Month: March 2021

Max Cavalera has reflected on the breakup of SEPULTURA’s classic lineup, saying that the situation in the band was “rotten from the inside.”

The Brazilian four-piece fell apart in 1996 with the exit of Max after the rest of the band split with his wife Gloria as their manager. His brother, drummer Igor Cavalera, stuck around with the group for another ten years before leaving SEPULTURA and re-teaming with Max in CAVALERA CONSPIRACY.

Although SEPULTURA has maintained a diehard fanbase in all parts of the world throughout the band’s nearly four-decade history, Max-era albums “Roots” and “Chaos A.D.” were by far SEPULTURA’s most commercially successful, having both been certified gold in the U.S. for sales in excess of five hundred thousand copies.

Max looked back on his final album with SEPULTURA during a brand new interview with France’s Heavy1/Hard Force. He said (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). “The whole ‘Roots’ thing is a very confusing time in my life, because I don’t think I knew how to deal with the whole fame thing very well — especially in Brazil. We went to Brazil, and the record was massive — like real, real big; like BEATLES big. And I remember I tried to go to the mall with my wife, and we got mobbed. And I knew that 70 percent of the people didn’t own a SEPULTURA record; it was just the curiosity of the celebrity thing. And that really bugged me. It was, like, ‘Yeah, all these people, they don’t give a fuck. They’re just there. It’s a thing. I don’t understand this thing.’ So I struggled with that a little bit. At that time, I was drinking heavily and taking drugs. So I was wild. And, of course, it is marked by glory and tragedy. At the same time you’re commemorating this big record, there’s a big tragedy right in the middle of the thing, which is Dana’s [Wells] death,” referring to the August 1996 passing of his stepson. “And it’s bitter, man. I don’t think I ever actually fully enjoyed what ‘Roots’ brought because of that. It was cut in half, because of that. But that’s life, man.”

Asked if Dana’s death was the starting point for many of the disagreements that led to the eventual breakup of SEPULTURA’s classic lineup, Max said: “The situation in the band, it had been going bad [even before that]. It wasn’t the beginning of that, but it added to it. And one of the main reasons why it added to it — a lot of people don’t know the story — we were in England, ready to do the [Monsters Of Rock festival at Castle] Donington with Ozzy [Osbourne]. And we received the news that Dana died. And my wife was in total despair. And I’m her husband; I have to comfort her. So I [flew] back to America to be with her. And I found out later that Andreas’s [Kisser, guitar] wife tried to move the body, tried to steal Dana’s body and tried to get him buried real quick so we could go back on tour. And that’s — c’mon, man. I was, like, ‘Who does that?’ It seriously made me think about the people I’m making music with. Are those my real friends? It was confusing, man. And then it got worse because, eventually, they ganged up, including my brother — I cannot put him out of that thing; he was part of it — it was like a mutiny. The three guys against me, and against Gloria. So they wouldn’t talk to her. That last European tour, it was just pure misery; it was miserable. Of course, it [didn’t] show in the music; the music [was] great [and] the shows were great. But the other 23 hours of the day was fucking misery — trying to deal with that. And eventually her contract was done. They always say in the press that she got fired by those guys, but that’s not true. Her contract was actually done; she decided not to renew it. In fact, she told me, ‘Go with them if you want to. It’s your choice. Don’t make me hold you back.’ And I just couldn’t do it because of things like that. There’s that kind of stuff going on — heavy stuff.”

According to Cavalera, there were other differences that contributed to the split, including the rest of the band’s aspirations to work with more established and notable figures within the music industry.

“They had different ideas,” he said. “One of the main ideas was to replace Gloria and a lot of our crew and people with very ‘professional,’ big people. And to me, that seems a fucked-up thing to do, where the people that helped you get to that was [these] people, and now that you’re big and successful, now you can hire anybody. You’re just, like, ‘All right. Fuck you. You’re done. Your shit’s done. We’re going with [these] successful people.’ I didn’t agree with that, because I think everything was going good. We were getting all the major festivals; we were supposed to headline Big Day Out in Australia, so she couldn’t be that bad of a manager, the way they envisioned.

“Honestly, I think the best thing we could have done would have been to take a whole year off, and everybody should go somewhere, clear their heads and come back a year later, and talk about it,” he added. “But even with that, there was no remedy. It’s broke — the thing is broke. It’s rotten, man, from the inside. It needed something, and eventually what it needed was separation.”

Last year, SEPULTURA bassist Paulo Xisto Pinto Jr. said that he has had “zero” contact with Max, adding that a reunion with the band’s original frontman would have to happen “naturally.”

