If you're into swordplay and gladiatorial combat, but the 3 Inches of Blood video for "Trial of Champions" didn't satisfy your bloodlust, guide your mouse towards the new Lair of the Minotaur video for "War Metal Battle Master."

The clip, which was directed by Gary Smithson, features warriors in clashing sword-on-sword combat, and pulls no punches in its depiction of the violent horror of war. In the vid, various fighters lose their heads and/or arms, and naked vampire chicks chew on the discarded limbs and bathe in the blood. And remember, the girls are NAKED and drenched in gore, so if you're under 18 please don't click on the link (wink, wink).

In 2004, Death Angel released their first new album in 14 years, The Art of Dying, but it's really their latest offering, Killing Season that stands as the band's comeback record. While the former was well-written and pretty heavy, it lacked a focus, sounding somewhat like a band trying to keep up with the times.

Killing Season is just the opposite. It doesn't even take over where Death Angel left off after 1990's Act III. Instead, it makes a return to the type of straightforward melodic thrash the band started out playing in the late '80s before Death Angel got sidetracked and started stressing technical proficiency over strong songwriting.

Days before heading off for a tour of Europe, singer Mark Osegueda took a few minutes to reply to a batch of our quirky questions, and, in the process, revealed what a jerk he was as a kid, what famous musician he used to mistaken for and how his band accidentally helped break Alice in Chains.

We keep accidentally calling your record Killing Time, which also would have worked as a title. When you're not with the band, what do you do to kill time?
Mark Osegueda: I have to play music!! Too much down time means bad health for the kid here -- meaning I love the bottle, and when I have too much down time, the bottle has been known to be my North Star. And it can guide you to some peculiar places. I also have another band called All time Highs. It's more a dirty rock 'n' roll thing. Other than that, I hang with my girl and the pups, exercise, try to eat well, and I recently started flossing.

What's the closest you've come to killing somebody, either by accident or on purpose?
Back in my heyday of debauchery, I used to try to make friends to keep up with the amounts of stimulants I ingested, and some of them suffered some pretty gnarly results such as smashed faces, poisoning, the end of relationships But I've grown since then. Read more...

This cover was done for the band Being Killed. I also did their previous album cover, which also featured zombies. This time around, they gave me the title concept, which was "Kill Yourself," and instead of illustrating a man shooting himself after being trapped by zombies, I decided to do something different. It's less gory, but I think it's more forboding, morbid and horrific.

All hope is lost.The zombie invasion has taken over and the husband has been injured while trying to fight them off. He dies from his wounds and returns to life to join the others who are busting in through the window to kill the wife – the last remaining victim. When there's no way out and no hope left, the choice is to either be slowly eaten alive or to slice open your veins and pray for a quick death. Lets hope she actually dies before the feasting begins.

Like most of my work, this was done digitally in Photoshop using mixed media/photo manipulation and airbrush with the wacom tablet.

After months of press releases and promises, System of a Down guitarist Daron Malakian has unleashed the first song by his new band Scars on Broadway, which also features System drummer John Dolmayan.

The tune, "They Say," is pretty rockin', but not exactly metal. It doesn't sound that much like System, either. The track is driven by a simple, foot-to-the-floor guitar riff, no-nonsense drumming and vocals that sound to us like a cross between the flamboyance of Placebo and the snotty aggression of Sex Pistols.

And while there's no solo, there's some cool whammy bar guitar warbling over the chorus. Also, the lyrics are way political, proving that Serj Tankian isn't the only member of System who has a beef with the current administration. click "more" to check out the track. Read more...

In our closest Who Rocks Harder contest to date, Dream Theater defeated Rush by a single vote. And that happened only after the two tied two days ago (thanks to one voter who said he couldn't decide) and had to go into sudden-death overtime.

To celebrate Dream Theater's victory, we present a full streaming concert video of the band from Budokan, Japan. click "more" to watch the nearly three hour show from 2004: Read more...

