via The Chive, in case the logo didn’t make that clear

Can someone please try the above but with metal? I don’t really care if it’s death metal or power metal or whatever, just make sure you film it and send it to me. Also, don’t get arrested. Thanks.

ANYWAY, here’s some shit we did this week:

• We debuted new music by Scale the Summit and Junior Bruce.
• We learned about the NBA from God Forbid’s Doc Coyle.
• We spoke to Alex Webster from Cannibal Corpse and Kris Norris from A Cancerous Affair.
• We checked out the latest album from Goatwhore, hardcore 7″s from Losin’ It, Appalachian Terror Unit, and Overlooked, and free releases from Autolatry, Yellow Eyes, Agartha, and Uvikra.
• We were surprised to learn that bands like this still exist.
• We were reminded that Juggalos are hilarious.
• We learned that Greg Puciato is dating the porn star Jenna Haze.
• We also learned that Bill Ward isn’t participating in the Black Sabbath reunion.

Okay, five o’clock! Time to punch out! Who’s got a joint?

-AR

Scale the Summit’s breathtaking album The Collective is a sonic masterpiece, the kind of aural adventure that would be perfectly befitting of the sweet grooves of a good old-fashioned vinyl. Lucky for us, Prosthetic Records has decided to produce exactly such a product, a 180-gram vinyl reissue of The Collective limited to just 250 copies. If you haven’t already pre-ordered one of these, what the hell are you waiting (and at only $15, too, a bargain)? They’re gonna sell out any second, and they’ll start shipping tomorrow.

If a big old vinyl disc isn’t enough for you, how about the allure of a previously unreleased bonus track called “Redwoods”? The band’s already been playing it live on their current tour, as of today “Redwoods” is available for purchase on iTunes and Amazon as a single, and we’ve got the exclusive stream for you below:

And so we come to the last of our four consecutive posts about fantastic early-2012 tours that have been announced in the past few days. Are you guys a little sad? I’m a little sad.

ANYWAY, Scale the Summit! Another band that is just great live. And this is gonna be their first headlining tour, which means they’ll probably play for longer than the thirty-or-so minutes we’ve always seen them do thus far. Which is in no way bad news. And support will come from Elitist, if that does anything for you. But missing StS would be a real crime, so, y’know. Don’t do that.

Here are the dates:

Click to read more…

We had a blast at The Metal Suckfest in NYC last weekend, but don’t worry if you couldn’t make it; earlier this week we shared Justina Villanueva’s photos from Night 1 (featuring Municipal Waste, God Forbid, Today is the Day and more) and today we’ve got Mariel “Tormentia” Pietrykoski’s photos from Night 2. After the jump, relive all the glorious metal brought down upon us by Cynic, Obscura, The Red Chord, 3, A Life Once Lost, Scale the Summit, Last Chance to Reason, Fight Amp, Rosetta and Ultrageist on Night 2.

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The Inaugural Metal Suckfest is almost here!!!! Twenty bands will DESTROY The Gramercy Theatre on November 4 and 5, PLUS there’s an awesome, five-band pre-party at the venue the night before, making this THE can’t-miss hang of the year.

Tickets are on sale now right here, and you can hit up the fest’s official website for more info on the shows, including the complete line-up. In the meantime, we’re counting down to this weekend of chaos and debauchery by speaking to one member from each band on the bill. We continue today with legendary guitarist Chris Letchford of Scale the Summit, whose most recent album, The Collective, was released earlier this year on Prosthetic Records.

Read our chat after the jump. And don’t forget to check back in the coming days and weeks for interviews with more of the musicians participating in this awesome event!!!

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That’s right! Tickets for The Metal Suckfest — the two day festival with a line-up so ridiculously awesome we can’t believe we actually put this thing together — are ON SALE RIGHT NOW.

You can buy tickets to Day 1 (November 4) or Day 2 (November 5) individually for thirty bucks a pop — that’s just three dollars per band!!! — or, for your best value, buy a THREE DAY PASS! for seventy-five bucks.

“Wait, there’s a THIRD day?” you ask. That’s right! On November 3, the night before the fest officially kicks off, we’re hosting The Metal Suckfest Pre-Game, which will be headlined by legendary black metallers Mayhem and will also feature Keep of Kalessin, Hate, Abigail Williams, and Woe. Individual tickets to that show cost twenty-five dollars, but with your Metal Suckfest 3 Day Pass, you get a ten dollar discount. Pretty sweet, eh?

