It has come to my attention that some people are still confused about the difference between SLAM METAL and DEATHCORE. While they may seem similar to the novice observer, the truth is that they couldn’t be more different — in fact, they really have nothing at all to do with each other (srs). Think of it like Islam and Christianity: they some common roots, but at the end of the day they really have nothing to do with each other and will never see eye-to-eye.

In a nutshell, deathcore is what happens when some pretty boys want to be rockstars, and think that it’s super cool and scene to be in a “sick metal band.” The end result is basically generic death metal with some equally generic breakdowns, but since the guys in the band are cute and have a lot of tattoos, kids eat it up and they sell lots of t-shirts at their Warped Tour booth when they’re not busy banging their jailbait groupies.

On the other hand, slam metal is grimy, blue-collar death metal that is pretty much the most extreme, inaccessible and brutal metal subgenre on the planet. Slam is pure brutality: none of the pagentry or larger-than-life personas of black metal, gimmicky costumes of neo-thrash or artsy nonsense of drone, stoner rock and all that, just CRUSHING FUCKING SLAMS. Even diehard metal fans (like the readers of this site) hate slam, so if you are in a slam band it’s because slam is in your blood, because you are never going to make a dime or get famous from it.

While deathcore and slam are almost completely heterogeneous, let’s acknowledge that there is a small amount of common ground (at least at a superficial level. In both camps, you’ll find lots of mesh shorts, sweatpants, weed references, and merch that prominently features controversial slogans in Impact font — but that’s about where it ends. To me, the differences could not be more obvious, but apparently some people still have trouble making the distinction between the two. Because I enjoy giving back to my community, in this post, I will go over a few easy ways that you can tell the two apart!

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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’s query was suggested by reader Yevgeniy Reznichenko:

IS ELITISM IN METAL A GOOD THING OR A BAD THING?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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MetalSucks is proud to once again be sponsoring the best mega-package tour of the summer — Summer Slaughter, of course! As you can see from the above poster, the mini-fest’s organizers have once again put together line-up that show cases a who’s who of the current metal scene.

And they’re taking it one step further this year — they’re letting YOU, the fans, decide who the last band added to the bill should be! Go to the official Summer Slaughter Facebook page to cast your vote.

Cities and dates for the tour will be announced on 4/20. ‘Til then… get ready to get slaughtered…

You know how sometimes you will get completely obsessed with a band, and you’re all “ZOMG CANNOT STOP LISTENING TO THEM!!!”? That is how I am right now with THE ACACIA STRAIN — I probably listen to Wormwood at least three times a day, and when I’m not listening to it, I am singing it in my head.

It’s always awesome to get the chance to see a band when you are at the peak of being into them, so I was very stoked to check out the DEATHCORE ACROSS AMERICA tour when it rolled through my town the other day: I Declare War, Whitechapel, Veil of Maya and The Acacia Strain = YOU’RE FUCKING MOSHING! I also got a chance to chat with TAS bassist Jack Strong [mirin that name, sounds alpha as fuck].

In this post I will share the three reasons why TAS is my favorite band at the moment, as well as a few words from Jack to support my points: 1. Their diverse fanbase 2. They are punk 3. Last but not least, TAS are fucking heavy as fuck.

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Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it seems like there was a week or two there where we weren’t being sent a lot of reader recommendations… and then over the past four or five days, I feel like we’ve just been bombarded with “YOU HAVE TO CHECK OUT THIS BAND THEY RULE SO HARD!!!” e-mails. Since it seems to be a slow news morning, I thought I’d go through a bunch of ‘em, picking out bands completely at random.

I haven’t listened to any of these bands in advance of writing this, so the following column will be one of those “Let’s discover the music together!”-type deals. Inevitably, some/most of these groups are gonna blow, but hopefully we’ll find a gem or two in the pile as well.

And so…

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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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The video. Not really the song so much. I mean, it’s another David Brodsky/Tim Kellen joint – how can you really go wrong?

Whitechapel’s A New Era of Corruption is out now on Metal Blade. It sold a helluva a lot of copies last week.

-AR

Nevermore, Kingdom of Sorrow, Nachtmystium, Watain, Heaven Shall Burn, Whitechapel…. and, uh, Attack Attack!. All these bands released records last week, and after the jump we take a look at how all of those records performed. Metal Insider‘s Zach Shaw has done a fine job of collecting the data, but you’ll have to visit Metal Insider to get his cheeky commentary. The numbers — with my own cheeky commentary, naturally — after the jump.

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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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Originally, I had planned on livetweeting this year’s New England Metal and Hardcore Festival for the purposes of turning my pithy comments into some sort of proper show report. Looking back on some of those 140-characters-or-less entries, I realized that there was really no need to do so. Instead, below you’ll find a selection of my most poignant tweets from the two day weekender. Enjoy!