The cover art for The Sword's second album, Gods of the Earth, depicts a dark, lightning-streaked sky and a flat stretch of scorched land surrounded by jagged mountain peaks. On the ground are the broken columns of a past colossus and in the middle, a skeleton hand clutching the handle of a long sword appears to be bursting from the earth. It's a classic image, the kind of old-school J.R.R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons-influenced picture that graced metal LPs of old. And that's exactly the point.

The Sword don't care for ProTools, samplers or metalcore song structures. They'd rather dwell in the past -- not necessarily in the hallowed era of the original Black Sabbath -- but in the same zone as groups that were inspired by that original doom metal sound, including Trouble, St. Vitus, Pentagram, Cathedral and High on Fire.

At the same time, frontman J.D. Cronise says The Sword aren't stuck in the past like a traveler with a broken time machine. Instead, he claims, they use fantasy and mythology as metaphors to address the unstable modern world of corruption and lies in a creative, escapist way.

During our Podcast interview, Cronise talked about the creation of the band's new album, the meaning of songs like "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" and "Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzephyrians," the metal scene in Austin, Texas and the birth and ascendancy of the band most likely to reclaim the power, glory, magic and majesty of Middle Earth (click "more" for a link to the revealing podcast). Read more...

Nobody guessed this week's Indecipherable Logo, which belongs to the comedy grindcore band Phlegm Thrower, who crawled from the slime-laden streets of Cavitite in the Philippines.

The band, whose stated lyrical obsessions are "gore, sex and perversion," was formed a few years ago and is currently comprised of phlegm spewer Tantaritas, programmer Mr. Katay and guitarist BukakkeMan. Past members include Captain Kill Me, Bitorr, Afro Man, Mr. Scientist, PookieMan, Pumaley, Dr. Satan and Senorito.

After releasing a pair of demos in 2006, Phlegm Thrower contributed to two split-albums in 2007, For the Men Who Love the Women and Repugnant Birth of Anomalous Entities. They claim they are now signed to Show Me Your T-ts Records.

We thought we were clutching at straws when we decided to ask the Grammy award winning art guys from Demon Hunter, Don and Ryan Clark to send us some exclusive illustrations. But we figured, "Well, what the hell (oops, we mean heck). All they can do is say no." To our surprise, they didn't turn us down. In fact, with no hesitation they sent us six kick-ass drawings that haven't been published anywhere else.

We'd like to think we're jaded enough not to get too impressed by anything, but we were genuinely humbled that the dudes who do all of the killer album art for Tooth & Nail and Solid State Records and have designed covers for Foo Fighters, Chris Cornell and Will I Am, were totally into contributing stuff to our metal blog. Kinda makes us reconsider doing so many stories on really evil bands like Deicide and Gorgoroth -- at least for, like, two seconds.

Click "more" to read what singer Ryan Clark has to say about the six original illustrations, then check them out for yourself: Read more...

Today's lime-green logo brings us back to our childhood when the toy company Mattel used to market little trashcans of goo called Slime. As we recall, they also sold Slime with little plastic worms in it, and, later the Slime franchise expanded to include Ghostbusters Slime and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Slime. But, like Coke Classic, you couldn't beat the original when it came to gunky, mushy entertainment. As long as you kept that crap out of your hair and off the rug, everything was cool, but Mattel failed to inform consumers of the drawbacks of the stuff, which led to many, many aggrivated parents. Anyway, this here logo looks like seven or eight cans of the stuff splattered up against a black wall. Is it art or a band name?

Here's a clip of Kreator performing their signature song, "Pleasure to Kill," from their new DVD, "At the Pulse of Kapitulation - Live in East Berlin 1990." The DVD combines sonically remixed and re-edited versions of the VHS releases "Extreme Aggression Tour 1989/'90 Live in East Berlin" and the horror-themed video "Hallucinative Comas" (click "more" to watch the video). Read more...