Fresh off a headlining gig at SF Gay Pride Festival last weekend, Chico’s own Armed For Apocalypse have officially inked a deal with Ironclad / Metal Blade records. Their debut album, DEFEAT, which coincidentally happens to be the heaviest album in the history of mankind, drops September 15th. Check out the Press Release below:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE….

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Ironclad Recordings Signs ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE: Set To Release Debut Album ‘Defeat’ in the US & Canada!….

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Los Angeles, CA – July 1, 2009 – Ironclad Recordings, founded by Unearth vocalist Trevor Phipps, is pleased to announce the signing of Chico California’s ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE; a band featuring the talents of former members of Will Haven, The Abominable Iron Sloth, and Ghostride. Ironclad Recordings is set to release ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE’s debut full-length studio album Defeat in the US and Canada on September 15^th, 2009 with SOAR releasing this behemoth of an album in Europe.  Defeat was recorded during two different sessions in late 2008 at the Pus Cavern in Sacramento, CA and Heirloom Studios in Chico, CA, with Matt Pedri engineering. Mixing and mastering for Defeat was handled by Eric Stenman (Saves The Day, Will Haven, Senses Fail, Far, Forever The Sickest Kids, Dashboard Confessional, Thrice) with cover art being tackled by renowned artist Matt Loomis, who has done cover art for Abominable Iron Sloth and the Makai in addition to merch designs for Mastodon and The Red Chord…..

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Trevor Phipps of Ironclad Recordings comments; “these guys are just ridiculously heavy with one of the darkest and meanest sounds in metal today. Get ready to be crushed.”….

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“We couldn’t be more excited as a band to sign with Ironclad Recording.  They have been loyal and honest with us from the very beginning, which is all too rare in this business. They are the only label that told us to keep getting heavier! What more can you ask for as a metal band?!” comments ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE….

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Derek Kerswill, drummer of Unearth, who recently played dates with ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE after his band finished their US tour with Testament, had this to say about the band;“ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE gave me this dirty, unsettling feeling… that was so emotionally dark that my insides were crawling out of me. I guess they stirred some genuine emotion in me because I FELT IT.”….

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The musical talents of ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE, featuring former members of Will Haven, The Abominable Iron Sloth, and Ghostride, can best be described as a racket akin to the gates of hell opening; mixing the sludgy, down-tuned heavy riffs of Crowbar and Eyehategod with the white noise assault of Cursed, and the death metal groove of Entombed. Guitarist/vocalist Cayle Hunter explains; “we don’t want to be faster or tougher than anybody else. We just want to make heavy music that is UNDENIABLE when you hear it.” ….

ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE’s, or A4A, monstrous new album Defeat will be released September 15^th, 2009 followed by a full touring schedule so be sure to keep up with the band on MySpace and Twitter for dates and other announcements…..

To get a taste of what A4A’s album Defeat will sound like, check out the new song ‘We Fell from the Bottom,’ which is currently up on the band’s MySpace page HERE….

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Current tour dates:….

7/01       Seattle, WA        The Rendezvous/Jewelbox Theater w/ Heiress….

7/02       Portland, OR      Tony V’s Garage….

7/03       Eugene, OR        Epic Space w/ Necryptic Jean Grey….

7/25       Chico, CA             The Senator 10 for $10 Tour w/ Poison the Well, Terror, Bane, and more….

8/07       Chico, CA             La Salles….

8/22       Eugene, OR        Epic Space w/ The Funeral Pyre….

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And so ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE could stay in constant communication with their fans, the band started up a Twitter account so make sure to follow the guys at www.twitter.com/AforA….

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ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE is:….

Kirk Williams - vocals/guitar….

Cayle Hunter - guitar/vocals….

Corey Vaspra - bass/vocals….

