so this is probably the coolest fucking thing I’ve seen in a while, someone sampled youtube videos of people just performing in front of a webcam and made some pretty awesome songs out of them – in video form. the first video i came across was actually the below track I’m New but after I went to Kutiman’s ThruYOU site I found Wait for Me to be just as cool. this is sort of in the same vein of Jack Conte, but I imagine this took a whole lot more time to compile.

Meant to put this up last month – Nine Inch Nails performs Wish with The Dillinger Escape Plan. Have to say I wasn’t that impressed with Puciato’s vocal on DEP’s cover of this but this performances is straight awesome.

Jason Statham, Danny Lohner and Maynard Keenan in Crank: High Voltage.

a man going by the name Major Douche informs us about the live incarnations of Puscifer in Vegas this February. the Major looks an aweful lot like that cop in some short film I saw a while back.

additionally, there is a new Puscifer track on the radio and at Puscifer dot com called The Mission with Danny Lohner and Milla Jovovich. This is an original track with Maynard and that chick from Resident Evil, sorta reminds me of Lovage (Mike Patton and Jennifer Charles). have to say MJK’s vocals are impressive on this track and the actress’ vocals aren’t too bad.

not only does puscifer have a remix of Lighten Up Francis (its good, you can hear it on puscifer.com) coming out on a soundtrack…

according to blabbermouth.net - maynard keenan is again working with billy howerdel on some recordings for A Perfect Circle (guess ashes divide didn’t pan out?), though they might just only release a few tracks online (their contract with virgin was up after emotive). there is also the possibility of one-off live shows.

tool is expected to begin writing sometime next year.

mjk did some work for a documentary called The Heart Is A Drum Machine. the Flaming Lips did the soundtrack, including a cover of elton john’s Rocket Man with vocals by maynard (!). this has got to be the best combination since gears of war’s lancer (gun/chainsaw).

and, Puscifer will be doing three shows in Vegas around valentine’s day. there was a promo video up for it, but now it’s private.

(source)

This is what happens when you let children believe that something like who wins American Idol actually matters. It’s even worse if their contestant of choice is close to their age and just as nerdy.

all of the good alternative acts from the 90s should just start a corporation of session musicians, only exclusive to themselves recording on each other’s records.

did you know Wes Borland is in Marilyn Manson now? yeah neither did i. happened a few months ago. I gave up on MM after Holy Wood, the album following that was even worse – but Eat Me Drink Me was a great record and gives some hope to Manson’s music after all. Twiggy rejoined earlier this year after stints in A Perfect Circle and Nine Inch Nails. Chris Vrenna (formerly NIN’s drummer) has replaced Pogo on keyboards.

the addition of Borland is a good one – he left Limp Bizkit (and in all fairness – while that crap band sucks, Borland’s guitar work was the highlight of their first two albums) , did some work with Danny Lohner (NIN again, lol) and had a few solo projects. then he went back to Limp Bizkit and promptly quit after recording an EP. hope he stays in Manson as that band hasn’t had a good creative guitarist since, well, Twiggy.

It’s happening - Axl Rose is finally releasing Chinese Democracy. I was 13 when the last Guns N’ Roses album came out and have followed this saga on and off, even when I’d moved on to better music.

Most people either stopped caring (including myself) or just forgot about them when 9 good quality tracks from the album leaked to the interwebs this summer. I still didn’t believe it would happen.

Believe it. Best Buy now lists a release date for the album (yes, we’ve seen these ‘release dates’ before) in November. Today, the single for the song Chinese Democracy was released to radio stations nationwide in the US and a certain soda company is gearing up for delivering on its free can of pop stunt.

Having heard the leaks, I can say that most of the songs are pretty cool and different but if you only had a passing interest in them (you liked Paradise City) or want the old band back (where’s Izzy?) you’re probably not going to be convinced. The only real gripe I have is overproduction of the tracks, but I suppose its to be expected for an album that was never supposed to come out and cost a crapload of money. My favorite is still Madagascar. Very reminiscent of some of the darker stuff on Use Your Illusion.

