All posts in Featured

Ukrainian metallers JINJER will perform without their drummer Vlad Ulasevich at the opening show of their North American tour tonight (Friday, October 22) after he tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Earlier today, JINJER issued the following statement via social media: “Brothers and sisters, there is no easy way to say this but unfortunately our drummer Vlad has tested positive for COVID and will have to sit out the first few shows until he recovers. He is doing fine and has no symptoms! The rest of us are healthy and tested negative. That being said, we will not cancel any shows and have decided to push on using his pre-recorded live drum tracks! We waited two long years to rock with you and will do our best to make this tour happen… and it will be one to remember for sure!

“See you in a few Seattle – let’s do this!!”

In addition to several already sold-out North American tour dates (including Nashville), JINJER has not only added two new dates in Rochester, New York and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but has expanded rooms at select stops. The Milwaukee, Wisconsin show at The Rave has been upgraded to the main room, while the show in Tempe, Arizona will move to the Marquee Theater (previously purchased tickets are valid).

Due to current COVID capacity restrictions in Canada, the previously scheduled shows in Toronto, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec — which weren’t able to be relocated — will be postponed to 2022.

JINJER’s latest album, “Wallflowers”, arrived in August via Napalm Records.

Hailing from the conflict-ridden Ukrainian region of Donetsk but now calling Kiev their home base, JINJER is one of the most talked-about modern metal bands today.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by JINJER (@jinjer_official)

In 2022, Florida death metal veterans DEICIDE will embark on a special tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of their second album, “Legion”. The Glen Benton-fronted outfit will perform the LP in its entirety, along with other tracks from the band’s vast catalog.

According to Wikipedia, “Legion” “is one of DEICIDE’s most musically ambitious releases, incorporating more technical riffing and song structures. The band considers this album to be its most difficult, and claims it is too chaotic. When the Hoffman brothers” — guitarists Eric and Brian — “quit the band, Eric stated that one of the main reasons was Benton refusing to play longer sets and being unable to perform the technical bass guitar riffing required for ‘Legion”s material.”

In a 2004 interview, Benton stated about the LP: “I think ‘Legion’ was ahead of its time. It was just too fast for everybody at the time. I think it just caught everybody off guard. They thought we were gonna put out a la-di-da album, and here comes this fuckin piece of music, fuckin style of music that’s fuckin’ over the top. Everybody fuckin hated it, all the magazines hated it; now it’s years later and everybody loves it.”

Back in 1995, Benton shot down the perception that he was totally unhappy with “Legion”.

“I made a comment saying that ‘Legion’ sucked,” Glen said in another interview. “Now everybody thinks I hated it. That’s not true. I didn’t hate the record. I just said that to the band, because that’s how I wanted to get my point across at the time. As far as that record goes, the only things I did not like was that we were being rushed by the record company, and the production was not totally satisfying. Because we were being rushed, we weren’t able to be selective with amplifiers and instruments, so when you compare ‘Once Upon The Cross’ to ‘Legion’, there is an obvious difference.

“The problem with ‘Legion’ was that we just went into the studio and played, then tried to fix things,” he said. “Of course, the more you do that, the more it takes away from the sound.”

In 2019, DEICIDE parted ways with guitarist Mark English and replaced him with Chris Cannella.

English joined DEICIDE in 2016 following the departure of longtime guitarist Jack Owen.

DEICIDE’s latest album, “Overtures Of Blasphemy”, was released in September 2018 via Century Media.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Deicide Official Instagram (@deicideofficial)

In a brand new interview with Britian’s ITV, QUEEN guitarist Brian May reflected on the numerous challenges he and his wife have faced during the pandemic, including dealing with several health issues and watching as sewage flooded his London home and destroyed many of his treasured possessions.

“Yeah, we’ve been through a lot of stuff,” he said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). “And I have to be thankful that we’re here at all. The final blow, after all the physical stuff, we got the house flooded, so that was a sort of final blow, ’cause that takes away a lot of your feelings of security [standing by helplessly as] your treasured possessions went up, or went down, I should say, into filthy water. And I think we’re still recovering from that. It’s funny — it does something to your psyche.”

