FEATURING MEMBERS OF GOATWHORE, AGALLOCH, WARBRINGER, ROSETTA, ZEBULON PIKE, NOCTEM, THE WILL OF A MILLION, EXCOMMUNICATED, AND TRANSLATION LOSS RECORDS

Every year year, MetalSucks asks musicians from across the vast spectrum of the metalsphere (or, in a few cases, the almost-metalsphere) what their favorite albums of the year have been. Death metallers, thrash metallers, black metallers, stoners, grinders, and djenters alike have graciously contributed lists to MS, and we’ve been running them in groups of nine to ten musicians at a time two to three times a day for the whole week.

After the jump, check out the final group… we hope you enjoy seeing what some of metal’s heaviest hitters were into this year as much as we have!

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I am definitely one of those media people who Vince complains show Iced Earth no love. In all fairness to me, though, I can’t help how disinterested I am in that band; my brain literally will not allow them to make any impression on me. Case in point: I completely left their new video, “Dystopia,” out of this morning’s “Cinemetal Round-Up,” for no better reason than I just completely forgot to include them, despite having previously made a note to do so. It’s like I’m Peter Griffin and Iced Earth are Meg Griffin or something.

ANYWAY, I will now make it up to both Iced Earth and Vince by not only posting the video (and the song is actually good so sheesh I don’t know why I don’t love this band), but by posting news of an upcoming North American tour on which they’ll be co-headlining with Symphony X. I bet that bill will make a lot of people happy, even if I’ll probably completely forget about it ten seconds after completing this post.

I can’t post dates because the band has only included them on their website in a manner which makes cutting and pasting impossible, and I’m far too lazy to type them all out one-by-one. So just go here and look for yourself. Support will come from Warbringer, so, in all seriousness, this is a pretty solid line-up, no?

-AR

[via Metal Underground]

Friendly reminder: as of RIGHT THIS SECOND, the legendary Richard Christy from Death, Iced Earth, Control Denied, and, oh yeah, The Howard Stern Show, is at the MetalSucks/Vertebrae 33  booth at New York Comic Con signing copies of Charred Walls of the Damned‘s ridiculously rocking new album, Cold Winds on Timeless Days, which is out NOW on Metal Blade Records. He’ll be there ’til 7 pm, so there’s still time for you to hop on a bus, subway, or in a cab and get your ass down there — we’re booth #2625. Myself and/or Vince are also there now, and will be there tomorrow and Sunday, too, and we may have some other special guests in store for you yet. So come on by, pick up some free swag courtesy of Indie Merch and Metal Blade, hang out, whatever. It’ll be a blast! Get all the details here.

And now, some other fun shit we did this week:

• We premiered a new live recording of Death’s “Leprosy” and new music from Trapped Under Ice.
• We spoke to Grutle Kjellson from Enslaved, Rex Brown from Kill Devil Hill/Pantera/Down, producer Shane Frisby, and Skateboard Marketing’s Munsey Ricci.
• Valient Thorr’s Valient Himself occupied Wall Street, GWAR’s Dave Brockie gave us the blow-by-blow on the NFL, and Eyal Levi from Dååth and Levi/Werstler and Audiohammer Studios got all Pacino-in-Heat on us.
• We checked out the latest releases from Warbringer and Årabrot.
• We continued The Countdown to The Metal Suckfest and launched a contest in which you can win some sweet swag and a meet and greet session at the show.
• We watched some inter-Emmure drama unfold.
• We begged Sasha Frere-Jones from The New Yorker to stop writing about metal forever.
• We enjoyed the use of Nine Inch Nails in the new trailer for The Avengers.
• We got excited about Cynic’s new line-up + song.
• We celebrated the best Dragonforce cover ever.

Have a terrific, relaxing weekend everyone. See ya Monday, if we don’t see ya at NYCC!

-AR

The release year is winding down. Aside from new Megadeth and Animals as Leaders records, I think we’re pretty much done with bigtime new albums until 2012.

The #1 record on the Current Hard Music chart last week came from a band whose music it’d be a stretch to call “hard.” Click through to find out who it was. Blessthefall, Misfits and Wayne Static had solid debuts, while a number of last week’s releases jumped off the second week cliff. All that and more, right here:

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If anyone needs any proof that the “New Wave of Thrash Metal” party is over, they should listen to Worlds Torn Asunder. It’s not that the record is offensively bad. Not by a damn sight. It’s just that there’s nothing here we haven’t heard before, at least twenty times, since Reign in Blood dropped in 1986.

