New Chris Brooks CD!
Hey! Head over to chrisbrooks.com or iTunes and get Chris Brooks’s new CD, The Axis Of All Things! I’ll post a review of the CD soon.
Chris is a ridiculously, offensively talented guitarist. Here’s a bit of info from his site (and you can check him out on Facebook too):
Chris Brooks is an Australian guitar player, recording artist, teacher and Suhr Guitarsartist based in Sydney, Australia.
With his debut solo album, ‘The Master Plan’, Chris delivered an exciting and diverse instrumental release. Forming a tapestry of melodic themes, soaring solos and fiery excursions in rock, progressive metal and rock-fusion, ‘The Master Plan’ is a must have album for fans of dazzling guitar work, imaginative songwriting, and creative arrangements. Hear for yourself why the word about Chris Brooks is spreading!
Chris’ new album “The Axis of All Things” comes out September 25, 2011!
Chris has recorded or played live with members of Yngwie Malmsteen’s Rising Force,Black Sabbath / Heaven & Hell, LORD, Steve Paoli’s War Machine, Lana Lane, Age of Nemesis, and been featured in major magazines like Burrn!, Metal Hammer, Sweden Rock and Young Guitar. Chris most recently appears on LORD’s “Set in Stone” album.
INTERVIEW: Machine Head’s Robb Flynn
The Blackening was an unstoppable juggernaut of metal power for Machine Head. Conceived in 2005 and released in 2007, it kept the band on the road for quite literally years. But all good things must come to an end. And so finally, in the year of our lord 2011, Machine Head present Unto The Locust. Produced by Robb Flynn at Green Day’s Jingletown Studios, it’s a surprisingly diverse album which tempers its thrash edge with classical influences, wild mood swings, laser-focused precision, blunt-force-trauma riffage and some of Flynn’s best ever vocal performances. It may be hard to ever forget The Blackening and the way it captured the charred hearts of both modern and old-school metal fans in equal measure, but Unto The Locust its own animal and it makes neither concessions nor apologies for its history-making predecessor. It simply gets on with it in its own kickass way.
So I guess the question everyone wants to know the answer to is, did you have The Blackening‘s success in mind when you started working on this one, or did you try to ignore it?
We definitely didn’t have The Blackening in mind at all. We lived that moment for so long. It was an amazing moment, but when it was done, we were really excited to start writing again. You’ve got to remember, when we started writing The Blackening, it was August of 2005. And we started writing for this record in June of 2010, so five years had passed. We were ready to write, and we were ready to create a new moment.
It was almost like that album wouldn’t let itself die, y’know? It just kept going and going.
Yeah! It was amazing. It was an incredible moment. The Slipknot tours, Metallica tours, Grammy nominations. It was an endless stream of good news! It was really amazing, but it just went on for a while. We were lucky enough to finish the tour in Australia. That was the last dates of the whole album cycle. The last show we played in Sydney. It was killer, a great way to end it, and we totally went triumphant into the writing sessions. We were really charged up.
I really dig the classical guitar influence on the new album. I understand you actually took classical lessons?
I did. I actually took classical guitar in high school. It was an elective I had to take and I mainly just smoked a lot of weed and played Black Sabbath songs. Haha. I got a C minus, which isn’t a very good grade. It’s below average. I guess I showed that teacher, huh? Haha. But it really got my mind into that mindset of playing it, and once I really started playing I always leaned towards classical players. Like, I always liked Richie Blackmore, and Randy Rhoads in particular was a massive influence. Randy Rhoads on the first two Ozzy albums brought a lot of classical vibes and that was a huge influence. So between that and Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, those were pretty much my main masters.
INTERVIEW: Mastodon’s Bill Kelliher
Mastodon’s Crack The Skye is a hard album to top. Heavy, progressive, psychedelic, multilayered, complex – any concept album that knits together such disparate elements as Rasputin and astral travel has gotta be followed up by something pretty big. Just like Crack The Skye, The Hunter finds Mastodon doing what they do best – combining lyrical and musical creativity – yet the approach is different, the songs are shorter, the themes less interwoven and the results more eclectic. The Hunter is a crucial album for the band. After the strength and influence of Crack The Skye, The Hunter has to prove it wasn’t a fluke – it just has to. Guitarists Bill Kelliher and Brent Hinds are one of the most interesting and creative duos in modern metal, and I spoke with Kelliher a week before the album’s release. But first we have even more important matters to discuss, about a shared interest…
(Oh, and, uh, language alert.)