As of this writing, there has been no official statement made by the band or their management regarding the album’s release date. Probably just a reverse psychology approach to hype. GNR management have issued a confirmation. It’s real.

Here is the first single, though this is an earlier mix that leaked in the summer.

here we have a rap battle between two MCs, only translated into a proper debate by a couple of english teachers. gotta love the Che Guevara shirt – you can blame that one on Tom Morello and/or Zach De La Rocha.

my favorite part, at 2:11: In fact, I once had a romantic rendezvous with your biological mother in which fellatio was performed forthwith and without explanation. The encounter lasted several hours and many unspeakable acts were implemented. I paid her for her services and no subsequent contact, either verbally or physically, has been made.

in the end, they reach a peaceful resolution. you can see the original language version HERE.

apparently the original song was damn popular in the 90s. i wouldn’t know as a rock kid, but there’s something disturbing about a fan made video that has clips of my little pony set to a pretty nasty song by Ginuwine covered by a rock band. the singer uses an auto-tuner for a few lyrics.

oh, but the song is the shit. it’s by a reunited band from the 90s called Far (masquerading as Hot Little Pony). the song is called Pony. heavy and cool. check out the mp3 HERE.

a new video for an awesome song, Momma Sed by Puscifer. looks like footage from it was used for the sunglasses ad. from a silly album, this is probably one track that would do well on the radio. then again it probably couldn’t match the amount of time the Puscifer country song sat on the Billboard dance tracks chart.

there is also yet another Puscifer remix album out called D is for Dubby.

This happens to be mashup by Jack Conte of Radiohead’s Exit Music with Chopin. The Aphex Twin-like drumbeat with live drums is pure awesome.

According to MTV, the ashes of late Nirvana singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain are about to be smoked by German artist Natascha Stellmach as part of an art exhibit. In June, the ashes were said to have been stolen from Cobain's widow Courtney Love at her home in Los Angeles. Love said at the time: I can't believe anyone would take Kurt's ashes from me. I find it disgusting [and] right now I'm suicidal. Love is said to have kept the ashes in a pink bag shaped like a teddy bear.

Stellmach says that she plans to smoke Cobain's ashes and "set him free." When asked about how she acquired the ashes, her reply: That's confidential and kind of magic. They came to me. And I am setting him free. In a statement announcing her find, Berlin-based Stellmach has detailed her plans to smoke the ashes as part of the forthcoming Set Me Free exhibition at the city's Wagner + Partner gallery on October 11th.

My thoughts? Kurt Cobain is a legend among the likes of Hendrix and Morrison and its only fitting that something like this would happen (a la the graffiti on Jim Morrison's Paris gravesite). And considering how Nirvana fans have demonized Courtney through the years, I'm betting this will give them some sort of appealing closure that doesn't involve bear-shaped pink bags.  But wait. Fuck it. Nirvana fans (the hardcore ones, you know who you are) will never have the closure they want, short of Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear joining the Foo Fighters or something (and yes I know Smear was a member of the Foo Fighters briefly). Besides, how do we even know the ashes in the pink teddy bear bag are even Kurt's? I doubt if Courtney even knows anymore. They could actually be the remnants of careers that went down the tubes in the late 90s after she had sexual involvement with certain artists (Manson, Reznor, Corgan, to name a few) masquerading as Kurt's ashes.

And think about this. How exactly does one smoke ashes anyway? From my understanding, and yes my chemistry knowledge is limited, ashes are the byproduct of fire and matter, are they not?. And to smoke something, as you would a cigarette or something else, wouldn't it need to not have been previously burned to ashes? I don't know, maybe I'm missing something. Maybe the lady is just going to roll the ashes up with some weed and smoke Kurt Cobain that way. Though I still contend that his ashes will not be smoked, just mixed in with the ashes created by the weed & fire, and will end up in a hippie ash tray.

