The new album from highly recognized black metal band Darkthrone is all up on the tubes. If you’re not familiar with Darkthrone, their early material is 2nd wave bm which was at the forefront of the movement. Their more recent work, however, is a throw back to 1st wave with the huge punk and thrash influences. Peep this awesome stuff.

-MW

We aren’t dead. We’ve just been super busy with things outside of the metal world. I’ve got a hell of a lot of stuff going on at school I need to take care of before I can slack off and post here more often. We’ve got some interviews coming up that I’m excited for, so stick around.

But say, we’re still looking for writers to fill the void! Apply by following the directions on the right!

-JR

If you readers haven’t been over to the awesome blog that is my home, The Number of the Blog (which has a new, official domain) then you probably don’t know why I haven’t been doing my series on here, “6*10^2+6*10^1+7*10^0 with ECDEU”, but I have been wrecked with school work lately and so I haven’t done any posting in probably about three to four weeks. I have built a time machine and now can continue this series and I am really stoked about it. I already have a new idea for the next few posts of this so this thing is back on; get ready.

-ECDEU

Re-Traced, the upcoming Cynic EP, includes 4 reinterpretations of songs from Traced In Air as well as one new song that, according to frontman Paul Masvidal,  “[references] other styles and influences we have in a different context, which is a lot of ambient, shoegaze, and different types of maybe more subtle forms of jazz, drum and bass, and electronic music.”

It’s sounding really awesome so far. I think I see and hear them playing wine glasses in “Integral”. That’s a bit different, and awesome. I can’t wait to hear the rest of the music.

Apparently the tracklist works out to be:

1. Space
2. Evolutionary
3. King
4. Integral
5. Wheels Within Wheels

ReTraced comes out May 17th! Mark your calenders.

- JR

During a performance of “Just A Man” (how fitting) at Faith No More’s appearance at the Soundwave Festival, Mike Patton jumped down off stage and commandeered a camera. After turning it on the audience, he turned it on himself.

Wowie. Mike’s been known to do crazy shit on stage, so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

After the jump, the picture. It’s obviously NSFW, so beware.

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Oh man, this is gonna be awesome. Looks like some expensive high def cameras were used for this.

“Farewell, Mona Lisa” is the first single off of The Dillinger Escape Plan’s highly anticipated new album, Option Paralysis. The full video will premiere online at www.justin.tv/thedillingerescapeplan at 4pm EST on March 1st.

According to Dillinger’s Facebook page:

“We will also be video chatting and Jamming and running around in our pajamas for you so go sign up to Justin.tv and get ready to ask us a lot of stupid questions.”

Sounds fun! Can’t wait. Option Paralysis is out March 23rd on Season of Mist/Party Smasher Inc.

- JR

Hello. My name is Jimmy Rowe. I’m the owner and proprietor of HeavyBlogIsHeavy.com. I needed help running the site, so I enlisted my brother-in-heavy Mitch to be a co-admin. Since the birth of Heavy Blog Is Heavy in the summer of 2009, we have enlisted two more contributors and are always accepting submissions from any of you who wish to contribute. All it takes is an email with a sample writing. If it’s good, we’ll let you post here. If it isn’t, we’ll probably just ignore you. If you’re confident that you don’t suck as a writer, shoot an email at heavyblognews(at)gmail(dot)com.

Anyway, I write to you today to explain a few things, as it may not be overtly obvious to some.

1. We are not professional writers. Well, friend and contributor Chris (Disinformasiya) is on his way to become a professional writer, but we don’t get paid for any writing. Sure, we run ads, but that’s out of my hope that it’ll help pay some of the cost of web hosting. But other than that, we’re just some guys who love music and just want a venue to talk about it.
2. We have our biases. Of course we’re biased. We’re bloggers. This goes in with us not being professional. We’re just a few opinionated dudes who happen to have a redundant domain name. The whole point of this blog is to give some opinions on things going on in metal and other heavy music, and if I’m not mistaken, that’s pretty much the definition of being biased.
3. One writer’s opinion doesn’t necessarily reflect the  opinions of the rest of the writers. The point of having multiple writers is having a little diversity. If we all had the exact same taste, the site would be boring as shit. Mitch has a tendency to listen to heavier death metal, Chris listens to hardcore and post rock, and I fit somewhere in between. Tyler hasn’t posted enough for me to tell yet, but I digress. The point is, we like different music. There’s some overlap, but we have different opinions. Don’t get us confused and lump us up together needlessly.

So that takes care of that. If you thought all this was obvious, I’m sorry. But certain events (which I like to call “ppgate”) have made it apparent that it might not be so obvious to some. That’s all I’ve got to say about that.

