Crescent Shield has released another song, entitled "Tides of Fire", available for streaming on our MySpace page from the forthcoming CD The Stars of Never Seen. Take a listen and let us know what you think! :)


Here's the official press release:

California's traditional melodic metal band CRESCENT SHIELD, which features the talents of former DESTINY'S END guitarist Dan DeLucie and ex-ONWARD vocalist Michael Grant, has made the song "Tides of Fire" from their forthcoming album "The Stars of Never Seen" available for streaming on crescentshield.com and the band's myspace page http://www.myspace.com/crescentshield.

The album will be released by Cruz del Sur Music on the following dates:
May 8: Germany
May 11: Rest of Europe
June 2: USA/Canada
The first pressing will include a limited-edition DVD of the band's entire performance at Germany's Keep it True festival in April 2008. A video of the band performing the title track from their debut album "The Last of my Kind" can be viewed below http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQqbTBO19Ls
The artwork for the CD was again created by comic book artist Gerry Alanguilan and can be viewed below.

CRESCENT SHIELD's lineup is completed by drummer Craig Anderson (IGNITE, ENGINE) and bassist Melanie Sisneros (ex-NEW EDEN, THE IRON MAIDENS, SINERGY), two veterans of the Los Angeles music scene.

Lots happening under the red crescent moon! The new Crescent Shield album is finally finished and out the door! Release dates have been set. Here's a blurb from our most recent press release:

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California's traditional melodic metal band CRESCENT SHIELD, which features the talents of former DESTINY'S END guitarist Dan DeLucie and ex-ONWARD vocalist Michael Grant, have completed recording and mastering their second album titled "The Stars of Never Seen". The album will be released by Cruz del Sur Music on the following dates:

May 8: Germany
May 11: Rest of Europe
June 2: USA/Canada

The band has made the song "Lifespan" from the forthcoming album available for streaming on crescentshield.com and the band's myspace page myspace.com/crescentshield.

The first pressing will include a limited-edition DVD of the band's entire performance at Germany's Keep it True festival in April 2008. The artwork for the CD was again created by comic book artist Gerry Alanguilan and can be viewed below.



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And here's a clip from the forthcoming bonus DVD from the Keep It True Festival 2008:

Welcome to another exciting bloggerific update! Here's what's going on in Melz Hell:

Crescent Shield

Yay! At long last, a song a week at a time, I've finally finished recording the bass tracks that will soon be the 9-song follow-up album from Crescent Shield, entitled The Stars of Never Seen. There's still a lot to be done on the new album, but hopefully you can start looking for it in Q1 or early Q2 of 2009!



Hangar 18

In other band news, Hangar 18 will be shredding the stage at the Boulder Station Casino in exciting Las Vegas, NV on December 27th! We've got two long sets of your great Megadeth faves on tap for those who wish to escape the post Christmas mall scene for a bit of headbangin'! The skinny can be found here:





Whole Lotta Rosies

Whole Lotta Rosies will be returning to the stage in early 2009 with a small warm-up set at the Viper Room in Hollywood, CA on January 29th followed by a trip up north to Redway, CA for the Winter Rock show. You can get all the info from the Rosies website:

Whole Lotta Rosies Official Website




Mz. Led

And the Mz Led train chugs along with tons of opportunities in January, including January 10 at Paladino's (Tarzana, CA) and Saturday January 31 at Molly Malone's Irish Pub in Los Angeles, CA. And if you haven't had a chance to see us live, here's some video of our recent performance at Weber's in Tarzana, CA, courtesy of Denis "The Moshking" Recendez:





LOTS more Mz Led videos can be found on our website at

MzLed.Net

That's all for now! Have a happy and safe holidays, everyone!

- Mel

Greetings, eyeballs of Internetworld!

I know I haven't been the most conscientious of MySpacers and my blog is very very dated and stale. So at long last, here's an update of what's been going on with me:

CRESCENT SHIELD: Crescent Shield is in the midst of recording, and I am about halfway through my bass tracks! The album is sounding great so far, with some really great songs on the way! Look for the album, titled The Stars of Never Seen, coming early 2009!

HANGAR 18: Vegas, baby, Vegas! Hangar 18 will be hitting the Boulder Station Casino and Resort in the City of Sin on December 27th! More information forthcoming!

