Month: March 2021

A streamlined switcher that includes MIDI, 8 programmable loops, and more.

In a recent interview with Australia’s The Project, KISS frontman Paul Stanley was asked how he came up with the band’s name nearly five decades ago. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I thought that it was something that would sound familiar no matter where you were in the world. It was the kind of name where a word like that, you would go, ‘Oh, I’ve heard of KISS.’ And it also had so many different meanings — a passionate kiss, a kiss of death, whatever. So it was a word that I think was open to interpretation. And I guess it worked, right? We’re here, what? 48 years later — something like that. But who’s counting?”

It was previously reported that Stanley — born Stanley Harvey Eisen — came up with the name KISS after drummer Peter Criss mentioned he was in a band called LIPS. Stanley and co-founder Gene Simmons started a band called WICKED LESTER in 1972, which later became KISS.

KISS launched its farewell trek in January 2019 but was forced to put it on hold last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“End Of The Road” was originally scheduled to conclude on July 17, 2021 in New York City but is now expected to last well into 2022.

KISS last performed this past New Year’s Eve in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The concert broke Guinness world records for highest flame projection in a music concert and for most flame projections launched simultaneously in a music concert.

KISS’s current lineup consists of original members Stanley and Simmons, alongside later band additions, guitarist Tommy Thayer (since 2002) and drummer Eric Singer (on and off since 1991).

KISS hasn’t released a full-length disc of new music since 2012’s “Monster”, which sold 56,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 3 on The Billboard 200 chart. The band’s previous LP, “Sonic Boom”, opened with 108,000 units back in October 2009 to enter the chart at No. 2. It was KISS’s highest-charting LP ever.

Paul Stanley – Kiss | The Project

Ahead of their upcoming Aussie tour, KISS frontman Paul Stanley Zoomed in to reveal how the band chose their name, and what came a close second.
Head to https://bit.ly/38cv2Pc for all the details.
#TheProjectTV

Posted by The Project on Friday, March 5, 2021

Former JOURNEY drummer Deen Castronovo says that he was on opiates for over a year while waiting to get his back surgery during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 56-year-old musician, who had been sober for nearly five years after being fired from JOURNEY, revealed his latest ordeal in an Instagram post earlier today.

He wrote: “Quick update my friends.. Day 4 of detox and finally feeling better. The 1st 3 days were torture. After being on opiates for over a year due to Covid restrictions and not being able to get my back surgery this is something I never want to go thru again. Opiates are evil and the withdrawals are murder. Don’t go it alone!”

Deen was dismissed from JOURNEY in 2015 following years of alcohol and drug abuse that led to him being sentenced to four years’ probation for a variety of charges involving his now-wife (including physical abuse, coercion, and unlawful use of a weapon).

Castronovo had been arrested after a 24-day methamphetamine binge, and later publicly accepted responsibility for his actions, saying, “Domestic violence is a choice.”

In a 2016 interview with Ultimate Classic Rock, Deen said that his heart sinks when he hears of musicians’ deaths as the result of drug addiction.

“Every time I see one of those, the first thing that comes to mind is, ‘That could have been me,'” he said. “The way I was using and drinking would have killed a rhinoceros.

“It hurts — you see these guys and they’re so talented. It could be me. The next time, it will be me. If I do this again, it’s just a matter of time. I’ve done the jail, I’ve done the institutions. What’s next?”

Castronovo recently announced his exit from THE DEAD DAISIES in order to prepare for his back surgery. He has since been replaced by Tommy Clufetos, who has previously played with BLACK SABBATH, Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Zombie, Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper, among others. Clufetos previously toured with THE DEAD DAISIES in 2015.

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PAPA ROACH singer Jacoby Shaddix spoke to Radio.com LIVE! Check In about the band’s upcoming follow-up to 2019’s “Who Do You Trust?” album. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “We’ve got about three-quarters of the record finished. We took some time and we rented a house all together, locked in this place for a month. Everybody got COVID tested. Nobody left the house for a month. There was no in-and-outs. We had food delivered, and we had a friend of ours cooking out for us. And it was music 24 hours a day for a month. Literally, there was something happening at all hours. And this creative process, we got lost in it.

