When Some Kind of Monster came out, Jason Newsted suddenly surpassed Dave Mustaine to become #2 on the list of Most Popular Former Members of Metallica*, mostly because he made some pretty funny comments about how the whole Phil Towle/group therapy thing was bullshit — comments which, at the screening I attended, were met with rapturous applause. (The house was obviously packed with Metallica listeners.) Suddenly, everyone rather conviently forgot that Newsted was a willing participant in the Load albums, and he seemed like the cool dude who had jumped off a sinking ship before it was too late. And the fact that he was playing with Voivod didn’t hurt his case any, even if the fact that he was also playing with a certain aging Brit sorta did.

But then of course just a few years later Newsted was out of Voivod and in Rock Star Supernova, and his cred went down the drain just as fast as if he’d stuck around for St. Anger.

Click to read more…

It’s no secret that non-metal singer Ryan Adams is a metal fan. And I have a cousin who is so enamored of Adams that he has sent me multiple e-mails trying to persuade me to attempt to add Adams to the line-up for The Metal Suckfest, possibly to perform his kind-of-but-not-really metal album, Orion, in its entirety. Alas, I did some investigating, and we would not be able to afford the SWAT team it would take to protect Adams from the crowd.

ANYWAY, perhaps as part of this campaign to get Adams on the MSF bill, that very same cousin sent me the below mp3 of Adams recently discussing metal on NPR. It’s brief and worth a listen, not just to hear what Adams has to say about his own metal fandom, but for the reveal I have now spoiled in the headline. Which I guess isn’t really too shocking, ’cause, seriously, what’s more metal than A Walk to Remember?

MANDY MOORE LOVES VOIVOD

Apparently this isn’t the first time Moore’s love of the Canadian outfit has come up in conversation, so, uh, shame on me for not following her career more closely.

-AR

I stole this photo from Invisible Oranges.

I wasn’t a big fan of last year’s Maryland Deathfest: The Movie. But I haven’t seen Maryland Deathfest: The Movie II, so for all I know, filmmaker David Hall knocked the ball out of the park the second go-round. And one way or the other, I respect that Hall is trying to do something different from most metal concert films, and I respect that Hall is working with some very cool bands (he’s also directed films for Today is the Day and Fuck the Facts) for what I’m assuming is pretty much no money. If your goal is to be a wealthy man, you don’t make documentaries about death metal festivals. Clearly, Hall loves his subject matter.

So I was pretty bummed to read “Don’t Be a Dick: A Tale of Indie Filmmaking, Extortion and MDF,” a guest post he wrote for The Deciblog today in which he tells the completely awful and depressing story of why the footage he shot at last month’s Maryland Deathfest 9 will never see the light of day.

Click to read more…

Holy shit, this is the biggest release day of the summer so far. Tons of good stuff from Devin Townsend, The Black Dahlia Murder, Helms Alee, Sourvein, Jungle Rot , and more.

Also, some stuff that just sucks.

Click to read more…

Written into the leftfield metal legend is the Faith No More/Soundgarden/Voivod tour of 1989-90. The tits-rad US trek captured three daring bands at different career points: FNM had gone supernova with “Epic” and then-new single “Falling To Pieces”; Cornell and crew’s Louder Than Love was underground hot and schoolyard cool for the Bruce Dickinson-endorsed “Big Dumb Sex”; Voivod stood at their creative apex with the inimitable Nothingface.

Click to read more…

Cool things about this live footage of Voivod trying out a new song called “Kaleidos” — (Thanks to MS reader Leslie for the correct song title) — at the Roadburn Festival this past Friday, April 15, in Tillburg, Holland:

• Snake reads from his lyric tablet;
• Dan Mongrain sounds so much like Piggy it’s almost supernatural;
• Away makes more sounds come out of his tiny drumkit than most so-called technical drummers these days can conjure up out of their 57-piece monstrosities;
• Snake prowls the stage like a starving feral dog;
• Blacky is back!;
• It reminds me of Dimension Hatröss-era Voivod;
• These guys pour out more energy than most bands half their age;
• The crowd seems rather complacent — until they unleash a collective roar of approval at the end;
• The awesome Away-illustrated hellscape backdrop;
• I’m flashing back to 1990 when I caught Voivod headline over Soundgarden and Faith No More (and blew them both away — no pun intended) at The Backroom in Austin, Texas.

