INTERVIEWS:
BLACK OATH "To Below And Beyond" (Doomentia) SCORE: 86/100
Holy shit, a new full length from Italian doomsters Black Oath! Had no idea it was out, probably because for awhile it was released independently through the band. Suffice it to say, it took me quite a long while to really get into the disc, simply because there was an AWFUL lot of melodic passages and vibe to this disc. I still don't feel it stacks up to their previous two killer efforts "Ov Qliphoth And Darkness" or "The Third Aeon." The approach is a little different, that's for sure. After the short 2 minute instrumental "intro," which I might add retains a really dark feeling, the dark acoustic like guitar opener of 'Wicked Queen' starts the disc off, and though there's still a dark feeling there, it's unusually laid back compared to what they've done in the past. Still, the vocal melodies do shine, with some catchy choruses throughout, alongside a few structure and tempo changes, including a heavier set of instrumentation just to "balance" things out. 'I Am Athanor' starts right off the bat with some speedy leads, though the melodic sung parts are quite catchy, I had problems with this track at first. It's almost TOO melodic in many parts. This tune goes through A LOT, which might have added a bit to the confusion, but there's no denying the band keeps things interesting for the almost 8 minutes in length. 'Mysterion' too starts off doomy and somewhat heavy, keeping the darkness out front but reined in quite a bit. This is a tune that retains the doom tempo almost from start to finish well. 'Flesh To Gold' is easily one of my most favorite cuts on the disc, especially the way the soaring and emotionally charged vocal work at the end grabs you and crushes you with great force. The ending of this song is one of the most amazing moments on the disc, but the band isn't quite through with you yet; as we witness another truly awesome cut in 'Healing Hands Of Time,' with great singalong passages and soaring vocal work on the choruses, by now a good trademark of this disc. The melancholy and somewhat doom tempo proves this band hasn't abandoned the doom elements completely; they're just a bit stepped back compared to the melodies. 'Sermon Through Fire' was mostly a 5 minute instrumental with a little spoken word passage to it; not really much to it but the ending darkens things a bit and brings the heaviness to the forefront. Finally, we have CD ender 'To Below And Beyond,' which brings up some guitar elements you've heard earlier on in the album. They do try and keep it interesting, but the synth choir voices at the end alongside the lone piano notes took a turn out into left field, leaving me going "why?" Still, they take the huge roaring twist vocally right before the songs, what I will term "first end." Overall, the band is still crafting good material, but as I said, it's definitely going to strike you as quite a different recording from what they've done previously. In the end though, it's still doom, and still, vocally this may be some of the band's best work. It's not a perfect cohesion, but an album that has worked it's way into my heart and collection, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I digest these albums FULLY many times before committing pen to paper.
Contact: Doomentia Records.
BLOOD FEAST "The Future State Of Wicked" (Hell's Headbangers) SCORE: 88/100
Holy shit dude, next thing I expect to read is "Sam Kinison found alive." Yep, the latest vocalist to tackle the microphone (and newest since their "reformation" sometime in the late 2000's) sounds JUST like what you'd think to hear if the beloved comedian Sam Kinison took over for a thrash metal band. And quite frankly, that sick "auuuuugh!" vocal style is what pushes many of these songs RIGHT over the top! And old Sam, uh, I mean, Chris Natalini, starts the disc off with a long winded scream that shows this CD ain't taking any prisoners or showing any signs of slowing down... Well... More on THAT in a minute. A blistering whirlwind of speedy yet thrashy riffs with very quick opener "INRI" and we're underway. Right on into 'Off With Their Heads,' which, if you didn't pay attention to the track change and difference in time, you'd swear this track was a continuation of the first. Some absolutely PSYCHO lead riffing comes courtesy of track 3 (in case you lost count) 'Brethren,' a pretty straightforward but brutal affair. Now interestingly enough, Blood Feast this time around chose to play around with some slower tempos (on followup 'By The Slice,' but unfortunately it doesn't take well with their crazed assault.) There are a few odd riffs in this cut as well, but things REALLY take a nosedive with the cut 'Who Prays For The Devil,' definitely one of my least favorite tracks on the record. YES, I still love doom metal, but it's hard to really take this cut in. However, there's still some cool stuff to find within this cut, so it's not a complete loss. The choruses REALLY suffer the most on this one. One of my favorite tunes was 'Last Rites,' which plays up more on the dark and eerie riffing, and is one of the very few times a slower approach works well here. It mainly has to do with the absolutely crushing thrash riffs. When slower is used properly, a track like 'Nein' hits all the right senses. 'Remnants' was an absolutely ripping thrash instrumental, clocking in at almost a minute and a half, before the disc blinds you with some swirling crazed lead guitar assaults to round out this 5 minute piece entitled 'The Burn.' Nothing totally original or innovative here, but this ripping thrash assault is power driven by the crazed and maniacal throat rippings of one Chris Natalini, who has REALLY made his mark here... The blood will get boiling and the rage factor significantly increased, and I daresay this will become a favorite among those who remember this band from the 80's (though surprisingly, it's one of the few 80's metal bands I hadn't had the chance to listen to).
Contact: Hell's Headbangers Records.
DAMMERFARBEN "Herbstpfad" (Northern Silence) SCORE: 78/100
Yeah, yeah, I know... A CD from 2012... I've held off on reviewing this CD for quite some time, because frankly I didn't quite know what to make of it. We reviewed their "Im Abendrot" album back in issue #52, getting damn near a perfect score, as it is a near masterpiece. The band still utilizes lots of different tempos, structure changes and speeds, but they're not as pronounced as the debut. In fact, I daresay that much of this 7 song affair is instrumental in nature, as your opening track is a short 2 minute instrumental, then track 3 and THEN track 5. And CD ender 'Vintervisa' is mostly a "retelling," so to speak instrumentally wise, of the opening cut, this time utilizing female vocals instead of the blackened ones. It's a strange disc, for sure, and it seems to me like there's an almost folkish doom metal element permeating the disc. After your opening instrumental (which has nice folkish violins, or is that a cello, which is melancholic and eerily beautiful), we cut to the first "real" song, in 'Im Spatherbst,' sadly one of the weakest cuts on the disc. Usually, the varying and sometimes dizzying yet diverse elements play as their greatest strength: here, the slower, almost doomy instrumentation finds itself in a strange mix with the blackened vocals. Personally, I think they should have used a clean sung voice for much of this track, but that's a personal opinion. It hits home more towards the end of the track, but still it's not a terrible opener. The followup is one of the three instrumentals mentioned; mostly melodic acoustic guitar work and it's not really driving the point home for me. 'Zu Nachtlicher Stund' soon rights the ship a bit, however, and this time the folkish influences turn an almost epic sound out of this track, right before the ADD fired brains of this group steer the ship in a complete 180 turn and pour on the blackened instrumental fury. Much better tune here. And though I somewhat complained about THREE instrumentals on a mere 7 track disc, it's track 5 'Lov I Hoststormen' that completely blew me away! This is a cut featuring ONLY synths and higher noted violins but man it's put together so well, it's a "top ten" of instrumental tracks for the ages! And finally, the fast paced blackened instrumentation wastes no time in cranking up cut 6, 'Und Winters Kalte Kehret Ein,' proving that if they had a mind to, Dammerfarben could indeed craft an epic, Nordic style black metal masterpiece. This cut has more of the blackened fury than any other cut on the disc, but true to form and fashion (or anti-fashion, as the case may be), they throw a curveball at the proceedings, threatening to bring doom metal to the forefront. But in fact, the slower proceedings are almost waltz-like in quality, proving once again that Dammerfarben indeed won't sit still long enough for you to get comfortable.
Still, with all that being said, the disc seems rather experimental in nature, begging me to ask first off, WHY only 7 songs? It's almost an EP for Odin's sake, barely hitting the 30 minute mark! And WHY 3 instrumentals? And a lone female voice on the CD ender? Overall, it's a bit too "light hearted" in many places, really, compared to their stunning debut. It's obviously not a failure, mind you Dammerfarben are way too skilled to "fail," but I will ALWAYS prefer the debut over this album any and every day. Still, there's some nice and melodic stuff in amidst the "madness," and that instrumental gets to me every time. What's next?
Contact: Northern Silence Productions.
DESOLATION ANGELS "King" (Desolation Angels) SCORE: 82/100
A band who released a somewhat NWOBHM flavored album in 1986, and then somewhat disappeared until this newest release in 2017... Right off the bat I will say I didn't really know what to expect out of this U.K. based band who has since relocated to the States. Suffice it to say this band knows how craft some catchy material with hints at heaviness, something that many bands across the spectrum of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal movement knew a LOT about.
The albums starts off with the riff-tastic, almost folk inspired lead guitar work of the cut 'Doomsday.' Good sung vocals, and I detect a marked similarity in vocal approach, not unlike Dave Wall's efforts on that 1986 release. Paul Taylor knows how to craft his delivery to fit the mood of the song, something that will become more evident as some of the material takes a darker turn later on down the disc. And of course the lead solo work is good; I would expect that since both Keith AND Robin were duelling guitars on the debut full length in 1986 that their guitar skills had only improved markedly in over 25 years, and this album proves the point well. Energetic and rockin' riffs bring up the cut 'Another Turn Of The Screw,' this time adding a somewhat heavier headbanging flair to the proceedings, not forgetting to craft some decent choruses while power rocking. Slow and melodic follows with 'Devil Sent,' and this band does melodic quite well. 'Rotten To The Core' follows up with one of their heaviest and darkest cuts on the record (and by no means the lone wolf of the bunch), adding some cool heaviness at the track's end, though you're never bludgeoned with it. 'Your Blackened Heart' I didn't care for at first, it's a heavier and darker number that took me quite some time to really "get." At first I thought that maybe it just was forced heaviness, but I somewhat get a tad turned off by the heavier guitars; overall it's the weaker choruses that made me turn away a bit. Still, not a horrible tune by any means; just not playing to the strengths of the band. And what, might you ask, are those strengths? Glad you asked. Followup 'Find Your Life' became, to me, one of the most enjoyable of the bunch and proof positive that NWOBHM bands crafted amazing melodies that were heavy in their emotional content; not necessarily the bludgeoning over the head with sonc riffery that makes this track one of the best on the record, one that will stand with you for a long time. Ballad like it may be to start off with, but if you stick with it I'm sure you'll agree that the heavier choruses soar and the vocal work is amongst it's best here. 'Hellfire' was an interesting twist, a kick ass, heavy as hell headbanging affair, and something I didn't really think I would hear on this type of disc. Catchy choruses, etc. make this a somewhat surprise standout. And if you think 'Find Your Life' was such a fluke, get a load of followup 'Sky Of Pain,' which contains JUST as much epic melody and catchy singalong choruses as the aforementioned hit, and it also has some genuine rockin' feeling to it. It's a little less "ballady" as 'Find Your Life,' to a degree, but doesn't stop it from being another amazing highlight. Sadly, the disc closes on somewhat of a weak note, as CD ender 'My Demon Inside,' in my honest opinion, was way too weak to close out the album (I feek 'Sky Of Pain' did that job nicer than any other cut on the disc). It's not terrible, by any means, but it's too melodic, too laid back, and not enough catchiness going on here. Adding a bit of insult to injury, the song just fades out at the end. Still, you'll find good solos within, and I dare say that save for a few blunders, the band is definitely not only firing on all cylinders, but they took a few risks that definitely paid off and will turn some heads in many different directions. Kudos to the band for branching out JUST enough to keep people from scratching their heads, while understanding the basic flavor and formula of the NWOBHM era brought into the "modern day" era. I definitely look forward to seeing what else the band can come up with on future releases; possibly the heavier sounds will permeate, or maybe there will be more material akin to 'Sky Of Pain' and 'Find Your Life.'
Contact: Desolation Angels.
DREAD SOVEREIGN "For Doom The Bell Tolls" (Van) SCORE: 93/100
Here's something interesting... A 6 song affair, this time with only TWO instrumentals instead of three. The disc is "shorter," song wise, but there's NO bad songs here... The reason this scores higher, even with two almost useless "filler" pieces. Though I will admit, the opening instrumental (which is also the title track, go figure) does set the disc up nicely. 'Twelve Bells Toll In Salem' starts things off, and it's a 13 minute affair, folks. Very mournful guitar work, and against a minimal instrumentational backdrop, the vocals shine quite well here. There's a lot of solo instrumentation to be heard, which isn't unsurprising given the song length. On to 'This World Is Doomed,' which absolutely ROCKS! Killer rockin' guitar work opens this track up nicely; an explosive more uptempo treat from Alan and company. You start noticing some psychedelic and swirling guitar work; pay attention because THAT becomes more impressive later on. Alan does some of his most vicious and scathing work on this track, filled with venom, fire and fury! Then the aforementioned somewhat useless instrumental 'Draped In Sepulchral Fog,' which runs about 2 minutes. Didn't care much for the scrapey guitar work at the end. Could have given us another song. I'm going to skip track 5 for right now, because I want to discuss this in depth, but the CD ender 'Live Like An Angel, Die Like A Devil...' Yes, it's a Venom cover. And to add psychedelic guitar riffing to a heavy track... Alan could do Cronos' job for him if he decided to give up Venom, that much is for sure. The end of the track was a little bit of a tease, I think... Are we going to someday have another Dread Sovereign cover of Venom's 'Witching Hour?'
Alright, the reason I held off on track 5, 'The Spines Of Saturn.' HOLY MOTHER OF THE COSMOS, someone Out-Hawkwinded the mighty Hawkwind! This has to be the most surprising cut on the disc, complete with spacey synths, those psychedelic guitars and still retaining a doomy feeling. Something I thought I'd NEVER hear Alan and company pull off. To me, this is more like an EP, but dammit if this isn't the best album Dread Sovereign has ever created. Sure, I'm kinda pissed that they had to add two instrumentals to what essentially is a 6 song affair, but they got every song RIGHT, as opposed to their last disc, where there were a few tracks that weren't quite solid. I still recommend getting this gem, as it has enough to keep you interested for QUITE awhile.
Contact: Van Records.
DROIDS ATTACK "Sci Fi Or Die" (Independent) SCORE: 98/100
Damn! The mighty riff... Hymns have been offered up to it, and people the world over bartered up their souls just for the chance to hear it. Megadeth's "Peace Sells But Who's Buying" album proved Mustaine made a contract with the devil to procure more great riffs in three songs than most bands can muster their entire careers. And Droids Attack crafts an entire ALBUM around the power of the riff! Folks, this album is kick ass from start to finish. "Stoner metal" is what this band is pigeonholed as, though I detect a bit more in here. Loud, shouted/sung vocals accentuate the heaviness that punches through this album like a steel drill through the earth's crust. Okay, insane descriptions aside, just about every song on this disc is great. Even the opener 'Die Glocke,' though starting out with a bit more laid back fare, contains rockin' riffage, though the few points detracted for it's taking awhile to get up off the floor and start cranking the riff... Though with vocals, it seems more like an intro! 'New Plague,' here we go. My favorite cuts here are the one-two punch of 'Clawhammer Suicide' followed by 'Brahma Astra,' the former cut containing great catchy choruses and quite aggressive and loud, and when Brad yells 'it's time to stop fucking around,' they MEAN it!! Start/stop riffage reigns supreme here! The latter is just fucking cool altogether, it's a CRUSHING heavy tune, complete with 'Bombs away!' in the choruses. Simplistic, but it's as effective as a twenty ton sledge hammer to the face! And this tune incidentally contains tons of instrumental passages as well, like they decided to throw in some almost improv jamming in there while keeping it heavy! 'The Maze,' a noteworthy almost two minute piece, is an instrumental! And it's heavy! And riff-addled! And it ROCKS!! There is quite an abundance of instrumental passages to be found in many songs, though 6 and 8 minute songs NEVER get boring here. Might I also mention 'Mashenomak,' which is a VERY slow doom metal tempo like piece? It's not all faster headbanging pace, and there's some singing too! Want more? Check out 'Mashenomak Strikes Again,' the followup... Yes, complete with rockin' riffs and fuck, what's this? A Saxophone that ROCKS??? Sax solo?!? Damn, these dudes thinking outside the box. By track 8 though ('Rebirth,') some of these riffs sound like they're interchangeable with 'Brahma Astra,' but fuck, who cares!?!? The two final tracks 'The Annunaki' and 'Enoch' have some surprises of their own, but damnit I've said more than enough already!!! Where the FUCK has this band been all my life, and they've got like THREE other full lengths? WHY isn't this band bigger than they are? WHY the fuck are you still reading about "Sci Fi Or Die?" BUY this album or die, goddamnit!!!
Contact: Droids Attack.
GALLILEOUS "Stereotrip" (Gallileous) SCORE: 89/100
You'd never think to find a stoner rock band coming out of Poland of all places, a land known more for extreme bands like Behemoth, Vader and Decapitated. But like the oddity that is Honcho and The Satellite Circle from Norway, we find the most amazing bands in the strangest places. Now granted, Gallileous started out life as a more funeral doom sort of band, complete with extreme vocal work, but slowly over their career morphed into a heavy, fuzzed out stoner rock band. Which is where we found them in 2016, and I must say I enjoyed this album a LOT more than one of their previous efforts "Necrocosmos." Right from the get go, though, this looks to be a disaster, with opener 'Eaten By The Universe' containing some rather odd clean sung vocals. The song title gets repeated quite a bit, but the guitar work is fuzzed out and kinda heavy. It's not a bad tune, but definitely not one of my favorites. Funny thing is, this cut is not even 3 minutes long, like the track 'Open Window,' which is another cut I wasn't too crazy about. This one contained a LOT of higher register singing, and a few strange repetitive guitar work near the end. Still, the power of the riff compels, meaning these two cuts aren't the disaster they seem to be. 'Sonic Boom' was a rip rockin' treat, and many of these tracks will be stuck in your head for a long while. Still, the doom metal roots are not totally abandoned, which made 'Born Into Space' an absolute treat, with the slower vibe and almost etherial sung vocals. 'Dust On My Back' starts off with crunchy rockin' riffs, keeping things near a midtempo pace and bringing lots of solo instrumentation before the slower and heavier doom carries us to the end. It seems to me that Gallileous is at it's absolute best when giving these songs a bit of space to breathe and grow; the faster and shorter songs oftentimes aren't their best, even if a number of 3 and 4 minute songs do their best to make you rethink that position. If they're rockin' hard, they're great, and for that there's no shame. The songs have good variety to them, and even the spacey, more melodic 'The Sound Of The Stereo Sun' makes for a good listen. I'd love to know what kind of effects they're utilizing on the guitars, as it's seemingly a bit different from the usual stoner rock fare with Sunn, Green and Orange amplification. Not a perfect record, but I definitely dig the heavier, stoner rock end of the spectrum these guys are travelling down!
Contact: Gallileous.
GRAVE DIGGER "Return Of The Reaper" (Napalm) SCORE: 86/100
Haven't really listened to much Grave Digger, well, not since I had the amazing "Heavy Metal Breakdown" on cassette. That was their first record. Thankfully, what impressed me most about that record was how heavy they could be, while still retaining that snarling, evil and dark vocal style that just slices the endings off your nerves... In a good way! Still, after the somewhat interesting intro (which serves as the title track), I must say the first two tracks didn't instill much confidence. 'Hell Funeral' is a bit of a speedy number, and it's okay, but doesn't really pack much of a punch. Too much power metal oriented, and I mean more in a modern day sense. Followup 'War God' is another fast tune, it's okay as well, but nothing to rave about. Then the electronic opening of 'Tattooed Rider' kinda reminded me of the opening of Priest's 'Turbo Lover.' Still, hands down one of the meanest and most bad ass cuts on the record, a true head bangin,' fist waving metal fucking ANTHEM. Adding multivocals to the choruses is something that works well here; you'll find them doing this A LOT. Followup 'Resurrection Day' is no slouch either, some dark and heavy yet punishing riffs keep things at a frenzied pace, and the choruses keep it heavy. 'Season Of The Witch' is another down and dirty skullcrusher, kudos to the band for the Middle Eastern guitar riffs opening the track up (though I fail to see the significance on a track with this particular subject matter). 'Road Rage Killer' might sound like a silly subject to tackle, but it's a speedier number that reminds me of heavier 80's styled speedy power metal. And it's definitely got that Judas Priest vibe, but with a MUCH heavier edge. We're still rockin' here folks, as the onslaught continues with 'Grave Desecrator' utilizing an interesting tactic: bringing the crushing heaviness while allowing the choruses to "lighten" things up a bit. It's still a mean rockin' cut. 'Satan's Host' reminded me of a more punk tinged rocker, and it's a fun little tune. And another one of my alltime favorites off this disc in 'Dia De Los Muertos,' man what a kick ass track, and fun to sing along to as well. One mean riff rockin, kick ass tune. I use that term a lot, 'cause that's what the majority of this disc does. 'Death Smiles At All Of Us' was an interesting track, a bit less on the bone crunching heaviness; more of a modern day era power metal tune. It's cool, but not the dirty, down and heavy rocker I'm wanting. Still, CD ender 'Nothing To Believe.' It's the damn ballad folks. And the rough gritty vocals do NOT hold up well trying to sing this one in a more melodic fashion. The choruses aren't bad though, well, when they "heavy" it up a bit, but most of this shouldn't have been done, in my opinion. It's a skullcrusher to be sure with lots of kick ass tunes, and I daresay it's damn enjoyable. Yes, I know they have since released a new album, but there's older stuff I wanted to cover, and this one deserved second mentioning...
Contact: Napalm Records.
HELSTAR "Vampiro" (Ellefson Music) SCORE: 97/100
Holy crap!!! If power metal were this dark, aggressive and just rabidly HUNGRY like this, I would be such a HUGE fan!! I've never heard a power metal singer who literally SOUNDS like he has 300 years of vocal experience under his belt. Whatever else you may think about the almighty Mr. James Rivera, I think this is the most ungodly record of Helstar's career. And I absolutely enjoyed "A Distant Thunder" and "Burning Star." However, I never got a chance to hear "Nosferatu," which may be the reason I'm so overtly skullcrushed by this album. People say this album is in the vein of "Nosferatu," and yes the Vampire theme continues, which is a very apt persona for Mr. Rivera. Dark acoustics, heavy thrash riffing, punishing drums, and of course the Rob Halford like high ended notes that Rivera pushes way past the stratosphere. The man exudes an air of snarling, sneering and downright sinister power, even employing some almost black metal vocals; witness the song 'Abolish The Sun' near the end for some jaw dropping monstrous moments. SO... How about the rest of the band? Well, new guitarist Andrew Atwood is definitely no slouch; he plays with precision, speed and power, but most importantly KNOWS how to craft emotionally laid solos. Very important when many of these tunes have several of them to choose from. 'Black Cathedral' was one of the first tunes I heard, and I FIRST heard it in a live setting when Helstar for the very first time in their career played in Atlanta last year. The low toned vocals work so well here, and damn near everywhere else, that you imagine this centuries old vampire at his most dark and powerful. Check out the live clip we uploaded on our facebook page for his pre-song banter. You won't find a 'Run With The Pack' type of catchy, anthemic rocker, though 'Repent In Fire' comes about the closest with those heavy, multivocal shouted choruses. No sir, this is all about creating a dark, haunting, sinister and dangerous feeling that pure evil incarnate is RIGHT around the corner. Just when you think you haven't heard anything different on this record, 'Abolish The Sun' comes along and displays an almost doom metal approach from start to near-finish. These are some crushingly heavy tunes, folks, and so very dark for what power metal normally gives off. My only complaints are quite few: 'Off With His Head' is a bit too straightforward for the skill and power this band possesses, but that's a somewhat minor complaint. These songs run about the 5 minute mark, though the 6 minute doom metal like piece 'Abolish The Sun' rather makes sense. And to end the CD, some beautiful violins, cellos and melodic acoustic guitars alongside Rivera singing in a surprisingly melodic tone, showcasing James' "softer" side of delivery. Such a masterful album that will leave you completely engulfed in a nightmarish, sinister world, definitely gets my vote for power metal album of 2016, even if it REALLY is a mixture of dark punishing thrash and power metal. No, not much from 2016 comes close, well, maybe except for the Visigoth album... But that's a story for later on in this issue...
Contact: Ellefson Music Production.
ICE WAR "Ice War" (Shadow Kingdom) SCORE: 83/100
There's been a LOT of talk about Ice War, and most of it positive. This album pops right out of the gate with some rockin' guitar work and an almost galloping guitar pace which is found throughout the disc. A quite energetic tune in 'Battle Zone' to start the disc off. The vocal work here is mostly higher toned, though never TOO high (like some power metal singers we cringe at). Followup 'Dream Spirit' reminds me of that NWOBHM approach yet more in line with what the Swedes were doing with 80's metal. A more melodic approach here and I dare say a tune that could have been found on several NWOBHM single releases from "back in the day." Now my most major complaints: The two followup tracks are among the worst I've heard on the record. 'Standing Rock' goes for sheer speed and power, but the choruses are really bothersome and the guitar work doesn't sit well with me. I can't even get through this tune or the next one; followup 'I Am The Prisoner' has some cringing moments, with those "whoah-ooooooh's" which REALLY grate the nerves. Ice War chose to utilize some very odd guitar riffs too, which made this tune that much worse. However, we get back to some killer rockin' riffery with 'Slaver's Whip,' complete with some choppy guitar work bordering on thrash. Cool choruses, too, which are a standout on this disc, though they are usually limited to "naming" the title of the track they appear on. 'Reverence Of Gold' sees our one man band leader utilize a rare lower register, complete with some uptempo rockin' riffs, while 'We Will Stand' and CD ender 'Falling Out' close the album out superbly with not one, but TWO anthemic like cuts. 'We Will Stand' seems to be a bit more complex than the rest by utilizing some structure changes and daring to be a bit more "daring," so to speak, in it's choice of instrumental passages, while 'Falling Out' has some of the best vocal work on the disc, choosing to soar and rise in delivery with the choruses. It is fun to sing and does make for a great CD ender track. Still, there's a TON of repetition in the vocal and lyric department; not a huge distraction since the songs are fairly short (not one song manages to ever reach the 5 minute mark, and 3 minutes is the average length of many). I'm not completely overwhelmed but there are quite a few good songs on this 8 track affair... That being said, those two songs REALLY drag the score down, but there's still plenty to enjoy from this solid outing.
Contact: Shadow Kingdom Records.
KHEMMIS "Hunted" (20 Buck Spin) SCORE: 97/100
High praise abounds for this band from Denver, Colorado, and the praise is all deserving. It's those riffs, man... Right from the opening track, you hear those "bright and full" guitar leads that are the innovative cornerstone of the entire disc. Still, these purveyors of massive doom can "bring the pain," so to speak, choosing to inflect some harsh brutality riff wise (witness the brutal death throes of 'Three Gates,') and the crunchy guitar openings of the title track. And if you're a fan of Pallbearer, then you'll be delighted to hear the spellbinding duo of Ben and Phil work their vocal magic. Still, I felt that to add extreme vocal work was a bit out of place on 'Candlelight,' the only blight to this masterful affair. The sudden drop into funeral doom was the first and most obvious clue. It was an awkward switch: Khemmis has no need for extreme vocal work here. We mentioned 'Three Gates' earlier, though, and the death vocals actually worked well here. Contradicting myself am I? Not when you realize that on this track, Khemmis is actually emulating November's Doom in fine fashion, complete with a bit more uptempo pace. Still, they know when to bring the doom back in. 'Beyond The Door' is a thing of beauty, very mournful and melancholic, and those soaring vocals! And a few blackened vocals do their magic near the end; oh yes, I'm seeing more cohesion here. The last two tracks probably have more instrumental passages than the rest, though our CD ending title track has some rockin' riffs that take up a lot of space. They know how to jam (though I wish they'd bring more of the heavier rockin' to the table - very small complaint though), they bring the crunchy dark doom, and they can flat out occupy a very nice space in my CD collection. For fans of Pilgrim, Pallbearer and the like, there's another band you desperately need to add to your shelf.
Contact: 20 Buck Spin Records.
KING WITCH "Under The Mountain" (Listenable) SCORE: 93/100
Scotland, Scotland... Hmmm... What do I know about music from Scotland? Well, Alestorm's unique brand of Pirate metal for one... As for 80's metal, there's Chasar, brilliant NWOBHM lads. Hell, I know more about 80's metal bands from Ireland (Trojan, Killerwatt, Blackwych, etc.) And maybe I'm a tad out of touch, but a heavy brand of doom metal? Female fronted? And the music doesn't stop there; truly branching out and incorporating quite a few diverse elements within these 9 tracks. Right off the bat, the opener 'Beneath The Waves' will remind you of how truly heavy and ominous doom SHOULD sound. In fact, I'm sure there's a bit of Candlemass and early Sabbath worship going on here. The riffs though, are MASSIVELY heavy, nearly all the way throughout the disc. The percussion is absolutely floor crushing, and the bass guitar gets equal time to shine, but the absolute star of this disc is Laura Donnely, who is a massively BALLSY heavy fucking metal singer. She soars, she sings, and she is such a powerful presence within this band that (as I saw one reviewer harp on) she doesn't NEED to have her vocals pushed forward into the mix. Her absolute acrobatic vocal abilities shine; nowhere more than on the cut 'Solitary' (which in fact, reminds me a LOT of the Orchid title track to their "Capricorn" album in execution and "heavy slowness.") The doom madness crushes with 'Carnal Sacrifice,' in which a nice doomy build effortlessly transposes into some faster headbanging and soul crushing heaviness. It's down to a bit of melodic doom with 'Solitary' (which was already mentioned), but folks, it's still HEAVY despite being a tad "laid back." And the title track: Holy shit, did this band EVER pick the best song on the record for that honour. Fast raging guitar work, soaring vocal acrobatics, and suddenly drops down to some soul crushing massive heavy doom. All in a 4 and a half minute song. Another good doomy track in 'Approaching The End,' man you just never know WHERE this band will take you. And the almost "ballad" like piece, where Laura proves that she can sing, but it's still a HEAVY voice. Almost at odds with the slightly ballad "atmosphere," yet the bluesy guitar work manages to pull you in. It's different, but somehow still works. "Bright" leads pull you in for the start of 'Hunger,' and I dare say if 'Under The Mountain' is their best track for a title track, 'Hunger' gets the nod as the most "accessible" track of the record; kinda reminds me of how Bobby Liebling wrote 'Star Lady' and the band KISS wanted to buy it. This could easily have been a "doom metal hit single," where the usually heavy handed vocals of Laura scream more metal than anything else, proving once again her versatility and diversity. The last two tracks on the CD raise eyebrows immediately, as they are the fastest on record: 'Possession' is downright evil and sick; still managing to throw in some surprising slow almost funeral doom moments, while CD ender 'Black Dog Blues' is the lone disappointment on the record for me due to a rather odd set of vocals and some rather odd guitar work near the end. It's a bit too frenetic for what's going on, though you cannot deny the aggressiveness and heaviness are still in full force. Overall, it's a crushing record that proves Laura is one of the most powerful vocalists in ALL of metal; one that will give most dynamic male singers a run for their money. On par with the heaviness and majesty of Orchid's first full length, King Witch (shouldn't that be QUEEN witch?) has provided the world an absolute skull crushing MONSTER of a first album; dare I say this band SHOULD win newcomer doom metal band of the year for 2018???
Contact: Listenable Records.