Now if someone were to acquire Cobain's soul and smoke that, maybe I'd be impressed. Whoops! That already happened...in 1994.

here are some awesome fan-made Tool videos. I think the Vicarious one may be a little too literal compared to Tool’s video, but still cool anyway. the last video is a piano/vocal cover.

THE POT

VICARIOUS

RIGHT IN TWO

I’d actually seen clips of Maynard Keenan in CAD before, but never saw this one. Some of the lyrics and the rhythm of his vocals would end up becoming Sober. Thank god he found the other guys in Tool a few years later.

I thought it would be only fair, before I potentially rip this album into shreds, that I share with you what Metallica means to me and why I’m even bothering with this after St. Anger was such a turd.

I came to the Metallica party late. I was 11 years old when the black album came out, so I make no claims to be OG but anyone my age who does is probably full of shit. I knew a guy who had an …And Justice For All t-shirt before that and wondered who the hell Metallica were. Admittedly, my music knowledge up to that point consisted of whatever was fed to me on the radio, the classic (late 60s and 70s) rock that my parents listened to and occasionally some cool stuff my older sister was listening to. The heaviest thing I’d been introduced to up to that point was Guns N’ Roses, and while I still love that band, they’ve always been hard rock. Metallica was my first real introduction to metal.

Metallica’s black album (self-titled, if you wanna get technical) was also the mainstream’s first real introduction to metal. Up to that point, the mainstream had been subjected to bullshit like Poison, Warrant, Motley Crue, etc. They took their heavy sound and made it more accessible, made smaller songs and wrote catchy hooks. And they blew up. They were Anti-Hairmetal.

And honestly, the only real good songs on that album were the ones released as singles. After Metallica’s explosion in the early 90s, a lot of people went back and listened to Metallica’s “classics” that came before and had a jerk party. In retrospect, while I still enjoy stuff like Sanitarium, One and Fade to Black - I don’t really think their first four albums are as great as everyone makes them out to be. So they did speed metal. So what? Does speed and intensity make something great? For me, Metallica’s best moments were focused intricate melodies, which is why I think the black album was such a milestone. Everyone else who came to the party late, but like to spout the same fanboy bullshit about “nothing compares to Master of Puppets”, are full of shit and you know it. You heard the black album first.

That being said, I’m not a Metallica fan. Between Nirvana and Metallica, those bands opened the door for things I would listen to later in my life and come to think of Metallica the way I do Black Sabbath. Sure, they opened some doors, they changed the face of rock music for their time, and they are legends. But do I found myself listening to Black Sabbath’s Paranoid album very much? No. Every metal act today owes a lot to Metallica, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin. And that’s the extent of it. Most of Metallica’s catalogue is not timeless.

Metallica would go on to reboot themselves in the mid-90s with Load and Reload, combining their heavy catchy metal with a bit of country and southern rock and a little bit of alternative sprinkled in. And while a lot of the OG phonies were made sick by Metallica’s new direction, quite a lot more people were introduced to Metallica and metal in general. And to be honest, I still like a few songs from those days and even a few from Garage Inc (Turn The Page – best Bob Seger cover ever). Metallica made a lot of money in the 90s.

But it would be a combination of age, punishing the very fans that helped bring them to the space they were, rehab and general big-headedness that would be their undoing at the beginning of the new century. First, Metallica sues Napster (which for those with no point of reference, Napster was at one time a service just like LimeWire or Kazaa) and cracks down on people SHARING their music. Then the rehab thing. While I don’t think someone being treated for an addiction is necessarily a bad thing, recording a record during or after said rehab was just not a good idea for James Hetfield.

St. Anger. I still have not listened to this album all the way through. In fact, the most I’ve heard of this album were the 3 or 4 songs that got (briefly) played on modern rock radio at the time. They intended to throw all of the shit they did with Load and Reload out and get back to speed metal, but do it the Metallica way and come up with something new. And they did. But the album was recorded poorly. James Hetfield’s vocals sound like karaoke (like they were recorded on a 4-track) and whatever the hell Lars did to his drumkit its an understatement to say that his drums were annoying trashcan-like percussion. The guitars and bass are muddy in the mix, and overall the record just sounds awful. Recordings in a garage sound good for an unknown band, but for a band of this caliber to make something that sounds like shit is an eyebrow-raiser.

