Happy Halloween kids! Hope you don’t get tooth decay! (ar ar ar)….Went into the office yesterday with the help of my engineer Bill and couldn’t believe the messes all around Manhattan with tons of tree limbs all over the place. Seems like our block was spared! We are sooooo lucky. Looking at the devastation all around the area, Hoboken, Jersey Shore, Connecticut, Long Island, Queens, Brooklyn, Seaside Heights, Breezy Point, the subways…I mean a reporter said Hoboken looked like Venice. It’s so surreal and so very sad. Homes and cars moved like toys. Mother Nature is one hellacious biatch, ain’t she? And that collapsed crane on W 57 St is the new tourist attraction! Our thoughts and prayers go out to everyone affected by this storm and we pray they can rebuild before too long. Keep the faith! Better days coming….Rockers from bands like Disturbed, Bush and Nonpoint reacted via Twitter to the news of Superstorm Sandy’s devastating Monday night (Oct 29th) assault on the East Coast, according to Loudwire. Disturbed‘s David Draiman wrote, “Such devastation. Such loss. I can’t help but be overcome with emotion seeing the images of the destruction wrought.” He later implored fans to donate to the Red Cross. (www.redcross.org) Papa Roach tweeted, “Checking the pictures of #Sandy on buzzfeed.tumblr.com. Sorry for everyone’s loss on the east coast,” while Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale posted, “Hurricane Sandy — treacherous times — sorry for all the disaster, watching the news now. It is terrible.” ….On to the news: Pulse of Radio reports Korn will take a step back from the heavily dubstep-influenced style of their last album for the band’s next project, according to an interview with guitarist James “Munky” Shaffer by the Phoenix New Times. Shaffer told the weekly paper, “I wouldn’t say it’s a 180 from the last album, but we’re definitely taking a different approach. We’re not going with the dubstep style, but we are using a lot of interesting recording techniques.” Korn’s 2011 effort, The Path Of Totality, found the band collaborating with electronic artists like Skrillex on all 12 tracks. Fans were somewhat divided over the hybrid of metal and dubstep, although most seemed to think it worked. But when asked if the band’s next set will be a return to a more traditionally heavy sound, Shaffer said, “I think it will be . . . it’s more melodic and the guitars are more aggressive and much more in your face. I think what we did before was bold and took a lot of balls, in regards to the album devoted entirely to dubstep. To me it’s very much a Korn album, but I want to feature more guitar on this album, on the one we’re writing right now.” Shaffer added that the new disc will still feature electronics, but not necessarily done in the style of dubstep. The guitarist added he was comfortable with the way The Path Of Totality turned out, saying, “We’ve always been a band that’s tried to reinvent themselves and innovate what we do, I think. We were at the point in our career you know, our tenth album, (and it was) like, let’s go for it.” Korn is currently writing music for its 11th album, but has yet to unveil a timetable for its recording or release. The band will perform on the ShipRocked four-day cruise that sails from Florida at the end of Nov….Another Shiprocked band, P.O.D., was forced to cancel an appearance this past Sunday (Oct 28th) at a festival in Ventura, CA after officials objected to the lyrics of one of the band’s biggest songs, “Youth Of The Nation.” According to the Ventura County Star, an official at the Ventura County Fairgrounds sent an email to the promoter of the Monster Jam Fest requesting that P.O.D. not play “Youth of the Nation” because the lyrics, which were partially inspired by three separate school shootings, were “too touchy and controversial” and “too violent to be played at a family event.” Gimme a break, will you!??? When did city officials even care about LYRICS! And especially from a CHRISTIAN ROCK BAND who only cares about it’s audience! Unreal! Don’t get me started on California!…..System Of A Down frontman and solo artist Serj Tankian introduced his classical symphony Orca in a first-ever performance by the Das Karussell Orchestra in Linz, Austria on Sunday night (Oct 28th). Tankian launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the event, initially seeking out $25,000. The fundraising drive was very successful, with any additional funds used to cover the expenses of mixing, mastering, and promotion. The performance was recorded and filmed professionally for a DVD release in 2013. Tankian said in a statement, “While I have rearranged some of my past rock compositions to be performed as orchestral pieces, such as the Elect The Dead Symphony in 2010, Orca is the first four-act symphony that I have composed, a mix of early-20th-century compositional styles combined with the powerful range of film scoring.” The singer told us a while back that writing a symphonic version of his Elect The Dead album was a good test of his abilities: “Doing the symphony thing just made me feel a lot more confident as a composer, also just kind of feeling like, you know, my palette is completely open — whatever I want to do, whatever I want to use, any color that I want to use, I’m more proficient in it because I can do it that way. You know, when you can write for an orchestra, you can kind of write for anything. It’s given me a lot bigger aspirations for sound that I’m going after than I did before.” … Green Day‘s video for “The Forgotten,” the band’s contribution to the soundtrack of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2, premiered Tuesday night (Oct 30th) at MTV.com. The track marks the trio’s first appearance on a Twilight soundtrack and the clip itself features footage from the movie. The soundtrack arrives on Nov 13th while the movie, the final film in the Twilight franchise, opens three days later on the 16th. (MTV)…Blabbermouth reports Los Angeles theatrical rockers Black Veil Brides will release their new album, “Wretched And Divine: The Story Of The Wild Ones”, on Jan 8 via Lava/Universal Republic. Fans who pre-order the album on iTunes are being treated to an instant download of the lead single, “In the End”. The track was recently chosen as one of the theme songs for the WWE‘s Hell In A Cell pay-per-view event, which was held Oct 28 at the Philips Arena in Atlanta, GA. The CD was produced by by John Feldmann (Papa Roach, The Used, Atreyu) and is a full-fledged concept effort, though the band’s lead singer, Andy Biersack, has not revealed the exact narrative just yet. “Lyrically, the most important thing for me is, how can I tell a cohesive story?” he told Revolver magazine. “How can I take the story and kind of weave it into songs that are written otherwise about a lot of personal experiences and the band’s experiences?”…And don’t forget, today at 3 PM Eastern/Noon Pacific, Halestorm is doing a Hale-O-Ween concert on The Warner Sound YouTube channel. You gotta subscribe to see it!….HAPPY HALLOWEEN BIRTHDAYS to Adam “King Ad Rock” Horowitz of the Beasties Boys who turns 46 today, Happy 49th to Mikkey Dee of Motorhead and Happy 31st to Frank Iero of My Chemical Romance!
