blog.jamlegend.com

JamLegend is usually a venue for emerging talent to find a worldwide audience, but sometimes, we have the privilege to bring true legends to a young and unsuspecting audience.  One such band is Death, who began their influential career in Orlando, Florida in 1983.  Death is without a doubt one of the pillars of metal, pioneering the genre of death metal (why do you think it's called "death metal"?) by pushing the horizon of what's considered "metal."  Go to any metal show, and we bet you good money you will see someone wearing a Death shirt with the band's iconic logo featuring a scythe.  The band continued to be active for a very long time, but when founder and central member Chuck Schuldiner passed away from brain cancer in 2001, Death was put to rest with him.

Death originally began as Mantas in 1983 when Schuldiner was only 16 years old with founding members Rick Rozz and Kam Lee.  The band shed the Mantas name and became Death in 1984, starting a long and steady journey to becoming metal legend.  Keep in mind the Internet didn't exist for most people in the 1980s: Death's music and reputation spread slowly as metal fans traded cassette tape recordings and read about them in fanzines.  Everyone was intrigued by this new band simply called Death with their intense, ultra-fast drum patterns, gutteral vocals, tempo/key-changes, and lightning-speed guitar solos; the music was fast, but instead of punk or hardcore's kinetic spark, it possessed a smoldering energy and gravity.  It was something people had seen glimpses of in other bands, but really crystallized in Death to become a springboard for a brand new genre.  After a few years of Schuldiner moving from city to city and subsequent member shuffles, Death finally released their debut album, the landmark Scream Bloody Gore.

Chuck Schuldiner continued writing songs and performing with Death with a rotating cast of supporting musicians, many of them in their own famous bands such as Gene Hoglan, Steve DiGiorgio, Terry Butler, etc.  He even expanded into prog metal with a second band called Control Denied.  So it was quite shocking and tragic that in 1999, Schuldiner was diagnosed with brain cancer and passed away in 2001 at a too-young age of 34 after a long, brave battle with the disease.  While Chuck Schuldiner hismself was modest and rejected the idea that he was instrumental in creating the death metal genre, the list of musicians who attended his funeral shows the breadth and depth of Schuldiner's musical influence.

As huge fans of Death, we really hope that finding Death's music on JamLegend made your day, and maybe even added something new to your perspective on the metal bands you already like.  Bands like Death come only once in a long, long while, and we're in happy disbelief that we're in the position to introduce this amazing band to a new generation of fans.  Relapse Records has released the Death discography digitally available via iTunes, and will also release works by Control Denied as well as Mantas.  For more information on Death, please visit the band's excellent official website, their MySpace page, or their Facebook page.  Enjoy "Lack of Comprehension" from the Human album below!

 

Sometimes, you need a fresh start even after attaining success--a reboot to make everything runs the way it should.  If you thought Revocation sounds too tight and polished to be a new kid on the block who started their journey in 2006, you're correct.  For a few years, the Boston, Massachusetts band was active as Cryptic Warning, which evolved from guitarist David Davidson and drummer Phil Dubois-Coyne jamming to Guns n Roses and Metallica songs when they were still in middle school.  After a few demos, a studio album, and a growing underground following, Cryptic Warning metamorphosed into Revocation.  In an interview with Jackson Guitars, his guitar sponsor, Davidson explains the name change: "Ultimately, we dug the name and thought it had a cool weight to it.  I’ve always been a fan of one-word names and there’s not too many out there left because there are so many metal bands gobbling up everything that sounds evil or brutal."

Revocation's music can be described as an alloy of thrash metal and technical death metal.  There is an aspect of the band that's a stickler for technique--an intricate intertwining of guitar and bass parts, the galloping double-kick drumming, and the dexterous guitar solos.  But the songs aren't just cold, hard show of musical technique:  Revocation has a sense of flair and showmanship, as if the boys who played along to Guns n Roses never quite grew out of them.  Armed with a new name, the band felt a creative surge to record Empire of the Obscene, a self-released album in 2008.  Their fortunes soared when they caught the attention of Relapse Records, one of the top metal labels in the business. 

In the fall of 2009, Revocation released Existence is Futile through Relapse to rave reviews, including a Decibel review that called it "absolutely godlike."  While many metal bands often invoke fantastical themes to go with the crushing brutality of the music, Revocation's songs are surprisingly grounded in real life--from frustrations with politics and the collapsing economy to personal rage, there's much that resonates with the audience emotionally once they're done being awed by the musicianship.  With a solid album behind them, Revocation swiftly rose from the underground to terrorize the mainstream when Spin magazine named them one of the Ten Artists to Watch in 2010.

You can play along with Revocation's "Dismantle the Dictator" from their latest album Existence is Futile below.  For more info about the band, visit their MySpace or Relapse page.  Existence is Futile is available directly from Relapse, as well as via iTunes, Amazon, etc.  Revocation is on tour right now in the US--check them out live if you can!

