Good morning Radicals! Hope everyone had a lovely weekend! Let’s get to some music news!
Brent Smith, Zach Myers, Lou Brutus, Eric Bass, Barry Kerch-Shinedown
Shinedown has completed recording its new album for a tentative late spring/early summer release. Guitarist Zach Myers told hardDrive affiliate Razor 94.7 on Friday, “The new album is done. Our part is done. Not all of our part — Eric (Bass, Shinedown bassist) is now mixing the record as well. He was just gonna produce it and someone else was gonna mix it. But now he’s mixing the record. So Eric is not done, but the (rest) of us are done with our recording parts. So it is done. It’s in the can.”
The new LP follows up 2015’s Threat To Survival, with Myers saying, “It’s heavier than Threat To Survival, but it’s fresh, it’s new. My favorite thing about our band is that we’ve never made the same record twice . . . I have to be a musician first, so I can’t just cookie-cut the same sheet of dough and go, ‘Well, here it is. It worked last time.’ I’d rather not do that and fail than do that and succeed.”
The new disc is the band’s sixth studio effort and is the first to be produced entirely by Eric Bass, who has produced songs before but not an entire record. The band recorded a total of 16 songs for the set, out of which Myers said “12 or 13” will make the final cut.
Lou Brutus and Synyster Gates at Rockfest 2017
Avenged Sevenfold guitarist Synyster Gates told Metal Hammer magazine in a new interview why he decided to launch an online guitar school with his father, noted musician and acclaimed session guitarist Brian Haner Sr. Gates explained, “I wanted to set something up that I felt could help kids like me from a young age . . . I felt like I could do a pretty good job of curating a curriculum, and with the help of my father, who is an amazing musician, and has been playing in and out of studios for 40-plus years, I felt like we could really give people that extra benefit of our experience.”
Gates said that the curriculum took about two years to develop and goes from “very, very beginner — how to pick up a guitar — all the way to advanced theory that gives you a good solid foundation for jazz and other different applications.” Gates said that the project is more of a “community” than a school, saying, “People can search you out, and find like-minded people to help instruct, or form bands together . . . there’s so much to learn from everybody.” Avenged Sevenfold recently released a deluxe edition of its latest album, The Stage, and will begin a North American headlining tour on January 12th in Nashville with special guests Breaking Benjamin and Bullet For My Valentine.
This is a new low for those people scamming money out of fans! I Prevail posted a message online late last week warning their fans against buying fake band merchandise on Facebook. Anonymous users on the social network are allegedly exploiting its advertising platform to market unauthorized merchandise to various artists’ fan bases. I Prevail said, “Over the past month, our band and many other bands have been taken advantage of by multiple pages selling fake merchandise and promoting it on Facebook. This most recent knock-off has over 6k likes and 1k shares. PLEASE do not fall for these tricks. Unless it’s coming from the official I Prevail page, it’s a fake piece of merchandise that we don’t receive a penny for.” Same reason you don’t buy shirts from a random guy in the parking lot! You know those are fake!
Lastly, a bit of fun for your Monday morning: A Vimeo user named Sleep Good has taken Nirvana‘s angst-ridden grunge classic “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and changed its tuning from the original key of F-minor to a major scale — transforming the moody anthem for disaffected youth into a summery pop-punk celebration.The result sounds “a little less Smashing Pumpkins and a lot more Weezer,” according to Billboard, with Sleep Good even renaming it “Teen Sprite” and pretending it’s from a band called “Nirvirna” who hail from sunny Southern California coastal town La Jolla and not rainy, gloomy Aberdeen, Washington.
Finally, we’d like to wish a HAPPY BIRTHDAY today to Ryan Sitkowski, lead guitar for Motionless in White, as well as belated wishes to Ivan Moody of Five Finger Death Punch and Jinxx of Black Veil Brides! Have some cake!
