Here is a quick smattering of news related to some of the records and bands we are working with currently.
ShrinebuilderAlbum Review: Shrinebuilder, ‘Shrinebuilder’ (Neurot)If you’re looking for an album rich in texture, ambiance, and clever turnarounds, then Shrinebuilder’s debut is a no-brainer. A supergroup featuring members of Sleep, The Melvins, and Neurosis, all led by Scott “Wino” Weinrich: how could it not be awesome? Certainly doom and heady metal fans the world over have been clamoring for this record since news of Shrinebuilder’s existence leaked earlier this year. For those folks fighting the good fight, this album is pretty much what you might think it would sound like, but better. If, of course, you’ve never heard of Spirit Caravan or Om or any of the number of great bands associated with the members of this project, Shrinebuilder is a bit harder to define.
As heavy and ominous as anything, Shrinebuilder still eschews conventions. The album’s opener, the eight minute “Solar Benediction” is as close to traditional metal as you’re going to get. Legendary drummer Dale Crover of Melvins fame takes the track from ragged thumper to creeping doom so subtly you almost miss it. After this exploding of the extreme possibilities of the genre passed, the band swerves into an experimental mode, vaguely reminiscent of late-era Fugazi’s instrumental work fused with pristine psychedelia. Not just an overture for the album to come, this track is more like the requiem for metal in general.
Shrinebuilder is a brilliant exercise in hypnosis. As long tracks drift into one another, sharing themes and consequence, it’s easy to drift into a waking dream. Anchored to the headbanging heartbeat of Crover and bassist Al Cisneros (of Sleep), Wino and Neurosis guitarist Scott Kelley’s guitars soar and shriek, twist and turn through the hazy, mystical atmosphere of the record. Tracks like “Blind for All To See,” with its perfect feedback and oozing leads, are the sort of plunge into the unconscious of metal that the uninitiated might find nightmarish. But to those determined psychonauts who love both the heavy and the unexpected, Shrinebuilder is nothing short of a wet dream.
SlayerSlayer on Jimmy Kimmel November 4thThe Jimmy Kimmel Show is letting the house go to hell when he invites Slipknot to the Halloween edition of his program tonight (Oct. 30) and then legendary sinners Slayer hit the show on Wednesday (Nov. 4) - the program airs at different times throughout North America, so check your local listings.
The CD portion of the Slipknot's 10th Anniverary reissue of the debut CD features 25 tracks, including the original album as well as rare demos, remixes, rare b-sides and more. A companion documentary, entitled "of the (sic): Your Nightmares, Our Dreams", is packed with behind the scenes footage of the band from 1999. This inside look features both live and backstage footage from around the world. The DVD also features a never-before-seen concert and all the music videos from their debut cycle, as well as other surprises.
Slayer will be releasing their 10th studio album World Painted Blood on Tuesday, November 3 in North America, and on Monday, November 2 to the rest of the world.
"As we're so excited about World Painted Blood," said the band's Dave Lombardo. "We wanted to do something special for the packaging, and have been working with some really cool ideas. They've taken time to get just right, and with our headlining the Mayhem tour for most of the summer, it's just taken that much longer to get all these great ideas exactly the way we want them."
World Painted Blood To Stream on Myspace Halloween WeekendThrash legends Slayer will take over MySpace's Music portal this Halloween weekend to promote their upcoming album, World Painted Blood. The entirety of this new and highly-anticipated release will be streamed until the album officially drops on Tuesday, November 3. In addition, every slot on the site will feature Slayer content: music videos, behind-the-scenes footage, and more.
MySpace Music will also host the 20-minute video Playing with Dolls, an animated graphic novel set to the band's new music, including a bonus track not found on the album proper. This unique feature will only be available after Tuesday in the form of the album's deluxe version, where it will be presented on DVD and accompanied with its own booklet. For more information on the various release formats, click here.
Playing with Dolls, directed by Mark Brooks of Metalocalypse fame, is a 12-part narrative that features serial killers, psychotics, and other nefarious personality types. The animated graphic novel is presented from the point of view of a nameless protagonist who commits acts of depravity as part of his purpose; “his methods are as grisly and varied as they are poetic,” according to a press release.
Slayer: 'You do wonder if you've grown together or apart'So being in a rock band is a cakewalk? Think how sick you are of the sight and the sound and the smell of everyone at the end of a weekend-long stag do. Now imagine all those Sunday morning feelings of wishing everyone else would shut up extended from a couple of hours to 28 years. Imagine those years grinding on and on and on as you do the same thing album after album, show after show.
