Have you got another confession to make? Are you a fool who has never tried egg foo young? Well, it’s time to be my hero and try out this ultra delicious recipe for a Chinese omelette packed full of veggies and smothered in gravy that will put you end over end and you’ll definitely want these to stick around.
The rumors are true! Norwegian black n’ roll band Kvelertak have signed to Roadrunner Records. An interesting choice for both parties, but Kvelertak had a huge breakout in 2011 that no doubt afforded them the luxury of shopping around for the label that gave them the best offer. After critical success as well as other career highlights such as sharing the stage with Foo Fighters, it’s undoubtedly only going to get better.
The tracklist to their Kurt Ballou produced sophomore album Meir is as follows:
1. Åpenbaring
2. Spring Fra Livet
3. Trepan
4. Bruane Brenn
5. Evig Vandrar
6. Snilepisk
7. Månelyst
8. Nekrokosmos
9. Undertro
10. Tordenbrak
11. Kvelertak
The leading single from the album, ‘Bruane Brenn,‘ can be heard below:
Meir will be released March 26th. According to Roadrunner, we can look forward to Kvelertak North American tour dates that are to be announced soon. Get the mead ready, because it’s going to be a raging party.
- JR
Brendon Small is a remarkable fellow. Not only has he enjoyed the success of two animated series on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim (Home Movies and Metalocalypse), but the Berklee graduate is also a gifted musician and standup comic.
Small discusses Metal, why his next television endeavor won’t be animated, acting school, his heroes, and his hopes of returning to standup comedy.
So do you ever plan to revisit standup, and what was that like compared to acting, studying at Berklee, and then today, making cartoons?
It’s funny, ’cause my goals in standup are very specific and small from time to time because I enjoy doing it, I enjoy [it] when new stuff works. I’m kinda using it to develop some ideas right now, but there’s some other stuff that I’m working on. When I go up onstage, when you see me performing, it has nothing to do with the world of Metal, or anything. It’s more just related to my life and my family… it’s kind of almost more… about whatever’s going on in my life at any particular time. But it’s fun, I enjoy it. It’s harder than anything else you’ll do… I just kinda learned how to redo it, relearned the rules or whatever “not to do”. Stupid mistakes people [make] with the audience.
Playing Metal in front of 30,000 people is WAY easier than performing for a small room of 18 people.
Really? The pressure’s that different?
It’s just [that] comedy’s not guaranteed to work. It really is not. When you go see a comedy show, it doesn’t mean it’s gonna be funny. You’re trying something that may not work. When you go and see a Metal show, I can go and rehearse, I can sit with the drummer, I can write some songs, I can put ‘em on a CD, and… I can gauge whether people are enjoying themselves by sales on all that stuff. And then I can go and play them, and chances are good – unless I screw up – that what I give the audience is what they expect, and they’re excited and everything. But that is NOT the case with comedy. I could have a misstep from the very beginning and lose people who are actually fans, by maybe losing confidence in the moment… Even if you do really well at the top of your set, it doesn’t mean that the middle of your set is gonna go well. But you can also potentially get them back again.
Anyway… I’m still very fascinated by it, but you kind of get out of it what you put into it. You have some comics who just want to be standups for a living, then you have people that are gonna utilize it as a tool for writing.
Danko Jones01. Terrified
02. Get Up
03. Legs
04. Just A Beautiful Day
05. I Don’t Care
06. You Wear Me Down
07. Type Of Girl
08. Always Away
09. Conceited
10. Don’t Do This
11. The Masochist
12. I Believed In God
13. I Believed In God (Reprise)
In every metal-head’s life, there was a time when we listened to accessible music albeit classic rock on prime-time radio or the pop stars that our young minds were susceptible to. We all started with commercial and arena friendly jams and whether you’ve abandoned that kind of music completely, revisit it for nostalgia’s sake or you simply still enjoy it like a lot of us used to it still exists. While commercial music still has plenty of innovative and legendary bands such as Muse and The Foo Fighters respectively, there is a lot of rock and roll that just won’t stay dead. The AC/DC‘s, Metallica‘s, Aerosmith‘s and Kiss‘ of the world have long overstayed their welcome for the sake of monetization while not bringing anything new to the table. They take a lot of spotlight from bands who are the least bit interesting and fun. Enter Danko Jones, a Canadian hard rock three-piece that beckon a refreshing take on vanilla rock music.
Brendon Small, creator (and pretty much everything else) of Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse and Home Movies, is finally poised to release his side-project this year with Brendon Small’s GALAKTIKON. Described as a “High Stakes Intergalactic Extreme Rock album,” GALAKTIKON seemingly rips a page out of Devin Townsend‘s Ziltoid The Omniscient and will be an over-the-top rock opera of sorts with influences from modern black metal, Queen, Foo Fighters, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins and Weezer. Here’s what Brendon said in a statement:
“This album should be thought of as an audio comic book, an over acted chamber drama, a ridiculous premise that takes itself way too seriously all the way to the end,” states Brendon Small.
GALAKTIKON is pretty much Dethklok in a shiny melodic rock package, featuring legendary drummer Gene Hoglan and Dethklok live/studio bassist Bryan Beller, as well as retaining mixer/engineer Ulrich Wild. Obviously, this is quite the departure from Brendon’s work in Dethklok, but should be just as excellent given the roster’s quality!
Brendon Small’s GALAKTIKON is due out this April. We’ll follow up with more information as it becomes available! In the mean time, hit up the project on Facebook for up-to-date information!
- JR
We now interrupt your previously scheduled METAL for some mindless bullshit! Please bear with us.
