Fan-filmed video footage of ROB ZOMBIE‘s entire June 29 concert at San Manuel Amphitheater in San Bernardino, California as part of this summer’s Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival can be seen below.
Rob Zombie‘s fifth album, “Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor”, sold 34,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 7 on The Billboard 200 chart. The record arrived in stores on April 23 via Zodiac Swan/T-Boy/Ume. The CD was produced by Bob Marlette, who has previously worked with everyone from BLACK SABBATH and ALICE COOPER to WILSON PHILLIPS and LYNYRD SKYNYRD.
Zombie told Artist Direct in an interview that “Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor” could one day make it to the big screen as a Zombie-directed film. The rocker and filmmaker explained, “I think it could. I made it with that in mind. At least in my mind — no one else knows this — I wanted to have a storyline that runs through the record so if someday I wanted to make it into a movie musical like THE WHO‘s ‘Tommy’ or ‘Quadrophenia’, there was a structure to follow. I’m not really talking about what it is because I think it’s sort of relevant at this point.”
Legendary rocker Alice Cooper has told The Oakland Press that he is working on a covers album featuring songs that were originally written and recorded by THE DOORS, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and THE WHO, members of the so-called “Hollywood vampires” of the early and mid-’70s. A 2014 release is expected.
Back in March, Cooper told RollingStone.com about the upcoming CD: “We do a thing in our show, which is a tribute to Hollywood Vampires, my drinking club,” Cooper explained. “And it was Keith Moon, John Lennon, Harry Nilsson, Micky Dolenz — a very eclectic bunch of drunks. Half of them are dead, so we do four songs in the show in tribute to them. We do ‘Break On Through’, ‘Revolution’, ‘My Generation’ and Jimi Hendrix‘s ‘Foxey Lady’. I just kind of said, ‘We’ve never done a covers album, let’s think about that.’ So [producer Bob] Ezrin and I are kind of bouncing it around right now.”
Asked what some of the wish-list songs are, Cooper said: “I would keep it right to about ’73, ’74. I don’t want to just go anywhere. I want to keep it right in that sort of drunk era, so it’s specific. I would say ‘Break On Through’, that’s a really good rock track there. The other ones, think of it — Harry Nilsson, there’s a lot of good stuff there that could be rocked out. I think of songs as being clay. Take a song like ‘Jump Into the Fire’ and take that to a harder level, and that’ll work.”
Alice‘s latest album, 2011’s “Welcome 2 My Nightmare”, sold 18,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to debut at position No. 22 on The Billboard 200 chart. Cooper‘s previous CD, 2008’s “Along Came A Spider”, opened with just under 10,000 copies to land at No. 53.
Recorded with longtime collaborator Bob Ezrin, who produced the original multi-platinum “Welcome To My Nightmare” album in 1975, “Welcome 2 My Nightmare” picks up right where they left off, with Alice trapped in his own warped mind.
“I think if we ever take Alice Cooper to Broadway, it would just be called ‘Nightmare’,” Cooper told The Oakland Press. “‘Welcome To My Nightmare’ would be the first half and ‘Welcome 2’ would be the second half. That would work. That idea’s always out there; you just have to wait until a producer comes long and says ‘I love that idea.’ I think maybe a little more time needs to go by before ‘Nightmare’ becomes sort of an American classic; then we’ll have that validity to go and do the (Broadway) show.”
Quality fan-filmed video footage of KING DIAMOND‘s June 30 performance at the Graspop Metal Meeting in Dessel, Belgium can be seen below.
KING DIAMOND in December signed a new three-album worldwide deal with Metal Blade Records.
After a six-year touring hiatus, KING DIAMOND triumphantly returned to the stage in 2012 for European festivals Hellfest and Sweden Rock.
King, 56, whose real name is Kim Bendix Petersen, underwent open-heart triple-bypass surgery in November 2010. He has since completed his cardiac rehabilitation program and has stopped smoking entirely, changed his diet and is getting regular exercise.
In a February 2013 interview with Metal Sucks, King Diamond stated: “I had to change my diet and become a nutritional expert, eat much better food. I stopped smoking; haven’t had a drag. [My wife] Livia quit, too. We walk at least five days a week.
