Silver Cypher is the winner of the Heavy Metal Shock contest!

It was a real honor to be featured among so many great bands! Thanks to everyone who voted for us in this international underground metal contest! Though there was no prize at the start of the contest, Emanes Metal Records has generously offered to feature one of our songs (yet to be determined) on their upcoming LP compilation titled LONG LIVE METAL, so many thanks to them!

Special thanks of course goes to Raskal for creating this contest and showing his awesome support of the underground!

All the bands in the contest were great, and if you haven't heard them, we hope you'll take some time to check them all out:

ROADKILL (HOLLAND)
DRAGON'S LAIR (GREECE)
ELFION (USA)
DEAD RAGE (USA)
HEAVENFALL (ITALIA)
ARMORY (USA)
DARK FOREST (UK)
CROWNING GLORY (UK)
IRON CRAIST (ITALIA)
TRIDENT WINTER (AUSTRALIA)
ELVENPATH (GERMANY)
TOWER OF STONE (SWEDEN)
SONS OF VICKINGS (FRANCE)
DANTESCO (PUERTO RICO)
STAIN ON SOCIETY (CANADA)

We will get around to thanking everyone personally for their support, but it will take us some time to make it through the hundreds of voters! From here, we continue working on our new album (which we are recording in December), so be sure to check back late this year to hear some new songs from us! As for Raskal he's already started work on HMS 2, so be sure to check it out, and continue supporting the underground!

Thanks again and Metal On!
Jon

Recently, we've received criticism for the following quote:

"Leave the corporate radio driven crap behind and experience the all new genre of dark power metal"

The criticism comes from the misconception that we claim to be the first dark powermetal band. We did not intend for that conclusion to be reached. We are only saying that we are a band in that new genre. I feel that we must set the record straight, because otherwise people could get the wrong impression about us.

Putting you in our shoes, here was the problem we were faced with:  We couldn't call ourselves "thrash metal". Nowadays people think Lamb of God or Skeleton Witch: bands which have growling/screaming vocals unlike us. When we called ourselves "powermetal", people we're imagining a NWOBHM sound like Iron Maiden or Helloween, and after hearing our music, people would tell us that we sound darker than they expected. Eventually, we just kept the "dark" when we said "powermetal".

The second misconception is that the dark powermetal genre has been around for years. This is not true at all! The bands considered to be the founders of this form of metal (Iced Earth, Demons & Wizards, Nevermore) have been around for years, not the genre. For example, Iron maiden and Judas Priest, bands that existed since the 70's, are considered by many to have defined the genre of powermetal, however they were not called powermetal from the start. The term "powermetal" was coined years later; a fact clearly evident by Metallica's 1982 "Power Metal Demo", which has become a staple of thrash metal, but by today's definition, it is far from being powermetal. As of August 2007, if you Google "Dark Powermetal", you'll get 52 entries. Not 52 bands; 52 total results….on the internet. Clearly, it has to be considered new, because it's not a widely used by any major bands or even by the bands in that genre.

The 52 results might fuel the argument that "Dark Powermetal" isn't a valid genre; for if a genre was unique enough to warrant a new definition, then that would have already happened. It is and was! The term "American powermetal" is commonly used in Europe to define this form of music (which I know from living in Germany for a year) and can be read about on Wikipedia. Now, what is the MAJOR PROBLEM with this title? Americans have no idea what it means. You can't be a band in America, and say you are an American powermetal band; they'll just think you're being patriotic, and it won't tell them anything about your sound.

Genres are defined from necessity. In metal music, there is a vast range of different everything. In the era of Myspace, people have literally millions of bands to sift through. Even the most metal metalhead can't listen to everything, so genres help people narrow down their search.

So, finally, while we do consider our music to be original, we in no way consider it to be genre defining, and we've never made that claim.  If you are curious about where this whole topic started, check out MetalReview.com's review of our first full length "Yesterday's Tomorrow":

http://www.metalreview.com/3790/Silver-Cypher-Yesterday's-Tomorrow.aspx

And thanks for taking the time to read this long rant! - Jon

http://sacredmetal.de/index.php?page=reviews/eigen/silvers2006

Silver Cypher: Demo 2006

This was taken November 2006 by our Big Nasty friends at Sudsy Malones. It's low quality, but you get the idea.

If you have any video's you've taken of us, let us know and we'll post it on here!

We played a label showcase recently. We did it basically so fans of ours who had never seen us live would get to come out. We had an awesome turn out, and we'd like to thank everyone who made the trip to see us. We had a great time playing!

After the show, though, we had an interesting conversation with some AR people. They basically had nothing positive to say about us, and, more specifically, said our songs were too long, and we had too many leads. 

I tried to explain to them that our 9 min song wasn't too long by metal standards by referencing Dream Theater - Change of Seasons (25 min song), and they responded with the comment "whose Dream Theater?" I said "Ok, that's all I need to know", and they said "Well, have you ever heard of sevendust". At this point, I thanked them for their time, and left.

Also, one can compare this experience to Emperor Joseph II comments to Mozart that his opera had "Too many notes", and that if he just cut a few it would sound better. Mozart responded with "Which notes would you have me remove". By telling us to cut our leads and shorten our songs, they were essentially telling us that we had "Too many notes".

Of course, we're not comparing ourselves to Mozart, just comparing our experince with his. There will always be people like the Emperor Joseph II and these AR reps who feel like they are experts on how music should be. If people don't take these "expert" opinions with a grain of salt, then there would be no original music.

PS. Some of our fans had heard the AR reps talking about us when we were playing live and heard the comment "If you remove the singer and drummer, you'd have pearl jam"...................please, can anyone make any sense of this comment? I am totally oblivious how anyone could come to that conclusion, especially an "expert"

Let us know what you think about this experience by posting a comment. Thanks for taking the time to read this blog.