Carl Begai

By Carl Begai

It was announced in April that vocalist Roy Khan had officially left Kamelot, citing personal reasons following a major case of burnout. The move came months after the last minute cancellation of the band’s North American fall tour back in 2010, leaving everyone else in and around the Kamelot camp scrambling to honour commitments and make ends meet. The band has managed to forge onward with temporary (for the moment) vocalist Fabio Lione from Rhapsody Of Fire, and although no one is talking about it, there’s a question mark stamped on a successful future without Khan.

During my recent interview with keyboardist Oliver Palotai covering his new and unexpectedly stellar Sons Of Seasons album, Magnisphyricon, he opened up regarding the tour cancellation and the far reaching effects of having the rug yanked out from beneath Kamelot’s collective feet.

“It affected me a lot, but not musically. The hard thing is, when a tour like that is cancelled there’s no insurance or anything like that. I was moving at the time, and I was relying heavily on my income from that tour, and it was at a time when the new Sons Of Seasons album was still in the making, which is something I invest a lot of my own money in. That money was missing, so it made the last steps quite hard.”

“Musically, well, I guess it did affect me after all because there’s only one other incident in my career that shocked me just as much, and that was Blaze Bayley’s criminal management, which caused the band to split up. That and the Kamelot tour cancellation are probably the two worst things that have happened in my life.”
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By Carl Begai

By all accounts that matter, Gamma Ray’s latest full length album To The Metal – released last year – was a well received next step in the band’s lengthy career. Diehard fans who have been following founder / guitarist / frontman Kai Hansen since his Helloween days may beg to differ due to the album’s traditional metal focus, however, having instead found shred salvation over the last 20 years in Gamma Ray records like Insanity And Genius, Land Of The Free and No World Order. So it goes that the band’s interim EP, Skeletons & Majesties, has the potential to fuel the fires of discontent a little bit more. Not so much for the re-recorded versions of aged tracks ‘Hold Your Ground’ and ‘Brothers’, or the newbie ‘Wannabe’, but the acoustic renditions of ‘Send Me A Sign’ and ‘Rebellion In Dreamland’ will likely set off the same alarms that Helloween tripped with their full-on acoustic 25th Anniversary album, Unarmed. One does not, after all, fuck with the classics.

Then again, Gamma Ray’s career is based on unpredictability, a point Hansen jammed right between the metal world’s eyes when he ditched Helloween – the band he co-founded – in their 1988 heyday during the band’s Keeper Of The Seven Keys era.

“Our real fans are used to us doing something different from time to time, and on every album in a way,” says Hansen, not the least bit ruffled by any negativity that comes his way regarding Gamma Ray’s music. “We can never get it right for anybody (laughs). We do an album and there are always a lot of people that say they like it, and there are people that are compelled to be critics and have to say something because ‘I like it’ or ‘I hate it’ isn’t enough. People always exaggerate in one direction or another. They’ll say it’s not as strong as the last album, or it’s too far away from what Gamma Ray should be, or it’s the same shit again and again. People always have opinions, so we can’t do anything except take it as it is. Judging from the buzz that we got for the songs, I think To The Metal was received well.” (continue reading…)

By Carl Begai

Arch Enemy vocalist Angela Gossow and guitarist Michael Amott recently fielded a host of questions from yours truly about their new album, Khaos Legions, with the result from said head-to-head-to-head landing on the BW&BK website (found here). Over the course of our discussion, Gossow tackled a number of subjects outside but related to the development of the new record, which is quickly coming to be recognized as one of the stronger albums of the band’s career.

Although Gossow isn’t the first woman to make her mark spewing death metal vocals, as Arch Enemy’s popularity has grown over the last decade she’s become widely regarded as the person who carved a carnage-strewn path for other ladies to do the same. She also has the distinction of being in a minority of extreme metal singers that doesn’t sound like a slobbering mess behind a microphone. Anyone with a mind to listen will realize there is reason and meaning behind the shred emanating from her throat.

“It’s a very conscious effort,” Gossow says of keeping things intelligible, “because if you want to do a death metal growl it’s very easy to have just one vowel that you use. That’s what happens because some death metal singers are just going for the sound. I want to have a lot of attack in the voice. I’m actually not thinking death metal when I sing; I think vocals, lyrics, thrash metal, rhythm, accentuating certain parts, the melody I’m following even though I’m screaming. Some of what I do is quite melodic, and I’ve been told by some producers that I actually change pitch when I’m doing my vocals. I’m song orientated. I’m not the death metal Chosen One that thinks I have to be as extreme as possible. I want to go with the song.”
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By Carl Begai

It’s been almost a decade since In Flames twisted their once-trademark melodic death metal sound into something less volatile and more mainstream. The aptly titled Reroute To Remain album signaled the change, but the band didn’t crash and burn as so many disgruntled fans had expected. On the contrary, In Flames earned themselves a legion of new fans even as some veteran followers hung on to hope, secretly admitting the band’s new musical direction wasn’t, in fact, that much of a disaster. The band’s new album, Sounds Of A Playground Fading, is by no means a return to old form, but it ranks as one of In Flames’ most diverse outings to date, seemingly hinting at the band’s past as they move forward. Personal observation, for example, has me hearing strains of the Whoracle album from 1997 on new song ‘A New Dawn’. Then there’s the mysterious and dark spoken word piece ‘Jester’s Door’ that preceeds it, which sounds like an obvious tip of the hat – lyrically more than musically – to their 1996 album, The Jester Race.

