Welcome everyone to episode 389 of Signals from Mars.
I'm your host Victor.
And for this episode, we welcome Jeremy Weltman back for another Lazy Listener special.
It is the June 2024 albums review.
New music, new releases, however you want to put it.
We're a few weeks late, but who cares.
It's all cool, it's all good.
We just want to share and talk about music.
I'm ready.
All right, so we're back for another one of these monthly album reviews.
I love talking about new music.
I say this all the time, whether it's from bands we all love, whether it's new bands, I try to listen to as much as I can.
Some months I can listen to more than others.
And this month, for example, I'm going back and relistening to a lot of the things that I noted down that stood out to me earlier in the year.
Because due to time and whatnot, I haven't been able to throw stuff into the playlist as I would have liked to.
Hell, this episode for June is coming out in late July.
Folks, life gets in the way.
Regardless, the music is still good.
There isn't a sell by date stamped on any of it.
So you can still enjoy it, whether we're a few weeks late or not.
I hope that you still appreciate the fact that we do make an effort to do these episodes and try to turn you on to new things that are out there.
I know that there are other shows that do it.
Despo Geek, for example, does a great job with Fresh Blood and with other episodes that they do where they talk about new music.
And we're not we're not the only show to do it.
So it's definitely not a new concept at all.
It's just that I'm trying to spread the love this way.
So I hope you guys can appreciate that as well.
Jeremy does a bang up job.
We try to make sure that we don't sync up and listen to all the same things.
Sometimes we do because there's a big release from a band that we're both interested in.
But I try to listen to stuff that he's not listening to and vice versa.
And I think that we do cover a lot of things when putting these episodes together or when putting my list together, I do give preference to PR firms and labels that send me stuff.
Then I go searching on other sites and checking out what releases they have, see if there's anything that I don't have and try to do my best to cover all grounds.
With this episode, I do post the entire list of of releases.
Obviously, there's more out there.
There are other sites that I check up on and they have sometimes 40 to 50 releases more.
I do the best that I can.
And I think what's best for my audience.
And if you've got a band or a label or PR and you want me to list your your music, drop me a line.
Signals from Mars at signals from Mars dot com.
You can also go to signals from Mars dot com to check out everywhere where we're posting on social media, where the show is available to subscribe.
If you're into podcasting 2.0, sign up on some of those services as well.
You could also check out the video version of these shows.
All that great stuff is is available to you.
What else?
We also have merch up there on the website where if you want to help us out by giving us a donation or picking up merch or signing up for the Patreon, you can do any of those three things.
There's also a buy me a coffee, which I've renamed as buy me a pizza.
You can also pick up stuff on Amazon and we got a kickback for I say we I get a kickback because I'm an Amazon associate.
And if there's a sale that is associated where I can get a kickback, then I do get a kickback.
I just want to mention that they don't kick me off of there.
Anyway, let's get on with the episode.
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of signals from Mars.
I'm your host, Victor.
And joining me as usual over here is Mr. Jeremy Weltman.
How are you, Jeremy?
Yeah, doing good.
Really good.
I shouldn't really be saying Spain beat England in the euros, but I am going to speak to you because we obviously meet over music.
And so let's let's discuss all the great music instead of the football.
We'll forget about that.
That's absolutely it.
That's that's the cool thing about this show that we do with signals from Mars.
We come from different parts of the world.
We could have differences with other things like on the football pitch when it comes to talking music.
It is a brotherhood here.
I love talking about music with you and with other people that we have on the show.
And today is no different.
We're going to talk about music that came out in June of twenty twenty four.
And shortly thereafter, you and I also have to record the best of the year or what we've enjoyed the most out of the first half of the year.
But before we do that, let's get away.
Let's put away the last month out of the first half of the year here.
A lot of sites in June are already posting their best of the first half and not everything is out yet.
So so this is the last month to break things up.
We're at the equator of the year.
This is to help all of you lazy listeners that say that there's no good music out there.
Well, you just have to search it out.
And Jeremy and myself have done a I think a bang up job this month of kind of sorting things out and picking different things.
I think we've overlapped on one thing this month, which is the Anvil album, which is later on this month.
But outside of that, we purposely listen to a bunch of different things.
So let's start things off with June 7th, which had new albums from Bon Jovi on the other end of the spectrum.
We have Vomit the Soul, Holy Mother, Entranced, which I'm just realizing that I actually listed that.
Evergrey, Grand Slam, Apocalyptica, Enter Chikari, ESA, Nightmare.
Actually, Nightmare is from last month.
So wherever I pull this information from is incorrect.
And the reason I know this is that I went to listen to it and the date within Apple Music was May.
So that's a mistake on my end.
Anyway. Wow.
First one that I'm going to trip over.
That's a mystery. Rarity, Grand Demise of Civilization, Devil Moon Risen and Holocide.
We had reissues from Carnivore, from Ashes to New and Chris Rhea.
