After listening to Psycho’s female blowtorch, Penny Torture, and Ava Inferi’s haunting distaff elemental, Carmen Susana Simões, I realized it’s time we just chill and admit that women are all-around better at this metal-singing thing.

Is this mad exaggeration? It feels like that when I’m away from an MPEG player, but then I listen to those two radically different bands, to Psycho’s primal-scream old school death or Ava Inferi’s doomed-out, gothy whatsit, and it feels I’m not over-reaching, I’m underselling.

And it’s not just two superior releases (Ava Inferi’s Onyx and Psycho’s Pain Addict Pigs). It’s just become impossible to ignore the fact that females are not only doing equal or better work in the same genre jobs as male counterparts, they’re also making metal records that go places no male on Earth — none, nada, zip-ol-lina — could go. That 2011’s best metal so far — Subrosa’s No Help for the Mighty Ones — is an almost all-femme effort of relentless pan-genre awesomeness only adds arsenic and new lace to my argumentative cake.

All of which may have the reader thinking, “You do realize, you silly person, that you’ve just written off the work of one half the human race.”

To which I say, “Yeah, well, I guess I’m pimping a little irony here, since that’s business as usual with women and the metal press. But irony aside, please bear with me.”

Click to read more…

The Austerity Program play this Sunday January 31, in Brooklyn at Public Assembly (70 N 6th St) with White Suns, Immanent Voiceless, Daniel Malinsky. You should go, goddammit!!!

I did not get into metal until relatively late in life. My teenage years were spent buying everything that came out on Touch & Go and Amphetamine Reptile. I’d see long-haired wasteoids hanging out in suburban playgrounds and think “Look at those chumps who’ve got it so bad for Reign in Blood while I know that Atomizer is really where it’s at. (Actually, I still pretty much feel this way.) At that point, MetalSucks was not a website, it was a personal belief.

Still, I was not unaware of what the metal kids were up to, even around fourth grade. A few of them that I invited to my birthday that year party chipped in and bought “Shout at the Devil;” since I only had about twelve records at that point, I figured that I’d listen to the record once a day because what else are you going to do? And it kind of freaked my parents out, and that was cool. And it had a pentagram on the cover which I spent a lot of time trying not to look at because I was worried something might happen to me.

Click to read more…

By now, y’all are more than aware that Chris Cornell has been recording with hip-hop producer Timbaland. The consensus around the blogosphere has been that this is going to be a fiery trainwreck of Mariah Carey Glitter proportions. Now, throwing fuel on the burning upholstery, Cornell solo concerts to promote Scream (as in, what you’ll probably do when you eventually hear this album) have been announced. I know I should just go hide in my secret underground bunker with my special lady and repopulate society until this whole thing blows over – but I think I actually want to see this disaster LIVE!

Click to read more…

The Webernet rumor mill has been aflutter in recent weeks with the news that two of the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin — Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones — would like to take the band out on the road following their massively successful 2007 reunion concert. The late John Bonham’s son Jason, who participated in the reunion show, would likely sit on the drummer’s throne, but singer Robert Plant has publicly stated he isn’t interested, instead opting to continue making bland alt-country music for the NPR / Starbcuks set with crooner Allison Krause.

All this begs the question: if Plant does indeed decline, who would take his place? Various names have been bandied about — Steven Tyler and Chris Cornell among them, and the latest, petrifying, scary and frightening choice: Myles Kennedy of Alter Bridge.

Click to read more…

I understand that Twiggy Ramirez re-joined Marilyn Manson because the money’s right, but I guess that Manson has to get something out of it, too – and it would appear that the payoff for him is some sense of nostalgia for a time when he was much, much more famous. In an interview with Rolling Stone last Friday, he revealed:

“The turning point for me was when I went to see Led Zeppelin’s reunion show, and I saw Jimmy Page and Robert Plant look at each other for a moment, and they probably said, ‘Holy shit, we wrote ‘Stairway To Heaven.’ I wanted that look again… I want to look at Twiggy and go ‘Holy shit, we wrote ‘The Beautiful People.’”

When giving interviews, I think it’s a good rule of thumb to never, ever, under any circumstances, mention Led Zeppelin and your own band in the same breath, unless maybe you are/were a member of, say, The Beatles or The Stones or some shit. ‘Cause “The Beautiful People” was a big big hit in its day and I like it and all, but “Stairway,” it ain’t.

In response to Manson’s statement, ousted Manson member Tim Skold revealed that he would be re-uniting with his old band, Shotgun Messiah, because he was inspired by “that look that Steve ‘Sex’ Summers gets when he looks over at Kristy ‘Krash’ Majors during a Pretty Boy Floyd show.”

-AR