Remember that Number of the Blog digital compilation we told you about? It’s here, it’s awesome, and it’s completely free. Our brothers in blog have great taste, and the proof is that 10 of the 18 bands on The Sampler of the Blog Volume 1 have received prior coverage on MetalSucks (which is the very validation of “great,” naturally). So what are you waiting for? Download that bitch for free in a variety of formats from the links found here.

Click to read more…

First The Number of the Blog goes all “we’re gonna make a ‘Best of the 21st Century’ list just like MetalSucks,” and we’re all “What the fuck dudes?” Now they’re all “we’re gonna make a compilation of our favorite unsigned bands and give it away for free just like MetalSucks,” and we’re all… come on dudes, really???

But just like last time, we’re actually like “We kid, we kid… that rocks!” ’cause it does. Just look at the tracklisting they’ve compiled for The Sampler of the Blog Volume 1, which they’ll release this coming Friday. I mean, we’ve written about 10 of the 18 featured artists, so it must be good!

1 – Cormorant – ‘Scavengers Feast’
2 – Returning We Hear The Larks – ‘Uprising’
3 – Enditol – ‘Monoculture’
4 – Tre Watson – ‘Spack Jarrow’ (previously unreleased)
5 – Iron Thrones – ‘Against The Grain’
6 – Robots Pulling Levers – ‘Sumati II’ (previously unreleased) (featuring George Richman of Hypnorock)
7 – A Walk With The Wicked – ‘Architects Of Sadism’
8 – Cloudkicker – ‘We’re Goin’ In. We’re Going Down.’
9 – Shades Of Devastation – ‘Art Of Agony’ (previously unreleased)
10 – Amogh Symphony – ‘Osiris 1′
11 – Giant Of The Mountain – ‘Awakening’ (previously unreleased)
12 – Keith Merrow – ‘Heart Of The Sea Nymph’ (featuring Jeff Loomis of Nevermore)
13 – Shaidar Logoth – ‘Mashiara Shai’tan’
14 – I’ll Eat Your Face – ‘Dr. Pancake’s Luxurious Ratskin Housecoat’
15 – Soul Cycle – ‘Rising Defiant’
16 – Cut Your Teeth – ‘T.W.H.W.Y.T.B.’
17 – Assimilated Mind Phase – ‘Breeding Insanity 2.0′ (previously unreleased remix)
18 – Brent A. Petrie – ‘Collapse/Conquer’ (previously unreleased)

As for the 8 of the artists we haven’t listened to, well, color me curious ’cause that GroverXIII’s got pretty good taste in metal. I mean, he reads this site, so he must, right?

-VN

Stand down, posers! Our proteges over at The Number of the Blog and Heavy Blog is Heavy have teamed up to topple the mighty corporate goliath that is MetalSucks by compiling a giant list: The 100 Best Albums of the 00′s. Don’t they know that any attempt at defining the best metal in the 21st century (even if they’re only focusing on 10 mere years of it) is completely futile, rendered useless by the ultimate, definitive, end-game masterlist — The 21 Best Metal Albums of the 21st Century So Far… — that we compiled in 2009??? Nice attempt by piddly metal bloggers at getting their audiences riled up over subjective taste, a favorite old pasttime of ours. I hope no one reads your stupid list and this thing goes belly-up.

I kid, I kid… I love both blogs dearly and I look forward to checking in on a daily basis to see who they come up and how they do so. Our list’s greatest strength was also its downfall; the industry panel that voted lended the list an air of authority but the results didn’t necessarily reflect popular opinion, and a number of bands ended up being represented multiple times. The TNOTB+HBIH list only allows one album per band, which should make things interesting. They’re also allowing reader submissions. Read their rules here.

This would probably be a good opportunity to let you all know that we’re making a new list! It has nothing to do with albums or anything that happened in an easily defined time-period. Expect it in May. That’s all we’re giving you today… any guesses? Tee-hee!

-VN

Google’s search algorithm is a funny thing. For example, I just switched web browsers (to Google Chrome… which smokes Firefox in speed if you’re wondering), and though I imported all of my settings not everything made the cut. When I went to type “numberoftheblog” into the address bar the auto-fill wasn’t working, so I just hit return and ended up with a google search for “Number of the Blog metal.” And the number three result was MetalSucks. We be linkin’ to Number of the Blog and they be linkin’ to us, so for some reason Google decides to include us in a search result for their site. The Internets!

Anyhoo, remember when “deseee” (don’t ask me how to pronounce that) of TNOTB interviewed me? (Part 1 and Part 2) Somehow he managed to convince Axl to lay off the bong long enough to put together some pretty coherent and funny answers to deseee’s equally serious and ridiculous questions. ‘Cause my buddy Axl’s a “moderately successful metal blogger” (his own words). Sample:

Why SOOOOOOOO much advertising on the site?

What happened was, we hired Gene Simmons to sell ads for us, and we told him we’d give him a cut of any banners he sold. Suddenly, ads fucking everywhere. Damndest thing.

Read the whole interview at The Number of the Blog. It’s scintillating!

-VN

For those who may’ve missed the constant plugs in our comments section over the past few weeks, everyone’s favorite hater-for-the-sake-of-hating Ziltoid is now lending his scribbling skills to the MS Maniac GroverXIII-helmed metal blog The Number of the Blog.

Let me repeat that: Ziltoid is blogging. Get your haterade out, Suckalos and Suckalettes.

Apparently the day we let Ziltoid run MetalSucks was just the tip of the iceberg as far as learning about ridiculous bands he thinks are cool such as \\\Maytag. Since it’s a slow news day today, I decided to mosey on over to Number of the Blog to see what old Zilty is up to. The very first Ziltoid-penned post I stumbled upon is about how the Pokemon video games are metal.

Let me repeat that: Ziltoid thinks Pokemon is metal. Pokemon is the tr00est of the tr00, the kvltest of the kvlt, the ultimate standard of metal superiority (because Zilty only listens to the very best music) to which we should all aspire.

Lap it up, kids.

-VN