Andrew W.K. will release his fifth full-length studio rock album, “God Is Partying”, this Friday, September 10 via Napalm Records. The long-awaited nine-track opus of maximalist grandeur drops nearly 20 years after the release of his full-length debut, “I Get Wet”.

Gifting fans with one last taste of the new album before it drops this Friday, Andrew W.K. has revealed a follow up to recent new singles “Babalon”, “I’m In Heaven” and “Everybody Sins”, titled “Stay True To Your Heart”. The track’s mechanical heartbeat builds towards a butterfly drum fill, bursting into an utterly soaring chorus, as the Party God conveys one of “God Is Partying”‘s most addictive hooks. “Stay True To Your Heart” is a standout offering, evoking the uniquely delirious euphoria that Andrew W.K. delivers so well.

Andrew W.K. says about “Stay True To Your Heart”: “What is the most brutal form of positivity? I want to get in there. Being and staying. Being true to yourself isn’t the same as staying true to your heart. They told me all about this when I started forming. Approving the disapproval of others. Happiness. Seriousness. Zones of care — yourself, your family of supervisors, your city of strangers, your bathroom, your basement, your street. What does it mean for me to be not-human? What does it mean for a not-human to posses my party mindset? It’s not appropriate for me to analyze this song in that way. The song is meant to analyze me. And the listener is meant to party.”

Hovering in the fluorescent spotlight of his legendary party power, “God Is Partying” sees Andrew W.K. ransack the corners of the human psyche, reaching a triumphant apex in his catalog, 20 years after the release of his chart-topping 2001 full-length debut, “I Get Wet”. Emotive yet steadfast, ominous yet invigorating, “God Is Partying” embraces both the break-ups and break-downs of life, and Andrew W.K. once again provides his audience with the perfect soundtrack to celebrate life in all its perplexing and euphoric intensity.

Channeling the manic euphoria that has compelled Andrew W.K.’s auditory insignia for decades, “God Is Partying” is soaked with a flood of epic energy — often traversing seemingly impenetrable lyrical themes while remaining refreshingly relatable, inspiring, and vital for survival. From sinister metallic bastions like the buzzing single “Babalon” to the timeless story telling of “Remember Your Oath”, the album will have fans embracing their own party power and reveling in the depths of musical euphoria. “God Is Partying” opens triumphantly with Andrew W.K.’s hyper-melodic keyboard stylings introducing the menacing and magical music of “Everybody Sins”, perfectly setting the scene for the dramatic immensity to follow. Tracks like the poetic “No One To Know” and the soaring tension of “Stay True To Your Heart” transport the listener to the precipice of a paradoxically infinite sonic horizon — rising into synthesizer-infused epics of mega-jumbo rock music, each track showcasing another example of Andrew W.K.’s expanding abilities as a vocalist and songwriter. Only halfway through the album is the listener driven directly into fiery depths with the massive track “I’m In Heaven” before ascending back up and into the sonic stratosphere with the tracks “My Tower” and the album’s gargantuan closer, “And Then We Blew Apart”.

“God Is Partying” track listing:

01. Everybody Sins
02. Babalon
03. No One To Know
04. Stay True To Your Heart
05. Goddess Partying
06. I’m In Heaven
07. Remember Your Oath
08. My Tower
09. And Then We Blew Apart

Various formats will include additional bonus tracks “I Made It” and “Not Anymore”.

You know that classic moment in “The Wicker Man”, when Edward Woodward suddenly realizes that he’s toast? That flicker of horrified realization: that’s what MASTIFF sound like. For reasons that will become clear when you hear this horrifying slab of disgust, the British quintet sound very much like the right band for the right moment. Bilious with contempt for the state of things and utterly, remorselessly black-hearted from start to finish, “Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth” is a sustained scream in the face of uncontrollable madness.

