We feel like we don't give Depth enough spotlight on Metality. But that will most definitely be changing as they truly deserve a lot more attention. Every blogger writing about Middle Eastern metal needs to post about them.

They're one of the heaviest beasts to come out of the Kuwaiti metal scene. The band's most recent EP "Memento Mori" (produced by Sajid "Sarj" Masood at Sarj's Studio) is not a release to be missed. If you call yourself a true supporter of middle eastern metal (with balls!) and somehow have yet to listen to the EP then you're better off with your collection of Lady Gaga, Jad Choueiri and Bieber CDs.

The band is currently working on new material, that's already sounding stampede-heavy! And we'll definitely be posting about it all over our networks once it's out!

Here's a little taste of Depth to give you an idea of the amount of ass kicking they bring to the table.

Listen to the entire EP by visiting Depth on Youtube
Or click here to download the band's entire discography

I haven't heard much for AMARANTHE before. I've heard claims that they might be the next big thing in female fronted metal bands. But haven't heard much besides promo clips.

My first actual encounter with the band was when the funny guys in XERATH posted about AMARANTHE's video for the song 'Hunger' with the caption "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS????" Which instantly cracked me up (not at AMARANTHE, but at XERATH's reaction).

So I decided to give the song a chance. That didn't turn out so bad. It's a pop metal song, with good cop/bad cop vocals; catchy for the most part. But I just can't get over the Universal bumper used at the beginning of the video.

I enjoy my share of melodic death metal with pop influences (SCAR SYMMETRY and ENGEL to name a few) and AMARANTHE are basically following the same formula with little tweaks here and there, I can see the band touring with acts like Dead By April and they would probably pack the place. The band gets a plus 1 in my book nonetheless for having Olof Mörck (Nightrage) among it's ranks as lead shred meister.

Stream "Hunger" below and then tell us what's your take on pop metal?

AMARANTHE's new self titled studio album is out now via Spinefarm Records.

And make sure to also like XERATH on Facebook to follow their hilarious status updates!

Last night, a friend sent a link to this hilarious clip of Hitler reacting to the new MORBID ANGEL. Unfortunately by the time I prepared a post about said clip, it was already set to "private viewing" on Youtube. But luckily someone else uploaded it and it's now available for public streaming once again.

Even though the new MORBID ANGEL record is not officially out (official release date is June 7th via Season of Mist), you might have probably read or heard about the huge backlash the band's been receiving for the drastic change in their overall sound. Band members and their label are trying to defend the album; saying it's "genre defying," and that fans should listen to it with an open mind.

Returning front man David Vincent told Metal Hammer UK:

"how fucked off are you, first of all?”

“It would be very easy for us to go, ‘Hmmm, let’s take the greatest hits of Morbid Angel and make them a bit better and change a few of the little things and do very well,’ he continued. “Would it be pure artistically? Not at all, and it would cheat our fans out of the very essence of what Morbid Angel has always been. For people who have an open mind, this is going to be their favourite Morbid Angel album ever.”

While Season of Mist asked fellow death metal heavyweights to give their 2 cents on the record.

And then we have the clip below, that was made by a fan. Enjoy.

A few months ago, CHIMAIRA's camp was going through a bit of a change with long time members Jim LaMarca, Chris Spicuzza, and Andols Herrick leaving the fold.

The new line-up recently performed live on May 25th at The Machine Shop in Flint, Michigan, and they seem to gel together amazingly live! Wait till you hear the line-up, you're going to have an eternal jaw-dropping reaction!

Mark Hunter - Vocals
Rob Arnold - Guitar
Matt DeVries - Guitar
Emil Werstler (DAATH) - Bass
Sean Zatorsky (DAATH) - Keyboards/Samples
Austin D'Amond (BLEED THE SKY, THE ELITE) – Drums

Watch fan-filmed clips of the band performing live, below:

Short-haired Emil Werstler on bass is just as god damn beastly, as long-haired Emil Werstler on lead guitar!

[Source: Blabbermouth]

This isn't really news. But it's still interesting to point out.

I was watching a re-run of a recent SNL episode (hosted by Jim Carrey), where they featured a short piece about a research concerning metalheads. The news piece was about how "people attending heavy metal concerts can give themselves brain damage if they move their heads more than 75 degrees while keeping beat with the music"

Seth Meyers then went on to jokingly state:

"Cuz if there are two things metal heads are good at, it’s geometry and caring about what happens to their brains."

I remember reading about a study made by the British Medical Journal a couple of years back, that got me cracking up a bit. And it seems to be the same research being talked about in the clip below. The study suggests that headbanging could result in serious injuries. And offered a few ways of reducing the chances of any happening. Like:

"To headbang to slower songs, particularly to adult-oriented rock"
[Ed note: because when I think headbanging and circle pits, the first band to go to is The Fray.]

