​Back in January the good people at Metal Sucks offered a 14-track primer on NYC metal under the appropriate-enough title NYC Sucks, Volume 1, featuring local luminaries/YIMBY alumni like Naam and Battilus. Volume 2 has arrived, available once again for stream or download via Metal Sucks, this time including Krallice, Goes Cube, the Austerity Program, Wetnurse, and, yes, IKILLYA. Full track list is below; let's hope the Bieber/Weingarten duet makes Volume 3.

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​Kudos to the presumably ironic blog Metal Sucks for curating the also presumably ironic NYC Sucks, Volume 1, a 14-track comp of local metal featuring Made Out of Babies, Castevet, Meek Is Murder (nice), and a few luminaries you may remember from our very own Yes in My Backyard column, including Naam ("kraut-metal crushers") and Battilus ("the blackest, bleakest, and orneriest of the lot"). Stream or download directly from Metal Sucks here; tracklist is below. Watch the volume if you're at work, unless you'd like to explain that you're listening to a band called Mutant Supremacy.

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Photo by: Michael Kahan

Jeff the Brotherhood, at the Williamsburg Waterfront this Sunday, for free, with Murder City Devils (!) and Obits

Quick favor. Let's all keep this link a secret from Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin, and all the other bloviating right-wingers our next-door neighbor Roy Edroso rounds up every week. Because what we have here is the premiere of a music video from Nashville's JEFF the Brotherhood, two sludge-punk siblings whose songwriter dad is good friends with Al Gore. And in the wrong hands, this little music video could be possibly construed as, oh, shall we say, Satan-worshipping? It's not, but you know how those conservatives frown upon pentagrams and human sacrifice and corpse paint. They might just get the wrong idea.

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The metal world lost one of its greatest voices, and one of its nicest guys, on Sunday morning, when legendary singer Ronnie James Dio died of stomach cancer at 67. After swatting away Internet rumors earlier that day, Dio's wife and manager, Wendy Dio, finally delivered the news herself: "Today my heart is broken, Ronnie passed away at 7:45 a.m. 16th May. Many, many friends and family were able to say their private good-byes
 before he peacefully passed away. Ronnie knew how much he was loved by all. We so appreciate the love and support that you have all given us. Please give us a few days of privacy to deal with this terrible loss. Please know he loved you all and his music will live on forever."

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It's been that kind of day. Except for the chocolate-chip cookie. [Metal Injection]

​Credit Maura for lasting long enough in the New York Times's dreaded Modern Love column yesterday to turn up this revelation regarding the love memoirist Rachel Sontag found while she was down and out. "I simply needed to make enough to pay next month's rent so we could maintain our state of suspended existence together," Sontag writes. "I took a job as a hostess at a restaurant in Harlem. I walked neighbors' dogs. I bathed and fed friends' children. I pursued work as a foot fetish model. I posed nude for a 75-year-old artist doing a series of oil-painted vulvas. I sold beer at death-metal shows called 'Brutal Truth,' 'Pig Destroyer' and 'Repulsion.'" So there you have it: attending a Pig Destroyer show ranks somewhere between having your vulva painted in oil by an old man and walking strange dogs for money. We're positive they'd be flattered. [NYT]

So our/my favorite guy on the planet, one of the few metal dudes to have evolved admirably into life after his most renowned association (unlike his more famous counterpart), just got a book deal from Simon & Schuster. He's been angling for this a long while now, as he told us when he wrote for us last May, and we're thrilled to see him finally get his due. McKagan announced this today on Reverb, the music blog of our sister paper Seattle Weekly, and in his post, he explains firmly that his book will not be the GN'R version of The Dirt.

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When we spoke with Iron Maiden drummer Nicko McBrain last summer, the Florida resident told us that his 35-year-old metal band would be touring again in 2010. This afternoon brings word that Iron Maiden is, in fact, coming to Madison Square Garden on Monday, July 12. This works out extremely well for McBrain, a golf obsessive who'd expressed disappointment at the possibility of a tour eclipsing the Ryder Cup--the Final Frontier World Tour ends July 20. Tickets for the MSG show go onsale Saturday, March 20 at 10 am, presale happens three days before through www.ironmaiden.com, and we're currently rallying an army of secret-metalhead drunks to flood the balconies.

Lita Ford and her family. The champion fighter is the one with the highest hair.

So this was going to be a post about The Runaways movie, and how we're seeing it on opening day and you can't stop us, but then we got to wondering what former real-life guitarist Lita Ford was up to, and here you have it: she's been busy breeding a mohawked mini-fighter.

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"Brandon Stosuy, a Brooklyn music critic, read from his oral history in progress of American black metal: a welcome demystification, cast in normal-dude voices." Way more where this came from over at Ben Ratliff's critical dissection of Saturday's Hideous Gnosis symposium on black metal at Public Assembly. Topics covered include the difference between black and death metal (David Carr is grateful), the genre's roots in crypto-Roman Catholicism, and ludicrousness of trying to have a serious conversation about corpse paint. Recommended for this photo alone (grimmer than you think, my friend!). [NYT]