I don’t believe that Job for a Cowboy or Suicide Silence created deathcore, but they seem to be the two bands that everyone points to as the epitome of that genre, perhaps because they’re two of the most popular bands to emerge after the tag gained some steam (no one ever called The Red Chord “deathcore” when they started), or perhaps because they’re both so-called “MySpace bands” whose careers took off roughly around the same time. In any case, it’s been interesting to watch their paths diverge; there might have been some similarities between the two bands circa Doom and The Cleansing, but there sure as shit isn’t anymore. JFAC have gradually turned into a traditionalist death metal band (and a very fine one, I might add — their new EP, Gloom, features what is easily their best work to date) while Suicide Silence have pursued a musical direction more reminiscent of Slipknot.

Case in point: the band’s new song, “You Only Live Once.” Mitch Lucker’s vocals are still DM (unlike Corey Taylor, he’s not doing any clean singing… yet), but “Unanswered” this ain’t. In fact, the intro, the bridge, and and the section starting around the 2:22 mark could very well be from a Slipknot song.

I’m not saying any of this as an insult, by the way. I like Suicide Silence, and I like this song. I think this band serves as a gateway for a lot of fans, and I’m absolutely fine with that — I can see how kids might take the leap from this to Morbid Angel (but hopefully not the new Morbid Angel, ’cause that shit is terrible) much easier than I can see how kids might take the leap from, say, Hollywood Undead to anything that isn’t a life of stupidity and waste. I’m just observing that this band has a different set of aspirations from some of their peers.

And then I found twenty bucks.

“You Only Live Once” comes off of Suicide Silence’s new album, The Black Crown, which is out July 12 on Century Media.

-AR

The Revolver Golden Gods Awards will air on VH1 later this month (or something… I know we got a press release but I was too lazy to read it), and it will be interesting to see that, because I was there, but I didn’t actually see very much of the show. I saw the schmuck from Asking Alexandria drop his mic two seconds into “Youth Gone Wild,” and I saw some of Avenged Sevenfold’s performances with Duff McKagan and Vinnie Paul, and I saw enough of Chris Jericho performing “For Whom the Bell Tolls” to consider throwing myself over the balcony and ending the awards in spectacular fashion (sometimes, sacrifices must be made for the greater good). But by and large I was too busy snorting coke in the bathroom with a girl who fucking swore to me that it wasn’t a herpes sore that lying bitch! to be bothered.

So one thing I had absolutely no idea even transpired was the below montage paying tribute to the five guys who died in the past year that are relevant to the readers of Revolver, which is to say, not Phil Vane or Frankie Sparcello.

But I shouldn’t be a jerk about it, it’s really a very touching video.

-AR

[via Metal Underground]

Corey Taylor and Joey Jordison have basically been contradicting one another in the press for months, with Jordison telling anyone who will listen that Slipknot will live on without Paul Gray, and Taylor telling anyone who asks that he’s not so sure. Now Metal Insider tells us that, in a recent video interview (above), Jordison has gone so far as to say that not only will Slipknot continue with Gray, but if necessary, it will continue without Taylor, too:

“You know what?! That’s for him to answer. As far as I’m concerned, Slipknot’s my baby and I have a bunch of songs written. And I’m in rehearsal right now with all the guys and it’s completely on fire. Donnie [Steele, Gray's replacement]’s doing a great job. And as far as Slipknot’s concerned, it’ll always exist — with or without [Taylor]. So that’s it.”

Click to read more…

I know it’s not the most popular thing to admit to around these parts, but I really like Slipknot (up through V3:TSV, that is). I appreciate the fact that they bring a fairly heavy sound to the masses, flip the bird at their detractors, and continue moving forward despite alleged inner band turmoil, an increasingly fickle buying public, and the death of bassist Paul Gray.

Their side projects, on the other hand, have all left me cold. Stone Sour, Murderdolls, To My Surprise, Dirty Little Rabbits – bah! Nothin’.

So, when I heard on Monday that M. Shawn Crahan AKA “Clown” was interviewed on some internet radio show about his latest project, The Black Dots of Death, I decided to investigate. I had no interest in the 30-minute interview, so I opted for Clown’s own promo video for the record instead.

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I’m not gonna do a regular worst week this week, because I wanna ramble for a minute. I’m sure no one will be too disappointed.