MEDEVIL "Conductor Of Storms" (Independent) SCORE: 62/100
Okay, so the story goes something like this: Medevil, hailing from Canada, take part in a sort of "battle of the bands" competition to take the grand winner all the way to the Wacken festival in Germany to play. Suffice it to say, Medevil don't walk away with the top prize, but they have been gaining a lot of attention. What first caught my ear, and I am extremely surprised no one else mentioned this, was lead singer Liam Collingwood who sounds a LOT like David Wayne from Metal Church. Not EXACTLY, you understand, but close enough in his intonations and singing. And true to form, this band takes off like a ROCKET with their first three tracks: CD opener 'Nightwalk' which portrays heavy riffs right off the bat, 'Machination Factory' which slows the tempo down just a bit but remains heavy and impressive nonetheless, and 'An Empty Glass' which blazes away in a killer thrashy fashion. The guitar work often undertakes dark overtones here as well, and these are three tunes that Metal Church would have quite possibly had on one of their earlier albums, if we were in an alternate universe. And that's my most favorite part of this 8 song affair folks. Followup 'In The Distance' is a nice instrumental, and though I dig it, it also points the way to the massive failure of this band. A not quite 3 minute instrumental (which annoys me a bit by utilizing the last 30 seconds of quiet rain noise) manages to creep it's way into the rest of the album. Let me explain. Followup 'The Angel Of Rain' proceeds to continue on with said rain sounds (okay, there's rain in the title) and melodic acoustic guitars to start. Folks, already I miss the rockin' this band is capable of doing. This song being almost 8 minutes long is definitely OVER indulgent with various moods, tempos and time changes, and it's frustrating as hell. It's almost like the first three songs never happened! Right when you get back around to some rockin' and killer instrumentation, it drops the bottom right out. It does this about 6 or 7 times in the length of the song. Okay, so now followup tune 'A Sacrifice' brings back the heaviness and David Wayne like vocals, and at least is consistent from start to finish. Not a bad tune, but it does sound rather familiar by this point on the disc, and definitely NOT as good as the first three. Neither is its followup 'Escape,' which is a straight forward speedy number, though the riffing is weird and I can't really get into this tune. Most of what stands out here is the lead soloing, which I must admit is quite accomplished all throughout the disc. And the final travesty? The totally unnecessary 12 minute CD ender 'The Fabled Uxoricide,' which starts out with melodic crooning yet again, and of course jumps around all over the place yet again. It's like they're afraid to get rocking again. Don't get me wrong, none of this is god awful, but when you play like Metal Church, and you SOUND like Metal Church, you EXPECT some thrashing heaviness to be present for the majority of the disc. Still, with all that being said, the last few minutes of this CD ending track do have some damn good jamming moments, but I have to sit through many minutes of odd structure changes and to me the last half or so of this disc sounds VERY subdued, as if they're afraid to break out and just kick ass. Still, a decent first effort, but they are a band that needs MUCH decision making to do if they plan on trying to be a potent force in the metal world. Decide: Are you balladeers or kick ass metal rockers?
Contact: Medevil.
NASHEIM "Solens Vemod" (Northern Silence) SCORE: 78/100
Somehow we missed this one awhile back, as it seems we no longer get servicing from Northern Silence Productions any longer. Vicious Swedish black metal with more than a handful of doom metal to go along, this is one kick ass and vicious project. Right off the bat though, the first thing you need to know is you have 4 songs and a total running time of 48 minutes. Two 13 minute tracks, one 11 minute cut and CD ender 'Vordnad' at 9. Sadly, it's the CD ending track that brings the score down a LOT farther than it should, though the first three cuts are sheer excellence. We mentioned the doom metal which is ALL over the place on this album. The guitar work on these first three cuts is what makes the disc so damn fascinating, as they are completely masterful of being both a black AND a doom metal band at the same time. Opener 'En Nyckel Till Drommars Grind' shows you EXACTLY what you're in for. You know, their approach reminds me greatly of that Spanish warlords Dantalion took on their first few albums. Nice and slow, doomy guitar work with a unique mixture of melancholic and grim atmosphere. They even throw in very subtle synthesized passages, which you almost don't notice. Throwing a curveball, followup track 'Jag Fyller Min Bagare Med Tomhet' cranks up the speed making this sound more like Nordic style black metal. Of course, once the "lyrics" kick in, it's back to doom. I was rather intrigued by the clean sung, almost ghostly torturous wailing that added a new dimension to the proceedings and proves that mastermind E. Grahn (who performs EVERYTHING on the album) is very versatile. No less can be said about the music either, which takes turns punching through steel with speed and blackened precision, or slowly creeping into your mind and body via the doomy touch. It's quite varied for 2 13 minute tracks! Third cut 'Att Av Odets Tradar Vava Sorg' goes back to blackened fast instrumentation, and this particular track has probably the most melodic instrumentation of any cut on the disc, and rather surprisingly so, utilizing many dark yet strangely melodic acoustic like guitar work. And the clean sung vocals return once again, proving that Grahn could indeed front a traditional doom project if he wanted to. Still, CD ender 'Vordnad,' though not terrible, utilizied a set of solitary acoustic like guitar passages that did not grab me as well as everything else. There's about 5 minutes of this before the blackened shriek comes in, and then it continues on for another minute and a half. The sick blackened vocal work is the main highlight of this track, slow and doomy though it is. Sadly, the vocals are quite short lived, making this 9 minute track fall a bit short of expectations where the rest of the material is concerned. To be sure, it's a fine disc, but 3 out of 4 is barely a 75 or so; still there is much to enjoy on this disc and I surely cannot wait for the next outing from Nasheim. Hopefully it's more than 4 tracks!!!
Contact: Northern Silence Productions.
NIGHTPROWLER "Unholy Rawness" (Midnight Sorcery) SCORE: 97/100
It's amazing what a simple search will do to fling you far and away from where you intended to be via the internet. As many know, we've been updating the classic album section with actual band web info. Nightprowler to me was just one German 80's metal band with a very rare 2 song EP from 1986. Until it was revealed to me on the Encyclopaedia Metallum website that there was ANOTHER band named Nightprowler, and they were from Ecuador. Well, holy shit! I don't know of ANY bands from Ecuador, let alone one that plays blistering mixtures of punk and proto 80's styled black metal! They kinda remind me of Speedwolf in that their lead guitar work is rather unorthodox and comprises some NWOBHM leanings alongside the raw punk vibe of a band like Toxic Holocaust. We'll skip the rather silly opening "intro," of some strange moaning girl saying goofy things about her master and Lucifer. Actually, I WILL mention that, now that I think about it, that "girl" sounds an AWFUL lot like the woman who played the lead role in that old T.V. series "I Dream Of Jeannie."
ANYWAY... Back to the fucking review. These guitars rock man... The vocal work, well, some might not consider it black metal but it kinda does to me. They bring the fury and venom courtesy of, well, old school Venom. They're kind of echoed too, as if they're being shouted from a distance. Folks, this album ain't gonna win any originality awards, but the 7 songs (minus the "intro," of course) totally kill poseurs with power. There's a bit of speed, too, so plenty of headbanging activity. Cuts like 'Drunk Whores And Destruction,' 'Midnight Sacrifice, 'Hammer Of Horrors,' and 'Night Of The Prowler' should tell you practically all you need to know. Some of the riffs do sound a bit interchangeable after awhile (like 'Hammer Of Horrors,' the opening guitars could be mistaken for those in 'Drunk Whores And Destruction,') but that's really a minor complaint. Sometimes you just want a balls to the wall, face ripping session with no intros, acoustic interludes, or silly spoken word pieces that distract from the overall vibe you hope carries from start to finish. In short, sometimes you just wanna bang your head and ROCK. Nightprowler does that in spades. Oh, and 'My Boot Over The Face Of Christ' has that Hellhammer/Voivod wierd kinda riff going on; sometimes it works, and sometimes it don't, but overall this is the kinda black punk thrashing madness you crave, at the end of a long and frustrating day. I enjoy this kinda band over someone like Midnight anyday, and this CD sits quite nicely to the left of albums by bands like Speedwolf, early Venom, and Toxic Holocaust; showing that in this day and age, it's the blending of two or more genres of music that brings out the smile to an old headbanger's face. I'm sure the horned one would agree.
Contact: Midnight Sorcery Records.
NOKTURNAL MORTUM "Verity" (Oriana) SCORE: 98/100
I've been awaiting a new Nokturnal Mortum album for quite awhile now. We missed out on "The Voice Of Steel," but absolutely adored "Weltanschauung." That was over 13 years ago, and though I LOVE their earlier stuff like "Lunar Poetry," "Goat Horns" and "To The Gates Of Blasphemous Fire," I can't seem to get enough of this newest release. First off, it must be said that this is definitely a more folk oriented album, and the heavier guitar work seems to take a backseat to the flutes, dulcimers, cellos and all sorts of manner of folkish instrumentation. About the only thing left from their more blackened days is the vocal work, but the blackened vocals are ALL over the place. I cannot POSSIBLY go over the nuances of each and every track, because there is SO much to digest from song to song, that it would take an entire magazine issue itself just to detail so! But seriously, my only complaints are two: the odd tribal intro that starts the album, and track 10: 'Black Honey.' That's it folks. 'Black Honey' bothers me for two reasons: One, the clean sung low toned vocals are really odd, and the instrumentation is bouncy, kinda goofy and just not my cup of tea. But everything else, holy shit! After the intro, 'Molfa' blasts RIGHT outta the gate and is probably their fastest and most furious cut on the record. Tribal, almost militaristic drumming adds a unique twist to probably what is their closest (and on this disc, probably their only) attempt at the old black metal days. Still, with the folk instruments all over the place, you see where this is headed. My absolute alltime favorite track is 'Song Of The Snowstorm,' fuck that atmospheric/ambient set of synths borders on space rock, but this tune is absolutely EPIC. They add some interesting heavy twists here too. I forgot to mention how some of their chanting vocals sound a bit Native American on the 'Molfa' track too. There's a bit of a doom metal pacing to some of their tunes, especially on 'Spruce Elder,' and later on down the disc with the interestingly titled 'In The Boat With Fools.' Dark and haunting heaviness can be found within 'Wolfish Berries,' and the CD could have ended very easily with the amazing nine minute piece 'Night Of The Gods.' This track alone carries the essence of EVERYTHING they've done on this disc to an epic and fantastic conclusion; it's pure magic. The instrumentation has this weighty gravity to it that just pulls you in; you almost forget you're listening to a lengthy piece! Still, CD ender 'Where Do The Wreaths Float Down The River' utilizes some rather light bell notes but FILLED with ambient landscapes; the thunderous percussion roars a few times, but the essence of ambient nature fills this CD's closing instrumental. Great for a drive through a deserted forest filled highway (like the path to Mount Pisgah, for instance). This CD will probably annoy the "black metal purists," but there's no denying that the Ukranian horde has crafted such an amazing album; it took me about 10 or 15 complete spins to really "get" everything. Take some time with this one, as the production is crisp and clear and allows everything to flow fully, but you'll need many rotations to digest all that is. What a masterpiece!!
Contact: Oriana Music. (No website listed).
OBSESSION "Order Of Chaos" (Inner Wound) SCORE: 53/100
I remember two good 80's metal albums from Obsession, and I owned both of them: "Scarred For Life" and "Methods Of Madness," the latter being more impressed upon me than the former. So I know this album is about 5 years old, but it just seems to me like it rather came out of nowhere. I didn't see many reviews on it and I only happened upon it by chance when I was at ProgPower last year and saw it in the Nightmare Records bin. So curiosity got the better of me and I picked it up.
Right off the bat, lemme say that the overwhelming disappointment didn't hit me immediately. Sure, I can detect a bit of a darker tone permeating some of the cuts on the disc, but let me tell you; it doesn't often work in their favor. And the choruses didn't strike me with the title track opening things up. It's readily apparent that two things are an immediate standout from start to finish, and that is Michael Vescera's unique singing voice, and those amazing lead solos ALL over the damn place. So the first track didn't impress me, and followup 'Twist Of The Knife' with it's faster start and okay choruses didn't inspire confidence either. Something was missing, and the worst culprit was track three 'Forbidden Desire,' hands down THE worst cut of the disc. Slower and a bit more straightforward, with some really odd opening guitar framework. The odd shouted multivocal pieces were unnecessary in my opinion, and the band just DOES NOT DO the slow, haunting, dark and sinister thing well... At all... SO, what DO they do well? 'When The Smoke Clears,' track number 4, is the answer. Despite the acoustic start, the rockin' guitar work, the soaring vocals and the less than dark tone gives rise to a more energetic and outstanding track, which is what Obsession here excels at MUCH better. And those twin lead solos here are awe-inspiring. 'License To Kill' follows, a much better effort at bridging melody with a rather different approach to the song structure. I oftentimes think this would be a good song to feature in a James Bond film. THIS track is the lone exception to the rest of the somewhat darker fare that plays to the strengths of Obsession's core principles, if you will. Keeping things going, 'Wages Of Sin' is no slouch either, complete with catchy and nice soaring vocal work on the choruses. The minimal instrumentation here plays to accentuate Vescera's vocal work, and it's another highlight, as is the followup 'Cold Day In Hell,' which chooses to add some speedier fretwork in amidst the amazing high ended leads, making for an unusual contrast that, once again, plays to the strengths of this band and the vocals add the heavy punch that gives this track a life all it's own. Sadly, that's all you get, as the last two tracks ('Mercy Killing' and CD ender 'Dark Shadows') fail to capture much interest, aside from the flashy and quite skilled lead solos. The main failure of this album is the "catering to the darkside" so to speak, and it's not like it's an utter failure, but many times the choruses fail to spark an interest; something that can drive the otherwise average mainlines into something special. And though CD ender 'Dark Shadows' had a very interesting set of instrumentation, it quite simply failed to deliver. Seeing as how their previous album "Carnival Of Lies" came out 6 years before this one, and their effort before that was 1987's "Methods Of Madness," I suspect they had plenty of time to "tighten things up," as it were. Still, 4 songs out of a 10 track affair; they can indeed do much better.
Contact: Inner Wound Recordings.
PAGAN ALTAR "The Room Of Shadows" (Temple Of Mystery) SCORE: 94/100
Unfortunately, I can't say as I'm all too familiar with Pagan Altar, even though I DO have a CD copy of their "Volume One" disc. I must not have really appreciated it at the time I got it, since it sits on a shelf with other CD's that I "didn't get." To be honest with you, I don't even know what prompted my interest in THIS album, but I may have gotten it from a digital download service through Haulix or one of the others. Still, it's gonna make me go back and revisit "Volume One," as maybe now I have more of an appreciation for the late vocalist Terry, whose contribution definitely brings out the "old world folk" influence that permeates this disc.
And to be honest, his delivery is a tad mournful and somber, though you can hear traces of a somewhat southern dialect in the way he pronounces a few words (like 'macabre' and others). The guitar work is outstanding, reminding me a great deal of that NWOBHM "slight rock" alongside 70's rock and of course that doomy folk touch. The most ominous thing about this record is the lyrical content, complete with Satan's arrival, rotting dead breaking through the ground, Vampires and Jack The Ripper. EVERYTHING about this album screams innovative and quite different from anything else out there. Doomy opening guitar work on CD opener 'Rising Of The Dead,' bright lead guitar work that rarely ever rages out of control, and acoustic passages and near ballads are what's on display here. One of my absolute favorite tracks is the folk story inspired 'The Room Of Shadows,' (yes, the title track), with mainly acoustic guitars but man, in the MIDDLE of this track the guitar work picks up tempo and ROCKS! Incidentally on this cut, Terry showcases some SOARING vocal work; the absolute top shelf BEST on the disc, and it's a goddamn shame he didn't rage like this on the rest of the album. Even CD ender 'After Forever' (Don't think it's any relation to the Black Sabbath song of the same name), with it's heavier acoustic guitar work and more dynamic vocal work, is a treat. That being said, don't expect ultra heavy instrumentation; these are songs that work in the doom metal frame. Cut 'Jack The Ripper' raises some interesting questions lyrically, asking what the motive for Jack's killings were since "there's nothing for him to steal. It must be for what they know."
With all the great things there are to say about this, the songs are LONG: 'Jack The Ripper' itself clocks in at well over ten minutes, and besides lead solos that blaze away with grace and skill (and actually are INTERESTING to hear), there's not a whole lot of variety within the songs themselves. Still, if that's not a bother, this is a fascinating listen, a bit more "laid back" than you might expect, but not too many 70's rock/doom metal/folk inspired tunes will you find expertly done. And Terry's vocals might be an acquired taste for some, but I think this is a great record. Just sad that it's probably THE last one.
Contact: Temple Of Mystery Records.
SAMAEL "Hegemony" (Napalm) SCORE: 98/100
My history with Samael goes back a LONG way. "Ceremony Of Opposites" was the first epic album I ever heard from them, and I was instantly hooked. The nasty bite of the vocals, the heavily anti-christian stances in the lyrics, the sinister keyboard passages from a guy who, live, NEVER moves behind the keys onstage. When I saw them on Halloween of I think 1994, they impressed me mightily. Then their two followups left me feeling a bit "betrayed," if you will, though "Passage" was the better of the experimental "synth pop" stuff. Fast forward to issue #37, when in an interview Vorph promised me that Samael was heading "back to the roots," so to speak, with upcoming full length "Reign Of Light." Imagine my surprise when that record didn't deliver the goods, so I just went on to play "Ceremony," delve into their back catalog, and practically ignored this band.
So I've missed a few albums down the path. However, when I saw the video for their latest album, I thought "holy, HOLY shit! Is Samael back? For REAL this time?" And lo and behold, Samael IS INDEED back. Now first off, I will say that YES, I am aware there are still heavy keyboards here and probably some electronic percussion as well. There's a very seriously dark, sinister and militaristic vibe that permeates this disc and man is it every snarling, biting and extremely vicious. YES, fuckers, Samael is INDEED back. Now, granted, I know that further down the disc, the rather simplistic formula starts to sound a bit "similar," shall I say (there are pieces of 'Black Supremacy' and 'Dictate Of Transparency' that are quite simply interchangeable), but who fucking cares!?!? This to me SHOULD have been the logical followup to either "Ceremony Of Opposites" or "Passage," and if Samael had continued down this path, I might have remained a fan through those dismal years. The vocals absolutely dominate everything here, as they should. And those lyrics are quite intense. Take a line from 'Angel Of Wrath,' where you can feel the venom dripping from lines like 'Blood Fire! Red Fire! Savior and Destroyer!'
Now granted, sometimes the synthesized electronic passages get a little weird. They make the beginnings of a few songs almost cringeworthy (I'm talking about 'Red Planet' and 'Black Supremacy,' but also what made the bonus cut 'Storm Of Fire' one of the weakest cuts on the disc. You probably don't have the version with the bonus track, so no worries). Still, it's only a problem for a few seconds. And I must say that including a Beatles cover of 'Helter Skelter' was a REALLY odd choice, but goddammit if it didn't grow on me, because Samael made it sound like THEY WROTE IT... The militaristic presence on here would make any sane person hard pressed to believe this was a cover. Yes, the epic, bombastic and overwhelming presence of the synthesized passages might be a turnoff to some AT FIRST, but please give this a chance if you thought Samael didn't have that aggressive blackened sickness down in there somewhere. Besides, it kinda reminds me of the way Dimmu Borgir used synths to create a certain atmosphere, but here Samael proves that the harsh, cold, and eerie electronica fits well with black metal's aesthetics. I would even venture a guess that Euronymous from Mayhem would surely approve of this, especially since Samael succeeded beyond anyone's WILDEST dreams; far above and beyond even what Mayhem tried to do with their "Grand Declaration Of War" album. Fantastic job, and welcome back Samael!
Contact: Napalm Records.
SKELETON WOLF "Skeleton Wolf" (Independent) SCORE: 95/100
Featuring two of the members of blackened thrash outfit Maax probably tells you what to expect from this brand new group, and right off the bat lemme tell ya if you loved Maax, the split with these guys now brings us TWO unholy rock and rollers!! And that's not an inappropriate description, as the almost power metal riffage is heavily accentuated by thrashy riffing, furious percussion pounding, and the acidic death influenced raspy blackened vocals of Tim Green, who also did time in Maax... So if the vocals sound a little familiar... Anyway the disc starts off with some very interesting melodic like riffs, which I last heard on the Japanese band Solitude's debut release... Still, 'Bow Down To Death' opens up the disc nicely, well, except for the over-indulgence of repetition of the song name throughout the end. NO END to the punishing guitar work here. Slower and more eerie of a start follows up 'At The Sixth Foot,' and it's quite a headbanging piece. 'M.P.F.F.' (which stands for Metal Punk Fight Fuck) might sound a little odd lyrically but continues the punishing assault with yet more thrashy riffs. Dark lead riffing permeates 'Whatever Demons,' but to me the tune could have been a little bit stronger. Still, the last three cuts close out the disc in furious, but interesting fashion, as 'Eternal Lies' proves this isn't a one trick pony by utilizing both faster and slower riffing and structure in the choruses themselves, though I was a little annoyed that the rockin' comes to a stop for some lone acoustic guitar work (that probably goes on a tad longer than it should, though it's dark), and 'She's Insane,' lyrically, probably could have been called 'Crazy Bitch...' Still, those almost power metal ROCKIN' guitars prove it's not all a speedy thrash fest. And our little gem of a blackened thrasher closes out with pounding percussion and some more of those almost too good for power metal rockin' riffs. This CD ender is the shortest track on the disc, and the simplisticly short (lyric wise) but simple choruses are memorable. Dig how they utilize a somewhat Running Wild set of riffing to close out the track (and the disc), and I mean more modern, or "recent" era Running Wild. Yes, it's sometimes surprising how melodic the guitar work can be but make no mistake: Skeleton Wolf is awakening something a bit unusual in blackened thrash land; still a bit too vicious and acidic to be considered black 'n' roll, but the axemaster Brett Schlagel proves once again that his talent is too vicious to be left behind since his departure from Maax. I look forward to more!
Contact: Skeleton Wolf official website.
SOLITUDE "Reach For The Sky" (Spiritual Beast) SCORE: 96/100
Man, it REALLY has been a long time since we caught up with the Japanese band Solitude. We last reviewed their "Virtual Image" sort of EP release back in 2001, and here it is 14 years later when they unleashed their newest full length. I was impressed by their "Virtual Image" album back then but an even more blown away by this one. 8 tracks and nearly ALL of them scorching thrashy masterpieces. With a bit of diversity that you might not expect from them! A dark set of acoustic guitars lead the buildup on the opening track 'Venomous Angel,' and for the next SEVEN tracks, the rockin' don't stop, the thrashin' gets more and more intense, and I do believe these are some of the best songs Akira has ever written! The drums pound furiously on this disc, and even though a few tracks are long, he doesn't waste too much time closing the songs out. Followup 'Blow' is one of the most intense songs here, bringing out an unusual Motorhead meets NWOBHM flair to the guitar work. It's a fast and rockin' affair folks! The cannon fire blasts at the end of the song accentuate just how explosive this stuff is! Proving it's not all fast speed, there's some REALLY nice melodic high ended guitar work opening up the title track, which runs at a different pace but still manages to impress. The vocal work is borderline death metal, with that Lemmy from Motorhead vibe he's always had since day one. A somewhat melodic track that outright ROCKS. Another heavy tune follows in 'Don't Need Mercy,'a faster cut that shows off Akira's penchant for NWOBHM flair in his writings. Still even more surprising is how Akira takes a somewhat Middle Eastern/Arabic set of almost thrashy guitar work and STILL manages to make a punishingly heavy and frenetic affair! (Take note, oh ye of the band Melechesh!) This makes 'On The Edge Of Sorrow' not only kick ass and thrashing rock, but adds a very unique mysterious and eerie vibe to the whole thing! And 'You Got My Mind' DEFINITELY will remind many of Motorhead.
Now the "bad." Well, it's not really BAD per se, but though I did enjoy the more melodic and somewhat down tempo guitar work of CD ender 'December,' it's not really among his best work. It DOES have that "late night kick back and chill vibe while still rocking slightly" thing going for it, but at 8 minutes it gets a little repetitive. Still, the two lead solo sections are something to see, as he incorporates amazing guitar leads on EVERY turn. Akira is one of few guitar players I know that will do blazing fast lead solos on one track, then slow them down completely on another, as if he knows EXACTLY what type of lead solos go with certain songs. Still, I must say when you have the first 7 tracks blaze away with such power and precision, I have NO fucking idea just how you would end an album like this.
OH! Damn... before I go, I forgot to mention THE most amazingly kick ass instrumental song I have EVER heard from ANY band: 'Escape For The Crime.' This short 3 minute instrumental kicks awesomely serious ass, better than ANY other instrumental I have EVER heard. For months now I thought "shit, this is so killer that it NEEDS good lyrics and sick, blackened vocals." SO... I obliged. I wrote lyrics for it and did some long winded blackened screams and retitled the song 'Ace Hellfire Batallions.' If you want to hear it, email me. This CD kicks so much ass it inspired me to get off MY ass and do something. Fucking thrash masterpiece of 2017 as far as I'm concerned...
Contact: Spiritual Beast Records.
SPIRITUS MORTIS "The Year Is One" (Svart) SCORE: 98/100
After the brilliant "God Behind The God," The first Finnish doom metal band does it yet again!! And sadly, I had thought no one would beat Arcana 13 for best doom metal album of 2016, but here, right at the end of the year, it's no surprise that it takes a heavyweight band like Mr. Witchfinder and crew to leave the competition face down in the dirt... EVERY track on here is great, from the more midtempo rockin' pace of opener 'Robe Of Ectoplasm,' to the more melodic, beautiful and mournful CD closer 'World Of No Light.' Which, I might add, closes the album off beautifully and in an epic fashion. Right from the start of most songs, you can hear the heavy, dark and crushing doom, Mr. Albert Witchfinder often playing the vocal chameleon portraying many different moods and "auras," if you will. My complaints with this album are very few, and more along the lines of a few individual occurrences than anything long lasting. First off, on the cut 'Holiday In The Cemetery,' the opening low toned spoken word play was a bit odd, but soon the track rights itself quickly. And my only other minor complaint is on 'She Died A Virgin,' where Albert spends a bit too much time on the long winded higher registered notes, which were a surprise but just oddly drawn out. That and the over repetitive "no one saw her disappear" line. But still, man, Spiritus Mortis has cranked a fucking masterpiece of epic doomy proportions. Maybe I'm just too picky, but there's not one song I would ever skip over. The timing of the songs was a great idea as well, as there are only 2 songs that clock in at 9 minutes or longer, and they're spaced out nicely alongside a 3 minute, a 4 minute, a 5, 6 and two 7 minute songs. Toying with the idea of diversity, it's amazing to me that this band can create 8 epic masterpieces that don't sound remotely like the other, and really I have nothing more to say, except that it's a shame this is only available as an expensive import from Finland. Still, it's worth every damn penny, and easily crushes anything else for doom metal masterpiece of 2016.
Contact: Svart Records.
TANK "Valley Of Tears" (Metal Mind) SCORE: 95/100
Even though this album is a 2015 release, it's still a revelant "recent" release from a long standing NWOBHM band... Actually, since new singer ZP Theart is such a versatile cat, this band is able to play around with quite a few styles and sounds... If you're expecting the gritty, hard and heavy mixture that brought about such albums as "Power Of The Hunter" and "This Means War," you're thinking in the wrong direction. However; if you, like myself, fancied the energetic and catchy rockin' Tank experimented with briefly on the album "Honour And Blood," then you'll definitely be in the right mindset to appreciate this album. Actually, this release surprised me, as I felt Doogie White was a little underdeveloped and not QUITE the man to pull off the job, as the 2010 album "War Machine" left me quite disappointed, and even kept me from checking out "War Nation," the 2012 followup. I read in an interview where the band felt new vocalist ZP brought new life to the table, and allowed Tank to experiment with more hard rock styles of songs. Still, MY interest was piqued when I learned that ZP had sang before with none other than DragonForce for almost 10 years!
Let's get to the meat of the album. First of all, the emotionally soaring title track starts this album off amazingly, and is probably one of the best tunes on the record. It has this kinda melancholic atmosphere to it but still retains a rockin' edge, complete with almost thrashier guitar work, which surprised me that Tank has this much multi dimensionality! Followup 'War Dance' keeps the metal flowing, and is still energetic. One of my favorite tunes is the cut 'World On Fire,' ending choruses being a tad overrepetitive, but what has to be considered one of the heaviest cuts on the disc. And 'Make A Little Time' showcases a little more of a hard rock edge, but still with a somewhat heavier NWOBHM flavor. It's your standard "rockin' and partyin'" anthemic track. 'Heading For Eternity' has the most amazing soaring vocal work, another great highlight to a disc that showcases heavier edged music while proving that even though it's NWOBHM/Hard rock laced, it's much too epic and full to be considered a band that SOUNDS like it came straight out of the 80's. These are songs that we all knew Cliff "The Riff" Evans is capable of writing.
That being said, it's not ALL picture perfect. There is not one crappy song on the record, however it must be said that even the worst of tunes on here suffer NONE from ZP's performance; in fact the track 'Eye Of A Hurricane' would be quite lackluster if not for ZP's performance; he raises the bar for all the cuts here and even manages to add additional life to cuts where they were lacking. The same can be said for 'Living A Fantasy,' but once again, ZP is the man who makes these few cuts better than they actually are. I questioned closing out the album with an instrumental, in 'One For The Road,' as there isn't much variety, and Tank (under Cliff Evans, that is) is capable of closing out an album in an epic fashion; they pretty much proved this with "Honour And Blood's" track 'Kill.' It's amazing to me that Tank is still alive, despite the band being split into two different factions, but the fact that Tank has mutated and evolved into a band capable of marrying three different styles of music into a seamless machine... Well, that is indeed the true power of a Tank.
Contact: Metal Mind Productions.
THROES OF DAWN "Our Voices Shall Remain" (Argonauta) SCORE: 98/100
Throes Of Dawn is definitely no stranger to our publication. Heri has graciously recorded radio promo spots AND done an interview with us quite some time ago (issue #50), and it's odd that we missed this newest release. We reviewed "The Great Fleet Of Echoes" in this album and were pleasantly surprised just how Pink Floyd'ish it was, and how the metal was still there. But with this newest release, some 6 years later, nearly all the aggressive elements have been removed entirely; still, this remains one of their strongest and most amazing bodies of work. First off, damn, the amazingly epic and emotionally charged guitar work is ALL OVER the place; in fact it's hard to say what my two favorite instrumental pieces are, let alone one! I'd have to say that Heri must have reached down VERY deep to pull at the heartstrings for this one. I am sad that I didn't discover this when it came out, as right now I can say it's one of my alltime favorite records of 2016 (and there were a LOT of great album that came out that year). Synths fade in on the opening track 'Mesmerized,' and the slow build up is a great way to start the album. Throes Of Dawn doesn't do ANYTHING in a hurry, and the dreamy buildups mean slightly long song running times. Bordering on doom metal length for ALL the songs, it means you have a lot to take in, and trust me when I say Heri varies things up from minute one to the last on each song. One thing that did stand out to me was how effective the "aaaah's" multichant vocals are and he uses them a LOT. 'We Used To Speak In Colors' starts right off with pianos and drums, and there is a bit of melancholic "rockin'" to be found within. Emotionally charged choruses are the norm here, and you'll be singing this stuff for DAYS. One of my favorite cuts is 'Lifelines,' the minimal instrumentation accentuates Heri's extremely simple yet powerful delivery and buildup; almost ballad like but once the "heaviness" kicks in (and I have to use quotes on heaviness, since on this album it takes on an entirely different meaning from EVERY other album that utilizes heaviness), it's stunning. Expertly crafted, with one of the most AMAZING lead solo work on the disc, just ungodly man! Followup 'The Understanding' is DEFINITELY no slouch either, and also contains some of the best fucking lead work on the disc. It's like magic, and these guitar passages you swear you never want to end. The title track follows with an unusual pairing: mostly bass guitar and atmospheric synths amongs somewhat low toned vocals, almost eerie in nature. Still, the soaring choruses and eventual "heaviness" keep you in there. Now, for the slightly bad: I almost wasn't sold on the ultra melodic 'One Of Us Is Missing' track, with the kinda toybox notes and kinda sappy ballad like delivery, though the lyrics are somewhat sad and melancholic in nature, however that didn't stop me from enjoying a track that does a complete 180 turn by the 5 minute mark. And here, there's some AMAZING saxophone work, reminiscent of Pink Floyd's greatest work, while those killer "aaaah's" help close this tune out. And further, CD ender 'The Black Wreath Of Mind' at first seemed a bit too long at 14:24. Still, having said that, though the bruising heaviness is gone, the dark and eerie vibes are NOT, this being THE darkest cut on the disc, complete with ominous piano notations. However, the country twanging guitar work was a bit too much, though fortunately this doesn't last long, and the last 5 minutes of this track are sheer heaven. After awhile the length of this cut grew on me, as Heri has a way of sneaking up on you and entrancing you to sleep while rocking out and gently bringing you back down from the clouds. I still miss the blackened days of "Binding Of The Spirit" and "Pakasherra," but dammit, I have to say this is indeed Throes Of Dawn's FINEST hour, and a disc that I am surprised I love so much. As a footnote, I gave a copy of this disc to a Romanian friend at work who doesn't speak the best of English, but thought this disc was stunning. And so it is. Welcome back Throes Of Dawn, you've been away FAR too long, but this more than makes up for the 6 year absence. I daresay this would have been worth a TWELVE year wait.
