A bunch of big records came out last Tuesday: Suicide Silence, Fair to Midland, Sepultura and Decapitated. After the jump we’ll take a look at how those and a few recent releases sold over the past week.

But first, a follow-up on a question I asked in last week’s column: how do the numbers for Arch Enemy’s Khaos Legions stack up against their past releases? I don’t have week-by-week breakdowns for each album to compare to Khaos Legions‘ cumulative total of 13,944 after five weeks, but these total sales figures for Arch Enemy’s best-selling albums should provide some frame of reference:

Anthems of Rebellion: 74,712
Doomsday Machine: 108,036
Rise of the Tyrant: 55,812
Wages of Sin: 71,688

With Khaos Legions falling off the charts in week six, that means they sold less than 1,092 units last week, the minimum number required to crack the Top 100 Hard Music Chart. Based on that I’d say it’s going to be a tough climb for Gossow, the Amotts and co. to match their past success this time around.

ANYWAY, back to last week’s big releases:

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MS staffers have lives too, and as such we can’t always get to the record store the very day new releases come out. We’re guessing it’s the same for you guys, too, but that doesn’t mean you’re not interested in the week’s new releases, right? With that in mind, here’s Vic Vaughn on all the shit that came out yesterday including new records from Decapitated and Suicide Silence.

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MetalSucks tipster extraordinaire Hetal Bhatt sent us the below video, and while it has nothing to do with metal, it did make me laugh, and I did forward it to friends. So, enjoy:

And on that note, here’s some stuff we did this week:

• We debuted new music by Chimaira, Cannabis Corpse, and S.O.S.
• We debuted a new music video from Sleeping Giant.
• We got new gear tips from Periphery’s Misha Mansoor and Revocation’s Dan Gargiulo, and we spoke to Michael Amott from Arch Enemy.
• We checked out the latest releases from Decapitated, The Black Dahlia Murder, Limp Bizkit, and Wormrot.
• We pondered a world in which concertgoers can’t film shows with their iPhones.
• We marveled that anyone finds Tosh.0 to be funny.
• We wondered which deathcore frontman has the best tattoos.
• We found the worst line-up for a festival ever.
• We chose our favorite extras from the new Annotations of an Autopsy video.
• We broke the bad news that vocalist Chris Clancy and keyboardist Drew Stavola are both out of Mutiny Within.

You’ve got one more week with me and me alone before Vince comes back. Deal with it, fuckers.

See ya Monday.

-AR

Sleeping Giant, metallic hardcore, uh, giants, will release their latest and greatest album, Kingdom Days In An Evil Age, on July 12, and by that time, the band will already have begun the latest installment of the Scream the Prayer tour, alongside Norma Jean, The Chariot, War of Ages, Close Your Eyes, Texas In July, I The Breather, The Great Commission, Sovereign Strength and As Hell Retreats. In anticipation of Sleeping Giant’s summer of excitement, MetalSucks is pleased to be debuting the band’s new video, “Dead Men Walking,” right here, right now. Check it out below!

Like we said, Sleeping Giant’s new album, Kingdom Days In An Evil Age, comes out July 12 on Ain’t No Grave Records; you can pre-order it here. And get dates for the Scream the Prayer tour right here.

If you told me there was a tour with Born of Osiris and As Blood Runs Black, I’d probably tell you to have a nice time and let me know how it was. And if you told me that there was a tour with Darkest Hour and The Human Abstract, I’d probably trample your grand ma to get there. I mean, I’m sure she’s a nice lady, but she ain’t no Darkest Hour and The Human Abstract live, y’know?

As it stands, though, all four of these bands will be doing one tour together:

But y’know what? I am not going to bitch about two bands I love touring with two bands I feel lukewarm on, because, hey, at least it’s not two bands I love touring with two bands I hate, y’know? I haven’t seen Born of Osiris live since, uh, I think it was 2007, right when The New Reign came out, and at the time, I was actually pretty impressed — I didn’t sour on them until later, and even then, it was for reasons really having nothing to do with their live show; and I’ve never seen ABRB live, so I can’t talk any smack there, even if I don’t quite understand all the hype that once surrounded that band. So I’ll still take this over a Mayhem Fest or whatever, where I’d have to slog through who knows how many crappy bands just to see Slayer, any day of the week.

Dates are as follows… some of ‘em even have additional bands, like This or The Apocalypse and Sleeping Giant, on the bill:

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…..AS some of you may or may not have heard, Guitarist, Andrew has parted ways with Oceano. This decision was reached through personal as well as minor quarrels amongst the band. We wont go too much further into detail as it seemingly is not a band issue any longer.

If we’re to use MySpace blog comments as our guide, the fan reaction to last week’s news of Andrew Mikhail’s less-than-amicable departure from self-proclaimed deathcore beef-bringers Oceano was generally postive. In a post marked “Andrew Leaves Oceano” the band acknowledged their former guitarist’s public denouncement of the group before assuring fans that tour plans were not changing in spite of this. Scrolling down the page, however, it seems Mikhail wasn’t entirely happy with the comments being made. Using the presumably Outkast-referencing handle “andrew3000.” he replied directly to Oceano saying:

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I’ve really been digging some hardcore this year, thanks largely to 2009 releases from acts like Coalesce, Lewd Acts (review here), Rise And Fall, and White Shit (review here). I spend a good bit of free time surfing the web to check out bands to hype here on the blog, and with Sleeping Giant, I’ve stumbled on to another great one. Now, before any corpse-painted atheists get all testy with me: yes, they are a Christian band. Yet to be closed-minded about Sleeping Giant simply because of their proselytizing lyrical content would be to miss out on a promising talent on par with early Hatebreed.

The video above (which does a fine job with a limited budget) is for “The Army Of The Chosen One,” which comes off the band’s sophomore Facedown Records album Sons Of Thunder. Sleeping Giant are currently on the California Love tour with deathcore kings Winds Of Plague and Oceano. Remaining dates are below.
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