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…

J. Bennett stopped by Decibel HQ last month; naturally, we took the opportunity to grab some adult beverages. It didn’t take long for me to punch up some Kylie in a jukebox that was doing just fine with Use Your Illusion and Ride the Lightning. Nor did it take some random backpatch hombre long—like maybe a second and a half—to cleanse the bar of Ms. Minogue’s exotic stylings with something off of Relentless. Little did this kid know that my drinking comrade was in town specifically to meet up with Bobby Liebling for our May cover story. Ah, the seren-dipshittery—a nice bit of low comedy before an interview that I assume blew even Bennett’s mind.

Said cover story is an instant favorite for multiple reasons, but I think number one is this brief aside from Sean “Pellet” Pelletier, longtime Liebling supporter/sufferer, describing the abode of the Pentagram mainman’s parents.

“There were Cocoa Krispies stuck to the ceiling because Bobby threw a bowl of cereal.”

That’s what I call living. I mean, you don’t need heroin and crack to do that shit, although I suppose it helps. On a moderately more serious note, while the cover’s in simple black and white, the issues detailed therein—loyalty, hedonism, spirituality—span a broad, colorful spectrum. Liebling has defied the odds in virtually every facet of his life—despite endless, infamous struggles with addiction, he’s concocted an absolutely essential proto-doom canon, and lived long enough to see a lethal cocktail of self-sabotage and bum luck transform into international adulation. Worthy subject matter—funny, heartbreaking and, again, sometimes mind-blowing.

And the rest of the issue is no slouch. We’ve covered the Napalm Death flexi already, but there are outlandish and informative features on Burzum, Gridlink, Kylesa, Krallice, Darkest Hour (specifically John Henry’s metal mutha), Obscura, the Scion Rock Fest and shitloads more. Hit it or quit it.

-AB

You can buy the May 2011 issue of Decibel here, or get a full subscription to ensure you never miss an issue, or of those awesome flexi discs!

This year’s edition of the Scion Rock Fest is shaping up to be way better than last year’s… and only a few bands have been announced so far.

Last year’s event wasn’t slouchy; with appearances by Cannibal Corpse, Shrinebuilder, Yob, Voivod, Hate Eternal, Magrudergrind, Ludicra and a number of others, the lineup was pretty sweet. But the layout — four venues, two of them about a mile away from the other two — and the locale — freakin’ cold-ass, drab Columbus, OH — were major downers, especially compared to the free festival’s inaugural year at the Masquerade in Atlana (which hosted four stages in the same venue).

The festival’s organizers seem to have taken note, opting to move the festival to the West Coast for the first time ever in its third year. According to The PRP, the event will take place on March 5th in Pomona, CA (about 30 miles due east of Los Angeles — view a map here) at the Fox Theater and the Glass House, each of which will host two stages.

Oh, you want to know about the lineup instead of my overly verbose introduction??? Read on:

Click to read more…

With little to do in lame-o Columbus, OH, Kip and I sat around our hotel lobby with our shvantzes in our hands until 2pm when The Beast aka The SlayRV — the piece de resistance –  arrived to pick us up… and so the party began. Anton OyVey, Rich Hallford, The Rev of Burger Conquest fame and Mark Lafay pulled that baby right into the parking lot, beers and whiskey in hand, and much rejoicing and drinking immediately ensued. The SlayRV is a classy fucking affair with enough room to sleep 8, a fridge, a front lounge, a toilet (but no pooping allowed on the bus!) and a shower. STYLE, bitches. Whichever bands end up taking this thing on tour are going to have a hell of a time.

From there it was off to the Thurman Cafe, the home of what is supposedly the best burger in Columbus.

Click to read more…

On Friday, March 12th an epic journey of mammoth metal proportions began. The plan:

1. Fly to Columbus, Ohio for Scion Rock Fest the following day.
2. Take a 3-day road-trip in a converted tour bus down to Austin, TX, stopping along the way to visit select food locales and see the sites.
3. Four days of SXSW.
4. Fly home.

Click to read more…

Not that I trust the opinion of Ben Ratliff more than I do my main man Vince – but while he’s still doing this whole Heavy Metal Road Trip thang, we probably ain’t gonna get a proper review of the show.