So GO BUY TICKETS NOW. The full line-up is after the jump, in case you forgot… do not forget that four more bands are still yet to be announced!!!

Click to read more…

Click to enlarge the ridiculously sweet poster art by Rodney Githens from Vertebrae 33 and Metal Band Art

When we first announced The Metal Suckfest, we promised you that it was NOT just a bunch of tours already-in-progress, routed so that they all converge for one event. That it was NOT just bands that all sound alike and one would normally expect to find on the same bill. That it would be a wholly unique concert in which some truly incredible artists are coming together JUST to play THIS ONE SINGLE EVENT.

And now you know — we weren’t lying.

We are SO PROUD to announce the line-up for the inaugural Metal Suckfest, which will take place November 4 and November 5 at The Gramercy Theatre in Manhattan. As you can see, the bands range from thrash to death to grind to prog to noise rock to NWOAHM to stoner to we don’t even know what you call it, but they all have one thing in common — they are all fucking awesome, and they are all 110% MetalSucks approved. This fest is gonna be so great, we keep having to pinch ourselves to make sure it’s real.

Tickets go on sale Friday at LiveNation.com at 10 am. 12 noon. We’ll be announcing the final four bands on the bill shortly, but trust us — you don’t wanna wait to get your ticket.

Here’s the rest of the line-up:

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4
Municipal Waste
God Forbid
Today is the Day
This is Hell
Howl
Black Tusk
Magrudergrind
All Pigs Must Die
Ramming Speed
Prime Evil

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5
Cynic
Obscura
The Red Chord
3
A Life Once Lost
Scale the Summit
Last Chance to Reason
Fight Amp
Rosetta
Ultrageist

-Vince, Axl, and Everyone at MetalSucks

With oddball bands like Exivious and T.R.A.M. turning heads in the metal scene over the past couple of years, is experimental jazz becoming the new “it” direction for talenthead metal musicians to move?

Click to read more…

Ever since Within the Ruins were chosen as the opening band on Summer Slaughter via popular fan vote there’s been speculation that some of the other bands who were up for that final slot would team up for a tour of their own. That tour — dubbed the Slaughter Survivors Tour — has finally been announced, and as with its namesake older brother, it’s a mixed bag.

Conducting From the Grave will headline, which for me is neither a great thing or a bad one; I liked their first album and enjoyed their set at NEMHF 2009, but felt that their follow-up album saw them regressing towards the genericness of their peers. I feel roughly the same way about The Contortionist; I could take them or leave them. Regular readers of MetalSucks know we LOVE Scale the Summit, so there’s that. Volumes play generic 2nd-gen djent, Structures play generic 3rd-gen Sumeriancore (but have sick choreographed stage moves, brah!!!), and Rings of Saturn have some kind of tech-deathcore / Psyopus-meets-Oceano thing going on that isn’t wowing me on first listen.

So that’s your tour, ladies and gents. One great band, a couple of OK bands, and a couple of shitty bands. In other words, this will be a great opportunity to catch Scale the Summit! Dates after the jump.

Click to read more…

Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli…

And now, it’s the time of the week you’ve all been waiting for: the three-hour window your folks are out of the house, allowing you to jack off comfortably Decibel’s monthly Guess Next Month’s Cover and Win a Decibot Shirt Contest! I’m going to predict this will be the first “FIRST” to get the answer right —provided, of course, that the band/musician/farm animal we’re spotlighting is in fact typed out below the “FIRST.” Unless the first person who sees this types in “System of a Down,” just to be a dick/radical. That said, it’s been a few years since System of a Down proper existed — although who hasn’t enjoyed the “Five Serj Tankian Solo Albums Nobody Cares About/Bassist ‘n’ Friend Randomly Beating the Shit Out of Brent Hinds Era” — so they could ostensibly be rocking spiked wristbands now.

But no, it’s not System of a Down. There’s your hint.

-AB

Decibel’s June 2011 issue, which features Ghost, Killing Joke, Mastodon, Hate Eternal, Gorguts, Protest the Hero, Born of Osiris, and Scale The Summit is available here, or make your mama proud and just get a full subscription.

Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli…

There’s been a lot of buzz about remaking The Crow with Bradley Cooper. Because, you know, nothing conveys goth-punk flair, existential angst and an unyielding appetite for vengeance like the frat guy who probably stuffed fans of the original into lockers. The producers should’ve just gone to Killing Joke mastermind Jaz Coleman. Not only would it at least be novel to see a 50-year-old Crow, but he’s been dressing the part for years.

