MetalSucks

From a Rhythm magazine interview with Dave Lombardo that I saw on Blabbermouth:

Rhythm: Playing with METALLICA at Download in 2004 must have been quite an experience.

Lombardo: “Yeah. Show ‘em how it’s done! No disrespect to Lars [Ulrich], because Lars is great and he’s a very nice guy, but he needs to spend a week at my house and we need to sit down and play. I could show him — ‘No, Lars, like this!’… ‘Let’s chill, let’s relax, have some coffee and let’s play!’ Hahahahaha!”

If you’ve ever seen/heard this show, then you’re already aware that Lombardo ain’t dicking around – he and Joey Jordison both made Metallica sound at least 95% better (alas, Hetfield still insists on using those honky-tonk “wom-ahn” vocals he’s become so fond of). Check it out:

And while we’re on the topic, here’s Jordison playing with the band:

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In no particular order…

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UPDATE: Testament are definitely doing this tour. There’s no mention of High on Fire in the press release – interpret that as you will.

Well, here it is, kiddies… the tour you’ve been waiting for… there’s not much else you need to know other than this:

1. There will be a limited amount of ten dollar tickets avail to each show.
2. Tour dates are after the jump.

Get stoked.

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You know how I know things aren’t all terrible in the metal world right now? The people who run iTunes think there’s enough money to be made that they’ve now created an entire metal section.

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Holy shit. I wasn’t even out that late last night, but for some reason I am just so tired today that it feels like nothing is really happening. Am I really typing this? Did I really write something positive about Zakk Wylde? Can I please just go to sleep now? I’m just gonna go to sleep now.

Before I do, here’s some things that happened this week:

• We’re giving away a free download of Katatonia’s new song, “Forsaker.”
• We spoke to Hypocrisy’s Peter Tagtgren and Brian Cook from Russian Circles and These Arms Are Snakes.
• We checked out new releases from Slayer and Jesu.
• Otep Shamaya gives women in metal a good name – too bad she won’t be a woman much longer.
• Leaves’ Eyes singer Liv Kristine gives women in metal a bad name – or, at least, a silly one.

Alright, seriously, night-night time for Axl. I think Gary Suarez is going to the NYC Vader gig tomorrow; if anyone sees him there, give him a dead arm for me.

-AR

…MS Maniac Daisy May Tinklepants just pointed out to us that the cover art for their new album, Revisions, is awfully similar to the cover art for Throwdown’s new album, Deathless. The two are being released too closely together for me to think that one is ripping off the other (also, their respective music is so dissimilar that I wouldn’t be surprised if either band didn’t care for the other’s work), so let’s just call it serendipity.

And, while we’re on the topic, here’s Slayer’s video of “Eyes of the Insane,” which the reader known only as “Jimmy” pointed out was the precursor for both of these covers.

-AR

The metal community has been using the phrase “It’s their best album since…” a lot as of late. As though spurred on by the nineteen year old kids who now play the music they created better than they do, the Elder Statesmen of Thrash – or EST – have been enjoying a renaissance.

But here’s what sets Slayer apart from the pack: while you could certainly say that “World Painted Blood is Slayer’s best album since Season in the Abyss” and be telling truth, you could have said “It’s their best album since Seasons in the Abyss” about any album since Diabolus in Musica and been telling the truth. Slayer didn’t only just recently get awesome again – they really never stopped being awesome, despite what the scene snobs might have you believe.

But World Painted Blood finds Slayer sounding even more like the band that created the Holy Trinity than Christ Illusion did, so people are even more excited about than they were about that last offering. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

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The first press release into the MS Mansion inbox this morning bore a bit of bad news, at least for Canadian Slayer and Megadeth fans; Slayer have pulled out of the “Canadian Carnage Tour” with Megadeth, which was due to begin November 8th. The press release cites health concerns about bassist/vocalist Tom Araya as the reason for cancellation:

Slayer’s Tom Araya is currently under the care of a specialist for a back injury, thought to be related to his on-stage activity, and the physician has ordered an immediate surgical procedure to take place in Texas tomorrow (Tuesday) morning.

The press release doesn’t specifically say whether the tour — which also includes Machine Head and Suicide Silence — will continue on without Slayer, but it’s implied, saying more information regarding rescheduled dates will be release soon.

It’d be awfully easy to make a Dave Mustaine vs. Kerry King jab here, but instead I’ll take the high road and simply offer this: get well, Tom.

-VN

So of course I’m loving Slayer’s latest, World Painted Blood. But I won’t be eating a bag of crow over my prediction that the accompanying bonus DVD, “Playing with Dolls,” was going to suck. I’ve seen it now (well, some of it – I couldn’t make it all the way through out of sheer boredom), and despite the involvement of Metalocalypse director Mark Brooks, it is, indeed, lamer than Jason Suecof’s legs.