“I find that it was time for us to kind of shake things up in that way, ’cause the last couple of records, we’ve just gone into the studio and just started writing,” he explained. “Tobin [Esperance, bass], Jerry [Horton, guitar] and myself and Tony [Palermo, drums], we were just, like, ‘Let’s do something different.’ And so this shut-in vibe really… It’s like the farther you dig down creatively and you discover this piece, it’s, like, ‘Let’s go farther down the rabbit hole. Let’s go farther down the rabbit hole.’ And that experience for us really uncovered some rad sounds, some great songs, and just overall a good bonding experience for us. Because we’ve been doing this thing for years, and we really started to miss each other, being home.

“It’s a family — it really is. These are my brothers. I spend a large portion of my life with these guys on the road. And so after we are home with our families for a while, it’s, like, ‘All right, now [I’ve] gotta get with our other family. I miss my other family.’

“We wrote some ill music, and now we’re just putting the finishing touches on a bunch of it,” Jacoby added. “And I’ve gotta tell you, man, this next era, this next phase is… I am beyond excited. I think it’s some of the best songwriting we’ve ever done. It’s mature, but then there’s this reckless idleness to it. It’s just this duality of styles. We have our first acoustic ballad we’ve ever done. And it’s not like a, ‘Oh, honey, sweetie, sweetie, baby’ kind of ballad. It’s a song that just grabs you by the heartstrings and just toys with you. It’s just a super-dynamic rock record that I think is gonna blow people’s minds.”

Last month, Shaddix told Germany’s Rock Antenne that PAPA ROACH would not release a new album until the coronavirus pandemic has subsided.

“The touring is not coming back for the rest of this year,” he said. “I mean, there’ll be some pop-up shows here and there, but we’re not gonna drop a new album and tour until 2022. We’re just gonna wait it out.”

In January, a snippet of a brand new PAPA ROACH song called “Stand Up” was included in commercial for Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC) partnership with ESPN.

PAPA ROACH’s second greatest-hits collection, “Greatest Hits Vol. 2: The Better Noise Years”, is due on March 19 on Better Noise Music.

“Greatest Hits Vol. 2 – The Better Noise Years” includes 12 of the band’s top 10 hits released between 2010 to 2019 as well as three previously unreleased remixes and two unreleased acoustic recordings recorded live at the YouTube Studios in New York City.

“Who Do You Trust?” was released in January 2019. The disc was produced by Nick “RAS” Furlong and Colin Cunningham except for the song “Top Of The World”, which is helmed by Jason Evigan.

In December, PAPA ROACH released a five-song EP, “20/20”, featuring “new takes on old jams,” including “Last Resort” and “Scars”.

Photo credit: Bryan Roatch

Hail death and watch The Fading Flame with California death metal luminaries Putrescine.
The post Full Album Stream: Putrescine – “The Fading Flame” appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

MOONSPELL singer Fernando Ribeiro has defended LACUNA COIL over the Italian band’s decision to take part in an initiative dubbed “L’Ultimo Concerto?” (Last Concert) to highlight the increasingly uncertain future of music venues. Instead of delivering live performances as part of a scheduled free virtual stream on February 27, each of around 130 Italian artists was filmed taking the stage at a different venue and then standing there in silence as a way of commemorating the one-year mark since the first Italian venues closed.

Addressing the fact that some LACUNA COIL fans felt shortchanged by the experience, Fernando told Barbara Caserta of Italy’s Linea Rock (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I understand that sometimes the fans don’t mean any bad things about being disappointed. Being disappointed is something that happens every day, and people should grow up and learn that being disappointed is a part of our lives as well and that sometimes bands use their power and use their reach in order to help their community. For instance, here in Portugal, we played four shows in 2020, and only with the musicians community coming together, fighting the government, creating awareness for our situation that we could, in between the lockdowns, play these four shows. Four shows is nothing for a band such as LACUNA COIL or MOONSPELL, but last year, it was everything. So I support them, obviously.

“I understand that no man or woman is an island,” he continued. “We belong to a community. We cannot perform without our crew. We cannot perform without our fans. We cannot perform without the clubs. And people, if they like music, they should take this opportunity to understand that music is not only about the bands. We are just the face of a much larger body of people. And obviously, LACUNA COIL, as the great people they are, they wanted to show that to their fans, and I think in the end, when everything comes down, they did the right thing, and I’m quite proud of them. And I think that even though sometimes that happens with MOONSPELL — we get a lot of heat sometimes — but I think they stood their ground, and I think that’s what bands are for. We are not just merely entertainers — we are flesh-and-blood people. We need also to put the pasta in the table. So I think [any opportunity] to create awareness is always a great thing, and I wish more metal bands had the guys to create awareness too.

