Are you aware that Nickelback won an award this past weekend? Well, they did. The award for Outstanding Album at the 2nd Annual Western Canadian Music Awards. True. Check out THIS LINK for all the winners, all the categories. Congratulations, Nickelback.

Name? Russ Cogdell. Age? 25. Instrument? Guitar. How long have you been playing for? 12 years. All time favourite record? Bjork – Debut, or Vespertine Huey Lewis & The News – Sports Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Boatman’s Call Cyndi Lauper – She’s So Unusual Greatest experience on tour? Using a Hungarian toilet. Most horrible experience on tour? Watching a pair of naked dudes run on stage and dive into the crowd. Most embarrassing moment ever on stage? Sitting in a chair while playing a show on stage, while hallucinating with a 105 degree temperature & pneumonia. Do you have any sort of ritual before going on stage? Nope! With which band would you love to tour with? Nightwish or Rammstein. If I couldn’t be a musician, I would work as… A post production editor or a graphic designer. Best advice you ever heard? You’re not your fucking khakis. With which famous person (alive or dead) would you love to spend some time and why? Sally Fields, back when she was hot and a nun. What’s one thing you would like to achieve in life? Throw fireballs – just like in Street Fighter. Last Words: Ninja vanish!

Former THEATRE OF TRAGEDY and current LEAVES’ EYES singer Liv Kristine has signed a deal with Roadrunner Records for her solo project. Audio samples of the demo tracks “The Woman in Me” and “U R the Night” are currently available for download from Liv’s official web site – although you might be more familiar with Liv as the guest vocalist in new Cradle Of Filth song ‘Nymphetamine’! Both of her demo songs were produced by Kristine’s husband, Alexander Krull (ATROCITY singer), at his Mastersound Studio in Fellbach, Germany.

Were you in Glasgow last night for the first date of the Unholy Alliance tour? Here is the setlist that Slipknot & Slayer played… SLAYER Disciple War At Dawn They Sleep Fight Til Death Mandatory Suicide Hallowed Point Dead Skin Mask Seasons In The Abyss Chemical Warfare Hell Awaits South Of Heaven Angel of Death Postmortem Raining Blood SLIPKNOT Prelude 3.0 Blister Exists (SIC) Disasterpiece Three Nil Eyeless Vermilion Pulse Of The Maggots Iowa Heretic Anthem Duality Spit It Out People = Shit Wait And Bleed Surfacing Did you know? Hatebreed apparently don’t have a setlist this tour… they are winging it every night!

On the eve of a video shoot, this note from Walls Of Jericho… “compton here we come! or i mean anaheim. whatever thats the same right? close enough for me. either way we are leaving in the morning to head out to orange county and rock out for our first ever rock music video. should be a good time. we know the basic theme and its not supposed to be funny i guess but it makes me laugh every time i think or talk about it. maybe thats a good sign. we will see. if you are reading this and from the orange county area we are gonna need you to go ahead and come down to the chain reaction in anaheim bout 1pm on monday oct 4th. THATS THIS COMING MONDAY! show up and be an extra and become super popular amongst your friends. you know you want to. well if you read these on any regular basis you know that we never update these things. im not sure exactly why but the best reason i can come up with is that we arent fun or cool so nothing much really happens in our regular lives. and the band is pretty self explanitory. we play, we drive, we sleep, we fix our gear so we can play again. thats pretty much the idea. no reason to write that to you guys every day so we dont. on a similar subject worthy of note we just took an entire month off and it was amazing. i slept alot. i played some video games. i bought a motorcycle but unfortunately we leave for tour so i dont get to ride it til spring. but its good enough just to know that i made the commitment. im also drinking a coke. see how exciting we are! woo hoo! ok, well we kick off our tour with bleeding through, martyr ad, and it dies today this coming wednesday. bt and martyr are all good people and we already know we will enjoy it alot. im sure the it dies today dudes will be pretty sweet to boot. if not fuck em, we will arm wrestle for who gets to stay on the tour. haha. anyways, we go through oct 30th then drive straight home and leave for europe on nov 3rd. thats another month but get this, its with SICK OF IT ALL, 7 SECONDS, AND UNEARTH! HOLY FREAKIN SHIT!!!!!!! thats not even right how awesome that is. and to top the whole deal off, the last 10 days SLAPSHOT hops on and finishes it all out. thats gotta be the best tour in the entire world. we are easily the low part of the show but its still great to say its something we did. even if we are the ones everyone looks back at and wishes didnt make the cut. haha. whatever, fuckem. alright, im out. i gotta sleep. we leave at 8am and have a 36 hour drive that we need to do straight if we are gonna make the shoot. the live of rock stars just never stops.” mike