WHOLE LOTTA ROSIES: WLR will be making a northward trek to Central California in late January 2009. More info to come!

MZ. LED: My new project! I've joined a group of talented gals to pay tribute to the legendary Led Zeppelin. My first few shows will start this weekend at Webers in Reseda and Molly Malone's in Los Angeles. Here are some show specifics:

FRIDA​Y NOVEM​BER 7

Mz Led ~*~ All Girl Tribu​te to Led Zeppe​lin

Weber​s
19312​ Vanow​en St.,
Resed​a,​ CA
11PM

And:

SATUR​DAY NOVEM​BER 8

Mz Led ~*~ All Girl Tribu​te to Led Zeppe​lin

11-​08-​2008 22:​30 at Molly​ Malon​es
575 S. Fairf​ax Ave.,
Los Angel​es,​ CA 90036​
1030P​M / $8 Cover​

More info can be had on the Mz. Led Myspa​ce page at:
http:​/​/​www.​ myspa​ce.​ com/​mzled​1

Or the Mz. Led offic​ial websi​te:​
http:​/​/​www.​ mzled​.​ net


Hope to see you out at one of the upcoming shows!

- Mel

I had a very funny feeling the other day while walking across campus. Lately I’ve taken to noticing the wildlife that lives on the campus, namely squirrels and all types of birds. Yet in watching the wildlife the other day, I was struck with a strange feeling of mortality – that everything dies, and what remains is nothing. And I understood why people cling desperately to the thought of an immortal soul. As humans, everything we are is a huge investment of time and money. Someone somewhere invested a lot to see us through into adulthood, be it our parents, relatives or the taxpayers. And in between birth and now are irreplaceable experiences and memories that make us uniquely us, things that if we were to make an exact clone of ourselves today, it still would not, could not be us. True that there are genetic personality predispositions, but it is the sum of our experiences that forms the bulk of who we are. I had an epiphany many many years ago, as a teenybopper, when dutifully serving time as an altar girl at a Catholic Church in my neighborhood. I never really could get myself to believe in god or heaven or anything else, but I tried nevertheless to entertain the possibility. Until one day, while listening to the deacon give the gospel, I stood upon the altar, clad in a white vestament, standing with expected reverence, when I locked my knees. I saw the church start to darken, darken, darken, then pitch black. A second later, my parents had me outside the church and I was suddenly awake. But the period of time from my having fainted to the time my parents brought me outside was all gone. There was nothing, no perception of the passage of time, just minutes lost in the blink of an eye. It was then that I finally understood death. Death would be the same as fainting except there would be no waking. Everything just ceases without even the consciousness of knowing that it ceased. And given all this, as I walked across campus the other day, I confess I was gripped with a bit of fear when I thought that all of that, every last bit of who and what we are ends with the last breath and the last heartbeat. Everything that is us is formed by mere chemical reactions in the brain, and when those cease, so do we. We can never be here again, the moment, once lost, can never be relived. There is no time machine, no reincarnation, and no heaven above. So what does that leave for us poor mortals? That we should live for today, we should write, make, create, think, do, cherish the moment, and live each day with the desire to create an immortality of memories that lingers on in those left behind after our time has passed.

I’ve given thought to the concept of Child Worship and I think I was wrong in my assessment of the nation. You see, I used to think that this country was one that tried to place the child above everything else, including things like sanity and reason. But I realize that my original assessment gave today’s society too much credit. We’re not worshippers of our progeny, we are fanatics. And not fanatics in a good way either. I’m talking fanatics like Beenie Baby fanatics, where it’s more important to acquire them and to have them than to enjoy them. With as much effort and enthusiasm that’s been placed into preserving every single fertilized human egg, we could instead be raising the children we have in at least the standard with which my generation was raised. Imagine kids that have choices in taking art classes, music classes, woodshop and home economics, physical education in public schools, instead of being run through the mill in a coursework of useless Federal Government tests that do everything to leave as many children behind as they can. How about kids that aren’t doped up on prozac or riddelin, taught that every woe in their life is curable by a pill, that every bought of depression or hyperactivity is a disease. Where will these kids get their coping skills? How will they survive as adults if their poor school performance is the teacher’s fault, their social ineptness is the fault of their peers, and that the reason they’re not financially well-off is that their parents haven’t sued the right people yet? How are we putting children first when we dump them in front of the television, video games, or the Internet so we won’t be bothered with inquisitive minds while we’re trying to come down from a hard day’s work? And of course, the questions you hear often… if our society values our offspring so, why are schools underfunded and teachers underpaid, under-trained, and disrespected? No, we’re not a nation of child worshippers after all; we’re a consumptive nation that believes the chase is better than the catch. Salvage every embryo, every sperm is sacred (to quote Monty), because everyone wants children, and if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you. It makes you wonder if the same garage sale that you used to unload Beanie Babies after the craze died down will take the excesses of human babies once the fanatics have moved on to another fad…