Live albums from The Who, that is the Mongolian band, HU not the English band, WHO.
And a live album, Live in 82 from Loverboy.
I posted some videos off of that.
The footage looks great.
I mean, that's stuff that MTV used to play all the time back in the day.
So it's kind of cool that they've released that now or remastered it.
You know, I'm not that big of a Loverboy fan to know if it's one or the other, but it is out now anyway.
Jeremy, before going any further, what's some of the music that you listened to that came out this month and what are some of the things that stood out to you?
Yeah, so obviously I was the guy who listened to the new album from Bon Jovi called Forever because I kind of guessed that you wouldn't be.
Their 16th studio album. Can you believe that?
To be honest, I kind of pretty much gave up on the band Beyond Have a Nice Day, which I kind of liked.
I thought that was a pretty good album in its day.
So obviously my expectations were very low.
But what you have is, you know, it's soft rock.
You can play in a care home.
It does have some moments.
Living proof. I liked. I liked the People's House.
Very sort of typical Bon Jovi melodies of old, which I enjoyed.
There's also a song called Kiss the Bride, which will make Bon Jovi a fortune.
Every wedding is going to now play it.
It's one of those songs that's, you know, every bride's going to walk down to.
So, you know, you can't knock him for that.
That's all I've got to say about it.
You know, I don't want to knock Bon Jovi too much because they were a sort of part of my youth.
And, you know, they brought out some big, big hits.
But, you know, they're not a band that I'm going to play again and again.
So I'll quickly move on to the L.A. band Entranced.
There's an album called Muerte y Metal, which I believe, Victor, you're going to put me right on.
I think it says Death and Metal in Spanish.
Correct.
There we go.
And in fact, there's a mix of Spanish and English on the tracks too.
You know, really nice sort of New Obum style with a very modern touch.
The track Fantasy reminded me a lot of the Joe Stump sort of Alcatraz sound.
Really enjoyed that one.
There were quite a few other songs as well I enjoyed on this.
I don't know, Nothing sounds sort of very early Def Leppard in parts a bit.
And, you know, they put their own spin on things as well.
The vocalist has a good voice as well that fits quite well with this kind of music.
And I thought the mix and production is quite right as well.
So, you know, thumbs up to that one.
I then had a listen to Rise by Holy Mother, which is a New York based outfit.
Very traditional metal sound formed in the 1990s.
I think they've now released about seven albums and surprising,
I don't believe I've heard very much by them.
You know, they sort of passed me by a little bit.
But the Opener Fire, I liked, I very liked Fire Wind.
But there's some tougher songs on there like Jeremiah,
which is, you know, possibly the best song Dio's never written.
So, you know, if you like a bit of Dio, you're going to like some of this album.
It's not all amazing sort of catchy songwriting, but it doesn't have to be, you know,
it's for the most part, it's kind of Dio back to life.
Listen to Rise and tell me that isn't Dio.
You know, it really does sound like him on that particular track.
But, you know, it's I'd say it's a lot better than the last In Line album.
So, you know, it's worthy of your time.
I moved on to Grand Slam.
Grand Slam are back, you know, great British sort of rock sounds from them.
We've heard a lot of British stuff recently from Demon, Lionheart, Praying Mantis.
You know, we'll be talking about that in the sort of half yearly review.
And this is their second proper studio album.
It's called Wheel of Fortune.
Originally a Phil Lyonet project, as you know,
and although John Sykes is nowhere to be seen on this kind of thing,
the band continues with the original guitarist Lawrence Archer.
And by the way, Phil Lyonet's father-in-law is Leslie Crowther.
Now, he was the host of a UK TV show called, guess what it might be called?
Wheel of Fortune.
So they seem to have named the album after that or I don't know if it had any bearing at all.
But anyway, it might have been in the back of their minds.
There's also some welcome sort of Thin Lizzy style songs here.
The opener, There Goes My Heart, Trail of Tears.
There's a lot of variety too.
There's solid riffs, melodies throughout.
They've got a great vocalist as well, Mike Dyer.
He was once in a band called Tokyo.
And he also starred in some London West End productions and theatre productions.
So, you know, all of this makes it a rather decent listen in my book.
And although I could have picked Holy Mother or even Entranced,
this one is my album of the week.
OK.
So we've actually overlapped on two this month because I realized that with everything going on,
I didn't check off some of the albums that I listened to in June.
But I did listen to the Enter Shikari First, band that I've seen live, band that I've enjoyed.
The album is Dancing on the Front Line.
To be honest, this is a remix album that I realized once I started listening to it.
So it's a bunch of different tracks made into danceable tracks, basically.
Devil Moon Risen is an album that has a mixture of thrash and some old fashioned heavy metal.
It's self-produced or it's self-released and it seems to be self-produced as well.
It's funny, I always think about Mike Jones talking about, he often says,
awesome, garage metal or stuff like that.
