MetalSucks

Either something’s in the water at the Season of Mist offices or they’ve got some new personnel over there that’s movin’ and shakin’; in the past 1+ years, a label that has recently specialized in mostly European metal farther from the beaten path has signed Cynic, The Dillinger Escape Plan, and now Morbid Angel. Not that these acts are likely to headline the Rockstar Mayhem Yadda Yadda Tour anytime soon, but by most standards they’re much more “mainstream” than the label’s previous fare. All of which “previous fare” is quite good, by the way; I wrote a piece about some of Season of Mist’s lesser known bands a while back.

Check out a clip of the new song “Nevermore” filmed earlier this year below [via Blabs] for maximum ass kickage. Then, to counterbalance with a good laugh, check out Season of Mist’s laughably stuck in 1998 website, replete with bad flash, animated .gifs, cheesy imagery and pop-up windows (I recommend both the “light html” AND “heavy flash” versions for some solid lulz!).

-VN

Okay, so I Europeanized the date abbreviation for the sake of a catchier headline. Whatevs. The point remains the same: The Dillinger Escape Plan’s new album, Option Paralysis, now has an official release date: March 23, 2010 on Season of Mist (actually the band’s own Party Smasher via Season of Mist, not that there’s any reason you should care about the distinction).

This is another one of those stories where’s there’s not much else to say other than what I’ve already said. Based on the comments I’ve read on this site in the past, most of you seem to already have fully-formed opinions on DEP. Vince and I are stoked to hear this album, especially since it follows the sheer awesomeness that was Ire Works. But we haven’t heard any new music yet, so… y’know. We have to wait and see what happens.

And on that note, I leave you with this:

-AR

Here’s The Dillinger Escape Plan’s fifth webisode chronicling the making of their forthcoming album, Option Paralysis. And sorry if I got your hopes but, no, James Hetfield (Hatfield?) is not actually on the album. Just watch, it’ll all make sense.

The best part of watching these remains the all-too-brief teases of new music the band keeps feeding us. But everything we’ve heard thus far seems to be in the vein of classic, Calculating Infinity-style DEP mathcore, and while there’s nothing wrong with that at all, I am starting to wonder if there’s going to be any Ire Works-style Faith No More pop. I’d love for the band to continue to strike a balance between the two styles (as they did on Ire and, to a lesser extent, Miss Machine), but… who knows. I’m obviously speculating based on next to no concrete information, so… “Dead as History” fans shouldn’t lose sleep just yet.

-AR

Above you’ll find the fourth in-studio webisode for The Dillinger Escape Plan’s Option Paralysis. It’s worth watching mostly for the all-too-brief taste of new music you get, which sounds, well, pretty much like vintage DEP.

Maybe just as exciting is the band’s new, limited edition t-shirt for “Mouth of Ghosts,” one of my favorite songs off of Ire Works. Vocalist Greg Puciato explains:

Click to read more…

As one of the chief riff providers for swaggercore titans Every Time I Die, Andy Williams takes pride in making the discordant into catchy. For a perfect example of this, look no further than the band’s latest (MetalSucks-approved) album, New Junk Aesthetic. Distilling the band’s decade-plus essence into a tight half hour, it’s a satisfying mix of thunderous heaviness and easily the most appealing material the band have put to tape. But while he’s often overshadowed by vocalist Keith Buckley’s relentless wiseassery, it’s his and Jordan Buckley’s Skynard-by-way-of-Dillinger-Escape-Plan guitar work that make the band stand out and ultimately worthwhile.

A self-described “chatty Cathy,” Andy Williams was remarkably frank and refreshingly earnest in a recent interview with MetalSucks on the eve of the release of New Junk Aesthetic. Among other things, he discussed why he can listen to the new album and none of the band’s other material, his thoughts on the new Converge record, the changing landscape of the scene he came up in, and life over at ETID’s new label, Epitaph.

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As of today DEP and their producer, Steve Evetts, have been in the studio working on the band’s new album, Option Paralysis, for ten days. And besides getting a new DEP record in ‘10, y’know what that means? We get the new de rigeur in-the-studio video updates of DEP in the studio! Hoo-ray!

Here’s the first entry. You don’t really get to hear any new music, but you do get to see that new drummer Bill Rymer can hold shit down (probably) just as well as Chris Pennie or Gil Sharone.

