SEND EMAIL TO
NEWS [AT]
METALSUCKS
[DOT] NET
‘Cause I just found their new singer.
He’s young, he’s talented, and he recognizes that JESUS IS THE LORD, a message which somehow got lost in previous VR tunes like “Pills, Demons & Etc.,” “Dirty Little Thing,” and “Just Sixteen.”
OMG SLASH PLEASE HIRE THIS KID RIGHT NOW HE IS SO FREAKIN’ AWESOME!!!
-AR
[via Badass]
Fuck Nu-GN’R, and fuck Velvet Revolver, too. This band covers “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” and blows of ‘em out of the water. Axl and Slash, in all their various projects, have not sounded this good in decades. If this group’s originals are even half as soulful as this cover, they could single-handedly save hard rock from the Hinders and Godsmacks of the world. SOMEONE PLEASE SIGN THESE DUDES IMMEDIATELY.
-AR
Thanks to “S.” for the tip!
While both The Deciblog’s Shawn Macomber and myself both think that Chinese Democracy is pretty great, two music critics does not a hit album make. The record shit the bed when it came out in 2008, and Best Buy, who paid untold millions of dollars for the exclusive rights to sell physical copies of the album in the United States, were left holding the bag — I can’t find the exact figure right now, but I know they had to buy X million copies outright, and I know they weren’t allowed to return/sell back any copies they failed to get off their shelves. In other words, Axl Rose and Geffen Records ended up making out like bandits despite the album’s colossal commercial failure — they ended up not losing any money on the record’s fifteen year creation process, and they even got to claim that the album went platinum, because it did, technically, ship a million units. (For the record, as of this writing, it’s sold roughly 600,000 copies.) Meanwhile, if you’ve checked the shelves at your local Best Buy recently — and I have, for shits n’ giggles — there will literally be dozens and dozens of untouched Chinese Democracy CDs.
So what the crap is Best Buy gonna do with all those unsold units? Sell ‘em for $1.99, that’s what.
No guitar pedal is more well-known and widely used (or over-used if you’re Kirk Hammett) than the Cry Baby wah-wah. If you’ve got some time, dig into this new hour-long documentary on the Wah that started it all and its lasting effect on music, which our Brohemoths at Metal Injection posted over the weekend. Interviews with Eddie Van Halen, Jerry Cantrell, Slash, Kirk Hammett and Zakk Wylde should make it interesting for staunch metalheads while interviews with dozens of other guitar luminaries will delight your inner guitar-nerd.
Oh, what’s that? You’re not made of time? Make sure you at least watch the 2-minute intro sequence in which grown men do their best to vocally imitate the sound of the pedal. Because nothing says “metal” like a 65 year-old dude making funny noises with his mouth. Also, Eddie Van Halen officially sounds like he’s 153 years old.
After the jump, the official description of the documentary:
Banner Designed by Cysquatch
Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (sometimes) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.
This week’s query was suggested by a reader identifying himself simply as “Andy” –
WHICH MODEL OF GUITAR IS THE MOST METAL?
The MS staff’s answers after the jump.
I know I’ve been kind of obsessed (here, here, here, here) with The Deciblog’s “Justify Your Shitty Taste” columns, but can you really blame me? What’s more fun than watching people get upset over nothing?
I think you could count the positive reviews for Guns N’ Roses’ (really Axl Rose’s) Chinese Democracy on one hand; I oughta know, ’cause I wrote one of ‘em. I still take shit for that review, and I still stand by it. I completely, 100% understand why someone wouldn’t like Chinese Democracy, but I still completely, 100%, and without shame fucking love it.
And apparently, so does Decibel‘s Shawn Macomber because he has written absolutely EPIC defense (almost as epic as the album itself) of the record for this week’s “JYST.”
Round Two of Heavy Metal Blunders brings us, who else? Vince Neil! Yes, the official MS Mansion punching monkey got shipped off to the can last week. At this point, I don’t really care. But I did get a chuckle out of his girlfriend, Alicia Jacobs, who was concerned for her bank account, err… boyfriend. Jacobs claimed Neil was “not eating much other than peanut butter, Doritos and stuff like that. He had a baloney sandwich one day. It’s not optimal conditions.” I wonder what Razzle thinks about dem apples?
