So yesterday we learned that vocalist Derek Rydquist is not currently touring Europe with The Faceless, who seem to have recruited a replacement. What’s not clear is who that replacement is, and whether or not he’s a permanent addition to the group’s ranks, or is just filling in while Rydquist deals with visa issues, or family issues, or whatever other issues sometimes prevent musicians from flying overseas with their band. And while it looks like fans are asking “What the dilly, yo?” on The Faceless’ Facelessbook page, answers have yet to be forthcoming.

But the Bob Woodward to my Carl Bernstein, Metal Injection‘s Rob Pasbani, took the baton of great metal journalism and e-mailed Mr. Rydquist directly to get an update. Rydquist’s response?

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I was stumbling around YouTube last night when I came across some new fan-filmed videos of The Faceless on their current European tour with Born of Osiris, Veil of Maya, and Gorod. And I’m sitting there watching some shitty cell phone footage of the band performing their new song, “The Eidelon Reality” (listen to a pre-production demo of the track here), and I have this realization –

Hey, that ain’t Derek Rydquist doin’ the vocals.

And so I scrolled down to look at the comments where, indeed, some other dude has asserted “that doesnt look like the vocalist,” and the dude who filmed the above video responded, “I think they got a new one and he´s much better than the old vocalist.”

So, trying to be a good detective, I went over to the band’s Facebook page to see if Rydquist had been removed from their listed line-up. And as of this writing, he hasn’t.

But there is this comment on their wall from some fan who saw them in Plymouth last night:

“incredible tonight, tight as fuck but wheres derek? had no idea he was no longer in the band, never the less the new guy did a stellar job”

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From what I understand, it is not okay for “real metal” fans to like any deathcore bands. For example, you are not allowed to be into both Deathspell Omega and Winds Of Plague, because WoP don’t have the right haircuts or clothes to be considered a “legit metal band.” It is also important to share your unsolicited, excessively strong opinions whenever deathcore bands come up, letting everybody know that you “are into real metal,” and that “deathcore is the worst shit ever.”

With that said, I’m confused about how there are a few deathcore bands that seem to get a pass from metal nerds: Darkest Hour, The Faceless, Between The Buried And Me, etc. The same people who get very, very angry about the popularity of bands like Suiside Silence or Miss May I love The Black Dahlia Murder, All Shall Perish, and The Red Chord, which is weird to me because they do not really sound any different.

Can anyone help me understand this??? Why are some deathcore bands considered “generic garbage for idiots who shop at Hot Topic” but other deathcore bands are “brilliant musicians who keep pushing the boundaries of the genre,” according to metal nerds???

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A week or two ago word got out that Animals as Leaders, Intronaut, Last Chance to Reason, Dead Letter Circus (who I don’t really know but who just signed with Sumerian… and apparently Textures’ Stef Broks is a fan, which ain’t a bad sign), and Evan Brewer were gonna do a tour together; we didn’t write anything at the time because, well, we just told you everything there was to write. There were no other details to give!

There are still no other details to give, except now Animals as Leaders have put the tour poster up on their Facebook page, which I guess is something. I mean, if you thought this tour was just a rumor, now you know it’s a really real thing. You don’t know when/where they’re playing or whether or not you can go, but, hey, you do know that they’ll all be on the road together.

Hopefully information that is actually of some use, like tour dates, will be released soon, too.

In the meantime, uh… enjoy this poster I guess?

-AR

Thanks to everyone who e-mailed us about this! Feel free to e-mail us again when dates are released.

Of course when you set out to make a list like, say, the one we’re doing right now, of The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, you are bound to piss a lot of people off — that just comes with the job.

But I always find it hilarious HOW those people get pissed off. For example, this week I saw a lot of complaints that the guitar players we’ve been selecting aren’t “modern.” And I can’t believe we have to fucking define the word “modern” for some of you idiots, but apparently we do. So:

So… which one of you jackasses would like to call up Alex Skolnick or Vernon Reid or Adam Jones and let them know they’re antiquated and obsolete? ‘Cause I saw Testament and Living Colour and Tool live just last year, and I would not want to make that call. Just because those dudes have been playing this game for awhile doesn’t mean their best days are behind them.