May went on to say that he has been staying busy with QUEEN-related activities, including preparing for the band’s upcoming tour.

“A lot’s still happening behind the scenes,” he said. “QUEEN never dies, really. And I have to be very thankful for that. And it never sleeps either — we’re always doing stuff, remixing stuff. I’m sitting here in the studio in which I did a lot of my solo material but also we did a lot of work on the last QUEEN album, the ‘Made In Heaven’ album. And things are always going on. We remix, we re-polish, we repackage because there’s a constant demand — thank you — from people out there who wanna see some of the old material brought up to scratch in the modern media. So, yeah, we keep busy, and we will be out. I’m working on my fitness, which is the best thing I can do right now, very, very avidly, because next May we’ll be out back on the road, hopefully, continuing the tour of the world which we paused when COVID struck.”

This past July, Brian became distraught after water wrecked part of his home, ruining treasured possessions and memorabilia. He later told his 2.9 million followers on Instagram that the flood was the fault of the council, approving poorly designed basements to be built in the the affluent West London suburb of Kensington with “ineffective” drainage.

A year and a half ago, May had to be hospitalized after he tore his buttocks “to shreds” while gardening. As a result, he developed severe sciatica and suffered what he later described as a “small heart attack” from the medication. May then had a bad reaction to his heart attack medication and nearly died. More recently, Brian underwent cataract eye surgery.

Our cooped up correspondent pecks on some legendary death metallers, speed metal deviants, and an outfit neither black metal, nor from China this week.
The post For Those About Squawk: Waldo Pecks on Massacre, Sexmag and Ghost Bath appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

In a new interview with Vikram Chandrasekar of Tales From The Road, former MEGADETH guitarist Marty Friedman, who has been living and recording music in Japan since 2003, was asked about BABYMETAL’s unstereotypically “happy” lyrics and why they work so well within the context of the Japanese band’s pop-metal sound. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Metal has gone through a long history of lyrics [being] all almost interchangeable; they have to be dark and they have to be kind of scary and sort of negative and protesting everything. And it kind of works with the sound of aggressive music, but we’ve kind of really all heard that for a long time. And why wouldn’t it work with something with a much simpler and happier and maybe a more positive outlook? Why wouldn’t it work? And actually, it does happen to work. So that kind of gave the sound of metal a few more decades of life, I believe. Yeah, it just works — it just works.”

Back in 2015, Friedman told Metalholic.com that he was a huge supporter of BABYMETAL, whose members wear gothy schoolgirl costumes, do choreographed dance routines and bang their heads violently.

“I think the best thing about BABYMETAL is the fact that it’s very polarizing: you have to either absolutely love ’em or you totally hate ’em,” Marty said. “And I think that’s the mark of great things. Of course, I love them and have supported them since the beginning. The guitarist in my solo band over [in Japan] is also the guitarist in BABYMETAL. So I definitely… I’m a huge supporter of them, and I think they are a fantastic, fantastic unit. But I could totally see a metal purist go, ‘Hey, this is not right. This is not what metal is supposed to be. I can’t stand it. It’s just not… No. No way. No fucking way.’ I totally get it. But that’s what I also love about them. I mean, it breaks a lot of rules, and I’m all about breaking rules.”

He continued: “If you’ve seen some of the stuff I’ve done in Japan, I have injected my own metal into very, very pop situations, where metal shouldn’t go, but because it’s me, and because it’s the way I did it, it worked, and it happened, and it existed. So I kind of forced it. And I think that spirit is very metal. But there are a lot of purists out there, especially in America, who look at that and just go, ‘No fucking way!’ And I totally get it; I don’t have a single thing against these people. But that’s what I love about BABYMETAL: it’s very polarizing. And I think that my whole musical concept is also very polarizing. But I can tell you that it’s just the way that I am as an artist, and you really can’t go out there trying to please anyone other than yourself. If people wanna join the party, it’s great, and you love ’em when they do, but I certainly don’t think any less of people who disagree with my opinion.”

Many heavy metal fans have been reluctant to embrace BABYMETAL — which also includes producer Kobametal and a backing band of corpse-painted virtuosos — with some Internet forums calling them “the definition of a gimmick”, “awful” and “metal for hipsters.”