I really can’t believe it’s been a year since Peter Steele died… I also can’t believe he’s really dead. If you haven’t already read Anso’s two-part rememberance of the man, featuring interviews with bandmates, family members, and friends, you absolutely must do so — it’s amazing. Here’s part one, and here’s part two.

But I’d like to take a moment and pay tribute to the guy in a way that I know might seem weird — by discussing the song “Enemy of the State” from the Roadrunner United album. Steele didn’t write the music — Joey Jordison and engineer/mixer/producer Matt Sepanic did — but the keyboards and samples are by his Type O Negative bandmate, Josh Silver, and Steele did write the vocal melody and lyrics, and those contributions from Steele make the song really special.

See, the entire track is sung in a made-up language. And it sounds pretty authentic — I didn’t know it was made up until I read an interview with Jordison. I honestly thought, “Oh, Peter Steele is fluent in some cool Eastern European language. Awesome.”

Singing words that don’t actually mean anything might seem crazy, but I get the distinct impression that they meant something to him. I mean, check out his vocal delivery, the way that he laughs after certain moments — he was most certainly telling a story. He conveyed that narrative purely through sound and the tone of his fantastic voice — maybe he was making a commentary on how lyrics don’t matter, maybe he was just trying an experiment, or maybe he was just fucking around. I just find the fact that he even thought to approach the song this way so brilliantly weird. Even if it’s not necessarily the definitive Peter Steele song, the way he made it is definitively Peter Steele.

Vince and I will be away most of next week, but we leave you in the competent hands of Anso DF and Corey Mitchell. Try to take it easy on those dudes and not miss us too much.

-AR

A few years ago, Vince and I were at a Mastodon/Converge show at the Starland Ballroom in New Jersey (where, if memory serves, we met Kip for the first time!), when the In-Between Sets Dude on the PA announced that Hanson would be playing the venue on such and such a date in the near future. Needless to say, the crowd started booing, and then Dude on the PA was all, “I know, they suck, but they sell out every time they play here!”

I’m not really sure that I have a point, but I couldn’t think of any other way to connect Hanson to metal in order to introduce this video of Hanson playing Slipknot’s “Wait and Bleed.”

Apparently this was part of an elaborate April Fool’s joke, in which the band announced on Shockhound that they were recording a Slipknot covers album. I still don’t think Hanson are any good, but I’ll give them credit for taking the gag as far as they did.

-AR

[via Metal Insider]

But only so you all stop e-mailing us about it. Sheesh. It’s not even that funny. It sounds way, way too real to be funny — like, it could seriously be a Dr. Acula song or something.

Keyboard flip.

-AR

At long last, Slipknot have announced who will be taking the late Paul Gray’s spot as their new bass player… at least for the time being. And it’s someone hardcore Slipknot fans already know! Here’s the statement from the band’s official website:

For their upcoming shows in 2011, Slipknot has asked Donnie Steele to fill in for Paul Gray on bass. Donnie, as some may recall, was the original guitar player in Slipknot and had actually reconnected with Paul in recent years. Said the band on their decision, “Donnie was in the band at the very beginning, and rather than get an outsider, we thought it would be a fitting tribute to Paul to play with someone from within the family. Donnie was great friends with Paul and we can’t think of a better way to celebrate his memory than with someone who was there with us at the very beginning. The eight of us are looking forward to being onstage again and honoring Paul’s legacy with our families in Europe and Brazil this summer.”

So there ya have it. Whether or not Donnie ends up back in Slipknot on a full-time basis remains to be seen, but for now…

-AR

Thanks: Hetal Bhatt

Sure, it’s been a shitty week for Kvelertak and their stateside fans: We reported Saturday that the Norwegian scream-rockers got separated from vital travel documents right before departure for their first-ever US tour dates (including the MetalSucks co-presented SXSW super-jam). That bums me out cuz duh those fuckerz jam (which is good for concertgoers), but moreso because I was pumped for the band’s imminent chance to, like, collect on their roaring buzz here (which is good for them). Okay sorry about that mixed metaphor. But the point is that if I were a member of Kvelertak (please can I be a member of Kvelertak?), I’d want to further enable American rockers to pony up some cash for the record that about a billion of us have possessed/loved for months ahead of its proper US release. All is not lost cuz a bonus track-laden US version of Kvelertak still drops Tuesday, but I can’t help but lament the fact that a string of ballsack-singeing live sets would’ve cranked open a lot more wallets a lot wider. And deservedly so.

