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...

Heaven and Hell presented Resurrection Award at Metal Hammer's Golden Gods Ceremony

After this final interview clip with Heaven and Hell, we're all out of footage, which is just as well because the band is all out of shows -- at least for now. Obviously, we'll hear more from them when they finish their next studio album, which -- not so coincidentally -- is what they discuss in our last interview clip. Click "more" to watch. Read more...

Testament drink to continued success

The Bay Area thrashers of Testament will remain on the Metal Masters tour with Judas Priest, Heaven and Hell and Motorhead through August 31 in Mountain View, California. But if you missed 'em on the tour because you couldn't get to the venue by 8:30 a.m. (or whatever the hell time they took the stage) don't worry. Testament will be back in the States in early October (according to Pollstar, the October 9 show in New York City is with Children of Bodom).

MetalInjection.net recently hooked up with guitarists Eric Peterson and Alex Skolnick about touring, the band's new album The Formation of Damnation and the time the band met the Iraqi heavy metal band Acrassicauda. Click "more" to see it all. Read more...

What Testament singer Chuck Billy probably looked like at Metal Masters

Note to package tour bands: If you're not one of the top two acts on the bill and you want to play to as many fans as possible, be sure to post your correct set time on your MySpace.

For Saturday's Metal Masters show at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey we trusted Testament's MySpace to let us know what time the band took the stage. Yeah, we definitely should have called the band's publicist or checked with the venue, but considering how ambitious and responsible Testament usually are we figured if they listed their set time as 8 p.m. then that's what time they'd start their performance.

That being the case, we decided to get to the venue by 7:45, but since the parking lots were full by the time we arrived, we had to walk about a quarter mile. And right at the stroke of 8 p.m. we hear music echoing from the arena. Since we were still a block and a half away, it was hard to make out exactly what song Testament were playing, but it sounded kinda like... "The Mob Rules" by Black Sabbath. Read more...