Axl and I were joking the other night that we might have invented the phrase “still a thing” as applied to bands/people/trends that seem to have vanished from view but are apparently not just still around but quite popular. Only fitting then that the theme of this week’s Top Hard Music Soundscan charts is “still a thing.” I mean, the molasses-like state of inertia fixed upon modern hard rock radio and the associated bands over the past decade is just astounding to look at; nothing has changed in ten years.

Since there weren’t any notable metal debuts last week to crack the Top 100 aside from those in the Top 10, this week let’s look at all of numbers 1 through 10 on the Top Hard Music chart. Prepare to be astonished and baffled by the “still a thing”-ness of every single band.

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Touring is inherently not eco-friendly. Buses and trucks that burn through gas like Brent Hinds burns through beer, a rabid audience that produces several tons of waste in the form of bottles, cups, etc, bands that use materials that aren’t biodegradable simply because they’re the cheapest available… these are just some of the challenges of keeping things green on the road.

Kevin Lyman, the creator of Warped Tour and The Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival, has been aboard the green train for years: Warped and Mayhem feature 100% solar powered stages, volunteers from community recycling programs to sort through waste in each city the tour plays, biodegradable kitchen utensils for catering, and more. Read my chat with Kevin about Rockstar Mayhem’s industry-leading green initiatives after the jump.

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Amongst the older musicians on Warped Tour, dissing the traveling festival’s main constituency of tight-pants-wearing, hair-swooping, girly-man emo kids has kind of become like going fishing in a stocked kiddie pond; super easy but still lots of fun and irresistible. Every Time I Die’s Andy Williams and Dillinger Escape Plan’s Liam Wilson had plenty to say on the matter when I chatted with them about beards last month, and the latest rock vet — who makes those two look like kids themselves — to chime in is Tom Morello, whose band Street Sweeper Social Club played a couple of the tour’s California dates.

Elise at Reign in Blonde, who brought this video to my attention, makes a good point that most kids at Warped probably have no idea that the guy up on stage making funky sounds with his guitar has another, more popular band that’s sold tens of millions of records worldwide. But Morello seems to take it in stride, and though he fires a few shots at Warped’s primary attendees he recognizes the value of playing to a new crowd. Skip to the 1:00 mark for the Morello clip.

-VN

This year’s Warped Tour has a formidable albeit small deathcore contingent, the core of which is comprised of Emmure, Whitechapel, and California’s tattooed sons Suicide Silence. Competing with the likes of Hey Monday, Andrew W.K., and All American Rejects for the coveted attention of overwhelmingly teenage festival attendees, the group made sure to bring the fucking mosh at the Long Island, NY stop. After some delay on my part catching Emmure’s lively set, I hurried back to the press area to interview laid-back-and-damn-cool guitarist Mark Heylmun about Warped, the boldly minimal video for “Disengage”, and why fans should buy the recently released “Body Bag Edition” of their latest album No Time to Bleed.

Oh, and dubstep. We talked about dubstep.

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We love The Dillinger Escape Plan… and how could we not? Their live shows are among the wildest, most energetic and memorable today. Their discography both defines and defies mathy hardcore, throwing us for a loop yet again with their tight, ferocious new record Option Paralysis. So even though Axl had a chance to talk to some of the members right when the album dropped in March, I couldn’t pass up the chance to interview someone who wasn’t part of that chat: guitarist Jeff Tuttle. During the band’s Long Island, NY stop on this summer’s Warped Tour, I sat down with on a bench in a shaded area on the grounds of Nassau Coliseum to ask Jeff the Million Dollar Question: why the hell are The Dillinger Escape Plan playing Warped Tour???

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Believe it or not, Emmure frontman Frankie Palmeri and I have something in common, at least geographically. We both grew up in Queens, a largely residential New York City borough whose diversity has yielded artists from the Ramones to 50 Cent. Beyond that however, it was clear to me how different Palmeri and I are. When I sat down to interview him at the Nassau Colosseum stop on the Vans Warped Tour this past weekend, he seemed defensive and even a bit distant. I was immediately reminded of Henry Rollins’ “Get In The Van,” the essential collection of that seminal hardcore icon’s diaries from the Black Flag days. Like Rollins, Palmeri exudes an exhaustion with the trappings of the modern world. Noticing my phone, he quickly whipped out his –replete with severely cracked screen — and declared, without so much as smirking, “Here’s mine.” I could tell from our conversation that he was absolutely living the motto he asks Emmure fans to chant at their shows: “I’m fucking over it.” Read for yourself below.

