Soulfly fans of the world: there’s a new track called “World Scum” from the band’s forthcoming album Enslaved available for free download right now and for the next 48 hours! I just downloaded it and you can too! But first you’ll need to present your passport and social security number, be subjected to a thorough strip-search, made to walk through one of those new fancy-pants airport X-ray scanners, forced to bend over so Soulfly, Roadrunner and FanBridge can perform a full cavity search, and then, THEN, if you click “Like” on Soulfly’s Facebook page you’ll be able to click a few more buttons which will finally allow you to download the track (after which you’ll need to open it in iTunes or your player of choice).

All this, of course, assumes you’re interested in a new Soulfly track. I’m neither here nor there about the band, but, ya know, maybe you’re both here AND there.

Enslaved comes out on March 13th via Roadrunner Records.

-VN

I don’t hate Soulfly as much as some people — in fact, I quite enjoyed 2005′s Dark Ages, and that Greg Puciato sections of that one song from the last album — but I can’t find a nice thing to say about the album art for the band’s upcoming eighth full-length, Enslaved. It looks lo-fi, but not in a cool way, like the cover Terrorizer’s Hordes of Zombies. And why are the edges blacked out? And why are the edges on the left side more blacked out than the edges on the right side? It just doesn’t seem like that much thought went into this thing.

Enslaved comes out March 13 on Roadrunner. It has some pretty cool guests on it, like Cattle Decapitation’s Travis Ryan and Dez Fafara from DevilDriver (and, uh, Coal Chamber), so it should really go without saying, but if the music on the album is good, then it really won’t matter what the cover looks like. Although the band’s new bass player is the dude who used to be in Static-X, so that doesn’t bode well, does it?

-AR

…Max Cavalera recently revealed during a radio interview (video above) that he’s working on his autobiography with British journalist Joel McIver, who has previously penned such metal-themed tomes as The Bloody Reign of Slayer and Justice for All: The Truth about Metallica. The forward will apparently be written by Dave Grohl, who collaborated with Cavalera as part of his Probot project back in ’04.

Click to read more…

Congrats to readers Eva Nemec and “Rod Bender” (LULZ). They each correctly identified last week’s logo as belonging to the band Nylithia — a group Vince has rightfully praised right here on MetalSucks — and for their troubles, Eva and Rod each win a copy of the CD booklet for Stone Sour’s Audio Secrecy that has been signed by the band. Cherish them forever, Eva and Rod!

This week, we have another awesome prize, again courtesy of the nice folks at Roadrunner Records:  a copy of the CD booklet for Soulfly’s Omen that has been signed by Max Cavalera and company. Pretty sweet, right? And we’ve got TWO of ‘em to give away!

All you gotta do to win is identify the name of the band whose logo appears below, then shoot me an e-mail at axl AT metalsucks DOT net with your answer, your name, and your address. ALL ENTRIES WITHOUT AN ADDRESS WILL BE DISQUALIFIED. From everyone who gets it right, we’ll randomly select two winners and announce their names one week from today.

This week’s logo was once again suggested by reader Melissa Stern… thanks, Melissa!

-AR

Everyone whose parents raised them correctly loves Gojira, and so everyone whose parents raised them correctly has been eagerly anticipating the band’s seemingly-forever-in-gestation Sea Shepherd EP since, well, seemingly forever.

But now it looks like we might actually be getting close to its unveiling! Last week we got to hear a new song, “Of Blood and Salt,” which features guest appearances from Meshuggah’s Fredrik Thordendal and Devin Townsend’s Devin Townsend; now Gojira’s guitarist/vocalist/mastermind, Joe Duplantier, has given an interview with Metal Hammer in which he reveals that Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe (who previously appeared on the group’s “Adoration for None”), In Flames’ Anders Friden, and some dude named Max Cavalera are all going to appear on the release, too.

Click to read more…

“Ooh no!”

