Raven will release its new album, ExtermiNation, in Scandinavia on April 22nd, in Germany on April 24th, in the rest of Europe on April 27th and in North America on April 28th through SPV/Steamhammer. It will be made available as a digipak version (including one bonus track), 2LP gatefold green vinyl version and as a digital download.
ExtermiNation combines the melody/chaos/musicianship/lunacy that defines the band with songs that are simply the best they have done in decades. Rivaling the “holy trinity” of those early albums, and again working with the engineering metal mastermind who is Kevin 131 (Walk Through Fire) – the band have taken their game to the next level..this may well be their 41st anniversary but these guys are only just getting started.
In commemoration of Bon Scott`s death 35 years ago today, Raven release a snippet of their new song Thunder Down Under. You can listen to the snippet here.
ExtermiNation tracklisting Digi:
1. Destroy All Monsters
2. Tomorrow
3. It`s Not What You Got
4. Fight
5. Battle March/Tank Treads (The Blood Runs Red)
6. Feeding The Monster
7. Fire Burns Within
8. Scream
9. One More Day
10. Thunder Down Under
11. No Surrender
12. Golden Dawn
13. Silver Bullet
14. River Of No Return
15. Malice In Geordieland (Bonus Track)
ExtermiNation tracklisting 2LP:
LP 1:
Side 1:
1. Destroy All Monsters
2. Tomorrow
3. It`s Not What You Got
4. Fight
Side 2:
1. Battle March/Tank Treads (The Blood Runs Red)
2. Feeding The Monster
3. Fire Burns Within
4. Scream
LP 2:
Side 1:
1. One More Day
2. Thunder Down Under
3. No Surrender
4. Golden Dawn
Side 2:
1. Silver Bullet
2. River Of No Return
3. Malice In Geordieland (Bonus Track)
Raven live 2015:
3.6 MX-Mexico City – El Circo Volador
3.7 CO-Bogota – Thrash La Union Festival
3.8 CO-Pereira – Thrash La Union Festival
3.11 PE-Lima – Wairuru Club
3.13 BR-Sorocaba – Priliampus Bar
3.15 BR-Sao Paulo – Manifesto Bar
3.27 FI-Helsinki – Club Pkrl
3.28 B-Genk – Iron Steel Fest
3.31 D-Hamburg – Hafenklang
Alex Distefano of the OC Weekly spoke with the Metal God, Rob Halford of Judas Priest. The brief interview appears in its entirety below.
OC Weekly: Of the 17 full albums you’ve done with Judas Priest, what is your favorite and why?
Rob Halford: I get asked that quite a bit and I have to say Sad Wings of Destiny is my personal favorite, I really love that album. It has a lot of good things going for it, and it’s an important album for us as a band and for heavy metal music in general it’s just a very solid and representation of a lot of the best of Priest, the riffs, the tempo the songwriting and vocals. It’s still stands the test of time and is one of my personal favorites to this day, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love our other works.
OC Weekly: What was it about the shows in Long Beach [California], 30 years ago, that were so special?
Rob Halford: There are certain shows that a band performs in their career, that somehow keep and transcend the elements to produce magic on stage. That was certainly the case for us in Long Beach, 30 years ago. Everybody came to play their role for those shows, and those nights came out smoothly. Something about the scene in that moment in Sothern California, and there was just this fervor for anything heavy metal. With Priest, we were touring on a record that was a follow up to Screaming for Vengeance. Like any band, you just have to find the right audience, but for us it seemed to all just coalesce perfectly for those performances in Long Beach.
OC Weekly: Tell us how it came about that Judas Priest was featured on an episode of the Simpsons last year. Are you a fan of the show?
Rob Halford: I am a fan of the Simpsons, I’ve watched them for years. And, I was just at some Grammy parties, with some of the long time producers of the Simpsons, and one, who is a metal head, and we were talking about how important and far reaching heavy metal music is. Judas Priest as a band, loved to be a part of it. I watched the episode the other night and I love it. But the Simpsons has had all sorts of rock bands and musicians on the show, from all genres of music.
OC Weekly: As a singer, how do you keep in shape to be able to tour and perform night after night?
Rob Halford: Well if you’re a singer it’s even more physically demanding, and intense, so it’s so important to maintain your health. Back in my drinking and drugging days I did a lot of abuse to my body, but today as a metal head in this time of my life, I am more focused on being healthy by exercising, sleeping enough, and eating right. I know what I have to do, and what I need to perform every show we play.
OC Weekly: When you started the band many years ago, did you ever in your wildest dreams imagine it would turn out to be this massive, important and influential?