It’s also a deeply fucking weird record. “The Hiss” should go down in extreme metal history as one of the most disturbing opening tracks of all time. A slow-motion nightmare, crippled with distortion and disintegrating in real time, it slithers and spirals like some hideous, coiled discharge belched from Cthulhu’s spiny rectum, offering nothing but dismay and psychosis as reward. With that atmosphere of crazed dread established, MASTIFF truly let rip on “Fail”: a rush of tumbling skulls and sledgehammer force, it showcases an enhanced upgrade for the muscular slurry that made this band such an irresistible underground concern via previous albums “Plague” (2019) and “Wrank” (2016, both released via APF RECORDS). Whether through a bigger production or simply a surfeit of hateful energy, “Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth” is a heavyweight statement, and the unapologetic lack of anything remotely commercial or accessible makes that statement all the more potent.

One might even suggest that eONE have been exceptionally brave in signing a band whose music may cause more sensitive listeners to run shrieking from the room. But since the era demands it, MASTIFF have proudly upped the ugliness, banished all light and delivered songs like “Midnight Creeper” and “Futile”, monochrome, murderous torrents of sickening, crusty riffing, dense with extraneous, amorphous noise and the omnipresent threat of violence. Admittedly, a song title like “Beige Sabbath” does confirm that the Brits are not entirely incapable of having a giggle, but the song itself is no joke: two minutes of bloody-eyed belligerence and hell-for-leather grind, delivered with so much venom that you can almost hear vocalist Jim Hodge’s eyeballs bursting. Heaviest of all, the suffocated slither of doomy closer “Lung Rust” eradicates any final pleas for clemency, MASTIFF’s scabbiest riffs conspiring to make the descent into Hell as excruciating as possible.

If you need cheering up, this may not be the best place to start. Unless, of course, the sound of the world consuming itself from the inside out and spitting in the face of humanity is your idea of a good time. And it might as well be. Being crushed has never felt better.

In a new interview with the 102.9 The Buzz radio station, EVANESCENCE singer Amy Lee, who moved to Nashville in 2019 after living in Brooklyn for 12 years, revaled that she hurt herself “really bad” last week while preparing for her band’s upcoming U.S. tour with HALESTORM. She said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I hate working out. I hate it. I don’t know about you, but I hate it so much. And I have to find something that engages my mind. And music helps. But I finally found the thing for this time around.

“I have to always go through some kind of training before we go back on tour to get my body strong,” she continued. “And I found all these beautiful hiking trails in one of the state parks near here. So I’ve been hiking around Percy Warner [Park] on all these trails. And I run down all the different little paths — not the main drag — and it’s super fun, ’cause I don’t know how long it’s gonna be or when it’s gonna end, so I can’t quit. And I’m listening to the setlist and getting excited and going fast. And I tripped or took a bad step in the middle of the forest by myself and twisted my ankle. So I’ve been just, honestly, depressed…”

Lee added: “I was starting to feel really good, and then it’s, like, ‘No, you’re not.’ It’s fine. It’s doing better. I’m going to get back to it.

“It’s hard when you find that thing that you finally are, like, ‘This is good for me. This is a healthy choice. I’m actually enjoying it.’ And then it doesn’t work out.”

EVANESCENCE’s tour with HALESTORM will kick off on November 5 in Portland, Oregon and conclude on December 18 in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Earlier in 2021, EVANESCENCE released “The Bitter Truth”, its first album in 10 years, which the Los Angeles Times called their “fiercest songs to date.” Current single “Better Without You” is EVANESCENCE’s first Top 10 Rock Radio track in ten years, and previous single “Use My Voice” is currently nominated for “Best Rock” at the MTV Video Music Awards. It’s the second year in a row that EVANESCENCE has scored a “Best Rock” nomination, as well as the second year in a row that they are the sole female-fronted act nominated in the category.

Powerviolence vets and craft beer experts Trappist get Cross Faded with Oakland powerviolence quartet Connoisseur .
The post Full Album Stream: Trappist / Connoisseur – “Cross Faded” appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

TESLA guitarist Frank Hannon says that he made “a big mistake” by waiting too long to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

A month ago, TESLA announced it was postponing a few shows after Hannon tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. At the time, Hannon wrote in a social media post that he had “not been able to move all week” and revealed that he woke up with a 102-degree fever and could “hardly breathe” on the day that TESLA was scheduled to leave for tour.

