Stream Machine Head's "The Blackening" Online, More Updates From Rob

For this week only, you can stream the entire forthcoming Machine Head album "The Blackening" on Roadrunner Australia's MySpace page.

In other news, Machine Head frontman Robert Flynn has issued the following update about the first video and single off "The Blackening" as well as a reissue of "Burn My Eyes":

"Gotta couple of new developments going on in the camp. We have decided that we will not be releasing the video for 'Now I Lay Thee Down' as the first video off of 'The Blackening', the main reasoning being that we want to come out with a harder track for the first video. We came out with 'Davidian' off 'Burn My Eyes', we came with 'Ten Ton Hammer' off 'The More Things Change', we came with 'Imperium' off 'Through the Ashes of Empires'... and we feel we need to come out swinging with 'The Blackening'. It felt weird coming with a more melodic track as the first video, so us and Roadrunner spoke and thankfully they agreed, so we will be shooting another video. We would LOVE to shoot a proper video for the opening track 'Clenching the Fists of Dissent, but we are completely conundrummed about how to shorten our 10-minute-and-34-second megalithic opener down to 5 minutes without having to remove entire sections at a time, or worse, edit them down to 20 second pieces (but hey, any suggestions are welcome). So, our most likely candidate is 'Aesthetics of Hate', and we may shoot it as early as this week. It's unfortunate that we won't have a video to coincide with the release, especially since in Europe the video market is much stronger than in America, but if that's the only hiccup we encounter for this album's release, then we're WAY ahead of the 'hiccups' we had with the last one.

"Super stoked to be going out on the HEAVEN AND HELL tour in America; for those of you living under a rock, that's BLACK SABBATH with the mighty Ronnie James Dio on vocals, who recorded some of the best songs in all of metal. MEGADETH is also on the bill which is fuckin' killer, those two bands are the reason there's a MACHINE HEAD, and we are honored to be a part of it. This is gonna be all about paying homage to The Masters.

"To the best of our knowledge, the 'Burn My Eyes' re-release that was supposed to have coincided with the 25th anniversary of Roadrunner Records back in 2005 and was then re-scheduled to be released in October 2006, has been back-burnered. And as far as we're concerned, that's a good thing. This is the year of 'The Blackening', and the time frame to re-release it has passed, not to mention that the idea of re-releasing a 13-year old album that we already celebrated with two anniversary shows (three years ago) makes zero sense to us. We were never excited about reissuing it to begin with, as it was just gonna have a bunch of b-sides, and wouldn't have been nearly as cool some of the other re-issues that had DVDs and all sorts of cool shit... so, as much as some of you may be bummed, know that it's better this way.