Contact: Argonauta Records.
TYGERS OF PAN TANG "Tygers Of Pan Tang" (Mighty Music) SCORE: 47/100
First off, I have to provide a "definition," if you will... Anyone who has even the remotest interest in the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal Movement should be familiar with this term, which I will call the "Def Leppard Syndrome." This is an extremely important term, as it (to me) defines what ruined most of the brightest and greatest bands in the NWOBHM era. It has plagued NWOBHM bands in the 80's, still plagues them in this recording day and age, and even had it's effects reach farther than the United Kingdom (or Britain, Great Britain, etc.) ever intended. It is described as the bands in Britain who were envious of the massive success that Def Leppard achieved when they "went to America." Becoming multi millionaires with gold and platinum album sales, it dramatically changed the style and sound of many of these bands, almost overnight, and with mostly abysmal records and even more disappointing results. Nearly every one of these bands faded into obscurity. Even in Sweden, the results were felt as some bands that had a few albums under their belts changed their sound.
Now, to be fair, the NWOBHM wasn't ALWAYS categorized by bands playing straight forward heavy metal. In fact, many of the earliest NWOBHM bands are disqualified from being listed in the Encyclopedia Metallum AKA the Metal Archives for not being "metal enough." Many of these bands' removals are argued by myself, but whatever. More recent attempts by some NWOBHM bands (like the latest from Tank) to mix NWOBHM, heavy metal and more "accessible" stadium styled rock (AOR if you will) have been quite successful, breathing fresh and diverse life into a genre that has always been celebrated but very late to the "revival" stage. Then we have Tygers Of Pan Tang.
Now, I haven't heard any Tygers albums post "Wild Cat" and "Spellbound," but I HAVE heard that they progressed farther and farther away from anything "metal" since then. Dunno. However, I was impressed by their mixture of catchy, arena styled hard rock and more melodic NWOBHM leanings on about 5 tracks of this 11 song near disaster. Let's start with the good, and briefly: The first two tracks absolutely ROCK. Opener 'Only The Brave' reminds me of the path Tank took recently, and great to start off with an explosive number. Catchy soaring vocals, choruses and rockin' guitar work, a heavier take on the NWOBHM sound than I think they've ever done. Followup 'Dust' has an almost hard rock flavor entirely, but gets the job done. Down and dirty is the direction for 'Never Give In,' showcasing great diversity by being a fast tune, and I daresay is probably one of their darkest, heaviest and most aggressive tunes they've EVER penned in their entire careers. There's a bump in the road before the cut 'Do It Again,' again with soaring vocals and catchy choruses and melodies. Finally, track 9 'Blood Red Sky' is the last rockin' cut you'll hear on this disc, which has a REALLY hard rock vibe to it and dammit if this doesn't sound like a Saxon tune, our lead singer strangely channeling Biff Byford throughout the beginning of this track. And that's it folks, a mere 5 songs that barely make this worth the effort, when you have two "ballads," and a godawful train wreck called 'Glad Rags,' complete with twangy southern rock stupidity and the dumbest lyrics this side of the Mason-Dixon line. And the "cover" of 'I Got The Music In Me?' Lyrically, I understand the significance of a song like this, but it should have never been done. And what metal band in their right mind would EVER say "I feel funky?!" This ain't soul music, man! Finally, you would think CD ender 'The Devil You Know' would be a rockin' track, and it tries, but unfortunately our southern roots crooner prefers to sing in an odd, low toned drawl that makes this a heavier tune that sadly doesn't cut the mustard. The choruses are weak too, which is a surprise considering how well this band does with heavier material. If they'd cut out the damn fluff, and stop trying to "cash in" on Americana mainstream radio, this would have been a surprise hit; just look at the heavier tunes to see what this band is truly capable of. So please, stop giving in to the "Def Leppard Syndrome..." Please, for the love of heavy music and all that is (un)holy, just fucking stop it now... NOW!!!
Contact: Mighty Music.
VISIGOTH "The Revenant King" (Metal Blade) SCORE: 99/100
Damn... What DO they put in the water in Salt Lake City, Utah? 'Cause if the monstrous Caladan Brood (who scored one of our highest scores EVER in the history of the magazine) wasn't enough to whet your appetite, now comes power metal's biggest powerhouse in recent years. This album, every song is amazing. EVERY goddamn song. Headbanging riffs, great singalong choruses, catchy guitar work, that "epic" feeling that tells me maybe there's a Caladan Brood member in there somewhere, and yes, there IS a Gallowbraid member (which I must admit is yet ANOTHER amazing band from Salt Lake City). This band is bursting with talent no doubt, and it bleeds metal over EVERY track on the record. The cover of Manilla Road's "Necropolis" was a great choice, and sadly for me I heard the cover first before I got around to hearing the "Crystal Logic" album that bears this amazing track. The title track opens things up, with some kinda "crunchy" guitars coming in. 'Dungeon Master' is another great tune, filled with epic choruses and even some blazing lead solos. A tribute to all those who took on the title of Game Master in those epic late night D&D sessions. 'Mammoth Rider' comes close to bringing the doom tempo, and varies things up significantly. It's a warriors prayer if you will. And the clean sung passages? Almost ballad like but not syrupy. 'Blood Sacrifice' contains some acoustic guitars and clean sung vocal work that goes more for an epic and emotional feeling rather than catering to the "love ballad." Some absolutely BEAUTIFUL guitar work is contained within, an interesting yet eyebrow raising feature on lyrical matter that is extremely dark and rather occult laced. 'Iron Brotherhood' is one of my alltime favorites, complete with epic multivocal choruses, a tune that will make your heart burst with pride at being one of the true metal warriors. And listen to those bass guitars chug! 'Vengeance' has a bit of tempo and structure changes to keep things interesting, while the amazingly epic and sorrowful ending proves Visigoth to be a master at painting with different colors and brush strokes. A tune like this makes the canvas appear like a non-entity! 'Creature Of Desire' sounds like one of those somewhat cheesy 80's metal rockers, and it's an obvious nod to the strength and power of 80's traditional metal, done with class and a lot of heart. CD ender 'From The Arcane Mists Of Prophecy' is almost 10 minutes long, and sometimes may seem a bit TOO long, but the mastery of song and story continues, and behold the amazing funeral doom touch near the tune's end. Though most of the album is a bit "lighthearted," which may seem an insult to their mastery, THIS track contains some of the darkest instrumentation on record. Folks, this is a power metal masterpiece for sure, with Jake Rogers singing with heartfelt intensity, power and emotion, never once trading a strong delivery for cheesy high pitched power metal yawls! He doesn't need them, and the rest of the band turns in a solid performance... It's damn hard to say which two albums get power metal's best performance this issue; Helstar's newest or Visigoth's, suffice it to say that Visigoth are an absolutely amazing band and I dare say this would be an excellent band to see live. Salt Lake City turns out the masterpiece records yet again. How will they top this one?
Contact: Metal Blade Records.
CIRITH UNGOL.
Interview with Rob and Tim via phone.
Need I say more? This interview was a little difficult to conduct, but suffice it to say this band is one I've been after for an interview for a VERY long time. And of course, the "One Foot In Hell" album was indeed the 1000th title to be incorporated into the classic album archives at the Vibrations Of Doom compound. You're into metal, you KNOW about this band, so let's just jump right into what is unarguably a feature interview in ANY music magazine!
(This interview starts out with a little history lesson from Rob)
Hey Steve, lemme tell you something you'll crack up at, this is kind of historic and ironic. We're actually playing in a room where we recorded the drums for "Paradise Lost," but me and Tim are sitting in the room where we recorded "King Of The Dead," "Frost And Fire," and "One Foot In Hell," the old studio. And what happened was the guy still has the studio, but he's touring all over the world with other big bands and stuff, but the studio kinda sits idle for awhile. So it made perfect sense for us to kinda come back to where we actually started. We could throw a rock from where we're sitting and hit our old band room. We're back in the studio where it all began.
Tim: So were we. (laughs).
Rob: Yeah, we've heard that a lot over the years; it's always been a hit or miss thing. It is what it is. If you wanna tell true stories, though, there's a buddy of mine from Canada, he said "hey, there's this band Rush you gotta go check out right?" So we went down to L.A. and saw them at The Whiskey, and there was like no one there, just a few people and the guys in the band. We actually went backstage to meet them. But I mean no one's there, no one's heard of them, there's no photos posted on facebook...
Tim: (sounding somewhat mocking) "They have a funny voice!"
Rob: So we get back home and I'm playing the record for people and they're going "Oh my god, that guy's voice sucks!" A lot of people said that, but they turned into some megagroup. We were friends with them for years, we only lost touch with them after we reached some level... it's kinda hard to... Tim: But anyway, let's get going with the interview here! (laughing here)
Rob: Yeah, no, no, but the other part of the story is, when we get to write all our fan mail and some guy wrote us a fan letter like he said "Man, I bought your album (it was probably "Frost And Fire" or "King Of The Dead") man, your singer sucks so bad; I like your band but your singer is horrible." You know, we sit there and answer fan mail three or four nights a week after band practice. And we are trying to like get in touch with whoever is listening to our music. Anyway, two or three weeks later we get a letter, and we didn't realize it was the guy until we read it, but he said "I'm the guy remember I said you guys sucked, I've been listening to the album, and you guys are like my favorite band in the world now.
Tim: It's like when you're a kid and you drink beer for the first time, and you don't like it, but it becomes an acquired taste.
Rob: This is what's funny; at that show we played the other night, we read two or three reviews, not just one, that Tim sounded better now than he did on the albums!
Rob: Well, we're not actually touring, we're just doing selective things. It was just a twist of fate where everything came together perfectly to decide to get back together and play some more. It took a long time to get everything together. And it was about time to do it; it's been fun so far. It was awesome; the turnout and everything, the support from the fans over the years. Plus a couple of promoters in Europe, and also Jarvis here in our hometown, they've been emailing me... I'm not saying I'm the guy that caused this to happen, but I was the guy that swore I'd never touch another drumstick as long as I live! (laughs) I got so burned out from the music industry.. We were together for 20 years and even though I thought we did some great stuff... here it feels like you're swimming upstream but you're swimming up the Niagra Falls, that's how it felt to us.
So Jarvis, the bass player of Night Demon for three or four years kept bugging me "hey man, you gotta get back together, go to Europe, and everyone's wearing Cirith Ungol shirts and they love your band," and every year I'm like "Nope, nope, nope!" (laughing here). And then we put on this festival last year and like 1200 people came from all over the world and we sat there and did a meet and greet, signed autographs, and met some of these fans. First off, they're all under 30, second, they're like half girls, and the third thing is everyone knew every one of our songs. A lot of people are going to misinterpret this, you've read some reviews that said "oh yeah now they're getting together only because there's money there." That had nothing to do with it! In fact, I have a drum set and if I played for 10 more years it wouldn't even break even on the drum set I have now.
But the reason we got together, was the look in these kids' eyes. When I say kids, they're kids compared to us. But also, the pressure from people who said "Hey look, if you get together you know, you can play... Oliver offered to fly us over to Keep it True, and me and Tim went there last April. And it was just unbelievable... Everyone there knew who we were. There were thousands of people who knew me and Tim, even though we've aged a little bit. They knew, I mean in the middle of the night they knew who we were, in the dark! (much laughter here!) If this many people really like the band, why should we withhold the music from them? I know that sounds kinda idealistic and weird, but that's the real reason we're together is because people actually wanna hear us.
Rob: Naw, no. (didn't sound too sincere here - Ed). It doesn't hurt, but no.
Tim: Not like here! (laughs).
Tim: Yeah, yeah. Actually went down and saw that, they were doing a little tour around here with Night Demon, our friends in Night Demon. It was over at the Roxy in L.A. It was the same thing there, they cram the club there, it was Satan, Night Demon and a couple of other bands. It was pretty cool; they got the same reaction there. Like you said, it's like small pockets around the country where there's like diehard metal fans. It's not like it's fully concentrated on New York or L.A. or something; there's plenty of places where there's clubs, and lots of things are happening. You gotta hit the right spots and the right clubs if you're a metal band trying to make a living I guess.
Rob: Well, there's some reviews on this show that we just played, which were positive, but also too overall on the whole festival (Frost And Fire fest - Ed.) a lot of guys were saying it's one of the best festivals they've ever been to, plan wise. It's like a block from the beach, beautiful weather. Down town Ventura, there's like a hundred different restaurants, so anything you'd want to eat, you're within 5 minutes walking distance. But, I gotta comment on this, when we're doing the meet and greet the next day, people came all the way from Leningrad, Russia and from China to see the band, and yet there's maybe like a handful of people from L.A. and maybe 2 people from our hometown. So a thousand people flew from all over the world to see us and yet people we know couldn't even walk a block...
Tim: Well, that's how it is, you know, nobody in your home town gives a shit about you anyway. That goes with any band anywhere.
Tim: That's a killer man, like in the middle of the week. And I go "Oh, I'd really like to go see them, oh, it's on a wednesday, Aw, I gotta get up at like 5 in the morning!" (laughing.)
Rob: We have heard of that festival, yeah. So... I dunno if we'd had any contact with them yet, or whatever. We know people that are involved in it. We'd really like to do that. We do have a couple of things that are booked for next year (which, 2018 is already here - Ed). We're working on other stuff in the near future, and that's a possibility. I've heard that's a really good festival, and it's actually getting to be not quite the prog thing; they're doing a lot more metal and things like that. I've heard it's really nice, successful and really cool.
Tim: Yeah, they actually did the same thing at Keep It True last year; Rob and I were over there. Yeah, things like that, the classic metal bands like you know, Fates Warning, Manilla Road, Omen, all those kinds of bands that do all the festivals and stuff; all the guys that I talked to said they agree, they really have a great time and it's all about the fans and having fun.
Tim: We didn't really put out a "demo" demo, our first demo was "Frost And Fire." That was never supposed to be a general release to the public; that was supposed to be a demo for us to shop around and try to get a record deal. Because everybody else at the time was sending out cassettes... I don't know if anybody reading this knows what a cassette used to be (laughing here). Everbody was sending cassettes to record companies and they'd throw them in the trash, or they'd tape over them with their kid's play stuff. So we decided to make a record to show the record companies what we could do and what it would look like and things like that. Then it just kinda steamrolled into getting released. It's a long story and somewhat well known; I don't wanna get into it here.
Rob: I think where you might be getting confused, Steve, since the band broke up there's been a long history of bootlegs coming out. The only other thing we did before "Frost And Fire," we put out... They call it the orange cassette. And some of that stuff ended up on "Servants Of Chaos," like some of the early songs that Tim sang on like 'High Performance,' 'Last Laugh,' stuff like that. But that was a cassette that we were trying to do the same thing. We were sending this out to all the record companies, and we'd never get a response or anything. So we thought, if we do a record and we get good artwork, good photographs; you know, do a proper recording. That way when we hand that to someone...
And what's really funny, we were probably the first band to do that... Not ever, but during that era. Then right after we did it, then the Motley Crue's, Metal Massacre I, Brian put out his first thing on his own record label. We were the first band in L.A. to actually put out a record that was completely self produced and paid for by the band. The funny thing about that was, people say "hey, did you get any air play?" Well, there's a big local, kinda hard rock station in L.A. and on Monday night they played new bands or whatever. We sent them the album and they played 'I'm Alive' and 'Frost And Fire.' We're all sitting around the radio listening to it, we're all excited. Then the next day I talked to the guy and he goes "man, that's way too heavy for us to play!" (MUCH laughter here).
Rob: I mean, this is the station that's playing Black Sabbath, Deep Purple or whatever. That's where we kinda decided to do "King Of The Dead." All the songs off "Frost And Fire" were written by Greg, and we had a bunch more songs that we all wrote together. But he tended to write songs that were more, we thought had more commercial... Like if people listen to them like 'Edge Of The Knife,' or 'Better Off Dead' or something.
Tim: It was a big cross section of stuff we were doing. Just to show people what we could do. Our heavy stuff, our not so heavy stuff, instrumentals, the whole thing. It's just a weird thing.
Rob: that's a bootleg tape. Like I said we just put a cross section of all that stuff on "Frost And Fire." They're all about or around that time though.
Tim: are you looking at an album?
Tim: The thing you're talking about, is it an LP?
Rob: No, no he's looking at a track list and it's probably online you're looking at it right?
Rob: Oh my god, we did an interview with a guy in Poland last week, and he knew our underwear sizes! (MUCH laughter here). Matter of fact, he was asking so many pointed and detailed questions that were semi-secret... Well, not secret but not well known.
Tim: You have to dig through like all kinds of interviews to find these references to some of the stuff he was asking, which was really weird. This guy must have like a private investigator tracking us down or something.
Rob: He knows so much about us, why did he have to ask us any questions? He knew everything that no one else knew, it was kinda funny.
I've been doing Vibrations Of Doom for 25 years, and I just got to the point where, yeah, it's cool to read about how somebody recorded an album and things like that. You start talking about lyrics, you start getting into kind of a deeper ideology that I think a lot of publications miss the opportunity for, you know what I'm saying?
Tim: We had a thing in the local paper here, right before the last festival, and the guy's been doing it for like 20 - 30 years also. And he got to the point where all he does is turn a tape recorder on and ask a question, and then just types up the thing. He doesn't go through and go "oh, this is what he meant," He doesn't go through and...
Rob: Analyze it...
Tim: No, not analyze, but you know, just write whatever the hell you say and just put it on paper. Taking no time and no effort behind it. I'm kinda glad you said that because that kinda give us confidence. It was weird reading those off the cuff remarks and the guy just put them in there...
Rob: A lot of times I say dumb shit! (much laughter here from everyone)
Tim: I don't wanna print that out loud, but Rob will talk off the top of his head and say "hey this is off the record," but the guy would actually print it "hey this is off the record but blah, blah, blah. " You read that and you're kinda going "hey, that was supposed to be off the record." You're not supposed to print that and put the comment in there, you know!
Tim: You're right about that. I feel the same way when I go to see bands. You go to see a band and you're like "aw, man they're playing those three or four songs, why didn't they play those three or four from back in the day that are so much better." I mean, you kinda gotta move along; hopefully the stuff that we're gonna be doing in the future is gonna back up everything that we've done in the past. I don't think anyone's gonna have a problem with that. We wouldn't do it if we didn't think it was up to whatever standards, or low standards we may have (laughing here) for ourselves. We'll just integrate it with the classics of course when we go out and play.
Rob: Plus, our style is so unique and weird, you know. Between my completely unorthodox drumming style and Tim's voice, and Greg wrote a lot of our songs in the band. Our stuff is gonna be so weird that people are gonna like it. Who would say "I don't wanna hear 'Black Beast Of Blood.' (laughing here).
Tim: I don't wanna get too crazy, but we probably have 20 songs that were never recorded, or recorded right... We're gonna be pretty selective about what we do, but we'll probably throw something old in there and redo it.
Didn't get to hear "Paradise Lost," unfortunately, but that's one I'm going to have to track down.
Tim: Those are jam songs too, like 'War Eternal' and 'One Foot In Hell.' Yeah, you know, that's a great album too; I know what you're saying; it was just more straight ahead than the other ones I think. I think what you mean as far as... And more straight ahead like kind of a metal record instead of a little bit more progressive or whatever you want to say. I don't know about... In the doom thing, we've been called everything from the godfathers of epic doom metal to the worst heavy metal band that ever existed. So, you know, we're somewhere in between... Somewhere in between lies the truth. We take it all as just an honor to even be mentioned, and glad that people still wanna hear us and see what we are doing.
Rob: It's amazing also too that the people know our songs. I told this story to one of the other guys, when we were over at KIT (Keep It True - Ed.) it was really dark, we were over at the back of this building, 1 o'clock in the morning, these guys with leather jackets, chains... They seemed like a pretty rowdy group. They were very drunk, and I looked at Tim like this is gonna either end very badly or we were gonna make it through this right? We get up to them and they turn around and they point and they go "Tim Baker." This was one in the morning, nobody even had a cell phone light, right? It's just like dark like you were in an alley. They recognized me and they busted into singing 'Frost And Fire' word for word! And this was our first night in Germany, and I was like "oh my god!" So we thought we were gonna get beat up and they ended up like hugging us!
Tim: We're working on tracks in here, stuff worked up into our set. We're not giving it a timetable for anything new. We can't really be giving away anything like that. I've written tons of lyrics, we have that down. Hopefully it will be in the not too distant future.
Stylistically, we want it to be representing Ungol. We've progressed from "King Of The Dead," "One Foot In Hell" and that kinda stuff. We want it to be along the same lines... Heavy!
Rob: We were talking to the guys in Rush and Alex once said "I wanna make the heaviest music that we can." And I remember the next album was "2112" and I really liked that. But if you listen to their things; and they're fantastic musicians, but they kinda got into more experimental, progressive music. But I wanna kick it down into the gutter. I wanna take this stuff...
Tim: I want it to be more doomy...
Rob: Yeah... If you listen to "Frost And Fire" and "King Of The Dead" our answer was if that's too heavy, well look, THIS is our heavy shit. I wanna put out something that makes "Frost And Fire" looks like, kinda like a children's lullaby.
Tim: I wanna do something that's so heavy that guys go "wow." We're gonna have to have a parental label on the thing... (laughing here).
Rob: I'm sure you've seen the banger film thing on whatever it was... Not MTV or whatever. It was all the history of metal, it kinda had a flow chart of all the subgenres of the genres of the other kind of genres of metal that have branched off over the years. It's funny really when you think about it; it all kinda comes from what, Black Sabbath really.
Tim: Greg's band he was in for awhile, Falcon, actually had the singer for them on one of the tracks. It's all kind of a weird seven degrees of separation thing with all the metal bands and genres and stuff. I was never really into like the death metal or the thrash or all that kind of stuff. I'm not saying there's not good bands that DO that kind of stuff. You listen to our stuff and that's not really what we were into. I've seen a lot of bands and I'm friends with a lot of guys that are doing that stuff. Anything metal, for me as long as it's good, it's done well, it's cool with me, man, I love it.
Tim: To be honest, the Metal Blade that's really been taking care of us is the guys in Europe, in Germany. They're the guys that just re-released "Paradise Lost." Unbelievable packaging. They remastered it separately for the LP's, for the CD, and like a 12 page color booklet. I don't know if you've seen it. The albums come in 4 different colors of marble vinyl. They have our whole catalog right now. That would be the perfect thing for us, but I gotta tell you this; we have management now and stuff. What we're gonna do is whatever's best for the band.
We love Metal Blade; Brian (Slagel, founder of Metal Blade - Ed) recently picked us as one of the top 11 bands, or releases, that he ever put out in the entire history of his record label. That was a pretty fantastic honor. In fact we were on there twice because he picked his first album "Metal Massacre One," which we did 'Death Of The Sun' on. So we were the only band that was on his list twice. He picked 'King Of The Dead' also. They have our whole catalog and they're taking care of us and stuff.
My hope would be that we do something with them. What we gotta do is we gotta look out for whatever's really best for the band. And I think what's best for the band would be for us to stick together and our longevity, and putting out some more material. Whatever we do, it's not gonna be weak. Now, are we gonna evolve, possibly... But you know, evolution is something that happens whether you want it to or not. You know, like people grow an extra thumb or something (laughing).
They're gonna hear it and say "That's Cirith Ungol." They're not gonna say "well, that's the NEW Cirith Ungol," they're gonna say "wow, that sounds like classic Cirith Ungol.
Tim: Yes, exactly. We may even play one of our songs backwards note for note. (MUCH laughter from all of us). I'm just kidding...
Rob: That's off the record. (More laughter here).
Rob: I tell you what, if we do make it to ProgPower sometime, we'll hoist a couple of pints about that and have a good discussion... probably off the record though...
Rob: Hey, Steve, check this out. I was at a party last night; it's like October, almost November. It was like 85, 90 degrees last night at like 11 o'clock at a party. We live in an area that hasn't rained here in 8 years. Now it sprinkled last night, just to get the pavement wet. But that was the first time in probably 12 months. All our lakes are completely empty, there's no ground water left, there's...
Tim: (interrupting) 'We're gonna bleed, man!' (MUCH laughter here).
Rob: I just put a plug in here, I was endorsed by Paiste cymbals. And I got made one of the most unbelievable drum sets on earth. It's made out of solid oak and they painted it solid red on the outside. I dunno it's...
Tim: what's that gotta do with 'Doomed Planet?' (MUCH laughter here from all of us).
Rob: When the band was broke up, I never really wanted to STOP playing drums. Every single night I'd wake up in the middle of the night, for the last 25 years, having nightmares or dreams about the band. Like we're getting back together, recording an album, I'm getting a drum set. I'd work on cars and do stuff like that. And everytime I'd see a cymbal stand or something I'd get really excited. But when the band got back together, what got me really turned on was not only playing drums again but being around all the hardware...
Tim: The gong!!
Rob: The gong. Like an 80 inch gong, my wife said she'll leave me if I get it, the guys in the band said they'll quit the band if I get it, and the other guy said he won't help me carry it...
Tim: Nobody in the world needs an 80 inch gong (much laughter here).
Rob: Then I said well, a 60 inch gong, and they're like, same thing.
People talk about pre manifested destiny and things like that. I really think that people are on a path and sometimes you can learn to read... It's just like going out in nature, you can... Okay, I can see this trail where this person... I don't think we're really in TUNE with our environment, our reality, where we're at at a certain place and time, you know what I'm saying?
Tim: Yeah, I agree totally. I think what's funny though, I think some people can, when you look back in time, whether it's Jules Verne or other science fiction writers... Phillip Dick... or whatever. They kinda semi foresee the future before the rest of us do.
Rob: My point is though, it's like you don't have to not believe in something not for it to happen... Not for it... you know (pauses to think about what he actually said - Ed.) Like people may not believe Cirith Ungol's gonna have a new album out, but when it hits the shelf... Oh shit! It'll be like a ripple through the time continuum. (laughter here).
DARK ANGEL.
Interview with the original singer, Don Doty.
It's a goddamn shame... We've read so much in the press about Dark Angel's reformation, with later era singer Ron Rhineheart in tow, the rest of the members of Dark Angel going so far as to completely discredit their original singer who made such a lasting impression on the minds and ears of it's fans, that it's a shame he hasn't been given much press to tell his side of the story. In my honest opinion, Dark Angel should do what Rigor Mortis did when they arrived in Atlanta to play their blistering set of classics: allow both singers to occupy their songs in their fashion. Even though I was not a huge fan of Rigor Mortis' songs post Bruce, I did appreciate and even enjoy the unique chance to hear songs from "Freaks" and "Vs. The Earth" done by none other than Doyle Bright. So it is this fan's sincerest hope that this is DONE, to give proper justice to ALL eras of Dark Angel. According to Jim Durkin and even Gene Hoglan, this will never happen, so at least here you have the next best thing, the chance to hear the legend SPEAK on these matters, probably for the first time EVER.
Yeah. Well, Jim and I were actually talking as well. As a matter of fact, we were writing a song together, and I still have that song. Jim was all about me coming back, as a matter of fact he's the one that turned me on to Keep It True. And the way that came about, was he played the year before with Ruthless. And he said, "Don, it's a great festival; you'll love it. Go ahead, get D.A. back together, go ahead and do it. I can't do it right now because of work." And I said, "Okay Jim, you're going to be missing out, because I'm going to be booking a couple more shows." He goes, "go ahead and do it, I've just got too much work right now."
So I get ahold of Eric, Eric's on board, I get ahold of Mike (Sandro?) He's on board. In fact, he gets one of his buddies from another band to play guitar. I tried to get ahold of Gene (Hoglan), he didn't respond back to me. So I went ahead and got ahold of Sascha. And it was like, either way I went I was good to play; it would either be Gene or Sascha. Well, Gene got wind of that and he was like "Oh no. I'm Dark Angel. If I'm not going to play, then nobody is going to play." He basically got all the guys together and said "Look, I've been doing this 25 years, Doty's been doing it... nothing. Who do you want to go with? I've got management, I've got everybody. And basically everybody swayed on over to him. And I said that was cool, no worries. I understood. Actually, Eric stuck with me. And I told Eric, "Hey dude, don't fuck this up man, get your ass over there! You're not going to hurt my feelings; do the right thing and go play these shows!" So he ended up going over there and they played these shows. I'm the one who booked Chile, I'm the one who booked Sweden Rocks. I booked the shows that they did, so I know that they were good shows.
That being said, Gene had no intentions of me going because if I went, it would be like having me and Ron on the stage at the same time. Who's everybody gonna want to see? "We Have Arrived" and "Darkness Descends." Well, I sang on both of those. Don't get me wrong, there's a couple of good songs on the other ones, but everybody is mainly interested in "Darkness Descends."
Yeah. That's where it all started; it all started back in high school with these other two bands called Metallica and Slayer. (wow - Ed.) And nobody was known. We all practiced at the same damn garage; we all shared each other's shit. And that's how it was. We all grew up in Downey (California - Ed.) When we go to take off, everybody starts moving up the ladder, moving up the ladder. Well, I didn't see any money in it, and I had a great job, married and getting ready to have my first child. And I needed to make a decision. And that's the whole thing that everybody doesn't really know about. I actually had been pulling myself out. That's why, if you look back in time, you'll see that I did these shows on tour in Corpus Christi in Texas... There were three shows we did with Megadeth. And I did those, but I just barely made it by like three seconds on the timeclock Monday when I had to punch in for work. And I said, man, this is like too freakin' close guys! So they had another tour lined up already, and I said I couldn't do it. That's when Jim Drabos jumped in. Okay? This is starting to sound familiar, and it's starting to make sense.
Jim Drabos went ahead and did that tour that I couldn't make, because I was working. D.A. comes back and they said "Oh shit, we booked another show at The Country Club, Don, can you do it?" And I said, hell yeah I can do it, It's not going to interfere with work. And that was August of '87. Of course, Jim Drabos is out because Don is right here again. So I go ahead and do that show. From there, I pretty much told the guys look, I can't be doing this no more man, I can't take off work, I can't do this, you gotta find a replacement for me. Gene came in and said, "Hey, look, we're gonna do 'The Immigrant Song' from Led Zeppelin. And I said, Oh, man, I'm definitely out. I'm not doing that song; that song is too hard to do. Whoever does it, I feel sorry for them. They went ahead and did it anyways, poor Ron.
You can listen to that song and KNOW they shouldn't have done it.