Sooo… just thought we’d take this opportunity to remind you yet again that MetalSucks, with a special assist from The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley, will be presenting Heavy Metal Literature Night at at Hank’s Saloon in Brooklyn this Thursday, February 17. Members of God Forbid, Tombs, and, of course, this very website, will be doing readings from from some of metal’s greatest tomes, including Motley Crue’s The Dirt, Led Zeppelin’s Hammer of the Gods, Slash’s Slash, Marilyn Manson’s Long Hard Road Out of Hell, and more — kinda like what Will Forte does in the below video. Only we don’t make one of the biggest bombs of the year and get fired from Saturday Night Live at the end.
And, oh yeah, Vince is DJing!!! Come get st00pid with us. Thursday night. See ya there.
How come Miss Piggy can’t count to 70? ‘Cause every time she gets to 69, she gets a frog in her throat.
ANYWAY, here’s how we amused ourselves this week:
Speaking of 69ing: Monday is Valentine’s Day. I’m just reminding you in case you’re a burnout and you forgot to get something for your woman. Don’t say I never did nuthin’ for ya.
-AR
Here’s the latest round of idiotic news revolving around the band you can pretty much blame for this website’s existence.
First of all, Corey Taylor has been heavily rumored to be the new vocalist for Velvet Revolver, and then a couple of weeks ago, he refused to contradict that rumor, thereby pretty much confirming it. Now Metal Insider tells me that Duff McKagan thinks he’s being cute by pretty much doing the same thing, telling fans during a recent online chat that “I can neither confirm nor deny” that Taylor is the group’s new singer before apparently mistaking Taylor for a can of Pepsi: “He’s the voice of a whole new generation.”
Slipknot’s been around for over a decade now, so I guess McKagan doesn’t actually know what the phrase “new generation” means, but whatever. Like I said last month, there’s absolutely no reason to say shit like this in the press unless Taylor got the job. And at this point, VR absolutely needs to start denying the rumor, or just announce Taylor as the new singer. Because now if he’s not the new singer, whomever the new singer is is gonna hafta be pretty frickin’ awesome and/or famous, or the whole thing is just gonna seem anticlimactic. In fact, if Taylor isn’t the new singer, I’d say they either need to get Robert Plant, or just announce a reunion of the original Guns N’ Roses.
Which, incidentally, some morons think is what’s gonna happen. From Classic Rock:
The above video (which I first saw on Movieline) is of Mad Men star Jon Hamm doing a reading from My Dad Was in ZZ Top, a new book by Conan writer John Glaser. The book uses allegedly “found” documents to tell the secret history of rock n’ roll — Hamm is reading a chapter about the secret origins of the Butthole Surfer’s moniker.
Sadly, Hamm will not be at the MetalSucks sponsored Heavy Metal Literature Night at Hank’s Saloon on Thursday, February 17 — but lotsa other cool people will be! Members of God Forbid, Tombs, and The Austerity Program will all be on hand to do readings from some of metal’s greatest tomes, including Motley Crue’s The Dirt, Led Zeppelin’s Hammer of the Gods, Slash’s Slash, Marilyn Manson’s Long Hard Road Out of Hell, and more; MS’ own masters of mischief, Axl Rosenberg and Vince Neilstein, will also be on hand to read and DJ, respectively.
Oh yeah, and, of course, we plan to get pretty drunk.
Even more details coming next week!!! Get excited!!!
In 1987, $lash wrote the main riff for “Sweet Child O’ Mine” as a joke during warm-up for band practice, and after Izzy Stradlin and Axl Rose recognized its potential and turned it into an actual song, The World’s Best Jew ‘Fro argued against its inclusion on Appetite for Destruction, thinking it was too ballad-y for a hard rock album. Now, twenty-four years later, $lash has finally taken his revenge on the song that gave him his career: wearing a variation of his signature top hat that was apparently fashioned from some old clothes Rob Halford recently donated to the Salvation Army, $lash appeared on the Super Bowl half-time show with The Black Eyed Peas to assist Fergie in what Vince rightly referred to as a “mutilation” of the song.
Let’s class this bitch up.
On Thursday, February 17, at Hank’s Saloon in Brooklyn, we are going to be presenting (with some serious help from The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley!) Heavy Metal Literature Night. This will be like one of those classy book readings where intellectual types sit around drinking wine while people read aloud from beautifully written, deeply meaningful texts — only instead of intellectual types, the readers will be various members of the local metal community, instead of wine we’ll be drinking beer and whiskey and whatever else leads to terrible decisions in life, and instead of beautifully written, deeply meaningful texts, we’ll be reading from some of metal’s greatest tomes, including Motley Crue’s The Dirt, Led Zeppelin’s Hammer of the Gods, Slash’s Slash, Marilyn Manson’s Long Hard Road Out of Hell, and other books of that nature.