"To only headbang to every other beat"
[Ed note: don't be silly.]

"And to wear protective equipment"
[Ed note: now this one is just asking you to get your ass kicked.]

Saturday Night Live have certainly featured more heavy metal related sketches recently. Such as Betty White's death metal sketch on Mother's Day.

Kuwait's up and coming veterans of modern death metal, Benevolent, have managed to create a fresh wrap of modern brutality on their latest effort. Back in November the band released their debut EP "Divided" to overwhelmingly positive reception. The EP has already been featured on a number of popular blogs, such as: Metalsucks, and Hook in Mouth.

I've been personally a supporter of Benevolent since their early days of being an instrumental band. And they have certainly come a long way since releasing the mellow instrumental "Solace."

The album opens with the crushing! "Clairvoyant Transmission," a song that will impress any modern melodic death metal fan.

Hadi has certainly crafted amazingly technical, yet very accessible and catchy riffs all around the EP. His blues inspired leads, will not cease to amaze the listener and will only keep pushing forth till Fadi takes over the song with words of monstrosity. Fadi's vocals keep improving, and if he pushes harder, he will eventually deliver a monstrous sound for future Benevolent releases.

The Tyrant marks almost 10 minutes, and would certainly satisfy progressive death metal fans; the Mikael Akerfeldt troopers will love this track! The riff leading up to the song's main solo is beyond a haunting sensation. It gives an evil spine wrenching rush, that would make you want to devour an entire herd. Simply, bone chilling!

Haunting Shores was our first taste of Divided (technically The Tyrant is, but the song got a face-lift since it's first release as a single back in 09). The song shows off Benevolent's amazing vocal range, shared between Hadi and Fadi. Where Hadi handles the clean vocals on the chorus, which gives the song a melodic metalcore vibe. While the song's main verse carries out the polyrhythmic magic of Djent godfathers Meshuggah. With a neoclassically driven solo; Benevolent have produced a slab of diverse music, beating all senses into heavy metal oblivion.

The Quantum Paradox clocks over 10 minutes, and starts off with an acoustic passage, that gives way to anvil pounding drums; all adding up to create an intense opening for Fadi to tangle in lyrics of parallel worlds. Hadi executes some solid grooves midway through the song. That would definitely have Fredrik Thordendal nodding in approval.

In conclusion: Benevolent's debut EP "Divided" is a modern melodic death metal neck breaker, and by far one of the best releases this year. Along with Depth's Memonto Mori and Voice of The Soul's Eyes of Deceit; Kuwait's metal scene is stronger than ever, proving it's one of the heaviest contenders in the region for "the next big thing" coming out of the middle east.

My only issue would be that I can clearly hear the drum machine kick in, on Clairvoyant Transmission. But that's not something to complain about. The band managed to be as diverse as an internationally renowned act could be on a full length album.

Visit Benevolent on:
Myspace
Facebook
Bandcamp

[Ed note: Haunting Shores was featured on our digital compilation album "Metality - The Compilation" celebrating the blog's 1000th post. Available here for streaming and download.]

During Metallica's recent tour stop in Sydney, Australia, while performing "Seek and Destroy." Kirk Hammett was having a little fun kicking around balloons, when he accidentally kicked a little kid off the stage. It's rumored that the little boy is actually James Hetfield's son.

Somewhere out there, Dave Mustaine is laughing hysterically at karma's sudden win.


[Ed note: The little boy was not hurt.]

[Via: Blabbermouth]

The below photo was taken by a fan during the Clash of The Titans Tour stop in Dallas, Texas back in 91. Slayer's Tom Araya can be seen rocking a keffiyah (the traditional Palestinian headdress), which in recent years became a mainstream trend by many A-List celebrities.

As if Chimaira's Pure Hatred wasn't brutal enough already.

During the band's performance on Mayhem Fest in Idaho (U.S.). Chimaira was joined by Lamb of God's Randy Blythe, who along with Mark Hunter crushed the song's globally famous chorus to dust. If you ask me, they should consider re-recording the song with Randy doing back up vocals, as a matter of fact, re-record every metal song ever recorded and add Randy Blythe on it.

Fan filmed footage of the performance can be viewed below:

I haven't done an "Off Topic" post, in a very long time. But this 7 minute short for a new Mortal Kombat movie, got me pumped. (Plus Mortal Kombat is fuckin metal!)

