"My world just kind of bottomed out from under me. This thing that I have been dedicated to with complete focus and drive and attention and love... to having nothing but questions."
It's amazing that totally organically, Evan, my son and Nick, Gene's son, about a year ago started making music together. They've known each other their whole lives, but this bond they've had with music and this album they've done is crazy good.
The song possesses a driving and straightforward set of verses, a wide open and gothic chorus, and a sudden 6/8 groove for the solos that feels right out of those classic King Diamond albums.
It was always more rough and violent, says Destruction vocalist and bassist Marcel Schmier Schirmer of Germany's initial approach to thrash. We never tried to be the best musicians we tried to write songs that punched hard. On English heavy metal albums, it was always the first song on the album and the first song on the second side of the vinyl that were the fastest tracks.
I was too embarrassed to sing in my apartment, he says on a video call. But my roommate at the time was dating the preacher's daughter, and had keys to the church across the street. In the dead of night, the madcap bassist and singer took his recording equipment to the empty church, set up on the podium, and first sang his anti-war song Too Many Puppies.
I wrote the music before Oz passed away. But after Oz passed away, when we went back to England and we laid Ozzy to rest, when I got right from that, I went straight to Pantera celebrations with Phil, Rex, and Charlie. And then when I got done, when we got done with the Pantera celebration run, when I got home, I was just sitting in the house and [this] is when I wrote the lyrics and just sang the song.
We wanna do two days in Aston Villa [in Birmingham] and then come to America. And we wanna hear from everyone where we should go in America. And also we've gotta find a lot of young, new talent, because that's what [Ozzy] would want. That's what Ozzfest was all about. That second stage, that was the incubator - that's where so many [bands] came out of.
Master of Puppets is one of the few "perfect" albums in rock history (in other words ... all killer, no filler), and arguably the greatest thrash metal LP ever recorded. Tragically, though, it would prove to be the last Metallica album to feature the legendary Cliff Burton on bass.
Exodus with Rob Dukes is a whole 'nother beast. "3111" marks the vocalist's return to the fold after last appearing on an album in 2010, and what a return it is. On a song that's about narco killings in Juarez, Dukes gives a sufficiently menacing performance that's startlingly unhinged. The other members of Exodus said Dukes gave "the performance of his life" on the band's upcoming album
Limited to 150, the new model was handcrafted in the Gibson Custom Shop in Nashville using advanced 3D scanning, period-correct materials and construction techniques, with Murphy Lab hand-aging to mirror every detail of Richards' original black ES-355 - first used in 1969 and later during the sessions for the Rolling Stones' classics Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St and beyond.