“Macho Man” Randy Savage has perished. My father and I were actually at his first wedding, which is to say, we were at Summer Slam ’91. Vince and I are so bummed right now… I don’t think I can even go outside. I need to curl up with YouTube and remember a time when the “Macho Man” really did seem invincible.

We’ll never forget you, Mr. Savage.

Maybe this will cheer you up?

• We lied and said that Iwrestledabearonce were becoming a black metal band. Then, depending on your perspective, we either made it better or made it worse by debuting a new track from the band.
• We also debuted a stretched-out version of Hammerfall’s “Hearts on Fire.”
• Our list of the The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists continued.
• We spoke to Max Cavalera from Cavalera Conspiracy and Soulfly, Dean Herrera and Henry Selva from The Human Abstract, and the dudes from Noisear.
• We enjoyed a series of exclusive tour blogs from both The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley and Woods of Ypres’ Shane Madden.
• We gushed over Anaal Nathrakh’s Passion.
• We wondered why elitists find some deathcore bands acceptable and others unacceptable.
• We declared metal the winner in the war on grunge.
• We expressed our enthusiasm for Victory Records’ latest sign, Design the Skyline.
• We gave you a detailed analysis of the lyrics for the new Limp Bizkit single.
• We declared drinking to be for pussies.

Next week crack the top ten of our ongoing guitarists list, and, at least to the best of my knowledge, do not aid any bands in playing a prank on the public. And hopefully no one else we liked better than Fred Durst dies.

-AR

Roy Mayorga, former drummer for Soulfly and current drummer for Amebix and Stone Sour, apparently suffered a minor stroke following the latter band’s show in Des Moines, IA this past Sunday night. (See? Nothing good ever comes from Des Moines.) Here’s a statement the band released on their official website:

“It is with regret that we have decided to cancel the remaining dates on our current headline tour. Our friend and drummer, Roy Mayorga suffered a minor stroke a couple of nights ago after our show in Des Moines. He’s doing great and is expected to make a 100% recovery. We apologize to all the fans and look forward to getting back out on the road with Roy in the coming months.”

So, look… we’re obviously not huge fans of Stone Sour around here, but we don’t wish Mayorga any ill will. We wish Mayorga a speedy recovery so he can get back out on the road and make music for the fans who appreciate it more than we do ASAP.

-AR

Max Cavalera is a name you’ve probably heard recently. His band, Cavalera Conspiracy, has been making waves in the metal world with their latest release, Blunt Force Trauma, and are currently on tour in the U.S. But here’s something you might not have known: he’s been at this for decades.

Max, along with his esteemed colleague and brother, Igor, made some of the most beastly and innovative thrash in the mid 80’s and 90’s in the highly influential, underground metal outlet, Sepultura (Portuguese for “grave”). Unfortunately personal differences in ’96 drew him away from the band. Upon relocating to the States, he focused his talents on a new project, the still-running Soulfly (English for “Mighty-Spirit-Mosquito”).

For years Max worked tirelessly with the group, releasing seven studio album’s and gradually building a cult following in the process. Now with a new band and his brother back at his side, the world is finally taking notice.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with the bearded bellower to get the skinny on the new album and see what he makes of his recent success.

Click to read more…

Alright, so Sepultura pretty much lost me after Chaos A.D. I am not a fan of Roots, nor of any of the Derrick Green-era albums that have been released thus far. And I don’t think I’m alone in having written the band off. Even if you like Roots, fifteen years is a long time for a group to release no albums of any real note. So I was pretty comfortable with the notion that Sepultura were just one of the many bands I love that had their moment in the sun and then more or less completely lost their way.

But then last week we were lucky enough to get hear a little bit of the unmastered version of the new album, Kairos, and you know what? It was pretty good! I obviously need to hear the entire thing in finished form before I can really pass judgment, but just based on the little we heard, I’d wager that this is easily going to be the best album the band has recorded with Green, and will almost certainly be superior to any Soulfly albums, as well as Cavalera Conspiracy’s Blunt Force Trauma (although CC’s Inflikted may still win the “Best Sepultura Album That’s Not Really a Sepultura Album” award). Some of it was downright Chaos A.D.-esque, which is, of course, terrific news.