Click to read more…

Ever since the dawn of the nuclear age, mankind has been fascinated with The Bomb and its terrifying capabilities. Even before The Manhattan Project bore fruit, countless nuke-themed songs, movies, books, and of course, good ol’ propaganda flooded the American consciousness and captivated our over-reactive imaginations. Some truly masterful books (Level 7, Alas, Babylon, A Canticle for Liebowitz) and truly abominable pulp fiction novels were written, the government cheerfully advised its citizens to build bomb shelters out back and stockpile creamed corn “just in case!” (better an oblivious populace then a nation of protestors, right?), and Bert the talking turtle advised kiddies on the best way to protect themselves during an atomic blast (hide under your desk and cover your head, and everything will be swell!).

Click to read more…

Banner Designed by Cysquatch

Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (sometimes) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

Presumably inspired by this week’s announcement of a Big 4 show in the U.S., this week’s question was posed by MetalSucks contributor/author of the Reign in Blood entry into the 33 1/3 book series, D.X. Ferris. Mr. Ferris was even good enough to join us for this edition of QOTW! And his query was:

IF THE BIG FOUR WERE THE BIG EIGHT, WHICH BANDS WOULD BE THE NEXT FOUR IN THE GROUP?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

Click to read more…

It used to be that if you wanted to know what you should buy, you would see what famous people liked, and buy whatever they said was cool — like how I originally got into Suicide Silence after I heard Demi Lovato talking about them. But now there is another way to find out what you should buy: shopping haul videos. A haul video is where someone goes shopping, then makes a YouTube video where they tell you about all the stuff that they bought. Usually they are really long, and made by young girls who like to talk about themselves. I don’t have a video camera, so I can’t make a video, but I thought it might be cool for you to see some of the stuff I bought at Hot Topic the other day in case you are thinking about doing any shopping and and wondering what is cool right now.

Click to read more…

So this normally where we write some fairly meaningless bullshit as an intro to our weekly recap, but reader Sean Williams sent us a link to the below video update from one Mr. Devin Townsend, and we really can’t think of a better way to kick-off the weekend. As Sean put it, “Deconstruction AND Ghost as a double record? Holy fucking shit!” And it gets “Holy shittier” when we get to hear a little bit of new music…

Here are some other fun things that happened at MetalSucks this week:

• We debuted Joe Satriani’s first Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards webisode and new music by Sweet Cobra.
• Gwar’s Oderus Urungus answered more of your idiotic questions, The Red Chord’s Greg Weeks got unnecessarily rough, Daath’s Eyal Levi pondered the meaning of sacrifice, and Rumpelstiltskin Grinder’s Shawn Riley taught us how to make delicious hot wings.
• We spoke to producer/engineer/mixer extraordinaire Mark Lewis, The Contortionist’s Jon Carpenter, and Shred Sean from Blessed by a Broken Heart.
• We checked out new releases from Dawnbringer and Merkaba.
• We helped A Day to Remember struggle with young adulthood.
• We gave Jason Newsted a shoulder to cry on.
• We got excited that Byzantine are making a new record.
• The kid of the dude from the E-Street Band is out of Madball.
• We’ve decided that when we die, we want our ashes to be pressed into vinyl.
• Can you please help us find Elote 5?

Until Monday… don’t get alcohol poisoning…

-AR

During a recent interview, Lars Ulrich stated that Metallica “did not take advantage of everything that [Jason Newsted] had to give.” Which strikes me as Ulrich being too hard on himself. I mean, really, you’re telling me that Jason Newsted’s talents can be better utilized than they were in this song?

I mean, that’s a classic right there! The first time I heard it, I was all, “Master of Whatits?”

Still, I was curious what Newsted thought of Ulrich’s apparent admission of guilt. Here’s what Newsted told me*:

Click to read more…

Banner Designed by Cysquatch

Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (sometimes) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

There weren’t any real hot button topics this week, so we decided to just play a fun game that used to keep Vince and Axl occupied for many a lunch period when they were kids:

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

Click to read more…

Or so MS Maniac Ranpal Chana claims. And I gotta hand it to Ranpal… this video is absolutely fantastic. The special effects / green screen work and the animation are awesome, and I love the performance footage of each individual band member. I kinda wish Warbringer or Bonded by Blood or someone would make a video like this.

-VN

Jon Fine’s best known band was Bitch Magnet, a (usually) three piece active from the late 80s to the early 90s. Though hardly a metal outfit, Fine was a vocal apostle of heavy music in the independent circles the band traveled in, deeply knowledgeable and conversant in obscure, loud shit going back to the early 70s (and earlier). I met Jon at a number of shows in NYC and read a bunch of his enthusiastic and thoughtful posts on the now-dead Chugchanga mailing list and figured he’d have an opinion or twelve on this. Jon also played in Vineland, Coptic Light and even did some time in Don Caballero.
These days Jon pays rent as a media analyst. You can find him on Mediabistro, CNBC and Twitter (where he has about eleven times as many followers as Gary Suarez).