And it's totally what it is. It is low budget.
It is cool for what it is.
I also got to listen to the Evergrey album, Theories of Emptiness.
Look, if you're a fan of Evergrey, they're not doing anything you're not accustomed to before.
It's got a few really cool tracks.
It goes a bit too ballad deep for me personally, but it's not a bad album.
My pick for the week is Muerte y Metal from Entranced and for a few reasons.
Not only is it everything that Jeremy mentioned, but I'm going to be honest with you,
I'm kind of biased because I did get to interview James Paul Luna back in the day.
Not only is he the lead singer of this band, but he was the original lead singer of White Wizard
and then moved on to be in Holy Grail for several years.
Last Holy Grail release was eight years ago, which is Times of Pride and Peril.
I've always enjoyed pretty much everything that White Wizard Family Tree has released.
I enjoy his vocals on High Speed GTO and there's a lot of stuff from over the years with Holy Grail that I enjoy.
And this is just a continuation, similar to what I said about Evergrey.
If you're used to his vocals and what he's done in the past, this is a continuation.
I really enjoy the added facet of him singing in Spanish on this, which is kind of cool for me anyway.
So that is my pick of the week.
Cool. So let's move on to the 14th of June.
We had new releases from Fu Manchu, 96 Bitter Beings,
Un-Communion, On Lap, Embryotic, Autopsy, Jesus, I don't know why I got stuck on that.
Sulo, Rivethead, New Horizon, Zanaris, Axl Rudy Pell, Malignancy,
Mythologic, okay, brain farting there. Camerata, Medio Lanace.
That seems like Latin to me. If I say it in Spanish, it's Camerata Medio Lanace.
Okay, probably closer to how it's pronounced.
Perchsta is another release, almost a clothes hanger in Spanish.
EPs from Legionary and Drought and reissues from Devin Townsend with Terraria.
Jeremy, what did you listen to this month?
Yeah, so I delved into the fifth album by the reformed Black Country Communion.
It's obviously called V or Five.
Generally speaking, I think, and I think you'd agree with me here, Victor,
they've been a bit of a disappointing band in the past, given the sort of musicians involved and the expertise that they have.
This particular album, I feel, is a bit better.
I'm not overly into it, but it has a groove that I think is reminiscent of the California Breed project that Glenn Hughes put together.
And I think it's a bit more of a coherent album, even if it's more blues soul based.
So I think that it's got that going for it.
Hughes, obviously, is in his 70s now, but his voice is very strong.
And so that's a plus. It lacks the great solos again, though.
And that's that's a problem. But I did like the production on this in comparison with some of the past albums.
So it wasn't a complete no, no.
And, you know, if you like that sort of music, you're going to you're going to quite enjoy it.
You know, put it put it on in the car. Why not?
Next up, I tried Conquerors by New Horizon, which is on the Frontiers label.
I thought I'd actually hate this for some reason. I don't know why.
But there's a lot of I mean, there's a lot of Halloween style speed metal.
There's an abundance of keyboards.
There's some well worn sort of Egyptian Roman type themes.
And it's not all good for sure. But of course, it's a Swedish act.
And that means you're going to get great soaring vocals.
And to be honest, you can also get some terrific solos on songs like Daimyo.
One of them that means I think it's Daimyo or Daimyo,
the kind of sort of a very powerful Europe song with touches of maiden thrown in.
So but talking of Maiden, the album rounds out with a song
which you may be familiar with called Alexander the Great.
And yes, it is a cover of the Alexander the Great song, all eight minutes, 44 seconds of it.
A bold move, I must say.
But that aside, it's all, you know, quite an epic album.
And while it may be, you know, quite generic,
and I do fear that you probably hate it, Victor, others won't.
But I'm putting it out there to people who would like to listen to a little bit of sort of maiden epic stuff.
And they might enjoy that one.
I then had a listen to the latest album by Axel Rudy Pell.
It's called Written Symbol. It was OK.
I'm not raving about it, if I'm honest.
There's a version of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant song that really fails to match the original.
Sadly, a lot of the album lacks songwriting ability and inspiration, if I'm honest.
And maybe it's one that needs a few listens, but it's certainly not my album of the week.
And I guess, you know, if I'm going to pick one, it's probably going to be Black Country Communion overall,
just because, you know, I like sort of bluesy, souly sort of music.
And it was quite listenable, but it was a bit of a weak, weak, weak, weak.
Yeah, I think
the month, although it had some good stuff, I think overall in comparison to other months,
was probably weaker than May and April, for example.
So in any event, I listened to 96 Bitter Beings, Return to Hellview,
which is essentially, if you're not aware of the 96 Bitter Beings and CKY
split off or rivalry or whatever you can want to call it,
the original vocalist and guitarist of CKY is the person in charge of 96 Bitter Beings.
And this is a bunch of re-recorded CKY tracks.