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It’d be easy to categorize the rant Every Time I Die’s Keith Buckley wrote for Alternative Press as “old guy sour about kids these days” if everything he’s saying about the current young crop of bands on the Warped Tour wasn’t so damn on-point. At a relatively ripe 30-ish years old (I think) compared to the haircutcore multitudes, the lads in Every Time I Die, Dillinger Escape Plan and a small handful of other bands on Warped have earned the right to be crotchety old men; their music has stood the test of time in this crazy, ever-changing scene and has proven itself to be more than just a passing fad. And while Buckley lays it straight in his vitriolic rant and it’d be easy to say “he just doesn’t get it” with regards to today’s youth’s music choices, it’d be hard for any self-respecting music fan to argue with his points. Sample:

The problem is that kids here at the Warped Tour don’t know that half of these “bands” play to an iPod track or that most “artists” don’t even write their own songs. They don’t realize that the singer of Never Shout Never is just a poor man’s Justin Bieber or that most of these “moshcore” bands that use 808’s to really BEEF UP their bass tone are the most recent manifestation of nu metal. Really guys? The dude from Milli Vanilli KILLED HIMSELF because he was so ashamed at being outed as a phony and yet on a daily basis I walk out into the crowd and hear autotuned vocals in a live setting. What the fuck has happened to us? Don’t we want more than this? Music once made me want to play music. Now there are days that it makes me want to never listen to it again.

Buckley’s rant is really something you’ve got to read; it’s the kind of article that’ll have you pumping your fist and yelling “yes!” to yourself constantly. The final blow:

Put your ear to the ground, take off your stupid fucking neon shirt and get a haircut. Oh, and what happened to throwing tomatoes at people onstage that just plain sucked? I say we bring that back. As a matter of fact, I think Breathe Carolina are playing soon…

Zing! We wait for Never Shout Never and Breathe Carolina’s responses with baited breath. It’s been a while since we had a good feud ’round these parts…

-VN

Thanks: Brent Hicks

Emmure get a lot of shit here, from readers and staff alike, and I often feel like the odd man out for ranking their last record, Felony, among my favorites of 2009. Yet I experienced firsthand the collective love for the band when I caught their engaging, riotous set at the Warped Tour stop at New York’s Nassau Colisseum this weekend. To paraphrase my dear friend Elise from Reign in Blonde, who also witnessed this memorable performance, it’s easy to forget how popular Emmure are if all you rely on are metal websites. The young crowd were deeply into the band’s music, shouting along with the lyrics, windmilling wildly, and generally having a great time. It makes me wonder if you online sourpusses even know how to have fun, or have even so much as kissed a girl.

For me, the highlight of their Warped Tour set was a surprise cover of an early-Naughties dance-pop hit: Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone.” Without warning, Emmune-branded beach balls were thrown into the crowd, as frontman Frankie Palmeri led the eager audience in a singalong. After one last acapella take, the band segued quickly into “Bars In Astoria,” a song I really identified with from Felony. There was a certain artfulness to pairing the two tracks together, since “Better Off Alone” is almost certainly the type of song one would hear at a Queens nightspot over the past decade. Perhaps Palmeri has some less than pleasant memories associated with the track? Check out the fan-filmed video footage above of “Better Off Alone/Bars In Astoria” from a different date on the 2010 Warped Tour. Remaining tour dates are below.

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… here’s a fan-filmed live video with surprisingly decent sound quality [sent in by MS Maniac Damotello] of DEP covering Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher” at this past summer’s Warped Tour. Watch as the band tears it up — especially guitarist Jeff Tuttle’s near-perfect rendition of EVH’s guitar shred — and the song’s significance is completely lost on the mostly teenage audience, despite the many false cheers that erupt when Greg Puciato mockingly asks how many people know the song.

-VN