Ex-Grave Pleasures/The Oath guitarist goes punk with new Maggot Heart video.
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Updates include a “texture” knob, improved output, and refined low-end EQ.

David Lee Roth has shared a brand new piece of artwork in which he makes several references to his replacement in VAN HALEN, Sammy Hagar.

As he has done before, Roth styled the image in the form of a newspaper called The Daily Catastrophe and he incuded several front-page headlines that mention Hagar: “Concrete Flowers For Sam,” “Sam The Man Not Only Will Be Giving His Life For Rock And Roll, But Plans To Be Buried In His Recently Acquired Jet!” and “Red Rocker Refuses To Fly 55 In Afterlife”, the latter of which is a reference to Sammy’s nickname and Hagar’s hit single “I Can’t Drive 55”.

Hagar replaced Roth in VAN HALEN in 1985 and recorded four studio albums with the band — “5150”, “OU812”, “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” and “Balance” — all of which topped the U.S. chart. The highest-charting Roth-led VAN HALEN album was a No. 2, and it took until “1984” to achieve that. (2012’s “A Different Kind Of Truth” also landed at No. 2.)

Asked about his so-called “rivalry” with Roth, Hagar told Planet Rock magazine: “It wasn’t even a blip on my radar.

“I don’t respect Dave’s artistry, but I do think he’s clever and a great showman and what he did with VAN HALEN in the early days was fantastic. VAN HALEN couldn’t have made it without him.

“God bless Dave, but he refuses to acknowledge that VAN HALEN with me was even more successful than VAN HALEN with him, and that’s very stupid of him. That’d be like me not acknowledging what he did for the band before I joined: that would be stupid, wouldn’t it?”

Hagar, Alex Van Halen, Eddie Van Halen and bassist Michael Anthony last teamed up in 2004 for a U.S. summer tour. In exchange for taking part in the tour, Anthony reportedly had to agree to take a pay cut and sign away his rights to the band name and logo.

Early last year, rumors were rampant that the classic-era lineup of VAN HALEN would reunite for the first time since 1984. It has since been revealed that a health setback involving guitarist Eddie was responsible for the tour not materializing.

The rumors originally started with Roth, who hinted to Vulture that VAN HALEN would be playing stadiums with Anthony back in the lineup.

VAN HALEN and Anthony had not been on good terms for more than a decade, with Anthony not invited to join the reunion with Roth that began in 2007. The subsequent two tours and studio album, “A Different Kind Of Truth”, featured Eddie’s son Wolfgang on bass.

Eddie died on October 6 at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, California. The iconic VAN HALEN axeman died from complications due to cancer, his son confirmed.

#SoggyBottom #DLR #DavidLeeRoth #DiamondDave pic.twitter.com/zZ4Q2ZRHgh
— David Lee Roth (@DavidLeeRoth) November 30, 2020

The guitars feature a mahogany body with a maple top with a AAA figured maple veneer, comfortable 1959 hand-rolled neck profile with long neck tenon, aged finish, and Gibson USA BurstBucker 2 & 3 humbuckers.

In a new interview with the “Behind The Vinyl” podcast, Joe Satriani was asked if he started using the technique of tapping notes on his guitar when he first heard Eddie Van Halen in 1978. He responded (hear audio below): “I’d been tapping before that. I think, just like Eddie, ’cause we were the same age and started playing pretty much at the same time, we saw other people on television doing it. So I saw the guitar players in WISHBONE ASH. There was a show in America called ‘Don Kirshner’s [Rock Concert]’, and I think WISHBONE ASH was on one night. And I think my dad was watching it. And I just walked into the room for a second, and I looked and I see the guy playing with his fingers. And I’m, like, ‘Oh my god!’ I just went right up to my room, picked up my guitar and went, ‘That’s a great idea. I’m gonna do that all over the place.’

“My group of friends, everyone was tapping, but the great brilliance of Eddie was what he did with it,” Joe continued. “And that’s what you can say about everything. We knew the same chords — there’s a million guitar players that know exactly the same 12 notes, the same chords, we buy the same strings, we’re using the same guitars, pretty much. So what makes Eddie so special? Why did that genius just say, ‘Well, I’ll take that and just do this with it.’ But he did, and all of us responded like it was godsent.

“The first time I heard Eddie was when ‘Eruption’ came to the radio, and I was sitting there with my guitar just jamming along with the radio, and, yeah, my jaw dropped. And I put my hands down and I went, ‘Oh my god. I’m in the presence of greatness. That guy knows how to use things that I know.’ It’s, like, I’ve got all the tools laid out on my table just like him, but wow, look what he’s doing with them.’ And it just made me smile. I was so happy.

