The third annual Northern Invasion 2017 is scheduled to land at Somerset Amphitheater in Somerset, WI Saturday, May 13 and Sunday, May 14 with Soundgarden and Kid Rock topping the bill. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Attila
Soundgarden, Def Leppard, A Perfect Circle, The Offspring, Mastodon Booked For Welcome to Rockville
Monster Energy Welcome To Rockville 2017 will take place Saturday, April 29 and Sunday, April 30, 2017 at Jacksonville, Florida’s scenic Metropolitan Park along the St. Johns River. Soundgarden (Saturday headliner), Def Leppard (Sunday headliner), and A Perfect Circle lead the music lineup for Florida’s biggest rock event yearly! Discounted Early Bird tickets, VIP and hotel packages are on sale tomorrow Tuesday, December 6. You can watch the teaser and get the full details below:Continue reading
Rock On The Range 2017 Lineup Features Metallica, Soundgarden, Korn And More!
November 4th, 2016 Heavy Metal Releases
Attila Drops New Single – Ignite, New Album This Fall
Attila has released a second single from their forthcoming album Chaos , due on November 4th from Sharptone Records. Continue reading
Loathe – Prepare Consume Proceed
Prepare Consume Proceed (SharpTone Records) is the latest EP from Liverpool UK’s Loathe. But it’s not really the latest as it’s a reissue of an EP of the same name that was released, brace yourselves, October of last year. Better yet, if you lose all the filler interlude bullshit and intro track you’re only really left with four songs or just shy of 16 minutes of music.
I’m assuming the decision to reissue Prepare Consume Proceed so hastily was because it would function as SharpTone Record’s coming out party. Yes, this EP serves as the tip of the spear for a label that was officially launched less than a month ago. The brainchild of Nuclear Blast CEO Markus Staiger and former Sumerian Records vice-president Shawn Keith, SharpTone was rolled out to the motto of: “A new era of music begins…” With a roster including such luminaries as Attila, We Came as Romans, and World War Me all SharpTone looks and sounds like to me is Sumerian Lite. It’s what crawled out of the Van’s Warped Tour primordial ooze.
But label confusion aside, I am tasked with reviewing this EP. It’s worth mentioning that I walked in totally cold as Loathe’s website and social media pages are more devoid of useful information than a Fox News broadcast. But if you must know the band is comprised of members with names such as, I shit you not, DRT, SNK, MWL, NIL and frontman DRK.
So we didn’t start on the right foot, but hey, I’ve still got the music. The artwork and logos recall Unsane and Godflesh’s astethic rather than anything else on their label, but push play and what you get is an amalgamation of Structures djent and Suicide Silence grade deathcore. Competent enough, but less than memorable extreme metal. ‘In Death’ and ‘Solace; in Soil’ have pummeling groove and decent rhythm changes, but everything else is straight out of the djent playbook. You still get your cold electronics to spruce up the palm-muted slabs of sound and the occasional sung hook.
It’s just hard to get excited for music this by-the-numbers when you have acts like Textures and Periphery exploring lots of interesting areas within the genre. And do me a favor, drop the stage costumes and pseudonyms, its less edgy and more infantilizing than you think.
4.0/10
HANSEL LOPEZ
Album Stream: Enterprise Earth – Patient 0
Album Stream: Set To Stun – Set To Stun and The Desperado Undead
Set To Stun is streaming their new album Set To Stun and The Desperado Undead below. The album was self produced with Jordan Griffin and was mixed and mastered by Joey Sturgis (Asking Alexandria, Attila, Miss May I). They will be hitting the road on the BAT2BAT tour with Vampires Everywhere and Consider Me Dead.
Nov 30: Nile Theater – Mesa, AZ
Dec 01: The Co-Op – Albuquerque, NM
Dec 02: Tomcats West – Fort Worth, TX
Dec 03: The Korova – San Antonio, TX
Dec 04: Crossroads – Tyler, TX
Dec 05: The Tavern – Hattiesburg, MS
Dec 06: Longbranch Saloon – Knoxville, TN
Dec 07: Emerson Theater – Indianapolis, IN
Dec 08: The Canal Club – Richmond, VA
Dec 09: Santos – New York, NY
Dec 10: Firehouse 13: Providence, RI
Dec 11: The OutPost – Kent, OH
Dec 13: The Abbey – Chicago, IL
Dec 14: Skyway Theatre – Minneapolis, MN
Dec 15: Vaudeville Mews – Des Moines, IA
Dec 16: Marquis Theatre – Denver, CO
Dec 18: The Music Garage – Salt Lake City, UT
Mayhem – Live In Leipzig
What makes a “classic”? In the case of Mayhem’s Live In Leipzig (Peaceville) it’s primarily down to what it represents – not only the closest thing to a full album by the classic line-up of Mayhem (itself awarded the c-word at least in part for the fact that two of them were dead by violence within three years), but an important document in the development of both a scene and a genre. It’s impossible to look into the early days of “second wave BM” without running into a reference to Live In Leipzig, and it still regularly appears in lists of the most important releases in the genre. References to it tend to spend longer talking about its classic status, the “atmosphere” or the events of the scene it helped give birth to than the music itself, which can cause alarm bells to ring.
Setting everything else aside for the moment, then, the first thing to say about the music is that it’s RAW. Not just the sound – which is better than you may be expecting, especially in its’ remastered form – but the song-writing and playing too. People already familiar with the band after Dead’s… er… death may be surprised – the mystical, sinister atmosphere of De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas (Deathlike Silence) is thin on the ground, and the experimentalism that the band embraced in their later years is entirely absent. Early tracks like ‘Necrolust’ and ‘Carnage’ push their Thrash and Venom influences to the front, and even DMDS tracks are more savage and direct than their studio incarnations.
