Every day leading up to the October 23 release of System of a Down singer Serj Tankian's solo album, Elect the Dead, HBB Blog will post interview snippets with Tankian about the record. Here is part two:

Was it more fun or frustrating to create Elect the Dead?

Were there any stumbling Blocks on the path to The Dead?

Having been burned in countless articles, she usually flips the middle finger to anyone requesting an interview. But Arch Enemy singer Angela Gossow gave the green light to our recent podcast interview request, which will post on Friday on the HBB Blog and on iTunes.

In addition to complaining about journalists and the media, Gossow talked in depth about: Getting sick on tour, the melodic fury of the new Arch Enemy album, Rise of the Tyrant (which came out September 24), the dangers of megalomania and fascism, why it's not a good idea to use Hitler samples on a metal album, how her grandparents hid Jews from the Nazis, her relationship with guitarist Michael Amott, the return of co-guitarist Christopher Amott and how she encouraged grindcore pioneers Carcass to reunite for a tour.

Until Friday, check out Arch Enemy's videos for "Ravenous," "My Apocalypse," "Nemesis" and "Dead Eyes See No Future":

About six years ago, ex-Sepultura drummer, Igor Cavalara, invited me down to San Paolo, Brazil to do a guest spot at a new clothing store that he had opened. I’ve tattooed in a lot of places and I figured, what the hell, why not a clothing store, too?

He had plenty of space for me, and I tattooed my ass off while I was there and had a lot of fun. I had already known Igor for quite a while before that, but this was the first time I had made it to his turf. I worked hard, but there was still plenty of time for fun and I can’t say enough about the Brazilian barbeque. Now, one place you don’t want to bring a fat man is an all you can eat steakhouse full of every exotic meat you can imagine. As great as that one, the best part of the trip was going to a futbol game with Igor.

I’m not much of a sports guy -- for some reason, I never could really get into the whole thing -- but this was an experience like no other. For people in Brazil, futbol is like a religion. Igor had warned me that it was probably going to be crazy, but I had no idea what to expect. We went early and stopped at a little cafe near the stadium, where things just progressively got crazier. People were marching through the streets, chanting some crazy Portuguese futbol mantra, as if they were marching to war. At one point, I turned and noticed a bus rolling by, fighting thru the crowd. I guess that’s not that big a deal, except that the bus room for around 50, but was loaded with 150 crazed people. They were sitting on the roof, the hood, hanging off the windows on the outside, and were all screaming that same mantra. With all the bodies crunched together, it looked to me like some giant human Chia Pet (cha-cha-chia!). Read more...

Without the thrashy crunch of guitarist System of a Down guitarist Daron Malakian, singer Serj Tankian doesn't sound as metallic -- which doesn't mean his debut album Elect the Dead (which drops Oct 23) isn't heavy or intense.

Songs like "Empty Walls" and "The Unthinking Majority" are filled with distorted guitar blasts, hammering drums and artsy-angry vocals. But they're also colored with acoustic passages, keyboards, strings, Middle Eastern instrumentation and a range of influences, including folk, pop and alternative. And the lyrics are alternately political, emotional, surreal and silly. In other words, it's kind of like System of the Down -- just different.

Of course, Serj explains it all far better than we ever could, and for rest of the week we'll feature exclusive HBB Ball Blog video segments of the eccentric artist talking about raising The Dead:

Drawing From Life to fuel The Dead

Becoming a One Man Band

As the singer of Mudvayne and Hellyeah, Chad Gray's a pretty busy guy. Right now, he's wrapping up a Hellyeah tour with Korn, and when that's done, the band will head out with Bloodsimple and Otep. At the same time, Gray is helping finalize plans for Mudvayne's live and B-Sides album By the People, For the People, which will come out November 27 and feature two new songs, the recently released single "Dull Boy" and a cover of The Police's "King of Pain." Yet between the playing and planning, Gray accepted an offer to contribute a guest entry for the HBB Blog in order to vent about the bane of every recording artist's existence -- illegal downloading. And Gray's argument is pretty convincing:

If I take a bunch of wood and build a chair, and somebody walks up and steals it, no one in their right mind will say that's not theft. There's a lot of work that goes into making a good chair and if that happened to me, people would feel sorry for me and be pissed off at the guy who took it. Yet that exact situation is happening all the time to hard working musicians, and no one seems to care.