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I’m officially making the switch from the Top Hard Music chart to the Current Hard Music chart for the purposes of this column. While it’s interesting to see what classic Metallica and Aerosmith albums are charting and I still may occasionally reference the former, the latter chart paints a much clearer picture of the modern metal landscape by opening up more room for new records that sell less than classics, allowing a larger number of relevant new releases to place in the Top 100.

This chart has a slightly different way of tallying new releases, where sometimes they appear as having already been on for one week before official release — I’m still sorting through precisely what that difference is — so occasionally the chart positions are a little mixed up. But this only comes into play much farther down the list and this chart still provides a good gauge of relativity.

Now, onto the releases: as you all no doubt know, Mastodon and Machine Head were the biggies last week, and both did quite well — but the album that ended up at #1 is also a debut, and none of us saw it coming. Sebastian Bach, Warbringer and Maylene & The Sons of Disaster fared well in Week 1, while new records from Rose Funeral, Textures, Suffokate, Rwake, Brutal Truth and many, many more also appeared in the Top 100.

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Warbringer is a band that uses elbow grease: Screamer John Kevill and crew work hard, make forceful records, and tour enough to symbolically qualify as vagrants. But with less reliance on modern music marketing — and its shrieking tone, nagging omnipresence, and sweaty odor — how does a no-nonsense act like Warbringer find purchase on the sheer cliff face of success? It helps that their three albums create a Warbringer world, with listener-orienting devices like common track order schemes (think Metallica’s second, third, and fourth albums), common art design (twice with tattoo-able art by Dan Seagrave), and common title phonetics (War, Waking, Worlds). It helps also that Warbringer’s band personality is totally eyeroll-proof, just the shared vibe of five cool metal fans in cool metal t-shirts being cool and metal just like you.

And Kevill exemplified that friendly, frank chillness in a chat with MetalSucks this week — after which we just gabbed about general metal for an equal amount of time — as he discussed new album Worlds Torn Asunder, Warbringer’s first non-traditional producer choice, their new drummer’s attention to the three P’s, and keeping his band totally metal. Trends die, but there’s always an audience for the real. That’s Warbringer.

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I’m gonna put about as much effort into this introduction as Dark New Day put into promoting the release of their new album.

We begin today with Thrash or Die’s video for “Wake Up and Smell the Thrash.” I’m not really familiar with this band, and musically they seem like a pretty standard re-thrash outfit… but this video is friggin’ fantastic. Not only is it done entirely with puppets, but it re-creates a bunch of classic metal album covers, including ones by Anthrax, Dio, Kreator,Autopsy, and Vio-Lence. It’s also totally violent and demented. It is truly a must-watch.

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HUGE drop of new releases this week including much-anticipated new records from Mastodon and Machine Head, as well as a ton of excellent other stuff from Craft, Dead In The Dirt, Landmine Marathon and more. My release reviews are a bit shorter than usual just due to the sheer volume of material coming out this week, but I think I covered most points of interest. Check it out after the jump.  On a side note, Metalsucks wants to send a birthday shout-out to Rodney Githens, member of Vertebrae 33 and the artist behind the awesome Metal Suckfest poster.  Have a good one, dude.

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I really enjoyed “Living Weapon,” the new Warbringer track the band debuted last month; I’m enjoying the new new Warbringer song the band has just released, “Shattered Like Glass,” less. I think it boils down to the very simple fact that I don’t like the riff in the new new song as much as I like the riff in the old new song.

But it’s not a bad song, and there were bound to be some tunes on Warbringer’s new album, Worlds Torn Asunder, that I liked more than others, soooo… yeah, you should definitely check out this little ditty for yourself and make up your own mind. In fact, I’m curious to see what other Warreceivers (That’s what the band calls their fans, right?) think of “Glass” in comparison to “Weapon.”

Worlds Torn Asunder comes out September 27 on Century Media. The band will follow its release with a North American headlining run featuring Lazarus A.D., Landmine Marathon, and Diamond Plate as support. Get dates here.

-AR

Warbringer are streaming a new song, “Living Weapon,” on Hails and Horns, and I gotta say, literally within seconds of it beginning, I liked it a million times better than anything from Waking Into Nightmares. In fact, I think I liked it better than anything I’ve heard the band do since One by One, The Wicked Fall, their free EP that we were giving away back in the early days of MetalSucks.