Nearly 30 years into their career, Slayer are still touring the world, playing five nights out of seven to big crowds. They are still releasing huge-selling albums of extreme music. To the untrained ear, the music on their new album World Painted Blood sounds exactly the same as what they were doing on their 1986 album Reign in Blood, the Rick Rubin-produced record that is considered to be the sacred text of thrash metal. Slayer have a sound and a set of lyrical themes (religion, death, murder, war) to which they stick unwaveringly. There is a lesson here about single-mindedness and the strength of the human spirit. Probably.
I meet bassist and singer Tom Araya and guitarist Kerry King at their label's offices in west London. The building is bright and white and spacious. Araya and King both look wildly out of place, though I suspect King, wearing rolled-up camouflage trousers, with a red-brown beard reaching down to his chest, his head shaved clean, his skull, arms, legs and hands all tattooed extensively, and locked behind sunglasses, would look out of place anywhere other than on stage with Slayer. "I haven't exactly gone out of my way to blend in," he admits. The pair won't be interviewed together – after 30 years, who would be? – and the experience throws their differences into sharp relief.
Araya laughs a lot, and offers drinks from the iced tub of vodka, juice and beers behind him. He's 48 and has long strands of silver in his hair. His tattoos are well worn, like a sailor's. The band have just played a couple of shows in Europe. They were "awesome", apparently, but then they always are. Do you ever do rubbish shows?
"Oh yeah!" he says. "The first one's usually rubbish. You come off and look at each other and say, 'You know what, I sucked!' We have to start straight off at 150% and go straight to 200%. If we start at even 148%, we're fucked. If we're not all together from the off then half of us will never catch up."
You must sound bloody awful if you're not together.
"We do, yeah! That's exactly how we sound. We have a new song called Psychopathy Red which is pretty intense, the first verse was great, but then I lost the intro to the second verse and I couldn't catch up at all. I had to lose that whole verse and just wait for the third. To be honest, it wasn't long to wait and no one will notice anyway."
Araya talks of preparing his material at home with just an acoustic guitar and three chords. I ask if there's a sensitive singer-songwriter aching to get out.
"No! Not ever! No cheesecloth shirts!" he yells. "I don't want that at all. We must never, ever disappoint. Bands have disappointed me and it's a terrible feeling."
World Painted Blood must not fail. It is the last release due under their contract with Rick Rubin's American label. "He's always been there in the back seat," Araya says of their bearded overlord. "He listens to everything and says, 'Yay' or, 'Nay'. Luckily, it's generally been more 'Yay'."
Recently there has been talk of this being Slayer's last record, that they've had enough. "Seeing a 50-year-old man headbanging on stage would make me cringe," Araya said recently. He smiles a decidedly small smile when I ask if this is it for the band.
"We don't know yet," he says. "I know this much: being away from your family so much doesn't get any easier. I've been married for 15 years. I have a 13-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son and I want to make up for the all the time I wasn't there. I have nieces and nephews I've barely seen. This life demands so much of you, personally and physically. I honestly don't know how I did the first 15 years of Slayer. How did I get so fucking wasted then play every fucking night? Then, immediately after playing, do it all over again. How the fuck did we all do that?"
Are you as fearless as you were at 20? Do you want it all as much?
Araya pauses for a long time. "Er …" He pauses again. "Wow!" He takes another 10 seconds. "It's not so much 'Do you still want it?' as much as a question of 'How much more are you willing to take?' There's so much shit that goes on behind the scenes, not just the bureaucratic bullshit that goes on with the label or with touring, but the other, bigger stuff. It's the four different personalities in the band trying to get along. Sometimes we clash, that's normal. But after 28 years you do wonder if you've grown together or apart."
There is a popular theory among those that care about these things that people are frozen emotionally at the age they became famous. With Araya I'm not sure that's true – he seems almost painfully aware of being nearly 50 and of what he's missed to be where he is – but Kerry King seems a perfect case study. He's like a profoundly unpopular schoolboy who has never quite got used to having people listen to him. He's not sullen, not unpleasant, just utterly disengaged. "I like playing," he says. "The rest is bullshit."
As a child, King and his dad kept birds – hookbills and cockatiels – now, rather appropriately, he "does" reptiles. His latest favourite is his carpet python. "They come in a variety of colours and they look tough," says the tattooed man in the big black boots.
Could your python eat a goat? "No," King says. "It's not big enough." And that's the end of that.
In a stab at lightening the mood, I ask King what he thinks is the greatest record ever made.