Rob Halford: No not at all. And that is the best way to approach this. It’s great to have dreams and be ambitious, but it’s not a guarantee to have a long career in rock n roll. There is a risky part to what we do. But, it should always come from having passion in whatever type of music. When we began Priest, we never had any idea it would turn into the beast it became. You have to work hard, practice a ton and never give up. Good music always lasts. But, I’ll tell you this much, we could not have done it without our fan base. They are all around the world now and they push us to keep going. We love them all.
Judas Priest’s latest album, Redeemer Of Souls, was released on July 8th and landed at the number six position on The Billboard 200 chart.
When The Stillness Comes, the first new track from Slayer in nearly a year, will be available as part of Record Store Day on April 18th, it is announced today by Slayer and Nuclear Blast.
The song, accompanied by a live recording of Black Magic, from the band’s 1983 album Show No Mercy and recorded live at the 2014 Wacken Open Air Festival, will be available as a limited-edition (only 5000 copies worldwide), 7-inch vinyl picture disc exclusively at all participating independent record stories worldwide.
Greg Prato of Songfacts spoke with Mr. Big vocalist Eric Martin. Excerpts from the interview appear below.
Songfacts: If you want to start off by talking about the new album, The Stories We Could Tell…, how does it compare to previous Mr. Big albums musically?
Eric Martin: I don’t really think it compares. I’ve said this recently in a Japanese magazine – you won’t read it – that most of the albums we’ve done, we always took our second album, Lean Into It, as a blueprint. There was a great collection of songs and it was a smorgasbord of music and lyrics. And the sound quality and all that. I think some of our records had tried to be that Lean Into It album, but I kind of look at this one particularly, it’s unique and it stands out.
This is the record that I’ve always wanted to make. At the beginning we had inklings of it where we talked about our influence. We’re all influenced by blues-based rocker bands like Free, even like Grand Funk. That kind of style, or Bad Company. I remember Billy always talking about a band called Spooky Tooth. And Pat with Cactus. Beatles, as well. But a lot of blues rocker bands; we all agreed that we love the band Free, which is the same kind of band that we are: bass, drums, guitar, and vocal. And even though we have some songs that are… I’m not saying formulaic, but some songs are structured. And our first album was more spontaneous, just kind of jamming. Like a rock and soul band would do. Like Free.
That’s how I look at this record. Musically, it’s a little more structured, but it has that feel of our first album. It’s a little bit more on the blues side. Still chock full of rock, but it definitely has a blue tint to it.
Songfacts:…you mentioned the song To Be With You. What was the lyric inspiration behind that particular track?
Eric: To Be With You. I had this girlfriend. Well, I wanted her to be my girlfriend. We were really, really good friends. Her name was Patricia, actually. Patricia Reynolds. She’s remarried. We were really, really good friends.
She taught me how to basically write songs, write poetry. She used to write poetry and read it to me and we’d sit in her father’s broken-down Mercedes Benz in the backyard of her house with trees and weeds growing in it. She used to put crystals up.
I was totally enamored with this woman. She was beautiful. Smart. I mean, brains, beauty, break down the walls, made me crawl on my belly like a reptile.
I just loved this woman, but she just wanted to be my friend. She’d have tons of boyfriends, and maybe she misconstrued promiscuity for love. But I wanted to be the knight in shining armor. That’s what I was, a knight in shining armor. But basically, I didn’t get my feet wet.
I wrote the song when I was about 16, 17 years old. Mainly to impress my sister’s girlfriends, because Patricia wasn’t having me anyway. But I wrote it about her and I wrote it about how I would have done anything to just be more than a friend and a confidante. But as you go up, you kind of go, “Maybe that’s what it was. That was my place.”
And the year before I joined Mr. Big, my publisher at the time set me up with another writer named David Grahame. David was Paul McCartney in the play Beatlemania, and he kind of looked like Paul McCartney. And it was good. It was really short and sweet. I think we might have spent two days together, we wrote two songs.
The first song we wrote was a song called Captured By Cathy’s Kiss, which never saw the light of day. And he goes, “Hey, do you have any other songs?” And I didn’t. I didn’t have anything. I mean, I’d written a couple of other things that were on a couple of solo albums that I did prior – this was 1988, I think. And I reached into my bag of cassettes and I pulled out To Be With You. And my little demo of To Be With You, I had the majority of the lyrics, there was a couple that didn’t make it, that weren’t good, but musically it was more Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. It was a little on the folk side for the music. The melody was the same, but the music was kind of folk.
So when I got together with David, we did this demo and we played piano and acoustic guitar. He goes, “Let’s do something like Give Peace a Chance by The Beatles [Ed’s note: Actually this was a John Lennon solo song]. How about just a bass drum and a hand clap?” Which totally breathes new life into it. And then he came up with the second verse part: “Your game of love was all rained out.” I don’t know if he was a baseball fan or something like that, but I thought that was funny and cute. He wrote a couple more things too, but he breathed new life into this song. Gave a little humor, and my music was a little on the stale side. So with the help of the bass drum and the handclap, he gave it a step, gave it a little spark.