Are the people who made this aware that in 2009 we can give the illusion of actual movement through pictures that pass by at a fairly quick rate – say, twenty-four frames per second? I have to assume that this news someone never reached them – or that they thought this whole “video-graphic novel” style would somehow make the whole thing spookier. In which they were just wrong. Also, I don’t know if the music from World Painted Blood could have been any more awkwardly shoe-horned into this thing.

Watch it below, if the two previous paragraphs didn’t deter you. It was only s’posed to be on MySpace for a weekend, but of course someone got it up on YouTube – so check it out right quick, before the Slawyers get involved.

Part two is after the jump. And then tomorrow I’ll have my review of World Painted Blood.

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So as if you didn’t know, the new Slayer album, World Painted Blood, comes out this Tuesday (or I guess Monday if you’re in Europe). But as usually happens these days, the record is now streaming in full right here. Go check it out.

I’ll have a full review next week, but allow me to stir shit up right off the bat:

World Painted Blood > Endgame > Death Magnetic

If only Anthrax had actually gotten an album out this year…

-AR

Thanks to the reader known only as “L” for the tip.

We haven’t posted one of these crazy mash-ups in awhile, but reader Cody Barrick sent us this DJ Schmolli mash-up of Motorhead and Slayer, and since it a) doesn’t involve a terrible or semi-terrible pop or rap song and b) works surprisingly well, it struck me as worth sharing…

-AR

While I’ve been defending Roadrunner Records against Dave Mustaine, there’s been drama brewing in the Megadeth camp.

It all started when Mustaine gave a video interview to a Norway’s Lydverket blog. The half-hour long conversation was edited down to about four and half minutes for its final presentation, and a portion of that was devoted to Mustaine talking, for the trillionth time just this year, about being fired from Metallica. (This time he blamed it on the fact that he apparently decked James Hetfield back in the day for kicking his dog, because, y’know, Hetfield is a puppy-hating asshole and Mustaine is a saint and nothing is ever his fault.) And for reasons not entirely clear to me, Mustaine was seriously offended by the final video, and threatened that “as soon as I see that interviewer again, I am going to put him in a hospital.” (The journalist in question was actually a woman, but, hey, it’s hard to remember the little details when you never think about anything but yourself.)

Well, a full, unedited version of the interview has been released now, and as it turns out… Mustaine is the one who brought up Metallica. Mr. “I Don’t Want to Talk About Metallica Anymore.” Yes, the interviewer asks him to elaborate on his point a little, but he basically just starts talking about them, and going on and on and on… and then he brings up the whole Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame thing, which he was never asked about… I mean… Kerry King was right: give this dude some rope and he will hang himself. I’d call the dude an asshole, but really, this is just sad. Because Dave Mustaine is that guy who never got over his girlfriend leaving him, even though it was a million years ago and he’s now married to someone else.

Go to roughly the fifteen minute mark to see Mustaine bring up Metallica.

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Axe to Fall, Converge’s once-again excellent new album, is yet another stylistic shift: the majority of it is devoted to the band playing harder and more technically than they have in their post-Jane Doe era, while the closing two songs finding them venturing further away from their comfort zone than they ever have before. But even though guitarist Kurt Ballou darts all over the fretboard more than usual, vocalist Jacob Bannon changes nothing about his performance, from the breathless rambling on opener “Dark Horse” to his trademark pterodactyl-like shriek over the course of the album. But this isn’t to say that he’s in a state of creative stasis while the rest of the band moves outwards: Bannon’s hellacious scream is just as much a part of Converge’s uniqueness as is Ballou’s nimble riffing. Bannon’s work on Axe to Fall is as savage as it’s ever been, and once again adds weight and disturbing depth to the album’s metallic hardcore-fueled chaos.

Jacob Bannon’s place in metal, hardcore, and—for better or worse—metalcore is massive, with his trademark vocals incalculably influential and lyrics favoring the abstract over the melodramatic. Even outside of Converge, Bannon manages to be prominent, with a successful visual art career and running hardcore label Deathwish Inc. A surprisingly normal sounding (at least in terms of how he sounds on record), introspective guy, Bannon comes off as both wise about the metal and hardcore world while still impressed by and interested in it. In a lengthy interview with MetalSucks, he discussed the musical and lyrical intricacies of Axe to Fall, his approach to artwork in comparison to his vocal work, and people’s changing attitudes toward heavy music as they age.

