- Dec 20, 2005
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Gaze in wide wonder at the latest currents in the mainstream media and get out your scorecards. I have Mustaine marked down as needing to get back on hard drugs and off of evangelical Christianity, but you be the judge of the rest.
Julian Locke Unearthing the Pleasure of Thrash-Metal. Lowell Sun September 28, 2006.
After eight years and four albums, Boston's Unearth have released their most brutal effort to date, aptly titled III: In The Eyes Of Fire. Veering away from the overly polished and produced nu-metal that has quickly become the new genre of popular taste, this local five-piece has decided to take a more natural and rugged approach to recording and performing. This Saturday, along with Terror, Through The Eyes Of The Dead, Bleeding Through, and Animosity, Unearth will shake the Palladium to its roots and give fans what they've been craving -- Unearth's first thrash-metal album.
"We're five dudes that are really adamant about writing a ferocious record. We pushed the envelope and wanted to put out a thrash metal record," said guitarist Ken Susi. The Unearth crew, which includes vocalist Trevor Phipps, guitarist Buz McGrath, bassist John Maggard, and drummer Mike Justian, headed over to Seattle this time to enlist the help of Terry Date, who is known for his work with Pantera, the Deftones, and Soundgarden.
"We used to record with Adam Dutkiewicz of Killswitch Engage in Massachusetts. This time we took it to a new place, which created a new feel for the record," Susi explains. "We're just trying to play heavier and be heavier."
In a scene that is convoluted with melodic, heavily polished metalcore, Unearth is certainly making their mark and pushing their sound to a new level. "We're trying to bring an element of wholesomeness back into the scene. We wanted this album to sound more natural and organic. We stripped the guitars down for a more rugged sound, and so we could play all the songs live," Susi says.
To do that, they recorded without using a click track, which is used much like a metronome for synchronized purposes, and allows bands to precisely match up all of their parts together, creating a seemingly flawless album. The problem however, is this dynamic is nearly impossible to recreate on stage.
"When you use a click track, the drums are no better than a drum machine," Susi points out. "We wanted to make real music that humans could actually play on stage. We wanted to hear something more natural, and be able to play it really tight and really well."
Unearth has certainly risen to their own challenge, with tracks like "Unstoppable," "March of the Mutes," and "So It Goes," they decided to take a more introspective, personal approach to the song writing this time.
"We hate to do the same thing. We want to write about multiple things, because lots of different things touch us personally, whether it be heartache, addiction, world politics, gun control, or anything else. We would hate to limit ourselves," Susi says.
Saby Reyes-Kulkarni Gigantour Honors the High Art of the Guitar Solo. New Times Broward-Palm Beach October 5, 2006.
More so than any other high-profile traveling metal festival - Ozzfest Blackest of the Black, Unholy Alliance, Contamination, etc. - Dave Mustaine's Gigantour arguably draws upon a more conscious sense of metal history. Another way to put it is that Mustaine (who has been unabashed about Gigantour as a showcase for guitar-shredding and who personally hand-picks all the bands) likes guitarists whose tastes span the past three decades. Virtually all of the acts headlining this year's lineup feature guitarists who blend influences from the hard-rock of the '70s the balls-out thrash of the '80s the death metal of the '90s and today's more extreme forms of heaviness. So the guitar is a big focus here.
But how is Gigantour truly different? When you stack Megadeth, Lamb of God, Opeth, Arch Enemy, and Overkill together in one back-to-back-to-back sandwich, don't you get the same, um, overkill as these other heavy package tours? Not necessarily. Mustaine has gone to great lengths to ensure sophistication on top of heaviness. Another important distinction with Gigantour is that it celebrates thrash metal, which had very nearly vanished by 1993. Just as the movement's bands seemed to be hitting a collective stride the music mysteriously gave way to the more narrowly-focused death metal craze that, just as mysteriously, has never really faded since.
Mustaine agrees with the popular notion that grunge and alt-rock killed thrash. When asked why bands like his Metallica, Anthrax, Exodus, Sacred Reich, Voivod, and Celtic Frost all abruptly migrated en masse to a more straight-ahead sound, he answers with one word: "Nirvana." Closer inspection, however, reveals the flaw in this logic: the rise of alternative and grunge brought more attention to metal, not less. Could these bands have jumped the gun too soon, then? The ones that stuck to their guns - Slayer Pantera, Sepultura - all reaped great rewards amid the alternative revolution if not to the same degree that Metallica and Megadeth did with shockingly commercial records.