Songfacts: What about the song Just Take My Heart.
Eric: Just Take My Heart is about me and my first wife. Stacey was her name. Just laying there in bed the night before both of us are going to go our separate ways. You could hear a pin drop, that’s how quiet it was. She was leaving me for another man.
That was a tough year for me. I just talked to a guy the other day who was going through the same thing, and I said, “So, do you still live in the house?” He goes, “Yeah, man, we sleep in the same bed.” I go, “Me, too. I did the same thing.” It was really, really a tough situation for me.
Lyrically, that’s what it’s about. Musically, it felt a little formulaic, but it was truly heartfelt. Every lyric was exactly what I was thinking when I was laying there right before.
Read Eric Martin’s entire interview with Songfactshere.
The official music video for Finest Hour”– a track from The Killer Instinct, the second studio album by melodic rockers Black Star Riders – is now available for viewing. Watch it below.
Due out in North America on February 24th, The Killer Instinct was produced by Nick Raskulinecz (Rush, Foo Fighters, Alic In Chains, Mastodon) and is a talking book collection of perfectly crafted short stories seasoned with harmonized guitar riffs, barbed wire choruses, and a level of musicianship that will stand the test of time. One listen to Through The Motions, Finest Hour, Soldierstown, Blindsided, and Sex, Guns & Gasoline proves melodic hard rock is not only alive & well, but thriving.
Featuring guitarist Scott Gorham (Thin Lizzy, 21 Guns), vocalist Ricky Warwick (Thin Lizzy, The Almighty), guitarist Damon Johnson (Thin Lizzy, Alice Cooper/Brother Cane), drummer Jimmy DeGrasso (Y&T, Megadeth), and bassist Robbie Crane (Ratt, Lynch Mob), The Killer Instinct is a lustrous contribution to the chronicles of rock’s still-evolving history.
Listen to the back-stories on all of The Killer Instinct‘s album tracks as shared by veteran rock vocalist & lyricist Ricky Warwick
Following their appearance on this year’s Monsters Of Rock cruise, Black Star Riders will play three U.S. shows this April as special guests to Europe. Upcoming dates are:
4/24/15 Potawatomi Casino – Milwaukee, WI
4/28/15 House of Blues – Chicago, IL
4/30/15 Irving Plaza – New York, NY
Additional U.S. tour dates will be announced soon.
The Killer Instinct can be pre-ordered in multiple formats (domestic, import, and exclusive vinyl) from the the album’s landing page.
The track listing for the 2-CD digi-pak version of The Killer Instinct is:
1. The Killer Instinct (purchase the single on iTunes)
2. Bullet Blues
3. Finest Hour
4. Soldierstown
5. Charlie I Gotta Go
6. Blindsided
7. Through The Motions
8. Sex, Guns & Gasoline
9. Turn In Your Arms
10. You Little Liar
Bonus CD:
1. Gabrielle
2. The Reckoning Day
3. The Killer Instinct (acoustic)
4. Blindsided (acoustic)
5. Charlie I Gotta Go (acoustic)
6. Finest Hour (acoustic)
Leslie Michele Derrough of Glide Magazine spoke with Eddie. Portions of the interview appear below.
Glide Magazine: We know how much you love your New York Giants. What happened to them this season?
Eddie: Yeah, that is my favorite team and my favorite sport. I think we’re going to have a great year next year. I’m very optimistic, actually. I think that the big problem with this year was all the injuries that they had. So I think that Odell Beckham and Victor Cruz together on the field at the same time is going to be a lot for people to handle and if all those guys that were injured, if we get them back healthy and maybe a couple little additions, I think the Giants are going to surprise a lot of people and have a really, really good year. Again, if they don’t have a ton of injuries, which they had twenty-five guys on IR this year, and I know they say injuries are no excuse but obviously it plays a role. So we’ll see. I wish it was September already. I can’t wait.
Glide Magazine: AC/DC opened the Grammys the other night. How did you feel about that and their performance?
Eddie: I thought, and have thought my whole life, that the Grammys, when it comes to rock and metal music, is a complete farce and I’ve railed about it for a long time. I think it’s absurd, actually. They have no clue what they’re doing, and never did, and it’s embarrassing and unfortunately because they’re so lost in their nomination process of who they give Grammys to in those categories, it’s actually become utterly meaningless. Even if the artist every once in a while that deservedly win one, it’s meaningless, it does nothing. There’s no spike in their sales, it’s forgotten the next day, it’s kind of a joke.
