Leading independent music retailer VICTORY RECORDS has a special Valentine’s Day gift for you: the exclusive, limited-time chance to design your own PACKAGE DEAL!!

For You and Your Sweetie package deal, offers two shirts for $25 plus FREE shipping on the rest of your order ($7 for international). Choose one shirt for your Valentine, then choose one for yourself. After all, you deserve it for being so thoughtful. Also, take advantage of the free shipping by loading up on additional items from the Victory Records webstore. No Valentine? Go ahead and spoil yourself. Don’t miss out on this sweet deal.

IMO package deals are just the latest example of VICTORY RECORDS’ long history of innovative ideas. They offer consumers a great value for their hard-earned dollar, and give Victory a chance to get rid of outdated, shitty product that won’t sell at full price– everybody wins! It’s sort of like how at Olive Garden you can sample wine for 25 cents, only with breakdowns!!

After the break, a few of my favorite SKUs from this exciting marketing initiative– which will YOU choose for YOUR package deal???

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(photo from old_skool_metal_head’s Flickr)

Axl and I went to Summer Slaughter in NYC yesterday. That second bottle of whiskey was a really bad idea. But before said second bottle we got to see Darkest Hour… and any time I see Darkest Hour I have an incredible urge to listen to nothing but Darkest Hour the following day. Thanks to Spotify I have their entire discography instantly at my disposal and I’m letting Undoin Ruin rock away my hangover at this very moment. If anyone else at the show had the same urge they could do the very same thing instead of being driven to piracy (because we all know people are cheap-asses and ain’t gonna shell out for DH’s ENTIRE discography at once), so at least Darkest Hour gets paid something instead of nothing at all.

What kind of ass-backwards world do we live in where Victory Records is doing something right and Century Media isn’t? Can I get an “AMEN”???

ANYWAY, the metalnets have been surprisingly quiet when it comes to bands voicing their opinions on Spotify, especially if those bands are on Century. Maybe they’re afraid to speak up, maybe they’re against Spotify and don’t wanna look like this generation’s Lars Ulrich, maybe they just aren’t sure yet; I don’t know. But Lazarus A.D.’s Jeff Paulick (whose band and label are on Spotify, btw) has broken the silence and come out in support of Spotify in a guest blog for Metal Insider, specifically with regards to the whole Century situation. What I like about Paulick’s rant is that it seems very representative of the new, young generation of musicians that understand and accept music is not going to be a huge source of income in their lives. Here’s the money quote:

I am not depending on selling music for my income. In fact, I have two jobs when I’m not touring to help with my income. I’ll take a page from a good friend of mine Buz McGrath of Unearth. On one of our first tours he told me that he wasn’t in the music business, but that he was in the ticket and t-shirt business, and there is nothing closer to the truth than that.

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I am a big fan of leading independent music retailer VICTORY RECORDS. Back in the 90s, they gave us unfuckwithable classics of hardcore from bands like Earth Crisis, Bloodlet and One Life Crew, but they didn’t stop there! These days, they conduct themselves pretty much exactly like if someone gave me unlimited funds and told me to start a record label with the express purpose of trolling the fuck out of hardcore/metal fans.

For example, their latest signing makes Emmure and These Hearts look like heroes of the underground by comparison: Corpus Christi’s own DESIGN THE SKYLINE, who are partying like it’s 2008! As someone who misses the days when MySpace was still relevant, you couldn’t wear enough neon, and it was all about being scene as fuck, I am stoked to see this band join the Victory family, although I have to admit that it’s more than a little lulzy.

Cliffs:

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Despite what Sergeant D thinks, I like Jungle Rot. Standard, groove-laden old-school DM, plenty of bounce, plenty of riffs… wallowing on the verge of obscurity and in the shadow of Cannibal Corpse since their inception in 1994.

So how does a death metal band that’s been around nearly two decades, released 7 studio albums, 5 EPs and 1 DVD go from a bunch of relatively small labels — the biggest of which was Napalm Records — to signing with leading independent record label VICTORY RECORDS in 2011? I have no fucking idea.

The only explanation I can think of is that Victory is doing really well with new-death bands like Wretched and Within the Ruins and thinks they can stuff more of the same down pizza-vomit-shirt-wearing DM kids’ throats. Will they buy it? Hard to say considering Jungle Rot are a bunch of olds that have nothing to do with “scene,” but it certainly could fly. If you’re Jungle Rot, I’d hope that at the very least you’re collecting a sweet advance and that Victory paid 100% of it up front, ’cause good luck collecting on that shit if this record doesn’t recoup.

Jungle Rot’s new album Kill On Command will come out in June… on Victory. After the jump, the music video for “Worst Case Scenario” which premiered on MS in April of 2010.

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The latest addition to the family over at leading independent music retailer VICTORY RECORDS is some band called THE BUNNY THE BEAR. I’m not too familiar with them but they kinda sound like Alien Ant Farm meets Panic At The Disco (with the trancecore breakdowns of Attack Attack! or Abandon All Ships thrown in) — in other words, a very innovative mix of influences that range from old school to cutting edge! IDK, I feel like the press release does a better job of describing it than I can:

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It’s no secret that the music industry is in a shambles, with both profits and revenues at an all time low. With Napster, eDonkey and Audiogalaxy more popular than ever, anybody with a DSL connection can download an album in a matter of hours, often at CD-quality 96 khz. While the unprecedented access that we the fans have to new music is amazing, it comes at a price: the ability for artists to eke out a meager living by making music.