My point simply being: I don’t care if you hate our choices. That’s fine. But at least try to hate our choices based on an argument that makes sense, y’know?

And on that note, here are other ways we entertained ourselves this week:

• We debuted new music from A Pale Horse Named Death and Oakhelm.
• We checked out the latest releases from From Exile, Godstopper, and Cruachan.
• We wondered which is better, old music or new music?
• We philosophized about Google’s new cloud service.
• We fretted that metal may soon be blamed for terrorism.
• We got excited about The Faceless’ new demo.
• We bemoaned the current state of In Flames.
• We wept because Dave Grohl is not going to be on the new Mastodon album after all.
• We enjoyed a vegetarian cooking lesson from a dude in corpse paint.
• We questioned the logic of the new Avenged Sevenfold video.

Next week we unveil numbers fifteen through eleven on our guitar player list; the average age of those five musicians is thirty-one, whereas the average age of this week’s selections was forty-two. So maybe you can go back to being upset because you think they suck, not because you think they’re too old to be “modern.”

-AR

We’ve been getting emails for days about a supposedly leaked pre-production demo version of “The Eidelon Reality,” a new song that The Faceless have been playing live for some time. But every time I’d go and click a link the song would already have been pulled from YouTube [sad face]. Here I thought Sumerian Records was being pissy about a song leaking out that wasn’t supposed to (what’s the harm? good press, right?), but now we come to learn they were just doing a little quality control; peep the “official” pre-production version above with a handy-dandy “New Album Coming This Fall” bumper in case somehow there exists a Faceless fan that didn’t already know.

Peep the new track after the jump:

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Something I need to keep reminding myself: every generic shit band that sells a fuckton of records enables their record label to take risks on way more creative, fulfilling, interesting and inevitably far less commercially successful artists. It’s a sad fact, but thems the breaks: shitty commercially successful metal bands for teeny boppers generate tons of money, and without that money we’d see a lot less of the good stuff coming down the pike. For every Vampires Everywhere there’s a Nachtmystium, for every System Divide there’s The Ocean, for every Nickelback there’s an Opeth, for every <insert Victory band here> there’s a Jungle Rot… and for every Asking Alexandria there’s a Francesco Artusato and Evan Brewer.

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A couple of weeks ago, Vince broke your heart with the news that bassist Jared Lander had quit The Faceless. But time heals all wounds and when one door closes another one opens and always look on the bright side of life. So the band has now announced that “The sickest bass player in the game, Evan Brewer (Animosity/Reflux) has officially joined The Faceless.”

And the band isn’t dicking around. Brewer knows his shit.

So if you were, for any reason, worried that The Faceless would have a hard time filling Lander’s shoes, well, don’t be.

The Faceless will hopefully have a new album out on Sumerian later this year. Brewer is apparently releasing a solo album through that label as well.

-AR

Props to Heavy Blog is Heavy for catching this interesting update from Sumerian Records’ official Facebook page:

As HBiH notes, this sounds like it’s going to be a release (or releases) in the vein of Roadrunner United and Nuclear Blast All-Stars — basically a “who’s who” team-up of musicians signed to the label. Those offerings actually ended up being, by and large, pretty cool (I mean, of course there were some missteps, but I don’t look back at those albums and think, “Well, that was ill-advised”), and Sumerian’s current roster is one of the strongest in metal (The Faceless, Animals as Leaders, Periphery, Veil of Maya, After the Burial, etc., pretty much make up for their creatively vapid bands like Asking Alexandria and Upon a Burning Body), so it makes sense that they’d wanna do something like this.

Question is… what form, exactly, will it take? I almost don’t care, as long as Bizzy Bone is involved. Hey, it could happen.

-AR

Kip W. and I arrived in Austin, TX the night of Tuesday, March 15th. We’ve never flown in before Wednesday, the official start of the music portion of the festival, but that we felt compelled to be there for all of Wednesday’s day-time activities speaks to the volume of metal at this year’s festival. It was amazing and even overwhelming at times, but too much metal is never a bad problem to have. After a tasty burger at the Jackalope and some delicious but incredibly spicy chicken-wings that would leave our arseholes tingling the following morning, we headed to bed to rest up for the madness to follow. Sleeping is metal. Kip’s righteous snore is definitely not metal, but thank Odin for earplugs.