“The first thing MOONSPELL did on the pandemic was not to ask money for ourselves,” Fernando added. “We still had [a little bit of money] left from the tour, but we raised money as a fundraiser to the Portuguese league against cancer. Because they didn’t have any equipment — no masks, et cetera. So our fans came together with us and we could raise some money.

“There’s this part that sometimes people don’t like. But I think only doing stuff like LACUNA COIL helps you understand that music is a community and not just fans and bands. They are the top of the community, but we should defend everything else. So, bravo! [Laughs]”

Organized by KeepOn Live, Arci, Assomusica and Live DMA, the “L’Ultimo Concerto?” campaign was announced in January when the venues shared images on social media of their year of foundation and the year 2021 with a question mark, suggesting that their closures due to the coronavirus pandemic could be permanent.

Between March and June 2020, the Italian government imposed a national lockdown by restricting people’s movements to contain the pandemic. Thus, museums and cinemas closed and all cultural events were either canceled or rescheduled.

Around 300,000 people working in theaters, music venues, cinemas and cultural spaces in Italy have been rendered jobless since they shut their doors due to the coronavirus crisis.

MOONSPELL’s 13th studio album, “Hermitage”, was released on February 26 via Napalm Records.

The pedal combines band-splitting, exotic distortion curves, multi-band tremolo, compression, morphing, and flexible stereo processing.

AVENGED SEVENFOLD’s sophomore album, 2003’s “Waking The Fallen”, was officially certified platinum on March 17 by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) for sales in excess of one million copies. On the same day, the LP’s lead single “Unholy Confessions” was certified gold for accumulating 500,000 certified units.

The only other AVENGED SEVENFOLD album to achieve platinum status in the U.S. is the band’s third LP, 2005’s “City Of Evil”.

The RIAA developed its gold and platinum awards program in 1958 to honor artists and create a standard by which to measure the commercial success of a sound recording. The program trademarked the gold record and formalized the industry practice of presenting awards to artists for music sales achievements.

Presently, the RIAA awards a gold honor for 500,000 units sold, a platinum honor for 1 million units sold and a diamond award for more than 10 million units sold.

In the streaming age, each permanent digital album or physical album sale count as 1 unit for certification purposes, 10 permanent track downloads from the album count as 1 unit for certification purposes, and 1,500 on-demand audio and/or video streams from the album count as 1 unit. For songs, 150 on-demand audio and/or video streams count as 1 unit for certification purposes.

According to the RIAA, one equivalent song unit is equal to a single digital song sale, or 150 on-demand audio and/or video streams.

Last month, AVENGED SEVENFOLD singer M. Shadows told the Minneapolis, Minnesota radio station 93X that “70 percent” of the follow-up to 2016’s “The Stage” album was “done.” He said: “We’re working on stuff. We have some things we can’t finish right now ’cause of COVID — string players, et cetera. We know Andy [Wallace, AVENGED SEVENFOLD’s longtime mixer] doesn’t wanna travel, or his management doesn’t want him to travel because of COVID. So there’s just a lot of things going on.”

As for when fans can expect to see the new AVENGED SEVENFOLD LP released, M. Shadows said: “It doesn’t make sense for us right now to put out a record and not be able to tour it. The world has changed. Putting out a record on Spotify without touring for a rock band, it just doesn’t make sense to us. So we’re gonna wait till everything is back, then we’ll come out with the record, finish it up, and all will be good.”

Also in February, AVENGED SEVENFOLD guitarist Zacky Vengeance told Detroit’s WRIF radio station that he and his bandmates have done “lots and lots of writing — at a lot slower pacer than usual” — during the coronavirus pandemic. “Now that we are a little bit older, we move around a little bit slower, but [we’ve done] tons of writing,” he said. “We’ve gone to the studio. It was kind of a weird time to do anything in 2020, but that’s when we felt like it was a good time to go out there and start tracking all the stuff that we had in us.