"It was a definite bum-out," says Lamb of God drummer Chris Adler. Adler who describes himself and his brother, Lamb guitarist Willie Adler, as "speed metal freaks," was profoundly moved by this phenomenon and to this day feels at a loss to explain what happened.
"That's why we started the band," Adler says. "You'd go to the record store with 20 dollars and you'd leave with 20 dollars. There was that few years where it was like 'Man, all the veterans are letting me down - what the fuck is going on?' I don't point fingers at those bands. They had to keep their lights on and keep their career going. But that's the stuff that we sharpened our teeth on. We were in love with that old stuff and we're trying to keep it up now."
Even with thrash bands reuniting by the bushel in the past few years the style has yet to resume anything like a natural evolution, with many classic bands choosing instead to present their work with a kind of mothball sensibility, as if they're handling a relic preserved in time.
To some extent Gigantour's lineup - Lamb of God and Arch Enemy in particular - offers a remedy for this taking the thrash rhythm style Mustaine helped invent and attempting to apply it in new directions, rather than just specialize in the latest form of sub-genrefied extremity.
"A lot of guys get together and say 'Hey, me and five of my buddies are Slayer fans and we're going to start a band,'" Adler muses. "Well, you're probably going to sound like Slayer." He goes on to point out that Lamb of God, which writes via a five-way collaboration process, endures open contention between band members in order to bring varied influences together, including punk and country.
Although the members of Arch Enemy remain focused on staying within the limits of death metal their sound is the result of a constant balancing act between testing, pushing, and respecting those limits. It's important to remember that Arch Enemy guitarist/leader Mike Amott was a member of Carcass, easily the most storied grindcore band of all time. Meanwhile, Arch Enemy vocalist Angela Gossow has threatened to join a choir someday so she can have a forum for her singing voice.
And then there's Opeth which takes more liberties with metal than any other band on Gigantour. A death metal act with overt progressive and '60s psychedelic pop leanings Opeth only gets to play a four-song set for Gigantour. That's because, on average, Opeth songs can last an entire afternoon or so. Opeth draws from singer/songwriter Scott Walker's 2006 album The Drift, for inspiration.
"[Walker] used to be like a Sinatra-type of singer," guitarist Peter Lindgren explains. "But he had better tunes more depth than standards. But now, as he's grown older, he's exploring. What he's doing now, it's like horror music but with his Sinatra-style voice over it."
Lindgren encourages metal bands to look outside of metal and classical for creative stimulation. "You can spend a lifetime exploring jazz," he offers as an example "and you're never going to be able to grasp it all."
Regardless of how fans might feel about Megadeth's post-1990 output one of Gigantour's biggest thrills is seeing Mustaine's formidable rhythm chops fully intact even after doctors declared his career over for good in 2002 when he sustained a serious arm injury. Of course, with Mustaine, half of the fireworks come directly from his mouth. Mustaine, who refuses to comment on his newfound Christianity and recently condemned the United Nations' ineffectiveness so strongly that he decided to title the next Megadeth record United Abominations, told New Times: "The worst thing for our country is to lose its military might. If I were president, anybody that's here right now as an illegal alien, hey - you got in under the wire. Anybody that comes in after that you need to take an oath of citizenship. Our borders are gonna need to have fences."
Mustaine voted for George W. Bush in 2000 but with reservation, preferring McCain instead. (He also supported Perot in '92.)
"I voted for Bush," Mustaine clarifies "but it wasn't because I believed in his agenda. I thought that John McCain had a pretty good grasp of what our country needed militarily."
Mustaine suggests that we "pay the politicians what the teachers and pay the teachers what the politicians get - why would we give some bureaucratic pig who's just sucking our funds any more money when the people really taking care of us are our parents and teachers?"
He also supports the idea of mandatory military service in the U.S.
Lamb of God on the other hand, have left their fondness for politics (read: Bush-bashing) at the door on their latest album, Sacrament.
"After doing two albums of that," Adler chuckles "we felt like we'd expressed our opinion as well as we could. It's a lot easier for you to say 'George Bush sucks' or 'We hate the government' than to open yourself up and to beat yourself up - which is basically what this record is."
