“But seriously, why don’t people respect me for my musical ability???”

Kristen Randall’s biggest contribution to music is a leaked photo of her boobs, and when she left Winds of Plague last year, the world responded with a resounding “whatever” as the band proved that one cute chick keyboardist is as enticing to male suburban virgins as another.

So, following the same line of completely 110% sound logic that dictates that men should not be interested in breasts, Randall is taking the next logical step in her career and launching a solo project.

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No, this isn’t an article about boobies. Sorry.

Sergeant D. recently conducted an interview with Born of Osiris for Substream, and, as is often the case, there was a chunk of the interview that the magazine didn’t run. The Sarge has now posted that chunk at Stuff You Will Hate, and while some of it is over my head (Did you know that Johnny Plague apparently wears a lot of puffy vests? Yeah, me neither.), I did appreciate the revelation that BOO drummer/primary songwriter Cameron Losch has dabbled in rap music:

Sergeant D. compares him to Andy Samberg’s “Blizzard Man” character from Saturday Night Live, which I think is going too far. Blizzard Man’s lyrics are more authentic. “How’d I get so good at killing bitches/Well, nobody knows?” Seriously? There a lotta gangstas on the rough streets of Palatine, Illinois, aren’t there?

Read more at SYWH.

-AR

There’s a NSFW image after the jump. You’ve been warned.

Angela Gossow in the 2006 edition of Revolver’s “Hottest Chicks in Metal”

I love masturbating as much as the next guy who spends most of his day at the computer, but there’s no getting around the fact that Revolver’s annual “Hottest Chicks in Metal” issue – and now, apparently, accompanying calendar – is completely ridiculous. It has nothing to do with music, and there’s no equivalent issue for “Hottest Dudes in Metal,” because, well, metal is mostly a sausage fest and I imagine that a “Hottest Dudes” issue wouldn’t sell very well.

Now Arch Enemy’s Angela Gossow – who has been featured in past “Hottest Chicks” issues – has spoken out against the concept… as if you needed another reason to love her. From a recent interview with KNAC:

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So let’s say you’re Fear Factory. You’re in the headlines a lot these days because your founding guitar player has returned to the fold and you’ve recorded an album that ranks with your best. You have to go do your first big U.S. comeback tour. Who do you announce as your support acts? How about Winds of Plague, Dirge Within, and Periphery?

Wait… what?

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So apparently Ozzfest is coming back this summer, and is coming back as a traveling tour again (as opposed to the one-off fest it was in 2008). And that’s all well and good, only… who’s gonna be on the bill?

Mayhem, which is basically Ozzfest 2.0, has already scooped up a lot of big-name bands for the summer, including many who have played multiple past Ozzfests – namely Korn, Rob Zombie, Lamb of God, Atreyu, Shadows Fall and Hatebreed, the latter of whom I think have been on something like 90% of all Ozzfests ever.

Add to that other Ozzfest alum like Chimaira, In This Moment and Norma Jean, and some bands the kids today all seem to like, such as Winds of Plague and They Who Shall Not Be Named, and, well, that’s a whole bunch of potential mainstage and second stage draws right there.

Then there’s the mini-fests like Summer Slaughter. I can’t tell you which bands we already know are booked for some of these tours without betraying a lot of people’s confidence, but I can tell you that some great bands are now no longer available for Ozzfest.

And, oh yeah, Megadeth, Slayer, and Testament are now doing their American Carnage tour in the summer, so they’re out.

So who’s left? After the jump, I’m going to play my favorite game: it’s called “over-think about something incredibly unimportant.”

Before we proceed, it’s worth noting that I’m going to try and be semi-realistic when moving forward with some barely-educated guesses about who’ll be playing Ozzfest. If a band already has summer tour dates booked, I’m going to assume they’re not avail, although I acknowledge that they could cancel those dates in favor of playing for a bigger crowd. And I’m not even going to bother with bands like Pig Destroyer, Sigh, and Salome – bands that will play Ozzfest right around the time Joey Belladonna’s solo band plays four sold-out headlining shows at Giants Stadium. Also, obviously not all of these bands are gonna end up on the bill – these are just bands I think could end up there.

And so, without further bullshit…

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The line-up for the 2010 Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival (Jesus I hate typing all that shit) has been announced. See who’ll be playing one of the summer’s biggest metal tours after the jump, along with my snarky commentary, of course…

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So says Cosmo Lee at Invisible Oranges in a piece about the (admittedly pretty sucky) band Carach Angren. But I take serious issue with this declaration.