"That's a real sit-down-and-a-cognac question, isn't it?" he says, yanking the cap off a bottle of vodka and – surely for my benefit – filling a large glass almost to the brim before stirring in a tablespoon of juice. "Van Halen's first record is amazing. Sure, it's rock'n'roll, but it introduced the world to what the electric guitar could do. Sabbath's Sabotage is very, very heavy. AC/DC's Powerage, Judas Priest's Stained Class, some Maiden too …"
Ask him about what he does away from music and he'll tell you about collecting athletes' autographs. Ask him what he misses most from home when he's touring and he'll say, "being at home watching American football. I like to be in control of the TV. But the thing I miss the most from home is my stuff."
We have two minutes left so I ask what King has learnt about human nature after nearly 30 years on the road.
"I've learnt what not to say," he says. "Why set someone off? Some bands can't get over something someone said 15 years ago and split up, but when we go home, we just scatter. I don't need to call them. After all," he says, his voicebox audibly tightening as the vodka rips past it, "what am I going to say?"
NileNILE Schedules CD-Listening Party, Signing Session - Oct. 26, 2009Southern Carolina-based extreme technical death metallers NILE have scheduled a listening party and signing session for their new album, "Those Whom The Gods Detest", on Friday, November 6 at Earshot Records in Greenville, South Carolina beginning at at 7:00 p.m. Hear the new CD in its entirety, buy the album and have Karl Sanders, Dallas Toler-Wade and George Kollias sign it in person. Former members and contributors Jon Vesano, Mike Breazeale, Pete Hammoura and touring bassist Chris Lollis will also be on hand to celebrate.
The event is open to the public.
For more information, visit
www.earshot.com.
Produced and mixed by Neil Kernon (NEVERMORE, CANNIBAL CORPSE, QUEENSRŸCHE), along with a drum-recording job by Erik Rutan (CANNIBAL CORPSE, VITAL REMAINS, GOATWHORE), "Those Whom the Gods Detest" features the band's strongest production and perhaps its best material to date. The cover artwork was created by Michal "Xaay" Loranc, whom NILE guitarist/vocalist Karl Sanders had previously worked with on his second solo album, "Saurian Exorcisms".
The song "Permitting the Noble Dead to Descend to the Underworld" is now available for streaming on the band's MySpace page.
Sanders told Revolver magazine earlier in the year that the band's sixth full-length album will likely be NILE's most eclectic offering to date. "We're going to some very unexpected places," he said. "I've been listening to some oud music [the oud is a Middle Eastern lute — Ed.], Iranian music, and some Hindu stuff, and that stuff's definitely rubbing off on the new songs."
"Those Whom the Gods Detest" is scheduled for a November 3 North American release via Nuclear Blast Records.
HypocrisyHypocrisy Drummer Discusses Upcoming Album "A Taste Of Extreme Divinity"Swedish metallers Hypocrisy, fronted by death metal legend Peter Tägtgren, released their new album "A Taste Of Extreme Divinity" in Europe on October 23rd. The album will be released in North America on November 3rd via Nuclear Blast Records. A track from the album titled "Hang Him High" can be heard at the band's MySpace page. Hypocrisy's drummer Reidar Horghagen filled me in on the details of the new album, recruiting Alexi Laiho of Children of Bodom for their upcoming tour, and his history in music.
xFiruath: Tell me a bit about your personal history in music. How long have you been involved with music and what got you into metal?
Reidar: I started playing drums back in 1983 at an age of twelve. Elvis Presley and Kiss were my heroes at the time and my interest for music had been there for years before that. When I got my own drum kit I joined a local rock band. This first experience of being in a band was a good one. It was great fun but I always wanted to be in a rock'n'roll band. A couple of years later I was asked to join the only rock'n'roll band in the area where I lived and it was just great. I was a fan of bands like Thin Lizzy, Motorhead, AC/DC, Kiss, and Judas Priest and these bands were mainly the bands that got me into metal in the first place. These bands, including Metallica and Slayer are the bands that have inspired me the most over the years, and they still are among my favorite bands today. I joined Immortal in May 1996 and have done five albums with Immortal. I recorded the “Ghouls of grandeur” album with Grimfist in 2003. Then I joined Hypocrisy January 2004 and so far I have recorded two albums with Hypocrisy.
xFiruath: Are you currently involved with any other projects besides Hypocrisy?
Reidar: I'm quite busy with Immortal these days as well. Besides Hypocrisy and Immortal I have a rock'n'roll project that I enjoy working with when I find time to do so. The project is called Roads of Destiny.
xFiruath: Where did you record “A Taste of Extreme Divinity” and who did you work with for mixing/production, etc?
Reidar: We recorded and mixed the album in the Abyss studios. The production was handled by Peter Tagtgren and it was mastered by Jonas Kjellgren.
xFiruath: What’s different about the new album from previous releases?