Before we get into talking abut the album, there’s something I wanted to ask you because we both have this in common: what do you think about the new Star Wars Blu-ray
Y’know, I’m a fuckin’ Star Wars fanatic. I’ve got all the tattoos, all the toys… It’s like Beyond Thunderdome with the fuckin’ toy collection. I didn’t really know what was going on with the Blu-rays until I paid attention. I don’t really watch too much TV. And I turned the TV on and saw a commercial for it. My buddy had just told me about the spoiler – Darth Vader saying ‘Noooooo!’ as he’s throwing the emperor off the fuckin’ thing, and he was like ‘Fuck all that, it’s a bunch of bullshit. Can’t they just leave it alone? But I’m gonna buy it anyway.’ And after I saw the fuckin’ commercials, the advertising for it on television, I was like, ‘Man, it looks so awesome!’ I’m not gonna lie, I was completely sucked in by George Lucas once again. Just the little scenes that they showed on television, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to watch the whole thing.’ I’ve already seen the movies like fifty trillion times. I’ve got them on every format – Beta, VHS, LaserDisk – you name it. I’ve got every version. And it’s a shame that they had to fuck with the originals. They should have a Blu-ray of just the original movies separately if you want to watch those. Don’t fuck with it, man. Don’t put fuckin’ Hayden Christensen in where Darth Vader’s ghost was at the end of Jedi! What the fuck is that? Everybody aged except for him? What the fuck does that mean? Why? That’s just a sell-out. It makes me mad! I can go off on that shit. I was like, ‘What is that, a Walmart fuckin’ special?’ Maybe they should have done a young Yoda. Maybe Phyllis Diller or somebody could have done that. I don’t know. It’s ridiculous! But the thing is, when people always ask me, ‘What do you think of the new movies,’ well, they’re fuckin’ horrible, but then again I’m not an 8-year-old boy any more. And when I was an 8-year-old boy – my kids are young, my son’s name is Harrison, for god’s sake – my other son’s name is Cohen, so I’m a little nerdy with the sci fi stuff. But the thing about Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi, they’re still cool to me when I’m 40 years old. The new movies to me, they’re horrible. The fuckin’ fart scenes, where one of the creates farts, the whole Jar Jar thing, it’s fuckin’ retarded. But my kids, they think it’s awesome. They’re like, ‘Wow, this is the coolest thing ever.’ And when they watch Star Wars they think it’s kind of boring. They know the characters and they’re interested, but movies have changed so much since when we were kids. I tried to watch that movie Transformers when it came out a couple of years ago, on a small television on our tour bus, and I could not even watch it, because a) there’s way too much shit going on, because kids these days need to see like 50 bazillion laser beams and explosions happening on a TV screen at once rather than an actual story, and, like, feelings and script going on. It’s just all about the action and something happening on the screen. And I couldn’t watch it. I was like, ‘I’ve got to turn this off. This is shit.’ Everything’s in focus, everything’s CGI, it doesn’t look real, I just can’t stand it. So who am I to say anything about movies these days? Let them release it. I don’t have a Blu-ray player but I’ll probably buy one just so I can watch the movies again and boo at the parts they redid.
Neutrino discovery could prove existence of Yngwie Malmsteen
The interwebz is buzzing today with news that CERN may – may – have detected neutrinos travelling at 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. There’s still a lot of testing to be done to verify if this is a real result or if there was some kind of measurement error, but if true it has huge implications for the guitar world. Simply put, it would prove the existence of Yngwie Malmsteen, who to date has only been theorised as being a real three-dimensional object and not some kind of quantum hologram distorted via gravitational lensing and reflected off swamp gas.
I’m judging Rockstar Bowling Demon Rock Off guitar competition
Now this is going to be fun. What could possibly be more awesome than duking it out in a guitar battle royale where you must ultimately face the horned one him/her/itself, while being judged by an esteemed panel of respected guitar experts, and also me?
1ST ANNUAL DEMON ROCK OFF GUITAR COMPETITION
Celebrating ROCKTOBER, Rockstar Bowling proudly announces the first annual DEMON ROCK OFF GUITAR COMPETITION, to be held Sunday 16 October at 4pm at the venue’s Rock Bar.
Turning the volume up to “11” and inviting all amateur guitarists to showcase their signature “facemelting”, contestants will battle each other in a series of judged elimination rounds with two finalists selected for a soul-saving face off with the Devil himself. The Grand Prize winner will receive:
• A Gibson Epiphone Guitar
• $500 voucher to Gallins Musician’s Pro Shop
• Professionally Recorded Demo CD and Video
• Feature Showcase Gig at Rockstar Bowling Rock Bar
• Music Press Coverage Annoucements
• An Eternity of Free Bowling
REVIEW: Ampeg Micro-VR
The Ampeg SVT is the undisputed king of rock bass amplification. Seriously. It’s formed the backbone of rock for decades, and it’s so cool that even Paul Gilbert – a guitar hero – wrote a song about the glories of plugging a bass into a mighty SVT and rocking the fuck out. Now, Ampeg’s Micro VR doesn’t actually claim to be an SVT, but it certainly borrows from that classic mega-amp’s styling, helped in large part by its little partner, the SVT210AV speaker cabinet. It basically looks like a mini SVT for an elf.