So it’s Mr. Ratliff at the New York Times to the rescue! This being the Paper of Record, a lot of the prose is pretty flowery (and by “flowery,” I mean “bordering on pretentious and meaningless”), but it still gives you some sense of how the show went down. Here’s an excerpt:

“What a generation ago would be called hardcore punk is now routinely a part of metal festivals, slotted in as grindcore. Magrudergrind, a trio from Washington, brought a fantastic standard of it: speeding, screaming bullets of songs, squalid and economical two-beat frenzies with quick turns and no bass player. (They don’t need one.) This was at Circus, a smaller club. But over in the smallest of the four — the tiny, dingy basement club Bernie’s Distillery — the Texas black-metal band Absu was going at it with dark eye makeup, horror-house gothic vocals and no letup in its music’s clattery, narrow, obsessive drive. Metal is deep and wide. Between this and Yob lay two miles of college-town strip and an aesthetic galaxy.”

Read the rest here.

-AR

Oh man. This is gonna be such a complete shitshow. Earlier today Kip posted about our pending Midwest / Southern adventure… and yeah, shit’s gonna be nuts. Here’s how it’s gonna go down! (Kip… you taking notes?)

This afternoon, Kip Wingerschmidt and I will fly to Columbus, OH. We’ll have one night of relative calm before the shitstorm really hits at tomorrow’s Scion Rock Fest (download a nifty one-page printable schedule here), featuring Cannibal Corpse, Shrinebuilder, Voivod, Absu, Brutal Truth and a ton more brutality. Sometime tomorrow Anton Oyvey, Rich Hallford and friend O’ MetalSucks Mark Lafayowitz will arrive from Indianapolis, where they’ll have just stopped in to pick up The Beast (pictured), a truck that’s been retrofitted as a tour bus. On Sunday morning we’ll start our road trip down to Austin, TX for SXSW. On the way we’ll be stopping/drinking/bourboning/steaking/grilling/partying in the following cities:

Sunday: Bardstown, KY + Nashville, TN
Monday: Memphis, TN, Little Rock, AR
Tuesday: Dallas, TX
Wednesday-Sunday: Austin, TX (SXSW)

We’ll be Twittering, Flipcamming and updating from the road. Be sure to holler at us if you have any recommendations for places to eat, beverages to drink, herbal supplements to supply or sites to see. Kip & I will be holding it down for MetalSucks in SXSW at both MetalSucks-sponsored events — Full Metal Texas and the Prosthetic Records Showcase — so look for us there and, of course, at tons of other shows as well (MetalSucks-approved SXSW schedule here!).

After the jump…. the tour bus’s fortress of solitude…

-VN

Click to read more…

So the other day I was walking down 34th Street, and who did I see, Torah in hand, davening outside of a DMV Express but MetalSucks’ own esteemed Rebbe Anton Mofo’n Oyvey! Now obviously I didn’t want to disturb the man during his holy time, so I figured I’d catch up with him at the synagogue in the East Wing of the MetalSucks Mansion for our regular Shabbat dinner.

But then I realized that both Scion Rock Fest AND South by Southwest are coming up this week, and……could it be that Metal’s Most Brutal Rabbi will be hitting the road and rocking out with Vince & I for one or both of these adventures?!?

Come to think of it — Vince did tell me to buy a plane ticket to Columbus, Ohio for Scion and another ticket BACK from Austin, Texas 10 daze later without making mention of how we would be getting from one to the other. “We’ll figure it out”, he said, in typical Vinzian fashion.

Hmmm, I wonder…

Jews in Space? Nah — Heebz on the HIGHway!!

-KW

The lineup for this year’s Scion Rock Fest speaks for itself — Cannibal Corpse, Shrinebuilder and Voivod headline — and as if that and the 20+ other awesome bands on the bill weren’t enough, the event is completely FREE! But here’s the thing; even though you can currently RSVP on Scion Rock Fest’s website, you won’t be able to do so for long because the word from Scion is that those tickets are just about gone. Fortunately we’ve got a guaranteed pair of tickets to give away that will still be available even once the initial round of freebies have been slurped up.

So, to win your pair of tickets, here’s what we want you to do: leave a comment — with a valid email address that you check frequently — telling us which band on this year’s lineup you absolutely MUST see and why. In case you forget the awesome list of bands just look at the above flyer or the printed list of bands after the jump. We’ll pick our favorite and contact the winner on Friday, February 26th.

Click to read more…

At the beginning of the year I wrote a piece highlighting the sudden abundance of awesome metal festivals in the U.S.. Though our friends across the pond still retain an advantage in metal festivals in both number and size, 2009 saw a whole host of upstarts in the U.S.: Scion Rock Fest, L.A. Murderfest (in its 5th year), California MetalFest, Texas Metal Up Your Ass, Dudefest and of course long-established destinations such as Maryland Deathfest, New England Metal and Hardcore Festival and Dirtfest. SXSW and CMJ both made surprisingly strong showings for metal this year, too.

