Starting May 26, Christian metal band Demon Hunter will embark on a headline run with the recently reunited Christian death metal band Living Sacrifice, Oh, Sleeper, The Famine and Advent. The tour will be Demon Hunter's first since they released their fourth album Storm the Gates of Hell in November 2007. Why are six months going to pass between the album's release and the first date of the tour? Simple. The guys in Demon Hunter have serious day jobs. (click "read more" to hear the podcast interview with Demon Hunter singer Ryan Clark). Read more...

The answer to yesterday's Indecipherable Logo is Weakling. The now-disbanded San Francisco band described itself as "a cross between the atmospheric, monomaniacal, distorted black metal buzz of Burzum and the progressive, advanced death metal orchestrations of Opeth." Read more...

Check out the Maylene and the Sons of Disaster video for "Darkest of Kin,"but first read this article that appeared on the band last year in MTVnew.com's Metal File. And if you get bored, just scroll to "read more" to check out the page with the video:

You might call Dallas Taylor a little ... well ... infatuated with the tale of Ma Barker. She was the legendary matriarch of the Barker/Karpis Gang, a band of outlaws whose criminal exploits across the Midwest during the Great Depression gripped the American public. It was a story the Maylene and the Sons of Disaster frontman first heard as a youth, growing up in Ocala, Florida; Barker and one of her sons, who've been called "some of the meanest examples of humanity ever known to exist," were shot dead when the FBI raided a cottage she was renting just outside of — you guessed it! — Ocala, Florida.

The legend of Ma Barker continues to haunt the hard-rocker. In fact, the tale even inspired his band's conceptual sophomore LP, II, which came out March 20.

"I've always wondered what made Hitler tick — what made him think he was doing a good deed?" said Taylor, who was the original singer for Underoath but left that band's fold in 2003. "Serial killers too — it's always boggled my mind, and I've always wanted to know why they thought what they were doing was right? I've read up on Ma Barker, and she basically thought her family was doing a good deed," by committing a spree of robberies, kidnappings and other crimes between 1931-'35." Read more...

Nowadays, XBox, PlayStation and all them high-tech videogame consoles let you play sports games that look more realistic than most ESPN programming and action games that often have better effects than many Hollywood blockbusters. But back when Rob Halford was still in the closet, videogames were blocky, clunky and one-dimensional, and most of the bad guys looked like this week's indecipherable logo. Is it a giant jellyfish, an ascending spaceship or a living forest like the one in "The Evil Dead?" Who knows, but we think we see an "X" in there and maybe a "Z." We don't want to give too much away, though, so give it your best shot and we'll touch base again tomorrow.

Behemoth may have fought with Satan by their side, but Nile were able to invoke the power of Set, Anubis and Osiris and send those face-painted Poles back from whence they came. That doesn't mean readers didn't still feel a lot of love for Nergal & Co. In fact, most of the comments we received emphasized what a "tough choice" it was and that Behemoth was a "brutal band" as well. However, practically everyone who weighted in for our latest "Who Rocks Harder?" contest favored Nile. Read more...

Auditioning for Behemoth?

The General Mills cereal Wheaties has always touted itself as "The Breakfast of Champions." This assumes, of course, that champions prefer unsweetened wheat flakes and milk to a tasty egg white omelette and a plate of Spam. But regardless of how accurate their marketing claim is, we feel it would greatly behoove the company to feature 3 Inches of Blood on their cereal box.

Doing so would create a wonderful cross-promotional tie-in with the band's new video for "Trial of Champions," and you all know how metalheads love to eat healthy. We propose that a DVD of the video be included with every box of Wheaties, and that consumers who collect 100 proof-of-purchase seals be able to trade them in for a double-edged sword engraved with the band's logo. And we'll only charge the company a five percent fee for coming up with the idea.

Mull it over over breakfast, then click "read more" to watch the video for "Trial of Champions." And see it again on Saturday's Headbangers Ball on MTV2. Read more...

On February 28 at Slims in San Francisco, Bay Area veterans, Death Angel blasted out a set of tunes to celebrate the release of their new album, Killing Season, which came out last week. At the show EMG Pickups -- which endorses guitarists Rob Cavestany and Ted Aguilar -- were there to shoot the band playing the new song "Dethroned." Click "read more" to check it out. Read more...

"We Rock Sweet Balls and Can Do No Wrong."

The words on the CD cover are written in the same font as Iron Maiden's logo and above the statement there's a picture of a lightning storm bursting from a disco ball and striking a multicolor dancefloor that seems to be bursting into flames. The album is by Tragedy and it's described right under the logo as "an All Metal Tribute to the Bee Gees." Read more...

Otep mourns animal abuse in Iraq

"Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kind of sin." -- G. K. Chesterton

Ladies and gentlemen, friends and enemies, supporters and self-centered suckfish socialites, you will have to forgive me if this week's entry is a contentious, congested, clotting of curses and condemnations. I am sure the fine folks at HBBlog will censor bits and pieces of my paragraphs that might happen to be lathered in obscenities. But, so it goes in the corporate world of legal mumbo-jumbo, with all their silly Standards & Practices, et al. Though I do not agree with their policies, I can understand why they are in place. I mean, who would want to be sued by some irate parent in Idaho after they discovered their darling "tween" has been reading the insane tirades and profanities of a savage poet-woman setting the sun on fire, challenging the very breath of God, and spreading her messages of reckless, rogue lucidity all willy-nilly somewhere from the wild world of Los Angeles, California? Read more...

Korn frontman Jonathan Davis wasn't kidding when he sang, "Bitch We Got a Problem."

Founding drummer David Silveria is no longer in the band, Davis himself is going to tour this summer as a solo artist and now guitarist James "Munky" Shaffer, who left the group's European tour in January for a month to deal with family issues, has announced he's working with ex-members of Limp Bizkit and Faith No More on a new project called Fear and the Nervous System, whose debut album will come out August 8. Read more...