So although it is cool,
we kind of fall into that re-recorded territory that we've discussed in the past.
From there, I listened to Onlaps Waves.
I was surprised because this is off of AFM Records,
which usually puts out heavier stuff or stuff that's in the vein of New Wave of British Heavy Metal
or even more modern stuff. And this is kind of generic, to be honest.
It was kind of a radio rock friendly, which kind of caught me off guard.
I listed the entire thing.
It made me think for as much as people crap on bands like Nickelback and Creed,
there's people that are still trying to imitate them.
So from there, I listened to Rivethead's Absence of Time.
It's self-released.
It definitely once again has a self-release production and sound.
Isn't a bad album. I've posted some videos on Patreon and some people have said some nice things about it.
But I'm going to have to go with Fu Manchu and The Return of Tomorrow.
I've been a fan of this band for some time now.
By no means is this their best album.
For me, California Crossings is probably my favorite album of theirs.
But like every Fu Manchu album, it's got a few really cool rocking stoner rock songs, some great riffs.
Definitely something that I recommend checking out. It always has some cool melodies and stuff that I think just makes you want to get in a car and drive on a sunny day and drive with the coast in the background somewhere.
So yeah, for me, it would be again, The Return of Tomorrow from Fu Manchu.
From here, we probably move on to what I would consider the strongest week of the month just due to what was released.
So on the 21st, there was new albums from Wage War, Kitty, Cavalera, Canites, I guess how it's pronounced, Earth Tone 9, Seven Spires, Portrait,
Cain, Cavaen, K-V-A-E-N.
But is this one of these bands that the V is actually a U?
Cavaen?
Rendezvous Point, Assimilator, that sounds like a good 80s thrash band, but they're on Horror, Pain, Gore, Death Productions. So I would have to think they're a death metal band, but Assimilator.
Codex Mortis, Thornhill, Alcest, Greenleaf, and Hyperdon'tia?
Anyway, Jeremy, what did you listen to?
At the end of the year, we need to have a top 10 of band names as well.
Band names that you can't pronounce.
Yeah, we'll do that. Yeah, that'd be great.
So I started out the week listing to In Resonance Nexus by Earth Tone 9. This is an alternative metal band from Nottingham here in the UK, which is in New Zealand, if you don't know.
They've been, they've continued since reforming in 2010, apparently.
It's not my favourite style of metal, to be honest, but there were some bright spots with this. The melodic overtones of Under the Snake and the album Closer Strength is My Weakness, which I enjoyed.
There are clearly a lot of influences here as well, but they're a very talented bunch and I can see why they might appeal to their, you know, their fan base.
I moved on to A Fortress Called Home by Seven Spires. This is this symphonic metal band from Boston.
This was pretty awful.
Symphonic metal is not my bag for sure. You know, I do like a little bit of now and again, but the clean vocals, I suppose, were fine, but there was also the inevitable shouting in parts.
It wasn't all bad. There were some decent guitar pieces for one thing and for another after 12 songs, it did finally come to an end.
So next up was the metal sounds of the Swedish band Portrait, which has been releasing music now for 18 years. I didn't realise that.
Their fifth album, The Host, is actually very much to my taste. I really like this. It's dark and brooding. It's also fast paced, thrashy metal topped off with some very decent almost Bruce Dickinson style vocals and fine melodies,
defining the sort of more black metal song titles and the what you can describe as a ludicrous amateurish album cover.
But put that aside, it's, you know, it's also probably a little long, perhaps. There's 14 songs, there's one hour and 14 minutes of music.
They could have just picked out the best tunes, but if you're seeking out a grittier, sort of more metal version of Iron Maiden, then this might just be for you.
And for that reason, it's my album of the week.
Excellent. I'm just realising that I did not mention EP's released this week from Gasket, Black Veil Brides and live albums from Thornhill and Merillion.
OK, so I listened to new albums from Wage War, which is Sigma, Kitties Return with the album Fire and Greenleaf with The Head and The Habit off of Magnetic Eye Records.
The Wage War album, I will say, was interesting to me because Wage War is a band that there are tracks of theirs that I really enjoy and others that I really don't care about.
And the one single that I kind of enjoyed off of this, it was kind of more melodic and more poppy than what I had expected.
It's called Magnetic and I don't remember if I ended up posting it on Patreon or not, because there are videos that I check out and I'm like, yeah, this really isn't going to go over well or it's too poppy or it's too this or it's too that.
And then there are other weeks where I really have nothing else to choose from.
And I say, hell with it, I'm going to post it.
So I don't remember if I posted this one or not.
The album is OK.
Nothing extraordinary, but kind of just wasn't my thing.
I do enjoy that song, though. I do enjoy a catchy melody.
This week is kind of hard for me because Greenleaf, which I expected to be kind of more on the stonery side.
And the album is The Head and The Habit.
