May 31
I just got back from watching Drag Me To Hell and it scared me shitless. Go out and watch it.
But not before you listen to Obituary’s new song called “List of Dead” over on their myspace page. It’s off of their new album Darkest Day, which comes out June 30th on Candlelight Records. It’s heavy and stuff.
PS: Here’s an e-card, which features samples of two more tracks from the album, “Blood to Give” and “Payback”.
- JR
May 30
Finally. I was just talking about this yesterday.
Seven seas, etc. I haven’t heard it yet, but I’m getting to it. Look out for a review at some point.
Album drops Tuesday on Century Media.
Oh hey. I can finally post their new video for “You Aint No Family.” Thanks YouTube.
- JR
May 29
So I was gonna post iwrestledabearonce’s new video for “You Aint No Family”, but it’s only up at myspace video and for some reason Wordpress doesn’t want to post videos from there.
So anyway, “You Aint No Family” is the new IWABO single. As expected, it has elements of grind, electro, and jazz. I enjoyed the jazzy break in the middle of the song as well as the ho-down type of break towards the end. I’m still on the fence about these guys.
I can only link the video. Stupid wordpress. HAET.
Mike the drummer is more adorable than the chick.
It’s All Happening comes out in THREE DAYS. Why hasn’t it leaked yet? Century Media must be on the ball.
- JR
May 29
The new Killswitch Engage single “Reckoning” can be downloaded for free at this location.
It’s a good song, although it sounds along the same lines as before. The track comes off the band’s self-titled fourth album, which is scheduled for release on June 30.
Get another taste of the new album below with a video of KsE performing the song “Light in a Darkened World”
- JR
May 29
Shit yeah. Twelve Iron Maiden tracks will be hitting Rock Band June 9th, including some live tracks from the documentary Flight 666.
Aces High (live)
2 Minutes to Midnight
The Trooper
Wasted Years
The Number of the Beast
Run to the Hills
Can I Play With Madness?
The Clairvoyant
Powerslave
Fear of the Dark (live)
Hallowed Be Thy Name (live)
Iron Maiden (live)
Sweet list. I was hoping for some Wrathchild, but this will do just fine. This means I can get dominated by Run To The Hills on drums again. Oh boy!
- JR
May 28
Slow news day and had to attend a graduation. What’s more brutal and heavy than a new Job For A Cowboy song? The futures of some of those kids.
So yeah. JFAC’s new song “Unfurling A Darkened Gospel” is available on their myspace. Upon first listen, it sounds a bit more technical that what they’ve been doing previously. That’s good.
So yeah. It’s a definite step up. The album Ruination drops July 7th on Metal Blade.
-JR
May 28
Instrumental math-rockers Dysrhythmia uploaded a new track over on myspace. The track is called “Festival of Popular Delusions”, which is off of their upcoming album Psychic Maps, due out July 7th on Relapse Records.
It’s one of their more “straight forward and unrelenting-type tracks” off of the album.
It sounds pretty awesome. Put it in your ear hole.
-JR
May 27
The Heartland are one of those progressive whatevercore bands that like to do their own thing. They don’t care about the pressure to fit into a mold and conform to one genre, which is nice to see. I know I use this phrase too often, but this album goes all over the place. There are so many different influences going on in this album. At times, it sounds like Converge is opening at a Jimmy Eat World show. How about Between The Buried and Me playing with Explosions in the Sky? Hell yeah. This sounds like my kind of record. Speaking of BTBAM, The Heartland takes on a similar type of progressive song structure throughout the album, giving us chaos and extreme music with shifting time signatures and takes a break to be something much more beautiful, atmospheric, and catchy.
The vocals on Frontier range, but not too heavily. You have a Converge carbon-copy of a sort of mid to high-register that I’m not particularly that big of a fan of and then you have an emo/indie clean vocal style that accompanies the music at the time well without being too whiny.
The guitar work is excellent. The guitarist has chops, playing some shredding solos and chugging and grinding along in some complex time signatures and rhythms. Sometimes the band takes a step back and does a jazz or blues solo. Sometimes we get some ambient and atmospheric guitar lines with delay effects that lull us into a false sense of security.
