she was black.”

“Sparky realized that, even though he occasionally ate his own poop, he was still smarter than the people that surrounded him.”

Nicely done, Grover. “(required)” also gets a nod for this funny caption: “Epic Failgaiting,” which definitely made me chuckle.

This week we’re giving away three prize packages, each with a copy of Protest the Hero’s brand new live DVD/CD Gallop Meets the Earth, out September 15th, and a matching limited edition t-shirt (pictured here). That, my friends, is a great fucking haul for simply typing in a silly one-liner below. So get to it! This’ll be the last of our Gathering of the Juggalos ’09 picture series, and next week we’ll move on to bigger and better things.

Andrew W.K., I Get Wet (Island, 2002)
Andrew W.K. – vocals
Jimmy Coup – Guitar
Erik Payne – Guitar
Frank Werner – Guitar
Gregg Roberts – Bass
Donald Tardy – Drums
Produced by Andrew W.K., John Fields, Scott Humphrey, TSD, Frank Vierti

It has been suggested by some of our commenters that I don’t belong here. Be it my distaste for deathgrind, my inability to appreciate the tr00 kvlt nature of Norwegian black metal, or the fact that I don’t give a flying fuck about Protest The Hero, I’ve always felt like an outsider around you people. Yet at no point did I feel so out of place than during the countdown of the 21 Best Metal Albums of the 21st Century… So Far. Sure, I participated. I submitted a list. I presumed many of my picks would never make the cut (Unsane’s Visqueen; Zozobra’s Harmonic Tremors), but also acknowledged less esoteric favorites of mine from the past nine-and-a-half-years (Boris Pink; Down’s III: Over The Under) that I thought had a shot. Still, nothing could have prepared me for the sheer disappointment these past few weeks when none of my favorite albums made the goddamn list.

Rather than be mature about this sad state of affairs, I am now going to explain why everyone who voted in this poll is a fucking butthole for not selecting Andrew W.K.’s 2002 masterpiece, I Get Wet.
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Protest the Hero (recipients of one of only two 5-out-of-5-horns ratings on MetalSucks ever) are currently out on the MetalSucks-sponsored “Heads Will Roll” Tour with Misery Signals and The Number 12 Looks Like You, and yours truly had the privilege of seeing them headline for the first time this past Saturday night in NYC — and good lord, the band delivers the goods live to be sure. PtH have all the chops live they do on record; no ProTools chicanery there, folks. This is a tour you absolutely need to see when it hits your city, but it may already be too late; the tour wraps up with a show tonight in Chicago and another tomorrow in St. Paul, Minnesota. If you missed the tour when it came through your town or you live in Chicago or St. Paul but spent all your money on weed, check out the exclusive tour diary the Protest dudes did for us, below. It’s a great look into the zany behind-the-scenes antics of what goes down in the Protest camp on tour. And you get the impression this is only a fraction of the crazy shit that actually goes on.

-VN

The big frickin’ deal week before last was Metallica’s induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in Cleveland. Last week, the focus of the Metal community’s honor is Metallica’s Lucifer, Dave Mustaine, at The Epiphone Honda Fury Revolver Magazine Golden Gods Awards. Anti-Metallica sentiment was aired freely and to shouts of encore! The name of Mustaine’s band was chanted pretty much all night (poor Atreyu guy). The event went down at Club Nokia in downtown L.A. on Tuesday night hosted by Rodrigo from Mr. Show (Brian Posehn). Honestly? It was pretty awkward and not very Metal. A ton of Metal people were there, mostly ticket buyers. The vibe started a bit chilly outside the venue, then spiked at Killswitch Engage and Maynard James Keenan (not together) before a nosedive from which even Megadeth could not recover. I had a GREAT TIME! Photos by Adam Haussman.

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Baseball season officially got underway and New England Metal and Hardcore Fest is coming up next weekend. Surely all is peachy in the world then, yeah? Not so much.

• Dave Mustaine feuded with a mystery band, then kissed and made up before we even knew it.
• Protest the Hero released a new video and gave us a bunch of tickets for their tour to give away.
• We spoke with Daath’s Eyal Levi and TAD/Tadgarden’s Tad.
• Kip W. gave us two recaps (Day 1, Day 2) of our booze-fueled SXSW journey.
• Fear Factory got back together… except not.
• Ya’ll argued about which Mastodon album is the best and whether Jesse or Howard was/is the better KsE frontman.
• Ya’ll argued even more about IWRESTLEDABEARONCE and Oceano.
• We got an exclusive red carpet report from Metallica’s Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

See you next week. New England Metal and Hardcore Fest!!

Seeing as we’re sponsors of the awesome Protest the Hero “Heads Will Roll” spring tour (also featuring The Number Twelve Looks Like You, Misery Signals, Scale the Summit and Fall From Grace), we figured it’d be fitting if we gave away a pair of tickets to each show date. Thanks to the fine folks at Vagrant Records, we’re able to do just that! The full list of tour dates is in the above graphic, and there is an additional date on May 15th in St. Paul, Minnesota at Station 4, not listed, that we will be giving away tickets for as well.

To win, sent an email to vagrantrsvp@gmail.com. Make sure the words “PROTEST THE HERO – (DATE / CITY / VENUE) – (FULL LEGAL NAME)” are in the subject line, written exactly in that format with the info for the show you’d like to attend. Only entrants who follow the instructions correctly will be considered for tickets. Winners will be selected randomly and notified via email if they are selected, and tickets can be picked up at door time at the will call window on the day of the show (winners will either be on Protest the Hero’s list or the Vagrant Records list).Good luck, and see ya in the pit.

God bless Vagrant records for continuing to shell out $ for purty-looking Protest the Hero videos. Now three videos and over a year into the project we’re well past the point where a collection of home-vid live shots and backstage antics would pass for a music video, but instead we get this, a proper video for the song “Spoils” (from the jizztastic record Fortress). It’s not like this video is super-hi-fi like the now infamous “Van Breakdown Dance” video, but it’s pretty sexy, kinda like Rody Walker’s new beard.

Once you’ve watched the video, check out my interview with Walker. He talks a lot of shit. It’s fun.

-VN