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]

When I was very young, I remember having an intensely heated argument with my mom over who sang, “Wild World.” I insisted it was Mr. Big while she tried in vain to tell me it was a cover of a Cat Stevens song. Of course, she was right. But she should’ve known better than trying to reason with a smart-ass eight-year-old.

My mom has never spoken to Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam, and probably never will due to his lifestyle and beliefs. I, however, did get to speak to Eric Martin lead singer of Mr. Big. So I still win.

Click to read more…

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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’s query was suggested by a reader identifying himself simply as “Andy” –

WHICH MODEL OF GUITAR IS THE MOST METAL?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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I know I’ve been kind of obsessed (here, here, here, here) with The Deciblog’s “Justify Your Shitty Taste” columns, but can you really blame me? What’s more fun than watching people get upset over nothing?

I think you could count the positive reviews for Guns N’ Roses’ (really Axl Rose’s) Chinese Democracy on one hand; I oughta know, ’cause I wrote one of ‘em. I still take shit for that review, and I still stand by it. I completely, 100% understand why someone wouldn’t like Chinese Democracy, but I still completely, 100%, and without shame fucking love it.

And apparently, so does Decibel‘s Shawn Macomber because he has written absolutely EPIC defense (almost as epic as the album itself) of the record for this week’s “JYST.”

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Andy McCoy, one of the founding members of Hanoi Rocks, wrote a book. In 2008. [Our own Corey Mitchell reviewed it in 2010. - Ed.] I read it pretty recently as it came to me with a bunch of Christmas/Hannukah/New Year’s loot. My family doesn’t celebrate anything, so we basically give each other presents because the year is over. Yeah, I don’t know. We put up a tree, too.

Anyway, I kind of dropped the ball on Andy, and that’s kind of a recurring thing these days, because every once in a while I get caught up on that “having a life thing.” I did finally read it, though, and I quite enjoyed it. To an extent. Now, I love books. Reading = fun times for me. I usually have three or four books I’m juggling and one of them is almost always a music biography. But Sherriff McCoy; Outlaw Legend of Hanoi Rocks goes on the pile of band books that really could’ve used a good edit.

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Sooo… just thought we’d take this opportunity to remind you yet again that MetalSucks, with a special assist from The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley, will be presenting Heavy Metal Literature Night at at Hank’s Saloon in Brooklyn this Thursday, February 17. Members of God Forbid, Tombs, and, of course, this very website, will be doing readings from from some of metal’s greatest tomes, including Motley Crue’s The Dirt, Led Zeppelin’s Hammer of the Gods, Slash’s Slash, Marilyn Manson’s Long Hard Road Out of Hell, and more — kinda like what Will Forte does in the below video. Only we don’t make one of the biggest bombs of the year and get fired from Saturday Night Live at the end.

And, oh yeah, Vince is DJing!!! Come get st00pid with us. Thursday night. See ya there.

How come Miss Piggy can’t count to 70? ‘Cause every time she gets to 69, she gets a frog in her throat.

ANYWAY, here’s how we amused ourselves this week:

• We debuted new videos from DevilDriver and Intronaut.
• We also debuted new music from Battilus and VYGR.
• We started a cool new series of tour blogs from Eluveitie and learned fifteen new things about Crowbar’s Kirk Windstein.
• We spoke to Josh Scogin from The Chariot and Mark LeVine, author of Heavy Metal Islam.
• We checked out the latest releases from Regicide, Dragged Into Sunlight, Macabre, and Abraham.
• We helped Burzum launch a new clothing line.
• We learned a sexy new stage move from Dr. Acula.
• We continued to feel embarrassed for Slash.
• We pleaded with record labels to start using Bandcamp and stop using MySpace.
• We mourned the loss of Guitar Hero.

Speaking of 69ing: Monday is Valentine’s Day. I’m just reminding you in case you’re a burnout and you forgot to get something for your woman. Don’t say I never did nuthin’ for ya.

-AR

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:

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The above video (which I first saw on Movieline) is of Mad Men star Jon Hamm doing a reading from My Dad Was in ZZ Top, a new book by Conan writer John Glaser. The book uses allegedly “found” documents to tell the secret history of rock n’ roll — Hamm is reading a chapter about the secret origins of the Butthole Surfer’s moniker.

Sadly, Hamm will not be at the MetalSucks sponsored Heavy Metal Literature Night at Hank’s Saloon on Thursday, February 17 — but lotsa other cool people will be! Members of God Forbid, Tombs, and The Austerity Program will all be on hand to do readings from some of metal’s greatest tomes, including Motley Crue’s The Dirt, Led Zeppelin’s Hammer of the Gods, Slash’s Slash, Marilyn Manson’s Long Hard Road Out of Hell, and more; MS’ own masters of mischief, Axl Rosenberg and Vince Neilstein, will also be on hand to read and DJ, respectively.

