METAL ALLEGIANCE — with its four core members: David Ellefson (MEGADETH), Alex Skolnick (TESTAMENT), Mike Portnoy (THE WINERY DOGS, ex-DREAM THEATER) and Mark Menghi — played a record-release show for its sophomore album, "Volume 2 – Power Drunk Majesty", this past Thursday (September 6) at the Gramercy Theatre in New York City. Special guests at the gig included SEPULTURA's Andreas Kisser, ACCEPT's Mark Tornillo, ARCH ENEMY's Alissa White-Gluz, OVERKILL's Bobby "Blitz" Ellsworth, THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER's Trevor Strnad, ARMORED SAINT's John Bush and DEATH ANGEL's Mark Osegueda. In addition to material from both METAL ALLEGIANCE albums, the band performed covers of classic songs from EAGLES ("Life In The Fast Lane"), BLACK SABBATH ("Electric Funeral"), DIO ("Stand Up And Shout"), ANTHRAX ("Room For One More"), METALLICA ("Hit The Lights"), JUDAS PRIEST ("Rapid Fire"), IRON MAIDEN ("Aces High"), OVERKILL ("Elimination") and ACCEPT ("Restless And Wild"). METAL ALLEGIANCE began as a celebration of heavy metal, powered by the almost tribal bond shared between the extreme music community's most revered trailblazers, armed with a list of contributors onstage (and off) that read like a Wikipedia entry on the genre itself. "Volume II - Power Drunk Majesty" was produced by Menghi and Skolnick while Mark Lewis of MRL Studios handled the mixing and mastering. The cover artwork was created by renowned artist Marcelo Vasco (SLAYER, MACHINE HEAD, SOULFLY, HATEBREED) and Rafael Tavares. Portnoy recently told That Drummer Guy about "Volume II – Power Drunk Majesty": "After we had so much fun making the first album, we knew a second album would be inevitable. I think myself, Alex Skolnick, David Ellefson and Mark Menghi, we felt we tapped into something. The first album was more like an experiment, because we didn't know how it was going to go, but we also had all these guests. There had to have been 15, 20 other people on the album. We knew this time around, we wanted to streamline it a little bit and kind of focus on the core four. The four of us did all the writing together, and we wanted to streamline the guests — mainly leave it to singers, to give it more of a band feel. The first time around was like more of an experiment; this time around, it really felt like a concise unit between the four of us."
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