It's definitely different. I'm like dude you guys are pulling away from the core. Jim and I, we had a set direction on where we were going, and Gene had a different direction on where he wanted to go. Personally, I'm not into the pedophilia and the mindfucks and shit like that man. I'm into more like war and stuff. He gets into his shit, you can tell by the last album, the fourth one, where his mind is. Um, because he wrote it. Matter of fact, he wrote one more AFTER that one. It's just that they didn't authorize it, they didn't publish it.
Oh yeah... He wrote everything!
Exactly. He has a big influence, where he goes. He does carry a lot of presence with him. Don't get me wrong, he's a good drummer as well. He's gotten better and better over time.
It's not where I wanted to go, you know. So I simply said, you guys have at it, I'm bowing out. And I think that really pissed him off. Ron's okay I guess, but he's... I dunno. He just lacks something; there's something missing. And everybody can feel it. (I agree wholeheartedly - Ed). Like he just goes through the motions. But I mean, he's up there doing it, so I give him credit for doing it, and I give him credit because if he wouldn't have been up there, I wouldn't have been able to come back and do what I did. I'm not out to down anybody, I'm not out to put anybody down by any means. I think Gene is still a good drummer. I've seen a lot of drummers today that are phenomenal. Some of the stuff that these guys have learned. Even Greg, my drummer now man, he's freakin just crazy, CRAZY fast and crazy good. I gotta tell him, "hey dude, check this out. SLOW DOWN... (laughing). I guess they're used to death metal, and death metal is FAST shit!
I watch drummers closely, and man some of these guys today are just phenomenal. Gene's moved up and up and I'm glad for him you know. But when we were talking, I even told Gene, I said, look, I know that you're still pissed at me for something. Whatever it is, check it out dude... I'm sorry. Hopefully we can forget about that and move on. He's like "nope." I'm like "Wait a minute, check this out. Picture this as a job okay, because that's what it is. You don't go to work every day, and like the people you work with. But you still go to work every day. How about if we just come to work, and we do our jobs, and we split. You ain't gotta hang around me, and I don't have to hang around you. That cool?" Nope. I said, alright be a dick. Alright fuck you too.
And that's pretty much where we left and we haven't really spoken since. I suddenly became the estranged singer that was making shit up. Kinda hard to say that when Mike's been on facebook saying that he's speaking with me. Eric's been on there talking with me. I've done interviews with Jed. Hard to say I haven't talked to people because it's obvious that I have. Eric and I wrote a song together too, that's two songs that we were already going to come out with for D.A. and they are bad ass songs. And I'm really bummed that the public doesn't get to hear them. But 'Show No Fear' is a bad ass jam, and Eric wrote it! Hopefully one day here I'm gonna have Eric come up onstage with me, and we'll play it! I just gotta wait 'till he's done with D.A. I don't see D.A. doing a whole lot of stuff right now...
They're not going to be doing too much. Ron is too far away and everybody else is too far from each other. I think Mike moved too now so they're even farther from each other. And, how do you make new songs, well, the only way they can do that is number one, they've already got a new album. The same one that they didn't get published last time. So they're just gonna redo that one. That's why he didn't want me on board because I have new material; I have new songs. And why have Doty come on with new material that's going to be fresh, when they still have Gene's album that never got published. It doesn't seem feasible, so you just keep me out of the whole mix and everything will be smooth sailing.
He did, and you are absolutely right. Jim looks up to Gene, he always has and he always will. He'll follow Gene wherever he goes. And that's the part that hurt me, because you see Jim and I... I gave Jim a ride to school when nobody else would pick his ass up. (I'm laughing here - Ed). I took him out on dates because he had no car to go in, and I went on double dates with him. You know, I'm the guy he went to high school with. I'm the guy who started the band with him; it was Jim, Rob and myself. We started TNT that turned into Shellshock that turned into Dark Angel. Nobody has been there longer. And it gets me that he would pick Gene and have Gene tell him "Fuck Doty, we're gonna use Ron because Doty left us and Ron's always been here.
Not after that last stab in the back, when he came out publicly on Blabbermouth and said "look, if I came back, Ron's always been our foundation, Ron's would be my singer."
I just went, What? Jim are you serious? Alright dude, that's cool, I see where you're coming from now. Gene's got him by the nuts. That's cool. It really pissed them all off when I held the rights to Dark Angel, I held the rights to the logo because they never, ever applied for them. And that really shot Gene out because, if I hold the name they can't use it, which means they can't play. So I went live on Jimmy's radio station down there in L.A. and I said look, I'm gonna show you guys what a sport I am, I'm gonna pull mine; you guys can have them. And believe me, Gene had Jim write them up so they could get them. So, they have the name now. The thing they don't understand is, as long as you can prove that you had the name BEFORE that, you get the name. And I can prove that I've had it longer than Durkin. And that's what they don't understand is... I can still pull the name anytime I like. It doesn't matter that they HAVE it right now, it's who can prove that they had it FIRST.
Correct. And I can prove it, I have it on documented paper that I had it before anybody else. See, Jim has one of our first contracts; I have the first, second and third contracts AND I also have documentation before the contract. He's unaware of this documentation I had before them... because... You ever heard of a show called the Gong Show?
Remember how long ago that was on?
79, you bet. Do you know that Dark Angel APPLIED for the Gong Show?
That's right. The manager Don Doty went ahead and wrote up paperwork and applied. Because I wanted to get gonged, man! I wanted to go on national T.V. and get my ass gonged for having the fucking bad ass sound up there that the country had ever heard. That was my plan back then. And I wrote up all the paper work and wrote me down as the manager and I sent this shit in. Well, we ended up taking off and going a different way so I never followed it. But I still have all the paperwork from then with the date. So that shows that I had it (Dark Angel) back you know, early 80's.
I don't like the drama... I just don't want all the freakin' drama, you know what I'm saying?
You're absolutely right. And the fans don't wanna hear all your bubblegum stuff (laughing here - Ed). The fans just wanna hear that you guys are doing more music and putting out good shit. It's kinda tough whenever you gotta, kinda let them know where you're coming from. At the same time you don't want to sound like you're bitching.
Yeah... You see, that's the one I've never even brought up. Do you know how much money I've seen from "Darkness Descends?"
I have not seen one penny from "Darkness Descends." Not one royalty have I been given. And I'm sure Gene and Jim are fully aware of where all my checks went: in their pockets. Because that IS me singing on there, and that's my check. I wrote this shit, I SANG this shit, I should get PAID for this shit. You know, "We Have Arrived?" I own the rights to because I paid for that whole thing. I got the 2 inch tape, I got the rights. So anybody who wanted to do "We Have Arrived" had to come to me, which NOBODY has ever done. And I haven't seen a penny from that either.
Roadrunner actually paid me, I think 3 grand once. But other than that, I haven't seen a penny additional. There's like a shit ton of money that's owed to me and I'm aware of that. But I'm not one to make all these complaints and gripes about it. I'd rather just come out and play some new music. Let them think they got one over on me, I really don't care. I'd rather keep going. I've got some bad ass songs that we're writing right now that are gonna put the industry back on where it needs to be with thrash metal. The changes that are just gonna knock people on their butt, and it's gonna be bad ass. I'm just stoked to be out here playing it.
Hell yeah, and if you were to have heard 'Pounding From The Grave' or... I don't know if you've heard 'Syndicate Life'... It's definitely OLD school. It's good. If I'm gonna put it out I'm gonna like it. I think people are gonna be humming it in their showers (kaughing here - Ed), they're gonna be humming it before they go to bed. They're gonna be 'Pounding From The Grave,' duh-duh-duh da da... (he continues to sing the lyrics). You're gonna have this song, it's gonna be in your head and you can't get rid of it; I know, because I've been singing it for 2 freakin' years. I can't get it out of my head!
Right now we're trying to line everything up so we can get in the studio, because we have to do these now because they want to do a record.
I'm actually looking at three different labels, so I'm bascially going to put it out there as a bidding war. Whoever wants it can have it. Just tell me what you're gonna give me; some tour support, a little bit of money to throw at the studio and it's yours. And I know they'll make money, because metal is DEFINITELY around. It's maybe not as back in full force but the hard cores are always gonna be there, ya know? The fans that are there, I know I can count on them, and I know thet they're true, it's so cool.
True
Metal's in your blood; either it's there or it's not. And if you gotta have that driving beat; if you hear that, it makes you wanna get up and just makes you want to move. It's something inside of us; I know, whenever I hear it, it sparks up my whole life. And that's why I'm so stoked about playing again. And with the guys I have I've never been so lucky in my life. To have Henry and Kelly, it's just phenomenal. Now I have Doug doing bass; he reminds me of Rob he's just like, back in the day. Everything's just falling into place! Greg's got the drums...
I'm so stoked to see metal coming back, and I know that the festivals are all happening over there. I feel stoked that we got to headline the Armageddon Festival 4, it was really cool. I noticed that Dark Angel hasn't done any headlining which kinda makes me laugh.
I've headlined my own tour here, already. That's all I've done is headlined. It's going to continue that way when we go over to Europe; I KNOW we're gonna be huge in Europe. I can FEEL it. People are stoked about the band; the guys I have they have their own followings. And it's so cool because everybody backs them so much. I dunno, I'm just blessed I guess.
'Hammer Away...' (He sounds like he's a little disappointed by this question - Ed.)
No, no, no, no... they weren't... They were thrown together, that we put together... I think his name was Mark. We got together in his garage one day and we just started putting these songs together. We did like 'Road Warrior,' you know, 'Demons on the highway in search of rape and lust, when he guns the throttle, leaves others in the dust.' The words aren't all that, you know what I'm saying? They were good at the time, they were something we were putting together, we were kinda getting the feel of things. We definitely progressed quickly, and we knew what we wanted; we just didn't know how to get it yet. But by the time we put it together, that's when "We Have Arrived" started. 'Gonna Burn' is just totally commercial (laughing here - Ed). It wasn't really what we were striving for. Like 'Hell's On It's Knees' actually made it to the record, but it was one of the few that did. And after that, we definitely, you'll see a jump in progression. You know, we went to "We Have Arrived," and then we went to "Darkness Descends." And I thought we were definitely moving in the right direction. But then we took a left turn into the psychological, and I kinda... kept going straight.
I understand that maybe they were trying to up the game a little bit. Because metal has had a bad rap since the beginning. And Metalheads are sometimes given the impression that they're stupid, that they don't have any intelligence, they just walk around being brutal. But I've seen some bands write some well thought out and very verbose lyrics; just take Carcass and what not.
Oh yeah, there's a lot out there. And when Gene was helping writing, I loved the breath of fresh air of something different. It did make you think, and that was cool. I had to learn them as well. Gene is very gifted in the way of having a photographic memory. He was learning one word a day, and just the one word a day, and he could retain them. And that's really helped him in his writing. And that was a good thing. I think it got a little bit out of control on the third and fourth album. Too many words can hurt a song. You know, you gotta be somewhat repetitious, you gotta be somewhat catchy. You gotta have a hook, and if you don't, you're just making noise. It's music for a reason; because you can listen to it, you can enjoy it... And I believe that can be done with ANY kind of music; I listen to a lot of punk rock...
I don't care if you're SCREAMING the lyrics, you're still gonna have a hook in it. And D.R.I., and Dead Kennedys, and everybody else who we listen to...
Fear yeah. The guys are up there giving their all, but they still have hooks in their songs, and you were humming that shit when you walked away.
I tell ya, 'The Burning Of Sodom' was supposed to be the fastest song that you could actually sing something to. And that's what I was striving for. And I thought I pretty much hit it, because anything beyond that, I was tongue tied! We sped it up and we slowed it down until it got to right there. You can actually hear every word I'm saying if you listen and read along. It was difficult, I did have to do it many, many times, and I did do it many times in practice alone. It was a feat to get it all in and make it somewhat understandable. Because that's the bottom line, is you gotta understand what the person is saying. You have to be able to articulate what you're trying to put across. It was fun, though, I really did enjoy it. I enjoyed trying to do different things and different styles. When you hear 'Black Prophecies' you're gonna hear that there's so many different phrasings in the singing.
I give Gene credit for that, because he actually did that. It's a great song; it's longer than life, but it was a great filler. And he did a really good job with that, and I was pleased to sing it. I did change a couple of little things in it, and I just made it my own. And that's what you gotta do with any song that you have; you make it your own so it fits you...
That's basically a split, myself and Gene.
Let's see here. 'Burning Of Sodom' has mine, it has Gene and I think Jim on it too. 'Darkness Descends' itself was Gene. You'll find 'Merciless Death' was mine. You have 'Hunger Of The Undead' and 'Death Is Certain' was Gene, and 'Perish In Flames' was me. It's kinda split down the middle; I personally felt that Dark Angel wrote "Darkness Descends," because we all have our inputs, and we all contribute, so I think the whole band wrote it personally.
I personally like anything having to do with the Third World War... Anything having to do with history, anything having to do with war itself, future events, things that are going on right now in our country. Things that were really gonna happen, that were actually happening. I was writing this song not too long ago about the Red Baron; who he was, what he did, why he was named this and that. It was a pretty good song. It has to fit, you know, everything has to click. We dropped a lot of songs, because after we did them, we just... there was something not there for us. That's why D.A. never had a lot of songs. Probably one of the few bands that you'll hear a song on the first album that's again on the second album (laughs). I mean, how many bands do that? I don't know of any... Just Dark Angel!
A lot of it is production. And we changed up the beginning a little bit, where the bass is a little different, and different drums. For the most part, you know, we needed another song because we didn't have that many. So we pulled one of the ones that everybody liked, and we kinda redid it and thought "hey, Gene, check this out, you get to do this now, so what would you do?" And it was nice to have a little comparison, and the crowd already knew the song, so when we played it they just sang right along with us, which is always cool.
Yeah, I've heard of them...
Correct. And that's what we were going for. We had done the studio already so we knew what we DIDN'T want. And when we came in, we knew that we weren't going to play slower, we weren't going to play faster; we're gonna play at the same speed, the same tones... we were going to capture what you get live. We all thought, you know, it was a little bit muddy, but that's how we sound, and that is what we agreed on and what we went with. And Sean did a great job with mastering; he brought it all together and cleaned it up enough that it was listenable. The mix was just dead on. Everything came together and the spots that were empty, he hit that button and that reverb would kick in. And it was filling in just perfect. It was really an excellent job on mixing. We were very lucky there.
We've always liked that heavy, muddy... It gives it life, you know? We're not perfect, and if you come to see us live, don't expect a perfect performance, but you can expect to be involved with it. And if I gotta jump off that stage and land on your ass, that's what I'm gonna do (laughing here - Ed). Know that! I get into the crowd a lot, and I really do enjoy it...
The cookie monster thing...
Yeah, that's true. I listened to the death and I listened to the black.? Are they my favorites? No, because my heart is in thrash, I still like punk, which is way over on this side. But that's where I came from and that's where I'm comfortable. I'm comfortable not so much talking about Satan and God and the wars that are between them, it's more like... you know, check this out. We all have it tough, we all have a shit ton sometimes and we can all relate to that. But, here's the thing: when you come to a show, you get to forget about all that stuff! You get to just be free, and not have to worry about nothing. And that to me is freeing.
Yeah, I listen to the other stuff, I listen to everything. I listen to Taylor Swift (much laughter here), because my daughter listens to Taylor, so I gotta listen to Taylor Swift! I even listened to Miley Cyrus for awhile, so there! That's no joke. Whatever my kids are listening to, that's who I'm listening to with them, right? I got to hear some of the rap and the T.V. pop and other stuff. And my other son, he's into hardcore shit. He's into it, and that's cool. He's right down Dad's lane. I do appreciate all that's been done, and I'm glad that everybody got to express themselves in different ways. I don't dislike anybody or anything that they're doing. I do think it's for certain crowds though, and if you don't belong, you shouldn't go; if you don't like one song, you're not gonna like the rest.
I like to be a bit more diversified. I don't like to be pinned down and said "Okay, well this is all you're allowed to sing about Don!" (laughing here - Ed). Because that ain't gonna happen. And I'm gonna break a lot of molds, and people are gonna see that you know what? I'm gonna do things different. And it's gonna be good stuff, because I've got the backing to make it good.
That was my point. You already tapped on one of the things I have a song about. It's of the gods. People don't know our gods; you know, who is Poseidon, who is Zeus. I wrote a song about that, people need to know that shit, and it's good shit! They're gonna learn something, but they're gonna be singing metal while they do it! And that's the cool part!
I can't wait to put it out there for 'em. It's gonna change the way people look at, at least, our little square of the world.
And that's me man, I am a big dreamer. I see us doing some pretty big things. I have a couple of outreaches that I really wanna do. I have outreaches for even schools. For the kids. I wanna do a drum cadence, and I want my drummer to do this cadence. I want the kids to go ahead and do their cadences and come and match, and whoever does it the best is more than welcome to come and open up one of our shows for us. I think that would be an awesome opportunity for those kids to get recognized at the same time. It brings all the fans to the show, because they're gonna be bringing all their friends. It's a good way to promote music. And we're keeping it positive so the kids aren't out doing dope and gang shootings and everything else. They're focusing on music. If everybody gets on board with it, I think it will work well. If not then I'll just shut up and kick back. (laughs).
Oh my gosh. Dave Richards. Dave Richards was a very unique man. And by the way, I'm still looking for him, because I want to tell him hey and thanks. I can't find him; I've put it out there. He was definitely ahead of his time. He saw things and he saw what people were going to be wanting to collect later in life. And he was making it right then for them. He would take his bands like Jag Panzer, and Dark Angel, and he would take their songs... I have a 45 record and it's pictured like a christmas tree, and it has 'Merciless Death' on it!
Tell me that's not the coolest thing you've ever heard! There's another one that's a picture of a heart! And this little heart spins around on a 45. And it's playing 'We Have Arrived.' It's some crazy ass shit. But there's people out there collecting it today, and if you could find one, they're worth a little bit of money.
He saw things, and he would do picture discs for EVERYBODY. He actually DID pay us! We didn't make a whole lot of money from him, but you know. I made the statement earlier, I've never seen anything from "Darkness Descends," which I didn't. "We Have Arrived," I saw a check from Roadrunner for almost $2200 and one for $800 from Azra. So I've seen about 3 grand. Again, to have somebody give you a paycheck, tells you "hey, at least he's trying to be honest, and he's giving us our money."
I don't have anything bad to say about Dave. He definitely made things happen. I know we needed money one time... Here's a little tidbit for ya. Dark Angel needed to fund some things, right. And Dave goes "hey, I know a way you guys can make FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS, RIGHT now." And we all said "How, what do we do, what do we do?"
He goes, "well, you can't laugh now." And I said "Oh no, we won't laugh, sure." "What I want you to do is I want you to all get kazoos, and I want you to play 'Deep In The Heart Of Texas' for me." (laughing here). That's what we did; we all laughed our asses off. And when we were done getting up off the floor, he goes "Okay, will you guys do it?" And we went "What, you're serious?" He goes, "Yeah, I got a guy who will buy THIS record, as long as it has 'Deep In The Heart Of Texas.' Doesn't care what instrument you play, so use kazoos. And we will give you guys a different name." We ended up calling ourselves Billy Joe Bob And The Bo Hicks. We did 'Deep In The Heart Of Texas' on kazoo, and I HAVE it. I have one of the very few copies, ever. He got us our 5 grand, it paid our bill... Everything was cool; it worked! We did what we had to do and we had a good time doing it, because man, you listen to that you can't HELP but laugh!
Oh, someday I will, I DEFINITELY will. We are cracking up SO hard you can't help but join in laughing. Just one of those things.
Everybody kinda remembers the Fender show, in Long Beach, they had some rafters above the crowd. And what they did is they greased the rafters so nobody could climb up on them. Well, above the stage there were rafters as well, but nobody greased those. So I get out there and I climb up on the rafters and I get out above the crowd and I find out there's grease on 'em! So I do like anybody else and I woop! And here I go into the crowd. Bam, and they catch me and start crowd surfing me. Well, sure enough, I get to hear my verses coming up and I push everybody aside right? Don't ever push ANYBODY aside if you're crowd surfing. If you push everybody aside there's nobody below you.
Down I went right, and I hit my head on the concrete. And I'm walking up to the stage and I hear this guy going "Doty! Check your head!" And I'm like "what the hell" right? So I see some blood. So I'm walking up to the stage and I grab a terry cloth towel and some duct tape and I put the terry cloth towel on my eye and the duct tape around my head. And I start introducing, what I think, is the next song. And needless to say, I had a spiel for each song back then. And I go through this whole spiel and I see the crowd just staring at me. And I go "what the fuck is everybody's problem!??" They're like 'Doty, you just introduced the song you just did!' And I'm like 'Oh, shit.' There's blood coming down my face and they're like, 'Doty, get your ass to the fuckin' hospital!' I'm all woozy now and I'm thinking, "yeah, I better." Well, I go down and I get 22 stitches in my head. And I'm thinking "well, how did the show go?" (laughs).
It's times like that when you look back and you go "man, we had a lot of good times." We played a lot of good shows. It was us and Slayer at the Hollywood Palladium. It was SO packed. Venom was supposed to be the headliner but they backed out. So it was just Slayer and Dark Angel.
And that's what they did. But they didn't realize that Slayer and Dark Angel were a good enough bill to pack the place. The place was so packed that the fire department showed up and were kicking people out because people were jumping off the balconies into the crowd. It was so bad ass! It was like three pits going on. It was fucking phenomenal; it was one of the best shows I ever played! I'll hold that memory for the best of my life.
We toured with Megadeth; Dave is one of the coolest people you'll ever meet in your life. We kinda grew up together, we all practiced at Ron McGovney's house and we all hung out there. We played Radio City, we played Woodstock and Anaheim. They'd come out to our shows and they'd say "hey, great, I never heard 'Am I Evil' like that before," we played it at Mach 10! (laughter on both sides). We had good times, we backed each other up and we went to each other's shows.
What happened was, in '87 when I took off, they were offered a European tour. And I didn't hear about it and I had backed myself out all the way. And I guess they knew about it and they were holding on to it; I guess Gene knew about it and was holding on to it, until I had backed myself all the way out and then they announced it and they announced Ron (Rineheart - Ed). If I would have knew about it, we might have had a different Dark Angel today. (Gasp - another one of those split second decisions that changed the course of music history - Ed).
But I didn't hear about it so I think I did the right thing. I stuck by my family, I waited until they were all grown and you know, it's time to come on back and finish what we started.
They did get one tour, I think it was like in... probably in '87 or '88. Because I had just done the last show at the Country Club and then they went ahead and announced it.
DROIDS ATTACK.
Interview with Brad via phone.
The power of the riff! These guys got it in spades... People ask me ALL the time why I still do what I do for almost no money, 26 years on and very few accolades? Folks, BANDS LIKE THIS, who I discover on a regular basis. That nobody seems to know who the hell they are, even with their 15 or so years in existence! Like the review said, the power of the riff, something Megadeth tapped into way back on "Peace Sells," but hasn't truly capitalized on since. Well, meet the band who crafts more riffs on ONE ENTIRE ALBUM than most bands can muster in an entire career! Read on. This interviews gets REALLY deep, especially philosophical, proving once again that I am dedicated to bringing out the innermost thoughts of my interview subjects.
(laughs). Well, that's cool; we're around. We've been around for about 15, 16 years now? Well, Tony and I, my drummer, we've been jamming since 1998, but Droids started late 2001 kinda. Originally we were trying to find a bass player to jam with and it took us a few years until we found someone solid enough: Once that happened we put out our first record in 2004. And then we've just been "riding it out" ever since.
I think that's just because we've been pretty independent with every release that we've ever done. We used to work with a label that was a local label; they put out the first three records of ours, and we put out a split 12 inch with another label out of Minnesota. But none of these labels had a lot of promotional budgeting. So we actually promote ourselves. This last record, we probably put up about $1,500 dollars to promote it. And when you put a little effort into that, word spreads easier. It's a lot easier to throw money at press than it is booking an entire tour and taking the time off to do that.
It's the approach I guess. This is the most heavily promoted album we've done. All the other albums that we've done, we've thrown a little money at promoting it and we'd mainly hit the road and go on tour. But I think that's kinda like putting the cart before the horse, you know, you're rolling into towns where people don't know who you are. And yeah, you make friends and connections and that's great but that's kind of a small scale effort. Whereas if you put more money or more effort into promoting yourselves before you go on tour, that makes more sense. I guess we're slow on learning that.
Sure, sure. I think the business has changed a lot; the whole industry has changed a lot. I think it's changed more in the artists' favor, because you can reach a broader audience on your own; with the internet, you can plug into a lot of these different websites like bandcamp. That's the one we're on. I know there's like soundcloud... Back when we first started there was myspace and facebook. There's all these different places where you can have a presence and there's people hanging out and checking stuff out if they want to. Back when we were doing those tours; when we were organizing these small scale tours like I'm saying... That was kinda WHY we did it that way, because we were able to. We could book shows by sending out electronic press kits, or checking out other bands on facebook in a town that we were rolling through, and be like "hey, you wanna play a show with us?"
I think it's changed a lot in that sense that bands are more able to get out there and do what they want to do and have more exposure than they would in, say, the 80's or early 90's even... Before the internet I guess. But, there's not a lot of money for one particular project that gets spread out through everybody's project now. It's just a different industry, and I think our genre of music is a smaller slice of the pie... the whole market. But we're not doing this for money, we're doing it because we love metal music; we love playing and doing what we do. So I don't give a shit if we don't ever get rich off it; we just wanna play and have a good time.
Naw, man, there is money to be made, I'm not saying there's not. We have a jam space next to Bongzilla, and those dudes have been on tour geez, this whole entire year I think. And they're doing alright for themselves, you know. They have been around for quite awhile. So, I just kinda feel like if we just keep at it eventually, you know, the snowball effect will come into play at some point. It already is kinda, heading that direction a little bit. Every release we do we seem to pick up some more attention and getting more opportunities. We're not really booking ourselves as heavily as we used to right now, because we get opportunities coming to us. So we kinda pick and choose what we want to do. It's cool; we're not at that level yet where we can just roll into any town and people are gonna be waiting there for us (laughs). It's just a slow burn (laughs.)
Yeah, back when we first started... Kind of an interesting history. Our bass player, Darwin, he used to be booking a club here in town. He booked us our first show ever, in Madison. And at the time, he was at the helm of Crustacean Records. He liked us, he put us on the label, and we put the first record out. After awhile, some other guys bought into Crustacean and took over. Then the direction of the label kinda changed. The person who took over started favoring more nationally known acts. But we were doing well enough because we were getting out on the road and he thought we were representing the label well enough that he thought "yeah, let's keep working with Droids." So we stayed on the label for awhile. And they were really flexible with us.
It was cool working with them; they set up showcases, distribution networks for the records, and they helped us out, I'd say a great deal, in establishing ourselves in the midwest region where we're from. But then the guy who took over the label decided his time was up and he left. And once he left, nobody else was really doing anything with it so we decided to put the record out ourselves for this new release.
So, we've never done this before (laughing here) in charge of everything. But it's pretty cool; we set up a website - it's not that sophisticated. But we get steady orders online for our stuff, and every weekend I'm heading to the post office with a pile of merch to send off. It's something I never really had to do myself before, but it's kinda fun.
Yeah, sure. You know, our process of writing... it's definitely guitar centered, but it's also very rhythmic. I'm the guitar player, but I'm also more of a drummer than a guitar player. I used to play drums in bands for many years until all the bands broke up and I was left with nothing to show for all the work that I put into these bands. I decided I'm going to have to learn how to play guitar and come up with my own songs. So that's what I decided to do and this is the style I kinda came up with. It's based on a lot of the music that I like listening to, like Clutch, Helmet and Tad. Black Sabbath and stuff like that. And yeah, there's a lot of guitar oriented bands.
But being a drummer, I think I'm more like I guess attracted to really heavy rhythyms and stuff like that. And also with the style of music, I kinda wanted to come up with a SOUND that people could recognize, like "hey, that sounds like Droids Attack," you know? And I think that's what you're noticing with that repetitiveness. We kinda just sort of "hang around" in the same territory, but we try to take it different places. I don't want to be boring with what we're doing. Hopefully we achieved that.
Ha ha! Yeah, yeah. I just kinda heard it there, I said "you know what would be kinda cool?" And I think it worked out, I kinda like the saxophone. I listen to all sorts of different music too, it's not just all heavy stuff. I think I draw some inspiration from bands that have more instrumentation. One of my favorite bands growing up was Morphine. I dunno if you ever listened to them at all. There's a bass guitar and a saxophone and a drummer. Mostly. They had some other instrumentation in there too but that was their core. And they rocked, I loved Morphine, so that's where that came from. It's really good stuff.
It's a long one. That one it tells a story and I think that's why it ended up being as long as it did. It's actually TWO stories that are related, that's why you have 'Mashenomak' and 'Mashenomak Strikes Again.' It's based on a Native American folk tale about the fish monster. And then the second story is actually about our ex-bass player who had a run in (laughing) with a boat accident where their boats flipped over and uh, they learned about the Native American folk tale AFTER the fact. So we kinda made up a story, that was kinda funny, to go along with it.
Since I was telling a story, I had to have so many verses and so many points in order to tell the story. The music would kinda follow the story you know, I dunno, you add dramatic parts and build suspense. Being a Native American folk tale, I wanted to have Native American rhythms and drums in there. It was a very different kind of approach to our songwriting.
Usually what we do when we write music; we start with a riff and then we see where it goes. And then lyrics kinda come later; we'll be practicing, joking around and the lyrics just kind of "come up" (laughs) as we're jamming. But this one, it's like the lyrics came first. It was a different kind of exercise in the songwriting, but it fits in, with what we're doing.
(slight pause) Ha ha ha! I dunno man, Lovecraft, maybe he was influenced by the Native American folk tales!
(laughs). Yeah, I mean our whole album "Sci Fi Or Die" is based on ancient alien theory. I dunno if you know much about it; there's a whole series they've done based on it. Erich Von Daniken wrote a book years and years ago; I think it was back in the 60's. He was a bible scholar and he started kind of... He would read the texts and basically he would replace the word "God" with extraterrestrials. And then all of a sudden it's like it kinda makes sense. Adam and Eve were genetically engineered humans, and they created us to be a slave race. And they put us on this planet to do hard labor, and then they abandoned us and now we're left here. It's just a very interesting concept. It's so funny though, because you can say all these things in theory but people just say "dude, you're nuts. That's fucking stupid."
But is it any more dumb than any other religious belief? (laughs). So we decided to go with it and we came up with a lot of the songs based on the ancient alien theories. There's a wealth of material there: I really enjoyed writing music about that stuff. There might be some more ancient alien themes to come.
I know I upset a lot of people when I say this... I'm a very ardent, almost fanatical hater of christianity. Just because you read the bible, and you see what's going on in the world and you realize that if there is a loving creator that demands our respect, love and worship... He's basically abandoned us. If you look at it that way. They've been waiting for the messiah for over 2000 years (laughing here). You just gotta wonder. I try and take a middle road, as I get older, and realize that... Maybe there's a middle ground: Maybe there's a creative force but it's probably NOT the way it's detailed in the bible. You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, yeah I do. And that's ultimately what I teach my children. I say "there are forces that are trying to separate us as a race on this planet for their own purposes." And obviously we came from SOMEWHERE. Nobody knows where that is, or maybe somebody does and they're not saying, but WE don't know. There is just one unquestionable truth, and that IS that there is a creative force in the galaxy here. Whether it's within ourselves and we're all dreaming this and projecting this on our own, or whether it was something that created us all and we're in this together. Yeah. It's undeniable that there's a creative force in the world. You choose how you want to believe in that force, but... just don't treat people like shit! (laughing here - Ed). And do the best you can. And you will be fine, you know? That's my whole religious (laughing here on both sides) theory I guess.