But as far as AC/DC performing at it, I thought it was a really cool way to kick off the show and I thought that the band sounded good. I mean, there were a lot of people wondering who the drummer was going to be and obviously that was revealed that they brought Chris Slade back. I thought that Stevie Young replacing Malcolm, he looks like him and I’d guarantee 90% of the people watching had no idea Malcolm wasn’t even there. I don’t think in the mainstream world they follow it all that closely. Now I think if they see Angus in the schoolboy outfit, they see Brian Johnson singing, there’s AC/DC. They don’t get into it in the level that we might. But I thought it was a cool way to open the show and give everybody a dose of some hard rock music and then largely after that, unfortunately for the rock fan, there really wasn’t all that much to see.
Glide Magazine: Do you think Black Sabbath has another album in them?
Eddie: I don’t know. Possibly. I think Tony Iommi is the undisputed all-time master of riffs and when you have that catalog of riffs, I think that he could make twenty good records still if he wanted to. I’ve spoken to Tony about this, that “You should sell your riffs,” cause he said he’s just got archives of these riffs. I said, “You should sell them as ringtones cause you could never possibly make music with all of them. There’s just not enough time.” And he laughed and he said, “It’s kind of true.” So I honestly don’t know what their future is but I think that they could make as many records, great records, as they wanted to. The question just becomes, do they have the focus to do it, do they have the energy to do it, the desire to do it. Again, you’re talking about guys that are in their mid-to-late sixties and who have been through this for forty or fifty years and are now having some health issues with Tony. So it just comes down to if they WANT to. But I think if they want to, they certainly can, mainly because Tony has an archive, I know for a fact, of just riffs forever.
Glide Magazine: What were you like growing up? Were you the rock kid or a nerd?
Eddie: I was actually somewhere in the middle of the two because when I was growing up, if you were into the music I was, which was hard rock, you were considered a nerd. I graduated high school back in 1982, a long time ago, but the years I was in high school I was considered a total outcast. I was not in with the in crowd at all. I was not invited to the parties. I was considered this music geek and a guy that was not into the cool music of the time. A lot of the stuff I was into was not considered to be hip, cool music. And I didn’t care. I was defiant about what I liked: this is what I like and if you don’t like it, that’s fine. But I was judged a lot by what I liked at the time and what I didn’t like and I found that there were a lot of people that pretended to like music to just be in with this certain crowd and to get into parties and stuff; but they truly didn’t really like it. And I hated that. I always hated people that were fake and phonies about what they liked and didn’t like. So I always fought that and as a result, I kind of got lost in my own little world of music. I started pursuing a career in music as early on as my earliest days of high school. And that’s all that really consumed me at the time. I wasn’t a good student. I didn’t do well at all as far as grades or anything like that. I certainly wasn’t dumb, I just didn’t apply myself because I really didn’t have much of an interest in the stuff that was being taught. I was just totally in my world of caring about music.
Glide Magazine: Do you plan to do another book?
Eddie: Yes, I definitely plan to do a third book. I just don’t know when and I just don’t know what the format’s going to be…But I think that with the next book what I’d like to do, what I’m leaning towards, is kind of more an autobiography. I want to tell all the stories. I want to tell the stories about how I went from being this outcast kid in my high school in New Jersey to doing what I’ve done in the business on all levels, not just the things most people know me as, from the TV show or perhaps radio or whatever. But all the stories that led up to them, how those things happened, what it took to get them to happen. The good, the bad and the ugly. So I’d like to do that. I’m often asked by people all the time, “Hey man, how did you get to do this?” or “How did this happen?” I’ve got stories for days so I’d like to put those in some pages and get that story out there at some point.
Glide Magazine: What bands do you think are at the top of their game right now?
Eddie: It’s hard to say but I could tell you what I’m listening to and liking right now. That would kind of lead to thinking that those are kind of at the top of the game because they are bands that I like and are my favorite records at the moment. There is a new band called Farmikos that I like right now which features Joe Holmes, who used to play with Ozzy and David Lee Roth, and their debut album just came out and I really like that. There’s another kind of a new band that Scott Ian is a member of called Motor Sister and I like that record a lot. I love the new Marilyn Manson record. I was always a big fan of his since the beginning. I think he’s made a great comeback the last couple of years. I like the new Black Star Riders record, which Thin Lizzy kind of morphed into, and I think that’s really good as well. Those are a few of the new things that have come out that I really have been listening to and really enjoying.
Raven will release its new album, ExtermiNation, in Scandinavia on April 22nd, in Germany on April 24th, in the rest of Europe on April 27th and in North America on April 28th through SPV/Steamhammer. It will be made available as a digipak version (including one bonus track), 2LP gatefold green vinyl version and as a digital download.
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