“The other part that made me so happy was because he played so aggressively and so melodically — the whole song, like it was a whole Eddie Van Halen world that he would show you,” Satriani added. “But it was fun. It was rock and roll. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t pretentious. It was still, like, ‘Let’s just have fun.’ And I thought, ‘I need to get everybody that I know in this town to like this, because this is gonna be good for all of us guitar players that really wanna play.’ Cause it was that attitude at the time — I was feeling like people were telling us, ‘Slow down. Don’t play so many notes. No feedback. Try to make your guitar sound like clean guitars from the ’60s or something like that.’ We were waiting for somebody like Eddie to come along and just like reinvent it. And he did. And it was truly great.”

Eddie has said in the past that he was inspired to start doing the finger-tapping trick after watching LED ZEPPELIN at the Los Angeles Forum in the early 1970s. Jimmy Page played the solo from “Heartbreaker”, using both hands to tap out notes on the neck of the guitar, which inspired Eddie to take the technique and refine it, enabling him to play a seemingly impossible flurry of notes and pinched harmonics.

“It’s like having a sixth finger on your left hand,” he explained in 1978, according to BBC. “Instead of picking, you’re hitting a note on the fretboard.”

DEEP PURPLE’s Ritchie Blackmore reportedly claimed that he had seen CANNED HEAT guitarist Harvey Mandel using tapping onstage as early as 1968. DOKKEN guitarist George Lynch corroborated this, mentioning that both he and Van Halen saw Mandel employ “a neo-classic tapping thing” at the Starwood in West Hollywood during the 1970s. Mandel used extensive two-handed tapping techniques on his 1973 album “Shangrenade”.

Eddie used the finger tapping technique during his legendary solo on the aforementioned “Eruption”, voted the second best solo ever by Guitar World magazine.

Bleakheart grapple with loss and grief on “The Visitor.”
The post Video Premiere: BleakHeart – ‘The Visitor’ appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

Alissa White-Gluz says that she is “looking forward to finishing” up her long-awaited solo album.

It was announced in September 2016 that the ARCH ENEMY frontwoman had signed a deal with Napalm Records for the release of her first solo disc, which will feature contributions and collaborations with past and present members of ARCH ENEMY and KAMELOT, as well as MISFITS guitarist Doyle Wolfgang Von Frankenstein.

Alissa offered an update on her solo project during a recent appearance on “The Electric Theater With Clown”, the Internet show hosted by SLIPKNOT’s M. Shawn “Clown” Crahan.

She said (hear audio below): “With ARCH ENEMY, I basically do screams — I’m growling; that’s the type of vocals that I do. But I actually do clean vocals a lot too, and not that many people know that. I’ve done a lot of guest appearances with other bands and other artists where I use that clean voice, but I don’t really use it that much in ARCH ENEMY. So the solo thing is kind of just giving me an outlet to do basically any type of vocal acrobatics that I wanna do, whether it be blues-style singing, which I have a guest thing coming out soon like that, which is pretty cool. Rock singing, power metal singing, opera singing… Basically, the idea is that it’s a way for me to kind of get my musical rocks off in any way that I want, and it’s separate from ARCH ENEMY. So I don’t have to go in and dilute ARCH ENEMY or change what that’s about it, ’cause that wouldn’t be right either. It’s basically something that I kind of just had as this ongoing project that I’ve been working on any time I had time off from ARCH ENEMY touring, which was basically no time until this year. So I’ve been working a lot on it this year and recording it at a home studio that I built. And, yeah, so far I really like it, and I’m looking forward to finishing it up.”

Alissa also talked about her work with Patreon, a membership platform that connects fans directly with musicians, visual artists, writers, nonprofits and other creators they want to support.

She said: “Luckily — I’m very lucky that I have this — I have a Patreon page that I do, and that’s the way that I actually am able to keep in touch with fans. I do virtual meet-and-greets every month. The kind of meet-and-greet that we would normally do in person at every show, I just get to do it in a livestream every month. And I also get to share other music ideas there, poetry, and that motivates me to keep going — keep thinking of new merch ideas, new outfit ideas, collaborations, cover songs. That really, really motivates me, and it’s actually an amazing platform for artists right now, because, obviously, none of us can tour right now. And so this allows to maintain that bond with the fans and also stay motivated and stay supported by the fans so that we can keep making music and sustain ourselves until this pandemic is over. So that takes up a good chunk of my time, and I work on that.”

Alissa said in a 2017 interview that the idea for a solo project came about as a suggestion from ARCH ENEMY’s former lead singer Angela Gossow, who has been managing the band’s career for a decade and also oversees Alissa’s personal affairs.