This is not some Youtube mash up, this 7 minute short is legit, it was created by director Kevin Tancharoen as a proof of concept (as in proving it'll make money) to Warner Brothers and to also get an approval on having the movie being R rated (Seriously it needs to be rated R, the teaser fucking owns!!). If this concept goes through, this will be the GREATEST! Mortal Kombat movie ever, the teaser on it's own has got some brutal shit (warning not for the easily offended)

Reptile, likes to eat the heads of his victims, and they show em nom noming on one he kept in the fridge, no joke!



Another reason this movie is going to kick brutal ass, is because the story circles around Scorpion and Sub Zero, nuff said.

So please share this, so we can get our selves a new Mortal Kombat movie. That will surely sweep all others off the planet. If you think it'll be cheesy, go back and watch the old ones and compare, and don't tell me this barely has any elements of the game, stfu if you do.

MORTAL!!! KOMBAT!!!!

It's Saturday, meaning not much news is going on, and so, I give you this.

Badass Mother Fucker Drummer ( 0 . 0 )

Youtube and the internet tend to bring us an endless supply of hilarity. The video below easily falls under the soon to be classic videos on the interwebs.

The video is for a guitarist from Egypt, who decided to shoot an entire video (probably on his phone) for an epicly titled song "Leo In A Cage." The video is basically him trolling around with his guitar, and making his friends say: Rawr!

The best part about the video, is that he proves he used proper recording equipment for the end result.



Major props to Moey @ Moey.co.nr for digging up this soon to be classic.

So this dude, Raz Benari put together a 3 minute clip, where he squeezes in as much metal genres as possible to make up a coherent song. The result's below:

Calling your band Hadouken! is eye catching, because A) Yelling out Hadouken! is metal, B) Street Fighter is metal, and C) HADOUKEN!!!

The band doesn't play metal, actually they'll probably piss most readers off for their level of "sceneness," but the band managed to grab everyone's attention, by making this awesome Youtube clip, where they sum up, all the crazy stuff Youtube brought to the internet over the years, and the soundtrack is obviously a song by them titled "M.A.D." nonetheless, these guys get some props for calling their band Hadouken! Time for me to go kick Bison's ass.



[Via: IGN.com]

Earlier yesterday, a Twitter bug was discovered that allowed users to force other users to follow them, by typing "accept" followed by the desired username (accept username). The bug was discovered when a Turkish metal head named Bora Kırca, was rocking too hard to German heavy metal legends Accept, and ended up tweeting "Accept pwns" only to find out that the user @pwns started following him.

Naturally, what he did next was make a shit load of celebrities follow him, and then the Twitter frenzy blew up. Gizmodo, Mashable and many other social networking/tech sites as well as Blabblermouth, picked up the story, since then Twitter had to reset all users followers to "0" for a short time to fix the bug, and have been successful.

Conan O'brien, who joined Twitter after the late night wars, tends to always have something funny to tweet about, was one of many celebrities that were forced to follow other users.

The best thing about this, is that the recently reformed (with a new line up) Accept just released a new video for the song "Teutonic Terror" from their latest album "Blood of The Nations" out September 14th via Nuclear Blast Records. The album is the band's first in 14 years, and if anything this whole Twitter buzz should really help boost talks about the band's return.

Plus, "Teutonic Terror" has got a killer old school riff that will get you head banging instantly.


Visit Accept on Myspace for the latest updates concerning the band's upcoming album "Blood of The Nations" out September 14th on Nuclear Blast Records.

Accept's recently reformed new line up is as follows:

• Wolf Hoffmann: Guitar
• Peter Baltes: Bass
• Herman Frank: Guitar
• Mark Tornillo: Vocals
• Stefan Schwarzmann: Drums

[Sources: Blabbermouth, Mashable]

In High Heels (O . o)

Kvlt? or Cheese?

A couple of years ago I came across a Finnish band called Am I Blood, the first thing that caught my attention was the fact that their singer (Janne) sounds like the Finnish bastard son of James Hetfield and not in a Matt Heafy kinda way.

Naturally I was like, Che'yeah! and (being the Scandinavian metal sucker that I am) went ahead and gave their CD "The Truth Behind The Dying Sun" (yes they even used a form of death in the title) a shot, and was hit by a load of Finnish'Tallica.

While Diablo's front man Rainar Nygard looks A LOT like The James Hetfield, Am I Blood take care of sound duties. My point is, isn't it about time we get a Metallica-core or a Hetfield-core? Or maybe James needs to check his family tree, or his lawyer? Either way, here's the song that caught my attention a few years back.

This fail is too epic to simply be a fail, because it simultaneously earns a win as well.

Here's the deal, Amon Amarth completely slaying on stage, fan walks up....

Happy 4/20 Everybody :)