I’m one of those people who likes to read the news every day. It didn’t always used to be this way, that I would care about politics and what was going on outside my neighborhood, but with age comes the awareness that one does not live in a bubble. You get to be a certain age (say, 30) and suddenly your peer group starts changing. Everyone starts hooking up, moving in, getting married, having kids; you begin to realize that you no longer have anything in common with your friends. And you realize that what goes on in Washington actually does have an impact in your life. For some, growing older means growing wiser; for others, it means clinging to the traditions of your past, whether or not they are good traditions. We can either become more open-minded and aware of what is happening around us, or we become jaded and judgmental and wonder why everyone doesn’t share the same values as we do. Most of us become a little of both. I know that my daily perusals through the LA Times have led to naught but frustration. How could our country be moving in this bizarre, imperialistic, right-wing religious extremist direction? Does the embracing of such insanity spell the end of days for America, the home of the free and the rational? Would our founding fathers be screaming in tears if they could look upon the nation they birthed? How could be people be so willing to give away their rights, their intelligence, and their privacy to our current government, which has its core foundation fashioned with lies and deceit? And yet every story in the newspaper is the same, the American people handing over their freedoms wholesale and with less thought than they gave last week’s episode of American Idol. They do it in fear, in the name of god, or for money. And what’s worse is the eagerness to hand over other people’s rights, and to impose extremist Christian mores on a country whose foundations rest upon among other things freedom of religion and separation of church and state. How can I not help but take my age-opened mind and still become jaded and judgemental?

Ah, it seems as though the decency hounds are at it again, chasing Howard Stern into the realm of premium subscription entertainment. I read an article in the LA Times today about cable companies being under fire from the decency police (that is, the FCC in its new position as morality enforcers). The argument is that cable companies should have the same decency requirements as broadcast TV. The passage of this, of course, would lead the way for the FCC to hound Mr. Stern in his new home on satelite radio (which is the radio counterpart to cable TV). Now actually, i find Howard Stern's show completely inane and I really hate talk radio in general. And I actually agree that there should be some level of "decency" on public broadcast airwaves, or at least an expectation of "family friendliness" during certain hours so those easily offended can plan their listening schedules. But public airwaves are free and easily accessible. Cable TV is a different ball of wax. It requires a subscription that comes at a pretty hefty cost. And digital cable already has parental controls, so that the onus of protecting one's child from anything "indecent" falls right where it should -- on parents. Not everyone wants to be saved from themselves by the government. Not everyone wants to see "family friendly" programming only. Some people want to see the kids of South Park shove food up their ass and shit out their mouth. That's entertainment, and that's what many cable TV subscribers would pay for. A friend of mine best said it, that we're a nation of child-worshippers; we try to do everything for the children, and yet somehow we're failing them. Kids can't be kids anymore and parents are trying to shove the burden of raising them on society and organized sports. Kids need to grow, explore, and learn, and parents need to guide them. The FCC censoring sex and violence out of society isn't going to help create chaste, god-fearing citizens. It will do nothing more than damage American businesses (like cable and satelite entertainment providers) and divide the country deeper along the lines of those who want to be told what to do and those who value the First Amendment.

So everbody around is blathering about MySpace and how kewl it is, etc. Hmmm... it doesn't look too different from Yahoo's profile service and certainly not as kewl as having your own homepage (check out mine at http://mel.raven-mad.com), but I thought I'd create a profile and see what the hullabaloo is. I wonder how much senseless spam I'll get in my e-mail inbox for signing up for this service. And that brings me to my own personal digital soapbox where i can spew whatever garbage pops out of my brain, provided it doesn't get me fired, offend people, or otherwise severely impact my real world life. Welcome to free speech? Anything published online can and will apparently be held against you, so here I blog, and blog with care....