Twelve years ago, Limp Bizkit released Significant Other, and an ungodly amount of casual acquaintances and friends of friends told me that I had to check it out. But I saw the video for “Nookie” and immediately knew that, dear heavens no, I most certainly did not have to check it out. And it was bad enough that Limp Bizkit could actually be a make-it-or-break-it point in a friendship; I once knew a millionaire alcoholic who declared my clothes to be “welfare,” but loved Limp Bizkit so much he got a black eye in one of their pits, so I felt pretty confident that anyone who even liked Limp Bizkit was more worthless than the plaque I brushed off my teeth in the morning.

But for the next, oh, I dunno, five years or so — I knew the tide had turned circa Ozzfest ’03, when Lamb of God and Hatebreed were all the rage and Otep was the only nu-metal artist on the whole bill — anytime someone who didn’t really know me would find out that I listened to metal, they would inevitably bring up Limp Bizkit or Korn. Consequently, I beat a lot of people to death with a rusty lead pipe during those years, and am now forced to write under an alias so as to conceal my true identity from the authorities.

So I don’t know what it says about me that I don’t think Gold Cobra deserves an especially harsh beatdown for its sins.

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Metal Hammer and The PRP are both reporting that the below is the new album art for Limp Bizkit’s Gold Cobra, the comeback a recent New York Times poll tells us is anticipated by more people than any event save for Jesus’ rising. At first I thought it was a joke, but, no, it’s on Wikipedia now, too, so it must fo’ reals, as Fred Durst himself might say.

And, well… it’s certainly an improvement over the old album art. And is that a clever allusion to Macbeth I spy?

No, it’s probably just the Kardashian sisters. Common mistake.

So anyway. There. I said something nice about Limp Bizkit kind of! Feeling is healing, y’all.

Gold Cobra comes out June 28 on Interscope, which means I may actually have to do what I promised Vince I’d do like a million years ago and review it. FML.

-AR

I got home from last night’s ridiculously, ludicrously fun Dillinger Escape Plan’s show at The Music Hall of Williamsburg in the wee hours of this morning to find a new Limp Bizkit single, “Shotgun,” in my inbox. (The above cover art was apparently done by Wes Borland. Good to know he’s multi-talented.) And even though I was riding high on the buzz of DEP (and other things) and should have just gone to sleep, I decided, no, let me listen to this right now, and in doing so take my joy out back behind the barn and shoot it dead.

And shoot it dead I dead.

There’s a lot about this song that is just bad in a regular, fairly boring way — like the main riff, which is pretty standard 120 Minutes stuff.

But then there are parts of this song that are so phenomenally terrible as to be truly worthy of the name “Limp Bizkit.”

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Fred Durst has tweeted that Limp Bizkit’s long delayed reunion album/latest attempt to make people wonder if pouring Drano in their ears will make it stop, Gold Cobra, is actually going to be TWO albums.

We don’t know if they’ll be titled Gold Cobra I and Gold Cobra II or just Gold Cobra and something else (Fuzzy Warm Wet Tunnel, perhaps?), but unless neither one of them contains any actual content besides the sounds of Durst, Wes Borland, and the rest of their crew being raked over hot coals, it’s not going to matter what they call it. It will exist. And it will be awful.

This band is going so far out of their way to give me an aneurysm, I imagine they’ll be announcing a tour with Winds of Plague and Emmure any second now. In fact, Vince recently mistook a new WoP song for Limp Bizkit, so, y’know, have all your affairs in order and the cyanide pills at hand for when that inevitably happens.

-AR

[via Metal Insider ]

In 1997 there was this girl that I was really into. I don’t even remember what her name was now, but I remember being very excited when I finally found myself at her place with just the two of us for company.

“Hey, wanna hear something awesome?” she asked me. The correct answer in that situation is obviously “Yes,” and so she walked over to her stereo and hit “play.” And this is what came out of the speakers:

The song ended and I figured out some excuse to leave and I left. Later I wondered if the girl really liked the song (she certainly seemed to) or if she played it knowing it was awful because she couldn’t think of a polite way to reject me, but it’s a moot point: I will never know how my relationship with that girl might have played out, all because she had to go and be the first person ever to introduce me to Limp Bizkit, and, more specifically, Limp Bizkit’s terrible covers.

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People sometimes ask me why I spend so much time writing about Limp Bizkit if I hate them so much, and I really don’t have a good answer. I think it’s probably not dissimilar from the way my dad is always watching programs about the Nazis on The History Channel, even though he and his family just narrowly escaped from zee Germans with their lives — you wanna understand the monster that committed these atrocities, y’know?

And so with that in mind, I braced myself and listened to Limp Bizkit’s latest, “Walking Away.” And for most of the song, I was like, “Oh, great. A terrible alt-rock power ballad.” ‘Cause, y’know, I really thought we were finally done with those after Puddle of Mudd mercifully disappeared. In fact, the song is just so generic and lame that I wasn’t even gonna write about it; I was gonna save all my vitriol for the Gold Cobra review Vince tells me I absolutely must write (And “take seriously.” I have no fucking idea how to take a review of Limp Bizkit seriously, let alone write a serious review.).

