MetalSucks

If you haven’t heard about the laughing stock that is Microsoft Songsmith by now you’re either dead, completely tuned out, or my grandma. In a nutshell, Songsmith is a new computer program released by Microsoft that automatically creates cheesy sounding, karaoke-style backing music to whatever you sing into it. It’s the modern-day version of those cheesy ’80s Casio keyboards that played a beat and chord progression whenever you hit a new note, only for your voice. But here’s the catch: it’s a complete piece of shit. Since its release a couple of weeks back, the Webernets have exploded with Songsmith-ed versions of famous songs, featuring publicly available a cappella tracks piped into this disaster of a computer program. And the results are simply marvelous and endlessly entertaining.

After the jump, a look at some of the tastiest Songsmith creations based on songs by your metal faves.

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First thing’s first: Axl and I are going to see AC fucking DC at Madison Square fucking Garden tonight. HOLY SHIT! Big thanks to the folks who hooked us up with tickets; you know who you are!

AC/DC also happens to have just released their own Rock Band “Track Pack,” a standalone video game available for around $40 featuring AC/DC’s legendary 1991 Live at Donington concert. This pretty much seals the deal for Rock Band as the instrument-based video game of choice for metalheads and hard rock fans; the list of available full albums already includes Judas Priest’s Screaming for Vengeance, Megadeth’s Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying?, Rush’s Moving Pictures and Dr. Feelgood by Mötley Crüe. They’ve only got one Metallica song (”Enter Sandman”), but we’ll overlook that for now.

If we get a gaming system for the MetalSucks Mansion I’d definitely go for Rock Band, if only because playing the drums is so fucking fun. But we’d have to place a moratorium on drunk girls singing, because this is always, always annoying.

Since its inception in the late ‘80s, black metal has been one of the most rigid genres in terms of evolution and change. While bands like Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, and Behemoth trumpet the genre through its larger than life, orchestral origins, black metal’s “elite” have gained their notoriety through either a) being a part of the original church-burning generation and altering their sound as little as possible or b) miming the original church-burning generation as closely as possible, right down to the tape hisses and wall of buzz saw guitars. But after nearly two decades of existence and reverence in the metal and music worlds as a whole, many bands have moved away from their restrictive lo-fi roots and come to embrace different influences, resources, and inspirations. The band that has best exemplified this move from their base to the outer limits is Enslaved, one of Norway’s longest running black metal bands. Before American upstarts Nachtmytsium made it cool to melt your Burzum and Pink Floyd records together, Enslaved were dabbling in the dark power of psychedelia on Below the Lights and ISA. Though those who take black metal seriously insist that sticking to their guns has been the key to longevity, its shifts in sounds and ideologies has been what’s kept it alive. Those shifts have been most solidly illustrated by Enslaved, and has resulted in one of the most impressively consistent discographies in metal, right up through their latest genre-bending triumph Vertebrae.

Grutle Kjellson, Enslaved’s bass player and lead vocalist, has been with the band since the beginning. In an interview he was kind enough to grant MetalSucks via phone from his home in Norway, he talks about the importance of looking forward creatively, what influenced Vertebrae, working with longtime bandmate Ivar Bjornson in Enslaved and their experimental metal side project Trinacria, the overall importance of Pink Floyd on his band’s sound, and the fans that only want to hear songs off of their early ‘90s demos at their shows.

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