I have no idea what the titles were the for the songs we heard, but the band has already performed one called “Seethe” live, and have now debuted the title track in concert, too. You can check out the latter below. I don’t think the crappy quality of either this nor the “Seethe” footage is demonstrative of what we heard last week, but hopefully it will at least whet your appetite for more.

Kairos comes out later this year on Nuclear Blast.

-AR

[via Metal Underground]

So I’m listening to the stream of the new Cavalera Conspiracy album, Blunt Force Trauma, as I type this, and…some of it is  pretty good, and some of it is just fine. None of it is terrible, so that’s cool, but there’s really only one song that I love — “Torture.” It’s the second song on the album, but it should have been the first — it makes me wanna kick someone hard in the nuts, as opposed to the actual album opener, “Warlord,” which just kinda makes me wanna tap my foot while I do busy work.

What happened? I listened to Inflikted again over the weekend to make sure I wasn’t remembering the band’s debut in a sunnier light than it deserves — and I’m not. Inflikted is awesome. It’s basically everything you’d ever want from a modern day Sepultura album. It’s overflowing with piss n’ vinegar. But only occasionally do CC seem to reach the same level of I AM GOING TO BREAK YOUR FUCKING JAW-ness on BFT. It feels like too much Soulfly seeped into this one.

Headbang here, then let me know if I’m crazy or what in the comments section. Roadrunner will release the album fo’ reals tomorrow.

-AR

So Max Cavalera has been running around saying he wants to do the Sepultura reunion, but it ain’t gonna happen because Andreas Kisser is a dick, or, no, wait, Paulo is a dick, or, really, your mom is a dick and it’s all her fault that the reunion isn’t happening. And up ’til now, to the best of my knowledge at least, the remaining Sepulturians have kept their mouths shut about all of Max’s smack-talking.

Well, no more:

Now, of course, you should never say never, but that seems to be pretty definitive, at least for the moment. Maybe if Max points the finger at Igor next, though, he can really make this happen.

-AR

So back in May, Max Cavalera blamed Andreas Kisser for our current lack of a Sepultura reunion. And while I took Max’s side at the time, Anso schooled me right proper just a couple of days later, proposing that Max might be, um, less than honorable. And now that Max is changing his story just seventh months later, it’s getting really, really hard not to think that Anso nailed it right on the head.

See, all of a sudden, Max is on an anti-Paulo Jr. campaign. Last week he told Revolver that Paulo was “the only musician that didn’t improve much” during the classic Sepult-era, even going so far as to allege that Paulo didn’t record any of the bass tracks on any Sep releases prior to Roots. I didn’t think much of it at the time; for one thing, I don’t think that Paulo is anyone’s favorite member of Sepultura, and for another thing, even though it might seem weird that Max is asserting that for roughly a decade the band has a bass player so untalented that he couldn’t record his album tracks and no one ever thought to replace him, I’m sad to say that I’ve heard stories like that before, so it actually seemed entirely plausible.

But now Metal Insider has brought it to my attention that Max is once again talking smack on his former bandmate, this time saying it’s all Paulo’s fault, and not Andreas’ fault, that there hasn’t been a Sep reunion. He tells Sonic Excess:

Click to read more…

As always, I have to preface any judgment made based on a bootleg by pointing that any unofficial (and in this case probably illegal) release is not the best work by which to judge an artist.

But this audio recording of Cavalera Conspiracy performing a new song, “Warlord,” is not hitting my g-spot.

What I — and I think most people — liked about Inflikted was that it sounded an awful lot like pre-Roots Sepultura. And awesome pre-Roots Sepultura at that. If the Cavaleras had actually reunited with Sepultura, we really couldn’t hope for anything better. Not only did it blow every post-Max Sepultura release out of the water, it blew every Soulfly release out of the water, too.

