Head to The Meadows with Red Fang

And the winner for the most far-flung hard music tour of the year is... Communion of Sirens, featuring Opeth, In Flames and Red Fang. Should be interesting to see how the melodic, straight-forward rockers will fare with the more traditional metal-loving audience their Swedish cohorts attract. The package will be coming through New York City this December to perform at the horrendous Terminal 5, and with any luck I'll be catching it from the balcony. More dates listed below.

The Portland group have also just released a video for their Scion A/V collabo, "The Meadows," and it's as good humored as the gents that make up the group. Check it out! Couldn't be happier for their continued success.

SDCC Dreaming: The Cannibal Corpse Edition

I'm not going to lie, I have San Diego Comic Con on the brain. This is the second consecutive year that I will not be attending (after a pretty hot streak of going for the past five or six years), so I'm definitely yearning for some nerd magic in my life.

One of my favorite things to do at SDCC—besides starting trouble, baiting Glenn Danzig and seeing old industry friends—is perusing rows and rows of comics, toys, T-shirts and assorted other merch, thinking: "Who thought this would be a good idea?"

With that in mind, I present to you: the Cannibal Corpse comic book. I've never really liked CC, but I'm sure at least a handful of their black-clad fans have closed their eyes and tried to imagine what the visceral horror of Corpse lyrics would look like. Well, you can put that imagination away, kids. Available just in time for SDCC, Cannibal Corpse: Eviseration Plague illustrates every song from their latest album of the same name by acclaimed artist Vince Locke. At 96 pages, this graphic novel is a hefty testament to the artist's love of this death metal muses. And talk about exclusive—the comic is only available through Hot Topic during this summer's Rockstar Mayhem fest.

For a preview, click here. And for more coverage of the San Diego Comic Con, check out my forthcoming reports on The Beat.

Karma To Burn Reunite

There are few bands more appropriately named than Karma To Burn. The (mostly) instrumental trio from Morgantown, WV garnered as much acclaim for their meaty riffs and take-no-prisoners performance style as they did for their drug-fueled offstage antics. Led by a charismatic bass-playing sociopath named Rich "Little Dickie" Mullins, there was no telling what kind of trouble you'd get into hanging out with them—nor the snake-charming schemes you'd be let in on. This was all around 1996; and after the new millennium came and went—as did Karma To Burns' four-album career—I lost track of the guys.

Oddly enough, while Karma To Burn remain an obscure footnote in the American "desert rock" genre, they really were fucking huge in Europe. How huge? Well, let's put it this way: their current American club tour is a mere warm-up for their overseas festival appearances.

As fate would have it, they're playing tonight (4/20!) at NYC's Lit bar. But since I'm living it up in Florida until tomorrow, my plan is to catch them next week at Philly's Trocadero. Who's coming with me?

For a full list of shows, check out Karma To Burns' Myspace page. I, for one, can't wait to see them again (and get a T-shirt for posterity this time around).