Really surprised me. I really enjoyed this because it was kind of a it was had elements of of doom metal.
So elements of like sabbathy type stuff.
But at the same time, there were elements of more.
60s influenced Hard Rock, 70s influenced Hard Rock.
So there were some things that you could qualify as being more like zeppelin or more like cream or more like.
Other things that had come out in that era, early deep purple, maybe without the keyboards.
So it was it was really an interesting listen.
It's an album that I'm going to check out a little bit further to pick songs out for my 2024 playlist.
There are a few songs that that I did already throw in there, but.
There's more on there. It's just that.
One of these things where I got to listen to a lot of this album while in the car,
so I didn't really get to pick songs out as much as I would have wanted to.
So I'm going to go back and check that out.
My album of the week is Fire by Kitty.
And I think I've posted five or six tracks that they've released videos for.
I've interviewed every single member of the of this lineup of the band.
I got to see them live at the old BB Kings in New York, where I got to interview Tara and Ivy,
the guitarist and bassist. And I've been able to interview the.
Damn it. I was I was about to say.
The wrong last name, so.
Before I do, I'm going to look up the last name.
I'm sorry, my close to 51 year old brain is. It's having a brain fart right now.
I know that is Mercedes and Morgan are the two sisters.
That could happen in your 50s. Your brain just goes.
Yeah, it is. Come on, Lander.
See, I knew it was I thought it was I was going to say Morgan.
Morgan Lander, but I was scared to say.
The guitarist that I had interviewed who was in Machine Head, it's a very similar name anyway.
Morgan Lander, Mercedes Lander, Tara McLeod and Ivy Jenkins are the components of of the band.
I've always enjoyed the band. And what I like about this album is that they've mixed things up a lot.
There's there's been a long break between albums.
And I think that that's really helped them.
I think that they're a band that being away has helped them quite a bit.
And 2011 was the last album that they released.
I'm not saying that they should take what, nine, 13 years to release an album every time.
But maybe a five year break here and there would would help them.
They've also made it public that they've been in other bands and worked in other avenues like real estate while the band has been away.
And that's probably helped them quite a bit only from a financial standpoint, but from a.
A way of them getting the creative juices flowing.
So for me, the kiddies fire is the pick for that week for the 21st of the final week in June.
Saw new albums from Anvil, my epic crystal viper.
Nothing more. So buyer ill disposed ex cops sun bomb.
The era, I guess, 200 stab wounds, EPS from the X's and El Nino.
This is a short week because the Fourth of July holiday was was fairly close to this.
And it makes it so that bands don't release music.
There's a lot of people have their minds on barbecues and other things, especially in the U.S.
Jeremy, what do you listen to from this week?
Yeah, so not as much on this week for the reasons you just pointed out.
I mean, the final final week sort of really began with a fairly sour note for me because I listened to the very uninspiring sun bomb album light up the sky.
Now, I know many of your patrons, Victor, don't like Michael Sweet.
And on this album, I have to agree.
But here the songs are poor and I feel he's much better suited singing to George Lynch songs because I've got the, you know, the album that he did with Lynch.
And I quite like that.
Some of these songs have a bit of a Sabbath edge to them, you know, the riffing.
And they could have been improved probably with some remixing and a different singer for sure.
But for me, it wasn't really an enjoyable album.
I listened to it, tried to listen to it a couple of times and I just couldn't get into it.
And when you can't get into an album, you can't get into it.
But, you know, if the listeners are out there and they just fancy dipping into it and prove me wrong, then do so because, you know, everybody should listen to albums and listen to themselves.
You know, and maybe there's some people out there that may want to buy it.
So, you know, go out and buy it because, you know, you should support music either way.
My week improved, though, with a dose of Anvil.
The songs were a lot more upbeat and hey, we know that they aren't the best band in the world.
We know that. Everybody knows that.
I think Anvil know that.
But they've made a success and we'll talk about success in a minute, I'm sure, of being a tongue in the cheek metal band,
something we make on to explore a little bit later, as I said, in light of your excellent interview with Lips, which is on Blabbermouth.
They've mentioned it and you've put it up on Signals from Mars.
No surprises here, of course. It's melodic metal.
You can just turn up and sing along to.
It's got that unmistakable vocal.
Sure, no Anvil album is ever an eight or nine out of ten.
But as we've said before, there's always a place for that sort of warm comfort blanket of the greatest pub band ever.
That's all they are.
They're a good pub band and we'd all go out and watch them if they came to, you know, locally to us.
And why not? We need that sort of band around.
They've got the enthusiasm.
So for that reason alone, it's my album of the week, as it was when they released the last album.
I don't know when it was, maybe last year or the year before.
Excellent. Yeah. So I got to listen to Nothing More's Carnal, which is an OK album, very radio friendly.
But outside of that, my pick of the week coincides with you, Anvil, one and only.
Listen, I've said this a lot of times on the show.