And this song sounds a lot more like Soulfly than it does anything on Beneath the Remains.

Listen to it and tell me I’m wrong. I actually WANT to be wrong about this. I want the new Cavalera Conspiracy album to come out and make me eat my hat. I actually don’t own a hat right now (weird, right?), but I would happily purchase one specifically for the purposes of Cavalera-inflikted consumption.

-AR

[via]

If Horatio Alger were alive today, he’d be tempted to write about Slayer. Defying logic, popular fads and the moral majority, the band is an American thrash-to-riches story, having not just survived, but thrived on a regimen of non-compromise. Future musicologists will no doubt struggle to explain how four guys from Huntington Park forced Reign in Blood down the world’s collective throat, then went on to sell millions of records, win two Grammys, and amass a huge, rabid fanbase. And does any other band have a holiday dedicated to them?

As the curtain closes on their third decade in the music business, Slayer’s Dave Lombardo was good enough to shoot the proverbial shit with MetalSucks when the American Carnage Tour stopped in St. Paul, MN. Read the full transcript of our chat after the jump.

Click to read more…

Holy shit, is it seriously August already? It’s gonna start getting cold soon. Motherfucker. Here’s what we did this week when we should have been enjoying the sunshine and fresh air:

• We’re streaming Dementia/Dyslexia, the Metal Blade debut of Fleshwrought,  a new project from Animosity/Animals as Leaders’ Navene Koperweis and Job for a Cowboy’s Jonny Davy.
• We debuted an EPK for Iron Thrones’ The Wretched Sun.
• We also debuted “Fear, Emptiness, Decibel,” a new column from the editors of our favorite metal rag.
• We had a little beard on beard action with Andy Williams from Every Time I Die and Liam Wilson from The Dillinger Escape Plan. We also spoke to Avenged Sevenfold’s Johnny Christ, The Dillinger Escape Plan’s Jeff Tuttle and Pathology’s Dave Astor.
• We checked out the latest releases from Chimaira and Decrepit Birth.
• We schooled Korn’s Jonathan Davis on the BP Oil Spill.
• We questioned the sincerity of Max Cavalera’s claim that his collaboration with Fred Durst is all Ross Robinson’s fault.
• We questioned Glenn Danzig’s sanity. Again.
• We got pissy that Eddie’s not on the cover of the new Maiden album.
• We got boners watching 72 minutes of pro-shot Gojira footage.
• We did not get boners looking at Emmure noodz.
• We found the best bass player in the history of forever-ever-ever.

We’ll be hanging out at the Summer Slaughter show this Sunday here in NYC; if you spot us, please bring us presents. We like presents. Thanks.

-AR

As much as I love Max Cavalera, Soulfly basically started as a nu-metal band (and Roots is a nu-metal album… sorry, kids), and it’s sometimes hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that Cavalera had Fred Durst do a guest rap on SF’s 1998 self-titled debut. I tend to ignore it because a) the friend of my enemy is not necessarily my enemy, and b) Max has worked with plenty of dudes I  don’t like (Jonathan Davis) and plenty of dudes I do like (Greg Puciato, Chino Moreno), so, y’know, shit happens.

But the topic of working with Durst came up in a recent interview with PyroMusic.net, and… well, Cavalera basically places the blame for Durst’s appearance on producer Ross Robinson’s shoulders:

Click to read more…

Can you imagine if everyone to whom we give endless amounts of shit followed Dino’s example? We’d have Rose Funoral cards and Tommy Lee faking his own death and Fred Durst pulling a Billy Madison and pics of Joey Belladonna with his twig and berries tucked back. That’s the kinda world I wanna live in. I believe we can make it happen if we try.