Right. Well, people I think are way smarter. People dog out the younger generations all the time. Like, "oh, these kids, they're so self absorbed; they got their cellphones in their face," blah blah blah and whatever. But the fact is, people are smarter now than they've ever been. Because we have more access to information and we're just passing it around. I'm learning new things every day! And because of that I think religion is kind of... it's obsolete. A lot of organized religion is becoming obsolete. And I think that's a good thing. Like our government, like the music industry is going to have to ADAPT to a more learned society. You know? Just like the music industry is going to have to adapt to bands that don't really need them as much as they used to. Anybody who wishes it was the same way it was before I think... whatever, just don't do it anymore, get out of the way and let progress happen. I like that direction that we're heading in as a species.
It's really amazing to me that the dark ages (laughing) as we had them in the middle ages... People are saying we should have had the internet and technology in the 1600's. But with the way that religion carried on and persecuted things they didn't understand... And look, I know. Change is hard. Change is hard for ALL of us. But either you do it or it's inevitably forced upon you.
I listen to a lot of comedy, there's a comedian Doug Stanhope, he had a little bit about, "hey, if somebody had the bible and you were never exposed to it until you were an adult... would you follow it? Now?" Even in your teens, like "hey man, check this out, all this stuff is..." you'd be like "Fuck that," you know? That's why they have to hammer it into your head when you're a little kid and you think Santa Claus is real, and the Easter Bunny is real, and the Tooth Fairy is real. It's how they have sheeped us.
It kinda sucks I guess that I wasn't born later in life where (laughing) those ideas were obsolete because I kinda had to experience those things on my own. And you know, people are still keeping it alive a little bit here too. I dunno. I moved past it and I feel better for it.
I think a lot of people are scared, and rightfully so; nobody wants to die and nobody wants to think "well shit, I've lived 74 years and this is it." They want to believe in something. There HAS to be a reason we have that ingrained. Fuck, I don't wanna die, I wanna know that when I pass on, IF I pass on, that there's something greater out there waiting. Surely all those people who have died before me have gone somewhere great.
I think the whole thing about dying forever and never having an existence... I think I'd rather be burning in hell because at least with burning in hell I have an existence and I can sense and fear and I can still have human emotion and contact (he finds this funny here)... Whereas nothingness... I can't fathom nothingness for eternity...
Well, do you remember what it was like before you were born?
Yeah, I think that's kinda what it's like. Do you remember what it's like when you were asleep? (laughing here). I mean when you have dreams and you have a consciousness when you're asleep, on some level that's when you dream. But when you DON'T dream you just close your eyes and then boom! you wake up and you're like "whoah? Did 8 hours just pass" or however long you were asleep. And I kinda imagine it's just like that. You're just unconscious.
There's theories that you know, reincarnation, where whatever this energy, this spirit inside of you, as people call it... It transfers on to, say, a squirrel (laughing here). You know? And then that squirrel gets flattened by a car and then you become, I dunno... A flower? I don't know how it works but there's all kinds of theories. You know, I've noticed... When you have children... I've noticed some things that make me believe a little bit in the passing on of energy that way. My children, they kinda have their own personalities. Like the "old soul" kind of thing that people say. You know when you get some 3 year old kid that can play the drums like John Bonham... You're like "Holy shit, that's crazy," but maybe there's something to that whole... Maybe your daughter was John Bonham?! (laughing heavily here).
Yeah. No, it's cool man. Geez, we're getting pretty deep with this interview; I shoulda gotten really high before I answered this phone (MUCH laughter on both sides here!) I wasn't really expecting this, I thought it was gonna be like "yeah, we wrote that song, yeah we played that show, yeah, whatever" and then it's like "no, man, reincarnation" (more laughter here).
Sure, obviously you're inspired to do what you do, and I find that a lot of people... Because I consider people such as yourself who takes it upon themselves to show people like "this is music I believe in, I wanna talk to this band and I wanna share what they have to say." It's a form of art and I feel like it's much needed as a relationship for artists to have somebody who cares about artists, and cares about spreading the word. It's fantastic man. So I appreciate you taking the time to involve us in what you've got going on. It's very cool.
Yeah, sure (more laughter here).
Cool. Thanks. I think a lot of people have kinda latched onto those ones in particular. People who listen to like you say the chorus. Those have like these hooks in them. And whenever we write songs, we're not really trying to find a hook where it's like "okay, man, this is the part where everybody's gonna sing along." I feel like a lot of arena rockers, bands that have those kinds of shows... They have the moment in the song where everybody claps along. And then they throw a key change and it becomes really formulaic and kinda boring. So whenever we have moments like that, it's an accident but I think it's cool. (laughing). You know?
I hear some elements of stoner rock and I hear some metal in there. But obviously there's a lot more going on below the surface. Do you guys ever get jaded by seeing "oh, they're calling us stoner rock again." Because I know that people who are into Man's Ruin releases and now the stuff that's on Small Stone are obviously gonna dig what you guys are doing.
Yeah. I have noticed that people sorta have a hard time pegging us. It's one thing or the other, and I think we're not strictly one genre. (laughing) I feel like we're a crossover band. I've heard people use that term, we sorta mix styles. We call ourselves stoner/thrash, partly as a joke, but also kinda partly because I think that's really what's influenced me the most in our music.
So yeah, I definitely feel like... There's also some hardcore influence, you know, like Black Flag, definitely in the vocals. I just kinda roll with it; whatever people wanna call it is cool. I think some people sort of feel like they can only listen to a certain style of music in order to stay true to, whatever they... like they wanna fit in with whatever group of people... It's like "That's all we listen to, man. All I listen to is Turbonegro! And that's it!" (laughter here on both sides).
I definitely feel like when you limit yourself to that... You know, that's all you listen to is that style of music, but there's more out there. And that's more what our approach is. But those people probably aren't gonna dig what we're doing. And that's fine. But yeah, the whole genre thing. On this last record, somebody said we were more like a hair metal band or something like that and he was really dogging us on the review.
Back when I was younger, my brother was a big hair metal guy and he used to bring all that shit home and I'd drum along to it. I'd say I've got some Motley Crue influence in there some where. There's still some bands I'm really into from that era. Like Badlands, they're a really good band. Jake E. Lee he's an amazing guitar player, he's one of my biggest favorites I guess, on guitar.
Yeah. So I really dig Jake E. Lee too, and Randy Rhoads was great, but I dunno, Jake E. Lee for some reason... He's got the whole technical end of things down, but he's also got a very musical approach to what he's doing? It's kinda weird when somebody's shredding, a lot of times you can't really "hum along," you know? Like you don't hear it, all you're hearing is just "yeah, that guy plays fast." But HE, like it fits whenever he's playing solos. He's SAYING something, you know?
I was just having a conversation with somebody about Zakk Wylde vs. Jake E. Lee the other day. You know, Zakk's talented, don't get me wrong, but sing along to one of the solos! (laughing). It's all just a bunch of nonsense, you know?
That's something I have come to discover later on in my time on guitars. I have been concentrating for so many years on trying to find the perfect guitar TONE, and buying the correct gear to get the sound you want. You hear the bands that sound the way that you imagine YOU want to sound and you look at what they're playing through and you examine their techniques. You know, you put a lot of work into it that way.
But then, when you're sitting there and you're coming up with some new material... It's like man, you gotta play a little quieter, turn the volume knob down a little bit. And the way you pick and the way you fret those notes, you get really expressive once you turn the volume down. I started getting into bands... One that comes to mind right now is a band we've had the opportunity to play with a couple of times, Earth? They're awesome, and they're pretty minimalist with what they've got going on. Like they can take a lick and just streeeetch it out over like 10 minutes. It kinda puts you in a trance; it's really cool. I can't think of any band right now that really sounds like them, they've got their own thing going, and I really respect that.
I notice things; a little bit from here and a little bit from there. And that's how we end up with saxophone solos in our songs, I guess (laughter on both sides).
Well, the older stuff, when we first started out we were... Tony and I were jamming for awhile, and I was very new to playing guitar. Like I'd only been playing guitar for maybe two or three years at that point. So a lot of the songs I was writing were not very intricate. I would say when we first started out we were kinda more like a hard rock, punk sort of band. And I would say that first record is very in that vein. Metal, some metal in there too. But I kinda wanted to start simple with the band.
When I write songs, I kinda have the whole album in mind. Like "Okay, this album, this is what we wanna say, this is what we wanna do. This song leads into that song." It just becomes kind of a work of art. That's just my approach to it, or my theory behind it. It was pretty simple and straightforward. And then with the next record, I was like "okay, let's kinda expand on this sound and throw some different grooves at them, different time signatures and play around a little bit with what we got going on." But it still had that same sort of flavor. A lot of those albums were also really low budget productions recorded in jam spaces in basements, and wherever we could get some recording time for free or cheap.
So this last record, though, we had so many opportunities open up to us even though we didn't really have a lot of money, we've been doing this for so many years and playing different shows. We played some of the biggest shows we've ever had on this last record we did which was "Must Destroy." And "Must Destroy" we kinda started settling into "a sound," which we are still sort of evolving a little bit here and there. But still, that record was recorded on a budget... It turned out the way it did. Not disappointed in it or anything like that, but I felt like we needed to step it up with the production. So we hired like an actual, uh, "professional." I'm gonna use that word kinda loosely (laughter here - Ed). but that's what the guy does for a living; he is a professional sound engineer. He did a fantastic job of finding the right sound for our songs.
This record "Sci Fi Or Die," we approached it COMPLETELY different than how we have done any record we've done in the past. All those records were just kinda like "Okay, take one!" boom, "Alright sounds good!" He was like "okay, can you do it..." He kinda set me down and was like "Play perfectly!" (laughter here again on all sides). And I was like "Nobody EVER expected me to play perfectly before!" And that was kinda cool! He got us to focus a little bit more on our performance. And yeah, I am an imperfect in how I play, so it was VERY challenging to kinda... be perfect. But you could hear EVERTHING clearly and that's what we WANT. All of our albums previously to this one, were pretty raw in their approach, and this one.. If you take this album and put it up against any national release, I'd say it holds up pretty well. If I do say so myself, and it's not because of what WE did, it's because of what HE did.
His name is Mark Whitcomb, and he owns DNA Music Studios, or Sound Labs I think they call it here in Madison. I loved working with him and I think we'll probably work with him again on our next album.
It seems like every day I hear stories about great bands that I absolutely fall in love with that... Another one, trying to remember what their name was. They did a Pentagram cover... They were a GREAT doom metal band, they sounded like if doom metal was written in the Old West kinda thing, very original. Earthen Grave, that's it. Just a shame. Maybe you guys can be the Wisconsin band that kinda breaks out and gets well known worldwide and does really well. (I was UN-saying that these were bands that just called it quits and stopped being a band).
Yeah, I mean if that happens, that would be great. We're up for it (laughing) but it's not like the ultimate goal. Like what we're after. As long as we're inspired to create and inspired to perform we're gonna do it. We all have our own lives though; I've got my kids, I've got my family. I have a business I run and the band kinda happens AROUND all of that. If opportunities build up for the band and we have the time and the energy to devote to it; we love it, so yeah, we would probably pursue that! Until that happens, though, we're just gonna keep doing what we're doing.
You know, a lot of times too, when you have that level of success, I noticed it kinda fucks things up for bands. You get bands like... Ah, Jesus.. You know, like Black Sabbath! "Hey, Black Sabbath, you know, sales are down, and I think it's time Ozzy that you go solo. And uh, the rest of you guys, you know, whatever... If it happens to you, great." (laughing). Say what you want about the non-Ozzy Sabbath years, I think they are still a great band and have awesome material. But that's the first one I could think of off the top of my head. Things start getting fucked up I think when you start putting money into it and people get distracted by the business end of things instead of just "hey we're a bunch of dudes that just like playing together." We are creatively motivated.
But hey, if that happens to us dude, and I'm sitting on a pile of money then great! (laughing). I doubt that's ever gonna happen, though, man. It's not like we're playing anything that the masses really wanna chew up!
Yeah, man, we played a show down in Atlanta! That was a crazy fucking night too man! We played a gig down there; I can't remember the name of the space. It was across the street from The Earl. I remember we were hanging out at The Earl and going "Man, I wish we were playing at this place, this place rules!" But anyway, we played the show that we played, and the sound guy was like "You guys can crash at my house. We're gonna have a party and there's gonna be girls there. You gotta be really, be respectful to the women." And he kept saying that again and again, like "You need to be respectful." And I'm like "we're respectful, dude, we LOVE women!" Cool. Like "Thanks for having us, we won't fuck around." So we get to the dude's house and yeah, there's a party there. And the guy had like a tattoo parlor built into their kitchen, like they put up some drywall. There's all these people drinking and listening to loud music and we're kinda just chilling, like "Oh, man I'm gonna get some sleep." And all of a sudden I hear a ruckus in the other room, and I go to check it out. And it's some dude breaking down that tattoo parlor with his fist, like he's punching through the drywall and he's ripping it apart. And then some other dude joins in and they just start demolishing this thing. And I'm just like "Man, I dunno what these guys are doing," but there's a crowd gathered around it and there's some drama. And I'm just like "I just wanna go to sleep."
So I go into the other room and try to go to sleep, and next thing I know those dudes start pushing each other and it's turned into a fight. And I'm just like "fuck dude!" And we're in the middle of some kinda weird suburban neighborhood. And they go out rolling out into the front yard and the whole crowd is out there. And it's like 3 or 4 in the morning. I'm like "fuck it, I'm sleeping in the van!" (MUCH laughter here on both sides). Because the cops are gonna come here and I don't really wanna deal with any of this shit. But yeah, Atlanta was crazy man!
Um, it's possible. The stage was up a flight of stairs and it wasn't really very roomy. So it was easy to pack the place that we were playing, it felt like a bigger show than it really was! (laughing). And I remember the stage had a wierd little... You open up a trap door and you load in from behind the back stage area with like some stairs. And you lift the trap foor and you're right on stage. It was weird.
It was fun man; the guy who booked us really liked us and treated us really well. The people, yeah they were raging, but they were cool. But I was just like, man, I don't like that redneck shit where people are bumping chests and breaking shit. It's not my scene.
Uh, we actually played with a band from Florida, they're called Rojo Diablo. They were the only other band on the bill.
Sure, yeah! I loved Atlanta, man, it was fun visiting. I liked exploring the city. I love that Southern area down there. We played, geez, where else did we play? We played Nashville, North Carolina, I dunno... Florida. It's beautiful down there.
HOBBS ANGEL OF DEATH.
Interview with Peter Hobbs via facebook chat.
Damn if yet ANOTHER favorite band of mine from the 80's isn't being interviewed in this issue! The "Australian Slayer" put out a massively CRUSHING album with their self titled release, and they are still going strong today. Well, sort of. Like Bruce Corbitt of Warbeast/Rigor Mortis, Peter Hobbs isn't doing so well today health wise. But we hope he crushes all that and returns to the U.S. to slay us poseurs once again, for experiencing Hobbs' live is the ULTIMATE aphrodisiac for us 80's metal fans. Having seen them once, I wouldn't DARE miss them again!
Yeah, I've had a lot of health issues lately. We had to do the same with Europe this year.
There's so many bands around now, bro. I dunno, I think people are just wanting to be in a band to think that they're cool. It's flooding the market. There's some great things out there. I dunno, sometimes I think it's more cool NOT to be in a band nowadays.
Well that's always been my issue anyway, because the distance is far. We're 13,000 miles from Europe, you know what I mean? It's a fair distance. Like bands coming to here, depends on promoters, whatever. But it's gonna cost! Like the minimum air fare from Europe to Australia is $1800 you know?
Well, I met Chase out at Massachusetts. And we had a good talk about it and everything. He heard a few of the album tracks live. So he heard that and I did the deal with Hells Headbangers, I never even heard the album, and the same with Rockstack in Japan. And the deal was done, the material was sent to them, and I said "this is how the track listings I want, I want it to run like this," the artwork. And boom, we signed the deals and then it was released. It's still getting talked about; it's a great album, I've got great people on it with me. I produced it myself; I knew exactly what I wanted.
Look, I had a lot of songs form the 80's and 90's that I had kicking around in my head. And I thought "okay, that's what I was doing back then." I'll reinvent these and let's see what I can come up with. There were quite a few songs I already had in my head and I just revamped them. I wanted a wider variety of people to be listening to my music. I'm into so many other bands; I enjoy so much other stuff, that I give back to the industry what influenced me. So there is some Judas Priest in there, some Motorhead, and Black Sabbath in there. There's some black metal in there as well. It was my gift back to the industry.
You can't stay the same forever. The world has gotta go around. I see all this bullshit on facebook about all these people with opinions... Look, it's all up to the individual. If you're not liking what you're doing today, then move on and do what you've gotta do; broaden your horizons. You HAVE to move forward. Of course, maturity plays a big part in life; the things that you liked before are not interesting today. That change is always there, and I find it exciting too, to take on new challenges and things you haven't done before.
Music is music... It depends on which audiences you are trying to gain, or even... Not so much preach, but who you are playing to and everything. Look, I think there's a possibility, why can't there be? But not in a way... I don't name drop or anything... I mean if your name was Stryper, what would you be singing about? The people that go to see them, wouldn't like to see me. And vice versa. That's just how it is, but look, everything has possibilities.
Well, I'm a man of my word; I believe in a gentleman's handshake and agreements. You can't run around the world saying and doing one thing, and then being a hypocrite in another. Like a few of these bands that have turned around and say "I've seen god!" And becoming a born again christian. And I'm thinking to myself "why the fuck would you do that?" Because you're not happy within yourself.
I just recently have been in the hospital and in a pretty bad way. Like my health issues and that. Well, the Grim Reaper visited me quite a few times. And sometimes there where I did pass away. Oh, man, I fuckin' went to heaven! I got up there and I looked to these gates, and I looked through the fence, right? I saw all the fuckin' assholes I didn't like down here! And I thought, there's no fuckin' way I'm coming up here, I'm going back down there. So I actually went back and visited hell too. And this guy said to me, "no, I got too much work for you up there. You're too much competition, you're balls fuckin' chaos down here, so fuck off."
But that's a bit of a joke, but thats the way I saw it, you know? We don't know where we're going, but let's say I came very, very close and still day by day. I'm still battling these issues. At the end of the day, wherever we go, we deserved it wherever we're going. Same as the consequences when we're told, like the issues with me with my lungs, liver and heart at the moment. I was told many years ago; stop smoking, stop drinking, stop doing all this bad shit you do. It will catch up. "Ah, bullshit, it's my body, I know what I'm doing."
So, I think at the end of the day, we have to try and do what we gotta do to stay on here as long as we can to annoy the shit outta people that don't like us! (laughing here). And the people that do like us, the ones that we love, and vice-versa, we gotta try and help them too. As for wherever we go, if we've done a good job on this when we DO go, I think at the end of the day, I think we're all gonna end up going to all our different places. I think a nice holiday, a resort permanently would suit me! (laughs).
Aw man, back in the time I used to love Artillery and their "Terror Squad" album. That was just absolutely awesome. But now they're on a lot of festivals now. There was a lot of bands, there was just so many. But yeah, of course we got labeled the Australian Slayer. I had the opportunity to meet Kerry King when I played in Finland, in Oulu. The promoter was a fan of both Hobbs and Slayer. And on purpose he put us on, so we were right before Slayer. And we had to cross paths in the corridor. I met Kerry and I spoke to him. He goes "yes, I do know you and I've heard of you before." I said "look, I've been labeled the Australian Slayer, even tonight when we played they MENTIONED that, and introduced Hobbs Angel Of Death as the Australian Slayer." (laughs). I said "What do you feel about that?" He goes, "nah, man. Everybody's influenced by somebody. But I heard what you were doing. And you're Hobbs Angel Of Death. And that's it." You know what I mean? So it was good to hear it from him personally.
Let's say the song 'Hypocrites.' There's a Slayer'y feel there. A lot of people think that I sound like Tom Araya in some parts as well. But maybe Tom Araya... sounds like me! Because we're the same age. Tyrus was around too when Slayer was more or less just starting as well. The band I had before Hobbs Angel Of Death.
She's changed that much now... Personally, my opinion to this... I've spoken to a lot of young people. It's all about sacrifice. It doesn't come to you for free, and it doesn't come to you on a silver platter. You have to put the time in. There's no such thing as "pay to play." You earn the merit, and the merit is what will lead and get you up that ladder, further. I've always tried to support other bands, I've never pegged anybody or whatever. Because there's always room to make improvements with your units in the bands. Always be nice to people on the way up because you normally see them on the way down. It's a matter of getting out there and doing what you have to do.
I know the industry has changed, and a lot of people... What do they call it? Fund me stuff... Whatever it's called.
Aw, man... That is just bullshit. All that is doing is asking somebody to pay your gas bills, and your electricity bills and buy your champagne when you're pissing it up against the wall. If you can't make the sacrifices and leave your jobs, like I did. I left my jobs all the time and come back with nothing and starting again. These people that want to go and do things, and wanna keep their jobs... and have FANS... pay bills? That is the most disgusting thing I've ever fucking heard of...
I guess I just kinda see that on a different plane. The whole point of this is you're supposed to be giving back to your fans and your crowd. I think it should be a reciprocal thing; you should be able to give them something that they can't get elsewhere. I think artists are realizing that they don't to go the traditional record label route anymore. A lot of them are just doing it online and they have their websites and their fan pages; they're just kinda networking that way.
Yeah. It's their own thing. I just... I'm a person that's um, not scared to make the sacrifices no matter what. Either it's on or it's off. To be a freeloader, in a few things? That's not cool. That's what I've been saying to a lot of people, younger generation. It's cool because I've got guys that play with me and have played with me and they've got kids now, themselves today playing in bands. And they said, "What's the best way of attacking this pig? You know?" I said, bro, never pay to play, always stand your ground, and never be bored. In the end you'll work out what your value is, and the fans will let you know what your value is. You can't please everybody, ya know?
At the moment, I'm full bore resting. I have no choice. I had to cancel this European tour because the doctors and hospitals just won't let me fly. It's more or less "fly... you will die." I don't take things very easy. I thought I was Superman; unfortunately I learned the hard way. So I really have to recuperate. It's gonna take some time; I've had to turn my life 180 degrees. The drinking and the smoking had to stop immediately. I very heavily damaged my internal organs. There's no tour for me at the moment, but I've changed my ways and tried to do what I possibly can.
Because I miss you guys, I want to come back to America. I was MEANT to be coming this year! (2017) Whoever would have thought that this would all happened, but it does. So to all my fans out there and to all my good friends, I apologize for not being able to fulfill my obligations. But being the good friends that you are, and understanding. They understood the seriousness of this for me to stay back here in Australia. And they also know that I'm doing my best to get it all back together again, and hopefully get out and do some touring again and do what I've got to do. I've got great support from my promoters, and the guys that play with me.
Just like the European thing, they said to me, "We waited and we waited until your final decision." And they KNOW that I'm a stubborn bull, and I try and do the ultimate. But even they said "there's no way in the world you can attempt to get on that plane and come over here." Which is good, I mean that's pure honesty, and that's real humanity. Humans! Because they weren't thinking of themselves, they were thinking of me and us as a unit. Which was really cool. Because at the end of the day, I might make it there, but halfway through the tour you might kick the fucking bucket on stage! It's not a cool thing. I got a lot of respect for the people I play with.
Um, look, I think he had issues as well. I remember seeing him playing and he just said "I can't do this." And I just thought, how sad. Because the will and the want was there to do it. But at the end of the day, when the body says "fuck it, I've had enough," that's like me. I made my way to the hospital and my heart just stopped. And from that day now, I knew that this is not a feeling I've got a hangover, I'm not feeling good. I mean that's been building up for a long time. When your heart just stops... Pretty scary shit.
The body's actually telling you "for fuck's sake, you haven't changed the oil in a hundred years. Personally I think we all sit around and we relax and we think "what sort of age do I want to live to?" I've heard people say "ah, 60 will do mate. Or 70, 80's okay." The way I see it today, fucking hell, if I can be sort of on the ball and still think, and not have dementia... Fuck I'd like to live to be a hundred and sixty seven!
Another hundred years would be nice.
Of course. But I do realize, to have that extra length in life of today, it needs to be done with health and care. It's not the same as it was before; all this shit that we... Everything that comes in a box or plastic is fucked! Sadly even a lot of the fruit, a lot of the vegetables, everything; it's all cultivated, they use chemicals to make it grow faster.
I think sometimes these conspiracy theorists go overboard. BUT... At the same time, just like I think with a lot of religion, there's a middle ground in there somewhere where there's an underlying overtone of truth that's kinda gotten to be dug to to get through all the bullshit.
Definitely... Definitely agree with that statement.
There's no kangaroos!! (laughter here on both sides - Ed.). It's an eye opener. We've got a lot of open space here too. America is really weird, like you leave one town and go to another one. The accent is different, the mannerism is all different, like going from L.A. to Tampa, or L.A. to New York. It's so different. If I remember you guys were in Atlanta, yeah? It was really cool, though, and we had a good crew. It was really, really cool.
It's my pleasure, actually my thankfulness and respect goes to people like yourself. Because at the end of the day, without the media, without the fans, without all the things in the industry, I don't exist. So my hat goes off to you guys. You're actually giving YOUR time to me. It's all good. And hopefully I'll keep working on all these issues and I'll be back in the USA! I miss it, I love being in the US!
MANILLA ROAD.
Interview with Mark Shelton at The Basement in Atlanta.
This truly is a remarkable issue. A THIRD 80's metal band I've been into for quite awhile, this interview was done on their 40th anniversary tour, making them probably THE longest running metal band interviewed in this issue. And like Hobbs Angel of Death, thanks to Mr. Amos Rifkin for bringing them down here. Lots of great stories to tell from the old days, there aren't many around these days, those living legends like Mark "The Shark" Shelton.
NOTE: At the time of this writing, Mark Shelton passed away from a heart attack while in Germany on July 27th, days before this issue was to go to press. VERY fucking sad for me to think this is the last Manilla Road interview ANYONE will EVER read...
Well, it could be; they're sorta rare. We put them out originally on our own label because we couldn't find a label back then. Nobody was interested in us, we sent so many demos out to all the majors and all the labels that we could think of. Nobody took us on it so we decided well, I guess we're going to have to do it ourselves, because we weren't of a mind to just give it up at that time. Sometimes you wouldn't even hear back from them, but every once in awhile we'd get a nice letter saying "hey, thank you for sending this stuff, you're just really not what we're looking for right now, but keep us informed and what your status is." Which a nice way of saying "yeah, we don't like you guys." (laughing).
I definitely was influenced by bands like early U.F.O., Scorpions, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd. Lots of sort of psychedelic type roots going on there. I was raised in Kansas, and the predominant music force in rock and roll there was country rock. So I had a lot of influences from ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynrd, Atlanta Rhythm Section... Oh, Atlanta Rhythm Section!!! (both of us laughing here, since Mark is IN Atlanta at the time)
You know things like that. All of those things were highly influential. I think that and smoking a lot of weed (laughing) probably contributed to the psychedelic nature of the band. We slowly progressed out of that as the music scene and the metal scene got heavier. Because when we started really, metal wasn't a big thing. I actually got the term heavy metal from the French magazine Metal Hurlant, which means Heavy Metal in French. Then later on it got published in America as Heavy Metal, and eventually the two movies came out and everything. So that was sort of my description in my head about what heavy metal music should be about at the beginning. It's science fiction, fantasy, adventure, that type of stuff which was all encompassed in the magazine itself. That was probably another really big influence as to where I was going with the music.
We were asked all the time what kind of music do you play and we had no clue of what to tell everybody. All I knew was it had this epic nature, because I was really influenced by bands like Rush and things like 'By-Tor And The Snow Dog' to me is a really epic song. All of the stuff on "Caress Of Steel" you know, 'Fountain Of Lamneth,' and 'The Necromancer' especially is one of my alltime favorite epic tunes. That along with Michael Moorcock doing lyrics for Hawkwind and stuff... Because I was big into Elric and really big into Robert E. Howard and Conan. So all that stuff played into the ideas of what we were going for.
My guitar style, when I'm asked about that, I'd have to say it's a combination of a plethora of guitar players over the years that I really like that I stole little bits and pieces and tricks from... And then musical training. The list is too long to name, I could start naming guitar players that are my idols, but it turns into 100+ after awhile. But every one of those guys had some little fraction to do with helping me developing the style that I had. And I was always after a fusionary type idea; massing different styles of heavy music together to come up with a unique style. It's epic and it's metal, and so eventually that turned into epic metal.
Yeah, they did leave off 'Centurian War Games.' I think it was just a matter of space. They didn't have time, and like you said it was a bootleg, so maybe it was their way of making it look like it wasn't a bootleg, I dunno (laughs). We actually put out all that stuff originally on our own label. And very limited copies were pressed, probably in the neighborhood of 2 to 3 thousand each pressing. It wasn't until "Crystal Logic" that we pressed a lot more.
I think the thing that really launched us into the metal network was when we did 'Flaming Metal Systems' on the U.S. Metal Volume 3 compilation with Mike Varney from Shrapnel Records. That sort of broke us in the international scene. Because right after that when we put out "Crystal Logic" ourselves, Mike Varney actually offered me a contract but he didn't like the "Crystal Logic" album; we had already finished it when I met with him out in San Francisco out in the Bay Area. And he listened to the tape, all of the album, he listened to the whole album! He told me he really liked the intro, the prologue, which is like a minute and a half. He said that is just as killer as can be, but everything else on the album sorta sucks, I don't really like it. I was like "really?" He said, "But I tell ya what, I'll cut you a contract right now, I mean we can do the deal right now, if you promise to give me a whole album's worth of 'Flaming Metal System' style music.
And I thought about it for about 3 seconds and told him no. I said, "You know, I've already finished "Crystal Logic" and I really like it. I think this is what I want to push, I don't want to do 10 songs of 'Flaming Metal Systems.'
I don't either. I mean they were all done in the same period of time; we were finishing up the album ("Crystal Logic") when he signed us to do the song for the compilation album. And I wrote the song 'Flaming Metal Systems' SPECIFICALLY for that release. That's why you have the reference to 'When the shrapnel flies' and stuff like that. Always working with metaphors; it's a trait of mine, probably a bad trait (laughs). I didn't understand why he didn't like the rest of the album either? And I've always wondered what he thinks now since it's our most iconic release ever...
It was contract by contract; each contract was one in itself. It wasn't like they signed us for multiple albums.
Right. Well, first of all, they were just getting started as a label, and they were new to the business. They didn't really have the equation in their mind I guess from all the other labels, they just didn't know. The first one they did with us was "Open The Gates" and it was a huge success for them. And for us too, we made a lot of money on that one just right away. And "The Deluge" came out the same way and they just kept signing us because we were selling well for them. I have a feeling we were... maybe... the best selling band band they had at that time.
You know, things went really well with them but eventually they lost their distribution because their main distributor they had in France, New Rose distribution, got shut down for some reason. We had heard rumours that they had ties to the Black Market, or Mafia, or whatever in France; I don't know if that's true or not, but it's just what we heard. But when they lost that distribution they tried to do the distro themselves, and they did something that made the people at Important Records mad, and so Important Records just blackballed them in the industry. And strangely enough, we got blackballed too along with them because we were on that label.
After we were done with Black Dragon, and they really just couldn't do anything to help us anymore, we had a really difficult time finding a label to work with because of all that was going on. When we went to do "Courts Of Chaos," which was pretty much the last official Manilla Road album in my mind with Black Dragon, Important wouldn't put it out. David Chastain ended up talking Important into releasing it, as long as they didn't put Manilla Road on it, and so it came out with my name only on it.