Nick Harris - drums

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I’m sure you’re probably really looking forward to reading more about Michael Jackson dying last week. I mean, its not like every single person on every single stupid fucking social network, cable TV news channel, blog, or street corner has been talking about it non-stop since it happened. Not to be a dick or anything, but I don’t really see what the big deal is. I mean, sure it sucks that he died right before he was about ready to redeem himself with a bunch of big arena shows or whatever, but he’s certainly not the first person to die before they did all the shit they planned on doing, and he definitely won’t be the last. Around 200,000 people die every day in this world, not to mention all the other worlds we don’t know about yet. And I’d be willing to bet that most of them probably had some shit left on their plate. So what if they didn’t make up a bunch of great songs or trademark dance moves. Maybe they did and you just never heard them. And besides, the fact that Michael Jackson was as famous as he was should make it far less tragic that he died. At least he got to do a bunch of badass stuff while he was alive, like bang all sorts of hot gash (or whatever he was into), have a pet monkey, buy the elephant man’s bones, and probably a million other things that were too cool to even talk about publicly. Where’s the tragedy in that. Most people are born into shit and die in shit, their own and other peoples. Shouldn’t we spend more time mourning them then some dude who lived life like the royalty of a bygone era, and probably died in part thanks to his gilded lifestyle? And what was it that people, other than his family and friends, really loved about Michael Jackson anyway? His music? His dancing? His larger-than-life persona? None of that went anywhere. It’s still recorded for posterity. That the source of it has died only serves to elevate to an even higher level of visibility; his death only makes his life seem all the grander. So what’s there to piss and moan about? Sure, he died. But everybody dies. You’re gonna die. Probably a lot sooner than you think. Now that’s something to get bummed out about. And ultimately, their own impending mortality is what people are really dealing with when they get all upset when Michael Jackson, or Billy Mays or anyone else mildly famous dies. After all, celebrities seem impervious to the sorts of threats that face mere mortals such as ourselves. A corollary to the American Dream is the idea that if you can just get rich enough, or powerful enough, you can transcend death. But even Walt Disney’s cryogenically frozen head is as dead as any mouldering skull in the Chico Cemetery or dead squirrel in the middle of the road. Rich and poor, famous and anonymous all die the same death. No matter our efforts, no matter our accumulated wealth or accolades, no matter how many Platinum Records hang on our wall, we all end up dust. There’s no escape, even for Michael Jackson. Or for you. Or for me.

As far as pissed of comments and hate mail and all that, go ahead and do it. Any time you talk about someone who just died, it’s de rigeur for at least a couple idiots to write in with some or another version of “Don’t you have respect for the dead?!” And the short answer is no. Because they’re fucking dead. Unlike most people, I try to worry more about respecting people who are still living. Likewise, when I die I hope they throw me out of the back of a truck somewhere up in the hills and let the turkey vultures and skunks and badgers eat my guts and eyeballs out. I hope someone comes along and pisses on my corpse and kicks me when I’m bloated and full up with maggots and desecrates me in any sort of lurid pagan ceremony they see fit. Know why? Because I’m sure whatever happens after I die doesn’t have shit to do with what people do here, especially since probably nothing will happen at all other than I’ll be dead forever. So have at it fuckers! Do your worst! Lambaste me in print; disrespect my memory all you want. It doesn’t matter. Unless it does, which would suck. But hey, you gotta pick a side when it comes to something like this, and Pascal’s Wager notwithstanding, I choose to not give a shit.

So anyone who still reads this blog-which is probably limited to people who work at Synthesis, people used to work at Synthesis, and their immediate family-already knows that the rock band known as Surrogate is the best fucking band in the whole world. OBVS. However, what they, or more precisely you, might not know is that they (FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m in the fucking band so I guess I should say “we” to avoid feeling too dissociated ) have a new record coming out on July 14th titled Popular Mechanics.

SPOILER ALERT: It rules. Hard. Long. And Full of Seamen, like a crab boat, or a submarine, or possibly a bus transporting seamen to a submarine base. Anyways, the album is already up for Pre-Order at a few badass places like Amazon, Best Buy, and InterPunk. So you should go spend money there so Chris Keene can afford to shower his wife with jewels, wealth and Gold. Also you can add us on Myspace and/or Facebook so we can SPAM you with self-aggrandizing garbage until you’re fully convinced that we really are the best band fucking ever in history of all time. RECOGNIZE.

Man, who’d have thought that getting real time updates on what all your worthless, average idiot friends had for dinner, or seeing pictures of what other bourgeois morons they were hanging out with last weekend would be worth so much fucking money?

Facebook is getting a $200 million investment from a Russian Internet investor that values the social networking company at $10 billion even though it has yet to turn a profit.
The investment gives Digital Sky Technologies a nearly 2 percent stake in Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook’s preferred stock. Digital Sky won’t get a board seat.
The $10 billion valuation for Facebook is less than the $15 billion value implied in 2007, when Microsoft spent $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the company — even though Facebook has substantially grown since then. However Facebook’s own appraisal after the Microsoft deal gave the company a market value of about $3.7 billion, according to details revealed in a legal settlement.

And the Facebook hyperbole doesn’t in there. An AP story over the weekend ran with the somewhat mystifying title “Google increasingly battles Facebook in search.” The story of course went on to talk about basically every other shitty social media or user-review site, only briefly mentioning Facebook, leaving one with a nose for linguistics to wonder, is Facebook becoming the Kleenex, or Band Aid of Web 2.0 social networking, the blanket namebrand which represents a whole class of products? Or are journalists and other pseudo-intellectuals so currently enamored with the social media fad that they’re eating their own balls just to see who can over-inflate the importance of “USER GENERATED CONTENT” the most???

YOU MAKE THE CALL! LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS BRO, WIKI THAT SHIT!!11 Web 3.0 YOU’RE THE BOSS, DUDE, HIVEMIND. MEMETICS IS THE NEW MARKETING