ANYWAY, here’s some shit we did this week:

• We did a second installment of Cooking Contaminated.
• We’re streaming new tracks by Son of Aurelius.
• Eyal gave us a Daath studio update.
• We spoke to Max Cavalera and Ratt’s Bobby Blotzer.
• We suckered Decibel‘s Andrew Bonazelli into writing about the Metal Mets for us.
• We checked out some new German cheese metal releases.
• We called out David Draiman.
• We watched some great music videos, some awful music videos, and some really awful music videos.
• We made fun of the most annoying little kid in the world.
• We were sorry about Abacabb breaking up, but really happy about BOOBS!!!

Speaking of Eyal and studio updates: on Sunday I’m flying down to Atlanta to visit Daath in the studio. If you never hear from me again, assume I’ve been lost amidst a cloud of ATL purp smoke and awesome metal. But what a way to go!!!

-AR

To say that Max Cavalera put metal on the map isn’t exactly accurate; metal’s formative years dealt with pond-crossing pollination between Europe and the U.S. But Sepultura helped bring the idea that metal was a global entity into being, from their early death metal albums, proving them more than competen,t to their later thrash/groove metal records, which combined primal heaviness with South American instrumentation. Max has continued this in Soulfly, which, despite  hisliving in the U.S. for the last decade and a half, still includes bits of his heritage. Though Sabbath, Priest, Maiden, and so forth may have (unintentionally) presented metal as a mainly Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, Sepultura proved that if metal were going to be adored worldwide, it would be made worldwide as well. Their far-reaching success (both in the form of Max Cavalera’s Soulfly and the current incarnation of Sepultura) cements their very important place in metal.

Despite being in the game for more than twenty-five years, Max hasn’t shown any sign of slowing down. He founded Cavalera Conspiracy with his formerly estranged brother/ex-Sepultura drummer Igor; Soulfly’s recently-released Omen shows the same strength, vitality, and palatable riffs that the band has always been known for; and he’ll no doubt be hitting the road for the foreseeable future. In an interview with MetalSucks conducted shortly before the album’s release, Max talks about making Omen, discusses how he manages to rope in guest performers, and makes some lofty claims about the upcoming Cavalera Conspiracy album.

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I’m not so naive as to think that in any conflict there’s a evil-intentioned, deceitful jerk on one side who’s opposed diametrically by a lily-white innocent on the other. Especially in the entertainment biz, long a haven for those with awful people skills and only a passing acquaintance with reality. So we can all agree that to call hot, steaming bullshit! on Max Cavalera is in no way equivalent to an exoneration or endorsement of his foe and former bandmate Andreas Kisser. All I’m saying is that Cavalera’s latest statement, in which the woefully out-of-touch recovering nu-metalist attempts to turn the divided metal community against Kisser on the thinnest of premises, is embarrassing shit-talk at best and character assassination at worst.

Regardless of personal loyalties (full disclosure: I’m kinda anti-anything that lives in camo cargo shorts) or tastes (again, F.D.: Soulfly reeks), it’s hard to dispute the eye-rolling, head-slapping 8th-grade wackness of Cavalera’s logic. But just to be safe, let’s cart in the 100% impartial MetalSucks Translate-Bot 3000 to help us parse through the accusations in a May interview that Kisser squashed a proposed Sepultura reunion. Sure, even T-B3k emitted a sour wisp of oil fumes and the occasional clank when I began to feed in text that originates from a mega-stoner whose manager/wife has been describing his farts as musical perfume for two decades. But you’ll see that the results are stellar, if not uncannily laser-like in their precision. Take it away T-B3k:

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I don’t like to talk too much smack on Andreas Kisser, because he’s a terrific guitar player and I have no real evidence that he’s a jerk or whatever; I’ve never really seen or heard about him doing anything super-douchey, unless you consider his part in the dissolution of the classic Sepultura line-up super-douchey, which you might. It does seem awfully funny that Max Cavalera left and the band basically never made anything good again, but that really just suggests that Max was the driving creative force behind the Sepulturawesomeness, not necessarily that Andreas Kisser should suck it.

But awhile back there was a rumor that there was gonna be a Sepultureunion, and now Max has told AltSounds that it almost happened – except a certain guitar player ended up mucking up the works:

Click to read more…