We were actually broken up after "Courts Of Chaos," and I put together a band called Circus Maximus. And we sold that one off to Black Dragon too, which was the absolute last album I gave them. The final straw with me and them was that they decided it needed to be a Manilla Road album even though it wasn't, so that it would sell. And it doesn't even sound like a Manilla Road album... Maybe one or two songs does, a little bit, but it was definitely a different band. So that was my last dealings with Black Dragon.
Then we were signed, for a minute, with David Chastain's label Leviathan Records, which we put "Out Of The Abyss" on. And that actually did okay, because he had pretty good distribution and everything. But it was just right after that that the thing with Black Dragon happened with Important, and it became really difficult. And I did the Circus Maximus thing up until about '93 I think? We always knew that was just sort of a "do it for now, it's not going to last" type of thing. We never considered making it a long term project.
At that point, Randy Fox and I got back together, and we did a bunch of songs that we were writing. Brian's brother Harvey Patrick came on to start playing bass with us. We did lots of shows in our area, but once again we couldn't get a label interested in us. It wasn't until 2000 that I finally got contacted by a label in Germany, Iron Glory Records. They were looking to reissue the "Crystal Logic" album. Of course, we'd never toured in Europe, so we had no clue what was going on over there. There was this huge rise of fanbase over in Europe that was happening that we didn't know was happening.
In the last few years, it got lumped in to being one of those classic albums in that range of time.
Oh, Thank you!
Yeah, that's always an issue, and you see, they didn't have good master tapes to work off of on that.
I think they actually took it off of an LP. That's why it has vinyl noise on it.
They eventually got used I think for the reissues that we did with Golden Core Records. This is the label that we've been signed to for the last several years, that our last three new albums "Mysterium," "The Blessed Curse," and our newest one "To Kill A King" are out on. They're doing a reissue campaign that's been ongoing and still ongoing at this point. They're putting out like 10 or 11 of our albums.
They have been done and they are available, and everything up to... I think "Out Of The Abyss" is the next one that they're doing now.
I'm not sure. It was actually recorded at the same time as the "Invasion" album. Maybe the uniqueness of it is because it's an acoustic song. Maybe that's why it doesn't have some of the other noise on it or whatever. I dunno. 'Cause you wouldn't have any amp noise...
When we first started doing those albums, we were recording in a very small studio in a basement that was just getting started itself. As we grew, the studio itself grew. And I think that's because every time we recorded an album, I remember, we paying the money for what we did in the studio, and the next time we'd come in he'd have some new equipment! (laughing on both sides here). And I'd ask him "oh, you got this and this!" and he'd say, "yeah, that's what you guys' money paid for!" And that continued for years and years, so that studio sort of grew up alongside of us, you might say. We recorded all sorts of albums, all the way up through the Circus Maximus was recorded there. And then after that he sold the studio and we decided to build our own studio. That's where we're at nowadays.
That was sort of a grow up step by step thing with our own studio; learning how to do it ourselves, acquiring the money to be able to actually build the studio, acquire the equipment and everything...
Yeah, and then you have things like youtube out there which makes it really easy to get your music out to the public nowadays compared to the old days. You used to have all the labels siphoning through the bands they didn't like to get you the bands that they thought were the best. And you don't really have that happening as much nowadays, you can get on youtube and you can enter anything and everything. From good to bad! So like you said, it's sorta evened the playing field but at the same time it sorta made for a big clusterfuck too! (laughs). But we actually excelled up into the digital recording situation, we don't do it on analog or anything, anymore... obviously...
Yeah, actually, the main thing that's different is analog has a very compressed sound to it because the frequency range is not near as dynamic and broad as a digital situation is. With digital you can reproduce sounds that only dogs can hear (laughing here.) You know? And you couldn't do that on tape before. And that's the big difference in audio quality I think, is that one's really expansive and sort of limited. But, because of those compression limitations, it can make drums sound a lot better, if you ask me. So I still believe analog recording has it's place, and what they're getting into now - high dollar studios - are getting to where they're taping a lot of stuff ON tape, but they've got it in coalition with their ProTools or whatever they're using. And they're moving the data over to computer, but it's being recorded on analog tapeheads. So you get the best of both worlds, because it's an awful lot easier to edit in digital form than it is in tape. Because it's not like the old days where you actually have to cut and paste...
Now all you have to do is cut and paste. But I have to say we don't use triggered drums, and we don't use fake technology in the sense of... you know...
No, I don't cut and paste, I absolutely DON'T do that. All the rhythm tracks you hear are me playing the guitar track all the way straight through from the beginning of the song to the end. Every once in awhile we'll do punch-ins for guitar solos and stuff like that, of course, you know; but we were doing that anyway with analog. It's not like we're changing anything. But it's definitely a big thing to us that we keep it as natural as possible so it doesn't sound like machines playing music; it's still people playing music.
I find that there's a lot of mods that you can get nowadays that help digital sound more analog.
Exactly. And there's tons of plug-ins that you can get for your DAW's nowadays, it's huge out there. A lot of people swear by ProTools, but to tell you the truth, there's 101 different DAW's out there, and they're ALL really good. Some of them might not have as many good aspects as others but almost all of them do exactly the same thing. ProTools definitely was the innovator.
Oh absolutely. The place we master at they've got a big ProTools system. Cornerstone Studios, and he swears by ProTools and Mac's and all that stuff. I don't, I tend to just...
I'm a PC guy too (laughing). And to tell you the truth, it's a lot easier to work than a Mac is.
And right now I'm using studio one from Personnas, it's the DAW that we use in our studios. But we've just gone to that recently, you haven't heard an album yet done by us on that because we just upgraded our studio. We were doing it on a Roland BS2480 system, and I've still got the system, I love it, but it's a dinosaur now. I mean it doesn't even have USB technology in it. But it's still a great unit, and for the time it was spectacular. But it was all made for each other, and that's still the attitude I take with recording systems. If you get stuff that's made for each other, you don't have problems with machines not talking to each other.
Yeah, and for example, we take that to the n'ths degree, because our 24 track mixer is a presonnus mixer, and we're using a presonnus DAW with it. And the things just immediately, when we set it up (snaps fingers) it's like "Bing! Oh, we like each other!" And we have no latency problems or anything because of that. And we're not even using the fanciest of connection sources; we're using I think it's called the S800 FireWire. It's top of the line FireWire but it's not like some of the other things you have like Dante and stuff that's out there that are supposedly really combatitive against latency.
Well, we've always sort of done the death metal thing... a little bit, because the "Voyager" album was extremely light; there's several songs on it that are practically death metal, a lot of "rrrrrr!" from me. Come to find out, Scandinavia loves that album.
We've sort of approached it a little bit, there's a little bit of fusion of the death metal thing in there. Not necessarily black metal. But we definitely approach doom, thrash, progressive, psychedelic... Anything that we like, it's what I go after. If it trips my trigger, I'm after it, and I'm looking to combine it with what we do and try and make something unique out of it, because that's what Manilla Road has ALWAYS been about and I hope it never changes. We're ALWAYS striving to do something a little different than what we've done in the past. So, I don't think you'll ever see another album of ours where we try to make it like "Crystal Logic" or "Open The Gates."
Not that I don't LIKE AC/DC, I do, but I don't want to be a band that sounds the same from album to album. I have all the reverence in the world for those guys because they stuck to their guns, even though back in the day when people were slamming them for sounding the same, every album. Now they've done it for so long, and they've sold more albums than any other frickin' band in the world. And so now you got all the media saying "oh, they're great" because they stuck to their guns.
And that seems to be sort of happening with us too; people are really chiming in to us that they're just so happy that we didn't give in and do something super accessible or that we didn't just keep on trying to reproduce "Crystal Logic" over and over. The majority of our fanbase likes what we're doing, but you can't please everybody all the time. There's certain people that prefer the Rick Fisher days, some others prefer the Randy Fox days. We found a lot of young kids nowadays, they prefer what we're doing now over the old stuff. More than anything, we just have to please ourselves.
God, that's really hard to say; I mean, it depends on what kind of instruments and technology they invent between now and then. Because obviously what has made metal so easy for everybody to produce nowadays is the tech that we have; the technology is just out there. Like our tech is more advanced than we are, you know, in our brains. And heaven forbid we ever have that apocalyptic situation happen, because none of us know how to build most of the stuff we've got! You know? (laughing)
Yeah, we're screwed... But as long as we've got electricity I'm still good to go. Because I've got ALL Marshals! (MUCH laughter from both)...
Yeah, that's what I'm playing through tonight, as a matter of fact; it's a 50 Watt, English made tube amp that I've had modified a bunch of times. It's the old stuff, built back in the 50's or 60's.
But, to answer your question, man that's a hard one. But I have a feeling that people in music... The music industry has always looked to fusion to come up with new styles, even in the pop markets.
Yeah, they're fun, love those guys. We've played with them a couple of times and always loved hanging out with them.
There's just all sorts of possibilities. And I think it's just a trait of the music industry that the fusion we're talking about happens eventually. Look at what country music used to be, really raw country music back in the day. But nowadays, it sounds like country rock music, instead of country...
Not as much Hank Jr.... Well, I'm talking about even the big stars like Jason Aldean; they're putting out stuff that actually has more of a country rock, like a Lynyrd Skynyrd flavor to it or something like that. Instead of the three chord Johnny Cash type stuff...
I think that's it. Well, you gotta remember, like for example at the Grand Ole Opry... for soo long you couldn't even have a guitar amplifier at that Opry House. It was verboten, it was something you couldn't do. The only thing that was electrified at that Opry House was the P.A. and that was it. Everything else had to be played on acoustic instruments basically. And so that was staying raw country for as long as they could do it. But as the industry changed, eventually they changed too, and now you've got the Eagles playing there... And of course you're not gonna get the Eagles in there without some electric guitars.
And that's another good example. The Eagles were like one of those bands that helped innovate country sounds into popular rock songs. And there's a lot of bands that helped that happen: Lynyrd Skynyrd, Blackfoot, Atlanta Rhythym Section, ZZ Top... But yeah it did take a long time and a lot longer than it did with hard rock or heavy metal bands. Of course, I grew up in an age where heavy metal wasn't really a term for bands yet, or music. It sorta came about WHILE I was getting into the music industry. But you did have bands, like Black Sabbath who never really considered themselves doom metal, but they are called doom metal now.
Strangely enough, I hadn't even ever heard of Pentagram until just a couple of years ago. Well, maybe more than a couple of years ago.
No, actually, we ended up playing with them at the Boricellus(sp?) festival in Portugal. And the guys were going "Oh, god, we're playing with Pentagram, this is so cool!" And I'm like: "Who?" It's a cool sounding name but I don't know these guys. "You're kidding, Shark, you don't know who Pentagram is? Bobby Liebling?" No, I don't. "Oh wow." And then the movie came out and they're like "Oh, you GOTTA check this out."
And just like anybody else now, all these ancient tapes are being resurrected and put out there now. So. Yeah, that's a band I can't say "yeah, I followed them." But Sabbath's a good example for me. They always just considered themselves a heavy rock and roll band. But nowadays they're okay, Tony's okay with being called the grandfather of doom metal. Hell I'd be cool with it too! (laughs). And he deserves it, those guys are the ultimate. They were one of the bands that got me started. The first big rock and roll concert I ever saw was Black Sabbath on their "Paranoid" tour. I stood RIGHT in front of Tony Iommi ALL night going "That's what I wanna do! I wanna do that, THAT is it. I'm going home and that's what I'm gonna do" And sure enough, that's what I do now.
Well, maybe not as well as Tony does. He's the godfather to so many of us. But yeah, the future I think it's wide open and I think you're going to find, like you said, metal musicians always try to press the envelope. Well, we've already got... I saw on youtube some band with banjos, a country band doing Metallica songs...
Great, okay. I guess now we got bluegrass metal! (much laughter here). And obviously we've all chimed in on classical music a long time ago. Fusing that with metal music, which I think works perfectly. The first true composer was probably Wagner, when he did Gotter Dammerung...
Yeah, the Ring Cycle and all that. And some of that is just exceedingly heavy!
Absolutely. And then if you want to go for Voivod sounding dischordal stuff, listen to "Tocatta And Fugue In D Minor" by Johan Sebastian Bach...
Oh, I love Voivod. I especially love the MIDDLE of their career. I didn't really care for their first couple of albums that much, but once they did "Killing Technology" I was TOTALLY on board!
And it was the same way with Slayer, I was NOT a Slayer fan until they did "Reign In Blood." And when they did "Reign In Blood" I was like "Oh shit! Okay, they did it right this time, I love these guys."
And one of the shortest! (laughs) What is it 36 minutes, 38 minutes? But every song's a killer. A definite K.I.A. on every song. And I do like a lot of their other stuff they did after that, and their old stuff I like live.
NORTHERN CROWN.
Interview with Zachary via phone.
Another newcomer for this issue. I must say I was heavily impressed with their debut release, and they have a newer album out entitled "The Others." The thing I loved about their EP was how well their singer channeled more than one Candlemass vocalist in the cover they did. Their next album is even open to yet MORE experimentation, so no telling where this band will end up. Interesting to hear their black metal roots, which may bear fruit in the future... More on that later on.
Let me give you the whole background. Leona, who's the bassist... Her and I have been friends for a long time. And we actually used to have a black metal band together. And that kinda fell apart so we started Northern Crown. So she was actually a founding member of Northern Crown with me. And she's actually the one that came up with the name for the band. Now before that first album came out, she left the band; we sorta had a falling out over her leaving the band. Two years later we patched things up; she joined just in time to record the second album. So at that point it was just me and I was trying to get a record finished; I didn't have any members in the band.
A co worker of mine, Stephanie, introduced me to her then-boyfriend who is now her husband. That's Frank (their vocalist - Ed). He had moved to Fort Lauderdale; he was still living in Nashville. And the intial introduction was that "hey, Frank can find you a drummer to play on the record." Because I was going to do everything else; I was actually originally the singer in the band too. So he then introduced me to Josh who had drummed on both records so far. And I kinda mentioned "Listen, I'm not really feeling singing this; I actually wanna get a real heavy metal singer." And Frank casually mentioned that he wanted to do it, and I'm like "Well, dude, lemme Just hear you sing." What I was doing, was basically I was having people send me a demo of them doing like the first verse and chorus of 'Heaven And Hell' (Black Sabbath with Dio - Ed). Because if you can sing that, you can sing all the Northern Crown stuff! (I'm laughing here - Ed.)
And then he got really insecure about it, and I'm like "dude, come on." So I ended up giving like 3 auditions, and Frank was one of them, and he ended up being the favorite and I'm like, "No, seriously, you're the guy to sing on this." So that's how we ended up doing the first record; I basically had the entire thing tracked, and then I sent the sessions up to Nashville. They laid down the drums, and Frank did his vocals, then he did a couple of solos on the album. We mixed it and released it, and much to my surprise, it was very well received. Not that I was surprised because I didn't think the songs were good, but I'm surprised because we're nobody, we're not playing live (laughing here again - Ed). No label support, I funded this completely out of my pocket. And that includes, on that first album, I paid the other band members. So I paid Josh and Frank to play, and a couple other local musicians played on the album too; I tried to pay them, they didn't want money. Cool, whatever. So, that was album number one. Again, pretty well received.
Yeah. I consider the first one an EP, and the second one a full length. To me, a full length is when you hit like 40 minutes.
Yeah, it's one of those things where at a certain point, you're just sort of nitpicking. So that's the first album, and then I started writing the second one; it took us a little while to get started on it because Frank was moving to Florida; he was getting married and starting a new job. Unfortunately, real life and heavy metal are not super compatible. But we got it done, released it in October, and again got a really good reception; we actually got some coverage from some bigger media outlets; we ended up being in Decibel, we got a big two third page article about us in PowerPlay magazine, which is one of the bigger rock and metal magazines in the U.K. Angry Metal Guy gave us a STELLAR review, we actually got a lot of new fans of the band. That's through albums number one and two.
So, here I'll give you a couple of inside stories there. Originally, the cover on that album was going to be 'Electric Funeral.' I started working on it, and I wasn't feeling it. Black Sabbath is my favorite band ever. The reason I wasn't feeling it, is because, man, if you're gonna do something like Black Sabbath, especially Sabbath with Bill Ward, you have to jam that out live. And it just didn't have any feel me doing it by myself and sending the tracks off to the guys in Nashville. And I'm trying to figure out what to do, because you take that cover off and all of a sudden, the album's really, REALLY short, which we didn't want to do. And I'm talking to Stephanie, who is Frank's wife, and she's like "well, dude, you should cover something from Candlemass." And that's what led us to doing 'Crystal Ball.' Which is just an amazing song.
Yeah, I remember seeing that. So in 2008 I saw Candlemass in Chicago.
It was a great show. Obviously Rob was in the band. He has crazy pipes, but he can't remember the lyrics. And he has himself admitted he can't remember the lyrics. I actually read an interview with him where he out and out said "Yeah, I'm kinda lazy." And I'm like "Dude!" I guess if you're owning the fact that you're not putting the work in. But man, you're Candlemass!
So, you know, you're not in Solitude Aeturnus anymore, you're in Candlemass. THE sort of best band of that genre. You put the work in because there's expectations that come along with that.
Frank and I are both working professionals. We both work in technology; I'm self employed. He's married; we're both homeowners. We're busy guys and we have lives. But that being said, we're incredibly dedicated to our music. I have a recording studio at home, Frank has a studio at home. He just released a solo album earlier this year, that's kinda 80's prog rock. So think like Queensryche. It's an amazing album; it's like a 3 song EP. So we're dedicated to this. And at the end of the day; and I love that people have latched on to us. There's no casual fans of Northern Crown. If you like us, you're into us. Or you may not know about us yet. But I have to go to bed at night and know that I did the best I could in every regard on these albums. There's errors that I pick out on BOTH albums. I HEAR them when I listen to them, maybe I made a mistake in the mix, one of us was off in the instruments. And it drives me NUTS. It's probably stuff that nobody else hears. But the fact is that we're making this music for ourselves. And that doesn't excuse it not being perfect. Pride dictates, for me, that it has to be perfect. It won't be perfect but we at least have to STRIVE for it.
But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how perfect the album is to YOU, you got somebody sitting at the other end of the line that's gonna pick it apart minute by minute, second by second, track by track. It's kind of the unaviodable thing. Sometimes you can overwork a song to death, I've been in that situation too.
Yeah, you DEFINITELY can, there's gotta be a certain point where you just sorta draw a line in the sand. And you're like "it's done, it's time to move on with this." That's been a hard lesson for me to learn; I'm DEFINITELY better at it than I was three years, four years ago. And that just comes with experience and age I think.
That's actually a really great piece of advice I got. It was like an article I read somewhere is basically don't overdemo. And I would demo a song like from scratch multiple times. I don't do that anymore; I kinda get it to a good place and then "okay, it's done."
Over the course of re-arranging everything, one of the lyrics got kind of out of place, because he would make me do three or four takes of a song. But one re-arranging actually made the lyrics make more sense, so sometimes there's forces that kinda guide things in the proper direction, and you just kinda have to let that happen instead of trying to over analyze it and over complicate things.
You know, what I can say is that for the first two albums, I had an idea in my head on what I wanted those records to be, and that's not what they ended up being. And that's not in a bad way it's just that... I can't predict, and honestly I can't even really control where the records are going to go. So I just sort of write the songs, and just let it be. We're pretty far along into making the next album; it'll be out sometime next year. I can't really say for certain. For example, the hurricane... We haven't worked on it since Irma hit. Actually, since before Irma hit. Yeah, it was the end of August was the last time we worked on the album. So that's kinda knocked us off schedule a little bit.
So lemme tell you about that. So I'm in Fort Lauderdale. We didn't get it that bad. We lost power. I was going to be in Indianna the weekend that Irma hit. I actually ended up driving up there; I was going up there for a family event. And I came back the day after the storm hit, so I drove through Georgia the following days after the storm. So Monday night, the day after the storm, I stayed in Atlanta overnight then headed back to Florida. Got about 30 miles south of Georgia; there's no power, there's nothing. And that's how North and Central Florida were too. I don't want to go so far as to say a wasteland because the buildings were all standing. But I tell ya, you're driving down the Florida turnpike in Central Florida, and that's out in the middle of nowhere. And it's BLACK. Honestly dude, it was creepy as hell. I have NO urge to make that drive again.
I used to live in Savannah, and there's been SO many years when the forecaster said "yeah, the hurricane is gonna drop right over Tybee Island," which is 10 miles from Savannah. And it gets up the Atlantic and for some reason that Gulf stream air and that warm water pushes it out to sea. So we've sat through MANY hurricanes that just never hit our shores.
So you know what's kinda interesting about that. I was living down here when Wilma and Katrina hit. And people were very blase' about it, they were just like "whatever." The reaction out of people for Irma was a little different than I had seen, which was 12 years ago. People seemed a little more anxious about it. But then again, you know what dude, it was one of the 5 most powerful hurricanes ever. It was a little more terrifying.
So when I was driving that Monday night, and I was on I-24 between Chatanooga and Nashville, so you're kinda up in the mountains a little bit there. That's when Irma, which was a tropical storm at the time was coming through. So can you imagine racing down the side of one of those mountains with 50 mile an hour winds whipping around! (laughing a bit here).
I'm not sure how high a hurricane actually is up in the air. What was I gonna say, oh, so I started talking about the next album a little bit. Um, like I kinda had some ideas of what I thought I was gonna write and that ended up NOT being the case. To give you a little bit of teaser and preview... There's a song on there that's like a really epic, proggy song, there's a total stoner/ doom song on there... There's a total 70's rock, Uriah Heep sort of thing going on in another song. We're just really... I find myself tapping more and more into my love of 70's rock and 70's metal, like Sabbath, Deep Purple and Uriah Heep and that stuff...
Yep. Yeah. So... Um, total tangent, just reminded me; I was at a local wrestling show like two months ago. And somebody came out to 'Forever My Queen.' And I'm like "Wow." Somebody coming out to Pentagram.
Yeah, so I knew that creatively I was taking some risks on that album. And you know, for example, 'No One Came To Mourn Me.'...
So anybody that... Any of my friends that aren't into metal that's their favorite song from that album. Anybody like my age that's in their 40's or so and grew up in the 80's listening to Depeche Mode, and like that new wavey, electronic music from the 80's... That's their favorite song. You start reading the reviews of it and people don't know what to make of it. Unfortunately, sometimes metalheads show their asses a little bit. Because somebody called it like synth pop at some point (I'm laughing here). And i'm like, "Dude. There's NO POP on this record."
And that's kinda what I've wanted to do all along, it's just that I don't get a whole lot of support from electronic and industrial music. Because it's just not really... It's almost a dead genre to be honest with you, which is really kinda sad. Because I like stuff like Malhavoc and Ministry. Front Line Assembly especially, I thought was just one of the first industrial bands to start mixing the guitars in there besides Malhavoc and Ministry. And that stuff was just ungodly to me... So I get where you're coming from with 'No One Came To Mourn Me...'
So lemme explain some of the origins of that song to you. So I had actually written the lyrics to that song first. And there's not necessarily a formula to what I do, because sometimes the lyrics will come first, sometimes the MUSIC will come first, sometimes they happen in parallel. But I had all the lyrics to that written. And I'm sitting there one night in front of the computer by myself figuring out what I'm going to do with it because I REALLY liked what I had written. And I'm like... trying to figure out the music and I'm like "I don't think this is a guitar song!" Because I really don't! You get basically into the middle of 'Mourn...' and there's like a big crescendo like where all the strings and the synthesizers are all in. That was the seed of that song; that little 30 second stretch I had written.
And I played it for Frank, I'm over at his house one day. And I pulled out my phone and played it. And he didn't really get it. He didn't get where I was going with it and I was like "Alright, hold on." A couple of weeks later I had figured out how to blow it up and do a full song, and I'm like "these are the words to go with it." And he starts tracking it, and it's like... I don't know how people are going to react to this... (thinking here, slight pause).
They in fact react to it very poorly. But I LOVE what we did there.
Keep in mind, I'm 40 years old. So this is the... people have known of me since 2014 when the first album came out. And normally a musician might be a little more seasoned at the age of, so I was 37 when that album came out. Dude, I've been writing songs for a decade and a half or longer by that point. It was just stuff that nobody had ever heard.
You know what, on top of that too I would just say that Frank and I are VERY progressive minded that there's... Not a lot of rules in this band, other than to say it needs to sound like Northern Crown. And that's honestly it. So if we write an electronic song and we're like "yeah, dude, this sounds like us." Or if we write sort of a classic rock song. The track that I think is gonna be the title track on the next album. To me it sounds like Uriah Heep. When I play it for my dad, and he says "Dude, it sounds like Uriah Heep." (laughing here - Ed). Well, yeah. I played it for someone else and they said it sounded like Trouble.
Yeah. It's unmistakably us. It's unmistakably Frank and I. It's just an evolution of what we've been doing. And on top of that, the thing to keep in mind too about us... The first album, everything was written and I handed it off to Frank. The second album, I still wrote a lot of it but he was a little more involved creatively. NOW we're doing everything side by side.
What's happened with this album is I'll come up with a couple of riffs. I'll go over to his house, we'll jam them out; we'll have like a little jam session as a demo. I'll take what we did in that jam session and then sort of make a nice version of it in Pro Tools. Then I'll go back the next week and then we'll start working on the vocal arrangement. And we've actually been writing the lyrics for this new album on the fly. Like we'd literally sit in a room together, close the door... And I'll tell him "this is what I think the song is about; this is kinda where I want to go with it." And we'll sit there and write a verse, record it, write a verse, record it, write the chorus, record it. It's then a really positive thing for us at this point. It's been a REALLY good thing for us as a bandf to do that.
And listen... I am most assuredly in a lot of ways a control freak. (Much laughter here - Ed). I am better about that as I get older... You know, Frank as a singer should be able to pick the words he wants to sing...
To me, it's gotta be a little bit more difficult when it's two people trying to write lyrics as opposed to just one. And a lot of people think the singer usually writes all his own lyrics, but that's not always the case in some bands.
It could be difficult. There's actually a part on the second album, 'Les Autres.' There's one part of the song before it goes into like a little mellow break, the line is 'I want to die.' And that line was supposed to be "I want to fucking die." And we got into an argument about that. And he's like "dude, I don't think using the word is necessary," and "I don't want my family hearing me say 'fuck' on a record." And it turned into an argument. And I'm like, "Dude, don't you get the gravity of what I'm trying to say here?"
And then he started to just give in, and I'm like "No, no no no. You're not gonna just give in because that's what I want. You're gonna stand in front of the microphone and you're gonna figure out something that works. And if you find something that works that I'm happy with, then we're gonna do it. But I need you to understand BEFORE WE DO THAT, how IMPORTANT this is to me. (slight pause to let the words sink in - Ed).
And so yeah, we got into an argument about it, but you know what? It worked. We came to a resolution. Where I'm going with that, is we're creatively in synch at this point. There's definitely debates as we're sitting here working on stuff, because I express myself verbally, lyrically, way different than he does. And there can be some battles here because I'm like... I feel like the words that you use are really important to the sound of the band. But again, everything that we're doing up to this point... I feel like is working. Obviously, we'll see how everyone thinks once the album is out next year.
No. Frank and I are the only ones that live here. Leona did live here but she relocated to Seattle back in 2015. And then Josh is still in Nashville. And I don't say this to slight anyone else in the band, but Frank and I do the bulk of the work. And you know that that's how bands are. I don't involve Josh until everything's done. Josh is the drummer. I generally won't involve Leona until I've programmed drums and got all the riffs figured out. I'll get some feedback from her on the way. I'm sort of the first layer, I start bringing Frank into it. We kinda get a song figured out that everybody else starts to hear at that point. At least that's how it's going, especially for this album that's how it's going.
Well, it's named after a constellation. I definitely have heard that several times. Definitely heard that several times (laughing). At one point somebody thought it was a Game Of Thrones reference (laughing on both sides). Which was funny because at that point I had never watched Game Of Thrones.
No, I have now... But at that point I hadn't watched ANY of it. I didn't watch the first season until the second season was already underway.
I don't do a good job of staying up with shows or anything. My friends will get frustrated with me. When the Star Wars movie came out a couple of years ago, I didn't see it until 3 months after it came out. Not that I don't care, but I'm sorta off somewhere doing something else.
Is there anything else you wanted to know, any other questions for me? I've just kinda been rambling, so I didn't know if you had specific questions and I've just been talking over you this whole time.
You guys are real people, just like anyone else, and I kinda like to tap into that. I always like to bring different and diverse questions to the table or just topics of conversation. This is perfect.
The funny thing is, if somebody were to kinda ask me what we're writing about, my response would be, "well, have you listened to the record, because it's kinda obvious!" (laughter on both sides here - Ed). If anybody asks me what my favorite bands are, my response would again be "have you listened to the record?"
Okay, let me run down the big influences for you, because there's probably maybe one or two surprises in there. Obviously, it's Black Sabbath, Candlemass, and Deep Purple. Which are the really obvious ones.
Opeth is a big one that I don't think it comes through but, like, the way that I write, the way that I arrange things. There's definitely like a huge Opeth influence there. And then, Steven Wilson from Porcupine Tree, who produced a few Opeth albums... We're really big fans of his, and that definitely sorta influences us. There's a King Crimson influence in there too and in fact the way that I tune my guitar is the tuning that Robert Tripp uses. Because I generally do not play in standard tuning. I actually play in a tuning called New Standard. You can look it up on Wikipedia. There's definitely this prog influence on us. That's the stuff that really, REALLY influences me.
Dude, I'm a BIG Motley Crue fan. Whenever I can find a moment to sneak a little bit of sleaze in there, I'll do that. There's a little Uncle Acid hidden in the next album. You definitely gotta search for it, you probably still won't find it anyways, it's definitely a needle in a haystack. So that's the stuff that... Basically once Candlemass started bringing... And I've been a Candlemass fan for years and years and years. When Candlemass brought in the organs, that completely changed the way that I looked at doom metal. And I'm like, wait a second. This is... This is a great sound, in fact Opeth had been doing it... Opeth and Candlemass had the same keyboard player...
Yeah, it was the same guy that ended up playing keys for both of them when they were doing the whole organ thing. And you know the Opeth song 'The Baying Of The Hounds?' Again, that's just so perfect of like a heavy, HEAVY guitar riff and then a heavy organ riff playing along. It's not just keyboard, it's organ. It's different, you know?
Yeah, it's its own sound. The thing about a Hammond is that, especially when you start distorting it, which is what the 70's rock bands did. It starts sounding like a guitar. And that's one of the reasons it works so well in doom metal and it doesn't sound out of place, because it sounds like a guitar, except it sounds like a guitar with a lot of octaves. So it just kinda fits in the mix really well. Where I don't think I could necessarily do a Jethro Tull thing and throw a flute on top of it, because I think that would really stand out.
Well, there you go. I'm going to limit my ripping off to just ripping off Candlemass; I don't wanna rip off two doom legends.
What's really funny is that... There's a review that somebody did for "The Others" where they were comparing us to Hawkwind. And dude, we don't sound like Hawkwind. We don't. But what's funny about it is, I can tell the reviewers that DON'T read the press release. Because the press release is there to set the ground work for everything. And again, we spell out REALLY clearly what our influences are, what we're trying to do, how we consider ourselves.
I was annoyed at the time, I'm laughing now.
Press releases have one purpose and one purpose only; it's to get you interested enough to take the time... Which is sad really, if this is what you do (run a music magazine - Ed. Wasn't very clear on this in the interview), you shouldn't need a press release to help you. But they're trying to get you excited enough, and going "this is different," or "this is something that might stand out from the 450,000 other releases that come across my desk every day." They're all trying to achieve the same goal, but a lot of them aren't 100% honest in their descriptions and portrayals. And this is coming from somebody who's been doing this shit for 25 years (26 now at this moment).