In 1980, Coleman and his band were bloodthirsty rebels in spirit, not image. Their eponymous E.G. Records debut careened unpredictably between post-punk, metal, prog, disco and what we now know as industrial. Killing Joke influenced, well, pretty much everybody in the interior and exterior of Decibel and MetalSucks’ Venn diagram. (If you’ve never heard them, somehow, drop a jaw at the third paragraph of their Wiki page.) Add incendiary, prophetic, political screeds to taste, and you’ve got a recipe for a wicked Hall of Fame, appearing in our Ghost issue.

As usual, author Chris Dick went above and beyond to make this HOF one of the most thorough Killing Joke interviews ever; hence, we have reams of bonus content. Here’s a little bonus bloodsport to whet your appetite.

Click to read more…

In February Emmure’s Frankie Palmeri did a track by track breakdown of his band’s latest act of audio torture, Speaker of the Dead, for AP — and the results were nothing short of hilarious. As it turns out, not only is Palmeri stunningly untalented, but he’s also apparently inarticulate, unimaginative, and bizarrely obsessed with Street Fighter. Basically, he has all the makings of someone who will inadvertently provide us with joy for years and years to come.

Now The Human Abstract’s A.J. Minette has done a similar track by track breakdown of his band’s (fucking orgasmically incredible) latest, Digital Veil, for AP. And by “similar,” I mean insofar as they’re both dudes talking about albums on which they performed. Unfortunately, Minette is an intelligent, gifted dude who, at least as far as I can tell, does not believe that video games are spiritualist documents. For example, here is A.J.’s explanation of the song “Antebellum,” which has become my favorite track on the record:

Click to read more…

MetalSucks recently polled its staff to determine who are The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, and after an incredible amount of arguing, name calling, and physical violence, we have finalized that list! The only requirements to be eligible for the list were that the musician in question had to a) play metal (duh), b) play guitar (double-duh), and c) have recorded something in the past five years. We kicked off the list yesterday and continue today with #24, Scale the Summit’s Chris Letchford…

Few young guitarists are as ridiculously skilled yet as calmly restrained in their playing as Scale the Summit leader Chris Letchford. This is doubly true considering the fact that Letchford’s band is completely instrumental. Only once have I ever heard Letchord completely go OFF on a shred run like those that most metal guitarists butter their bread with, and that was in an improvised song-ending jam out at the band’s recent New York City show… and who even improvises live these days? Most of the time, though, Letchford is doing what Letchford does best — play laid back, mellow, but somehow still metal rhythms and leads that take the listener through a journey of space and time despite the lack of vocals in Scale the Summit’s music.

Click to read more…



Photos by Robert Bejil

It’s weird. Mention Periphery to any person on the street and they’ll think nothing of it. But speak their name to those who know, and it’s like you just dropped “Jeezy” at an As I Lay Dying concert. Periphery have become a huge band in the warped little snow globe of the metal landscape.

As a person who’s listened as the sextet has grown and evolved, and go through singers like cheez balls, seeing them live was an experience that I was far overdue to have. I had my chance about a week ago when the group ventured over to Hartford Connecticut’s Webster Theater supporting Fair to Midland along with Scale the Summit [Alas, they have since dropped off the tour. -Ed.]. The evening turned out to be a proggy feast I won’t soon forget.

Click to read more…

If you’re a regular reader of MetalSucks, then you already know how much we love The Human Abstract; their new album, Digital Veil, is surely one of the best of the year so far, and guitarist A.J. Minette’s recurring MS column, “Abstract Theory,” is always a fascinating read.

