All That Remains Singer Phil Labonte Tees One Up

At some point, you feel like beating your own face with a shoe each time it happens: A band dude announces his distaste for one of his own albums. That shit is so rude. I mean, saying so always sounds like a concession to those who dislike his band, when certainly the goal is for the speaker to seem candid. And in the process, the speaker sours any affection for the album felt by the 115,000 people who were nice enough to buy the damn shit. Plus, Earth to dildobrain, your partners at the record company are still trying to sell copies of the thing.

Even if your shit was an atrocity borne of ghastly intent and pants-shat execution (say, Lulu), stroking haters and burning fans is bad business. So maybe All That Remains frontman Phil Labonte was lost in Jamey Jasta’s eyes when he stated on Jasta’s podcast that All That Remains’ 2012 album A War You Cannot Win “overall sucked.” Why, you ask? In what way, you wonder? How so, you’re thinking? Not sure. But here’s what he said after that, see if it makes sense to you (via The PRP):

I think that ‘For We Are Many,’ in my opinion, [is] our best record. ‘Overcome’ has our biggest single ever. If “Two Weeks” was on ‘A War You Cannot Win,’ it would have been No. 1 for a long time. It’s just that when you go to radio, you have to prove yourself. So “Two Weeks” was really us pushing our way in, so I think it got to six or five or something. But I think that if it was now that we wrote that song, I think that it would be No. 1 for a while.

Elsewhere in the interview, Labonte warns bands of the evils of 360 deals with record companies. Here we’d like to warn record companies about signing a guy who will talk fans out of buying his own shit.