New Korn – interesting!
Y’know, I’m in two minds about the new Korn album. On the one hand, I really liked their last one, Korn III: Remember Who You Are. The songwriting and performances were killer and I liked the production too. But on the other hand, any time I hear ‘collaboration’ I hear that screechy record needle sound. And that’s how I felt when I heard that Korn were working with Skillrex and a few other dubstep and electronica artists on their new album The Path Of Totality. But y’know what? I quite like this and now I’m really looking forward to it. 2011 has been a freaking killer year for new albums – The Aristocrats, Dream Theater, Mastodon, Duff McKagan’s Loaded, Devin Townsend Project, Anthrax, Machine Head, Trivium, Chickenfoot (and I’ve heard the new Megadeth album because I interviewed Chris Broderick recently, and it kicks all sorts of ass) – could the new Korn be another one for the pile of great 2011 releases?
PRESS RELEASE
KORN TO RELEASE GROUNDBREAKING ALBUM THE PATH OF TOTALITY ON DECEMBER 2
Korn will release their tenth studio album, The Path of Totality on December 2.
But this one is unlike any Korn record. It’s even unlike any record released before.
The Path of Totality is an experimental album which finds Korn shifting gears and exploring new territory. That should hardly come as a shock to the band’s diehard fans, as Korn exploded onto the scene in the’90s and established themselves as hard rock game changers from that point on.
For The Path of Totality, the band collaborated with some of the leading dubstep and electronic producers in the world, including Skrillex, Excision, Datsik, Noisia, Kill the Noise, and 12th Planet. The result is something completely new, yet utterly and definitively Korn. Leave it to a band like Korn to continue to reinvent itself two decades deep into its career.
“The title The Path of Totality refers to the fact that in order to see the sun in a full solar eclipse, you must be in the exact right place in the exact right time,” Korn frontman Jonathan Davis explained. “That’s how this album came together. I think all the producers feel the same way. I’m not sure it could ever happen again”
The band’s recent (and much lauded) collaboration with dubstep’s hottest producer, Skrillex, titled “Get Up!,” was the surprise rock hit of the summer, the buzz of which started in Coachella’s dance tent in April 2011, when Jonathan and Munky joined Skrillex on stage for a show stealing unannounced performance of the song.
That performance generated the start of a deafening buzz. The track has sold over 150,000 downloads, while the lyric video has generated nearly two million views and counting. The song, a Top 10 rock radio hit, still continues to be one of the best testing songs on the format over 24 weeks after its release.
Adds James “Munky” Shaffer, “Get Up” started as a bit of an experiment, but we had such an amazing response from our fans and had such a great time collaborating that a full album of tracks came together in a couple of months. We couldn’t wait to get to the studio every day to finish the next song.”
Some of the song titles from The Path of Totality are: “Narcissistic Cannibal”, “Burn The Obedient.” “Illuminati,” “Kill Mercy Within,” and “Chaos Lives In Everything.”
The album will be released in two configurations: as a standard 11 song CD and a special edition CD that will include bonus tracks as well as a DVD of The Encounter, a full length video concert of Korn’s mind-blowing, once in a lifetime performance in the middle of a 900 ft long crop circle in a wheat field in Bakersfield. The complete concert, previously seen last year on TV and online in an abbreviated form, will be offered in its entirety to those who purchase the deluxe version.
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.
New Megadeth single available
The new Megadeth single “Public Enemy No. 1″ is now available on iTunes! Here’s the link. It’s a pretty rockin’ track with elements of “Hangar 18,” at least to my ears. I’m very interested to hear their new album, Th1rt3en. The album contains new studio versions of a few songs that have been released as demos before, some as long ago as about but they’re kickass songs that deserve the full production treatment.
Th1rt3en will be released by Roadrunner in November. It’s the first Megadeth album since The World Needs A Hero to feature David Ellefson on bass, and the second to feature the utterly monstrous Chris Broderick on guitar. Cool.
INTERVIEW: Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt
Opeth have always been a little left of centre, especially when taking the iconic sounds of death metal out of the 90s and into the naughties and infusing it with a progressive edge. But nowhere has that prog influence been more inspired – and even jarring – than on their new album, Heritage. There’s barely a hint of metal to be found on the album and absolutely no death growling anywhere. In its place there’s distorted organ, nylon string guitar, and – you’re not gonna believe this – fully authentic 1970s-style jazz fusion in the style of Mahavishnu Orchestra. Mikael Åkerfeldt explains the abrupt change in style…
There’s an obvious fusion feel to a lot of the material on Heritage. Where did that come from?