Let's look at it another way: If you want a Diet Coke, you will go into a store and pay money to get it, and then you'll walk out of the store with it in your hand. But if you didn’t pay for that Diet Coke, you better know if you walked out that door and that buzzer goes off, you're going to jail. It don’t matter if it costs $300 or 30 cents. If you steal something that you’re holding in your hand and you get caught, you’re going to jail. They don’t jack with that crap anymore. Shoplifting is pretty hardcore. They will bust your ass for nothing. Read more...

Paul Stoddard, singer for metal rippers Diecast doesn't have a lot in common with Dimmu Borgir singer Shagrath vocally, but that didn't stop him from picking the Norwegian black metal band's song "The Serpentine Offering" as his Bang of the Week.

"I love the cold medieval feel of the video," Stoddard says. "I also really dig the original clean vocals of bass player ICS Vortex. I think they really compliment the very brutal and legible vocals of lead vocalist Shagrath. Combined with some really eerie orchestral backgrounds this video perfectly showcases Dimmu's dark, mysterious flavor."

And if you don't believe him, see for yourself:

The reign of Black Tyranny has come to an end. Machine Head and Arch Enemy have wrapped up their co-headlining tour with special guests Throwdown and Sanctity -- but they didn't close the curtain without first pulling all the stops.

At the final gig at the Avalon in Los Angeles:

During Throwdown's set, Machine Head frontman Robb Flynn joined the band onstage on second guitar for a cover of Sepultura's "Roots Bloody Roots."

Machine Head closed their set with their first ever single "Davidian." The song featured Anthrax 's Scott Ian on guitar, and back-up vocals by Arch Enemy growler Angela Gossow, Bleeding Through singer Brandan Schieppati and members of Sanctity. During the song, Throwdown vocalist Dave Peters and drummer Ben Dussaut hopped onstage and dove into the crowd, and Machine Head guitarist Phil Demmel also demonstrated his stagediving pwowess.

Celebrity guests at the event included, Slayer guitarist Kerry King, Ex-Strapping Young Lad and Dark Angel drummer Gene Hoglan, Fear Factory guitarist Christian Olde Wolbers and drummer Raymond Herrera, Bleeding Through keyboardist Marta, ex-Eighteen Visions bassist Mick Morris, ex Kittie guitarist Lisa Marx and Bam Margera.

Now check out this classic video for Machine Head's "Davidian":

Normally, we're pretty unenthusiastic about cover albums -- especially from groups that formed before 1990. But we've gotta give props to Queensrÿche for Take Cover, a diverse collection of cuts that inspired and influenced the band to become the juggernaut it was in its prime (circa 1984 to 1990).

Tomorrow, the first single from the disc, a swirling, crashing take on Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine," will be available on iTunes. It's hardly a surprising choice coming from the heady, hard rockers who brought us Operation Mindcrime and Rage For Order, but the rest of the disc is more diverse, and it's that eclecticism that makes Take Cover more interesting than the bulk of similar records. The array of tracks includes an acoustic version of Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," a ripping rendition of The Police's "Synchronicity II," a surging version of Peter Gabriel's "Red Rain," a live cover of U2's "Bullet the Blue Sky" and a pounding interpretation of Black Sabbath's "Neon Knights," a song Queensrÿche heard every night on tour recently with Heaven and Hell.

"We'll never top the originals; they're classics for a reason," singer Geoff Tate says of the songs chosen for the record. "We were more focused on finding different approaches that took the songs in unexpected directions." Read more...

We've gotten a lot of cranky comments about the Trivium video for "Becoming the Dragon" being only available for U.S. broadcast. So, we got proactive and tracked down this link to Trivium's "Becoming the Dragon" video from our UK office. Cheers, mates.

There are no real surprises on Soilwork's new album Sworn to a Great Divide. Anyone familiar with the Swedish melodic death metal band's juxtaposition of dissonance and euphony will see it as a natural progression, and those who favor metalcore's blend of vicious growling and tuneful singing will also feel at home .

While it might seem like the band consciously followed a winning formula, singer Björn "Speed" Strid's says that's not the case. "Our music, it comes out in a natural way," he tells MTVnews.com's Metal File. We want to top ourselves every time, and we learn from the previous recording and try to take it to the next level. I definitely think we have developed our own sound, which is kind of hard nowadays."

Strid says the band takes pride in being one of the pioneers of the Scandinavian sound, following on the heels of the originators, At the Gates, In Flames and Dark Tranquillity.

"We've developed that [sound] through the years," he explains. "In the beginning, it was mostly the guitars that took care of the melodies. Now, it's in a different shade — it's more like the vocals take care of some of that stuff." Read more...