Click to read more…

UPDATE: Whoops. Pic is apparently photoshopped. Thanks to our readers for catching what I missed. Oh well. It was a funny story in theory at least!

It was just in January that Corey Taylor refused to deny that he’s the new singer for Velvet Revolver, which he really should not have done unless he IS the new singer for Velvet Revolver. And then it was just in February that Duff McKagan publicly sucked Taylor off, which he really should have done unless Taylor is the new singer for Velvet Revolver. I guess what I’m saying is, all signs point to Corey Taylor being the new singer for Velvet Revolver. Right?

Wrong. Check out this shirt Taylor was sporting at a recent performance:

So I guess that’s the closest thing to a public statement we’ll get from Taylor. Maybe his next shirt will tell us whether or not there’s gonna be a new Slipknot album.

-AR

[via 94 WYSP... thanks to Saul Hudson for the tip]

From Beastmaster:

“Over the last week I’ve noticed on the PRP that both Chelsea Grin and Within The Ruins have been denied entry into to Canada for their separate respective tours. Now granted, I don’t necessarily love these two bands, but I’m wondering if they are possibly related in some way…. Dun dun DUNNNNNNNN.”

Yes. They are both related in that I don’t like either of them. Unfortunately, I don’t control the Canadian government, so my guess is that they actually both just have merch dudes with records for possession or something idiotic like that. In any case, yes, I agree it’s ridiculous that Canada gets to be spared Chelsea Grin while Americans have to continue to endure them.

Click to read more…

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:

Click to read more…

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:

Click to read more…

I guess this guy Nardwuar is old news to Canadians, but I’d somehow never been privy to his shenanigans until reader Jason Bang sent us a bunch of his work a few weeks back.

And boy am I sorry, because I’d been missing out; this guy is like the OG troller, before trolling was trolling, before Sergeant D was Sergeant D, and loooooong before Ziltoid decided to make a Devin Townsend character his handle and infuriate the MS masses with his fuzzy purple hair. Pure genius. Watch as he toys with Slipknot’s Clown — who, to his credit, hangs in for most of the interviews — and frustrates #3 into leaving the set:

Brilliant. Higgins, one of the chief MS Mansion Monkeys, is jumping up and down right now and going “Oooooo. ooo. Ahhhh!” which is monkey-speak for “There’s an open position at the Vancouver Bureau of MetalSucks International if this Nardwuar guy is looking for a job.” So, uh, Nardwuar, waddayasay?

After the jump, watch Nardwuar troll Dani from Cradle of Filth, then watch him troll Steel Panther while Steel Panther troll him right back:

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Scorched-Earth Policy
TBA
Label – Self-release
Release date – Spring 2011

Back in 2001, my first taste of Slipknot’s then-forthcoming sophomore album, Iowa, was a two-minute piece of “The Heretic Anthem.” The snippet was found on a wee little mini-CD from Roadrunner Japan alongside similarly abridged jams by Fear Factory, Ill Nino, Bat Cave, Sepultura, and, uh, Cairo, among others. The weird thing is that this CD5-shaped Reader’s Digest of macho gruntcore — clearly designed for overhead play at Japan’s CD superstores — stayed in heavy rotation at my place for months. Crazy, right? But you can see how, once distilled to its 120-second essence, no song could overstay its welcome or commit an unforgivable gaffe — even Ill Nino’s! And listening to them all was like taking a healthy bite of twelve different pizza slices, some undercooked, most boldly similar, and totally fun! Even Ill Nino’s!

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We bid fuck off to 2010 tonight ,and that’s sad cuz this year contained the last days of  Type O Negative’s Peter Steele and metal’s Babe Ruth, Ronnie James Dio. We also have to prematurely turn the page on Paul Gray of Slipknot (see you in lefty heaven, dude), Bay Area legend Debbie Abono, and Makh Daniels from Early Graves. It’s like we’re leaving them behind in ’10 and will be forced to forge a path beyond 2011 without their support. What a rip-off.

