For a while now, many of our Facebook friends have been asking us to play Russian roulette with our iPod by putting the machine in random play mode, hitting play 20 or so times and documenting the results regardless of how embarrassing they might be. So, after ignoring such requests, we thought it might be fun to track down a bunch of metal musicians and put them to the random shuffle challenge. As it turns out, you can learn a lot about a person from their iPod.

We'll post a different Random Shuffle entry every day or so for however long it remains interesting, along with an armchair analysis of the rocker in question. And for each participant, we'll post the video for one of their selections, if it's available. We begin with Marta, keyboardist for Bleeding Through. Click more to see how her iPod dice fell and watch a video from her selections. Read more...

photo courtesy of www.photobucket.com

We've almost reached the end of 2008, and we gotta say it was a good year for metal. The genre continued to grow and diversify, as best exemplified, perhaps, by the top headbanging fest of the year, Rockstar Energy Mayhem. In a single day of Mayhem, fans could witness mainstream extreme metal (Slipknot), mainstream regular metal (Disturbed, Five Finger Death Punch), power metal (Dragonforce), lumbering prog/doom metal (Mastodon), contemporary thrash (Machine Head), deathcore (Job For a Cowboy), pre-deathcore/hardcore (The Red Chord), alt-metalcore (36 Crazyfists), female-fronted metalcore (Walls of Jericho) Christian metal/hardcore (Underoath) and hard rock (Airbourne, Black Tide). Read more...

photo by t.klick, courtesy of flickr.com

Hooray for Guns N' Roses and all, but let's not forget AC/DC. Even if Guns are the comeback story of the year (though we're not yet sold on Chinese Democracy, and may never be), AC/DC's tale is just as praiseworthy -- maybe even more so. It's one of consistency, reliability and sheer professionalism, an epic that never seems to end and doesn't falter in its enjoyability. AC/DC are a microcosm of rock n' roll as fountain of youth. Angus looks like hell offstage (what is he, 90?), but with a guitar in his hands, he's the eternally mischievous teenager and ever-present rock God, and he and his bandmates still rock with the fervor of a newly signed rock group earning its stripes. Read more...

We're not sure this is what they meant by 'honor the dead.'

The English paper The Telegraph has reported that AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" is becoming one of the most requested songs to be played at funerals in the band's home country of Australia. Read more...

The Gathering land new singer?

There have been some really bad covers of heavy metal songs over the years, and we're not even including any of the ones Pat Boone did on his absurd album In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy (1997). Just off the top of our heads, Die Krupps demolished nearly all of Metallica's biggest songs on their electronic barf bag A Tribute to Metallica (1993), Tori Amos butchered Slayer's "Raining Blood" and Fall Out Boy made mincemeat of Pantera's "Walk" onstage with Every Time I Die singer Keith Buckley. Read more...

Fortunately, there's an endless supply of this stuff, so unless we see some serious complaints, we'll keep bringing it on. Today's entry is from a Norwegian black metal supergroup that features ex-members of Vintersong, Carpathian Forest, Havayoth, Solefald and Spiral Architect. No, it's not Dethklok. Here are your choices:

a) Rorbagas
b) Borknagar
c) Emperor
d) AC/DC
e) Sorknagas