Back in 2017, Igor Cavalera told The Salt Lake Tribune that he and Max “believe SEPULTURA doesn’t really make sense nowadays, to do what they’re doing.” The drummer also downplayed the possibility of a reunion of SEPULTURA’s classic lineup, saying: “Unless it’s something really solid — and we haven’t seen that from their part — of doing something totally professional and coming together, trying to do something like that. At the end of the day, it would be special for the fans, so it’s not like a closed door, but at the same time, we have no time to spend energy with this kind of thing. So we just move forward.”

Max echoed his brother’s sentiments, telling The Salt Lake Tribune that he doesn’t even think about his former bandmates much. “For a time — for a long time — there was a war in the press, like, ‘He’ll talk this, I’ll talk that,'” he explained. “I got really tired of it, honestly. I’m not gonna do that anymore. So let them go their way and do their thing, and we’re gonna do our thing, and I think that’s the best for everybody.”

While stopping short of completely ruling out a reunion of SEPULTURA’s classic lineup, Max said: “Right now, we don’t even need it. It’s been so much of that kind of bad vibes through the years that I don’t even know how that would even really work out. I think what [Igor and I] are doing is the closest thing to that, and it works great, it works like a charm. It’s amazing.”

Igor and Max have spent much of the last six years celebrating the 20th anniversary of SEPULTURA’s “Roots” and 30th anniversary of “Beneath The Remains” and “Arise”, respectively, on tour all over the world.

SEPULTURA’s current lineup — vocalist Derrick Green, guitarist Andreas Kisser, bassist Paulo Xisto Pinto Jr. and drummer Eloy Casagrande — released its latest album, “Quadra”, in February 2020 via Nuclear Blast Records.

A fashionable fuzz that uses a JFET preamp and includes a noise gate.

An ultra compact 15-watt amp that works with any speaker rated at 8 or 16 ohms.

According to Grave Miasma: “There is no more ego-vanquishing burial rite than one that pounds flesh and bone into nothingness.”
The post Video Premiere: Grave Miasma – “Rogyapa” appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

NWOAHM kings Haunt release the first single from Beautiful Distraction, due out April 2.
The post Haunt Release New Track “In Our Dreams” From Forthcoming “Beautiful Distraction” LP appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

During an appearance on Kylie Olsson’s YouTube show “Life In Six Strings”, EXTREME guitarist Nuno Bettencourt confirmed that the band’s first new album since 2008’s “Saudades De Rock” has been “done for a year now.” He explained: “We were gonna release it last March, and the fucking pandemic came along. We debated and debated, and fans are still busting my balls every fucking day [on social media], ‘Where is that album?’ And it’s hard to explain that it’s, like, we can easily put it out — easily. Just, ‘There it is. It’s on iTunes. Go get it.’, Or, ‘It’s on Spotify. Go get it.’ But we’re a touring band. And it might be a little old-school thinking — we wanna come and play this thing for you, and we wanna release it when we come and play it for you — not at the same time; it’ll be soon. But we wanna be able to put it out and then have you be excited about it, live with it, come see the shows, come here, come there and do it. Now, if the pandemic keeps going the way it is, then we’re not gonna be able to have that fucking cake and eat it too.”

According to Nuno, EXTREME doesn’t yet have a new label home, which is part of the reason the band has been reluctant to release any fresh music during the pandemic. “We were gonna start going to new labels, but labels were shutting down,” he said. “People weren’t making deals. Yeah, there were Zoom meetings and stuff, but they didn’t even know what the fuck was happening with them. People aren’t even going back to offices yet and shit like that. So we didn’t wanna shop the EXTREME album as well in a time where people are going, ‘Really? You wanna talk about doing a record contract when people are fucking dying and we don’t even know what’s happening and the world is shut down?’ So we said, ‘Hit pause.’ And now we’re starting to have meetings again. Over the last few weeks, we started putting deals in place so we can get this thing out. And I’m really, really excited about it, as a guitar player, to share that with you and everybody.”

Nuno previously discussed EXTREME’s new album during a February 2020 appearance on “Trunk Nation: L.A. Invasion” on SiriusXM. Asked why it took EXTREME more than 12 years to release a follow-up to “Saudades De Rock”, Nuno said: “To be honest with you, we didn’t wait that long. We probably have about three to four albums done. Not ‘done done,’ but we did an album pretty quickly.

“One thing I always said to Gary [Cherone, EXTREME singer], ever since we started this band, is I never wanna release anything that I can’t wait to play people, that I just can’t wait to share,” he continued. “I don’t wanna put out albums just for the sake of putting out albums. I loved the stuff we were doing, but then I started writing some other stuff that I liked better. And then we kind of scrapped that. Then I latched on to something where we thought we had an album done about two years ago, and then I just tapped into these three or four songs. It was a ‘stop the presses’ kind of moment for me, and I went, ‘That’s it.’ It reminded me of when we kind of tapped into [1990’s] ‘Pornograffitti’ back then, to me, where it was a big kind of uppercut. Gary refers to this album as ‘Porno 2.0’ every time he jokes about it, but it’s very much like that kind of excitement for us.”