I always harken back to an album review that I did of a Rob Zombie album, which I just found fun and entertaining.
And that's how I feel about this Anvil album.
It doesn't need to have five million notes.
It doesn't need to have a perfect guitar solo that's perfectly mapped out with a metronome and exotic time signatures and stuff like that.
No, Anvil is what they are.
And sometimes, like you said, you just need comfort food.
Sometimes you just need comfort music, just something that entertains you and helps you through the day.
So for those reasons, Anvil is my pick for this week as well.
So real quickly here, let's recap our picks of the week.
So on the seventh, you picked Grand Slam Wheel of Fortune.
I picked entranced Muerte y Metal.
For the 14th, you picked the Black Country Communion with Five or V.
I picked Fu Manchu, The Return of Tomorrow.
On the 21st, you picked Portrait the Host.
I picked Kitty Fire.
I would also encourage you to check out that Greenleaf album.
I do think it is really good as well.
And on the 28th, we both picked Anvil, one and only.
So awesome. You guys have some homework to do.
You don't have to agree with all of our picks, but giving you music a shot.
Listen to some of these and let us know if you think that you've stumbled upon something new or we've helped you stumble upon something new or if you think that we're out of our minds.
Either way works for us.
Jeremy, you did want to talk about some other subjects?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just wanted to pick up on the Lips interview that you did, really, because I thought it was a good one.
It was a great interview and Lips talked forever.
Passionately, I thought as well about subjects that really mattered.
There were three major takeaways I took from that interview and I hope you sort of thought the same as well.
One, he talked about success, which we'll talk about in a sec.
The other one was the importance of producers for albums.
He mentioned that quite a bit.
And the other one was about bands making money or having to even pay venues to play, which we've touched upon in the past as well.
So maybe we can just sort of discuss those sort of three issues, really.
I mean, success. He sort of went on about how to him it was successful, you know, that he's making these albums.
It doesn't matter that they're not the biggest band. They don't have to be Metallica. They don't have to be Megadeth.
He was mentioning that most bands don't become the biggest bands in the world.
And when you think about it, we talk about all these bands that we listen to from week to week.
Many of those bands are small bands, aren't they? They're not household names.
You know, we've just mentioned quite a few there that I have to sometimes look up to find out who they are and what they've done before,
because you don't always listen to them or you've forgotten who they are.
And they're just small bands bashing away, but coming up creatively with some great music.
So I thought that was a really interesting point that he made.
And it's great that he enjoys the fact that he thinks that he has made a success of it,
because I think when you listen, when you watch the film before they got to the film stage,
they were obviously struggling a hell of a lot.
And I think things have changed a little bit for them since then.
You know, they get they get more tours, I presume, and a little bit more airplay and that sort of thing.
But, you know, we know Anvil, don't we?
We know Anvil as much as we know Metallica, but Anvil are not in the same league as Metallica.
And yet we know about them and we talk about them as one of the metal bands, you know,
of the many that we talk about.
And so in that respect, yeah, he's right.
They're a success. And so are all these other small bands.
If they produce great music, that's all they have to do to be successful.
Yeah. A few things there.
And I'm going to give a quick shout out to the basketball camp where I've been working at,
only because it ties in with basketball.
The notion of success.
As a coach, wins and losses aren't necessarily what drives me to consider what a success is.
As somebody that's coaching preteen girls, teen boys,
the evolution of them as players and people is more important than wins and losses.
To me, there's a lot of valid things in sports or a lot of values that can be applied to other points in life.
Because let's be honest, there's more losses than wins in everyday life.
And that's, I think, what kind of Lips was getting at.
Being a Metallica on paper.
Okay, you've got all that money, but you're kind of living in an alternate reality as well.
I always think back at this interview that Jim Brewer did with them.
And he was asking them what the price of an egg carton is of a dozen eggs, what the price of this was, what the price of that was.
And they had no clue because they've got people working for them that do all this stuff for them.
I remember interviewing the guitarist from the band The Sword.
And let me bring up the name real quickly here.
Again, this is always one of the most interesting parts of the show is me Googling things.
I got to speak to Kyle Schutt, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah. And one of the things. Yeah, it's him.
So one of the things that he said was how they could have done the entire Death Magnetic Tour, but they just ran out of gas.
It wasn't that they had to pay for the tour or whatever because they were making enough money. Metallica was giving them plenty of money to be on that tour.
But just the daily grind of getting in a van.
Sure, their equipment was being taken on a truck the next place, but they were on vans, buses, planes.
And he flat out said to me, listen, Metallica gets on their private jet after a show.
They're flown to the best hotel in the next area where we're playing.
So it's completely different to them.
And he said, you know, we're still in some sort of transport for six to eight hours.
The show's done and we don't get to see Metallica. We have to get on the bus.
We have to drive to the next city.
And it's six to eight hours of road and traffic and this and that.
And it's hard. It's wear and tear.