Okay, this is turning into a real bummer and, worse, it’s redundant to our oft-blubbery reportage of these deaths and others. But today, let’s quickly acknowledge that outside of the MetalSucks coverage umbrella fell the passings of two friends of metal, actor Tony Curtis and filmmaker Satoshi Kon. Curtis may’ve been a marquee leading man and master of frantic comedy in the ’60s, but he first delivered the single greatest, metallist, brilliantest line of dialogue in the history of cinema in 1957′s The Sweet Smell of Success (see headline). Even Mike Patton and Tomahawk made it the refrain of their jam “Laredo” (above, at 1:40). Which is odd cuz that album also has a track named “Sweet Smell of Success.”

Then there’s Satoshi Kon, whose mind-mangling 13-part series Paranoia Agent is one of those works that metal people can love for its non-damning treatment of outsider fuck-ups and its flip, fatalist depiction of mankind’s collective narcissism. It brings to bear the desolate panic of Hitchcock, Lynch’s themes of futile struggle against unfathomable evil, and inevitable dead-end violence, as found in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Which is odd, cuz the star of that movie reminds me of Mike Patton.

Cheers everybody! See you back here in 2011!

-ADF

Alright, let’s get our Headbanger’s Ball on.

First up today we have “Get Back in Line,” Motörhead’s first video in support of their new album, The Wörld is Yours. That album title, in case you don’t know, is a Scarface reference, and the title of this year’s offering from Upon a Burning Body — although my gut tells me Motörhead’s album will probably make a much stronger impression on the world at large. I dunno, call it a hunch.

But I digress.

The video is pretty cheap and definitely trite, but it’s Motörhead, so I don’t think anyone will care. I don’t know why this band even feels the need to make videos anymore — I would imagine that, at this point, Motörhead’s following will buy their new album pretty much no matter what, and that new generations of Motörhead fans will be created the same way they have been for years: via cool older brothers, cousins, uncles, and other terrible role models who pass the music down to the next generation. But even if I’m wrong and this band still needs new videos to sell their wares, well, I don’t really care so much that the video is a little lame, ’cause the song made me grab a MetalSucks Mansion Monkey by the tail and swing him around over my head for three-and-a-half straight minutes.

Click to read more…

So all this “We’re making a new album!”/”No we’re not!” back-and-forth between the members of Slipknot — specifically, drummer Joey Jordison (pro-new album) and vocalist Corey Taylor (anti-new album) — was already pretty baffling before the band started announcing tour dates for next summer, especially given that these announcements came roughly 24 hours after Taylor’s latest assertion that there’s no new ‘Knot on the horizon. ‘Cause if the band is booking gigs, then there MUST be at least SOME communication either between the band members or directly or at least via their handlers, which would suggest that someone could either tell Jordison to shut up, or tell Taylor to shut up, or tell them both to shut up.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Over the weekend, Taylor once again took to Twitter to try and clear things up for his fans, and, in doing so, once again only made things muddier:

Click to read more…

At least, it was my last time. I feel like I shaved years off my life drinking that crud. Yucky!

Here’s what else we did this week:

• The Human Abstract’s A.J. Minette kicked off his new MetalSucks column, Periphery’s Misha Mansoor checked in from The Legacy Tour, and The Red Chord’s Greg Weeks thinks that Scott Stapp will sore.
• We spoke to R. Loren of Sailors with Wax Wings and White Moth fame.
• We checked out the latest offerings from Deathspell Omega and Nekorgoblikon.
• Speaking of The Legacy Tour: if you’ve ever wanted to see what the blood in Revocation front man Dave Davidson’s head looks like, well, here’s your chance!
• We did our annual bitchfest about the Grammy noms.
• We got lost in a Map of Metal.
• We speculated about which label will land Between the Buried and Me.
• We were envious of the music criticism skills of The Dillinger Escape Plan’s Jeff Tuttle.
• System of a Down are getting back together! Just don’t call it a reunion.
• We spent way too much time talking about Slipknot.

The third night of Heavy Metal Hanukkah is coming a little after 5 pm. Have a good weekend, folks.

-AR

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Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (sometimes) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

This week, Anso DF suggested the Question of the Week; unfortunately, he did so before Slipknot announced that they’re headlining the Sonisphere Festival this year, so it doesn’t seem quite as relevant anymore. Still, it was a fun question to answer, so:

TO WHAT EXTENT WOULD A SLIPKNOT BREAK-UP BE BAD FOR METAL?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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