Oh yeah, and, of course, we plan to get pretty drunk.

Even more details coming next week!!! Get excited!!!

In 1987, $lash wrote the main riff for “Sweet Child O’ Mine” as a joke during warm-up for band practice, and after Izzy Stradlin and Axl Rose recognized its potential and turned it into an actual song, The World’s Best Jew ‘Fro argued against its inclusion on Appetite for Destruction, thinking it was too ballad-y for a hard rock album. Now, twenty-four years later, $lash has finally taken his revenge  on the song that gave him his career: wearing a variation of his signature top hat that was apparently fashioned from some old clothes Rob Halford recently donated to the Salvation Army, $lash appeared on the Super Bowl half-time show with The Black Eyed Peas to assist Fergie in what Vince rightly referred to as a “mutilation” of the song.

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Let’s class this bitch up.

On Thursday, February 17, at Hank’s Saloon in Brooklyn, we are going to be presenting (with some serious help from The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley!) Heavy Metal Literature Night. This will be like one of those classy book readings where intellectual types sit around drinking wine while people read aloud from beautifully written, deeply meaningful texts — only instead of intellectual types, the readers will be various members of the local metal community, instead of wine we’ll be drinking beer and whiskey and whatever else leads to terrible decisions in life, and instead of beautifully written, deeply meaningful texts, we’ll be reading from some of metal’s greatest tomes, including Motley Crue’s The Dirt, Led Zeppelin’s Hammer of the Gods, Slash’s Slash, Marilyn Manson’s Long Hard Road Out of Hell, and other books of that nature.

There will be booze. There will be music. There will be fun.

Mark it in your calendars. More details coming next week…

I remember a time when if a singer couldn’t sing, they either a) did not get to have a career, or b) fronted a really dirty-sounding band so that it didn’t matter that they sounded kinda, uh, off. I mean, Tom Araya was never exactly Ronnie James Dio, and no one gave a shit. It’s rock n’ roll, man! It’s not s’posed to sound perfect!

This tradition of “Fuck it if the singer doesn’t sound amazing” barely seems to exist anymore. And for that reason alone, I have to tip my hat to Duff McKagan. His band Loaded have a new album, The Taking, coming out in the spring, and they’ve released a bunch of new songs from that album. None of them are great songs by any stretch of the imagination, but I kind of admire the fact that McKagan’s vocals more or less sound like crap. I mean, they’re not modern-day Dave Mustaine bad, but they’re still really bad. He could have auto-tuned the fuck out’ve ‘em, but, no, the guy comes from a punk rock tradition, and clearly just does not give a shit about trying to convince the world that he’s any better than he is.

Check out some new tracks from The Taking after the jump to get a sense of what I mean…

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I remember a time when if a singer couldn’t sing, they either a) did not get to have a career, or b) fronted a really dirty-sounding band so that it didn’t matter that they sounded kinda, uh, off. I mean, Tom Araya was never exactly Ronnie James Dio, and no one gave a shit. It’s rock n’ roll, man! It’s not s’posed to sound perfect!

This tradition of “Fuck it if the singer doesn’t sound amazing” barely seems to exist anymore. And for that reason alone, I have to tip my hat to Duff McKagan. His band Loaded have a new album, The Taking, coming out in the spring, and they’ve released a bunch of new songs from that album. None of them are great songs by any stretch of the imagination, but I kind of admire the fact that McKagan’s vocals more or less sound like crap. I mean, they’re not modern-day Dave Mustaine bad, but they’re still really bad. He could have auto-tuned the fuck out’ve ‘em, but, no, the guy comes from a punk rock tradition, and clearly just does not give a shit about trying to convince the world that he’s any better than he is.

Check out some new tracks from The Taking after the jump to get a sense of what I mean…

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…

So yesterday, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross got an Oscar nomination for their score for The Social Network. I didn’t write anything about it because a) I was too busy fuming that somehow Christopher Nolan didn’t get a Best Director nod for Inception, and b) it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Reznor and Ross would be nominated, so it didn’t really feel like news. Still, it will be great if a few weeks from now we can start referring to the Nine Inch Nails mastermind as “Oscar winning composer Trent Reznor.”

But, no, the much more interesting cinemetal story to break this week is that Slash — who announced the formation of Slasher Films, a production company devoted to creating “edgy contemporary horror fare with a nod to the thrillers of the ’70s and ’80s,” back in October — has now started to discuss his first potential projects as a movie producer. From an interview that Entertainment Weekly conducted with the guitarist at the in-progress Sundance Film Festival:

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One of these men will not be on the new Kyuss album. Guess which one?