“I felt the benefits during two shows we did [last year]. My voice is now clearer than when I started singing. It was like always driving a used car and suddenly you have enough money to buy a new car. It felt brand new! That’s how my voice feels.
“I breathe different now than I used to. In the past [when we played live], it would been like [makes a gasping noise]. Now I go off stage and start talking to close friends…. I feel like I used to live in a house with ten windows and now I have twenty windows in the house. There’s so much I can see and I pay more attention to what I do see.
“My philosophy hasn’t changed but I don’t take anything for granted.”
King Diamond made his long-anticipated return to the stage with his MERCYFUL FATE bandmates Hank Shermann, Timi Hansen and Michael Denner on December 7, 2011 at the second of four intimate shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco as part of METALLICA‘s week-long celebration of its 30th anniversary as a band for fan club members only.
KING DIAMOND received a Grammy nomination in the “Best Metal Performance” category for the track “Never Ending Hill” off the group’s latest album, “Give Me Your Soul … Please”.
“Give Me Your Soul … Please” entered the Swedish national chart at position No. 28. The CD also landed at No. 58 on the Danish chart (the second highest new entry on the chart behind VELVET REVOLVER).
“Give Me Your Soul … Please” sold 4,500 copies in the United States in its first week of release to debut at position No. 174 on The Billboard 200 chart.
MEGADETH‘s video for the title track and first single from the band’s new album, “Super Collider”, can be seen below. The clip was filmed on May 10 in the Los Angeles area. California-based model, actress, singer and songwriter Hunter Elizabeth was cast in the lead role in the clip, which she says is “about a high-school couple still loving each other after all the years after graduation, and at the 10-year reunion, both characters find themselves successful (a model and a mathematician) and still very in love.”
A few photos from the set of the “Super Collider” video shoot can be seen below. More pictures are available at this location.
The track “Super Collider”, which was premiered on Full Metal Jackie‘s nationally syndicated radio metal show on April 20, was released digitally on April 23 via iTunes. `
“That songkind of came from that ‘Symphony Of Destruction’ corner of my mind,” MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine told Guitar World magazine. “You can’t always play aggressive, thrashy stuff. Sometimes those aren’t even songs; they’re like musical rams. But because I’m not a pop guy, I’m also not really comfortable playing sing-along songs. To me, ‘Super Collider’ made sense like a normal song — a verse-chorus-verse-chorus kind of thing. It’s written the way a real songwriter would write the song, instead of just taking all these musical twists and turns.”
Mustaine told Billboard.com in a new interview that he wanted to steer the lyrical themes on “Super Collider” away from both domestic and global politics that have dominated much of the group’s output over the years.
“I thought it’s just not the same climate anymore where you can really talk about stuff like that,” he explained. “People are so polarized they’ll chuck a musician that they really like because of them being a Democrat or them being a Republican or whatever. I’m not a partisan guy, and I seem to always get lumped in as a Republican, which I’m not. So I was trying to walk away from all this controversy and stuff that seems to follow me and let the music do the talking.”
“Super Collider”, which sold 29,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 6 on The Billboard 200 chart, focuses “a little bit more [on] human politics, like my mother-in-law having Alzheimers and things like that,” Mustaine said. “Not everybody watches the news, so when you tell somebody that this is going on, that’s going on, this guys is part of a cover-up, this guy is a philanderer, they don’t want to hear it. But if you say, ‘Hey, my mother-in-law has Alzheimers or something they might have going on in their life, too, all of a sudden you’ve got that bond. So I figured I would write about what goes on inside my heart instead of inside my head this time, and I think it really came across that way.”
“Super Collider” arrived in stores on June 4 via Dave Mustaine‘s new label, Tradecraft, distributed by Universal Music Enterprises (UMe).
The album is available as a limited-edition CD with 3-D cover and bonus tracks, regular CD, regular LP, limited LP plus a bonus colored seven-inch single with two bonus tracks, and a download voucher.
M. Shadows, Zacky Vengeance and Synyster Gates from AVENGED SEVENFOLD met up with Guitar Center TV at Guitar Center in Orange County, California to talk about some of their new signature Schecter guitars and amps and their forthcoming album. Check out the footage below.