It’s pretty hard to describe the amount of fucked up that goes into the process of picking a Grammy nominee, let alone a winner, but it’s clear that the group of people involved in those decisions are never all that concerned with which artists have put out the best releases. Normally I wouldn’t pay attention to things like this, but this year I was actually invested in quite a few “mainstream” releases; judge me all you want, but I love me some Lady Gaga and Kanye West.
With that said I can’t help but feel that the Grammys have missed the mark once again with their announced 2012 nominees. Maybe it shouldn’t matter to me, but it just feels wrong to leave an album like Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy out of the Best Album nomination slot. It was easily one of the most eclectic and widely acclaimed hip-hop albums of last year, and having him on the list just seems like it would pull the publicity and attention that these sort of Entertainment Galas thrive on. Now I get that Kanye has caused problems in the past, but depriving one of the few eligible and truly talented men (despite what you think of his personality and presence, he is definitely talented) out of an honor like this just seems to cheapen the award ceremony even more than it has been known for in the past.
I know Mr. West isn’t the only great artist from the mainstream that was left off of this list; bands like Bon Iver, The Antlers, and Florence and the Machine were also left off the list in place of truly mediocre and terrible acts like Bruno Mars, Adele, and Rihanna — a woman with a great voice but some truly awful music to accompany it. Sigh. My only hope is that Foo Fighters or Lady Gaga get the prize for Best Album, but I won’t be holding my breath.
Anyways, here’s the full list of 2012 Grammy nominees. Feel free to peruse the list and grimace at the choices. A few good Metal bands have been nominated for best Hard Rock/Metal act. So I guess you can get excited about that. /End Rant
Record Store Day, the bastion of the independent music retailer, already has a huge string to its bow – a notch for its bedpost, if you will – for their fifth year in 2012, in the form of a special split 7″ record proposed from Mastodon and Feist.
If this comes off I’m sure it’ll be great; despite some negative criticism of The Hunter, I still think Mastodon have more than got ‘it’.
Bassist and vocalist Troy Sanders let slip the news in this interview with MTV Canada:
With the support Record Store Day received from the likes of Deftones, Foo Fighters and Rush, I’m sure there’ll be a plethora of additional support for RSD 2012, which I believe is happening on April 21st.
- CG
So over the weekend I finally got around to checking out the Foo Fighters latest, Wasting Light. I’ve never been a huge fan, but I have nothing but respect for Dave Grohl and the boys for consistently delivering high quality rock records. And since Wasting Light has sold about a billion copies so far and has received nothing but high praise, I decided to give it a spin. Sure enough, it is a damn fine rock album. BUT-one thing I was really looking forward to that slowly drove me nuts while I was listening to it, is their brand new three guitar attack-specifically, the lack of it.
Despite reading an interview with the Foo Fighters in Guitar World a few months back stating that they have all these crazy, interwoven guitar lines throughout Wasting Light and Grohl saying something to the effect of “with three guitarists, you have to be really careful or everything turns into a big fucking mess…”, I found myself desperately searching each track for a part, ANY part, where I could even tell there were three different guitars playing. Much less playing three separate parts….
Which brings me to my point, and I think all bands with three guitarists (Periphery, Whitechapel, Chelsea Grin, Iron Maiden) suffer from this. I’ll call it “trying so hard to not overplay that everybody underplays” syndrome. Or to reference Grohl’s statement above, they try so hard not to make a mess with their three guitar attack, that they end up sounding like they don’t have three guitars at all.
Mastodon let their fans know that they’ve recently stepped into the studio to write and record their new album by uploading a series of photos in the album ‘New Album Recording April 2011′. The above photo of the legendary Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana, Probot, Tenacious D, Them Crooked Vultures, etc if you somehow forgot his legacy) was tucked neatly at the end, leading rock fans everywhere to salivate in awe at the possibility of Dave contributing to the new album. Dave is certainly fit for Mastodon’s sound, just as Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss, Them Crooked Vultures, etc) fit in perfectly in “Colony of Birchmen” from their album Blood Mountain. Hopefully this ends up being more than friendly goofing off and we see a recorded collab between Dave and Mastodon; it’s just undeniably sweet and should be excellent!
Expect to hear more about this soon enough. We’ll have the record later this year!
- JR
01. Cry For Help
02. High on Hate
03. Nightfall
04. No Funeral
05. Then Fires
06. Addicts
07. The End Is Eternal
08. Blood Trance Fusion
09. Ruined Life Continuum
10. Every Last Drop
I’ve never really been into real black metal, but the genre of post-black metal intrigues me. Beautiful ambient and shoegaze influence juxtaposed against the chaos of black metal made something different to me, and I enjoyed it. While I don’t see myself actively listening to and enjoying a lot of black metal outside of the occasional Emperor song, Nachtmystium are a strong middle point in the post-black/black metal spectrum of things, utilizing psychedelic influences and an experimental mindset. Nachtmystium are not your run of the mill black metal band, and Addicts will more that likely divide a lot of people in the black metal scene, which has its obsessions with remaining true to the genre.
For example, on the song “Nightfall,” Nachtmystium takes on a very catchy blackened punk sound with clean backing vocals and a classic rock bluesy solo, “No Funeral” takes a synth line and a dance beat and runs with it, and as Scott from Hook In Mouth put it, “Addicts” kind of sounds like a Foo Fighters song. This album confidently melds classic 70′s rock and roll, black metal, and hints of industrial to create something that’s actually kind of catchy. Some will say that black metal isn’t supposed to be catchy, but Nachtmystium makes it work well.
It’s obvious that this album would be different than Assassins, and despite the Part II suffix, this is an entirely different album and a logical progression, perhaps losing a tiny bit of their black metal sound along the way. This is a great follow-up to Assassins, and while it may find its place more comfortably in the ears of hipsters and casual listeners than in the ears of the so-called true and cult, this album stands up to be pretty great.
- JR