So now they have a new album out called Death Magnetic. I’d been hearing a lot about it – that they were finally returning to speed metal, they were correcting the mistakes they made with St. Anger, etc. But I was highly skeptical. I love to make fun of these guys.

But as I said, it’s only fair that I give them one last chance as their music in the early 90s would invite me to a whole new world of music.

The good news first: It doesn’t suck. It doesn’t sound like St. Anger. They’ve returned to writing epic songs again (god I fucking hate the internet – “epic” needs to be banned NOW) and they’ve mostly returned to their speed metal roots. The musicianship is top-notch. Lars Ulrich stopped using the trashcan lid for his snare. It’s pure headbanging fury with that trademark Hetfield growl. Metallica fans will be VERY pleased with this album, and a lot of metal fans will be too. I think I almost may like the single, The Day That Never Comes. The album almost sounds like a cross between their 80s sound and their 90s sound.

The bad news: They’re trying to recapture the sound that they became famous for, and frankly, there are other bands doing this better. Dragonforce, for instance. I’ve never liked them, but I can say I respect the fact that they can accomplish quite a lot of wankery at a blistering pace that not many other bands can. Metallica just sounds like they are having a hard time keeping up with the pace. There are a lot of good musical ideas (with an equal amount of wanky solos), but it all kind of blends together with same-sounding riffs that has me questioning if they’ve ripped off some of their own riffs. I mean, Hetfield clearly rips off some of his old lyrics from time to time, but I’m not going to go back and listen to the first four albums and determine whether or not they’ve stolen some of their own riffage. On top of that, a lot of the songs sound the same musically and I had a hard time figuring out when a song ended and a new one began. And although not quite as bad as the vocal recording/production on St. Anger, Hetfield’s vocals still sound a bit karaoke-ish. Put some mild reverb on his voice for Christ’s sake!

Conclusion: Fanboys will love this, and they should – it’s what they’ve been asking and waiting for and it’s miles beyond St. Anger. Honestly though, this band needs to give it up, or do something completely different. And different doesn’t mean resurrecting a sound that they pioneered during a certain area. I mean, break new musical ground. Like they did with the black album and Load. Maybe they’re not even capable of it anymore? Maybe they shot their wad with Load (lol, had to)? All I’m saying is that for Metallica to be worthwhile to me and a lot of other people again, they either need to just quit and save some face, or do something revolutionary. Or better yet, just make some really GREAT music.

While it doesn’t suck, you will not find anything you haven’t heard before on Death Magnetic. I will not force myself to give something a chance. If it doesn’t grab me on the first few listens, it just wasn’t meant to be. Anyone else who reads this should consider the same mentality for all music as it will save you a lot of time. Simply “not sucking” is just not good enough anymore.

Some members of Glassjaw, Thursday and Converge (and possibly The Number Twelve Looks Like You) have a project coming out September 9th called United Nations. Only problem is, most of the people involved in the project are still under contract with their primary band’s label so they’re not openly identifying themselves. Hence the Reagan masks.

Then there’s the album cover. A clear copyright infringement (The Beatles), so they’re only selling 1,000 copies of the disc online. Their upcoming 7” Never Mind The Bombings, Here’s Your Six Figures also has an alteration to a Sex Pistols album cover.

Gotta love these guys. The album itself is great, hardcore and punk but pretty violent and sometimes melodic. They remind me a lot of Dillinger. The songs are pretty short, though the last song is longer and features a sax. There are a couple of vocalists and most of the guitar work is awesome - minimal, varied, complex and heavy.

Unfortunately, I can’t host a sample here or I would. You can check them out at unitedfuckingnations.com (or stream the album from their myspace page). Album of the year contender.

the puscifer (maynard keenan and danny lohner) take on Pet by A Perfect Circle.