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I’ve really been digging some hardcore this year, thanks largely to 2009 releases from acts like Coalesce, Lewd Acts (review here), Rise And Fall, and White Shit (review here). I spend a good bit of free time surfing the web to check out bands to hype here on the blog, and with Sleeping Giant, I’ve stumbled on to another great one. Now, before any corpse-painted atheists get all testy with me: yes, they are a Christian band. Yet to be closed-minded about Sleeping Giant simply because of their proselytizing lyrical content would be to miss out on a promising talent on par with early Hatebreed.

The video above (which does a fine job with a limited budget) is for “The Army Of The Chosen One,” which comes off the band’s sophomore Facedown Records album Sons Of Thunder. Sleeping Giant are currently on the California Love tour with deathcore kings Winds Of Plague and Oceano. Remaining dates are below.
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If there was any doubt as to whether or not Winds of Plague are a pure marketing gimmick, such doubts should be laid to rest by the revolving cast of female keyboard players that have graced magazine covers the ranks of the band. Metal Insider reports that Wikipedia claims [see what I did there?] that the band has now had SIX keyboard players, the last three of them female, and that Alana Potocnik — formerly of The Breathing Process and Abigail Williams — has just replaced Lisa Marx, who herself replaced Kristen Randall only two months ago.

Apparently Marx couldn’t learn the parts in time for the band’s “California Love Tour,” which is surprising because, ya know, the ability to play the music should be THE FIRST consideration for ANY band. But having a pretty face on stage is way more important than that trivial little nuance, right?

Maybe some day she’ll show her boobs like her predecessor Kristen Randall. That page is STILL in the Top 5 most-visited pages on this site over a year later, you fucking hornballs.

-VN

…but apparently she’s going to be the new keyboardist in Winds of Plague, at least for their upcoming tour. A press release tells us that she used to be in Kittie and Day of Contempt, if that means anything to anyone.

Here’s what I’d like to know: do you think they ever even for a second considered getting a dude keyboard player? I’m not at all opposed to chicks in metal bands, but it’s not like Kristen Randall did backing vocals or whatever – literally any capable keyboard player should, theoretically, be able to fill Randall’s shoes. If a woman happens to be the best musician for the job, swell. But if you’re just swapping out one pretty face for another…

Get WOP tour dates here.

-AR

Yeah. That was pretty cool. (NSFW!)

In other news, a press release tells us that Randall has left Winds of Plague and is going to be on an episode of L.A. Ink. Whoop-de-do.

-VN

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: horror and metal go together like PB&J, like Jager and puking, like Kerry King and talkin’ smack. They are the most natural of pairings.

And so it is with great pleasure that we premiere this exclusive footage from The Thaw, the latest installment of Lionsgate’s Pictures’ “Ghost House Underground” series – a line of horror DVDs created in cooperation with writer/director Sam Raimi and producer Rob Tapert, the team behind the classic Evil Dead series and this summer’s Drag Me to Hell, which was easily one of the most fun movies of 2009.

The Thaw stars Val Kilmer stars as a renowned environmental advocate, Dr. David Kruipen. When Dr. Kruipen discovers the carcass of a woolly mammoth in a polar ice cap, he helms a team of four bright ecology students and leads them in a research mission at a remote Arctic station. When a pre-historic parasite shows up searching for a new warm-blooded host, the unsuspecting students are forced to choose between a quarantine that will result in their burial ground or a global epidemic.

The Thaw hits DVD on October 6. You can get more info on Ghost House Underground here. Bonus: the clip features music by Winds of Plague. (See, we told you metal and horror go together!) We hope you enjoy the footage…

[This exclusive has now ended.]

Somebody call Frankie and Annette!

I don’t really go to the beach much these days (’cause the sun is so not metal, dude), but if I did, I’d definitely want this. Why? Because a) I’m a dork and b) hopefully it would scare some people.

No word yet on whether or not Cannibal Corpse are going to issue Tomb of the Mutilated-themed swim trunks. But while we’re waiting, here’s some photos of girls in Winds of Plague panties. ‘Cause, y’know, why not?

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Behemoth vs. Winds of Plague; Poland vs. America; Corpsepaint vs. wigger hats; ugly men vs. hot chick; real metal vs. deathcore; substance vs. gimmick. Who won????

The answer, as well as more of this past week’s metal Soundscan chart positions and sales figures, after the jump.

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I listened to The Infection over the weekend for the first time in a little while. Guess what? Still kills. I can’t wait to see some of this shit played live.

Here’s a not-so-great quality bootleg of the band playing the first cut off the album, “The Venom Inside.” As Vince says, “This song just makes me happy.” What a killer way to open the show. Sounds like the crowd is almost as loud as Mark Hunter.

Friendly reminder: Chimaira are on tour right now with Hatebreed, Dying Fetus, Toxic Holocaust and Winds of Plague. Then they head to Europe in September with Unearth, Throwdown, and our friends in Daath. You can get all the tour dates here.