This album is pretty climactic, but somehow it just seems too short for a progressive record. At the end I feel that there’s just more to be desired. I think when hearing this album, we’re hearing a band that’s just now getting comfortable with who they are and experiencing a growth in their sound. This album is pretty solid. I’ll be looking forward to hearing more from this band as they plant their feet and get more comfortable and progress as they move on in their careers.
Check out The Heartland at myspace and listen to one of the lighter jams on the album below.
[audio http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/2571427_einna/3UrsaMajor.mp3]
3.5/5- JR
May 27
I’m sure this is old news to some of you, but Genghis Tron just posted a bulletin on myspace about it.
hey ya’ll,
i thought it was a secret but converge made a post about it so i can tell you all about it too!
we were lucky enough to have converge ask us to collab with them on a song for their new album. needless to say, its been an awesome experience and we can’t wait for you all to hear the song. converge is one of our favorite bands and their new album is sure to be devastating.
other than this, we will continue to lay low for a while.. whenever our new album DOES come out, it will surely be a pleasure for you to listen to. so don’t get stoked quite yet, but maybe start thinking about beginning to get stoked.
peace!!
GT
This will be nothing short of amazing. Converge have also been going on all about it over on their twitter page.
From their website:
If you’ve been paying attention to our Twitter feed, you may have noticed that we have had a few guests contributing to our upcoming album. Specifically, all of Genghis Tron have been working with us on one song in particular.
I’ll be looking forward to this.
-JR
May 27
Nothing gets my pants tighter than hearing about news regarding a new Dillinger release. The Dillinger Escape Plan has signed a deal with Season Of Mist Records, joining it’s roster of bands including Cynic, Gorguts, and Mayhem. The upcoming album will be released in early 2010 in collaboration with the band’s brand new label, Phonogetic Records, which is to be announced.
When describing the sound the new Dillinger album to Rock Sound Magazine, guitarist and mastermind Ben Weinman had this to say:
“The new songs sound dark and evil,” he stated. “Very early ’90s thrash-influenced.
“Lately I have been realizing the purpose of why I started Dillinger all those years ago. It was to make people truly uncomfortable and to make them not feel accepting of what is happening in their surroundings. When I was growing up, I discovered metal and it interested me, I liked that it was dark and talked about the fact that the world is not all puppy dogs and ice cream cones. But then it just got ridiculous, humourous. I look at black metal bands and they are supposed to be so evil. But it’s not real. It’s about fiction. About goblins and the gates of hell; pretty much a bad horror movie.
“The music we are writing is influenced by the feelings I get when I hear and see the real evils of this world. Horrible things that make me really question if there is a God or not. This shit is not comfortable, the world is not comfortable, babies are getting raped in your town for God’s sake. Young girls are being sold as sex slaves, but most people sitting at their computers downloading music don’t want to know. They want to sit on a message board or play fantasy football while their mommy makes them a sandwich.”
The thought of a thrashed up version of Dillinger is pretty badass, methinks. I’m a little bummed that the album won’t be out till 2010, but it will be worth the wait. What a hell of a way to kick off a new decade.
Late last night, Ben Weinman signed onto the official DEP message board and answered questions. Check out some of the more important questions below, after the jump.
May 27
Behemoth knows what happens when whores aren't put in their place.
01. Daimonos
02. Shemaforash
03. Ov Fire And The Void
04. Transmigrating Beyond Realms Ov Amenti
05. He Who Breeds Pestilence
06. The Seed Ov I
07. Alas, Lord Is Upon Me
08. Defiling Morality Ov Black God
09. Lucifer
This slab of blackened death will hit stores August 7th in Europe On Nuclear Blast and August 11 here in the States on Metal Blade.
- JR
May 26
Seriously. They had the single best metal record that came out last year and they put on one hell of a performance. There’s some poor band out there that has nothing because these guys have it all.
This video is over a year old, but it’s still amazing. And hilarious.
- JR
May 26
Two HevyDevy news posts in a row. It’s a good day.
Today while reading his twitter account, I saw that Dev released three bonus tracks from the Ki sessions on Bittorrent which features a b-side, a 15+ minute jam session, and Dev testing out his equipment. He actually did this a few weeks ago, but I couldn’t find any other place that had it available. Here’s what Dev had to say:
“Hey folks! Dev here…here’s three tracks for ya. I think they’re cool, but theyre just ‘bonus’ stuff for Ki…take em, love em, hate em, burn a disk and enjoy…(or not)
Track 1) SYNCHRONICITY FREAKS: This is the first song I wrote for Ki, didn’t end up quite right though…I like it and it’s cool to hear (I think) It’s unmastered.