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When I last spoke with Gojira’s Joe Duplantier about a year ago, the tone of the conversation was overwhelmingly positive; The Way of All Flesh had just been released to critical acclaim, the band had just come over to the U.S. for their biggest tour here to date (supporting In Flames) and everything was hunky-dory in Gojiraland. Fast forward a year, and the conversation is markedly different. Things are still fantastic for the band; The Way of All Flesh continues to sell and to be loved and they’ve toured non-stop all over the world with the likes of Metallica, Slayer and Lamb of God — but all this work has left the band exhausted.

In my recent chat with Joe before their headline show in Brooklyn last month, he explained the double-edged sword of the band’s newfound success — seeing the world, playing to sold-out audiences and opening for childhood heroes Metallica, while at the same time facing the realities of the constant grind of the road, living without a home and the hardships that come with being in a bus with the same 3 other dudes year-round.

Read my full chat with Joe after the jump, and also be sure to check out Axl’s show writeup (summary: they were FUCKING AWESOME!)

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I’d love it if some kind of behind-the-scenes DVD came with Slayer’s forthcoming World Painted Blood, but I guess I’ll have to settle for this.

The legendary thrashers’ attempt to get people to buy physical copies of their album – in case the four album covers wasn’t enough – is going to be a twenty minute DVD entitled Playing with Dolls, “a 12-episode video-graphic novel” from Metalocalypse director Mark Brooks. Inspired by the Jeff Hanneman-penned track of the same name, a press release tells us that “the film blends elements of animation and still-photography into a visual style similar to that of a graphic novel.”

Based on that description and the below trailer, that makes me think this is going to be akin to that lame Watchmen “motion comic” that came out earlier this year, which is to say, I have very little interest in watching this, huge Slayer fan though I may be. Luckily all signs point to the actual record being awesome, so I don’t feel too concerned about some bonus DVD.

World Painted Blood comes out November 3.

-AR

Dan Nelson is already a legend, and not necessarily in a good way. Like Gary Cherone or Blaze Bailey, he’s going to go down in history as a dude who was hired to be the new singer for a well-known band, only to get the boot fairly quickly; unlike Cherone of Bailey, the work he did with this particular well-known band will either never see the light of day, or slip out only as a bootleg. A fairly limited number of ‘Thrax fans ever got to see him perform live with the band, so really there’s only a small part of the population that has any sense of what his contributions may have been, positive or negative.

But Nelson is from Strong Island, and ain’t gonna let no Scott Ian or Charlie Bananas get him down. According to Metal Underground, Nelson has started a new project with drummer Paul Bostaph.

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Congrats to “wiffle bat” and “soup”, the two proud owners of the brand new Revocation CD Existence is Futile. Their winning captions for the photo at right submitted in last week’s funny photo caption contest:

• wiffle bat: “pardon me while i pass the brains of my bass player.”
• soup: “…one more push for the new Cradle of Filth album.”

This week we’ve got 5 copies of Revolver Magazine’s special all-Slayer edition, which hits newsstands this week: “This unmissable special issue takes you in-depth through the band’s hellacious history, including exclusive new interviews with every group member, an oral history going behind the scenes of their biggest albums and mammoth tours, a vintage Clash of the Titans roundtable interview… and a look inside the artwork of Slayer’s “unholy trinity”—Reign in Blood, South of Heaven, and Seasons in the Abyss—with illustrator Larry Carroll, and guitarist Kerry King reveals some of his favorite shit. On top of this, the issue contains never-before-seen photos and a selection of Slayer-inspired tattoos from their most diehard fans!”

Just come up with a funny caption to the below photo, courtesy of Shelby Cobras of Illogical Contraption.

When did you guys start listening to heavy music? How many of you started listening this decade? I’m seriously curious about this. Those of you who started this decade… Are you sick of it yet? Are you starting to get sick of it? Does it excite you the way it did in 2004? For those of you who started earlier… do you remember what things were like 1990-1995? Remember when Megadeth was going multiplatinum, Pantera was flying in private jets, and Morbid Angel and Carcass were on major labels? Remember how that pretty much died off?

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Actually, this gets old after about fifteen seconds. But the synchronized head banging really sells those first fifteen seconds.

-AR

Thanks to Ziv Frenkel for sending this in.

Slayer have the title track of their new album World Painted Blood up for streaming on their MySpace page.

Conclusion: it sounds like Slayer.

EXCEPT: the guitar solo. Lots of folks slag Kerry King for his one-solo-fits-all style of shred… and really, I can’t say that they’re wrong. Until now. This solo is not only different from King’s usual fare, but it’s slooooowwwwww. This solo probably has as many notes in the entire thing as most of King’s solos do in one phrase. And for that it’s seriously fucking awesome! Hanneman’s riffing and Lombardo’s drumming underneath lock in for a groove that compliments it perfectly, emphasizing the nuance of King’s solo all the more.

World Painted Blood drops November 3rd.

-VN