05/06/10      The Tip Top       Indianapolis, IN 
05/08/10     Triple Rock     Minneapolis, MN 
05/09/10     The Warehouse     LaCrosse, WI 
05/10/10     Brass Rail     Peoria, IL 
05/11/10     Outland Ballroom     Springfield, IL 
05/12/10     The Marquee     Tulsa, OK 
05/13/10     The War Legion Underground     Amarillo, TX 
05/14/10     The Downtown Greenhouse     Flagstaff, AZ 
05/15/10     The Glass House     Pomona, CA 
05/16/10     The Boardwalk     Orangevale, CA 
05/17/10     Hawthorne Theatre     Portland, OR 
05/18/10     El Corazon     Seattle, WA 
05/19/10     ICON     Pocatello, ID 
05/20/10     In The Venue     Salt Lake City, UT 
05/21/10     Black Sheep     Colorado Springs, CO 
05/22/10     Bottleneck     Lawrence, KS 
05/23/10     The Hanger     Wichita Falls, TX 
05/24/10     Emo's     Austin, TX 
05/25/10     Dos Amigos     Odessa, TX 
05/26/10     Launch Pad     Albuquerque, NM 
05/27/10     The Clubhouse     Tempe, AZ 
05/28/10     Cheyanne Saloon     Las Vegas, NV 
05/29/10     Mesa Underground     Mesa, AZ 
05/30/10     Slopshot Billiards     Gallup, NM 
05/31/10     Launch Pad     Albuquerque, NM 
06/01/10     Tequila Jungle     Lubbock, TX 
06/02/10     Emo's     Austin, TX 
06/03/10     Ridglea Theater     Fort Worth, TX 
06/04/10     Cool Party     Laredo, TX 
06/05/10     Warsaw Ballroom     Houston, TX 
06/06/10     Rustic Cowboy     Shreveport, LA 
06/07/10     Big Daddy's     Tallahassee, FL 
06/08/10     Brass Mug     Tampa, FL 
06/09/10     The Oasis     Charleston, SC 
06/10/10     The Milestone     Charlotte, NC 
06/11/10     Otto Bar     Baltimore, MD 
06/12/10     Buddha's Place     Newport News, VA 
06/13/10     New Brookland Tavern     Columbia, SC 
06/15/10     Mojo 13     Wilmington, DE 
06/16/10     Championship Bar and Grille     Trenton, NJ 

 

It's common to say some things never mix like oil and water, but in music, that is probably the least true saying you can subscribe to.  There are many bands who mix cultures and genres, but the band who has come to JamLegend's attention recently is Seven7 from the United Kingdom.  They are relatively new to our game, but they certainly got our attention with their own take on melodic, progressive metal.  We asked Arran McSporran, the bassist, to tell us more about Seven7.

The catalyst for the band's unique sound seems to be Nick Meier, their guitar player from Switzerland.  Nick, who came to London to study music, is a jazz guitar genius who won the prestigious Berklee Music award for "Best Jazz Guitarist" and is known in the jazz world for his ensemble The Meier Group.  Nick is responsible for writing the guitar solos for Seven7's songs--and by "write" we actually mean "improvise."  Not long ago, one of the JamLegend trackers contacted Arran to ask for a guitar tab for a song so the complex guitar solo can be tracked correctly.  Arran says, "The only problem is that we have no tabs because our guitarist is a jazz virtuoso so he improvises a different solo every time! So I had to try to look through some old videos to find a video of him playing the song live to give the tracker an idea of what's going on."  Nick's reputation as an amazing guitar player precedes him: in a review of Joe Satriani--that is, the Joe Satriani of guitar virtuoso fame--Jazzwise magazine said the album at times "sounded Nick Meier."  While jazz and metal could potentially end up in a disastrous culture clash, Arran characterizes the two sides of their master guitar player thus: "Rehearsals are interesting as he often brings two guitars: one down-tuned seven-string to play with us and an acoustic (he is sponsored by Godin Guitars) with which he is going to play quiet late-night jazz until the early morning after he's finished rehearsing loud and fast and with us!"

Arran also adds that Nick's wife, who is from Turkey, has opened up a whole new world of Turkish music.  In visiting her native country, Nick has picked up various Turkish instruments like Oud, Saz and Baglama, as well as the fundamentals of Turkish music such as quarter-tone systems and instrument-specific phrasing.  All of these influences and instruments land in Seven7's music, making it more rich and complex than the average metal.  Of course, you can't have a solid band with just a guitar player:  Seven7's lineup boasts Dave Brown's brawny vocals, Arran's soulful turn on the fretless bass, and drummer Dave Moulding laying an unshakable foundation.

Seven7 has found that putting their music on JamLegend has reaped its reward in "great comments from JamLegend users about how much they enjoy our songs (and our logo!?)" as Arran tells us.  They discovered JamLegend when they saw another band's song widget on MySpace and thought "with the tricky solos, I knew that the JamLegend users would really enjoy the challenge of playing along to our songs."  With a whopping 12 songs available on the game, you can get a good taste of Seven7's unique style and play beside a celebrated guitarist and test your chops.

To find out more about Seven7, please visit their official site or their MySpace page.  You can buy their album Try Something Different via iTunes and Amazon.  We hope you'll enjoy playing along to the title track "Try Something Different" posted below!