And that in a nutshell, is what Gigantour is all about. Well, that and a ton of sophisticated guitar soloing.
Michael Deeds "English Band Likes to Mix Laughs with its 'Extreme Metal'"The Idaho Statesman September 18, 2006.
Teddy-bear thrash band DragonForce turned frowns upside-down at OzzFest this summer. Turbo-charged by blazing guitar shredders Herman Li and Sam Totman, England's "extreme power metal" group dazzled crowds with super-fast, happy headbanging. Now DragonForce is headlining its own tour.
From a musicianship perspective, DragonForce's Mach-10, major-key melodies make you want to drop to your knees in worship. Eventually, you'll fall over laughing. DragonForce's new CD, "Inhuman Rampage," sounds like a "Final Fantasy" soundtrack played at 78 RPM. Skip the vodka and stick to Red Bull if you want to keep up with 28-year-old Totman and the rest of DragonForce:
Q: You're jumping for joy! DragonForce uses trampolines on stage.
A: We've got two of them. We had one, but it was off-balance, so we got another one from Wal-Mart or wherever it was. We were always jumping off of drum risers and stuff like that for years, anyway, so I just thought I would get a trampoline _ maybe we could jump a bit higher.
Q: DragonForce's music supposedly is influenced by video game sounds. How much of that is baloney?
A: I've listened to video game soundtracks for years, and I really like some of the old stuff, the noises and stuff. We don't write songs to make it sound like a video game. But the sounds that we choose on the guitar and keyboards _ we'll hear sounds that sound like a video game, and because we like video game music, we'll think, "Ah, that's a cool sound, let's use that."
Q: Whose idea was it to make fun of DragonForce in your music videos? Because they're comical.
A: Well, that's ourself. We're really just having a laugh, anyway. We're not really a serious band. It's not a total joke band; we're still serious. But we like to have a laugh.
Q: But whose idea was it to include inset close-ups of your hands during guitar solos?
A: That was us. We made all this effort to play these fast solos. We'd sit there for, like, weeks recording them all. We're kind of show-offs, so we want people to see what we've actually done! (Laughs)
Q: In the video for "Through the Fire and Flames," when you nonchalantly drink a beer while waiting for your turn during Herman Li's guitar solo, I about wet myself laughing.
A: I was just drinking it, anyway, actually, because I was bored, waiting from doing the hundredth take. ... The director just goes, "Ah, we might as well keep that in there."
Q: You guys have gone over well with American crowds. Power metal usually doesn't do as well in the United States as other places. It's a pretty European phenomenon.
A: I think all the normal power metal is pretty gay, anyway. People call us power metal, and it is partly power metal. But I think a lot of people that listen to us, I think they've never heard like Stratovarius and Kamelot and that kind of thing. And I don't think they actually would like it, because it's actually quite different.
Q: DragonForce is more thrash and speed-oriented. Your music is very technical.
A: I grew up with thrash as my main metal that I listened to. So that's why we play fast all the time. I think a lot of the normal European power metal bands is more like a normal rock band with a couple of fast songs thrown in on each album. We've got a lot of sort of punk kids and skateboarder kids and people that would listen to NOFX and that, and they like it. But I can't see them really liking a lot of that European stuff because it's more like just normal rock. That's my theory, anyway.
Q: Has DragonForce ever considered a ballad?
A: We've got a ballad on every album. ... The last song on the (new) album. "Trail of Broken Hearts," that's a pansy ballad if you ever heard one!
Q: Don't you get bored playing that song?
A: Yeah, well, it's not really a live song. We stuck it on the end of the album to sort of chill out after you've listened to all the fast ones. And then if people ... think it's gay, they can just turn it off, because it's at the end. That's why it's there.
Q: How close is DragonForce on stage to what you sound like on album?
A: We do our best. We're running around all the time and being idiots, so there's still obviously going to be quite a lot of mistakes and stuff, and it's, like, really technical. But the main thing is to bring across the energy, and I think we do that.
Hector Saldaña. Explore the Soft Underbelly of Death Metal. San Antonio Express-News October 6, 2006.
Death metal has its tender side, believe it or not.
And Atreyu has offered up clues to what softness lurks in the hearts of hardcore men since its debut album, "Suicide Notes and Butterfly Kisses."