Last month, progressive metal giants DREAM THEATER announced that they were postponing their previously announced North American tour to early 2022 due to COVID-19 concerns. The trek was scheduled to kick off on October 28 in Mesa, Arizona and conclude on December 14 in St. Petersburg, Florida.

In a new interview with The Metal Voice, DREAM THEATER singer James LaBrie spoke about the band’s decision to push back the tour, saying: “It just came down to how comfortable we were with going out. We were getting kind of mixed messages from promoters and our agencies. Our management was looking into it across the board with people that were out there, tours that were going on, tours that had come down.

“When you put together a tour, the amount of money that’s put into a tour, it’s astronomical,” he continued. “And the kind of production that we go out with is pretty big; it’s pretty substantial. We were just getting a lot of indication that the bands that had been going out were out for a week or two and somebody within the band or the crew came down with COVID and then the whole camp had to be shut down up to 10 days. Well, that’s financially disabling for any tour of any magnitude, that you can just pull down a whole camp of, let’s say, 30-something people and the amount of money that’s generated while you’re out there. You’re talking 10 days where you’re just dead in the water.

“So it didn’t make sense to us. One, we were still concerned with our health, going out. And even though we’re all fully inoculated, so to speak, we were still concerned with one of us coming down, getting sick and not being able to proceed. And then the business side of things.

“I mean, if I wanna be completely honest with you, it wasn’t a unanimous decision,” LaBrie admitted. “There were three guys in the band that said, ‘No. We don’t wanna tour. We’re not going out.’ And there were two other guys in the band that said, ‘C’mon, let’s do it. Let’s go for it. We’re all for it.’ And that’s what it came down to — is that it was a majority vote that said, ‘No. We’re not about to go out.'”

James also addressed DREAM THEATER guitarist John Petrucci’s recent comment that the the tour postponement was “unfortunate” and not a unanimous decision, with Petrucci and bassist John Myung being willing to return to the road as soon as possible and the other three guys opting to stay home.

“It comes down to sometimes you’re gonna have to agree to disagree, and granted, as he put it — I saw it; fans forwarded it to my site — as he said, he was frustrated,” James said. “Well, truth be known, we’re all frustrated that we’re not out there touring. That’s what we love to do — we love to be out. But some of us felt that we weren’t willing to take that risk and come down with this unfortunate virus. It just didn’t seem to me, and to the other two guys that were on the side of the fence that I was on, it didn’t make sense to risk it at this point. But everything is being rescheduled. It’s been postponed, and everything is coming back online in February. And I think we’re gonna be closer to not only more people being vaccinated but also herd immunity. So let’s see what happens.”

DREAM THEATER shared the news of the postponement in a statement posted on social media on September 27. The group wrote: “DREAM THEATER have made the difficult decision to move their October-December 2021 North American tour dates to early 2022. In light of current instabilities to touring that remain due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we feel confident that this is the right decision.

“Know that we are as disappointed as you are that we will have to wait a little longer to bring DREAM THEATER music to you live. We miss performing for you all and can’t wait until we can be on stage bringing our new album and fan-favorites to you.

“This was an extraordinarily challenging decision to make but needed to be done after taking into consideration the varying local mandates across North America. In an effort to present the absolute most complete and engaging DREAM THEATER experience that our fans around the globe have come to expect, we feel we are all best served to postpone all touring activities to early 2022.

“At this time, we ask that everyone hold on to their tickets as we are working frantically to finalize the reschedule of all of these dates. All shows are currently being re-booked to begin in February 2022. Please keep an eye on our website, and we’ll have a complete, updated itinerary shortly. All previously purchased tickets will be honored. Please consult your local point of purchase for any inquiries regarding refunds.

“We know that we all have eagerly awaited a return to normalcy, and the opportunity to enjoy live DREAM THEATER music together again. We apologize profusely but hope that everyone can understand the logic behind this decision.

“Playing music for our fans is all we ever want to do. We look forward to seeing each and every one of our fans as soon as possible. We wish it could have been sooner, but we are counting the days until we can see you all again.”

