Anthrax will release their long in the works new concert DVD, Kings Among Scotland on April 27th via Nuclear Blast/Megaforce Records. Producer/director, Film24Productions’ Paul M. Green (Opeth, The Damned, the Levellers) discusses the project in this video. Continue reading
Anthrax has been spending their winter on the road with touring pals Killswitch Engage on round two of the “Killthrax Tour”, with openers Havoc. Anthrax are frequent visitors to New England but haven’t played The Palladium for a few a while. The band has been just killing it live and are getting ready to release new live album and DVD package, Kings of Scotland (Nuclear Blast/Megaforce). You can pre-order the collection here, or pick it up on April 27th. In the meantime check out this photo set of the performance at The Palladium from Evil Robb Photography. Continue reading
In a post the Facebook page of the Borgholm Brinner Festival, an announcement was posted that Anthrax has canceled their appearance at the fest because they have canceled their entire summer tour has canceled its plans to tour Europe this summer “due to scheduling conflicts.”. The band added that “they sincerely apologize to all of their fans and hope to see them very soon” in a statement. No further announcement has been made or announced Borgholm Brinner Festival is curated by In Flames and takes place on July 27-28 at Borgholm Castle in Borgholm, Sweden. Continue reading
The wait for new music from Brendon Small is officially over! The genius behind Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse will be releasing the highly anticipated follow-up to Galaktikon tomorrow(August 25th) via Megaforce Records/MRI, but thanks to AV Club, you can stream Galaktikon II: Become The Storm in its entirety today!Continue reading
Sean Killian who as the vocalist and frontman for seminal second wave of American thrash metal band Vio-Lence has revealed that he is suffering from end stage liver disease (cirrhosis of the liver) and is on the list for a partial liver transplant to save his life. Continue reading
The wait for new music from Brendon Small is officially over! The genius behind Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse will be releasing the highly anticipated follow-up to Galaktikon on August 25th via Megaforce Records/MRI, and the first single has made its way online.Continue reading
Legend status rockers Living Colour have announced their new album Shade, due out on via Megaforce Records on September 8. You can see the artwork below.Continue reading
Masked industrial metallers Mushroomhead have announced there are heading into the studio to create their new album, their eight in all, this fall. The band has booked a fall tour of the USA as well, with Unsaid Fate, Sunflower Dead, Raven Black, and Death Division.Continue reading
Anthrax have released a new video for their new single, ‘Monster At The End’. The innovative clip was helmed by director Jack Bennett and can be seen at this link at Fangoria.com or below:
http://vevo.ly/ZYLbA1
Jack Bennet discusses his concept for the video: shot with four still photographers placed strategically on a Florida set while the five members of Anthrax performed the track live while he shot with the entire video with Super Sharp HD video still cameras. Each photographer would hold down his camera’s shutter button continuously for the near-four minute-long song, capturing a steady stream of hundreds of still images.
“Hey, it might have been a great idea, but holding down the shutter button on a still camera for that long a time? All we would have ended up with were four jammed cameras!”
“Video shutter speeds are faster and more reliable than anything we could have done manually, and we wanted as big a pool of still images to choose from as we could get.”
In post-production, Bennett went through the footage frame by frame and hand-picked the still images he wanted to animate – hundreds of them. Rather than print the video at 24 frames per second, he animated movement of the band members using the still images, creating a jagged, crude motion. “We didn’t want fluidity, we wanted the video to have more of a comic book feel to it, like flipbook animation.”
Bennett and his crew went one step further, taking a cue from the legendary Walt Disney animators of the 1920s and 1930s, who used the technique of rotoscoping, the art of painstakingly hand-painting individual cels to embellish a primary image.
Employing the fundamentals of rotoscope, Bennett has peppered the video with monsters, tattoos that come alive, explosions, popping eyeballs, speech bubbles, morphed images, and nods to the influence of ‘Creepshow.’ There’s even a frame or two of The Skull King, the evil character from Anthrax’s ‘Blood Eagle Wings’ music video that Bennett also directed. Actor Justin Michael Terry, who played The Skull King, is The Runner in ‘Monster At The End.’