“[Angela] was, like, ‘Well, you need something. You need something that you can do, because I know you’re a workaholic and you’re not gonna be able to just sit there like this waiting for the next ARCH ENEMY tour,'” Alissa told France’s Duke TV. “And she’s totally right — I needed something else to be able to work on. And also, I have a lot of ideas that maybe don’t sound like ARCH ENEMY and it would be kind of silly to just force them into ARCH ENEMY.”

According to White-Gluz, her debut solo album will be released under the ALISSA banner because she wanted to “keep it simple” and “make it very clear who it is and what it is.” In order to make the disc, Alissa “did a huge life overhaul,” which included building a studio and investing a lot of time and money into learning how to engineer and record, program drums and improving at playing guitar. “Of course, on the album itself we’re gonna have real musicians playing all of these things, but in terms of just getting the style down and the songwriting, it’s something that I need to start on my own,” she explained to Duke TV.

Alissa went on to say that her solo effort will contain some musical surprises. “It doesn’t really sound like ARCH ENEMY — it’s pretty different — but I think it’s pretty cool,” she said. “For example, a song that I’m writing with Oliver [Palotai, keyboards] from KAMELOT doesn’t sound like KAMELOT and it doesn’t sound like ARCH ENEMY, but it’s members of both.”

In the Duke TV interview, Alissa also revealed that her solo album will feature contributions from former NEVERMORE guitarist Jeff Loomis, who joined ARCH ENEMY in late 2014, didn’t have any of his songwriting ideas included on the latter band’s latest album, 2017’s “Will To Power”.

BODOM AFTER MIDNIGHT, the band launched by ex-CHILDREN OF BODOM guitarist/vocalist Alexi Laiho, has completed recording its first new music. The sessions took place at Finnvox studios in Helsinki, Finland.

Earlier today, BODOM AFTER MIDNIGHT posted a short video from the studio and included the following caption: “Recordings finished now and the files are ready for mixing. More info coming soon…”

BODOM AFTER MIDNIGHT made its live debut on October 23 at Rytmikorjaamo in Seinäjoki, Finland. The 17-song show consisted entirely of CHILDREN OF BODOM material.

Joining Alexi in the group are drummer Waltteri Väyrynen, guitarist Daniel Freyberg (ex-CHILDREN OF BODOM), bassist Mitja Toivonen (ex-SANTA CRUZ) and touring keyboardist Lauri Salomaa.

Laiho recently said that he will not shy away from performing his former band’s songs when he hits the road with BODOM AFTER MIDNIGHT. He told Kaaos TV (translated from Finnish): “We will be playing CHILDREN OF BODOM songs as that is what most of the audience want to hear. Those songs are written by me anyway, so I dont see any reason why not to play them. There will be so-called ‘basic’ songs, but there are also plans to play one or two songs live which CHILDREN OF BODOM has never played so far and some songs which we haven’t played live in ages, so the setlist will be a good mix. We try to play as diverse setlist as possible on each show.”

Jaska Raatikainen (drums), Henri “Henkka T. Blacksmith” Seppälä (bass) and Janne Wirman (keyboards) announced their departures from CHILDREN OF BODOM in October 2019. Two months later, they confirmed that they were the rightful owners of the CHILDREN OF BODOM brand.

CHILDREN OF BODOM played its final show on December 15, 2019 at the Black Box in Helsinki Ice Hall. A short time later, Finnish music magazine Soundi reported that the rights to the CHILDREN OF BODOM name are held by AA & Sewira Consulting Oy, the company owned by Raatikainen, Seppälä and Wirman. In June 2019, the trio filed an application with the National Board of Patents and Registration of Finland, and their application was subsequently granted for a five-year period starting on October 1, 2019. As a result, Laiho, who was CHILDREN OF BODOM’s singer, guitarist and main songwriter, isn’t authorized to use the band’s name without permission from Wirman, Raatikainen and Seppälä.

In November 2019, Laiho admitted to Helsingin Sanomat that there had been tensions in the BODOM camp for quite some time.

“The original decision [to end the band in its current form] came when the other guys said they just couldn’t do it anymore,” he said. “There were family reasons for it. I respect their decision. I myself have a wife and stepdaughter in Australia, and my wife understands my lifestyle. I’m pretty much gone [most of the time], but always I come back and I give them my all. Nothing is more important to me.”

According to Laiho, things came to a head when CHILDREN OF BODOM performed in Russia in October 2019.

“We fought a lot within the band, and I can honestly admit that those fights were mainly my fault,” he said. “They always started with some misunderstanding.”

Relations within the band apparently got so bad during the Russian tour that it looked as if CHILDREN OF BODOM would break up right there and then. But cooler heads prevailed, and the group decided that the shows in Finland would be their last with the most recent formation.

CHILDREN OF BODOM’s last album, “Hexed”, came out in March 2019 via Nuclear Blast Records.

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