“Could be,” laughs vocalist and instigator Anders Friden, who debuted as In Flames’ frontman on The Jester Race. “I want to keep it open to interpretation, but it came about because of the lyrics. The track had to be those 10 or 12 lines. I couldn’t make it into a whole song, they were perfect the way they were. As we were recording the album, we had to come up with a song order very early on and keep it that way. Having an album feel was very important to me. It had to have a certain flow, you could almost imagine it as having an A-side and B-side, like an LP.” (continue reading…)

By Carl Begai

At the beginning of April 2011, record label Century Media announced via official press release that the latest album from Swedish metalheads Wolf, entitled Legions Of Bastards, would only be released as a digital download in North America. The band was unaware of the situation, however, up until guitarist Johannes Losbäck stepped up to do this interview. Not the best way to kick things off, but Losbäck wasn’t interested in shooting the messenger. He was completely mystified by the label’s move, of course, and we both agreed the decision to limit the physical pressing for Legions Of Bastards is tragic, because like all Wolf albums, it was made for fans of traditional old school metal by fans of the genre.

“It’s important to let people know this has nothing to do with the band or the people we are,” he says. “We had no idea, and we didn’t even know that they released albums digitally because we’re vinyl fans. We’re still stuck in that age. If it was up to us we’d give the music away. This whole digital thing, I don’t get it. I have no files whatsoever of songs on my computer. I only use it for email and website stuff. I bought the latest Whitesnake and Forbidden albums on CD and it was like I was a kid again; I just wanted to get home and unwrap them and play them. You can’t do that with Spotify. What the fuck is that?”

As expected, Legions Of Bastards continues Wolf’s relentless pursuit of and homage to traditional heavy metal. In fact, when put up against the band’s previous two records, Ravenous (2009) and The Black Flame (2006), the new one sounds even more raw and uncomplicated. (continue reading…)

By Carl Begai

Part 1 of my recent interview with Arch Enemy guitarist Michael Amott and vocalist Angela Gossow for the band’s new album, Khaos Legions. Read on…

Time flies when you’re ripping apart preconceived notions.

Ten years ago Arch Enemy embarked on a journey that sounded a lot like career suicide, at least on paper. The introduction of vocalist Angela Gossow in 2000 as the replacement for founding singer, Johan Liiva, was dismissed as a sick joke by some and a guaranteed car crash by others, all before a single throat-grinding note was heard. Those predictions were silenced with the release of Wages Of Sin in 2001, the album that jumpstarted Arch Enemy’s five-years-young career and inadvertently kicked the door open for women interested in entering the realms of death metal. Guitarist Michael Amott and axe-wielding brother Chris were forgiven by all but the hardest-nosed fans for the scare, and Gossow went on to become one of the most recognized – and easily the most intimidating – women in metal, performance first and eye-candy second.

A decade later, Arch Enemy is by all accounts in better shape than ever. Self-managed and calling their own shots, they have unleashed the brazen and twisted Khaos Legions, a record that is sure to please diehard fans and, at press time, had earned them a decent amount of flak. All as expected, according to Amott, but he isn’t letting any of the critics get him down.

“This album is kind of nuts; it goes all over the place,” he says “It’s a very exciting record for me because it encapsulates everything that Arch Enemy is about. It was written over a four year period, so I think that’s why it’s got a lot of depth and girth.” (continue reading…)

During a recent interview with Area51 guitarist Yoichiro Ishino about the band’s current activities (online shortly), we discussed the tsunami and 9.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Japan on March 11th, 2011. On record as the strongest earthquake to ever hit Japan, it decimated the northeastern Tōhoku region of the country. Ishino wasn’t directly affected, but it’s still an experience neither he nor anyone else in Japan will forget.

“I was in Tokyo at the time,” says Ishino. “Although things fell all over the place, were thrown out of cupboards, fluorescent lights cracked and fell, there was no major damage to buildings in the Tokyo area. Up north is where there was the big earthquake, and much damage due to the tsunami. Japan in general is well prepared for earthquakes, but this time things were really way beyond our imagination. It was just too big.”

The present lack of the 24/7 “Sensationalize This!” media coverage that polluted the airwaves immediately following the disaster would suggest that Japan is coping with the situation. A full recovery – call it the power of positive thinking – will take years, and according to Ishino many people are rallying together and doing what they can to help their countrymen.

“Life in Tokyo is returning to normal,” Ishino reveals, “but the real problem remains where the damage was greatest. Close to 300,000 people lost their houses, and are living in temporary facilities. The nuclear power plant nearby (in Fukushima) is causing a lot of anxiety and instability. As a result, although there is an electricity shortage in Tokyo, everyone is thinking about what can be done for those in real need up north. People are really taking action to help.” (continue reading…)