And I know that a lot of people will say, oh, you know, go work in a coal mine.
You know, that's that's real work. Correct.
I'm not going to I'm not going to take away from the person that says that you're playing rock star.
You're being able to travel around and play your music.
But there's a difference between traveling around and playing your music and actually being able to survive.
And I think that's what Lips is more or less is talking about.
Listen, we don't need to be as big as Metallica so long as we can pay our rent, pay for our car.
Pay to put food on the table. We're good.
And he said, you know, we're at that level where we make a comfortable living, where we don't have to have outside jobs to do what we do.
I'm glad that the interview with him was was for the most part upbeat
because I've read some of the other interviews I've listed them and it seemed like he was kind of down with some of them.
So I was very appreciative of that.
It was it was hard for me if you listen, if you watch the video and then go and listen to the audio version, I cleaned a lot of my audio up because he talked a lot.
And there were times where I tried to interject and it wasn't possible because he kept talking.
So I'm going to make my sound good. So that's why I took myself out of a lot of the audio interview.
Yeah, he certainly talked passionately and that was great because he obviously really wanted to be there and talk about it and get it out there.
And yeah, and I think you're right with the success sort of thing.
That was an important point that you made.
There's a point that he labored on as well. And so you've made you sort of think that you needed to consider it and it's full, full detail, really.
Yeah, absolutely. And again, I think success is relative to who you are.
But what's he saying about the fact that he thought is that you're a success if you if you create your own music and put it out there, that's a success.
That's what he's trying to say. It's not successful in terms of he wasn't bothered about how many people buy it.
He was talking about, you know, you create something, you put it on record and you and it goes out there.
That's that's you've made a success of what you've done because you've you've actually produced it.
Right. And and listen, this can be in any sector of life.
Again, I mentioned my standpoint from basketball.
Is someone in business successful or from any economic standpoint?
If they don't have a penthouse, if they don't drive an expensive car or success for them,
is it just putting food on a table and making sure that their kids can get through university?
You know, there's different levels of success.
And sometimes because my level of success is one thing doesn't mean that your level of success needs to be the same again.
His was, as we're saying, being able to make a living and being able to put out 20 albums, being able to record off of 20 albums.
Let's say he put out 10 songs per album. Well, that means he's released 200 songs.
You know, he talked about writing a thousand songs.
He very may well have done that.
And, you know, I've read some of the comments on Facebook and people say, oh, you know, well, he's put out all those albums, but.
You know, his music isn't any good. Similar to what he said during the interview.
OK, you get a record deal and you do it. See, see what you can do.
So I found that part fascinating and again, something that can be applied to other parts of life.
So, yeah, you mentioned two other points.
Yeah, I mean, that really leads us into the importance of producers, because you're mentioning about, you know, he's released these albums and some people don't think they're any good.
I think they're really well produced, particularly the later albums and the more recent ones.
He was mentioning about he likes working with the same producer in Germany because he knows that that producer gets what he's doing, you know, and tells him what needs doing and gets the right sound out of the band.
And I think that's true because each band needs a different producer to get the right sound out of the band, don't they?
We've heard many albums in the past that are so good, but we've also heard some that, you know, really shouldn't have had that producer working on them.
And, you know, that's an important part of the music, music process is having the producer, because without it, you know, you can try and be a success and bring out all these great songs that you've got, but they need to sound great.
And it's even more important nowadays because, you know, we listen to stuff digitally.
We listen to stuff on 108 grams vinyl.
And some of it, you know, is overproduced.
Some of it is not produced very well, but often it's produced very well.
And I think Anvil have got it right on that score.
You know, I can't think of how they could produce their albums, their music any better.
When I brought up the producers and the engineer that helped mix it.
First thing that came to mind was Titans of Creation by Testament.
Good album that I think had they've worked with Andy Sneep again on the production side of things, could have been a great album, much like Brotherhood of the Snake, much like Dark Roots of Earth
and Formation of Damnation, the three albums that came out before that.
Andy was out with Judas Priest and only had a hand in the mixing of the album, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah.
Bands sometimes need somebody there to say, yeah, that's not quite good enough.
Yeah, let's do that again.
That vocal is missing something.
That solo doesn't hold up to how good the rest of the album is.
You know, the riffs are great, but that solo just kind of isn't up to the level of aggressiveness that we need.
Look at that Black Country Communion.
Who produced that? Because I think I know who produced it.
And it would lead me back into what we're talking about and what you've kind of discussed.
Let's see, Black Country Communion, the producer.
Ah, yes, it is exactly who I thought it was.
The producer is Mr. Kevin Shirley.
The thing that sets California Breed apart from Black Country Communion to me,
and I've always said this and I will always say this for as much as Andrew Watt is now working with some high end clients like Ozzy and the Rolling Stones and stuff like that.
Post Malone, so on and so forth.
People can bag on him all they want.