-AR

One of these days, I’m going to write a review for Iwrestledabearonce’s It’s All Happening. Swear it. In the meantime, as you could guess, I can tell you that I love the album and think you should buy it. So, that’s the short version.

The disc is finally coming out in Europe on August 31, and the band has launched a new website as a “virtual little treasure chest.” It’s all more or less bonus stuff that can be unlocked by forwarding the page to friends – in other words, X number of forwards unlocks Y cool shit. That’s a nifty little promotional tool.

Click to read more…

It’s 4 pm, and right about now we’re either interviewing someone or other or watching Job for a Cowboy. Either way, I hope we’re having a fun time.

Here’s what happened in MetalSucks Land this week:

• We’re streaming Iron Age’s The Sleeping Eye in its entirety!
• Current Coheed & Cambria/former Dillinger Escape Plan drummer Chris Pennie discussed metal with us.
• Daath’s Eyal Levi is home for tour and very busy blogging for us.
• Our girl Grim Kim visited Birmingham, England, the birthplace of metal.
• We checked out the latest releases from Assjack and Dysrhythmia.
• It looks Ozzy has hired Firewind’s Gus G. to replace Zakk Wylde. And that got us thinking about the legacies of former Ozzy axe slingers Jake E. Lee and Joe Holmes.

Have a good weekend, everybody. I know I will.

-AR

And they are a fucking EPIC fifteen seconds.

It’s just a demo for a still-untitled song (unless, for some reason, the band ends up calling it “Song 3,” which they won’t), but it already has me hungry for more. ‘Cause it’s not really mathcore as far as I can tell, but it doesn’t sound like “Black Bubbblegum” or “Milk Lizard,” either. Interesting.

The new DEP album, Option Paralysis, is scheduled to come out sometime in 2010 on Season of Mist.

-AR

[via Metal Injection]

Alright, people. I feel like fucking death. I just wanna go lie down and hopefully never wake up. Let’s get this over with:

• We finally finished the goddamn motherfucking list with “Albums We Wish Had Made It” entries from my man Vince (Soilwork’s Natural Born Chaos) and my girl Amy Sciarretto (DEP’s not-really-eligible Calculating Infinity).
• We got another exclusive world tour video tour diary from Misery Index. We also spoke with Johnny Kelly of Type O Negative and Seventh Void and got our bro-bros at Thrash Hits to do a video interview with Trigger the Bloodshed for us. Thanks, dudes.
• We lost IQ points just watching this video interview with the singer of Attack! Attack!
• We have it on good authority that there’s gonna be an Acid Bath reunion.
• Dallas Coyle is now answering your questions.
• So is Gwar’s Oderus Urungus.

We’ll be at Summer Slaughter on Sunday. If any of you spot us and want to buy us a drink, please, for the love of all things holy, don’t.

-AR

SPECIAL GUEST BLOGGER AMY SCIARRETTO OF ROADRUNNER RECORDS AND NOISECREEP

The Dillinger Escape Plan, Calculating Infinity (Relapse, 1999)
Dimitri Minakakis – Vocals
Ben Weinman – Guitars
Brian Benoit – Guitars
Adam Doll – Bass
Chris Pennie – Drums
Produced by Steve Evetts, Ben Weinman and Chris Pennie

The Dillinger Escape Plan’s Calculating Infinity came out in September 1999, but despite the calendar year of its release, it still went on to impart some sort of influence – large in some cases, smaller and less obvious in others – on much of the metal that came after it in the ‘00s, which is why I kept “playfully” complaining to the MetalSucks head honchos about their strict rules on the sphere of influence being relegated to the ‘00 decade. Yes, I understand that rules are made for a reason, but this album sorta deserves to break them.

Click to read more…

So by now everyone and their mother knows that The Dillinger Escape Plan have parted ways with longtime label Relapse Records. But one of the big, nagging questions – especially coming off the tremendous success of Ire Works – has been “Why?”

Well, our friends at Metal Insider recently caught up with DEP guitarist Ben Weinman to get some answers. Here’s an excerpt:

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So last week Dillinger Escape Plan’s Greg Puciato and Ben Weinman got up on stage in Australia with Nine Inch Niles to help out with “Wish,” a song DEP had previously covered. Up ’til now, all we’ve seen is shitty cell phone capture of the performance – but now NIN have posted something considerably higher quality on their web site.