There was a lot of action on the first day of SXSW: face-punching hardcore via the Brooklyn Vegan day party, a ripping set by recent Ironclad signees Turbid North, and of course the MetalSucks-sponsored Sumerian Records showcase featuring Animals as Leaders, Veil of Maya, The Faceless and more. There was even the somewhat odd but nonetheless fun sight of watching Phil Anselmo play a guitar in his old-school hardcore project Arson Anthem. Deetz and videos after the jump.

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“How do you feel about joining Origin, Jason?”

Well, hey now!, it was just last month that we were wondering, “Whatever happened to Skinless?” We weren’t really able to get a satisfactory answer, other than that the band was hoping to finally make a follow-up to 2006′s Trample the Weak, Hurdle the Dead this year.

Well, I’m thinking it might be another hot minute before that actually happens, because Skinless front man Jason Keyser has just been announced as the new vocalist for Origin.

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Yep, you read that right — Sumerian has signed T.R.A.M., a new supergroup consisting of Animals as Leaders guitarists Tosin Abasi and Javier Reyes, Suicidal Tendencies drummer Eric Moore, and Adrian Terrazas (who used to go by “Adrian Terrazas-González” but whatever), who played flute/sax/bass clarinet/percussions on three albums by The Mars Volta (Frances the Mute, Amputechture, and The Bedlam in Goliath). The band’s moniker, in case you haven’t put it together, is an amalgamation of the last initial of each musicians’ name (For the cheap seats: Terrazas, Reyes, Abasi, Moore).

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We told you last week about our very own SXSW “South By South Death” day party on Friday, March 18th at Headhunters, featuring the very excellent lineup of Kvelertak, Havok, Red Fang, Wormot and Meek is Murder, and also sponsored by Roxwel.com and NARM. MS contributor and Texas native Corey Mitchell has been doing a fine job keeping you abreast of other metal happenings at SXSW 2011.

Now we’ve got one more event to add to the fray. MetalSucks is proud to be sponsoring the official Sumerian Records showcase on Wednesday, March 16th, featuring some of our most favoritest bands: The Faceless, Veil of Maya and Animals as Leaders. The awesome lineup, which will play the Habana Bar backyard, is rounded out by Upon a Burning Body, Struc/tures, and NY up-and-comers Ultrageist. Be there!

After the Burial released their new album In Dreams on November 23rd just before heading out to California for their current tour with Winds of Plague. On the day of the album’s release I caught up with ATB guitarist Trent Hafdahl by phone; we chatted about the new album, new vocalist Anthony Notarmaso and his role in the writing process, what really went down when they dropped off the Bleeding Through tour this fall, their plans for 2011 and, of course, Sumeriancore. Our chat after the fold.

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I can’t think of anything clever to say right now, so I’m just gonna leave to my homies, Ozzy and Forest:

Here’s what we did this week:

• Veil of Maya’s Marc Okubo gave us our first Legacy Tour diary, Intronaut’s Sacha Dunable gave us a lesson in why Californians should have voted to legalize weed, and The Red Chord’s Greg Weeks gave MetalSucks readers a chance to write about the NFL themselves for once.
• We debuted new music by The Secret.
• We spoke to Dredg’s Gavin Hayes, Enslaved’s Ivar Bjørnson, and Nails’ Todd Jones.
• We checked out new releases by Masters of Reality and Colombian Necktie.
• We kicked off the arguing regarding the best albums of 2010.
• We wondered, “Which is better, death metal or black metal?”
• We also wondered if we should like Mogwai.
• We regretted learning about Gump-core.
• We watched a chick shred some Faceless.
• We tried to find a stage big enough to hold Glenn Danzig’s ego.

Have nice weekend everybody. See ya Monday.

