King Diamond

By Carl Begai

In 2006, long suffering Canadian cult favourites Eidolon released their seventh album, The Parallel Otherworld. The record unintentionally signalled the end of a decade-long career just when Eidolon had clearly hit their stride with Pagan’s Mind vocalist Nils K. Rue behind the mic, but the move to call it quits didn’t come as a surprise considering founders Glen Drover (guitars) and Shawn Drover (drums) had been devoting their time to Megadeth as of 2004. As fate and musical inpiration would have it, however, Glen and Shawn have decided to close out 2015 with a new Eidolon track, “Leave This World Behind”, featuring Rue and long time bassist Adrian Robichaud. The song marks the first Eidolon recording in 10 years.

“To be honest, we never called it quits, we basically just decided to put the band on the shelf,” says Glen. “I mean, at that point yes, Shawn and I were now half of Megadeth, and way too busy to consider anything else regardless of the fact that we had finally found an all around amazing and professional singer who couldn’t be matched. We had a lot of negative feedback in the past about some of our previous singers. All of those people were silenced when we brought Nils in.” Continue reading BraveWords Interview: EIDOLON – Life After ‘DETH (Once More, With Feeling)

By Carl Begai

Folks on this side of the music industry desk will tell you that the vast majority of press releases and band biographies are loaded with hollow bullshit. Many of these essays are too bloated with adjectives, mixed metaphors and blatant flavor-of-the-month ass-kissing to be taken seriously, often peppered with keywords and band names popular at the time and space in question, or yanked from a Wikipedia heavy metal page. These things raced through my head while scanning the bio for Moonspell’s newest outing, Alpha Noir, wondering out loud more than once if the newbie dweeb hired to write it had ever heard of the band before. Dropping names like Bathory and King Diamond as influences to describe an act hailed as one of the few and true remaining old school goth metal bands was absurd to the point of insulting.

Give Alpha Noir a spin and you’ll discover the description is dead on.

“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” frontman Fernando Ribeiro grins. “I tend to write those things myself. It’s not that I don’t trust someone else to do it, but I like to write and I think that sometimes the people at the record labels kind of miss the point. A lot of labels have many bands, and sometimes the people that write the press releases have to do it in a rush. I’d rather make things a bit more personal by doing it myself, so I’m glad you found everything in the press release to be true (laughs). With all the metaphors and poetry and personal notes that we put into the press releases, it’s good to know that people check out the new songs and realize that we’re not just blabbering and self-praising. We really tried to give people a clear view of what’s going on with Alpha Noir.” Continue reading BW&BK Interview: MOONSPELL – Into The Arena