Traditional wisdom has Dead being the quintessential Mayhem vocalist, but his style is much more straightforward and orthodox than that of Maniac or Attila – fans of the latter in particular may be disappointed with lines like “in the middle of Transylvania” delivered in a straight rasp rather than Atilla’s vampire drag-queen tenor. The quality he’s so treasured for, of course, is authenticity – it’s hard to deny the genuine rage and alienation of a man who shot himself in the head five months after this performance – but the extent to which it really informs the music is a matter of personal interpretation. It’s precisely that “realness” and lack of irony that can transform Live In Leipzig into something more than the sum of its sloppy parts, but it’s hard to pin down objectively – one person’s “sloppy” is another’s “dangerous”.
As a document of the genre’s early days, Live In Liepzig is as important as you’ve heard, and the bonuses in this package (a booklet full of scene memorabilia and a second disc of another performance with most of the same tracks and a rawer sound) makes it even more so. As a piece of music it’s both undeniably flawed and often genuinely captivating – and in many ways it’s the flaws that makes it so engaging. Still an essential history lesson for those interested in early 90’s Scandinavian BM, but not always an easy one to swallow, and some fans will find themselves blasphemously glad that Black Metal has been so thoroughly house-trained.
7.0/10
RICHIE HR
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A Masked Apocalypse: Drama Club
Drama Club. Photo Credit: Tara Dettman
This year’s Vans Warped Tour has introduced a number of new faces to the music world and each has their own story behind their musical journey. For the mysterious masked duo only known as Drama Club, their story is just as adventurous as their music. Audiences have been introduced to songs like “Fuk It” and “Maniac,” and winning over unexpected fans along the way.
The duo known as Zero and Andromeda have kept a relatively low profile and circulated around playing house parties until being discovered by Black Veil Brides frontman Andy Biersack.
Zero explains how it all went down. “We were just kickin it, making remixes and playing house parties and DJing house music. We did this remix of Andy Biersack/Andy Black “They Don’t Need To Understand” and people liked it and he liked it, and then all of sudden we were on a world tour with the Black Veil Brides. We kept doing house music, which we still do and love. They told us ‘you should make an album. These kids like what you’re doing.’ We said ‘fuck! We’re going to make an album.’ So we made an album.”
“Then they said ‘you need to do Warped Tour so you can tell kids about your album.’ So we said ‘fuck!’ So here we fucking are.”
Zero of Drama Club. Photo Credit: Tara Dettman
After bonding with Biersack, the duo were invited to take part on the Black Mass Tour in the UK and the first leg of their North American tour. While on that tour Drama Club gave fans a stripped down DJ set, they have since built up their music to accommodate more of a live format.
“That’s more DJ ing. We’re doing a little more performance here – a little more instrumentation and stuff. As the tour goes on, some of our buddies like Ryan Seaman [drummer] from Falling In Reverse and CC [Christian Coma] from Black Veil Brides are gonna sit in and play drums. They’re gonna build it. There’s so many crazy motherfuckers around here and we’ll build something crazy,” explained Zero.
Andromeda of Drama Club. Photo Credit: Tara Dettman
While audiences got tastes of both the DJ and the live sets, Andromeda explained that their setup is a mixture of both, without being pigeonholed into either format.
“We’re kind of like a hybrid thing. We started off DJing and then we’re like we know how to play instruments as well. We’re trying different things. Sometimes one of us will be DJing and the other one will be singing. Sometimes one of us will be playing keyboards and the other will be playing drums. [It’s kinda like] whatever works.”
“We don’t really want to define it, because it makes it more fun that way,” added Zero. “But obviously as we grow, we can build and add to it. Right now it’s small. We’re giving birth.”
“Today will be the same, but again it’s like…we have our heat. We bring our heat. We add our spice around it. It’s all good.”
Andromeda of Drama Club. Photo Credit: Tara Dettman
Drama Club have dropped their self titled new EP titled Neon Apocalypse during the Vans Warped Tour and have been giving curious fans a taste of their sound. They spent the summer on the Beatport Stage and showcasing what they are about.
“It’s independently released. It’s not super heavy but it’s sexy. You like girls and like crazy heavy shit – you’ll dig it. But it’s not metal. But girls like it. So I don’t know man. I like to go where the girls are and get heavy.”
“It’s sick, it’s punk rock. It’s got middle fingers but we’re not trying to be Slayer. I love Attila but we’re not gonna try to go out and be them. We’re gonna drop beats on your face.”
Drama Club. Photo Credit: Rei Nishimoto
While Drama Club has been slowly working their music into the club and electronic music circuit, they have swayed away from the EDM tag and instead continue to experiment with their eclectic sound.
“I don’t think so. I mean fair is fair but I’d say we’re an electronic act and we DJ house music and we love all sorts of electronic music and we love instruments. We love being in bands,” said Zero.
“Roof top pool parties. You can’t beat it,” said Andromeda.
“It’s just craziness. You have to see it and live with it. It’s been an interesting one for us because it’s not easily definable. Eventually people will start to define it themselves and will know what it is. Right now we don’t even care. We’re just rockin it. Just comin in hot!,” added Zero.
Drama Club. Photo Credit: Rei Nishimoto
As for future collaborations, The Drama Club will be looking for future collaborations, and possibly with fellow Warped Tour tour mates on future recordings. They both share their ideas on who they have on their minds.
“Everybody. Anybody on this tour that’s badass and anybody’s kickin ass,” said Zero.
“We have a recording studio with us wherever we go. We’ll be high jacking people…,” said Andromeda.
Zero summed it up best, “I’d like to get Attila, Riff Raff and Drama Club together. How about that? That would be some tight shit.”