This week’s Slaylist isn’t so much a single playlist, but a recommendation to check out a podcast – the one in question being Valient Himself’s awesome Rocknowledgy. In case you’re some kind of slowpoke who is behind the times, Valient Himself is the frontman of Valient Thorr,

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Well, Black Sabbath might be keeping collectively tight-lipped over the Bill Ward situation, but the individual band members aren’t – Geezer Butler, the band’s bassist, has posted a lengthy retort to Bill Ward’s statement over on his official blog.

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Here’s the second part of History Of The Hawk‘s European tour diary. Singer, Nathan Coyle promised and delivered photos of cool buildings and food, so it’s just like Instagram. (You can follow ThrashHits on Instagram, by the way.) In Part 1 we saw some cool bread in Budapest. This time there are Romanian window cleaners, flat tyres and gypsy curses. Life on the road, eh??

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Y’know when Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, and Geezer Butler released that terse little statement yesterday, saying they weren’t going to respond at length to Bill Ward’s prior essay on the ins and outs of why he wasn’t going to be part of this year’s Black Sabbath reunion? Well, it turns out they’ve responded to it in a different way.

And it’s one of the pettiest, most childish – and admittedly, inventive – ways imaginable.

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Mutilation Rites
Empyrean
Prosthetic
22 May 2012

by Tom Dare

Brief Guide On How To Make Black Metal In 2012:

1) Pick your basic influence. This should be a Scandinavian band active in the early 1990s or Bathory.
2) Decide whether to A) simply rip off said band or B) do something new. If A), you’re done. If B), move on to number 3.
3) Liberally draw inspiration from a French black metal band.
4) Add in one or more of the following elements to make yourself immediately distinct: post-rock, doom, crusty hardcore, prog, Neurosis, noise, electronica, instruments/melodies/rhythms distinct to your country of origin

It’s a recipe that’s served Mutilation Rites very well on their debut album Empyrean.

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When Emmure’s PR emailed us and offered us an interview, we umm-ed and ahhh-ed over whether to take them up on the offer. After all, on the one hand, we had our carefully maintained rep as snobbish internet musical neckbeards to maintain, and interviewing a band like Emmure runs pretty contrary to the conditions of our membership of the No Fun Club. On the other hand, the impish pricks among us couldn’t resist the opportunity to metaphorically poke the bollocks of the band’s often controversial frontman, Frankie Palmeri, in the hope he’d say something controversial.

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“Delain? Does anyone really even care about Delain?” Someone said that to us this week. To that we answered: “Well, personally speaking, it’s not really our cup of tea, but some people like them, as otherwise they wouldn’t be able to fly over to the UK and play shows here, right?”. We then followed it up with: “And that’s why Gary Wolstenholme went along to the Sheffield show of their recnt UK tour that’s just finished, and took a load of photos for us”.

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Well, this another one of those news pieces where the title pretty much says it all. Black Sabbath – i.e., Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, and Geezer Butler – have released a statement in response to the large statement made by Bill Ward yesterday, when he ruled himself out of the Black Sabbath reunion over contract issues.

And in contrast to Ward’s piece, the statement from the three other founder members of Black Sabbath is…well….remarkably short.

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If you asked us to put together a list of the most genuine, the coolest, and generally most all-round solid dudes that we’d interviewed here at Thrash Hits, then Doc Coyle, guitarist from God Forbid, would be right there at the top. When we chatted to him a few years ago at Download, he put up with our amateur-hour questioning like a pro, and when we sent him an email the other day with a load of snide questions about Equilibrium, his band’s recently-released sixth studio album, he once again took it all in his stride. Doc, sir, as far as Thrash Hits is concerned, you’re one of the good guys.

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Yeah, we’ve all seen that sick list of hilarious exam answers where students take the piss a bit but here’s the best one.

It’s just the best one.

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