Kyuss Lives!, the ridiculously monikered Kyuss non-reunion which replaces Josh Homme with some dude no one has ever heard of, are apparently “thinking of doing another record,” according to this interview with vocalist John Garcia. I object to the use of the word “another” because in case these dudes haven’t noticed, they’ve never made a record before, but I’d like to think that the phrase “thinking of”* means “it’s not written in stone yet,” “there’s still time to stop the madness,” and “we said this to gauge the reaction of fans, possibly as represented by an incredibly smart, exceedingly handsome Jewish blogger from New York.”

So, assuming that Garcia was, indeed, trying to get a message to me to see what my thoughts were, I’d like to now respond by saying: I don’t think this is a good idea.

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Next year’s early contribution to drunk driving accidents and teen pregnancy will come in the form of a headlining tour from Buckcherry, with support in the form of All That Remains (Making their conversion from metal to radio rock official — eat that, Atreyu!), Hellyeah, and The Damned Things.

I know that Vince is a Buckcherry fan, but they always seemed like GN’R Lite to me (vocalist Josh Todd and guitarist Keith Nelson were even in Velvet Revolver for ten seconds — Nelson retains a songwriting credit on the VR track “Dirty Little Thing”). I think I’ve made my feelings about All That Remains and Hellyeah pretty clear on this site before, but in case you wandered here via a search engine, please allow me to reiterate that the facts that I’m not inbred and I expect my singers to be able to sing disqualifies me from joining these bands’ respective fan clubs. And I want to like The Damned Things because of the presence of the Every Time I Have Anthrax dudes, but I also want to understand the appeal of Glee because Jane Lynch was really funny in The 40 Year Old Virgin, and it just doesn’t seem to be in the cards for me.

So this isn’t as lousy as, say, a Hinder tour, but, yeah, I’m gonna pass, thanks.

If you disagree with me, you can get dates here.

-AR

Axl Rose celebrated the two-year anniversary of Chinese Democracy‘s release by doing what he does best — no, not make music, silly. He sued somebody! Hey, dude’s gotta eat, and Democracy sales ain’t exactly paying for his next rental car, y’know?

According to 1up.com:

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Congrats to readers Sierra Brady, Chris Lincoln, and Will Goss. They each correctly identified last week’s logo as belonging to the band Filii Nigrantium Infernalium, and for their troubles, they each win a copy of Metalocalypse Season Three — Sierra on Blu-Ray, Chris and Will on DVD. Enjoy ‘em, guys and girl!

This week we have another awesome prize, this time courtesy the good folks at Eagle Rock Entertainment. One winner will get the following four DVDs:

• Heaven & Hell, Neon Nights — 30 Years of Heaven & Hell — Live in Wacken
• Velvet Revolver, Live in Houston
• Black Sabbath, Classic Albums: Paranoid
• Rush, Classic Albums: 2112 & Moving Pictures

Pretty sweet, right? Of course, you can purchase any of the cinemetal masterpieces by visiting Eagle Rock Entertainment’s website, or just clicking the above links — but this is your only chance to win all four DVDs in one fell swoop!

All you gots to 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. (I really can’t stress this last bit enough, as week after week I get entries with no address, and I don’t understand what the fucking problem is.) From everyone who gets it right, we’ll randomly select a winner announce his or her name next week.

This week’s logo was suggested by a reader known only as “Martin”…

-AR

Allow me to shill for a beat before the weekend: If you haven’t already bought one of our new, limited edition shirts, go get yours now!!! They’re selling fast, and soon they will be the title of a God Forbid album. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Here’s some other fun stuff we did this week:

• Valient Thorr’s Valient Himself gave us the rundown on Fun Fun Fun Fest, The Red Chord’s Greg Weeks found the CFL fun and confusing, Intronaut’s Sacha Dunable talked about the best and worst drives in the U.S., and The Austerity Program’s Justin Foley is the latest to weigh in on free metal from Scion.
• We debuted new music from Murder Construct.
• We spoke to Pentagram’s Bobby Liebling and Christopher Drew from Nevershotnever and Eatmewhileimhot.
• We checked out the latest releases from Riotgod, Electric Wizard, Rimfrost, and First Blood and Killing the Dream.
• We asked you about old school bands you wanted to like but couldn’t.
• We joined Gene Simmons, Slash, and Dave Navarro in having NOH8 for gays.
• We laughed at both Kirk Hammett and the little girl he kicked.
• We also laughed at Sebastian Bach’s frail ego.
• We got really excited about the new single from The Human Abstract.
• We also got really excited about Decibel‘s new flexi disc series.

Have a nice, relaxing weekend gang. We’ll miss you muchly, but we’ll see ya Monday.

-AR