Now, in a new interview with Ultimate Classic Rock, Hannon opened up about his COVID-19 battle, saying: “I waited too long to get the vaccine. I’ll be honest, I listened to too many opinions that weren’t qualified. That’s a big mistake that’s happening in the world today. I paid the price for it. I ended up getting it too late, too close to the tour when we were supposed to leave and I got sick.”

Hannon went on to urge others to take coronavirus seriously and get inoculated.

“[My wife and I are] fully vaccinated now and this is real, man. This shit ain’t no joke,” he said. “We just lost three more friends. You know, you’re either going to make it or not. This is a very bad thing that we need to come together and get this thing killed.”

TESLA played the first two shows of its summer 2021 tour — August 5 in Grants Pass, Oregon and August 6 in Grand Ronde, Oregon — without Frank. Filling in for him was Howie Simon (JEFF SCOTT SOTO, GRAHAM BONNET, STRYPER), who previously stood in for Hannon in September 2018.

TESLA will return to the the road on September 16 in Roanoke, Virginia.

Late last month, TESLA released the official music video for its brand new single, “Cold Blue Steel”. The clip was directed by Brandon Gullion and produced by Hannon.

TESLA’s latest album, “Shock”, was released in March 2019 via UMe. The follow-up to 2014’s “Simplicity” was produced by DEF LEPPARD guitarist Phil Collen.

To commemorate the 30th anniversary of METALLICA’s self-titled album, the Grammy-winning, 16-times-platinum-certified LP is receiving its definitive re-release on September 10 via the band’s own Blackened Recordings. Remastered for ultimate sound quality, The Black Album remaster will be available in multiple configurations including 180-gram double vinyl LP, standard CD and 3 CD expanded edition, digital, and limited-edition deluxe box set (containing the album remastered on 180-gram 2LP, a picture disc, three live LPs, 14 CDs (containing rough mixes, demos, interviews, live shows), 6 DVDs (containing outtakes, behind the scenes, official videos, live shows), a 120-page hardcover book, four tour laminates, three lithos, three guitar picks, a METALLICA lanyard, a folder with lyric sheets, and a download card).

Much more than a mere tribute album, “The Metallica Blacklist” celebrates the enduring influence of this musical milestone with one of the most ambitious projects ever conceived by the METALLICA team: An unprecedented 50+ artists spanning an unbelievably vast range of genres, generations, cultures, continents and more, each contributing a unique interpretation of their favorite Black Album cut.

“The Metallica Blacklist” offers up new dimensions of the record whose gravitational pull first drew the mainstream to METALLICA — and provides new insights into the universal and timeless appeal that kept it there: the boundary-smashing influence these 12 songs have had on fans and musicians of all stripes. “The Metallica Blacklist”‘s 53 tracks find singer songwriters, country artists, electronic and hip hop artists sharing their love of these songs alongside punk rockers, indie darlings, icons of rock, metal, world music and many, many more… and for 50+ good causes: Profits will be divided evenly between charities of the artist’s choice and METALLICA’s All Within My Hands foundation.

“The Metallica Blacklist” is a fitting and limitless homage, one that features bands who’ve shared stages with METALLICA alongside artists who are younger than the original album. It’s a truly staggering, at times mystifying assemblage of musicians, dozens of whom have little to nothing in common other than the shared passion for the music that’s united them for this album: 1 Album. 12 Songs. 53 Artists. Unlimited Possibilities.

“The Metallica Blacklist” will be available in formats including digital, four-CD and a limited-edition seven-LP vinyl pressing. Pre-orders will instantly receive multi-platinum selling recording artist, songwriter, philanthropist and trailblazer Miley Cyrus’s version of “Nothing Else Matters” featuring Andrew Watt, Elton John, Yo-Yo Ma, Robert Trujillo and Chad Smith, and Colombian-born rock/pop superstar, and winner of 20+ Grammy and Latin Music Grammy Awards Juanes’s interpretation of “Enter Sandman”.

All profits from “The Metallica Blacklist” will be split evenly between the All Within My Hands foundation and 50+ charities chosen by the artists who play on the album. All Within My Hands was founded by the band in 2017 as a way for the entire METALLICA family to give back to communities that have supported the band by supporting workforce education, the fight against hunger, and other critical local services.