Its latest album, "A Death Grip on Yesterday" -- which debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard 200 and represents a rare bright spot for metal these days -- combines hard and soft schizophrenia. It's the follow-up to "The Curse."
"We're into heavy (expletive) and melodic (expletive), too," singer Alex Varkatzas told the New York Daily News in April about the Orange County quintet's sonic stew of death metal, hardcore and screamo. "It just came out that way."
Atreyu brings its World Championship Tour 2006 to Graham Central Station on Monday with Every Time I Die, Chiodos and From First to Last. It's the band's third trip to San Antonio in 2006 but first as headliner, having been part of the A Taste of Chaos lineup in February and Ozzfest in July.
Another clue to where band members' heads are at is learning the band's name comes from "The NeverEnding Story."
Namely, it's the character hero that rode atop a fantastical flying, fuzzy-wuzzy dog.
"If you look at it for what it is, Atreyu was the defender of dreams in that movie," Varkatzas told MTV in 2004. "If you know that, it's kind of cool, and not that lame."
Singing drummer Brandon Saller counters Varkatzas' screamed vocals. But the message is usually pretty dark.
"I'm really shy and antisocial, but writing really agonized lyrics that come from personal experience is good for me," Varkatzas told MTV in the same interview.
"By sharing my pain with other people, and having them reading it and associating it with their life, it sometimes makes my problems seem easier to deal with."
Stuart Derdeyn. Death Metal for Happy People: But They're Still on an Inhuman Rampage. The Vancouver Province September 12, 2006
Unless you're a really big metal fan, an album titled Inhuman Rampage by a band named DragonForce would send you running for the hills. Songs such as "Revolution Deathsquad" or "Operation Ground and Pound" serve only to reinforce that conviction.
But don't be too hasty.
Because the follow-up to this U.K. quintet's Valley Of the Damned is another tour de force of super-tight, melodic hard rock with its tongue firmly planted in its cheek. Imagine Bon Jovi fronting Iron Maiden played almost twice as fast and you've got what the group has dubbed "extreme power metal."
"Actually, we kind of try not to say that much anymore, because we don't want people to get the wrong vibe that we're into that whole old-style power-metal style," says guitarist Sam Totman. "For us, there are so many other things involved in our sound that we didn't want to get stuck into that category.
"I mean, it hasn't hurt either because all the shows are selling out."
Epic and bombastic, with operatic vocals a la classic Judas Priest or 'Maiden, power metal came to prominence in the eighties with European acts such as Helloween or Europe. Detractors have dubbed the highly melodic and fluid form "happy metal" for its lack of angry Cookie Monster vocals and angst-ridden riffage.
There certainly are elements of DragonForce's fast, stadium-ready tunes that will put a smile on your face. But you're likely to be air-guitaring along to Totman and Hong Kong-born guitarist Herman Li's lightning runs too.
"We've basically just put everything we listen to together into it. Slayer is one of our favourite bands, so we've gone there and into thrash and death metal to keep the speed and aggression. But there is also the melodic hard rock of bands like Bon Jovi that we wanted to keep in there, too."
The combination is grabbing headlines in magazines such as metalhead bible Kerrang!, and the band recently completed a triumphant run of European festivals and Ozzfest's mainstage. The stage show is said to be smoking.
"Definitely we were something different to the second stage of Ozzfest, where all the acts tend to be the same. But on the mainstage, you went from Lacuna Coil to Hatebreed to us and that's a really big difference. We did find that the choruses really got the crowds going."
Heralded on by South African singer ZP Theart, lines such as "Through fire and flames we carry on" (from "Through the Fire And Flames") strike that perfect soccer-chant cadence that fans cling to on every chorus. Add in Ukrainian keyboardist Vadim Puzhanov's symphonic flourishes and David Macintosh's pounding drums and this could be the next big thing in English heavy metal.
"In the beginning I always thought that all the people who were listening to the new generation of punk rock with its happy melodies would be able to get into it," Totman says. "Initially, it was longhairs in 'Maiden shirts that came to shows, but now the audience is a complete mix of everyone; skater kids, punk kids, longhairs, girls.
"It's just what we wanted, not to be some grim-faced metal band that's negative and ultimately boring."