Track 2) KI JAM: This is Me, Jean and Duris kind of jamming in between takes while we were recording the album…yup. It’s unmastered too.
Track 3) TESTING SOME FENDER TOYS: This was a sunny afternoon and I’m just messing around with clean sounds and different pickups. It was a Fender 57 Twin reissue with some Mullards, My EJ strat, and a Keeley compressor. Echos were after the fact. Aaaand, unmastered. Get yer wank on.
Theres lots more stuff I’ll put up here in the next month or so. Music is life, thanks for letting me continue to do it!
Devin.”
How nice of him! I downloaded the .wavs from the torrent and converted them to mp3 for all of you who want them. Spread the word and support The Devin Townsend Project!
[audio http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/2568749_8jhu3/01SynchronicityFreaks.mp3]
[audio http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/2568822_yj00y/02OodlesofNoodles_KiJam_.mp3]
[audio http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/2568838_dpffe/03TestingFenderGear.mp3]
These are definitely interesting tracks. Make sure you pick up Ki when it comes out June 19th in the USA. It’s actually worth paying money for.
- JR
May 26
I shit you not. The next album to be released under The Devin Townsend Project, “Addicted”, is going to be akin to Nickelback, only “not about the penis.” 
“Sex sells and I understand that but I started getting a real dark energy off of the record. It’s like “we’re making money and this is how you make money”, so this next record, I want to make it sound like the Nickelback record and I want to have chorus’s like the Nickelback record, but I want the lyrics to be about infinity and quantum mechanics.”
“The whole point of this is to say “sure, that sells but is it the aesthetics that sell or is it you singing about your penis because if it’s you singing about your penis, then I’m going to know right away”. If it’s about the penis then I’m not going to sell shit, but if it’s about the sound then maybe I’ll sell tons of it!”
Before, Devin said in an interview that he tried to make a pop record with these huge and melodic choruses, but it was out of his comfort zone as a forty year old with bad teeth and no hair. 
“I wanted to write a pop record and I wrote a pop chorus and then all of the sudden I tried to write another and I was like, “I don’t want to write this shit,” you know what I mean? It’s like no one’s going to buy it anyway. I mean, my reality scheme as a musician is that I’m a 40-year-old dude with bad teeth and no hair, right? I’m not going to be a pop star any time soon, so I just have to be honest with what I do — what is it that I want to do? Do you really want to write shitty pop music and try to sell it to a bunch of people that you don’t like? Or do you want to just do what comes naturally? And do I like choruses? Hell, yeah! I like choruses and I like pop melodies, so to speak, but the more I tried doing it, the more I realized that how I really wanted to frame all of those choruses was crushing.”
Wow. The way I see it, it’s going to end up like a really heavy Nickelback album? I don’t know how this will go down. I’m conflicted here, as being generally anti-Nickelback (although I admit they are catchy). If I like this Devin Townsend album, I’ll have no real excuse. I’ll just tell people what Devin told us: “Well, these songs aren’t about Chad Kroeger’s penis.”
Update: I just found out that Devin has also said that “Some parts of it sound like Meshuggah, some parts of it sound like Boney M,” whoever that is. Addicted will also include a new version of the song “Hyperdrive” from his album Ziltoid the Omniscient with lead vocals by Anneke van Giersbergen, a female dutch singer. I <3 me some Hyperdrive. This sounds like it’ll be a fun record after all.
- JR
May 26
Progressive and epically badass metalcore band Protest the Hero are coming out with their first live CD/DVD, entitled “Gallop Meets The Earth”.
The setlist to the performance:
01. Sequoia Throne
02. No Stars Over Bethlehem
03. Bloodmeat
04. The Dissentience
05. Palms Read
06. Blindfolds Aside
07. Goddess Bound
08. Goddess Gagged
09. Spoils
10. Nautical
11. Limb from Limb
The footage was shot at the Sound Academy in Toronto last December and includes several bonus features, including every music video and a documentary of the tour featuring antics from the PTH crew. Fortress was one of my top albums of last year, so I’ll be giving this a look. “Gallop Meets The Earth” comes out August 11th on Underground Operations/Universal in Canada and Vagrant Records in USA.
-JR