Now, is the song ACTUALLY better than anything the band has recorded in several years, or am I just over  being over  the whole rethrash thing? It seems like the band was playing here in New York once a month for awhile there, and, honestly, it started to feel like overkill after awhile — so maybe the fact that I haven’t actually seen them in at least a year is helping my opinion of the music. But both the riffs and John Kevill’s vocal performance sound a lot more vicious to me than the material on their last couple of albums. But I dunno, maybe this is just the cloud of jadedness lifting.

ANYWAY, check out the track here, then debate its quality in our comments section. Warbringer’s latest offering, Worlds Torn Asunder, comes out September 27 on Century Media. The band will follow its release with a North American headlining run, natch; Lazarus A.D., Landmine Marathon, and Diamond Plate are playing support. Get dates here.

-AR

So Warbringer have a new album coming out, which means, of course, that it’s time for a tour! And while I feel like I’ve seen Warbringer live approximately eighteen gajillion times (is there any other band that tours as much as these dudes?), support is going to come from Lazarus A.D., who are great live, Landmine Marathon, who are GREAT GREAT GREAT live, and Diamond Plate, who I’ve never seen before but I know are beloved by our own Bob Cock.

So if you love Warbringer, you’re obviously going to this, but even if you don’t, I’d encourage you to check out Lazarus A.D., Landmine Marathon, Landmine Marathon, and Landmine Marathon. Stand near the front, and Grace Perry may even jump into the crowd and knock a few of your teeth out. That lady has force, dude.

Here are tour dates:

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<angrybloggerrant>Why oh why do labels sometimes not debut huge, gloriously hi-res versions of their bands’ album art? I’m aware that in the digital age, there are people who just don’t care that much about what the cover of their favorite band’s latest release looks like. But for those of us who do, it would be nice to be able to, like, see the art.</angrybloggerrant>

ANYWAY, here’s not a very large, not very hi-res version of the album cover for Warbringer’s upcoming Worlds Torn Asunder. It basically looks cool to me, although, again, I can’t really see it very well.

My prayers have been answered! Here’s the larger version. It does, indeed, look metal as fuck.

Worlds Torn Asunder comes out September 27 on Century Media.

-AR

Everywhere ya look, there’s an announcement of a new and unexpected pairing: Mastodon/hip hop producer, Metallica/Lou Reed, Mike Portnoy/butt-rock, and Rob Zombie/garment care. Well, Strange Bedfellows Month continues with news that Warbringer’s just-completed third album, Worlds Torn Asunder, was produced by Steve Evetts. His name is on good punk records (Saves The Day, Lifetime), veiny hardcore (Snapcase, Earth Crisis), and Symphony X; and, natch, he’s the Flemming Rasmussen to Dillinger Escape Plan’s Metallica. So dude has some stats.

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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, we have our first ever reader-suggested QOTW, coming from MetalSucks Maniac Cougar Party:

WHAT BANDS DO YOU HATE THAT YOU HAVE SEEN LIVE MULTIPLE TIMES BECAUSE THEY ARE ALWAYS OPENING FOR SOMEONE YOU LIKE?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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Nevermore’s MetalSucks-presented North American tour kicks off this Thursday in Vancouver. With support coming from Warbringer, Hatesphere, and Blackguard, these shows promise to kick all kinds of ass. And to celebrate, we’re giving away five pairs of VIP tickets to the tour! Here’s how to win:

• In the comments section below, tell us why you wanna see Nevermore live. Vince and Axl will choose their five favorite answers, and the writers of those entries will win a pair of VIP tickets to the show of their choice! Remember that this is MetalSucks, not Reader’s Digest, so the more entertaining your answer, the more likely you are to win.
• Make sure you specify which show you’d like to attend if you win. We can’t help you with transportation, so if you can’t actually get to one of these shows, don’t waste our time, okay?
• Make sure you register for the comments section with a real e-mail address, as all winners will be contacted via e-mail. If you connect to the MS comments section via Facebook, please leave your e-mail address in your comment, as we cannot contact winners via the social network.

And that’s it! Get a complete list of tour dates after the jump… and good luck!

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Someday I want to walk either up or down some stairs and then along a very bland-looking hallway towards the increasingly loud sound of people either chanting my name or the name of something cool with which I am closely associated – like a band, or, I dunno, this website. Of course, that’s likely never to occur, since I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor am I ever likely to be, in a real band, and you don’t often hear people chanting the names of bloggers or websites. Unless it’s Cum Fiesta. But, c’mon. MetalSucks is no Cum Fiesta.