There will be booze. There will be music. There will be fun.
Mark it in your calendars. More details coming next week…
Corey Taylor performing “It’s So Easy” with Slash in 2009. Could this be what Velvet Revolver sounds like in the not-too-distant future?
Corey Taylor must really, really hate having free time on his hands. He’s already the vocalist for Slipknot and Stone Sour, and he nearly joined Anthrax in 2007. Then, in 2009, he revealed that he’d “had a meeting” with Velvet Revolver about taking Scott Weiland’s spot in the band, but that it “it just didn’t work — for whatever reason.”
Now VR’s search for a new singer has been heating up, with drummer Matt Sorum going so far as to tell an interviewer that “The guy we’re liking now is a young guy” who is “known” (e.g., not a noob they picked up on Hollywood Boulevard) and whose background is in “a little bit heavier rock ‘n’ roll than we are.” Naturally, this led to lots and lots of speculation as to this mystery singer’s identity, and the combination of clues — that the vocalist was not unknown, that he was younger than Slash and company, and that he traditionally sang for a band or bands that were heavier than VR — caused some spectators, like our friends at Metal Insider, to ponder the possibility that Taylor might the man for the job after all.
Now the story has taken another interesting turn. Billboard has done a new profile on Taylor, which begins thusly:
So yesterday, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross got an Oscar nomination for their score for The Social Network. I didn’t write anything about it because a) I was too busy fuming that somehow Christopher Nolan didn’t get a Best Director nod for Inception, and b) it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Reznor and Ross would be nominated, so it didn’t really feel like news. Still, it will be great if a few weeks from now we can start referring to the Nine Inch Nails mastermind as “Oscar winning composer Trent Reznor.”
But, no, the much more interesting cinemetal story to break this week is that Slash — who announced the formation of Slasher Films, a production company devoted to creating “edgy contemporary horror fare with a nod to the thrillers of the ’70s and ’80s,” back in October — has now started to discuss his first potential projects as a movie producer. From an interview that Entertainment Weekly conducted with the guitarist at the in-progress Sundance Film Festival:
So Yahoo! has Ozzy Osbourne’s personal list of the Top Ten Metal Albums of 2010, and it may or may not surprise you to learn that it’s a really, really interesting mix of terrible and brain dead. (By the way, if you don’t like MetalSucks articles where I can really, really, really angry about something of less than no importance, then you should stop reading now.)
Okay so check out his list, and then I’ll tell you my thoughts. And before we begin, I should point out that it’s theoretically possible Ozzy didn’t actually choose these release, but, rather, than one of his handlers did it for him. But since it’s being labeled as “Ozzy’s list,” I am going to treat it as though it were written by Ozzy.
Axl Rose celebrated the two-year anniversary of Chinese Democracy‘s release by doing what he does best — no, not make music, silly. He sued somebody! Hey, dude’s gotta eat, and Democracy sales ain’t exactly paying for his next rental car, y’know?
According to 1up.com:
Hard to believe, but Chinese Democracy officially came out two years ago today. (You can read my original review here. I still stand by every word, and I still prefer CD to Death Magnetic.) Promotion for the album has still been anemic. Yes, the band (such as it were) has finally toured certain territories, but it doesn’t amount to much when you consider how much time has passed. And there have still been no music videos, I still haven’t gotten my motherfucking Dr. Pepper, and Axl Rose has only communicated with the press sparsely and electronically.
But that doesn’t really matter, because I don’t even think that my namesake would have the most interesting story to tell regarding the creation of Chinese Democracy.
Allow me to shill for a beat before the weekend: If you haven’t already bought one of our new, limited edition shirts, go get yours now!!! They’re selling fast, and soon they will be the title of a God Forbid album. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Here’s some other fun stuff we did this week:
Have a nice, relaxing weekend gang. We’ll miss you muchly, but we’ll see ya Monday.
-AR
“Bullying” seems to have become a hot button issue since 18-year old NJ college student Tyler Clementi killed himself earlier this year after his sexual encounter with another man was allegedly streamed online by his roommate and another student. Public outcries like this are always bittersweet; on the one hand it’s a shame it takes a death to bring an issue like this to light (an issue which had shamefully been ignored for way too long), but on the other hand any positive change that can result from such a tragedy can be looked upon as a silver lining.
Homophobia and gay-bashing in the metal community — where a bunch of social outcast have surprisingly low tolerance for others that are different than they are — are as bad as they are anywhere. Exhibit A: the outrageous comments right here on this site.