An update from Obituary’s vocalist, John Tardy… “I am sorry for all of you who might have tried to contact me in the last few days. The last Hurricane that hit us took my power out and my internet since Saturday. It has pretty much sucked! But, we did survive and are on schedule to get to Amsterdam on the 6th. It is my understanding that the first show in Eindhoven is already sold out. That has us really fired up and dieing to get there. I am just about over these storms, this is the 4th one we have been through. I will try to get back to all the emails and get caught up on the message board. Thanks for all the support and see you all soon!” John Tardy And… we have some more new photos! Look at them in the Obituary PHOTO GALLERY. “These are photos of us in the studio. We went into the studio for a couple of reasons. One: To try out RedRoom Recoring Studio in Ybor City, FL to see what kind of sound we get. Two: To try out Donald’s new Yamaha drum set and variety of Yamaha snare drums. Three: To try out a variety of Sabian cymbals. Four: To get a feel of the new material. We worked with Mark Prator who was involved in many other Obituary recordings through the years.” In other Obituary news, Trevor Peres is doing a live web chat TODAY on their site HERE, at 9pm EST (that’ll be 2am to us Brits).

Slipknot ‘Vermilion’ is now available for voting on the MTV2 NME chart HERE. Go cast a vote! In other ‘Knot news, ‘Vermilion’ has been added to the MTV2 TV playlist (see it between 6amí¢ä‰åäóì9am & 3pmí¢ä‰åäóì5pm) from today! And the video has been added to Scuzz!

GUITARDED – a 4 part series dedicated to the music and life of the “Guitar Hero” is about to launch! Radio 1’s Rock Show / Lock Up DJ Mike Davies will be guiding us all through in-depth interviews, sessions, lessons and live music from some of the best known guitarists around – this includes Steve Vai, Slash, Brian May, SLIPKNOT, Noel Gallagher, Lost Prophets, Datsuns, Graham Coxon, Brody Dalle, Andy Summers, Joe Satriani, Angus Young, Tony Iommi, Kerry King, Jimmy Page, Zakk Wylde, Auf Der Maur, Sid Vicious, Zakk Wylde, Robert Smith, Guthrie Govan, Gary Moore, John Squire, Jim Marshall, Fender, Gibson, Vox, Peavey, James Dean Bradfield, Aziz, Iron Maiden, Cooper Temple Clause, Ash, The Rapture, Mogwai, John Peel – the list goes on and on : Find out how the stars really came up their classic hooks and licks – Find out how the biggest names in guitar, practice and achieve their monster sounds – Listen to the ultimate selection of guitar based music – An absolute must for any rock fans or aspiring musicians. They have also raided the BBC archives and have exhumed rare interviews and sessions from Clapton, Angus Young, Tommi Iommi, Mark Knopfler, Paul McCartney, Keef Richards, Pete Townshend and Hendrix (including a very rare jingle that Hendrix wrote for Radio 1 back in the day we are told!). They have spoken to guitar manufacturers, amplifier manufacturers, fx pedal manufacturers and and more to get the real low down on what really does make the best set ups and best value for money for any aspiring rock musicians. They have spoken to all the major guitar magazines about all the latest guitar trends, buying figures and more… In the programs they will be featuring rundowns of the 20 greatest riffs / 20 greatest solos and the top 50 guitarists (according to votes from the guitar magazines and online voting from the shows themselves). Plus, following that on October 3rd – GUITARDED Part 2 – The second part of the Guitar hero specials returns with more in depth interviews and special sessions and lesson from some of the biggest names in Rock – In tonight’s show this includes – Noel Gallagher, SLIPKNOT, Jimmy Page, Jim Marshall, Cooper Temple Clause, Tommi Iommi, Gibson and Auf Der Maur. Also includes the 2nd part of the competition to win Joe Satriani’s amp, Brian May’s practice amp and a Les Paul guitar.

A lesson in 3 Inches Of Blood, as told by frontman Cam Pipes: “I’m sure you’ve all heard various gossip about the band over the past couple of months and until now we haven’t said anything to clarify some of the stories. To confirm, Bobby Froese and Sunny Dhak are no longer part of the band. The two of them decided they could no longer commit to touring and needed to deal with some personal matters. Naturally, we were all quite shocked and disappointed by their decision, but after much discussion we understand why they needed to do this and we wish them the best. We decided afterwards that we didn’t want to call it a day, so we’ve recruited the guitar talents of Justin Hagberg from war-metalers, ALLFATHER, and Shane Clark who plays in TEN MILES WIDE and THE ALMIGHTY PUNCHDRUNK. We’re also pleased to announce that we’ll be doing a tour of the U.S.A. as main support for METAL CHURCH.”

Following our earlier few photos, we’ve now added up a bunch more live pics for you from the recent London shows of Most Precious Blood & Zao. You can check them all out in the Photo Gallery of the band’s artist section!