Which is why we’re so thrilled to be co-sponsoring the band’s first headlining run in support of Veil! With Scale the Summit, This or the Apocalypse, Letlive, Across the Sun, No Bragging Rights, and (on select dates) Elitist all playing support, you just know that these shows are gonna be an awesome time. Seriously, this is the first can’t-miss tour of the spring/summer season, so make sure you get your ass to a show! Dates after the jump…

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Hey studs and foxes, Anso here. Please accept my most gracious hugz in return for partying with me these last two days. Running this site in the absence of Axl and Vince has been so superfun thanks to you, our cherished MetalSucks readership. I learned a lot of stuff too, for example that I should hereby refrain from “ass fucking [my] boyfriends cock” [sic]. K I’ll work on that while you all re-live some hilarious, informative, and sexy moments from this week:

• We debuted new music by Maruta.
• We spoke to Rob Arnold from Chimaira/Six Feet Under/The Elite, Jack Strong from The Acacia Strain, Varg Vikernes of Burzum, and Takis Kinis from prog-thrash legends Realm.
• We checked out the latest releases from DevilDriver and Wino. Plus, hot hardcore 7″s and all the stuff that Corey Mitchell rocked in February.
• We reveled in official confirmation of the System of a Down tour story we broke ahead of everybody.
• We proffered scientific evidence that to be in a band is a poor life decision.
• We were wowed by Evan Brewer, player of two basses!
• We peeped Devin Townsend’s nod to Sinatra and incredible new jams from Scale The Summit, Between The Buried And Me, Graviton, and All Shall Perish.
• We cheered Taylor Momsen and her desire to “fuck for Satan.”
• We met the new Dragonforce singer. It’s not Corey Taylor.
• We took a stand against D.R.U.G.S.

You’ll have a couple days to de-Anso yourselves, but please do rush right back to MetalSucks on Monday for more hot action when the bosses return from muling heroin in from Ecuador their business trip and we resume our regularly-scheduled action. You may now put your pants back on!

-ADF

Vic Vaughn already told you that Scale the Summit’s The Collective finally comes out today, and if you read this site regularly there’s no way you could’ve forgotten, whatwith my constant reminders over the past 2+ months. But records this good deserve extra mention, and since Scale the Summit are streaming the entire record at 29-95.com right now… well, there’s the extra mention.

So, stream the entirely of The Collective right now, right here. This record is phenomenal… it’s expansive, trippy, heavy, artful, compositionally sound (aka good songs), sounds fantastic (courtesy of Mark Lewis), there are no pesky vocals getting in the way of the instruments, and it’s just all-around well-balanced in every way. Easily one of my favorites, if not the favorite, of 2011 so far. That’s it.

Buy The Collective on CD for only $8.99 here.

-VN

Thanks: Fellow StS lovers TNOTB

Scale the Summit, Trap Them, Weedeater and Omnium Gatherum top the New Releases class of March 1st, 2011. New ones from American Heritage, Bill Steer’s Firebird, Grayceon and others also come out this week, making it one of the healthiest new release weeks for metal thus far in 2011. MS New Release Czar Vic Vaughn takes a look after the jump.

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Scale the Summit makes awesome party music, as I found out this Sunday when I had some folks over to the Vince Division of the Mansion to celebrate my birthday. It’s heavy enough to get the metalheads’ in the room bopping, but it’s not so abrasive that it’ll offend those who don’t like their music heavy. This applies for a lot of instrumental metal, actually; I tried it out with Animals as Leaders and was pleased to see a non-metalhead friend of mine doing a stationary headbang in a seat right next to one of the speakers.

But back to Scale the Summit. In case our world premiere of the new StS track “Whales” wasn’t enough for you, Prosthetic is streaming another new song, “Gallows,” over at their store. Just in case, ya know, you like it so much you actually feel like pre-ordering, you can do so right on the spot. Which I highly, highly, highly recommend; The Collective, officially out March 1st, is one of my favorite records of 2011 so far.

Head on over to Prosthetic’s store to stream “Gallows,” then come back here and tell us what you think.

-VN

BING! Still funny. Amazing.

I was kinda flattered last week when some people said they actually DO read the intros to “Worst Week.” So, uh, thanks for the ego boost!

In addition to Groundhog Day, here are some things we celebrated this week:

• The debut of new music from Scale the Summit and American Heritage.
• The formation of The Fred Durst Society of the Humanities and Arts.
• The announcement of this year’s line-up for The New Engalnd Metal & Hardcore Festival.
• The legacy of 18 Visions.
• The incredible comedic skills of Rush’s Neil Peart.
• The impending return of Beavis and Butt-Head.
• A new Protest the Hero song.
• Academy Award winner Francis Ford Coppola’s declaration that musicians shouldn’t be rich.
• Metal Injection’s Black Metal History Month.
• Dime.

Speaking of celebrating — don’t forget that Vince is DJing at Idle Hands Bar from 7 to 10pm tonight. All the cool kids will be there. You wanna be cool, don’t you?

-AR