“The Metallica Blacklist” features the following tracks:

* ALESSIA CARA & THE WARNING – Enter Sandman
* MAC DEMARCO – Enter Sandman
* GHOST – Enter Sandman
* JUANES – Enter Sandman
* RINA SAWAYAMA – Enter Sandman
* WEEZER – Enter Sandman
* SAM FENDER – Sad But True (Live)
* JASON ISBELL – Sad But True
* MEXICAN INSTITUTE OF SOUND FEAT. LA PERLA & GERA MX – Sad But True
* ROYAL BLOOD – Sad But True
* ST. VINCENT – Sad But True
* WHITE REAPER – Sad But True
* YB – Sad But True
* BIFFY CLYRO – Holier Than Thou
* THE CHATS – Holier Than Thou
* OFF! – Holier Than Thou
* PUP – Holier Than Thou
* COREY TAYLOR – Holier Than Thou
* CAGE THE ELEPHANT – The Unforgiven
* VISHAL DADLANI, DIVINE, SHOR POLICE – The Unforgiven
* DIET CIG – The Unforgiven
* FLATBUSH ZOMBIES FEAT. DJ SCRATCH – The Unforgiven
* HA*ASH – The Unforgiven
* JOSÉ MADERO – The Unforgiven
* MOSES SUMNEY – The Unforgiven
* J BALVIN – Wherever I May Roam
* CHASE & STATUS FEAT. BACKROAD GEE – Wherever I May Roam
* THE NEPTUNES – Wherever I May Roam
* JON PARDI – Wherever I May Roam
* SEBASTIAN – Don’t Tread On Else Matters
* PORTUGAL. THE MAN FEAT. AARON BEAM – Don’t Tread On Me
* VOLBEAT – Don’t Tread On Me
* THE HU – Through The Never
* TOMI OWÓ – Through The Never
* PHOEBE BRIDGERS – Nothing Else Matters
* MILEY CYRUS FEAT. WATT, ELTON JOHN, YO-YO MA, ROBERT TRUJILLO, CHAD SMITH – Nothing Else Matters
* DAVE GAHAN – Nothing Else Matters
* MICKEY GUYTON – Nothing Else Matters
* DERMOT KENNEDY – Nothing Else Matters
* MON LAFERTE – Nothing Else Matters
* IGOR LEVIT – Nothing Else Matters
* MY MORNING JACKET – Nothing Else Matters
* PG ROXETTE – Nothing Else Matters
* DARIUS RUCKER – Nothing Else Matters
* CHRIS STAPLETON – Nothing Else Matters
* TRESOR – Nothing Else Matters
* GOODNIGHT, TEXAS – Of Wolf And Man
* IDLES – The God That Failed
* IMELDA MAY – the god that failed
* CHERRY GLAZERR – My Friend Of Misery
* IZÏA – My Friend Of Misery
* KAMASI WASHINGTON – My Friend Of Misery
* RODRIGO Y GABRIELA – The Struggle Within

A new instant-gratification track is now available with “The Metallica Blacklist” album pre-orders: “The Struggle Within” cover by RODRIGO Y GABRIELA. It can be heard below.

Photo credit: Ebru Yildiz

HELMET’s first official live album, “Live And Rare”, will be released on November 26 via earMUSIC. It will be made available on heavyweight black vinyl as well as a CD digipak edition and digital.

Frontman Page Hamilton, who formed HELMET in early 1989, recalls: “After persuading our label folks in Hamburg to bake these old tapes, we finally managed to mix two live shows for release. Side 1 was recorded at CBGBs, which was our neighborhood club, a 10-minute walk from home. We all spent plenty of time at CBs and though this is not our audition night set, it captures the early frenetic energy of the band as well as my lack of scintillating stage banter.

“In 1989, I walked in off Bowery through the creaky swinging doors and plastic-slat, meat locker-style curtain into the greatest rock club in the world, CBGBs. Apparently, David Byrne (a musical hero of mine) was not sympathetic to the rent scandal that ultimately forced CBs to close but I am a maudlin old fool and have great memories from our time there. We became a better band by playing that stage a lot and I saw some of the best shows ever in that room.