Click to read more…

Last weekend I was lucky enough to be back in NYC for my spring break (even though the first week of March is clearly not spring), and was able to catch the Kreator, Voivod, Nachmystium, Evile, and Lazarus A.D. show. Considering that it had been a little while since I have been pushed up against someone bigger and sweatier than I am, I was pretty geeked.

While I was at the show it dawned on me that, unlike in most sports, there aren’t statistics that tell you how well a band performed. Soccer has the a similar problem, which they solve by giving each player a 1 – 10 ranking based on their overall performance. So in honor of the upcoming world cup and my brother, who both despises metal and introduced me to soccer, I give you the band ratings for the Kreator show in soccer style.

Click to read more…

Although at first glance at this photo makes it appear as though Ol Drake is stroking a massive hard-on, that’s actually a garbage bin just behind him. Alas, he was not that excited to be speaking with Axl Rosenberg.

Whatever the hell it is we’re calling Evile’s particular metallica subgenre these days – retro thrash, rethrash, nu thrash, or just plain old motherfucking thrash – they’re one of the better bands playing it right now. Like only a handful of their peers, they really seem to “get” the music – and so while their roots as a Metallica cover band might show, it doesn’t really matter ’cause, well, who can think about that shit while headbanging so damn hard?

It’s been a tumultuous time for the band as of late – founding bassist Mike Alexander passed away in October of last year – but they’ve managed to persevere, and now find themselves doing pretty much the best first North American tour any non-American (in this case, British) band could hope for: playing support for Kreator along with Voivod, Nachtmystium, and Lazarus A.D. And as if that wasn’t enough, almost immediately thereafter they hit the road with Overkill. Sheesh.

Following the band’s gig here in New York last weekend, I got to speak with guitarist Ol Drake, who, despite his almost Heavy Metal Muppet-ish appearance, is a very cordial, soft-spoken gentleman. After the jump, get Ol’s thoughts on playing the States for the first time, why it’s taken them so damn long to get here, new bassist Joel Graham, the status of the next Evile record, and more.

Click to read more…

Kreator’s twenty-fifth anniversary tour, which features the very strong supporting line-up of Voivod, Nachtmystium, Evile, and Lazarus A.D., rolled through NYC on Saturday night, and, yeppers, I was there. I don’t have tons to say about it, but I did wanna give you a quick run-down, in the event that you are somehow on the fence about whether or not to buy a ticket when the tour comes to your town… so here are some quick thoughts about all the bands, in the order in which they appeared:

Click to read more…

One of the dozens of things to dislike about Milwaukee is that it’s home to Hal Leonard, the publishers of history’s worst guitar tab book, Metallica’s …And Justice For All. I hate that goddamn book of lies. The authors of the alleged “note-for-note transcriptions” apparently are crotchety old uncles whose wedding band just celebrated their 10,000th gig. I mean c’mon! In my neighborhood, “Blackened” and “One” at minimum were mandatory learning, so even we knew something was rotten on the day we grabbed the tab book to compare notes: It turns out that the transcribers settled on ball-park estimation of metal’s greatest fucking guitar songs while also displaying a dazzling ignorance of distortion.

And the nutfucked thing is how Hal Leonard continues to sell this faulty piece of shit since fucking 1988. I pointed out its crappiness to HL in several curtly-phrased and progressively vulgar emails. Those went unanswered. One night, I helpfully grabbed a red sharpie to correct it with frowny faces and clusters of distraught question marks. That got me banned from Guitar Center. Then the worst happened: I began to doubt my own ear. After all, I reasoned, a lot of weed gets smoked in here; these “mistakes” in the tabs might’ve been the product of my imagination. But nay, the essence of Metallica riffs is embedded in my spine. I am right; these Justice tabs suck.

Click to read more…

Thus spake MS Maniac Michael Arose.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

Click to read more…

Metal Legacies is an ongoing memorial to extreme music pioneers who kicked the proverbial bucket way too soon.

This is only my third Metal Legacies entry, yet it is by far the hardest to write. As a college radio metal/hardcore DJ at The University of Texas from 1988-1990 I was a huge Voivod fanatic.

It was War and Pain that did me in first.

Then Rrröööaaarrr.

Then Killing Technology blew my mind.

By the time I started playing cassettes and LPs (remember those?) late Friday nights for the imaginatively titled The Metal Show, Voivod released what I believe was their greatest album, Dimension Hatröss. And while I admired every aspect of the Quebec, Canada-based futuristic space thrashers — from Snake’s wailing vocals to Blacky’s angular bass playing to Away’s soulfully robotic drumming and one-of-a-kind artwork — the key selling point was always Piggy’s guitar playing.

Click to read more…