SCRAPED THAT GENIUS OFF OUR WHEEL

We have fired Gary Suarez. There will be no more Scraping Genius Off the Wheel.

We have put up with Gary’s bullshit for a long time now. Whether it was praising Bush or defending Chris fucking Cornell or giving unauthorized interviews where he admitted to being “the odd man out at MetalSucks” or naming Kingdom of Sorrow’s album the best of 2008 or Andrew WK’s I Get Wet the best metal album of the 21st century, Gary has been at the center of more screaming matches during MS editorial meetings than any other writer we’ve ever worked with. And we generally loved his writing just enough to put up with his nonsense.

But that Oceano review was going too far.

We don’t censor our writers here; if we assign them an album for review, we allow them to say whatever they like, regardless of our editors’ feelings. That’s why you’ll often read contradictory statements here on MS; we’re all grown-ups and we hope that you, our readers, will recognize that the opinions of one writer do always represent the opinions of MetalSucks as a whole.

But here’s the thing: we never assigned Gary to review Depths. He did it on his own.

We begged him to change the rating. He argued with us until we were all blue in the face, insisted it was the best thing to happen to death metal in years and blah blah blah. This coming from a man who had previously told us he loathed death metal.

And, as it turns out, not everyone understands that the opinions of one writer do not represent those of MS as a whole. Because suddenly his five outta five review is getting quoted in Oceano press releases and on their MySpace page and somewhere the dudes from Mastodon are probably wondering how we could possibly think that Depths is as good as Crack the Skye. Which we do not.

Once it was clear that Gary’s review had spiraled out of control and was doing actual damage to the reputation of MetalSucks, we asked him to write a statement basically saying “Hey, this is just my opinion.”

His response? “Go fuck yourselves.”

That’s a direct quote.

It wasn’t long before Vince and Sammy were actively holding Axl and Gary apart. Never in our three year history has there been a physical altercation amongst the MetalSucks staff, but that was that. When the dust had cleared we had to give Gary the boot.

So that’s that. You won’t be hearing from Gary around here anymore.

And for the record, we think that Depths sucks.

-Axl & Vince