It all started when humble blogger Keith Spillett tried a little good ol’ fashioned investigative journalism for his blog Tyranny of Tradition, but it ended with an email from Sarah Palin herself praising trad metal outfit Ghost and condemning all of their fellow Swedes. How’d it get from there to here?

Spillett had been hammering Palin’s people for a response about her use of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla” as an entrance song for a campaign speech in 2008; after months and months of unreturned emails, Spillett’s inbox finally lit up with a response from Palin herself, and better yet, a follow-up including her thoughts on Ghost’s Opus Eponymous, an album that’s certainly got quite a bit of buzz in the metal community right now. Palin a metalhead? Who’da thunk it.

I’ll let you all read the entirety of Palin’s email on your own time, including bits about her love of Blue Oyster Cult and her TLC television show. But for now, the juicy bits:

Click to read more…

I am, of course, totally kidding. Gwar clearly would not fit with with the Fox News pundit, ’cause what he does is far too fantasy-based for their particular brand of entertainment.

ANYWAY, I mention it ’cause you might remember that last week we posted a video of GWAR killing a Sarah Palin stand-in as part of their most recent stage show (above); needless to say, we were not the first or last media outlet to pick up on the clip, and, as Oderus himself so poetically put it in a statement, “the right-wing tea bag numb-nuts are getting their knickers in a twist.” I’m almost surprised that Oderus hasn’t been invited back to Fox’s Red Eye to discuss the controversy.

Of course, this kind of brouhaha will ultimately amount to very little, but in the meantime, it can provide us with some entertainment. To wit: Rob over at Metal Injection has done a terrific job of collecting some of the more amusing comments left under the video on YouTube. My personal favorite, by some dude named PhillipMcLoins, is after the jump. And in case the non-sensical nature of the criticism is lost on you, I’ve added some emphasis to the contradictory parts of the statement in bold.

Click to read more…

One of the best parts of any Gwar show is seeing which celebrities/public figures the band is going to “kill” on-stage. And I don’t know if they were offing Alaska’s most infamous maverick on a nightly basis on their most recent tour, or if this is something they did special for the people of Detroit — but needless to say, I approve.

“After tonight you will never about Sarah Palin being your president ever again,” the mighty Oderus Urungus tells the crowd. Oh, if only it weren’t all just for fun.

Gwar’s Bloody Pit of Horror, the band’s latest, is out now on Metal Blade, and they’ll continue to slaughter people they don’t like out on tour for the foreseeable future. Get dates here.

-AR

Thanks to Jason McDaniel for making my morning.

There’s a lyric in this song that goes “I feel uninspired,” and watching the video, I know what Otep means. I really, really want to like her music as much as I like her (our politics are very similar, although I suspect she’s even further left than I am), but what a mess of metal video clichés, and what a lousy song.

And no one hates Sarah Palin more than I do, but… really? A revenge fantasy? Couldn’t they at least of hired someone who actually does look kinda like Palin, like Tina Fey (okay that may not be realistic) or that chick who played Palin in the porn parodies (I have a feeling she would have been available)? If you were gonna give her a facial anyway, might as well have had someone who does those for a living!

-AR

Just moments after telling a third grader that the vice president is the president’s “team mate” who “runs the senate,” Sarah Palin makes one last attempt to win votes from the metal community – and fails.

-AR

Call it the Sarah Palin Effect: so much is already stacked against In This Moment (a metalcore band two to three years after metalcore flickered out with an incredibly attractive frontwoman equipped with a ridiculously provocative sense of fashion) that the bar is set almost comedicaly low. But much like struggling to answer simple follow-up questions during one of your first televised national interviews, any slight hint of competency already exceeds expectations, and by many, will be perceived a victory. I wouldn’t call The Dream, the band’s latest album, a victory by any means, but considering the flaccidity of the genre in which it exists, they manage to ascend from “Why do bands like this still make music?” to “Not that bad, really,” with relative ease. Though by no means a classic, it wobbles between lame metalcore and admirable pop-rock somewhat effortlessly to maybe work their way onto the guilty pleasure heap – no small achievement when considering the ocean of sneers and venom already directed their way before playing a note.

Click to read more…

As an American, I expect to be lied to. Even if it’s a bad lie. Of course Sarah Palin can’t tell Fox News “I flubbed the Katie Couric interview because I’m a moron and I don’t know anything outside of the talking points I’ve been coached on.” It would just be too insulting to the literally dozens of people who actually think she’s an intelligent, well-qualified political candidate. So she has to say she flubbed the interview because she was “annoyed” that Couric wasn’t asking questions the American people care about (And by “American people,” Palin means… actually, I’m not sure who the fuck she means. Not me.). It’s bullshit – it’s not even good bullshit – but it’s what we do in life, whether it be for political or personal reasons. If you’re not going to a friend’s party, you tell your friend “Oh, my dick is caught in my zipper” or something other than “I have better things to do.”

Well, apparently, Daron Malakian didn’t get the memo, because a statement released to Blabbermouth yesterday by Scars on Broadway is either a) bullshit so bad it makes Palin look like master manipulator or b) a sign that Malakian literally just does not give two shits about his literally dozens of fans*.

Click to read more…

Trivium’s new album, Shogun, gets its official release on Roadrunner a week from today, but the entire album is currently streaming on the band’s MySpace page.

If you’re one of the people who showed enough restraint not to download the album when it leaked a little while back, here’s your chance to preview before you buy. Or, if you’re one of those people who hates Trivium the way Sarah Palin hates science, here’s your chance to know thy enemy, as the saying goes. Y’know, in the unlikely event you wanna try and make an intelligent argument against the band, instead of just calling them and their fans “fagets.”

Also, read our interview with Trivium’s Matt Heafy and Corey Beaulieu here.

-AR

“Sand and Snow,” the new song by Light this City, is currently streaming on the band’s MySpace.

Click to read more…

Did that morning MS-Mansion bong rip go straight to our heads, or does the Republican VP hopeful looks just like a certain metal mom? Apparently keeping batty old men in check isn’t the only thing they have in common.

-VN