A live package celebrating EXTREME’s “Pornograffitti” album was made available in October 2016. Titled “Pornograffitti Live 25 / Metal Meltdown”, it included a DVD, Blu-ray and audio CD recorded at the band’s show at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Casino on May 30, 2015, where they performed the record in full.

Take a look at Texas for this month’s Bandcamp Friday.
The post Bandcamp Friday: Texas Edition appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

SLIPKNOT’s Jay Weinberg spoke to Sweetwater about how he was influenced and inspired by his father Max, who has been a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E STREET BAND since 1974.

“A piece of advice that my dad passed down to me that I’m always grateful for, that’s kind of key information for any drummer to have, is you’re always gonna be best served with whatever practice you’re doing is to a metronome,” he said (see video below). “And to me, playing along to a metronome, doing exercises and just playing beats and stuff while keeping myself accountable, learning how to play with it as an instrument, to me, that’s been what serves the music that I love to play. It kind of adds that frenetic energy where it feels like a freight train that’s about come off the tracks, but the important thing to me is that it’s gotta never come off the tracks. Being tight is, to me, above all. Any band that’s impressive to me has always just been tight together.”

He continued: “As I apply that to a band like SLIPKNOT, we don’t play live to a metronome or anything like that; we just do what we do because we listen to each other. And the practice of hearing that metronome in my head allows me to feel the space in between notes and how I’m filling that, and that helps inform how I’m speaking musically to the guitar players and the vocalist and stuff like that. It’s got that energy to it, but it always has that invisible swing that’s super important to this kind of music.”

Jay was asked to fill in for his dad as the touring drummer for BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN & THE E STREET BAND more than a decade ago. Last year, he described the experience as “completely insane. And I didn’t expect for that to happen, but the stars aligned in that way that just like it was one of those ‘right places at the right time’ kind of things,” he said.

Jay discovered SLIPKNOT when he was a pre-teen, through his father. He was hooked immediately and was a huge fan of SLIPKNOT by the time he was invited to Los Angeles to try out as replacement for Joey Jordison in 2014.

SLIPKNOT announced its split with Jordison in December 2013 but did not disclose the reasons for his exit. The drummer subsequently issued a statement saying that he did not quit the group.

SLIPKNOT spent most of last year touring in support of its sixth studio album, “We Are Not Your Kind”, which was released in August 2019 via Roadrunner Records.

ARCHITECTS have claimed their first No. 1 on the official U.K. albums chart following an exceptionally close race for this week’s top spot.

The British metalcore band’s ninth album, “For Those That Wish To Exist”, finishes the week just 550 chart sales ahead of its closest competition, MAXIMO PARK and its new record, “Nature Always Wins”.

For ARCHITECTS, it’s not only the band’s first chart-topper, but its first Top 10 album too; their previous peak was No. 15 with 2016’s “All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us”.

Celebrating the news, and paying tribute to his late bandmate Tom Searle, ARCHITECTS singer Sam Carter told OfficialCharts.com: “I cannot begin to tell you how much this means to us. Thank you to every single person who bought this record. We love you so much and we could not have done this without you. To have an album that connects this much, with what we’re talking about — trying and pushing for a better world — it’s unbelievable. As ever, everything we do is for Tom Searle, our brother.”

“For Those That Wish To Exist” is ARCHITECTS’ sixth No. 1 on the official Rock & Metal Albums chart, and is the week’s best-selling album on vinyl and top seller in independent record shops.

On “For Those That Wish To Exist”, ARCHITECTS examine the part we are all playing in the world’s slow destruction, and tackle the biggest questions facing the future of our planet. Such concerns that have long been prevalent in the music of a band who have continually championed and shared their platform with causes such as Sea Shepherd, are outspoken critics of barbaric exercises such as fox hunting, and who focus on sustainability in everything from their touring to merch production.

The record’s 15 tracks hang in a limbo between energizing positivity that it is not too late to correct our collective course, and a paralyzing negativity of defeatism; where hope and despondency are bed-fellows triggered daily by the simple act of existence. A reflection of human condition, “For Those That Wish To Exist” calls for all of us to rise to challenge established models and strive for a collective betterment.

“This album was me looking at our inability to change to a way of life that would sustain the human race and save the planet,” summarized principal songwriter Dan Searle. “I wanted to look in the mirror and ask ourselves the question of what are we going to do, as opposed to trying to point the finger at politicians. Change has to start on a personal level. The world has developed a culture of wanting someone else to deal with it, when we need to take our own responsibility. It has to start there.”

ARCHITECTS is vocalist Sam Carter, drummer Dan Searle, bassist Ali Dean and guitarists Josh Middleton and Adam Christianson.

Photo credit: Ed Mason