I will always point back to that California Breed album and tell people, check this album out and see what a fiery guitar player this guy actually is.
And think about every time that I listen to Black Country Communion and think somebody needs to light a fire under Joe Bonamasa's ass.
The songs.
There's always two to three OK songs, in my opinion, and the rest bores me because I'm waiting for somebody to do something.
Glenn Hughes is always the star.
Jason Bonham is a second for me.
But Derek Sherinian, who could technically do a keyboard solo as well.
And Joe Bonamasa show me something.
I can still remember all the chats with Mark Striegel where he says, well, I saw him at a Les Paul tribute and he blew everyone away.
OK, that's cool.
Blow me away with a solo on an album.
It just it isn't there.
It again comes back to a super group not being so super.
So that's where I think the producer needs to come in and say, listen, Joe, the song needs you to wake up.
The song needs some fire.
The song needs some hunger.
Use whatever adjective you want to place on it and say.
This needs to go to the next level.
It does not with the way that you're playing.
So so the producer is an essential element.
That's what we're saying.
Absolutely.
And listen back to again, for people that want to say, oh, no, no, no.
Martin Birch, Martin Birch produced Killers.
Through, I believe, the X Factor by Iron Maiden, the X Factor by no means is a great album, but it's got some quality material on it.
OK, that's the one thing that separates Martin Birch from Kevin Shirley, in my opinion, just the ability to say that's not good enough.
That's way too long.
That doesn't work.
As opposed to just sitting back and fanning myself with a stack of hundreds and saying, yeah, that sounds great.
Yes, that's awesome.
It's it's having that relationship with the producers.
And then this is what Lips was saying, really, because he's got that relationship with that producer that you mentioned in Germany.
And he knows that he can speak to the producer.
The producer will speak to him and they get that they get it right between them for the type of music that they're producing.
At the end of the day, he's not going to change the music so much, but he's going to make it sound good. And that's what you need to you need to do.
Yeah, sound good. And as he pointed out, they helped pick out the first single.
Yeah, kind of say, well, you don't actually need a thrashy song on this.
You know, you can go with mid tempo and slower songs on this.
And yes, to your point, I think the sound of the album is great. Sounds really, really good.
And that's a testament to, again, a band being willing to work with somebody, understanding that people are there much, much like much like the coach on a team is there to help correct things.
And in a lot of instances, they're not there to just be a prick. They're there to help you improve.
And I think that's what he mentioned during the during the interview.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
The final point, I mean, was about the it was probably the saddest point, really, I think.
It saddens me, probably saddens you about bands having to actually pay venues to play. You know, we were brought up in an era when bands thought they could make themselves rich by playing.
But not just that, they thought they'd actually get, you know, 100 quid for playing a small venue at the end of the night.
They split it and all have a drink and a curry and maybe just have enough for the fuel to get in the minibus home.
But to not have any of that and to actually have to pay someone to play is destroying it's destroying music.
It surprised me that he said that they had to pay to play the whiskey given given the band name, knowing that Def Leppard and Motley Crueve both recently played there.
I wonder if those bands had to pay anything or since they were XM shows, XM maybe paid to rent the venue.
I don't know. But that kind of surprised me that a band like that would still have to do it.
Yeah, I know about younger bands and I know about younger bands having to pay on the tour still.
But yeah, yeah, it's difficult.
It's quite obvious, really, because you see all the bands on sort of festivals and you work out how much the festival's making in ticket prices.
And then you're thinking, well, if they pay the headliner so much, there's not there's very little as you go down.
You know, the beans can only go so far.
And eventually you're starting chopping the beans in half and then you're thinking, well, the beans run out.
And so the bands at the bottom, you know, they're not making anything out of it.
I suppose the very smallest bands don't mind. They're playing to a bigger audience.
They can maybe shout about their merchandise and hopefully some people will check out the music.
But there's mid range bands that probably aren't making very much out of the music business.
And the big bands are taking still a lot of money out of it.
Metallica aren't doing it for nothing. That's for sure.
And they complain about the cost of putting on a show, which probably has escalated enormously.
And that's why their ticket prices are so high.
But you feel for the smaller bands.
But it's good that we need venues for them to play in.
If they're still willing to do it, even for nothing, we need good venues and people to turn up and at least buy a T-shirt or buy a CD, check out the music, talk to them, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, I agree with you.
There was a festival here that went on a week ago and the headliner was Arctic Monkey.
I didn't know any other band on the bill. And that was the impression that I got.
OK, they paid so much for this band that they're not paying anyone else on the bill.
It's kind of sad, but kind of how this festival has always worked.
Just weird.
In any event, I do want to thank you, Jeremy, for joining me today for this awesome chat.
We'll be back soon with our best of the first half of the year.
And on that note, we say see you folks. Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening. And we will catch you next time right here on Signals from Mars.
See you, folks.
Thanks for listening.