-AR

I listened to the new Skeletonwitch album, Breathing the Fire, last night, and guess what? It pwns. THAT’S RIGHT, BALLS666. I’M GOING TO SAY “PWN” AS MUCH AS I FUCKING LIKE. YOU THINK THAT’S WORTH KILLING ME OVER?!? COME AND GET ME, COCKSUCKER.

Here’s some other shit that went down this week:

• As the headline says, Daath’s Eyal Levi is MVP for the week.
• We enjoyed an exclusive mp3 from Weekend Nachos.
• We spoke to a surprisingly upbeat Nergal from Behemoth.
• Holy shit, Sammy O’Hagar almost liked the new Winds of Plague album. Almost.
• R.I.P. Les Paul.

I’m going to see District 9 now. Have a good weekend, everyone.

-AR

In an episode of The Cosby Show, perhaps one of the least metal sitcoms the ‘80s produced, Bill Cosby’s Heathcliff Huxtable tells his learning disabled son, Theo, that he would rather see him bring home a “hard C” instead of an “easy A” after he struggled with a particular assignment. What this potentially says about black America in the Reagan era – results don’t matter, so long as you’re working hard toward them – is possibly troubling, but when applied to California blackened metalcore band Winds of Plague, it’s surprisingly complementary. Though pulling out all the stops all the time fails more often than it succeeds, the band manage to make their latest album, The Great Stone War, a really, really fun and interesting mess. Their hodgepodge of riffs and motifs doesn’t reach an iwrestledabearonce-level of drek, but also doesn’t display the cohesiveness and songwriting prowess of, well, a solid band. But in terms of the latter, in a genre as flogged beyond death and into bone dust as metalcore, mixing it up by any means necessary has more potential to yield results than keeping your cookie dough inside a Poison the Well-shaped cutter. Complain about Winds of Plague’s melodramatic breakdown-o-rama as much as you like: at least they’re trying something different. Or, at least, different enough to stand out for the time being.

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Now the nausea’s
In my guts
And I’m wrestling with doubt
The kind you get when your heroes
Sell you out
And as I watch the drawbridge come down
There’s mass extinction
On my mind
Human cruelty stains my thoughts jet black
I’ve got this feeling
Like things have gone too far and now we can’t get back

Here’s more fun shit that happened in the world of metal this week:

• We debuted new videos from Cradle of Filth and Arsonists Get All the Girls.
• We got exclusive tour blogs from Bison B.C.’s Dan And and Woe of Tyrants’ Chris Catanzaro.
• We spoke to members of Winds of Plague, Decrepit Birth and Born of Osiris.
• I counted down 50 things I love about Pig Destroyer, and then added a 51st.
• Ulrich Vs. Mustaine Vs. Ian and Zakk Vs. Ozzy made us laugh with glee.
• Kerry King Vs. Killswitch Engage was pretty funny, too.
• Dallas Coyle answered more of your questions.

Vince gets back from vacation tonight right around the time Repulsion take the stage, and then tomorrow, hopefully, Craig’s List will lead us to some Tool tickets. See ya Monday!

-AR

Winds of Plague = really good people. Not only did they know their shit, they also had a sense of humor that wasn’t consistent with that of an inbred southern hick. Vocalist Johnny Plague can bench-press 5,000 lbs a day and keyboardist Kristen Randall may or may not be into making out with chicks – maybe I read too far into some things she said, or maybe I just automatically assume everyone is gay until proven straight, or maybe I just was hoping to make-out with Kristin because, let me tell you, she is pretty smokin’ in person. As a matter of fact, there isn’t one unattractive person in the band. That has nothing to do with their music, and everything to do with being horny. All the time.

ANYWAYS, Johnny’s idea (which may or may not have been plagiarized) for The Great Stone War is pretty nifty. Yeah, it’s yet ANOTHER concept album. But from what I have heard thus far, it’s a solid fucking record. If you weren’t a fan of Decimate The Weak, do yourself a favor and check out The Great Stone War.  If for some reason you’re not into it, at least you have a bunch of sweet artwork from the album sleeve to peep at from time to time.

For the most part, these guys (and gal) are going to be pretty busy the rest of 2009. Rumor has it they will be touring with Unearth in November, so make sure to keep an eye out for an official press release. Below is my slightly awkward interview.

P.S. – Enough with the WOP basketball jerseys. Please. That shit needs to stop. Seriously, this is just silly already.

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I’m not in the mood for fine prose right now, so let’s just do this thing.

Metal Nick at Metal Injection captured the below footage of Necrophagist playing a new song, “Dawn and Demise,” on the recently completed, MetalSucks co-sponsored Summer Slaughter tour. Because it was captured with one camera, no soundboard, etc., it’s not exactly up to the usual high standards of Metal Injection, but it should keep all the Necrophreaks satisfied for the time being.

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