We write the press release ourselves. Frank's got a little more music biz experience in that way than I do, so it'll end up being him that writes it, and he's responsible for the final version of it. And then we have a PR team we work with, Clawhammer. But as far as the bio and the press release, we write all that stuff ourselves. There's no label fuckery in there (laughing).
So I have reached out to labels and there's been some interest, but basically the interest has been for distro deals...
Which is, by the way is fine too, but it still requires me to come out of pocket. And I don't want to give up anything; I don't want to be beholden to anybody. The reason that I would want a label is to get our music in stores in Europe, because then that's gonna create a demand. Because you put a very professional product together, you put the CD's in stores in Europe. Fans are going to buy them, and then fans are gonna want to see us live and some promoter is going to want to bring us to Europe to play.
Which would be fun to do; I'm not betting on it, I'm not depending on it, I'm not expecting it. If the opportunities present themselves, you know, we'll definitely try to do it. The reason we're not signed is we don't play live.
We will figure out when to do it when the time is right. And that's with understanding that the time may NEVER be right. As you know, being in a band is difficult. I'm self employed; I do work as a consultant. I'm a software engineer. Priority number one for me is to have money coming in. Because I'm not on salary; I have to go out and hustle for every dollar. And that's not to denigrate anybody that makes a living any other way; it's just what I kinda chose to do for myself. That's A number one
My best friend and chief collaborator has a wife and a career, and those are the important things for him. In the spare time that we have, we work on Northern Crown. So you basically say out of however many free hours we have in a year, X of those hours are gonna be spent on Northern Crown. So I could spend the time writing new music, working on it with Frank, and then getting those songs REALLY polished and just making a really bad ass, cohesive album that I'm super proud of. OR, I could spend my time finding band members, finding rehearsal space, making sure everybody shows up to practice, making sure everybody at practice is staying focused and isn't just there to fuck off and drink beer.
There's literally only so many hours that I can put into this band, and I would rather that those hours go towards making new music. If the opportunity presents itself for us to play live, and I'm fully into it and Frank's fully into it... and then whomever the other musicians are, because it may not be Josh or Leona because of geographic reasons. We find other musicians that fit in personality wise, and sort of understand that they're coming in as musicians in an existing band. And I'm not looking for, and this is going to make me sound arrogant, but I'm not looking for creative guidance from anybody. It's like, "dude, I need a lead guitarist, I need a keyboard player," that's what I need and it's not necessarily that I need somebody to help me write songs or send somebody to change the sound of the band. I have A job for you to do. And that's another thing for me to manage to.
So, yeah, it's about getting the most out of the time that I have to put into Northern Crown. But again, I don't wanna dampen anybody's hopes. I would LOVE for us to be able to take these songs out on the road at some point but I can't promise that that's going to happen.
Especially with the way life is nowadays. I don't listen to albums the way I used to. I used to know all the lyrics by heart, every single song. Life nowadays is NOT like it was when I was in my late teens and early 20's. Like you said, there's responsibilities and you know... That's why issues don't come out but once or twice a year because I don't feel right reviewing an album that I haven't listened to nine or ten times.
It's good to have standards. That's what I talk about wanting the albums to have a certain level of quality. It's the same thing that, would I love to release an album this year, sure. But then I would be rushed. And I don't want to do that.
RITUAL.
Interview with Gypsy ReBeth via facebook chat.
Ritual. Many people unfortunately STILL think the band is called Widow, a fact that we're going to have to correct in the classic albums section. Personally, I cannot for the life of me see WHY this band isn't revered along side of Diamond Head, since their very first album "Widow," coming out right at the beginning of the 1980's, is such an amazing album with wonderful vocals and a very unique kind of melancholic atmosphere that you hear on the record; not just the songs themselves and the vocals/guitar arrangements, but down to the very unique and interesting production. I've always held a special place for that particular album, nothing they've done since has come close to how epic that album is. And of course there's some very interesting stories about Gypsy ReBeth's life that shaped how this record turned out.
Uh, no, that's not true at all! Mason is still with me, the bass player. It's kind of wierd actually because in Ritual he was the bass player from the beginning. But what a lot of people don't know is he's actually a drummer as well. And he did do a couple of things on a few tracks; he's pretty good. It's been quite useful in the studio and of course there's always that option. He's still with me, even on the acoustic stuff I go out and do now. But on that he plays the kit, he doesn't play bass. The actual three original members of Ritual are still alive and kicking. Rex, who was the original drummer ON "Widow,' he's... I dunno where he is now but he's still alive and kicking in Norfolk, which is where he came from.
Yeah, I think Ritual always was a bit different. That was recorded at Wickham's, on literally a 16 track analog desk. We've always used analog, I won't use digital stuff; I just can't relate to it. In those days we were tuned to like a drop D, nothing really special. But what it was, the actual recording machine was running at um... cause they normally run at like 30 I.P.S. or something, so I think we ran it at 15. And that was the engineer's idea not mine. It's just the way it always sounded; I don't know why. The three of us just had that kind of sound and that's it.
Oh, thanks very much, I'm really flattered you'd say that. It's a really sad story of Ritual, it's the usual tale of, uh, bad management, one disaster after another. But the biggest tragedy was when the record company released the album, they didn't put the band's name on the album! (laughs). It was just released as Widow, and everybody thought the band's name was Widow, which was complete and utter rubbish! But in those days, once you've pressed up a few copies... And I think originally they pressed five or six thousand. But it was enough of an investment not to change it. In those days we were lucky, we had a PR guy called Max Clifford, who's fallen from grace now, but he got us on the Freeman's Rock Show, the Friday Night Rock Show, and that really kicked off the album. The management, when it all kind of broke up because of heavy debts and bad management and stuff like that, the remaining quota of the albums that were out there... we don't know... the management seemed to sort of disappear and we never saw any more albums again. Even now it's a bit of a mystery where they all are! They never come on the market! I mean, one sold on ebay for like a grand! I dunno, $1500 dollars. I have my own copy, but they're really rare now.
The reissue by Shadow Kingdom was really good because that gave us a chance for a lot more people to hear it! They gave it a really nice treatment; new artwork and all that. It was good that it sort of got out there again and didn't disappear. I'm glad you like it!
One of the main problems for early British rock bands... And don't forget Ritual was formed in 1973. We were going for years and years. But, you can ask any sort of older British rock musician what radio was like and you just could NOT get your stuff played on air. It was out there because we'd already done things like mini albums on cassettes and stuff, which all the bands were doing then. So we've been around and through it, but it took us THAT long to get air play, it was that bad. Because the big companies were just corrupt. You know how it is, and that's just how it was.
Oh yeah. I have to say that you guys, over the pond there, were way ahead of us. Because finally, I mean, and I know this from experience, because the ONLY company that would reissue... And I didn't chase them they actually came to ME, would release those two Ritual albums, was an American company! And even now, here, it's REALLY hard for rock bands. Completely difficult, whereas, I do feel in America, and a lot of my friends have gone there in the past and they're still there... At least the opportunity is still there for them to play, and get out there... Whether it's bars, or clubs or whatever. There's a lot more places. Here, it's very small, and our population in this country is obsessed with this really bad pop music (laughing).
I've been a big follower all my life. Not by way of influence, but when I was growing up, people like the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison and all that stuff. And what amazed me about a lot of those bands, people like Stevie Ray Vaughn and stuff like that, they kind of became quite big in their own states first. And that's really difficult to do here, even though we're a tiny country compared to America. I think I read you know, you can get England into Kansas like 7 times, which is really funny. (laughing here - Ed).
It's absolutely incredible isn't it? I've got friends in the business that I've known for years. Like Lemmy, god rest his soul, is an old friend of mine. Sabbath and Ozzy we know well because you've got to remember all these bands used the same studios. We were like a close knit family. We would often rehearse at Rick's studios, which is way over near Wimbledon. That was one of the better ones. Girlschool live just up the road from me here. The center of New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was very much a London thing. Whereas heavy metal, or heavier bands, came from the Midlands originally.
I don't know what it is about British people; they don't see the music that we've produced as a cultural thing that we spread. Even Led Zeppelin, they still kind of deny it. Over here, we recognize say, Jimi Hendrix and his contribution, his MASSIVE contribution to music. But we don't recognize our own, it's odd. We never got any support and we still don't.
Yeah, it's a long time, but you gotta remember the first few years... I would say the first five years of that were spent just working, gigging, working, sleeping... (laughs). And then trying to get somebody to back us. Labels were not signing rock bands then, they just weren't. They were signing punk bands. You're talking about the mid to late 70's. It was a bad time for rock bands. And when we eventually DID get some money and start recording it was probably I would say the late 70's. I got a few recordings, I have some early recordings, but then again, they're on things like cassettes, there's a few singles and stuff. It would need work. They could be remastered, we have had stuff remastered. Again, this all takes, you know, somebody has to come to me and say "Look, I'm really interested in some of the old stuff, how about we get into that?" But of course, it's all about money; it's all about what they can make out of you.
Recording and remastering costs a lot of money. There's a few albums that have disappeared, because they were simply put out on cassette. There was an album called "Gypsy" that was put out in 1985.
That's really good. We did an album called "Daughters Of Joy," which, that's disappeared because the masters got... they got taken away because the management company again got into debt, so we can't redo those at the moment. There was a sort of EP called "Pandora's Wish," there's... Ah, I've got a whole list here. What you're undertaking is quite an expensive venture. And they look at the options, they think "these guys are getting on a bit now. Are we gonna get our money back?" And that's the honest truth. It just is the hard way that the business is run. And if Ritual ever reappears again with another album it will probably be using some of the tracks I've been recording over the last one or two years. We were always determined to put that third major album out on vinyl. So that's what we've been working on really.
Yeah, Shadow Kingdom is pretty good. It's just that I had a licensing deal with them. And that actually runs out next year (which would be THIS year - Ed.) So it's just one of things; I'd rather re-license to another company so I'll think about that when the time comes... And I'm sure, I'm SURE there's a few metal labels that would snatch up a new Ritual album. It's just making sure that all the material is the kind of stuff that fans will expect, because they hear Ritual in a certain way. And it HAS to be that way. It's very simplistic, it's just of a certain atmosphere and aura, is what they like.
I've been asked to do gigs, and I said look I'm not going to do gigs unless we could use a drummer that's suitable for the stuff, and the time or the venue is right. But it's always in the background; I haven't deserted it at all. When the band is quiet, I kinda do my own stuff. I actually started as a flamenco player. I started at the age of nine; I used to play at theaters during intermissions as a little flamenco player. My dad put me on stage doing that stuff (laughs).
I'm sure you're gonna see something in the next year. We'd love to come back to America, absolutely love to.
We came here in 1972. This was before I formed Ritual. I was doing a little stint with a band over there called Tranquility, with a friend of mine. They released a few albums and they did quite well. Then he went on to become a writer and wrote the stuff for Grease... You know, that crap. (laughs) I came back after a year, and my bass player Steve he stayed there; he's been there since then, but he died last year which was quite sad. But he kept saying "come back, come back sometime and we'll sort out a tour so you can get some gigs."
No, no, Naisha, which is apparently... It means the brightest star in Apache apparently. It's actually off the "Valley Of The Kings." And it's the title track. And there is a video, so yeah, I can send you the link for that. It's pretty cool, you'll see my guitar in that. Which, before you ask me, I don't have it now; it's in a private collection. I made two of them, which I used to use in Ritual. It got sold to a private collector, because I used it for 10 years and it had it's day. Normally in the old days I used to use an SG but this was just built for promos and all that. A bit of fun.
The actual video was filmed in Windsor Safari Park at the Egyptian Exhibition, which is really cool. It's actually on location AND it was filmed by a BBC producer, so it's quality film. It looks a bit dated now, but what can you do.
Yeah, I mean it's no mystery really. It's not that I'm a pagan or a cultist. Like anybody else I'm fairly knowledgeable on some things. I think it all stems from my theories on life. A lot of the things we see in the news, in the media and stuff; it's all a ritual really. And our life is a ritual, and these rituals stem from ancient times. And I'm a strong believer that we're all from another place. But we still have these rituals and beliefs, stuff like that. I don't actually believe anything I ever see. Unless you can sense it and feel it yourself. I think everybody has their own kind of picture.
Like if you see something on Fox News, or whatever you guys watch over there. You probably think the same as me you think "yeah, right, okay. Yeah, show me the proof man." And I think that's a natural thing within all of us, because I think instinctively we kind of know the truth.
Yeah, I've always been that way. I've always said "look, what is this all for, why is that?" Don't look at that, look behind here, then look behind that and go back to where it makes any sense. It's a crazy thing really, but I look at people like (laughing here)... David Icke...
Yeah, I know, and you know what, that's the really bad thing. Because I say "Listen, I know he's nuts (I'm laughing here). Okay?" That's fine, but WATCH the video. Then tell me that you REALLY think he's nuts. Like, 9 out of 10 people say "you know what? That REALLY sounds like it, that could work for me." Because EVERYTHING he's saying is true! There's no bullshit. The only time I kinda switch off for him is when he starts going into like "we are all one consciousness." Because we did all that shit in the 70's. And for me, that doesn't work because I think we are all very individual consciousnesses. Whether we are connected in SOME way, I'll agree with that. But I think he's gone a little bit on the sort of hippy, dippy trip for me. (MUCH laughter from me here).
But the other stuff; the other stuff's really good. And I think yeah, I think we're all hybrids. We probably come from somewhere else, I mean it's just practical data isn't it. I mean one day, WE will probably go to other worlds and do the same thing won't we? We'll be dropping in planets all over the place and that's if the planets are real or whatever, and we'll probably be putting our own species there and doing all sorts. We're already tampering with life ourselves NOW aren't we. So, I dunno why people find it so hard to believe really.
What was that, like growing an ear on a mouse. People go "I don't believe David Icke," but we're doing that shit already.
There's no strong occult connection, but I think it's all connected. With a lot of the things; Like the ancient races, I think were very occult minded in the way they lived their lives. Because it has some meaning from them that's passed down is all, really. They were more idealistic, I suppose, like we all were. What is it they say? "The dreams of youth become the regrets of maturity." I don't believe in that, but I think as you get older, you kinda think "Yeah, I was on the right track, definitely, but I'm still waiting for the answers, like everybody." (laughter here on both sides).
The thing that really gets to me the biggest about that Council Of Nicaea, where Emperor Constantine... They took great pains to describe the clothing that he was wearing at the meeting with the popes and the priests to basically say that, "Well, you know, we can't SAY he's still a pagan but, this is what he was wearing." And people that aren't clued in they have NO clue what that even means. But, you look at that and it's an OBVIOUS clue... He wasn't really worried about christianity, he just wanted to make sure that the money and the merchants and the trade was still flowing in the right direction.
Absolutely. I mean, if you look into things like the gnostic scriptures and all that stuff, and you wanna go way back. You suddenly start to see a pattern with all these religions where "Hang on a minute! Doesn't that happen in the other religion, they've just given it another name?" All the images start to become REALLY common, and one of the most common images... I wear a bracelet all the time, it's a snake: a serpent bracelet. Because the serpent is the oldest god known to human kind; it goes RIGHT back to the Sumerians, right beyond that. And I believe these images have been used... The serpent in christianity. And in a lot of other religions; the Hindu religions and stuff like that. They just use these ancient symbols and rituals... Again there you go! (laughing here). Throughout so many different religions? You think "How can you people say you're all kind of worshipping a different god, it's just like another story of the same thing."
I think a lot of people turn away from religion, and especially christianity because it's so rigid. They're saying, like for instance "thou shalt not lie." Well, hang on a minute man, sometimes it IS good to lie. If your best friend is dying of cancer and you don't want him to know, then you're gonna HAVE to lie, aren't you? Or something has happened, and you're not telling the truth to PROTECT somebody, how can that be wrong? So it's all these little things, they kind of... It doesn't work does it? They're trying to make us live our modern lives on texts that are like 2000 years old. But you go back 6 or 7 thousand years, the story was the same? But they've all adapted it for their own purposes.
It comes back to that mind control thing. And I'm not pointing the finger at ANY religion here, but I think we all know the ones that kind of brainwashed and they're like sheep. And you just mentioned about the way women are treated which I find REALLY appalling. REALLY appalling. My mum, god bless her, she's at rest now but she was a great pusher for women's equality of rights. She would have been APPALLED if she had known more about these kinds of things that go on now. And I've kinda got that burned into me. I think we're all equal and we all should be treated the same; I don't care who it is. But I just can't understand the mentality that you've just brought up. How can you POSSIBLY like a religion that denigrates women to such a point? To our Western values, it's just appalling. We can't get our heads around it; it's just unbelievable! And I think it all comes down to control.
Somebody said to me one day about god, they said "what do you think god is?" And I said "I tell you what I think god is, I think it's us." We WILL one day become our own god, however, I think we've got a long way to go. And I think that's the most honest answer. I think some of us will aspire. Generations thousand of years in the future; I think human beings WILL aspire to something... Amazing! I think there'll be a passing of the ways with some before that.
It's just some of those lines, isn't it? Just like "the meek shall inherit the earth." Well, that's a load of crap, BUT there might be something in there. And I truly believe the meek are the better part of us... And again, that's why musicians like myself are involved in this, because I believe it feeds the higher part of us. And I think if I do nothing else on this earth, if I can make people feel good, then you've really achieved something positive rather than... I dunno, either preaching religion or creating some kind of terror attack or to do something real bad, you know. I think we're the good guys. I do, we're the good guys, that's it...
And I'd go a step further, and I'd say it's actually FORGOTTEN science. Once upon a time there was probably a civilization knew ALL this stuff. Before the thing they call the fall of man. And I truly believe that makes a LOT of sense to me. Where at some point things changed, here, I don't know when and we became what we are now. And I just think now, we're kinda on that road where we're learning all this stuff again. It's almost like infinity is a cycle or a figure eight. It all kinda goes around. When they talk about infinity, I think that's what happens. Things just keep going round and round. And the occult will ALWAYS be in our lives.
I mean, if you look even at the christian ceremonies, I mean LOOK at it, those Catholic sermons man. All that regalia, the altars, all the paraphernalia, it's an frikkin' occult ritual isn't it? It's all still there, it's just been given a different name hasn't it?
I mean, what is the pope if he isn't a high priest? That's what he is, isn't he?
The Jews rejected Jesus as the messiah; it makes me wonder if they rejected him because A. they either KNEW that he was a psychological invention of the Roman Empire, a psychological warfare tactic, or they thought that Jesus didn't fit the model of what the messiah was supposed to be according to their ancient texts.
Yeah, I mean I think what you're saying has QUITE a lot of validity. And we tend to think of psychological warfare as like, recent. But it's PERFECTLY feasible to think this could have happened. Absolutely, I TOTALLY agree with that. Because let's face it, again we come back to the powers that be. There will ALWAYS be powers that be that wish to divide and rule. Now, that's a PERFECT way to do it, isn't it? And you know, whichever millenium you live in, there's always gonna be controlling powers that want to invent things to control the population.
And I don't know enough about it to kinda make an educated comment, but it sounds NOT a million miles from what could have happened.
Oh gosh, yes, still doing it. You can talk about anything from governments to the moon landing, to Princess Di. And I truly believe so many of these things are an illusionary fake by the powers that be to create something. And again, it's to create more control or to generate more money (which allows more control). And it's all part and parcel of the same thing. You can go way way, way back; I'm sure most of the wars have been created for that purpose. We've had recent examples, the Iraq war and things like that. And we KNOW that our government schemed to get us into it, whether we should have been there or not. All wars are pointless, because people just die and that's it. There's no result and nothing changes. It's just there for a purpose.
I think there's an American president who said... I dunno which one it was, but he said "war is good business." And you know, that sort of thing is always ringing in my head. And not because he's kinda of THAT person, what do you call them... an Illuminati? But I'm sure the people above him are. I'm actually convinced that 1% of this planet is running the other 99%. My dad was a freemason, he was a mason. Yeah. I've been invited to join several times, but I just can't get into that secret society. It's not for me. He was the very low level mason. But you know, the people at the top of those organizations are EXTRAORDINARILY secretive. You NEVER know... their hand is in this, that and the other and you NEVER know... And the masons are a very ancient... A very, very ancient kind of secretive order, like many of them.
I mean, our royal family. They're related to SO many people. They proved how many American presidents are actually distantly related to, which is REALLY freaky. Again, it all comes back to that control thing. I think we're all stuck here; we're all stuck in it. And there's not a lot we can do about it. But it's sort of nice to know. I'd rather know that not know. It's best to be careful.
Religions; a little knowledge is dangerous. And people tamper with all sorts of things like, whatever. Because they think it's a bit trendy, they'll go out and buy the Key Of Solomon or Aleister Crowley book and before you know it... they are painting their room black and getting involved in all sorts of stuff. The problem is that they don't realize that it's only making them more vulnerable and open to negative forces that they simply don't understand and could NEVER control. I'm a VERY strong believer in don't mess with what you don't know.
There's SO many things in this world we've yet to sort of grasp fully. We don't even know who's controlling US! And whoever is controlling us, they're masters of this kind of manipulation. And all sorts of influences and powers that we, we don't know. And I think getting sucked in is part of their... I dunno what their plan is, but I think their plan was originally... so the story goes... I mean the Sumerians were taken over by these... I dunno, these alien beings or whatever. Because they were mining for some stuff here and they needed... There was only 600 of them apparently. These forces or beings from another dimension wanted to enslave the human race so they got millions of people to mine this crap for them...
Yeah! And I think that, even if it's true or it's not true, it's STILL going on today. We're working... You know, whoever goes to work... I mean, even the queen, even these sort of people, the queen, the president or whatever... They're ALL working in the pyramid aren't they? They're in the pyramid scheme, in some kind of pyramid system. We're the bottom, and these guys might be halfway up but they're CERTAINLY not at the top. Absolutely not.
Ah, we've solved the problems of the world, I mean that's it.
The music industry is a very... for anybody coming into it... I mean I had a guy the other day who's kids were going into it said "look, can you give me any advice," and I said alright, "have you got a spare week?" (laughing here - Ed). Because there's just SO much to know. Yeah, once upon a time, you were a musician, you got your guitar, and you played a few gigs and it was cool, you could do your thing. Now it's a lot different; it's very complicated. Nowadays musicians have got all the gear and no idea. Their basic abilities sometimes leave a bit to be desired. But that doesn't matter, because mummy and daddy bought them a nice Gibson, and they can afford to rehearse at a good studio and you know, dad's best friend works at a record company. So it's all that kind of stuff going on still. But so much more of it because there's so many musicians now. Everybody wants to be a Star. It's a bit of a minefield and old fogies like myself, we just kinda... I like Willie Nelson who just tracks along with his old beat up guitar and that's it, that'll do it you know? (laughing here yet again - Ed).
Yeah, you got to be pragmatic about it, I never blow my own trumpet, I say that I'm just the guitar player, I dunno. We just enjoy the music, which I think the people like myself came into it as a kid from that. The money, if you make some money, that's nice; if you don't... Well, if you love the music that will sustain you through. But I mean I wonder how many of these sort of young pop artists we got out here now, what they're gonna be doing when they're 50; I'm not sure.
I'm not a big fan of Mickey Rourke. I mean, I've not seen many of his films. I like him as an actor, because I liked him in Iron Man. (laughing here) I only liked that film because it's good a good soundtrack. He was taking a taxi somewhere and somebody said to him I dunno, something about Justin Bieber or something, and he said well, do you like him? And he said, "ah, he's just a punk ass bitch." "What's all this..." and he was doing all the rap movements, he goes "what's all this?" And it's true because in a way it's a kind of... I mean, rap isn't my favorite music but it's kind of disrespecting real, proper rap artists. Isn't it? Some kind of skinny, middle class kid thinking he's down with the boys. (HUGE laughter breaking out on both sides). I did laugh. And Mickey Rourke was right on the nose I have to say.
Oh yeah, we got all sorts of words for them here. British rock musicians, we're sort of quite down to earth really. And most of us come from... Because in America, you don't have like a class system like we've got here. It's a bit less defined. I mean, yeah, you got people with money and people without money. But here, it's a bit more complicated. It's kind of where you come from, who your parents were and all that stuff. Do you have any money. Social classes are a bit... I dunno, it's hard to explain, but I come from a sort of an upper, a more upper working class background. We weren't trailer trash but good working class people. You've probably got that there in the States I know.
There's a bit of rivalry because most of the rock bands are really kinda working class. And there was an invasion in the sort of late 80's and 90's with the prog rock bands, and they were, funny enough, they were mostly middle class bands along the lines of Pink Floyd who... The funny thing about Pink Floyd, the middle class probably laughed at them, most of the rock musicians go "yeah right. Well, that's great. Sit in the studio for two years, man, right, far out." They're not really that impressed.
But on the other hand, we've got the people here they absolutely adore the old bands like The Who, The Beatles, The Kinks, the Stones. Because they're just like me, and they REALLY worked hard. So yeah, Motorhead, all the later bands. All the New Wave bands; Black Sabbath, oh god, Iron Maiden. Even Eric Clapton. They're kind of all great people; they're not privleged in any way. It's that kind of inspirational thing where you know... Jimi Hendrix came from NOTHING. He was from NOTHING, but look what you get. You get EVERYTHING from NOTHING.
And you know, that's always an inspiration to younger people. Where, they've kind of lost that inspiration now, because they look on the T.V. like you say at these talent shows, and they think "Hey, I could do that!" Yet you LOWER the level of expectation of professionalism. It's just LOWERED. I dunno why. But it just seems to have gone that way. Young guitar players... And I'm not being biased; I look at them and think "my god, these guys on the T.V." I seen guys on youtube, and I'm like "what are you doing?"
Yeah. Same with me, absolutely. I wasn't born a singer. Because when Ritual formed it was a four piece band in 1973 (WOW - Ed). And the lineup was Steve Smith on drums, Les Haynes on bass, Graham Fox on vocals, and myself. And Graham suffered from a LOT of throat problems over the next year. And he left. And I had a couple of singers after that; temporary singers. Funny enough, one was an American guy who was pretty cool. A guy called John Mitchell. And eventually I got fed up with these guys coming and going. I said, I'll have a go at it myself. And we ended up as a three piece because I was doing the vocals. That was sort of in about '75. So I kinda had to start singing, but like yourself I had to work at it. And it wasn't easy. If you really like what you're doing, like you say, you put the time in and do the work.
When you look at these young people, somebody could have gone along and said, "look, what you've got is good, but look! Just go in and work at it for awhile. And so that's really good because you've OBVIOUSLY got talent." And THEN come back and make a future of it. Don't make it NOW, right? (laughing).
But they don't. It's like "look at me, I bought a guitar last week. Now I'm gonna tell you something about this Les Paul thing that I've got." No, don't tell us because we all know! It's so funny. After my bass player and I, we're really bored and we're really fed up, we want to come and youtube, because they DO cheer you up (laughter here on both sides - Ed). God bless these little... No but bless 'em. I seriously, absolutely wish them all the luck. Because it's hard. You know? I wanna bring 'em up and say "listen, LISTEN! Keep it up, keep working at it man, and by the way, get your thumb off the top of the neck! (HUGE laughter from both of us here). And sit more confortably, you look really bad, you're gonna get wrist problems, like I've got now; I've got wrist problems, I've got finger problems. 54 years down the line, that's what happens.
You learn as you go along. And that's what I wanna do, because they're kids! It's the next generation coming through.
I think my image of a Widow has always been soberly because love and beauty for me are two of the most important factors in life. And in music for me it HAS to be something beautiful, because I DON'T relate to ugliness. There's plenty of ugliness in the world; you can step out into the street. If you're an artistic person, you want to see things in a kind of... And that's just how I see things; I'll see something good in everything, that's me. Because I think everything's kind of got it's own beauty. Even if it's a kind of ugly beauty. You know what I'm saying. I'll give you a good example; you'll see some women and they're kind of ugly and yet they're STRANGELY appealing. It's like that.
So when I was actually writing the song, I had an image of a person, a lady if you like, who lost a loved one, but she was quite young when she lost him. And I think when something like that happens to you, when you lose somebody very young, I think it can almost kind of, in a way, it colors your soul into black color. And you've got this kind of darkness that surrounds you. It all sounds very weird but I kind of perceived it as a very sad, dark, black thing. Now the Widow ever lost that by falling in love again; which I hope she did, of course. But at that moment in her life I saw her in a very lonely place, alone, lost, without anybody that loved her. Because that person is gone. And I think that's a VERY black and dark place to be in life. Doesn't matter who you are. You can see where I'm going with that.
I was a lot younger then, it was my idealistic view of how it looks when you've lost everything. It's this term Widow. When I was a kid, they used to say to me, "oh, that's Mrs. Schwarzenegger over there, she's a Widow, you know?" Like some kind of black bags they put on women. Because it was also considered not very nice for Widows to be hanging around single men. It was odd, for Widows were meant to be kind of... Remember I grew up after the war, so there were still a lot of the old values around people think that Widows should remain faithful to their dead husband.
In this country we had a lot of Italians that settled at that time. But the Widows wear black for like 7 years. And they did it even when they were living here. Some of them 10 years. And you see this kind of... I dunno she's lost her husband, she's quite attractive, 30 year old woman, she's all dressed in black. And that's just how it was and I suppose from a kid that made an imprint on my mind. The Widow image to me is something really awful, and kind of mourning. There's a HUGE sadness to it, like when you listen to Handel. If you listen to Handel, there's this kind of immense sadness in the music that's just... awful. You listen to it, I tell ya. I can't listen to it very much, because it's got this almost an air of despair about it. You feel that the writer thinks this horrible, horrible sad, inevitability of life.
Yeah. If I write something sad, often they're instrumentals. I write a lot of instrumentals like that. If you take 'The Enchanted Princess' off of "Valley Of The Kings," that's quite sad. 'Subrosa' which is a late one which I wrote for somebody special I've known in my life. That was kinda... that's sad as well. She was a well known glamour model here in the 60's. I met her when I was quite young. And I had that SAME feeling when I wrote "Widow." What about, I don't know, because in that time it was '93, and I really didn't have anything to be unhappy about.
I think it was Eric Clapton who said, "when you write something, you have to go to a place where you can't take anybody with you." He's right, you just have to sort of look within yourself, and let it come out really.
Oh, they were fantastic. In the early days we used to do a lot of shows in the West End. There were a couple of clubs there we used to do called the Temple in Wardour Street. And of course you know we played at the Marquee many times. At the Temple, we'd be on the same bill with UFO and The Pretty Things. And later on of course with Motorhead. We didn't support Sabbath at the Odeon; we were supposed to. They picked a band... You'd have to look REALLY deep into the archives, because they asked us to do it and we couldn't do it. A band called 720 did it. It's a crazy, crazy world, but I think we supported MOST of the 70's bands over the years.
That was UFO in it's pre-Schenker days. Michael Schenker who I know, we met at the Liver studios in Victoria many, MANY years ago. In fact, I bought a silver fox fur jacket I used to wear, I bought off of him. He's a really nice guy, Michael. He's one of the few people in this business who, if you listen to his playing, there's a lot of love and soul in it. Just listen, he's a beautiful player, he really is. He's a VERY nice guy. As are many people in the business.
You just don't get a chance for honest... There's a lot of really good, hard working decent people. And I always say to people on ANY show that's listening... DON'T believe all the crap you read about the drugs and the sex and drinking. (laughing here - Ed). Some of it's true, of course it is, but underneath all that, there's a LOT of hard working guys out there trying to just give of themselves to entertain everybody. You know, that's the bottom end, and at the end of that of course we're all human.
I suppose the last bigger band we supported was one called Stormtrooper. That was towards the end of when we were kind of packing up really. Oh, and Mama's Boys of course. So many of them really. We almost went on a bill with Girlschool, but to be honest with you, there was management problems there. Because their management company was not the same as ours. But in the mid 90's was when things started to fade out, because they started closing all the venues down. We didn't have the management that would have put us on some of the bigger places. A lot of those gigs kinda wore out really, it was a shame.