(By the way, I didn’t put a note that Cum Fiesta is NSFW because, well, it’s called “Cum Fiesta.” If you clicked through and did not realize that it was going to be a porn site, please never reproduce, as there are enough idiots in the world as it is and we don’t need your gene pool to continue. Thanks.)

ANYWAY, I mention it because it’s how the new Nevermore video, for “Emptiness Unobstructed,” begins. And why wouldn’t you chant for Nevermore? Nevermore are fucking awesome. We’re sponsoring their North American tour with Warbringer, Mutiny Within and Hatesphere (dates here), and I totally intend to go, and I totally intend to start a “NEV-ER-MORE!” chant. Okay, I probably won’t do that because I’m not really an extroverted or even social person, but I will go to the show and chime in with a chant that someone else started.

In case ya haven’t heard, lemme drop some knowledge: “Emptiness Unobstructed” is off of Nevermore’s new album, The Obsidian Conspiracy, which is out now on Century. It’s awesome. Go get it.

-AR

[via Bloody Disgusting]

The MetalSucks-sponsored Pestilence Reigns Upon North America tour is now more than half complete, with the action set to wrap in New York City this Thursday at the Gramercy Theater. In addition to the technical metal legends, Warbringer, Vital Remains, Enfold Darkness and Sacrificial Slaughter will also be in tow; in addition to NYC, those of you in Chicago (tonight!), Montreal and Toronto still have a chance to catch this excellent tour, so don’t snooze and lose.

Axl and Vince will be in attendance at the NYC show on Thursday; as usual, feel free to buy us beers.

-VN

The fact that the Nevermore North American Tour 2010 has already been announced isn’t lost on us… but since any good metal tour auto-magically looks cooler with our logo followed by “Presents…” atop its bill, we figured we’d jump on and sponsor it! Neo-thrashers Warbringer, American neo-melodeathsters Mutiny Within and Denmark’s melodeath/thrashsters Hatesphere are on the bill as well, making for a fun bill of metal that will kick off in Vancouver on September 23rd, circle around the U.S., and wrap in Edmonton on November 5th.

What does this mean for us? Well, besides getting to stroke our ego every time we look at the poster, we get a pair of VIP tickets for every show. And for you lucky chaps, you get to be the recipients of said VIP tickets. Golly! Details for how to win those will be announced soon.

And even better, “Create Your Own Conspiracy Contest” winner Ben Robson gets his shot to perform his version of “The Obsidian Conspiracy” with the band in his hometown of Pittsburgh on October 25th; and since Century Media had graciously offered to fly him and a friend to a show for the performance, Ben gets to use that money to bring down a whole buncha friends and family instead. If you live in or near Pittsburgh, do not miss this special show!

Full list of tour dates after the jump. Sorry Floridians, but you get screwed once again (and as usual, not our fault!).

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I don’t remember which show it was at, but Vince and I recently saw the ridiculous amount of cell phones snapping photos and video at a concert and started to reminiscence about that time in 1991 when Axl Rose jumped into a crowd in St. Louis to punch some dude who taking unauthorized photos of the show, thus inciting a riot (Rose’s first of at least four). If he pulled that shit today, it would seem even more ridiculous. Hell, before I ever saw Metallica live, I had some bootleg cassette of one of their shows that I bought off some dude at a flea market (seriously) for ten bucks. The audio quality was atrocious, but I still listened to the thing like eighteen-thousand times. Today, bootlegs of live shows are just a given; security doesn’t try and stop anyone from recording the show, because seemingly everyone is recording the show. Even if they find an audio recorder on me during the traditional pat-down, just saying “I’m interviewing the band” is sufficient to get them to ignore it. But they never ask to see my press credentials or anything, ’cause they don’t really care – they can’t take away every cell phone that comes through the place.

Which is all just a long-winded introduction for the very good quality fan-filmed footage of Pestilence playing at Neurotic Deathfest last week. We would have killed to have such easy access to this kind of footage when I was younger; now it’s pretty much expected that if you play a show, it’ll be all over YouTube within a matter of hours. Check out a clip below; you can watch more at Shut Yo’ Mouth.

And if that footage makes you feel all warm and tingly where your bathing suit covers, then don’t forget that MetalSucks and Decibel are teaming up to bring you Pestilence’s first U.S. tour in sixteen years (!) starting at the end of May; Warbringer, Vital Remains, Enfold Darkness and Sacrificial Slaughter are also on the bill, so you know it’s gonna be a good time. Get dates here.

-AR