Metal News.

First up, a few upcoming local shows to make mention of. On Sat 6 Oct, there'll be a licensed all-ages show at Fowler's Live featuring Double Dragon, Skintilla, This Side Of The Massacre, Half A Smile and Asphyxia. Doors open at 7pm. Next up, on Fri 19 Oct, there'll be a show happening at the Lizard Lounge featuring Obdurate Seduction, Order Of The Buzzard and Art In Exile. Doors open at 8pm for that one. Finally, on Sat 20 Oct, the Underground will be playing host to an all-ages show featuring Skintilla, Taunt, Burial, Sonic Euphoria and Hybrid Illusion. Doors open at 7pm.

On the subject of shows, Poland's Behemoth, who last came by this way at the beginning of 2006, will be doing a tour of Australia and New Zealand in December. The band will be paying us a visit on Wednesday 12 Oct, headlining a licensed all-ages show at Fowler's Live.

Recently, Mastodon's Brent Hinds suffered some serious head trauma after getting into a drunken stoush with System Of A Down's Shavo Odadjian and a musician by the name of William Hudson (though not the William Hudson of Nebraska power metal outfit Cellador, who's apparently copped a bit of flak from misguided Mastodon fans as a result of the incident). An intoxicated Hinds allegedly started the fight, confronting and hitting the other two musicians after the MTV Video Music Awards in Las Vegas (which also saw Tommy Lee and Kid Rock tangle). After Odadjian attempted without success to calm the Mastodon frontman down, he and Hudson punched him in the face, knocking him to the ground.

Finland's Nightwish have just produced their country's "most expensive album of all time", having sunk approximately half a million euros into their latest release, 'Dark Passion Play'. The band's first original full-length release since 2004's 'Once' (which reputedly cost a mere 240,000 euros to make), 'Dark Passion Play', which has just come out in their native country, took ten months to record and features contributions from nearly 130 musicians.

Online television station VBS.tv (www.vbs.tv) have just posted up a short, two-part interview with a Lebanese death/grind band called Oath To Vanquish, who discuss, among other things, the challenges they face playing extreme metal in a country which is regularly at war, and whose corrupt police force (whom they liken to the Mafia) runs what amount to protection rackets on venues that host metal shows. The interview appears on a segment called 'Practice Space', which also features brief conversations with groups like Against Me!, 1349 and Enslaved. Oath To Vanquish have a couple of songs (taken from their 2006 debut, 'Applied Schizophrenic Science') posted up at www.myspace.com/vanquishlebanon; a hard-hitting video clip of one of these, Executive Onslaught, can be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyxoCu_esog


James Brazel (jbr09171@bigpond.net.au)