We’ve been listening to not only fusion but all sorts of music. And the fusion aspect comes from Mahavishnu Orchestra, Billy Cobham… I listened to Alphonse Mouzon, the drummer who was with Larry Coryell in The Eleventh House; some Herbie Hancock; the Headhunters, who are a mix of free-form and jazz and pop and whatever. But we listened to all styles of music. Some influences are more there than others, but I think we’ve been quite taken by the sounds of fusion for quite some time now, all of us.
How did you write it? Fusion is very ‘musician’ music.
I write everything on my own. I’m not really a good keyboard player, although I’m learning and I would love to be better. But with Opeth I can play what I want to hear, and I can play it fairly well. But I really, really rely on the other guys to make it proper for the actual recording once we go into the studio. I make demos of everything, and the demos, if I do say so myself, they’re pretty fucking good-sounding! I work a lot on the drums. Every ghost hit on the snare has got to be there. Everything’s there. So I want to have a splendid demo that I can present to the other guys so they should almost feel intimidated! I tell them, “You make it better than this and we have a real fucking thing going here!” And they always do! I think it’s inspirational for them to get that kind of level from the demos. Once they come up with something it’s gonna be fucking outrageous.
It must be great to have musicians who are professional enough to deal with that!
Yeah! I surround myself with really, really good musicians, but they are also more than metal musicians. They listen to all sorts of music, they’re interested in their own instruments and in developing their skills for those instruments. That’s been the case since the beginning. We always aimed to be fairly competent musicians because it makes experimentation so much easier. I mean, we could not have been doing this album with just a bunch of musicians who can only play metal. It’d be physically impossible.
INTERVIEW: Dream Theater’s John Petrucci
When Mike Portnoy quit Dream Theater a year ago, it could have been a disaster for the band. Instead they went into audition mode, recruiting former Extreme/Steve Vai drummer Mike Mangini to record A Dramatic Turn Of Events. The new album is classic Dream Theater, with odd time signatures, clever arrangements, genre-hopping, long instrumental sections and plenty of shred. Mangini proves he’s the perfect man for the job, and the entire band sounds energised and inspired by the new, more democratic approach to composition. It’s their most varied and creative work since 1999′s Scenes From A Memory.
The first impression I had of this album was “This reminds me of something. What is it? Oh! Dream Theater!” It really brings back the things I really loved about the Images & Words era.
Cool! We were definitely conscious to look at our goals for the new album and really talk to each other beforehand. I had a lot of conversations with Jordan (Rudess, keys) about the compositional direction, and trying to hone in on the elements that make the band special in our eyes. We had a conversation with James (LaBrie) about where we wanted to take the vocals melodically, and conversations with John Myung (bass) not only about the album but each song. We had a very focused general outlook of the entire writing process. And not only that but as a producer what it was going to sound like when it was all said and done. So that probably helped keep it in that direction.
Another new Dream Theater clip surfaces!
Dream Theater’s new album, A Dramatic Turn Of Events, is due out on September 13 via Roadrunner. I’ve been lucky enough to have access to it via secure encrypted don’t-even-think-about-sharing-it-or-you’ll-get-your-ass-kicked-by-hired-goons stream, and it’s incredible. Everything you ever loved about Dream Theater is here. Everything you didn’t (Mike Portnoy’s barked vocals) is gone. Dream Theater haven’t been this diverse since Images And Words, and new drummer Mike Mangini does an incredible job.
A 90 second clip of “Beneath The Surface” has just been released – check it out below – and when you’re done, why not head over to MusicRadar for a cool track-by-track examination of the album by John Petrucci himself?
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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), guitarworld.com, Tone Deaf, Beat and The Brag. I started I Heart Guitar in 2008. I've been playing guitar since I was 8 years old, and I've been writing for magazines since I was 18 (I'm 33 now). I've also worked as a guitar teacher (up to 50 students a week) and a setup tech. I live in Melbourne, Australia. You can check out my guitar playing at Reverbnation or on YouTube.
You can email me at iheartguitarblog@gmail.com