DAY ONE
So nice of @metalsucks to have this limo waiting for me at Union Station. My driver Tito has already taken a shine to me. #nemhf 12:42 PM Apr 23rd

My limo driver Tito and I stopped at Uno’s for a quick bite. I wonder if Rose Funeral refuse to eat here on principle. #nemhf 12:52 PM Apr 23rd

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Two new song title puns in one headline?!?! SCORE!!!

So. Periphery’s self-titled Sumerian debut comes out one week from tomorrow. The band has been pretty generous about letting people hear material from that record, and now they’re streaming what I imagine will be the last song we get to hear before they inevitably stream the album in-full. The track is called “Imsomnia,” and you can hear it in all of its djenty glory here.

A little less exciting is the new Whitechapel song, “The Darkest Day of Man.” I wanna like this band. The kids who go apeshit for them look like they’re having so much fun. It just doesn’t do anything for me. I don’t know what makes these guys any different from the eight-hundred other bands all playing the same style of metal. I tried. I did. Swear it.

Metal Blade wil release Whitechapel’s new album, A New Era of Corruption, on June 8.

-AR

I’d actually argue that we’re in the middle of the same old era of corruption that we have been for some time – most of my life, if not even longer – but, hey, A New Era of Corruption is a pretty cool album title. And while I have no idea what the album art has to do with the title, it’s pretty frickin’ metal:

I haven’t been a huge Whitechapel fan in the past, but I’m open to having my mind changed if the album rocks hard enough. It comes out June 8 on Metal Blade.

-AR

Here’s some fan-filmed footage of Whitechapel’s latest exercise in having three guitarists all play the same part. It’s called “The Darkest Day of Man,” and presumably will be on the band’s new album, which should be out sometime this summer on Metal Blade.

In all seriousness: I don’t really dislike this band as much as Vince does, but their appeal is a little lost on me – especially after I saw them live earlier this year. But there were a lot of people in the crowd and those people seemed to frickin’ LOVE this band, so…

-AR

[via The PRP]

Anyone remember this from a couple of years back?

Well that Taco Bell isn’t too far from the Mansion, and I’m ashamed to admit, but sometimes, in moments of stoned weakness, I purchased food there. But ever since that little incident, I haven’t eaten at a Taco Bell; I can’t. I know that ALL fast food is crap, but come ON, a man has limits.

Still, I guess it’s nice of them to start this whole “Feed the Beat” program, in which they basically give touring bands $500 worth of diarrhea food for free. And now Metal Insider is reporting that a handful of metal bands – including Atreyu, Iwrestledabearonce, Whitechapel, Municipal Waste and Earthless – are rumored to have been selected for the offer.

And as Metal Insider says, “tour support is tour support” – so I don’t blame the bands for participating. And the dudes in The Waste are probably fucked up half the time anyways, so they won’t be able to tell the difference. Meanwhile, Atreyu have been spewing crap forth from their mouths for years, so they might as well put some back into their mouths for a change.

-AR

P.S. I wanna give extra credit to Metal Insider, not just for originally reporting on this story, but for coming up with a headline that is vastly superior to my own. Nice work, Bram!

Last night Vince and I hit up the Trivium/Chimaira/Whitechapel/Dirge Within show at Irving Plaza here in NYC. I will never ever get sick of watching Chimaira live. They have a forty-five minute set on this tour, and they really make the most of it by basically segueing directly from one song to the next with a minimum of on-stage banter, presumably in order to allow a maximum of brutality. To top it off, the set-list was pretty much perfect – they played at least one or two songs from each of their albums (This Present Darkness excluded), and not always they song(s) you’d expect, either. Definitely go check ‘em out!

Here they are doing “Severed” at the Download Festival in 2007. They played this song last night and the pit just went insane – I think this has to be the heaviest track on Pass Out of Existence, no?

-AR

Philosopher and academic Paul Hegarty began his 2007 tome Noise/Music: A History with the following description: “Noise is not an objective fact. It occurs in relation to perception–both direct (sensory) and according to presumptions made by an individual… Whether noise is happening or not will depend on the source of what is being called noise–who the producer is, when and where, and how it impinges on the perceiver of noise.” Such a definition is necessary in order to reasonably assess Chicago-based deathcore act Oceano.

While heavy metal has previously been appropriated–and, arguably, misappropriated–by artistic outsiders with agendas and ideologies, alongside nostalgic or even fetishistic sentiments, deathcore is a rare internal and naturally occurring movement that adopts the typically academic precepts of noise music inadvertently and almost entirely by chance. Indeed, as a subgenre, it is intolerable to most self-described heavy metal fans. It is safe to posit, given the lineup’s youth (at least one member is apparently still below the legal drinking age), that Oceano (and their deathcore ilk) are wholly unaware of and uninitiated in the legacy of noise that came before them, beginning with the Futurists and Dadaists of the early 20th century, continuing with the Fluxus artists of the 1960s and the avant-jazz musicians of the 1970s, and ultimately exploding worldwide in the latter fifth of the 1900s with performers like Merzbow and Lustmord paving the way for today’s stars like Christian Fennesz and Stephen O’Malley. It is a testament to Oceano that a manifestation of their talent for noise emerges even as they genuinely attempted to write an album’s worth of listenable heavy metal songs.