“But, like I said, we’re doing it at a slow pace, so we’re still in the process of recording,” he explained. “We’re taking it really, really slow, making sure everything is the way we like it. We’re not in a big rush to get anything out, mainly ’cause we wanna get on the road, and we wanna be able to bring it to life. We wanna tour, we wanna travel, we wanna play songs that people wanna hear; we wanna expose them to some new stuff. ‘Cause I just feel like rushing to put something out right now and letting it dissipate because of the void, while people are worried about where their next meal is coming from or the paycheck, the last thing in the world on people’s minds is, ‘AVENGED SEVENFOLD’s gonna put out a new album, and that’s gonna be the saving grace for us all.’ And I feel like we’ll take it slow, let the world get a little bit back to normal, and when people are ready, we’ll know — we have a good sense of that. We’ll slowly finish it up, and then unleash it when the world’s ready.”

Last December, M. Shadows told Kerrang! magazine about the musical direction of the new AVENGED material: “The [new] record sounds nothing like ‘The Stage’ — it’s a completely new direction, and it sounds nothing like anything we’ve done. That’s all I’ll say about it: it’s over the top, and it’s very eclectic and wild.”

AVENGED SEVENFOLD kept a low profile during 2019 and will likely not return to the road until the end of this year or early 2022. A blood blister on M. Shadows’s vocal cords forced the band to cancel a summer 2018 tour with PROPHETS OF RAGE and THREE DAYS GRACE.

Asked if he is fully healed up now, M. Shadows told 93X: “I feel good, man. I’m just working on a new technique so that I can make sure I don’t have any problems anymore. For the last year, that’s what I’ve been doing — is switching up a lot of things, singing from a different place, and just making sure that when I hit the stage again, I don’t resort back to old bad habits.”

“The Stage” was surprise-released in October 2016. The release of the disc, which was announced the night it went on sale, earned the lowest sales of an AVENGED SEVENFOLD album in 11 years. It sold 76 thousand copies in its first week, 73 thousand of which were physical.

“The Stage”, AVENGED’s debut for Capitol, sold less than half as many copies in its first week as the group’s two previous efforts, 2010’s “Nightmare” and 2013’s “Hail To The King”.

In a new interview with Kylie Olsson’s YouTube show “Life In Six Strings”, former DOKKEN and current FOREIGNER bassist Jeff Pilson was asked if he has ever given any thought to writing a book. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I am actually working on a book right now, but it has nothing to do with my life. Well, it does indirectly. I’m actually writing a yoga book at the moment. There’s a little bit of autobiographical material in it, but I don’t think I’m enough of a superstar for anybody to really be interested in my life. I think I’m just being realistic. I feel it would be presumptious to think people would be all that interested in my life. [Laughs] Maybe 10 people would. [Laughs] My family. Some of these [musical] projects I do, who knows if more than 10 people are even listening? [Laughs]”

Asked how he first became interested in yoga, Pilson said: “I’ve been doing yoga for 43 years — way before it was trendy. I had a back injury. Somebody told me to do it. I spent three hours on my back unable to move, and in that time, I decided I was going to do something. And I was only 20. So I started doing it, fell in love with it. I’ve made a lifelong commitment to it, and feel that it’s been so important for keeping me sane. ‘Cause I’m a fairly neurotic individual. [Laughs] But it’s really kept me sane and kept me focused and gives me great energy. Yoga and meditation are really important in my life.”

He added that he is “writing a book that I think could apply to a lot of people, which is what yoga does on a day-to-day basis.”

Jeff went on to say that he is just about “halfway though” writing the book and he has yet to secure a publisher for it. “I do have an editor that has been helping me out immensely, so when the time comes, I’ll have something at least legitimate to give them to read,” he explained. “But I’m not in any hurry. This is the kind of stuff that the post-touring life is gonna use a little more of. So I’m just working towards that.”

In the meantime, FOREIGNER and DOKKEN fans who are interested in Pilson’s yoga-related endeavors can see him teaching a meditation class on Monday nights via the Hot For Yoga web site. “It’s been very, very cool,” he told “Life In Six Strings”.

Pilson is best known for playing with DOKKEN and FOREIGNER, but he also toured with DIO in the 1990s and performed on three of the group’s albums — “Strange Highways” (1993), “Angry Machines” (1996) and the group’s tenth and final studio release, “Master Of The Moon” (2004).

Join Jeff Pilson for his weekly virtual Yoga class, hosted at HotForYogaSCV.com/

Posted by Foreigner on Sunday, August 23, 2020