Not much to say here – you just gotta love it when there’s so many great musicians on one stage.

-AR

Of the MetalSucks Mansion inhabitants only Gary Suarez was (reportedly) man enough to attend the shit-hot Dillinger Escape Plan ticket (w/ new drummer!) at The Studio room of NYC’s Webster Hall on Saturday night, part of a brief 3-date East Coast DEP jaunt. While I was happily sleeping off the sedative effects of a 10-course outdoor Snow BBQ (that brisket… holy fuck!!), the video warriors of Metal Injection snuck in a hand-held video camera and captured 5 songs, among them a cover of hometown heroes Living Colour’s now-classic “Cult of Personality.” Unlike previous DEP cover experiments that sailed right over the heads of Warped Tour attendees not even born by the time F.U.C.K. came out let alone 1984, the hipper and older NYC audience lapped that shit right out of Greg Puciato’s bodyglove. Watch as the band tears the house down and Ben Weinman rips through Vernon Reid’s metal-jazz-gasm solo like Vince Neil through a new pair of jeans.

-VN

Knife The Glitter isn’t afraid to reference the cinematic nadir of popstar Mariah Carey’s career. Nor are these noisy rockers afraid of opening for Dillinger Escape Plan for three “cozy” East Coast dates beginning tonight in Philly. Presumably, it ain’t afraid of no ghost neither.

The as-yet unsigned band – apparently still without a singer – have a few promising instrumental demos up on its MySpace page. You can also listen to some of the more metalcore-ish tracks the band did with a former vocalist at its Purevolume page. So in case you were thinking about showing up for these DEP gigs late, think again, fucker.

-GS

[Gary Suarez pooched the screw. He also writes for Brainwashed and rarely manages the consistently off-topic No Yoko No.]

OK, not really, but they are playing some East Coast venues much smaller than they usually would. I don’t think the word “intimate” applies to a Dillinger Escape Plan show, but these three February gigs might come close.

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When it was announced last month that Killswitch Engage would be on Disturbed’s fourth Music as a Weapon tour, we were flooded with so many irate e-mails from readers you’d have thought that Howard Jones had just been caught raping hundreds of metal fans’ mothers; KSE fans just couldn’t seem to wrap their heads around the concept of the American New Wavers acting as support for one of the most love ‘em or loathe ‘em nu metal acts on the planet. We didn’t report on the development at the time, though. Frankly, I figured it was just one of those things; sometimes awesome bands tour with crappy ones. You can’t please all the people all the time.

But now that Chimaira and Lacuna Coil have joined the tour, I gotta ask: what the frick?

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… here’s a fan-filmed live video with surprisingly decent sound quality [sent in by MS Maniac Damotello] of DEP covering Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher” at this past summer’s Warped Tour. Watch as the band tears it up — especially guitarist Jeff Tuttle’s near-perfect rendition of EVH’s guitar shred — and the song’s significance is completely lost on the mostly teenage audience, despite the many false cheers that erupt when Greg Puciato mockingly asks how many people know the song.

-VN

Well… happy friggin’ new year, everyone. We gots some catchin’ up to do.

As Dillinger Escape Plan fans may have heard by now, the band has hired some dude no one has ever heard of, Billy Rymer from The Rivalry, to replace Gil Sharone, who, in turn, replaced founding drummer Chris Pennie for 2007’s orgasm-inducing Ire Works and all subsequent touring for that album. Now, I know that Sharone’s departure may worry the DEP faithful – the dude was not only an awesome drummer, but watching how chill he always was live, even while playing some retardedly complex drum parts, would seem to suggest that he may very well be a god amongst men (or at least drummers). Hell, even DEP front dude Greg Puciato told us that Sharone is like “the kid in school who always gets good grades just because he’s naturally fucking super gifted.”

But here’s the thing.

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If I told you there were a new supergroup on the block that includes John LaMacchia (Candiria), Jeff Caxide (Isis), Greg Puciato (The Dillinger Escape Plan) and Julie Christmas (Made Out of Babies / Battle of Mice), you’d think the result would be some kind of furious explosion of heavy, right?

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