Frontman Adam Warren honors the vocal tradition of Yoko Ono (a participant in Fluxus even prior to her marriage and music with John Lennon) as much as he does Chuck Schuldiner. On “Slaughtered Like Swine,” Warren reproduces a stunning approximation of a porcine squeal. “Empathy For Leviathan” ostensibly mines the pelagic and oceanographic themes suggested by the band’s name and album title, though its lyrics are so inscrutably delivered that they could have very well been recorded underwater. Tracks like “With Legions” and “Samael The Destroyer” involuntarily lampoon heavy metal conventions with gratuitous noodling and tempo shifts, the latter of these permitting Jason Jones a three second bass solo. Oceano sound their best on “District Of Misery,” where the cacophony rarely lets up over its three minute duration. Here, bestial braying, irritatingly ticking drums, and insufferable low-end dominate, ending with the sound of an exploding septic system.

My sole, albeit minor criticism of the otherwise irreproachable Depths pertains to its six-and-a-half minute long title track. This melodiously repetitive, comparably exoteric diversion–perhaps an unconscious nod to the early looping experiments of Pierre Henry or Karlheinz Stockhausen– both well meaning though ill-advised and should be chalked up to the occasionally misguided ambitions of youth. I won’t posture as a seasoned deathcore aficionado, and I’d postulate that some of the more experienced fans of the subgenre may be disinclined to agree with my ebullient assessment of Oceano, perhaps favoring antecedants such as Suicide Silence and Whitechapel. Even still, Oceano’s Depths delivers on the promise of its title and offers an immersing aural experience for fans of La Monte Young and Job For A Cowboy alike.

In his aforementioned book, Professor Hegarty not only chronicled the role of noise in 20th and 21st century sound but also adumbrated a “future culture” based in some measure upon it. Going forward, I cannot possibly any credibly anthropological survey of such a culture without reference to Oceano, the undoubtedly reluctant new aesthetic leaders of noise.

(5 out of 5 horns)

-GS

[Gary Suarez is serious. He usually manages the consistently off-topic No Yoko No. Say, why don't you follow him on Twitter?]

I am SO PISSED that I missed Chimaira’s most recent tour (with Hatebreed), because a) Chimaira slay live and b) I’m fucking dying to hear some more material from The Infection in a live setting – when I saw the band on this spring’s Music as a Weapon tour, the album had literally just come out that day and the band were, consequently, only playing two new songs.

So. Rhythm guitarist Matt DeVries had to pull a Mark Morton and leave the tour early so he could get home for the birth of his new child, Austin (Mazel tov, Matt!); filling in for him is Daath co-guitarist/all around cool dude Emil Werstler. I am using this little fact as an excuse to post this video I saw on Blabbermouth of the Wersterful Chimaira performing “The Venom Inside.” Also, to point out that bassist Jim LaMarca seems to have shed his signature locks. That leaves DeVries as the only dude in Chimaira capable of windmilling. Just sayin’.

Chimaira continue to decimate Europe alongside Unearth, Throwdown, and our friends in Daath through October 12; then, at the end of the month, they hit the States again with Trivium, Whitechapel and Dirge Within. Get dates here.

-AR

So. Atreyu have a new album, Congregation of the Damned, coming out October 27, and the band has made it perfectly clear that they intend for said album to be a return to form after the lackluster results of their sell-out arena rock effort, Lead Sails and a Who Gives a Fuck? Now they’ve debuted a new song, “Stop! Before It’s Too Late and We’ve Destroyed it All,” on their MySpace. Are we convinced that the Atreyu of yore are about to make a return? Can any band that’s not Faith No More get away with having a exclamation point in a song title? Do we even care?

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Job for a Cowboy bassist Brent Riggs ended up being one of the most fun interviews we did at this year’s Rockstar Energy Mayhem Festival. For one thing, it may or may not come across in this transcript, but the dude has a really dry sense of humor that matches our own. For another thing, it seemed as though the dude barely wanted to talk about JFAC – he must have to talk about JFAC all the time, so it’s hard to blame him – but when the topics of weed and weightlifting arose, his eyes lit up like a little kid on Christmas, and he suddenly became quite garrulous. A man after our own heart.

JFAC’s new album, Ruination, is out now on Metal Blade. After the jump, check out our full chat with Brent Riggs.

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If more mainstream hard rock bands sounded like Halestorm I’d like a lot more mainstream hard rock.

Meanwhile, Whitechapel remind me why deathcore is a waste of my time.

That is all.

-VN