Reidar: The new album ain't that different from the previous albums I think. It's a classic Hypocrisy album in my opinion. It contains all the elements that we want on a Hypo album. There is fast and aggressive songs like “A Taste of Extreme Divinity,” there is dark and slow songs like “The Quest,” you'll find some crushing mid tempo songs like “Weed out the Weak” and “Valley of the Damned.” When listening to it you can tell immediately that this is Hypocrisy. It has the unique sound that separates Hypocrisy from most other bands in the metal scene today.
xFiruath: Do you have a favorite track or any particular segment of the album that you like the best?
Reidar: “Weed out the Weak” is my favorite track at the moment, and I have to mention the segment that starts around 3:40 out in the song called “Global Domination.” It has this dark, tragic, and powerful feel to it. A great combination I must say.
xFiruath: What do the lyrics deal with on “A Taste of Extreme Divinity?”
Reidar: This is a question for Peter to answer really, but I think it's mainly about a psychopath killer who believes he is God.
xFiruath: Are there any plans for music videos from the album?
Reidar: I guess we will make a music video from one of the track's on the album, but we haven't decided what song, when or where to film it yet.
xFiruath: You guys have Alexi Laiho of Children of Bodom joining you on tour for guitar duties. How did that come about?
Reidar: Peter must have mentioned it for him. Peter and Alexi are friends and we needed someone to take the 2nd guitar position for the upcoming US tour. Alexi has agreed to fill the guitarist spot and I'm sure he will nail the songs and do his very best on stage with Hypocrisy. We are happy to bring him with us.
xFiruath: Where will Hypocrisy be touring in the upcoming months?
Reidar: We are touring the U.S. in November and December. Then we are doing a headlining tour in Europe called Long Time, No Death 2010 starting on the 24th of January. In March we are doing four shows in Sweden, and we will perform at several summer festivals as well.
xFiruath: Outside of Hypocrisy what bands/albums have you been listening to lately
Reidar: I am quite busy these days so there's not much time to sit down and listen to music. I get to listen to music when I'm out driving my car though, and lately it's Thin Lizzy's “Live and Dangerous,” the new Immortal album “All Shall Fall,” and “A Taste Of Extreme Divinity” with Hypocrisy that's been spinning in the stereo.
Hypocrisy Hope to Feed From Pain's SuccessHypocrisy are making an unusual comeback with the release of their latest record, 'A Taste of Extreme Divinity.' Multi-instrumentalist Peter Tägtgren considers the band his main focus, though he has had a variety of side-projects. None have gotten as big as Pain, which in 10 years and six albums put them in a solid supporting slot for Nightwish during their latest tour.
"When Pain started getting really popular in Sweden people thought that was the only thing I'd ever done," Tägtgren told Brave Words. It's a form of industrial metal that is equally fused with techno and its power-pop sound has absolutely nothing to do with the dark, heavy riffage of Hypocrisy. The new Hypocrisy album will be released in America the first week of November, and Tägtgren hopes that the popularity he's attracted via Pain will turn more heads towards his original, most-loved project.
Tägtgren says that moving from the Pain sound to Hypocrisy, as different as they are, were easy for him. "I've learned a lot from playing live with Pain because with the way the music is -- with that chugging rhythm -- you've got to be so f---ing tight." Keeping it separate also keeps the fans happy.
With a smile, Tägtgren says, "I think the Hypo fans have forgiven me for Pain's commercial success."
PelicanPelican, 'What We All Come to Need' -- New AlbumCrafting and perfecting the instrumental music genre and ambience that audiences recognize them for, Chicago's Pelican are both out on the road and out with a new album this week, thanks to new label home Southern Lord Records.
Unable to be pigeonholed by the variety of their musical influences as well as the lack of a vocalist, the new album keeps a heavy focus on its sound and taking a light hearted approach on such tracks as 'Glimmer' and then sludging it up and tuning low on others such as 'The Creeper' this album is yet another success and if you need a soundtrack to your days, start it off with this album.
As previously stated the band is currently on the road for the month of October for a headlining tour along with labelmates in Black Cobra, as well as Minsk and Sweet Cobra picking up on select dates. Additionally, while on the road in support of the new release, the Chicago area paid homage to the quartet as the legendary burger house meets metal haven Kuma's unveiled a new entree to their roster, titled the Pelican Burger. Described as a 10-ounce Kobe beef patty with pan seared scallops and lardons, in a garlic white wine sauce on top of a parmesan crisp, you can satisfy both your ears and your stomach with all things Pelican.