-AR

Invisible Oranges’ Cosmo Lee posted another YouTube video of a chick shredding yesterday ’cause he’s a smart man and knows that videos/pictures/posts of chicks having anything to do with metal fetch lots of comments and spark controversy from our male-driven Interhole portals. This chick is hella talented — in all my years of making a serious go of being in bands I never got to that level of dexterity — but the best part about this video is obviously her mom making the bed in the background. A+++ would do business with again! But then Cosmo takes a swipe at The Faceless, whose song “Meghan The Metal Queen” is covering in the vid, and you know that ain’t gonna go over well with yer Uncles Vince and Axl:

Evidently the song she is covering is The Faceless’ “Prison Born”, which is new to me, and hopefully will remain that way forever.

But holy moly, do the kids love that song. On YouTube, they’re covering it on guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. Actually, they’re covering pretty much every technical death metal band on guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. I kind of want these kids to get off YouTube and to form bands with actual people. But then they’ll probably just form more technical death metal bands, which would just spawn even more YouTube videos, until YouTube becomes an incomprehensible mush of sweep picking and blastbeats. Remember when metal bands wrote songs?

Them’s is fightin’ words.

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It is no mystery that I generally hate tech-death and deathcore, and ESPECIALLY bands who combine the two like Faceless, Braindrill, BTBAM, and so forth. It’s possible that the genres bore the fuck out of me because I’ve been listening to this shit for 20+ years and blast beats stopped being novel to me sometime in the mid 90s, but it’s also possible that I’m just not a beardo who thinks that a metronome is worth fapping over.

I guess there is something in the water up in Canada, or maybe there’s just nothing better to do there than sit in your room and practice your instrument, because there sure are a lot of tech-deathcore bands from up there. I can’t get into that stuff for the most part, but I was pretty pleasantly surprised by the new track from BENEATH THE MASSACRE. Despite having an “X the Y” name and playing a lot of notes, this band is pretty sick– check them out if you are fiending for some Ion Dissonance/The Faceless type shit. I think they have a recording out now on Prosthetic or something.

-Sergeant D.

Neither Vince nor myself were able to make it to The Faceless’ show with Suffocation here in New York this past Saturday night; I think that’s the first time we’ve missed the band live during the entire Planetary Duality tour cycle. So, of course, they played a new song, “The Idol of Reality,” live. Figures.

But at least Metal Injection was on hand to capture some footage! (I remember Metal Injection being the first to break “Xenochrist” in 2008, too. I think those dudes love The Faceless even more than we do.) Check it below.

Not shocking news at all — the music sounds great. Totally epic, totally batshit crazy, and perhaps even a touch more melodic than the band’s past material? In any case, I’m ready for the studio version. It’s been two years since Planetary Duality, which is only thirty-two minutes long. Me wants new The Faceless album now please.

The Faceless’ new, yet-to-be-titled album should be out next year on Sumerian.

-AR

There’s really almost nothing to say about a tour headlined by Suffocation and featuring The Faceless, Through the Eyes of the Dead, Decrepit Birth, and Fleshgod Apocalypse, other than, “Where can I buy a ticket?” Kind of amazingly, I still haven’t seen TTEOTD live yet, and I’m not even sure that Fleshgod Apocalypse, who are Eye-talian, have ever played North America before; but I can vouch that the other three bands all crush testicles live, and based on how much I enjoy their recordings, I’d like to believe that the other two bands will as well.

This is pretty much a perfect line-up. No dates have been announced yet, but you should fall to your knees and pray that the tour is coming to your town.

More as we get it.

-AR

We don’t like Carnifex — in fact, we think they’re the only blemish on the otherwise pristine Summer Slaughter line-up — but we know at lot of you do really like Carnifex. Because you e-mail us about them. Constantly.

So here’s the band’s new video, for “Sorrowspell,” which sounds like the name of a pagan metal band but whatever. I think it’s a pretty standard performance clip, but, again, I’m really only posting it to remind you about Summer Slaughter, which is currently underway, also includes Decapitated, The Faceless, All Shall Perish, The Red Chord, Veil of Maya, Cephalic Carnage, Decrepit Birth, Animals as Leaders, and Vital Remains, and is, oh yeah, partially sponsored by us. Get dates here.

-AR