The party keeps on rolling into the fall with another brand new festival, Planet Caravan, to take place September 18th and 19th at the Orange Peel in Asheville, North Carolina. The lineup is headlined by Clutch and Pentagram, with Orange Goblin, Kylesa, Burst (!), Yob, Wino, Astra, and Revolution Mother rounding out the bill. I haven’t heard of Taddy Porter, Orchid, or Pick Up the Snake, but even if all 3 bands are terrible (highly unlikely) that’s still a fucking killer lineup!

MetalSucks is co-sponsoring the event so we’ll have more news as it’s available. Check out the press release and festival details after the jump.

Click to read more…

So I was thinking back to the CMJ Music Marathon here in NYC last fall, and how Bison B.C. seemed to be the “buzz” metal band on everyone’s tongue. If you were there to see them you witnessed something awesome, and if you weren’t there you heard about it from everyone else and felt like a dipshit because you missed it. At the Scion Rock Fest last month in Atlanta the buzz bands were Krallice and Salome, depending on who you asked (there were, after all, four stages running simultaneously). So who’s it gonna be at this year’s SXSW? My bets are on any one of the awesome bands on The End Records / MetalSucks showcase, but your guesses are as good as any.

Here’s a live video of Bison B.C. performing in their native Vancouver. What are the shows you absolutely must see at this year’s hoedown in Austin?

-VN

It snowed 8 inches in NYC on Monday, but we got back from the Scion Rock Fest in Atlanta just in time to deliver you our usual drudge report. Can you imagine if we’d been stranded? No MetalSucks for two days. What would you have done? Contemplate these noteworthy events of the week as you get ready to enjoy your weekend (65 degrees Sunday in NYC!):

• Mastodon release early contender for best metal video of ’09.
• Watchmen got metal… or not.
• We spoke with NEMHF founder Scott Lee.
• Lamb of God and God Forbid make strong Soundscan debuts.
• We looked at new releases from Hatesphere, Wolves in the Throne Room, Abacabb, Centaurus-A and General Surgery.
• Chimaira released a new single and a super-duper-deluxe pre-order.
• We waxed ecstatic about the weed in Atlanta… oh yeah, and some bands played at the Scion Rock Fest too.
• Doc Coyle struck back at the Internet.
• MetalSucks got nominated for a Metal Hammer “Web of Death” Award!

We’re big fans of pagan metal here at the MS Mansion. BIG fans. Just last night Sammy O’Hagar waltzed in at about 5pm, still drunk and rowdy from the night before (!), dressed in a full get-up of warpaint and animal skins. Obviously there was no other choice at that point but to hand over control of the MS Mansion Mothership to the capable hands of the monkeys, so we put on Turisas’ The Varangian Way and started the party right back up again for the ol’ chap; the freight train kept rolling until at least 4am. Last thing I remember is Kip jumping on top of Axl’s desk and screaming something about “Battle!” and how we need to take vengeance against the other metal websites that constantly rip us off. As I type this, Sammy’s passed out in the bathtub clutching a bottle of Jim Beam while DBR and Satan Rosenbloom are snuggling in my bed; I had to sleep on the couch. Those fucking assholes.

Click to read more…

Axl did such a fine job recapping this past weekend’s Scion Rock Fest that there’s no need for me to reiterate what he already wrote. But even your MS editors part ways once in a while, and while Axl watched the end of Pig Destroyer’s shortened set I headed inside to catch Krallice purely for the curiosity factor. What I saw completely blew my mind and was easily the highlight of the day for me.

Click to read more…

As Axl said this morning, Mastodon’s set at this weekend’s Scion Rock Fest was absolutely monstrous, a highlight of which was the new material from their epic new album Crack the Skye. So much so that when we finally boarded the plane to take us home we both went straight for our iPods and simultaneously selected Crack the Skye as the album that would take us into the air to, err, Crack the Skye (rimshot!). So trust us when we say that you won’t want to pass up this opportunity: The End’s Omega Mailorder is running a special pre-order blitz for the new album, and they’ve got four different configurations you can order — CD, CD/DVD, vinyl, and double-vinyl w/7″. They are also taking pre-orders for the “Divinations” picture disc vinyl, which features two versions of the first single from Crack The Skye. Not only are these packages all insanely affordable, but there’s also a special package deal that includes an exclusive Mastodon t-shirt. So get on your shit and order one right now!. The album’s damn fine, and you don’t want to pass up this opportunity.

-VN

TheFuckingWeather.com tells me “21°!? IT’S FUCKING COLD. Should have gone south,” as if looking outside at the foot of snow on the ground didn’t make it obvious. Funny enough, we did go south this weekend. But it snowed 4 fucking inches down there, stranding all of our friends and causing inexperienced Atlantans to drive like complete and utter assholes (seriously, people… get it together), worsening my pot-induced paranoia as Ax and I attempted to high-tail it to the airport to make our flight out (we missed it).