WARBEAST.
Interview with our thrash legend, Bruce Corbitt via phone.
This is one of the most difficult interviews I've ever had to conduct. The tone changes QUITE drastically from beginning to especially middle, when the full revelation hits Bruce about how I felt about the last Rigor Mortis album "Slaves To The Grave." I mean, here is one of my fucking IDOLS, one of my most favorite metal luminaries of all fucking time, and I have to reveal to him how disappointed I was with their last release. So we're both trying to work this out, and of course I'm in full defence mode while still trying to maintain the respect and dignity that this man has shown me throughout my entire career. Add to this all that as of this writing, Bruce was fighting for his life and going into a life threatening surgery, and I gotta tell you, this had me sweating bullets by the conversation's end. Still, this ought to tell you how hard I pushed to get Bruce to BELIEVE he was going to beat cancer, and still be around for us, ALL of us, who are some of his most devoted and diehard fans. At the time of this writing, Bruce was on his way into the hospital yet again to fight for his life, literally...
It's still going pretty bad, you know, just dealing with cancer and heart disease. It's pretty fucked up, you know?
I'mma do my best man. Like I said it's not looking good but I'm trying to beat it and survive; that's life. I don't have any idea about being able to perform again right now, it doesn't look like any chance you know?
Yeah, I know. It's getting sad, like you said the list is pretty big and getting longer every month. I'm lucky to have these chances to try and beat it; at least, you know, I didn't just drop dead immediately. I got a little bit of fight left in me.
Yeah, well, we thought long and hard about the name and whether we should change it or not. The main reason was the fact that so many people didn't understand that it was an actual, serious band. And it wasn't just some kind of metal support group or something. I think the name was confusing people a lot. As great as Texas is, and we're proud of it and love to represent it, we also didn't want people to think it was like that, made for Texans only or something (laughing here)
We didn't do it easily, because we knew we'd have to say "formerly Texas Metal Alliance" for a year or two, and that's never an easy thing. In the end, before we put out any official albums or anything, we did make the name change. It didn't get even more confusing having some releases out there already (laughs).
Well, it's almost impossible to find a name that hasn't been thought up. And there was already some other bands that had been using Warbeast, or had used it for awhile. It sometimes comes down to who gets signed first, who gets legal rights to the name. I looked it up and found a few that had used it but they broke up or whatever. Just like there's 20 or 30 Rigor Mortis'es out there! (laughing)
Yeah, it's crazy. So right after we did decide to go with Warbeast, another band that had started using it around the same period... They were from Europe though, but they were like "Well, we thought of it last year!" And we were like well, y'all might have started using it before we changed the name, but we're putting out an album, and it's kinda like I said earlier; whoever puts out an album first usually ends up owning the rights to the name. So that band had to change their name to Warbeast Remains. Add a second name to it, you know what I mean?
It's a confusing thing. I've been through it all before because of the Rigor Mortis thing. It just depends on how far we wanna push it if we really want to mess with this band that's using it in Russia, or some other territory. We have the legal rights to the name, and if we really wanted to mess with them we could. A lot of them bow down gracefully once they find out they don't have legal rights to it. And I don't see anyone getting super huge or rich and famous out there under the name Rigor Mortis or Warbeast so (much laughter here on both sides) you know, we haven't really had to do anything.
I have been more recently in the last couple of weeks. But we've had trouble... Usually Liquid Metal, Jose and them over at Sirius Satellite have been playing all of our previous albums, and for whatever reason he's not responding, and none of them are playing anything off this new album. And that's a little bit of a discouragement you know, as far as what's happened before. We're still getting lots of press and interviews and doing these releases, but you take away that airplay there and then us not being able to go out and tour in the future to support the album. She's happy and we're happy to do anything we can as far as getting any kind of press. I don't know if you saw the music video that just came out, our film just came out 2 hours ago...
You'll have to check it out, it's an 18 minute film, starring the dude from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So we've been excited, waiting for this day to come to release this video. I'm sure she was just happy to give me another good interview, she might have seen the one we did from years ago.
Yeah, dude, I do!
Yeah, it's uh... It's a joke. I mean I can't say for sure. You know, it's been a year and a half since he made that comment. He went through quite a bit when it first happened. I think he's actually been on Sirius since then, so I'd be surprised if that's it, but you never know.
Ha haha! Right! I hear ya man (Bruce is finding that statement hilarious). No telling what's going on; Jose could just be having a busy month on vacation. No telling man; blackballed because of Phil... I don't think that's it.
We've got quite a few good reviews for the album, and the only difference this year is like I said we're usually being played on that, and unfortunately we would be ready to get out and support this album with a lot of touring, but we had to break up the band and me retire and all kinds of crazy unfortunate bullshit.
No other choice. I shouldn't have even made it when the tumor started internally bleeding and stuff, but somehow I did survive and I made it through the chemo and the radiation and now I've got my big, really serious surgery on the 28th (which already happened - Ed.) that I hope I make it through.
No, we got lucky to play there a few times, hopefully and if a miracle happens... But the band's all broken up and went their own way, so if it does happen it won't be anytime soon or anything real easy to pull off. It's definitely going to be a couple of years down the road man. The surgery's gonna be so hard to survive and then recover from as it is.
Oh yeah...
Well, I am, I mean like I said there's no cure for this cancer that I got, and they can only treat it not cure it. Very few people live a certain amount of years. Like I said. I'm not laying here like "oh, I'm about to die." Gotta think positive and think I got a chance to beat it, but I'm also realistic about it. There's so many people out there... I don't know if they're just doing it to try to help me through it or whatever, but um, they're like "Aww, you got this easy!" (he's laughing here). It ain't gonna be that easy but I'm gonna do my best and I am gonna fight and beat this shit; if anybody can it's gonna be me. Like I said, I'm just realistic and knowing the seriousness of what I'm going through.
(laughing here). I appreciate it though, dude. You know, I'm a fighter; I've already beat death several times over the course of my life, and a few times recently. And like I said I'm doing good considering all I've been through, and I'm just less than two weeks away, so we'll know soon how I do with the surgery. It's not an easy situation with the heart disease and the cancer, but like I said if anyone can do it it's gonna be me.
(laughing) Yeah well I'm hoping. I'm lucky to still be here as it is, unfortunately for Mike Saccacia from Rigor Mortis, he didn't get the second or third chances to fight for his life like I did, but I'm grateful I still got this chance. 'Cause like you said, we keep losing people every day and the list keeps getting longer man.
I gotta hand my hat to you; when you guys did that reunion show, you guys did it with class and respect, even though they didn't let you play the two songs you wanted to perform, I was like "this is how a reunion should be." Everybody that was involved in the band, SHOULD be involved in the band. And Don Doty wasn't just a singer on one... He was the singer for like two albums... He was a HUGE part of their early success, and to leave him out to me is just criminal.
Well, the thing was we were definitely going through there (the Atlanta area - Ed.) and we were gonna see Doyle so it just made sense to go ahead and let him get up and be part of that night. Since we lost Mike, it's almost been 5 years but we've done a few shows to honor him around here. We didn't call it Rigor Mortis, but we called it like... One time we called it the Saccacianators...
And then, yeah the Wizards Of Gore, we called it that. But one time we were the Saccacianators, and did a big thing for Mike and Doyle got up and was part of that as well. And recently he came down and was part of a thing where we added Mike Saccacia to the Texas Musicians' Museum, it was about two months ago and unfortunately it was after I found out I couldn't perform anymore. So I once again asked Doyle if he would come in and sing and a few other singers around here to fill in for me. I became really good friends with Doyle, and even though we're on different albums, we're still part of the same band and whether I was the original singer or not, it just seemed right that he should be included in some of our reunion shows, you know?
Right! Did you see the Rigor Mortis documentary I did?
Yeah. Well, it only goes up through the earliest days of where we all started and then up to when we got signed to Capitol. But I plan on doing part two as soon as I beat all this cancer bullshit.
Yeah! I got to tell the rest of the story, which you know after the first album and I got fired, I got Doyle's coming in and then we go all the way back to when we reunited and did our final album together. I'm the one in charge of doing the documentary, but I'm definitely going to be fair and tell Doyle's part of the story.
That was a cool thing, because when we formed this band we couldn't get Rigor Mortis, or Gammacide or any of those bands to play for this benefit we were gonna do for our friend Wayne Admy from Hammerwitch. That's why we kinda came up with the idea to.. hey, it's Bruce from Rigor Mortis, and let's get Scott and Rick from Gammacide, a couple of dudes from Rotting Corpse. And you know, all team up and play 2 songs by each bands. And rotate some guest musicians and rotate out as we play each band's songs. And after that we had such fun jamming with the Gammacide dudes, that they brought it up, like "you know, we can't do Gammacide fulltime and you can't do Rigor Mortis fulltime, so we should do this you know, give us something else to do."
The history of where the bands came from and us knowing each other goes way back, and then we just work so well together. As far as the writing, we've had different members for each album. So it's kinda been a little different for how we do each album. But we don't all sit down together all at the same time and write. Usually Scott and the guitarist, which is a lot of times been Scott's only founding member besides me. But he'll get together with the drummer and the other guys and write some stuff at home, bring it in and show them. And they'll try and come up with some stuff on the spot. But once they get their blueprint laid out for the songs and the music, then I start hearing it, then I add my part later. We all know our roles in the band and I usually just give those guys the freedom to come up with some music, and if I hear anything I'll throw in a suggestion. But most of the time I let them work it out and then I get to have fun adding the subjects and the lyrics I wanna write about.
Yeah, and I mean I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the type of singer that writes all the lyrics to every sung I've ever sang; not at all. I've always been very open and cool about having other guys write, whether it be that they wanted to or they're really good at it, or I needed some help or I couldn't write all the songs myself. It's just different reasons why over the years I haven't done it. The album before this, I wrote EVERY song. This is one I just wanted to do it all (laughs). But on this one I was back to being open to having a few of the songs being written by Scott or somebody else. And we did the last Rigor Mortis album, same thing, I was cool with Harden and Casey helping out with writing. It depends on how the situation is with the band and if the singer's "the main guy." Some singers are just like "I'm gonna do it all." or whatever. Some guys like me are like "Cool, let's all write" because it adds variety.
I didn't get any bad feedback about it, but it was one of those times when I thought maybe should just not review it you know, because I realized it was Mike's last effort...
Especially when the first two months of reviews are like we were getting 9's and tens, and everybody was raving, and it was the best feedback on any album. And we all still believe it's our best album by far. So... I mean if I had saw what you wrote, I might not be talking to you right now! (laughing here from Bruce, which really didn't make me feel any better - Ed). And you must have been freaking, because there was hardly ANY bad feedback for the first two months it was just all good. Then we got a couple of bad ones, like any band is gonna do. The production is so much better compared to what the first album was like. And it's different you know what I mean, but there's still lots of stuff that sounds like Rigor Mortis from the first album to me, just better production and a more mature band. Where we just didn't repeat ourselves, like "Do that four times, do that four times." You know what I mean, just the typical patterns and stuff.
It's one of those things where the artist transcends their work, and they've created something that is almost just inhuman to be made.
Yeah, and that's how a lot of people are with that first album. The songs are just so good. We wish the production and the sound of that first album would have been so much better than how it turned out. And it woulda sounded like what we sound like when we played in the jam room or live. But a lot of people got used to it even though it was a terrible produced album. The songs made up for it, you know what I'm saying? But even though that album coulda sounded better, and like 'Slaves To The Grave...' a hundred times better sounding album. People are just so partial to something they've heard for 30 years, that how are they all of a sudden gonna like the new album overnight just as much as something they've been listening to for 30 years. It's just not gonna happen, it's gonna take a little time.
That's why I don't even pay attention if the reviewer told me they've only listened to the album a couple of times. I'm like "are you fucking kidding me?"
It's just ridiculous. Being a fan of bands I grew up on, and I would get the new Iron Maiden, well, you know, I've been listening to "Piece Of Mind" for the last year, every day to where when I get "Powerslave," I'm not gonna love it... I mean I might think this is bad ass, but it'll take me awhile to get used to it, you know what I mean? But I wouldn't have sat down and tried to compare it to "Number Of The Beast" or "Piece Of Mind" the first or second time I'm listening to it (laughing here).
I don't know if the band ever understood that, I don't know if I just sounded like some arrogant fucking asshole, but I wanted to do everything I could to make that band succeed because I kinda felt it was my personal responsibility. And maybe I was wrong to a degree but you gotta remember, I've been in the music business for over 25 years, I knew a FEW things. Just from talking to bands, talking to record labels. I dunno, maybe I come off as an arrogant prick but I just wanted to help. That was the whole deal.
(long pause). Yeah, I mean I'm reading this thing about "Slaves To The Grave" now, and I'm kinda shocked to be honest to be reading something this bad about an album that we feel so strongly about. And I can't agree with anything you're saying here. I mean "the vocals don't sound as heavy as the first..." Hell, it sounds like I'm baby talking and like a little kid on that first album... (Imitates a somewhat whiny voice). "In five easy slices, you're in six lovely pieces!" Now I sound way more evil, way more demonic and powerful. I'm not understanding what you're hearing there dude. You know? It's pretty strange to me (laughs) because I make fun of my vocals on the first demo and that first album because I'm so unsure of myself, and they're so weak and timid compared to what I do now. Like my wife doesn't even like this kinda music, but when she heard the first album she kinda laughed, because she'd been around recent Rigor Mortis and Warbeast shows. And I took her back, you know "and this is how I sounded back in 88" you know, and she didn't think I sounded more evil or demonic or anything, the vocals are more acceptable and meek... I dunno. I know how people love that album, but to sing the way I do on that first album, I really gotta take myself back and step down a notch from where I've went to and what I've grown and learned over the years and what I'm able to do compared to that first album. It's like going backwards, kinda. I don't know whether I'm explaining that right but it's true. I'm having to go in reverse to do more simplistic, less difficult kinda of vocals. It's all cool, I don't think I saw this one, (the review - Ed) I might have. But it's unfortunate for someone who liked that first album so much to not like this last one.
Thank you man.
Yeah, I've gotta agree with you on that. On "Slaves To The Grave," they got my vocals cranked up nice and loud, so I definitely don't have any problems because hell, the band WANTED my vocals up loud like they were on all my releases. And this Warbeast one it's too (laughing hard here), you're right, it's too level. And that's the only problem, I'm listening to it, and I'm just like, man. You could understand what I'm saying better if it would have been up a little louder. It just depends on the band. With Rigor Mortis, the guys preferred the vocals to be up; with Warbeast, I'm always competing with guys that are scared I'm covering up their guitar riffs. (MUCH laughter on both sides). It's just kinda funny, because they're playing through the whole song and I'm only singing on like 30% of a song or something, where I'm not even there most of the time.
Mike's a brilliant guitarist, no doubt about that. It seems like the album just kinda suffered a bit from too much melody and... I dunno, it's hard to mix those two things together and get a potent record. But I guess maybe you can see where I'm coming from with that.
We were showing more versatility by having some of those melodic solos in those songs. Where it wasn't just plain full speed the whole time. But I don't think forever for a second that I back off on the vocals or the lyrical subjects or anything. I'm writing about fragance of corpses about carrying around... my best friends are dead bodies that I put together from other pieces of other bodies and stuff. I allowed those guys to write lyrics to some of the songs as well.
You also didn't hear some of those songs live, and for a few years we were playing a few of them live. They definitely went over very well live when we played 'em.
I like music that evokes strong emotion. Whether it's one direction or the other. And I guess this just didn't really speak to me on that level. Because obviously I am into music that's QUITE different from the mainstream or the norm, and I guess I just demand more out of the music that I love and listen to. I guess that can sometimes be a bad thing.
Well, pretty narrow minded, probably. But a lot of people, if they were expecting us to do the first album again, they were going to be disappointed. But I can name just as many things on the first album that had slow... the slow intro to 'Demons' and the first part of 'Slow Death.' It's not like that whole album was just blistering a million miles an hour. I knew what the people wanted; it had nothing do with anything, you mentioned something about Bruce's personal life or whatever might have had something to do with why... No, I'm the one that's fighting for the sicker lyrics. If you're seeing in other albums they went away from the horror stuff. A lot of it; but it was me, like "Man, we need to have more like this, we need to have more like the first album." To try to get that part in there, naturally we didn't want to recreate the first album but I knew what fans of the first album were wanting. So I at least made sure... And that's how 'Flesh For Flies' came about. And some of those songs like that.
Right. And then like I said, I let my wife after hearing "Slaves To The Grave" which she was more familiar with. And to go back and put on the first album, and she would say the exact opposite of you! (much laughter on both sides). She thinks I sound like a wimp on that first album! And I do you know compared to... Just because I started having more confidence in myself; to put out more force. I was getting away from being very unsure of myself and I was just barely belting it out.
Nah, I just think if you were so partial with the first album that you weren't gonna be as accepting of uh... Well, the first song there's a 3 or 4 minute long melodic Iron Maiden sounding guitar solo that comes at the end of the album. After it's the fastest shit you ever heard in your life, or the first half of 'Poltergeist.' Then you go and then you have the second half is like it could be part of Iron Maiden's epic long, one of their... 'Rime Of The Ancient Mariner' or something. It's just the versatility that Mike wanted to display on that album. And it, it's weird because a lot of people around here... They loved the fast and crazy part of Rigor Mortis but that's the part that makes them appreciate Mike and his loss even more, because a lot of people didn't realize that he had such a wide arsenal of talent that he could do different shit. They just thought he was like "ah, he can just play fast," no, he can play ANYTHING.
Naw, man. Luckily there was enough of the good stuff out there that a lot of people liked. I didn't expect 100% even though for like the first two months, it seemed like it was almost all positive. Then when we finally got a few bad reviews, we were kinda in shock, like what? (laughs). I was thinking everybody loved it!
We didn't expect it to be that way from the beginning. It was just the early reviews were all good. And then of course people probably being kind about it because of the loss of Mike. But the Warbeast, this is like the first album you actually listened to then?
Wow. That's wild because I started doing it like, not long after... Actually the first show was 2006. It was only a year after the Rigor Mortis reunion when we did that first show. It was probably about 10 years ago when we first had the full lineup and started making it official, where we're playing and about to write a demo and all that stuff. The first album came out in 2010. But we've been around for awhile, man!
Of course, "The Enemy" from 2010. If you went back now you'd find that all three albums are... you can tell it's Warbeast but they're not all... They've got versatility as well, as far as sounding different on each album. The vocals will give you that sound of a band, the guitar riffs like you said from Gammacide and my vocals. That gives us the sound of Warbeast.
I've listened to the album twice all the way through but so far I'm fucking LOVING what I'm hearing man, definitely.
Cool. Like I said, maybe one day you'll be able to get back and check out some of our other ones. Bringing the horror into Warbeast when I can, you know, we didn't want to be the same band. I've not changed or mellowed or pussed out in any way. I KNEW people wanted to hear more... I knew that some people hearing "Slaves To The Grave" were going to be expecting stuff from the first album. And I had so much pull myself to get as much of that stuff on there as I could. And being open minded to knowing that not everybody's gonna love it like you. But that hopefully everybody would be open enough to hearing a different side of Rigor Mortis and still saying that we haven't totally sold out. Because that same song you're hearing that beautiful melodic solo, the same song you were hearing some the most blistering, heavy, fast shit you could ever hear. It ain't like the whole song was just all... totally pussy shit! (laughing here).
And you know, that brings up another point too, because... So many metalheads today... I'm not going to say they're stuck in the past. But you think about... Bands that are trying to... Nobody wants to hear... AC/DC made a career off of making the same album for 20 years. I'll go see them live all day long, but when it comes to a new album it's like, you know, what are they really doing nowadays.
But why do you think it is that most metalheads are resistant to change? You think they're just hanging on to nostalgia, do you think they're realizing that they're getting older and older. And I know my music tastes have changed a little bit since I've gotten older. I've gotten into more melodic things. I guess the metal collaborative in general... These guys are 50, 60 and 70 years old still making albums. You can't really expect them to have that demonic rage and pissed off anger that they had when they were 18 and 20. So you know, what the fuck do you do, you know?
Well, like I said, I still wanted to be the heaviest, fastest thing, and that's what I would do if it were up to me. But I got musicians to work with (laughing here - Ed). Obviously, you can hear Rigor Mortis and Warbeast definitely not selling out. I understand what it's like for one of my favorite bands to puss out you know what I mean. It lets you down. So being on that side of it as a fan, I'm always not wanting to disappoint any of the fans we have that became a fan of ours BECAUSE it was so brutal and heavy or gory or whatever. It's not as scared of change or whatever as sometimes it's... You don't change yourself but sometimes you realize that's what people are expecting out of you.
Well, that's exactly what we thought we were doing on "Slaves To The Grave," but somebody like you maybe didn't get it (My dumb ass is laughing here, because I "understand" where they're coming from by I really don't) because... I mean we're not gonna sound like that first album because modern day production... There's no way we could make ANY album ever sound like that album again because it was such a fluke deal (laughter on both sides) at how that album turned out that we're always kind of shocked that people loved... I mean I dunno what you think about the production of the first album. But imagine if that album would have had the production we all wanted and if it would have have really sounded like that, would that album have been remembered... We feel like "goddamn;" it sucks that it didn't turn out to sound like it should. But then there's so many people that love that album that it's been put into hall of fames and shit!
It's amazing to me how different a band can be live. Kataklysm, another band. I can't get into them on record, but live they come over very well. Obviously I don't look at every single album the exact same way. There are examples where a murkier and not necessarily a crystal clear production adds to the overall weight and heaviness. No other album in history that I know of is more the case with that than Dark Angel's "Darkness Descends."
To us, that album just came out too clean and too thin sounding for what we really sounded like. It had a lot to do with the producer we ended up using who had never done metal before. And we were in a studio that had only done country albums (laughing here - Ed). To us that album is just too clean! We would NEVER sound like that first album as far as if you came and saw us live. And I can tell by talking to you you would have loved how we sounded live if you had heard these songs then you would understand what we were saying you would like this album so much even more if we would have gotten a halfway decent kinda production from it. It's clear and crystal clear, but when we cranked it up live it had more rawness and balls to it. I'm always gonna love that album, it's what I'm known for. I'm just sorta sad about... It's like a commercialized version of Rigor Mortis, is what it sounds like to me. (laughing here - Ed). Its sad because we really were a fast, brutal, evil band.
Right, well, they finally... The more time we had and the more shows we did... Once it became... hey, this wasn't just a one time reunion, they finally opened up to us playing that, different songs to the set list. So over time I did get 'Slow Death,' and 'Bodily Dismemberment' and some of those songs in there that we weren't playing on the first tour. And that first tour was weird, I dunno if you remember, but basically we played 15 songs or something, and I was only up there for 8 of them. So half of the songs I wasn't even on stage for. That's not a normal type situation and it didn't stay that way, because as we stayed together more and more, Casey especially was like "man, we need you up there, it gets kinda weird and different for the crowd when you're gone so much." So it started becoming a deal where I started singing more, Casey started singing less. And we kept it at the most where I'd only be gone for one or two songs throughout the show.
No, no, that was just a one time thing.
Yeah, because I ended up singing all those songs. Like, we let Doyle sing two songs that night. Then all the other shows, I was singing them, you know what I mean?
Yeah, so, that's pretty much all we did. You saw a show where Casey sang two or three, Doyle sang two then there was a couple of instrumentals. Later on, like I said it would be like mainly a set of everything, and if it was songs I didn't... You know, even off "Versus The Earth" I was singing those, songs that Doyle had done. Now there was the "Freaks" demo that we did before "Freaks" (the album release - Ed), that we might release... me singing those songs like 'Cattle Mutilation,' and 'Freaks' and some of those other songs. We might put that out just as a little something that we've never put out before; me singing the Freaks demo. So those songs were all easy for me to do because I was singing them before Doyle showed up.
Yeah, well we're talking about it. We just released the 1986 demo last year on CD for the first time. It was just a little 8 track cassette that we made like 500 copies of. Have you listened to that?
But I'm just laughing because of the stuff I was telling you about how my vocals were on the first album, were even MORE that way on the first demo. Where it sounds like I'm (laughing here) "He seeks fresh bodies in the morgue!" I mean, I'm a young kid, well, not a kid but a young man not knowing how to sing and scared of what I'm doing. One of these days you'll have to go on youtube and find that original demo and listen to some of those songs.
I can still go back and do those voices but it's like stepping back. Like, an athlete that has to run slower or something (much laughter here from both of us - Ed). You know? That's how I feel when I do try to sing like the first demo or the first album. Which I do sometimes, you know what I mean? I might not have had a big vocal range but I feel like I've got more strength and power and balls to do different shit.
Now some of the stuff that amazes me when people like... bands or whatever, or like myself... That some of the stuff that we came up with, ideas or the lyrics or whatever for a song. Sometimes I'm like "wow, that was pretty clever" or something. You might realize that you're a lot more experienced and everything else now after so many years, and your skills are a lot better... But something about that youth, you know, being young and angry and not BEING so professional. (laughing here) Sometimes that creates some of the best moments in metal.
Exactly. And a lot of that's why so many bands, a lot of their best stuff is on their early albums. It does kinda get harder, even if you've improved and have all this experience in the world. You have to compete with what you've already done; it's kind of a weird situation as you get older. Hopefully I'll get to do another one; right now I'm just thankful to be around to talk about this new one (album - Ed).
Recently, it's interesting because the Wacken festival was sold out this year. And I was able to sit down at my computer and watch... I watched Megadeth, I'd never seen Megadeth live. I sat there and watched their entire show from Wacken. It's kinda weird that it took the metal world so long to really catch on to utilizing technology. How do you feel about that personally?
To me, there's nothing that beats the live experience, but shit man, they stream courtroom documentaries now, you've got facebook live that can go anywhere people can go. It's kinda natural. It seems like it takes the metal world a long time to catch up, I dunno.
Well, I try to remain old school in my ways but also adapt to modern times and use it to my advantage with the band and everything. I've definitely kept up with the progression of things like what you can use to your advantage as far as social media or the live videos.
I have nothing against it, I'm always like everybody's allowed to film, take pictures, do whatever you want. I've actually went live myself, facebook live. I did it during out Warbeast release show where Phil was singing for me like he did last month. There's people all around the world right now; there's somebody sitting at home on a Friday night that would like to be watching Phil up there singing this Warbeast! There's disadvantages to everything but you have to leave yourself a little bit of open mind and not throw away the past. It's always good to still show up at a show and pass out a flyer and do stuff like that. Don't ever let that part of it end. People are either gonna see it one way or another, so why not let them see it WHILE it's happening.
EDITORIAL NOTATIONS
WAY overdue... A lot happened to me last year, and the tragedies came in threes to be sure; my live in girlfriend of 5 years left me, and shortly after that I lost my job. The final blow was the passing of my father towards the end of the year, and quite frankly I didn't have much desire to do any music magazine stuff. Still, with the tragedies I suffered, 2017 was also the year of one of my greatest triumphs in life, the thing I had strived for for many years and unfortunately didn't achieve with Hallows Eve: my participation in the latest Darkflight album, which saw me contributing clean sung vocals to half the record. I STILL carry this album around with me wherever I go, as it was one of my only constant reminders that the year wasn't a complete loss...
So here we are in 2018 with a magazine that should have come out right around September of last year, right after or during ProgPower. I came to a realization where I said things that I have said for years, like "why am I continuing to do a project that brings me no income whatsoever." Sure, I do still love metal, but a lot of this became WORK for me. And of course, after a 9 to 5 at the "office," sometimes I wanna come home and just play videogames or watch a movie or something. You know how it is if you're a working sort. Still, what motivated me the most to finally get off my lazy ass and get this thing finished was after many, MANY years, this issue in particular had one very important thing I had strived for for awhile: EVERY single interview in this issue was conducted either by phone or streaming voice over the internet. A few were even facebook voice chats! This however left me with a TON of transcribing work to do, which felt monumental in and of itself. Especially when there were multiple speakers, as was the case with the Cirith Ungol interview, or when the vocals were in a heavy accent, as the case turned out to be with both Hobbs Angel Of Death and Ritual. Still, I am very proud of this issue, despite the lateness, as always, and I feel the interviews this time around were different, diverse and very insightful. If I walk away from an interview laughing and actually educating as well as informing our readers; at the end of the day it's a great accomplishment. And still, when I look at these interviews, it's amazing to me the common threads that connect seemingly unconnected bands; like the production details of Dark Angel are discussed by both Don Doty from D.A. AND Bruce Corbitt from Warbeast/Rigor Mortis. I sometimes think that unseen forces guide my hand in conducting these interviews to where seemingly unrelated and unconnected conversations gain familiarity from band to band. Or it might be that I just need to stop asking the same damn questions in interviews.
Darkflight... I still get people asking me this all the time. If you heard the "The Hereafter" album, then you can finally imagine WHY it takes Ivo quite a few years between album releases... The work Ivo and I put into this release was frustrating at times, especially given the fact that though the very first song we put together was done VERY quickly (and it was the track that Ivo decided he wanted much more from me for the album, vocal wise), the last two tracks were difficult given I had a hard time figuring out EXACTLY what it was he wanted my vocals to sound like. The third song almost didn't happen; it was literally a 13th hour decision that made the final track 'Sans Ame' such a keeper. We stepped outside of ourselves and created a masterpiece. I am very proud of what I did and I definitely look forward to the next release, even if Ivo is (at the time of this writing) thoroughly exhausted both idea wise and creatively. I never understood long delays between albums in bands, but being so close to the heart and essence of this project it now makes perfect sense.
On a final note, I REALLY wanted to review the newest Darkflight album. I have been told, by several people however, that because of my involvement, I should recuse myself from doing so. You see, to me Darkflight's composer Ivo embodies what I call the "top 5% of amazing musical composers" in the entire world. So naturally, my list of must review bands always includes Darkflight, and has since their second full length. That being said, I feel I COULD have reviewed it, since I didn't write any of the music and only wrote lyrics for my vocals on the three songs I appeared on. Having said that, as far as I'm concerned, the album (were I to review it) would score a 98, with the few lone points being taken off for, surprise! My vocals at the beginning of the CD. This was a track that Ivo and I went back and forth on for awhile ('Crushed'), until he finally settled on a somewhat low toned viking style of vocals I was experimenting with. What's even more hilarious for me is how Ivo and I BOTH "lament" over some of the Russian and Ukranian doom bands that utilize low toned clean sung vocals, which neither of us are crazy about. Still, I do have an alternate version of the song with different vocals, including a different delivery which I thought would have carried the song's ending further and "ended" if you will on a more powerful note. Anyone that wants to hear it, feel free to email me... Hopefully on future collaborations (which I am assured there WILL be), we will see this alternate track released as a bonus... But it's still Ivo's project and he's happy with my contributions, ALL of them. On the next album I hope to be more involved and definitely write more lyrics.
I cannot tell you what the future brings for either DOOM Radio OR the music magazine. This may very well indeed be the last issue of the magazine ever written though somehow I doubt it. Many may have noticed less than 5 shows have appeared in 2018, further proof that either I need some serious time off or maybe I need to rethink priorities. I hate to see it all end after 26 years in publication, but obviously a paying job (that I happen to enjoy) takes precedence over what may be seen to many as a mere "hobby." At this point I will take my leave by saying that as we get older, we don't seem to be as passionate about the things we onced loved. I don't seem to attend as many concerts as I used to, though I am right now enjoying taking part in the Records Of Mass Destruction event that happens every Monday night in metro Atlanta. Where will this publication be in 5 years? I cannot say. But I still hope I am able and willing to support such great underground music, because I definitely still enjoy discovering new bands from around the globe on a constant basis...