But then at the 3:18 mark, I was caught totally off-guard — ’cause Wes Borland takes a guitar solo. I pinched myself, but I wasn’t dreaming; I looked out the window, but I had not somehow missed the start of the Apocalypse; I had the MetalSucks Mansion Monkeys run a quick lab test on my weed, but someone hadn’t mixed it with a stronger hallucinogenic. There really is a guitar solo in a Limp Bizkit song now.

Granted, it’s nothing that anyone with ten fingers and five minutes to practice couldn’t play, but still… it seems like just yesterday that Hetfield and Ulrich were able to bully Kirk Hammett into not taking solos because they might “date” St. Anger, and here we are, and Wes Borland is taking a motherfucking guitar solo. What’s next for Bizkit — blast beats?

-AR

[via The PRP]

Did you know that we have lives outside of the metal world? It’s true! And sometimes, that life gets distracting. I LOVE writing for MetalSucks more than I love certain members of my mother’s family, but like any job, there are gonna be days when there’s some out-of-office shit going on and it’s really hard to just sit at your desk and concentrate.

Alas, today is one of those days. Thus, I present four stories that you might find of interest, but about which I have little to say. My sincerest apologies.

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I don’t know. I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. I’ll bring it up in therapy this week.

In any case, I am now about to listen to this song for the first time, and just type out my thoughts as I do. Should I get high for this, take the edge off a little? I think I’m gonna get high for this. Be right back.

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What? Is dids nots gets to plays Aprils Fools joke.

-NC

In February of ’07, while he was absolutely not just biding his time until Limp Bizkit got back together, Wes Borland taught a series of guitar clinics in such glamorous locales as Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Jakarta and Bangalore. And while I kid about those places, it’s as reassuring to me to learn there is some kind of metal scene in Jakarta as it was to learn that I have a distant cousin who is a rabbi in Dublin (I’m not making that up, by the way.). Peeps get around, yo.

So here’s a Jakartan (is that right?) band called Vendetta, doing a cover of Lamb of God’s “Now You’ve Got Something to Die For.” It’s serviceable but not great, but like I said, it’s cool that there are kids are trying to get shit done in Jakarta, and it’s cool that 75% of this group consists of chicks. At least, I think they’re chicks.

-AR

Thanks to Will Morley for the tip!

[From Delfi.lv, via MS Maniac Phillip W.G.]

To review: last year Wes Borland joined Marilyn Manson. This seemed a little odd because while Manson and Borland both like to play dress-up, Manson is a known Limp Bizkit hater – a fact which Manson explained away at the time by claiming that Borland “used to be in a really terrible band that he left because he felt that it was a destructive force in art.”

Of course, this little marriage didn’t last very long because Borland went running back to Bizkit, thus making Manson look like a fool or, at best, pretty naieve.

So, of course, Manson being the God of Shit Talkers, he has now lashed out at Borland in Kerrang:

“We almost made the mistake of having Wes play guitar but he re-joined Limp Bizkit,” Manson explains. “That move forever eradicated my feelings on his choices in life as an artist.”

When asked why he thinks Borland went back to his old band, Manson said: “That is what I find myself asking when I urinate sometimes. He said he would never go back. If the reason is money, then I’d rather roll up a 5 note and shove it up my urethra. I’d rather set my dick on fire than join something that I hated.”

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Fuck me naked with a spoon.

Last night we got what looked like a mass e-mail from someone claiming to be Wes Borland, announcing that he was, once again, out of Limp Bizkit. Upset that Fred Durst has apparently committed to direct another movie in August instead of touring North America with Bizkit, sissy cry baby face Borland complained in the e-mail that “Fred has once again proven that he does not view Limp Bizkit as a legitimate artistic endeavor but, rather, as a commodity… I will spend my summer touring with Marilyn Manson instead.”

We dismissed this e-mail as a terrible April Fool’s joke, as I’m assuming any other media outlets that received it have as well, as it I’ve yet to see it reported anywhere. And I wouldn’t have thought twice about it… if not for this series of tweets from one Mr. Frederick Durst:

wes couldn’t hang… out with the old, in with the new. 8:10 PM yesterday from TwitterBerry

new guitarist is da bomb! 9:29 PM yesterday from TwitterBerry

ever wonder what break stuff sounds like with an awesome shred solo? 10:26 PM yesterday from TwitterBerry

let the countdown to egstinction [sic] begin! 11:05 PM yesterday from TwitterBerry

1st rehearsal over… time to go home n rust in peace 1:19 AM today from TwitterBerry

Well, Durst’s horrific spelling aside, I was now more than a little nervous about all the classic Megadeth references and talk of “shred solos.” Since we get a press release every time the Japanese go ape shit because Marty Friedman farted or whatever, I shot his publicist an e-mail basically asking if she knew what the hell was going on. I honestly thought I’d get an e-mail back telling me she had no idea what the crap Durst was talking about and my pot-addled brain was reading way too much into the mindless ramblings of the mentally deficient.

But here is the absolutely horrifying response I got instead:

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Fuck Wes Borland, and fuck everyone who supported this lying sack of shit.