AVENGED SEVENFOLD will release its sixth studio album, “Hail To The King”, on August 27. The title and the cover artwork (see below) were uncovered via an online scavenger hunt that led fans to different web sites that were hosting puzzle pieces.
Asked what fans can expect from the follow-up to 2010’s “Nightmare”, AVENGED SEVENFOLD guitarist Synyster Gates told Revolver magazine: “I think our songwriting has improved by leaps and bounds. Sonically, this record is our biggest record by fucking far. When you turn this fucking thing on, it blasts your fucking head off.”
The new disc was once again produced by Mike Elizondo and is the first to be wholly written without drummer and key songwriter James “The Rev” Sullivan, who died in December 2009. Sullivan has since been replaced by Arin Ilejay, a former member of CONFIDE.
Regarding how Arin did during the recording sessions for the new album, Gates said: “He came in fucking hot and tore us a new asshole. It was really, really cool. He has impeccable groove, which we’ve always known. But what I don’t think we knew is his proclivity for taste. He is one of the most tasteful drummers I’ve ever heard in my life. He got that caveman, fucking barbaric huge groove philosophy that we were trying to go for on this record. He really got it in his heart and soul. We definitely had to work with him on it. On the first day of recording, I think everybody was getting to him, so he started overplaying and trying to show his stuff a little bit more. And we said, ‘Dude, you’ve just got to lay back and do what we’ve been talking about for the last fucking nine months.’ And he came in the next day and just blew everybody’s mind.
“Originally, we thought that maybe we’d have to write the drum parts. M. Shadows [vocals] and I play a lot of drums. I’ve been playing drums since I was 16. And Jimmy had given me a fucking thousand lessons if he’s given me one. We’re not great or anything like that, but we definitely understand the drums and are huge fans. We thought that we maybe were going to have to arrange all of these songs, especially on day one. But when he came in on day two, it was just so refreshing. Everybody had goose bumps and we were just looking at each other like, ‘Holy shit, this kid’s a monster.'”
AVENGED SEVENFOLD will celebrate the album release by playing a free show at the Hollywood Palladium on August 26.
The new disc was once again produced by Mike Elizondo and will follow up 2010’s “Nightmare”, which earned the band its first No. 1 album on The Billboard 200 chart.
M. Shadows last year hinted at the direction of the band’s next studio LP, telling Metal Hammer that it will not sound like “Carry On”, the group’s contribution to the video game “Call Of Duty: Black Ops II”. Shadows explained, “The new album has a lot more of a [BLACK] SABBATH / [LED] ZEPPELIN feel to it than ‘Carry On’. There’s definitely more SABBATH in what we’re writing, and we’re proud of ‘Carry On’, but this album is going to be on a whole new level.”
“Deceiver Of The Gods”, the ninth studio album from Swedish death metallers AMON AMARTH, sold around 17,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 19 on The Billboard 200 chart. The record arrived in stores on June 25 via Metal Blade Records.
AMON AMARTH‘s 2011 CD, “Surtur Rising”, opened with around 15,000 units to debut at No. 34. The band’s 2008 album, “Twilight Of The Thunder God”, registered a first-week tally of more than 11,000 copies to enter the chart at No. 48.
Recorded at Backstage Studios in Derbyshire, United Kingdom, and produced, mixed and mastered by Andy Sneap (OPETH, MEGADETH, EXODUS, ARCH ENEMY, KILLSWITCH ENGAGE), “Deceiver Of The Gods” delivers ten fiery battle hymns made of buzzsaw riffs and epic harmonies all driven by vocalist Johan Hegg‘s commanding Viking roar and absorbing accounts of Norse crusades and treachery.
“Deceiver Of The Gods” comes adorned with another outstanding Tom Thiel-created cover portraying a mythical battle between the Norse Gods Loki and Thor. As an added bonus, Messiah Marcolin (CANDLEMASS) makes an appearance as guest vocalist on eighth track, “Hel”.
AMON AMARTH is opening the main stage of this year’s edition of the Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival, which kicked off on June 29 in San Bernardino.
THE ROCK ALCHEMIST – Italian Rock Band from Turin with a strong sonic identity that blends modern rock with progressive, hard, alternative, and pop elements!
Kimmo Kuusniemi’s SARCOFAGUS return with a Historic 2010 Concert Video Premiere on YouTube! Click image to watch the video