Earlier this month, Petrucci told Robert Cavuoto of Sonic Perspectives about the DREAM THEATER tour postponement: “Well, it’s an unfortunate decision. John [Myung] and I really wanted to tour, and are dying to tour — dying to get out there and support the [new DREAM THEATER] record. And unfortunately, we couldn’t convince the other guys that it was safe. So, it wasn’t a unanimous decision, unfortunately.

“It’s frustrating for me, because everything has opened up and concerts are going on, and theaters and arenas and clubs and everything is open,” he continued. “Bands are out there, and a lot of my friends are touring successfully. And there are ways to do it safely, which we were very prepared to do. But, like I said, we couldn’t convince the other guys it’d be safe, and so we had to push it off.

“I’m the type of person where I hate disappointing people, I hate disappointing our fans. So, it was definitely an unfortunate decision.”

DREAM THEATER’s 15th studio album, “A View From The Top Of The World”, is being released today (Friday, October 22). The seven-song LP marks the band’s second studio album with InsideOut Music/Sony Music. The artwork was created by longtime cover collaborator Hugh Syme (RUSH, IRON MAIDEN, STONE SOUR). “A View From The Top Of The World” was produced by Petrucci, engineered and additional production by James “Jimmy T” Meslin and mixed/mastered by Andy Sneap.

Rufus Publications and Ross Halfin have announced a new limited-edition book, “The Black Crowes”, featuring thousands of unseen images from Ross’s extensive library.

Produced alongside Chris and Rich Robinson, the book is a huge photographic essay on the band, formed in Marietta, Georgia in 1984. The book features introductions from both brothers. Chris writes in the book: “To say that THE BLACK CROWES & Mr. Halfin have a long history together is most definitely an understatement. Here in these photographs you will see & feel.”

Ross comments: “Could I tell you stories about this band? I could probably tell you a hundred, and one of the highlights was seeing them opening for THE ROLLING STONES at Wembley Stadium and whilst doing an hour’s set they did a 25-minute version of ‘Thorn in My Pride’. In hindsight, perhaps not the best idea to warm up 90,000 people, although I did think it would be funny if they put it out as a single and called it the ‘radio edit’ — but that’s not really the point to this. It’s something I remembered which made me laugh. Then again I saw them at The Forum in London when they did a really succinct and great rendition of the Joe Tex song ‘Hush’ made famous by DEEP PURPLE.”

Two editions of the book will be available: A huge 600-page-plus edition, numbered and signed by Chris and Rich Robinson complete with a luxury slipcase and lenticular print; and a stripped down 300-page version, unsigned. Both books measure 245mm x 345mm. The deluxe version will cost £300 and the standard edition will cost £89 plus delivery worldwide.

For more information, visit www.rufuspublications.com.

Produced by Live Nation, THE BLACK CROWES’ 37-date “Shake Your Money Maker” tour ended on September 25 at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in Bethel, New York.

Joining Chris and Rich Robinson in the new BLACK CROWES lineup are longtime bassist Sven Pipien, who played with the band live from 1997 up until the band’s hiatus in 2015, along with Brian Griffin on drums, Joel Robinow on keyboards and Isaiah Mitchell on guitar, plus backup singers Mackenzie Adams and Leslie Grant.

Rich told Cleveland.com that he and his brother wanted to re-start THE BLACK CROWES with a clean slate. “There was a strong agenda in the band [previously] to keep Chris and I apart and keep Chris and I fighting,” he said. “We just didn’t want to have to deal with any of that negative [stuff], so it had to be this way in order for it to be what we want.”

“Shake Your Money Maker” was re-released in multi-formats sets in February through UMe/American Recordings. The album, fueled by singles “Jealous Again”, “Twice As Hard”, “She Talks To Angels” and a cover of fellow Georgian Otis Redding’s “Hard To Handle”, has sold over five million copies.

Chris Robinson recently confirmed to SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk” that there are tentative plans to record a new BLACK CROWES album.

This week is coming in hot with blazing new releases from Cradle of Filth, Massacre, Waking the Cadaver and more!
The post Five For Friday: October 22, 2021 appeared first on Decibel Magazine.