Spoke with M Shadows of Avenged Sevenfold yesterday. They are jazzed about their upcoming tour with Breaking Benjamin and Bullet For My Valentine coming up in January. They are also preparing their deluxe edition of The Stage for a Dec 15th release. The vinyl and CD will have a lenticular cover. I wanted to know what that was. He said remember the Tool album, Ænima? That is a lenticular cover. Anyhow, be listening for Matt on hardDriveRadio as one of Lou Brutus‘ guests in the coming weeks.
Alternative Press and The Pulse Of Radio are reporting Linkin Park‘s Mike Shinoda took to Instagram to reveal the special tribute car the band and Mercedes-AMG created to honor the band’s late singer, Chester Bennington. Mercedes-AMG paid tribute to Bennington by creating a car with a flame decal similar to that of the vocalist’s flame tattoo. The car made its debut at the Petit Le Mans in Braselton, GA while Shinoda and Linkin Park turntablist Joseph Hahn shared photos of the vehicle on social media.
Linkin Park have a history of being brand ambassadors with the automotive company. Earlier in the year, Bennington himself had purchased a Mercedes-AMG GT-S sports coupe a few months before his passing.
In other news, Linkin Park’s episode of Carpool Karaoke, filmed less than a week before Bennington took his own life in July — will now premiere this Thursday (Oct 12th). Following Bennington’s suicide, series creator James Corden said that he would let Bennington’s family and bandmates decide whether to air the segment.
Linkin Park is scheduled to take the stage at a memorial concert for its fallen singer on Oct 27th at the Hollywood Bowl, with members of Korn, System Of A Down, Blink-182, Avenged Sevenfold and others all scheduled to appear as well.
Hellyeah is also releasing a deluxe edition of their recent album, Unden!able, due Oct 27th as a CD/DVD Best Buy exclusive and CD and live audio digital deluxe. The physical package contains the fan-shot live concert DVD, We’re All In This Together. The digital package contains the live audio from the DVD.
Featuring footage captured by the band’s fans from the Australian leg of Hellyeah’s 2015 Blood For Blood world tour, We’re All In This Together also features frank on-camera discussions with singer Chad Gray discussing the heavy rock lifestyle and the band’s history within the heavy rock community.
Unden!able features three Top 10 Active Rock singles, including “Human,” “I Don’t Care Anymore” and “Love Falls,” which has just reached Number Seven.
Chad Gray told us a little about what “Love Falls” is about: “The song is really more about self-love. I’m a product of my past, and I came up in an abusive household, and I chose to isolate myself vs. getting beaten. When you start that way — you know, I was very young — you have a hard time finding self-confidence, self-assurance, and I’ve always wrestled with that. And that’s really what the song is kind of about.“
Unden!able was released in June 2016 and marked the first time Hellyeah’s current lineup — Gray, guitarists Tom Maxwell and Christian Brady, drummer Vinnie Paul and bassist Kyle Sanders — recorded together as a unit. The band does not have any live dates scheduled for the rest of 2017 and may be starting to get to work on its sixth studio album. (Thanks Blabbermouth.)
Well, it’s about time! The Offspring expect to release a new studio album in 2018 as guitarist Kevin “Noodles” Wasserman spoke about the band’s long-awaited follow-up to 2012’s Days Go By during a recent interview in Brazil. Wasserman said, “We’re working on it. We have been, yeah, for a while. We’ve got a few songs already done. We wanna do a couple more, and we definitely wanna get something out soon. Our fans have waited long enough, I think, so we wanna get something in their hands that they can listen to and hold and put in their ears.“
Lou Brutus asked Wasserman a while back about the Offspring’s tendency to take several years to make a new record: “You know, there’s times when, you know, we’ll call management and go, ‘We’re not done yet. What’s the label saying? Are they pissed?’ ‘Ah, don’t worry about it, you know, we’ll get by.’ ‘OK, good, that’s what we wanted to hear.’ The pressure really hasn’t ever been bad, because we have been around for a while and we’ve had a certain amount of success, people kind of leave us alone to do it the way we do it best.”
As for a possible release date for the next Offspring record, singer Dexter Holland said, “2018, for sure!” The Offspring issued its ninth album, Days Gone By, five years ago. It spent 2014 on the road promoting the twentieth anniversary of its breakout album, Smash, by performing the disc in its entirety at a number of shows.
In April, The Offspring played its 1992 album Ignition in full at a benefit show in Berkeley, California, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of 924 Gilman, a nonprofit music and art community space.
Now we know what Bring Me The Horizon guys are up to! Singer Oli Sykes and keyboardist Jordan Fish will set out at the end of this week to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and raise money for Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Southampton Hospital in the U.K. So far, the pair have raised approximately two-thirds of the financial goal they wanted to reach, earning the British equivalent of $89,000 with the goal being the equivalent of $131,000.
The campaign began after Fish and his wife had to bring their four-day-old son Eliot to the hospital’s pediatric care unit when he suffered a brain hemorrhage. Fish attributed much of Eliot’s survival and recovery to the unit and decided to do something to give back to it, with Sykes offering to help as well.
Donations have also come in from bands like Good Charlotte, Architects and others. The pair will travel to Tanzania on Oct 12th to begin their eight-day hike up Kilimanjaro. The mountain is the highest summit in Africa and the pair will have to ascend more than 16,000 feet to reach the peak.
Bring Me The Horizon’s most recent album, 2015’s That’s The Spirit, reached Number Two on the Billboard 200 album chart and featured the hits “Happy Song” and “Throne.” Last December, the British act released its Live At The Royal Albert Hall DVD, documenting an April 2016 concert at the legendary London venue with a full orchestra and choir. All proceeds went to Teenage Cancer Trust.
I meant to post this yesterday, but I cracked up as I was watching This Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO Sunday night. (If you haven’t seen before, SHAME! DVR it for God’s sake!) Host Oliver mentioned Slipknot in his opening monologue. It was awesome! In a bit about President Trump, who recently invited a large group of military leaders to the White House. While standing together for a photo op, Trump said, “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm,” in front of a group of journalists. The media immediately asked the president to elaborate on his statement, especially since tensions between the U.S. and North Korea have been escalating. Trump said “you’ll see.”
Naturally, John Oliver covered the story on Last Week Tonight, tagging a Slipknot joke onto his commentary on the situation. “For a start, no moment in the preceding nine months has been even remotely ‘calm,’” Oliver began. “It’s like we’re two hours into a Slipknot concert and they just said, ‘Enough ballads, now we’re gonna play one that rocks!’” (Thanks Loudwire for the transcription.)
Happy 63rd today to David Lee Roth of Van Halen!