“We used a lot of stop-motion effects as well as other special and visual effects in the same way as was done in the original Exorcist film. “We even added a little bit of grain, some dust and some scratches just to give it that analog feel.”
Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante commented:
‘The Monster at the End’ video takes us back to our love of comics and horror. We’ve always loved the ‘Creepshow’ movies and wanted something like that for this video. Jack is easy to work with, all we did was perform the song, he did the real work with the editing and achieving the look that we wanted.
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In 2016, for the first time since the eighties, New York thrashers Anthrax find themselves with a genuine burden of expectancy being placed upon their shoulders. Not since John Bush joined in 1992 have the eyes of so many been fixed on the band.
The reason for this is all thanks to 2011’s Worship Music (Megaforce, Nuclear Blast). After the rather colourless Stomp 442 (Elektra/Warner) and its largely forgettable follow-up Volume 8 – The Threat is Real (Ignition), the band released the perennially underrated We’ve Come for You All (Sanctuary/Nuclear Blast). Although clearly superior to their previous couple of outings, its reception was still mixed and far from anything they had enjoyed during the 80s and the turn of the 90s.
However, when Worship Music landed, all that changed. Although possibly helped by a combination of expectancy levels being at an all time low due to more publicized unrest and personnel changes within the camp, as well as there being a gap of eight years between records, the 2011 “comeback” album helped itself no end by simply being one of the strongest records the band had released to date. All of a sudden, the messy upheavals and well documented hirings and firings were forgotten as fans were treated to one of the best Metal albums of the year. Worship Music was a roaring success.
So, having firmly re-established themselves with a critically lauded new album and almost constant touring, the band’s next trick had to be how to maintain that momentum from inside the studio again. A pretty mammoth task they just about succeed in achieving with latest album For All Kings (Megaforce).
After a restrained drum and cello introduction, a typically Anthrax riff takes over and opener ‘You Gotta Believe’ begins properly, hammering away at you until you can catch your breath during its quiet middle section, before it builds back up to a suitably big finish. I’m afraid that by the time vocalist Joey Belladonna belts out “your golden halo is burned and melted” during ‘Monster at the End’ it’s already all over for you as the chorus digs its claws in, almost physically forcing you to sing along, regardless of where you are and how many strange looks you may attract.
Initially led by Belladonna, the title track is simply a monster, with drummer Charlie Benante quickly taking centre stage, owning the song completely with one of his most confident performances in recent years. ‘Breathing Lightning’ and ‘Suzerain’ are big songs with big choruses, and the thrashy as hell ‘Evil Twin’ is as close to old school Anthrax as you could possibly wish for. ‘Blood Eagle Wings’ is a lengthy, but worthwhile eight minutes, and ‘Defend Avenge’ has an opening riff reminiscent of ‘Among the Living’ but is also the album’s first throwaway track, although it does contain a quality guitar solo and improves as it goes along. ‘All Of Them Thieves’ is another (slight) disappointment, but again features another great solo from new boy Jon Donais (Shadows Fall) and gets better towards the end.
Bassist Frank Bello takes control of the intro to ‘This Battle Chose Us’, an improvement on the previous two tracks, and proceedings are brought to an impressive close with a short, sharp burst from the satisfyingly speedy ‘Zero Tolerance’.
A couple of wobbles during the second half aside, ‘For All Kings’ is every bit the worthy successor to Worship Music, although there could be a question as to how much material (if indeed any) was salvaged from the studio at the end of those previous sessions, such are the distinct similarities between the two records in places.
Mainman Scott Ian might come in for a lot of (mostly anonymous, and online) flak when it comes to decisions within the band (his band to be fair), but whatever missteps he may or may not have made in the past, he’s certainly helped make sure the band have a firm footing both for now and a few years to come.
8.0/10
GARY ALCOCK
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