Sure, on the one hand it’s pretty funny to think about, say, the bassist for The Autumn Offering working at his dad’s ravioli factory when they’re not on tour. Admittedly, the contrast between some D-level metalcore band’s onstage persona (“U MIRIN OUR STAGE PRESENCE BRAH?!”) and the sad reality of seeing them try four times to get their 1998 Saturn to turn over in the parking lot after the show is pretty amusing, but this isn’t high school. Music isn’t about who’s making money and who’s 27 years old and still thinks it’s cool to be in a band, it’s about COMMUNITY. To me, the scene is one big family, and I look out for my family members. Whether you are the “fuckup-idiot-with-a-heart-of-gold cousin that everybody feels sorry for” (Eyehategod) or “ridiculously good-looking older brother we r all jealz of” (Oli Sykes/Bring Me The Horizon), if you are family I will always have your back — and family members do not steal from each other!!

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Six albums and ten years after signing with Victory Records, Darkest Hour found themselves free agents after their most recent release, 2009′s The Eternal Return. Last month’s announcement that Darkest Hour had signed with E1 (formerly Koch) came as a surprise to many who thought they’d end up on a more established metal label but makes perfect sense given E1′s recent track record of signing already established metal acts.

Shortly after the band announced their new label, I caught up with Darkest Hour guitarist, occasional MS columnist, fellow member of The Tribe and MS interview alum Mike Schleibaum to chat about the band’s career, their recent label move, and what to expect on the next record (it’s already being written). Darkest Hour were doing a short string of headline dates on their way back from their U.S. tour with Dillinger Escape Plan, Animals as Leaders and Iwrestledabearonce, and though a slight snafu prevented us from talking the day we’d originally planned on, we hooked up the next afternoon. Our chat after the cut.

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Photos by Adam Haussman

My bosses at MetalSucks love me for my looks, but by now Vince (pictured here) and Axl (here) know that my dazzling physical gifts are accompanied by a lot of blown deadlines and indecipherable twaddle about the band Junkyard and drugs. To compensate, I help out with dropped assignments and try to do a really super job on the big stories that fall to the MS L.A. Bureau. Well I direct your attention to the word try in the previous sentence cuz for the last month or so [Seven weeks, Anso. But who's counting. -Ed.], I have been failing to produce even a coherent thought about the Between The Buried and Me/Cynic/Devin Townsend show back in January. I got zilch.

But it’s not my fucking fault. Stupid tour. It was too good.

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… then Taproot are about to get fucked! Welcome to the club!

The news that Taproot have signed with Victory is a head-scratcher, to say the least. For one, the Ann Arbor, MI-based nu-metal turned radio-alt-metal band sounds nothing like any of the other bands on Victory. I believe that a big part of a band’s success on any given label is directly correlated with how psyched the label’s employees are about the project, and this especially holds true for smaller/niche labels. That said, I can’t see the recent college grads that signed on to work for A Day to Remember and Silverstein getting amped up to do menial work for Taproot.

But moreso, haven’t Taproot heard the myriad Victory Records horror stories?

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I’m extremely amped about the new Between the Buried and Me album The Great Misdirect. Anyone else?

The Great Misdirect also happens to be the last album BTBAM owes Victory Records under their current contract, meaning the only two bands on that label that we give a shit about (the other being Darkest Hour) are both about to be free agents. Without the pressure of having to placate label boss / mafioso Tony Brummel for an advance on the next record, hopefully BTBAM will go all the way and make 100% of the album they want to make; not that they’ve really appeared to hold back in the past anyways.

Here’s their second studio update.

-VN

Saying your metal band’s got “The Bloodiest Music Video Ever” is kind of like saying your metal band’s new album is the most br00tal, pummeling, and best work to date; it’s certainly possible but we hear that shit all the time, and mostly it ends up being a load of crap. So if your label sends out a press release declaring you’ve got the absolute bloodiest video of all time and you even go so far as to register bloodiestmusicvideoever.com to debut the video, you better be able to back that shit up!

Fortunately for Victory Records’ Wretched (recent recipients of a MetalSucks 2.5-out-of-5 horns rating for their album The Exodus of Autonomy) their new video for the track “A Preservation of Immortality” is indeed really fuckin’ bloody — as well as twisted, morbid, dark and all that jazz. Whether it’s actually the bloodiest video ever made we can’t say, but we’d certainly think this video gives it a run for its money (plus: boobs!).

So, is Wretched’s new video the bloodiest ever? Head on over to bloodiestmusicvideoever.com to watch it, then tell us what you think in the comments. And be sure to include links to your own nominees for bloodiest music video ever.

-VN

Say what you will about Victory Records – and chances are you have, even if you’re in a band that was once on Victory – but it’s hard to find a label with a better sense of marketing and a better understanding of its audience. Its lasting success can of course be attributed to its decision to move away from the buzz cuts ‘n’ bros hardcore on which the label was initially focused and releasing albums of mutated ‘core (post-hardcore, metalcore and later deathcore) and fringe genres that the hardcore kids could grasp on to (third wave ska, indie rock, emo, etc.). A label that can run an ad on MTV2 for Hawthorne Heights, Aiden, and Silverstein one minute and another for BTBAM, Darkest Hour, and Emmure the next is one dedicated to survival, even in an increasingly splintered music climate.

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