This morning I was listening to Misery Signals excellent 2008 album Controller on my iPod and it seemed to perfectly fit the cold, morose mood of the day. Here’s the video for “A Certain Death,” not my favorite track on the record but a pretty good one nonetheless.

-VN

Several of you have emailed us inquiring about a possible meetup at tomorrow’s Scion Rock Fest in Atlanta… but what would be the fun in that? So let’s do it this way instead: we’ll be there, you find us. I have a full beard, Axl has a chin-strip beard and a goatee. I’ll be wearing a green hoodie, and if I were a betting man I’d say Axl will be wearing a black one. We look very Jewish, and strikingly similar to our South Park avatars (+ beard for me). We’ll be hanging with Rob from Metal Injection, and ya’ll know what he looks like. Ask around, and ye shall find us.

See you there!

We regret to inform those who entered our contest to win tickets to the Scion Rock Fest that those who win will still not be guaranteed entry. You’ll still have to get there early and wait on line like everyone else. However, since we’re one of the only places left where you can even get tickets, we still think it’s a pretty sweet deal. Sorry about the mixup! Winners will be chosen tonight and notified tomorrow, so enter now!

PLEASE NOTE: THE DEADLINE FOR CONTEST ENTRY IS NOW THIS THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12TH!

As promised, MetalSucks has 10 pairs of tickets to give away for the cumgasm inducing Scion Rock Fest set to take place on February 28th at The Masquerade in Atlanta. Axl and Vince will be partying down in Atlanta, and this is your chance to join in on the fun. As usual, we prefer to leave the selection of the winners up to skill and not to fate, so here’s what you’ve got to do to win: tell us which of the bands on the bill you’d be most excited to see and why. In case you need a refresher, you can take a look at the full list of confirmed bands after the jump or squint at the pint-sized version of the official poster at right.

Remember, this is MetalSucks: in other words, the funnier/wittier/crazier your entry is, the better the chance that we’ll like it. Email all entries to news AT metalsucks DOT net with the subject “SCION ROCK FEST,” and be sure to include your full name and address. Winners will be announced and contacted on Friday, February 13th and will receive their tickets in the mail shortly thereafter. While tickets available to the general public do not guarantee entry, all MetalSucks winners will be guaranteed entry via a list at the door (details TBD). We’ve just been informed that even contest winners are not guaranteed entry, so still make sure you get there early!! Plus, from what we hear, entries at the official Scion Rock Fest website are now closed, so this is your only chance to get ‘em.

And the confirmed bands so far are…

Click to read more…

In the summer of 2006, before MetalSucks was even a twinkle in our young, stoned eyes, Axl and I headed across the pond to England’s famous Download Festival at Castle Donington to get our metal on. Our minds were literally blown; neither of us had ever been to an event of such magnitude and we were literally shocked at the seemingly endless and welcoming metal community in Europe. In 2007 and 2008 we talked of going to other European festival mainstays like Wacken and Hellfest, and though we never made it back we were continually jealous of the rich European metal festival scene.

Americans have reason to be jealous of their European forefathers no more; a glut of both indoor and outdoor festivals have hit the American circuit in the past few of years, and in 2009 even more promoters are jumping on the bandwagon with a glut of killer destination metal festivals already lined up.

Click to read more…

As promised, MetalSucks has 10 pairs of tickets to give away for the cumgasm inducing Scion Rock Fest set to take place on February 28th at The Masquerade in Atlanta. As usual, we prefer to leave the selection of the winners up to skill and not to fate, so here’s what you’ve got to do to win: tell us which of the bands on the bill you’d be most excited to see and why. In case you need a refresher about which bands are on the bill, you can take a look at the full list of confirmed bands after the jump or squint at the pint-sized version of the official poster at right.

Remember, this is MetalSucks: in other words, the funnier/wittier/crazier your entry is, the better the chance that we’ll like it. Email all entries to news AT metalsucks DOT net with the subject “SCION ROCK FEST,” and be sure to include your full name and address. Winners will be announced and contacted on Monday, February 16th and will receive their tickets in the mail shortly thereafter. It is important to note that a ticket does not ensure entry; the event organizers are giving away approximately twice as many tickets as the venue can hold. HOWEVER, all MetalSucks winners will be guaranteed entry via a list at the door (details TBD).

Those who prefer not to leave their ticket chances up to the illogical writing tastes of the MS staff can register at the official Scion Rock Fest website starting on January 28th.

And the confirmed bands so far are…

Click to read more…