I’ve got a lab report due soonish, so you’ll be seeing a bit less of me for a little bit. Try not to burn the place down, okay?

Yours Truly,

- JR

I’ve been listening to a lot of Protest the Hero lately. The band doesn’t sacrifice songwriting for technicality and find a great middle ground. They certainly stand out in the crowd of metalcore that they’re lumped in with.

When listening to their full length debut Kezia, I remembered how great the song “Turn Soonest To The Sea” is.

The sheer melodic beauty from 3:45 to the end makes for a song that I can’t resist listening to on repeat. This may be the greatest singalong part in a metal song that I’ve ever heard. Truly epic, and very memorable

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Here’s a fairly entertaining behind the scenes video of iwrestledabearonce’s “Danger In The Manger”. The video was right, how the production team managed to turn that pile of shit into a video that looked that cool is pretty awesome. I hope they keep the puppy in the video. They’d better, dammit.

So I’ve got an idea. This is Mildred, the iwabo puppy. If you click the image, you can get a full size screenshot of the HD video. It isn’t the best quality, but it’s from YouTube, so whatever. Open up Photoshop and replace the green screen with whatever you want. This should be fun. Who knows?

- JR

Now you can own, in my opinion, the greatest album to come out last year in colored vinyl format. Oh boy!

The clear pink double vinyl of Between The Buried and Me’s The Great Misdirect is a Victory Records exclusive limited to 200 copies, so if you’re a fan of the band, that’s the one you need to get, and fast. I ordered mine last night. So there’s AT LEAST 199 left, but I can’t be the only one who nabbed one, so get one if they’re still there. They’re the same price as the clear orange double vinyl (around $20), but the orange isn’t as limited, so by extension it isn’t as cool. But it fits the artwork of the album better.

The album is currently on pre-order. They start shipping March 16th.

In similar news, Victory Records is also releasing the newest Manure Emmure and Darkest Hour albums on vinyl. You can find them here, due out on the same day.

- JR

And I wouldn’t have him any other way.

- JR

GUNS!
RAZORS!
KNIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVES!

You can download the new Deftones song “Rocket Skates” for free at gunsrazorsknives.com. “Rocket Skates” is off of their upcoming album Diamond Eyes, due out May 18th.

For those who want to sample before you download, there’s an official promo video featuring the lyrics above. What a great idea. More bands should do things like that for promotional use. There was some measurable amount of work put into the design of the promotion and design. The song ain’t half bad either.

- JR

The PRP posted fan-filmed footage of “Unbreakable”, a new song off of their highly anticipated (at least to me) upcoming album [id]. Quality, as you could imagine, is pretty crappy. Vocals are practically indecipherable and the audio is mushy, but it’s enough to get a vague idea of what’s expected. I can hear the melody in the work and I like the main riff a lot. I love those dissonant-yet-strangely melodic high EHN-EHN-EHN-EHN chords (if anyone out there knows if there’s a technical term for that sound/chord, let me know so I can stop sounding like an idiot).

[id] comes out April 6th on Sumerian Records. Here’s another song from the same show off of [id], “Namaste”.

- JR

If you read this site and don’t know Norway’s SHINING yet, then shame on you for being so dense. I gave Blackjazz a 4.5/5 and touted it as the 2nd great album to come out so far (after Ihsahn’s After, which coincidentally features SHINING frontman Jorgen Munkeby playing sax).

The video features live footage from concerts in Trondheim and Stavanger, Norway last month. The video was produced by a small Norwegian video production company called MONITORmedia.

Visit SHINING on MySpace, because they are awesome as shit.

- JR

This can’t be a coincidence. It’s like dumping your girlfriend, but then getting jealous when she starts dating someone more attractive and popular than you are, so you start hitting the gym and dressing like him. Come on, man. That’s not good looking out.

If you haven’t heard of The Empire Shall Fall, they are a metalcore band fronted by Jesse Leach. And well, that’s pretty much it. They’ve got a slight progressive tendency with the song structure. They certainly don’t follow the formula that KsE follows of Verse-chorus-verse, etc. No new ground being broken here though, but the music is pretty okay.

And while I’m on the subject, the Alive or Just Breathing-era KsE fans came out of the woodwork recently when current vocalist Howard Jones has been absent from tour, throwing around wild speculations and hopes of Jesse’s return to KsE, and it’s annoying as shit. Am I the only one that thinks Jesse is an overrated vocalist? He’s okay, but I don’t see why everyone’s swinging from his pubes. His screams come across as weak at times and his singing is spotty, but that’s just me I guess.

God damn. He left nearly eight years ago and people still aren’t over it. If you want to listen to Jesse Leach, listen to The Empire Shall Fall. It’s technically better than new KSE anyway.

- JR