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I had the displeasure of seeing Dope live once (don’t ask). They were playing at Don Hill’s, a club here in NYC that holds about 300 people, and, to my surprise, they actually managed to pack the place pretty full. So after the band before them concluded their set, Dope kept the crowd waiting for 45 minutes while their roadies set up elaborate stage dressing fit for an arena show: extra platforms and a new PA system and lighting rig (I guess the house systems weren’t good enough for the band) and giant wooden backdrops and a chain link fence (!) and who the fuck knows what else. This kind of shit really isn’t necessary for a small club gig, but it might have been forgivable had the band come out and rocked the kids’ faces off; instead, they came out and played for… 45 minutes. To repeat: the band played for as long as they kept the crowd waiting for them to play. In hindsight, it seems clear that all the rigmarole was really because without the fancy lights and props, the band knew they didn’t have much to offer.

I’m telling you this story because Dope will be opening for Black Label Society and Sevendust on their upcoming tour, which still strikes me as an odd package – that Zakk Wylde, who once proclaimed “Fred Durst can eat a dick” on his band’s DVD, would share a stage with not one but two nu-metal bands just seems weird.

Weirder still: Wylde has now recorded a track with Dope. Let me type that again, lest you think your eyes are failing you: DOPE HAVE A SONG ON THEIR NEW ALBUM WITH ZAKK WYLDE ON GUITAR.

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“And the fifth angel blew his trumpet. And I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to the earth, and the key of the pit of the abyss was given him. And he opened the pit of the abyss, and smoke ascended out of the pit as the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun was darkened, also the air, by the smoke of the pit. And out of the smoke Limp Bizkit reunited and came forth upon the earth; and authority was given them, the same authority as the scorpions of the earth have.

“And in those days the men will seek death but will by no means find it, and they will desire to die but death keeps fleeing from them.”

Revelations 9:1-6

Ladies and gentlemen, Limp Bizkit have reunited.

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Another week gone in the waning days of summer, another week in the rampant gossip-mill of MetalSucks:

• Wes Borland signed on to be Marilyn Manson’s new guitarist, sans-body paint we hope.
• Lamb of God is recording a new album, tentatively due February 2009, with some producer no one has ever heard of.
• Another Guns N’ Roses song from Chinese Democracy leaks, presumably from the Rock Band camp.
• Jonathan Davis claims he is waving the flag for musicianship; we laugh a lot.
• We gave you lessons in pig squealing.
• We pondered the lack of white t-shirts in metal.
• Metallica played a new song live, and ya’ll argued a lot about it.

Marilyn Manson was always one of the most staunch anti-Limp Bizkit activists during that band’s heyday – so the announcement that Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland is joining his band seems kind of odd.

Luckily, Manson, ever the clever media manipulator, managed to do some damage control with this kind of hilarious statement:

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I mean, really. The above headline is so unfair. Lots of perfectly respectable metal musicians give lessons when they’re not touring ’cause it’s a good way to make some extra money.

Of course, those musicians tend to be talented, hard working, blue collar dudes in real metal bands. And, also, y’know, musicians.

And none of those words describe John Otto, the Limp Bizkit* skinsman/resident hobbit who is now offering drum lessons for $150-$200 a pop (depending on if you want a little alone time with him or don’t mind sharing him with someone else who thought that “Rollin’” was a good song). Having never taken a drum lesson, I have no idea if that’s a fair price or not, but if I were gonna take a drum lesson and it was gonna cost me $200, I would probably want it to be with Dave Lombardo or Gene Hoglan or Paul Bostaph or Kevin Talley or Jiminy fuckin’ Cricket, or at least, like, David Silvera.

Anyways, you can get more info here. Please book something soon and help Mr. Otto get his Ferrari out of the shop – Fred and Wes tell him the LB reunion is still at least a year off and he really, really needs that car to get laid.

-AR

*Frodo – uh, that is, Otto – is apparently also in a band called The Killer and the Star, but I think even fewer people have heard of them than have heard of Black Light Burns.

Sonny Mayo’s sudden expulsion from Sevendust makes me worried that Snot might reunite – I mean, fuck, it almost happened once already just about a year ago.

For those of you lucky enough not to be familiar with Snot, they’re a band that holds a legendary place in the minds of kids who actually like nu metal, since they were poised to join Limp Bizkit as one of their generation’s most annoying bands when front man Lynn Strait died in a car accident in 1998 (I’m not speaking ill of the dead, mind you; I’m just speaking ill of the dead’s shitty music). After Snot disbanded, its various members went on to such craptastic acts as Amen, Invitro, Godsmack, and Hed PE. Hell Mayo’s replacement, Mike Smith, even usurped Wes Borland for the one Limp Suckit album that even Fred Durst’s most ardent supporters seem to think sucks.

ANYWAY, in this day and age when bands like Blind Melon aren’t gonna let a little thing like a dead front man stop them from living their rock n’ roll dreams, I would be in no way surprised if some re-jiggered version of this band tried to figure out a way to cash in. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Here’s Snot’s video for “Stoopid.” Apt description if ever there was one.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/6VjJeKoVVM4" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Cute dog, right? Yeah. He died in the car crash, too.

-AR