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Faith No More to play King For A Day for a night
Y’know the Faith No More gig in Santiago, Chile on November 14? Today the band has revealed two big pieces of news.
1) They’ll be playing the King For A Day, Fool For A Lifetime album in its entirety
2) Trey Spruance will play guitar for the gig!
This is huge news! Spruance, genius from Mr. Bungle, Faxed Head and Secret Chiefs 3, played on the King For A Day album but didn’t play on the tour (Dean Menta was the band’s live guitarist during this era, before they hired Jon Hudson for Album Of The Year). King For A Day was a pretty damn influential album for me back in the day and I still give it a spin for a solid three weeks or so every year. If you’re not familiar with it, here are some clips. It’s a much darker, more aggressive, heavy and melodic album compared to the stuff they were better known for from The Real Thing and Angel Dust.
COOL GEAR ALERT: Ibanez FRM100-TR Paul Gilbert Fireman
Paul Gilbert’s Ibanez Fireman signature model is freaking gorgeous, but the version(s) released a few years ago were also freaking expensive. Ibanez and Pablo Gilberto to the rescue! The FRM100-TR is a much more affordable alternative and it features Paul’s new DiMarzio Injector pickups (along with an Area ’67 in the middle position), which I reviewed a little while ago.
The guitar is made in China, and if you’ve played Ibanez’s stellar Artcore range you’d know that they make some great stuff in China, with especially impressive fretwork. As a Paul Gilbert fan and simply as a guitar geek I would love to get my hands on one of these for a test-drive – hell, I want one to keep now and I’ve never even played one!
Def Leppard Australian tour – and a sad, sad tale of birthday betrayal
The mighty Def Leppard are touring Australia soon with Heart and the Chiorboys. Sounds like it’ll be a great gig – I saw Def Leppard last time they were here and they were amazing. The tour is presented by MAX, Triple M, Australian Guitar Magazine (who I write for), KOFM, Mix 106.3 and Mix 94.5.
The press release and tour dates are below, but first let me regale you with a tale.
Picture it. Wodonga. 1988.
An already-into-rock me is about to turn 10. All I want for my birthday is Def Leppard’s Hysteria album (on cassette, natch). My cousin Daz was into Def Leppard in a big way and he was a few years older than me and, in my opinion, totally cool. So, my birthday rolls around and my first present is one of those awesome 80s boom boxes with two tape decks and a graphic EQ!!! I was in heaven! I could play the hell out of my Dire Straits and Beatles tapes on this! Then mum hands me another present, all wrapped up, obviously a cassette. YES, I think. This has got to be my Def Leppard tape! This is going to be so awesome! So I hastily unwrap it, all trembling hands and chattering teeth. Def Leppard Def Leppard Def Leppard!
You know what the cassette was?
Jason Donovan’s Ten Good Reasons.
Needless to say, I was mortified, and being 10 I was able to tantrum it out until I got my Def Leppard tape too. Hehe.
Now on to the press release!
DEF LEPPARD ROCK AUSTRALIA THIS OCTOBER JOINED BY SPECIAL GUESTS HEART AND AUSTRALIAN ROCK BAND CHOIRBOYS
McManus Entertainment is thrilled to announce Def Leppard’s return to Australia in October. They will be joined by American rock band Heart, who will be touring Australia for the very first time.
With more than 65 million albums sold worldwide, Def Leppard – Joe Elliott (vocals), Phil Collen (guitar), Rick “Sav” Savage (bass), Vivian Campbell (guitar) and Rick Allen (drums) – continue to be one of the most important forces in rock music.
Hi! I'm Peter Hodgson. I write for Gibson.com, Australian Guitar, Australian Musician, Mixdown Magazine (including my instructional column, 'Unleash Your Inner Rock God,' which has been running since 2007), Blunt, Beat (including their weekly hard rock/metal column Crunch) and The Brag. And I'm Assistant Social Coordinator with Seymour Duncan.
I've been playing guitar since I was 8 years old, and I've been writing for magazines since I was 18. I've also worked as a guitar teacher (up to 50 students a week), a setup tech, a newspaper editor, and I've also dabbled in radio a little bit. I live in Melbourne, Australia, and my hobbies include drinking way too much coffee, and eating way too much Mexican food.
You can check out my guitar playing at Bandcamp or on YouTube, and feel free to email me at iheartguitarblog@gmail.com