“Owner Hilly Crystal and manager/booker Louise Parnassa sat facing each other, west and east at desks up front and barely looked up to acknowledge me. Louise, a very pretty and seemingly dour (I got to know her a bit and she is sweet and lovely when she’s not dealing with hundreds of dipshits in rock bands) Jersey girl said, ‘Can I help you?’ I handed her our first recorded music on a cassette tape with hand silk-screen torture helmet artwork from a Spanish Inquisition book and an umlaut over the ‘M.’ The songs ‘Born Annoying’, ‘Rumble’, ‘Shirley Maclaine’ and ‘Geisha To Go’ were done at Don Fury’s 8-track Soho basement studio. She said, ‘I might listen in a couple of weeks. If you wanna play sooner, audition.’ She signed us up for the first available date, which was that Sunday. (Maybe Monday?)

“We played with a NIGHT RANGER-style rock band, one dude wore a thigh bandana and a singer/songwriter girl wearing a long Loretta Lynn-kinda dress. Mike Kirkland and Tommy Victor of the band PRONG did the door and FOH that night. Mike later told me he wrote in the CBs notebook, ‘Cool band, book with COP SHOOT COP or UNSANE.’ Louise told me a few years later we were like ‘ice picks in her forehead,’ but she thought I was cute (paraphrasing here, think Jersey alphabet…fuckin’ A, fuckin’ B, fuckin’ C) so she booked us almost monthly. ‘Murder’, ‘Repetition’ and ‘Sinatra’ were brand new, so this show was pre-‘Strap It On’, year zero. Henry probably still had dreadlocks; Peter wore Beatle boots and skinny legged pants; John and I always dressed like 12-year-olds, so no, it wasn’t some brilliant HELMET marketing scheme as a few bitter downtown hipster turds claimed. For $50, the FOH engineer would record your set on CBs 2”, 16-track tape machine. I’m pretty sure our friend Brian Childers who was the singer for a cool band called CRAWLPAPPY was manning the desk.

“I’m glad we shelled out the money; if you were one of the 30 people there, you helped pay for this live album. Thanks.

“Side 2 is part of the set from the Big Day Out festival in Melbourne, Australia. Our first trip down under is a bit of a blur after almost 30 years but the memories I have are fond. A brief escape from the frigid NYC January dreariness was welcome relief. Unbundling at Bondi beach, surrounded by beautiful topless women sunbathing next to the clear, clean, warm water of the Tasman Sea was soundly beating the 6-flight walk-up, grocery-schlep to my East Village apartment while wrapped up like ‘Nanook of the North.’ The shows, hmmmm. My performance was no doubt effected by all the fun in the sun and copious amounts of alcohol (red label Coopers mate). Someone did manage to run a 2″ 24-track tape machine during our set at the Melbourne Big Day Out; thanks are due to those folks. We’ve had these tapes collecting dust in the band locker (New Jersey pre-2001, North Hollywood since) for all these years so we enlisted our talented pal Toshi Kasai to mix some of the set and Golden Mastering to polish things up.”

Although HELMET disbanded in 1997, Hamilton revived the band in 2004, and the group has continued to tour and record.

HELMET’s latest album, “Dead To The World”, was released in October 2016 via earMUSIC.

Bassist Pär Sundström of Swedish metallers SABATON spoke to Music Connection about what it’s like for him and his bandmates to exist as a self-managed entity — a rarity among groups operating at their level. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “You start a band because you love to play. That’s how you start a band — you want to play your instrument in a band. And there was no difference for me. And that’s the first thing you do as a band — you get together, you get into a rehearsal room and you start playing some songs. After that, you need to expand, you need to grow, you need to do something. You need to call somebody to have a gig, and somebody in the band has to pick up the phone and call that somebody to get a gig. And then somebody has to do a poster. And then somebody has to arrange that somehow we get there or that there’s technical things there. So somebody has to do that. And I can’t just stand and watch while things are not happening. So I just jump on directly and do all that stuff. So no matter if it became designing a tour poster, album artwork or it came to arrange a recording session… And eventually, these things evolve, and suddenly you are dealing with economy, you are dealing with logistics, you are dealing with legal aspects. So I started to pick up that. I have no training whatsoever, but suddenly I needed to know how to market myself, I needed to know how to present something in a good way, I needed to know how to sell it, how to charge for it, how to account for it and how to get the show on the road. And along the years, I think I’ve been doing pretty much everything, no matter if it was fixing the tour bus or repairing it from damages to being a guitar tech. I am also a licensed pyrotechnician. I’ve been hanging lights in the roof. I built my own festival and a cruise, and promoting tours, festivals, shows, other bands, marketing that. And it’s all because I have an interest in learning things, and I don’t want to sit and watch nothing happen; I can’t do that. I just have to make things happen. And that’s why I just jump on to things, and eventually it grows and grows and grows.”

He continued: “I think I’m quite demanding. And I love this band so much that I don’t want too much other… I don’t mind other people to come in and help — of course not — but it would be difficult for another manager to come in and do this in a better way than I would do it. The other way we have done it is that the SABATON team has been growing. So everything we’re doing in-house. Today we run the label business inside. We do the management completely by ourselves. We do all the logistics for tours. We book it all. We book whatever it may be — from a hundred crew members, 10 trucks and whatever we need, we have it in-house. We have huge warehouses. We own so much stuff that it’s crazy. I was actually going through it two days ago in our main warehouse for one of the projects, and I was just looking at costumes. And I realized that we can outfit entire armies of Vikings, crusaders, Spartans, Greek warriors, World War I troops from France or from Belgium or World War II soldiers from the United States, modern armies… We have pile after pile after pile, or crates after crates with clothes, just because of different projects. And we always think that we take control over things. We don’t rent it, we don’t outsource it — we control it, we own it, and we put it on and we do it ourselves. Same with a lot of photo sessions, music videos — we produce them, we direct them, we are involved in the whole production of it. The albums, we are the main producers of our albums. We do things our way. And it’s demanding, but we have a big team. And we are constantly growing. And even during the pandemic, we did pretty well. Even though we couldn’t tour, and we have a lot of people that are depending on touring, but we still did well. We run our own mailorder; it has several people. We also developed that further. We [do it] completely by ourselves. We don’t use any merch company. We develop the stuff ourselves. We design it, we source it, we market it and we have it in our own mailorder.”

Earlier this week, Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported that SABATON founders Joakim Brodén and Sundström were ordered by the Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket) to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax surcharges.

The Swedish Tax Agency, which manages civil registration of private individuals and collects taxes such as personal income tax, corporate tax, VAT and excise tax, believes that Brodén and Sundström did not report their income from USA tours in 2016-2018 correctly. As a result, each one of the musicians will have to cough up a substantial amount to settle their debt.

Brodén, who writes all of the music for SABATON, is the one who is facing the biggest tax blow, having been ordered to pay back more than two million Swedish kronor (more than $233,000).

Brodén and Sundström claim to have followed the United States – Sweden Tax Treaty which covers double taxation with regards to income tax, corporation tax, and capital gains tax, and insist that they had hired experts to make sure the paperwork was filed properly. Despite this, the Swedish Tax Agency said that the accounting was not handled accurately.

Brodén and Sundström can appeal the decision.

SABATON is considered to be one the most important bands to emerge from the Swedish modern metal scene, having been honored with five Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards (including “Best Live Band” three different years) and nominated several times for the Swedish equivalent of the Grammy Awards, the Grammis. In 2016, SABATON’s “The Last Stand” album debuted at No. 1 in three different European countries and cracked the Top 3 in four others. Brodén, Sundström, Chris Rörland (guitar), Hannes Van Dahl (drums) and Tommy Johansson (guitar) curate a festival of their own, Sabaton Open Air, that started back in 2008, as well as their own forward-thinking Sabaton Cruise which has been held since 2009.

SABATON will support JUDAS PRIEST on the “50 Heavy Metal Years” tour of North America, which is scheduled to kick off this week.