So all the final details for this year’s Winter’s Wake festival are finally here! The venues, scheduled bands, and ticketing information all have been announced, and I’ve collected all of it right here for you!
Monthly Archives: January 2013
Innervenus Music: Two New CDs Coming Next Month!
Hello, friends. Regular visitors to this website have surely noticed that recently the volume of writing I am putting out there has significantly decreased. I apologize for that. But it hasn’t been the result of laziness, I assure you. I’ve been getting myself involved with a few other things — as I keep alluding to in several new posts over the past few weeks — and finally I want to let you know about one of those.
So, I have been asked to join the Pittsburgh-based record label The Innervenus Music Collective to help out with their PR and publicity. It’s a pretty exciting opportunty for me — first of all, as a writer I’ve been working with a variety of PR people and representatives from other labels, so I understand what’s involved, and it’s cool to be getting some experience from the other direction now. But even more than that, now I get to work directly with a group of people who do so much to support our local music scene — between planning shows and giving away the Iron Atrocity compilations, not to mention releasing albums from some really talented bands (Vulture, Invader, Fist Fight in the Parking Lot — just to name a few examples that I had written about last year)!
And so this new position has been using up a lot of my free time recently, mostly because we’re gearing up to put out two CDs in February: the debut full-length by grindcore/death dealers Grisly Amputation, and a self-titled EP by death-thrash-groove-sludge-core band Lycosa. I’ve been sending out promo materials to a whole slew of websites and magazines, so we should start seeing some reviews trickle in shortly, but I figure I wouldn’t really be doing my job (EITHER job – as a writer OR a publicist!) if I didn’t also inform you about the releases here on Valley of Steel!
I Can Has Videos?
So here’s something pretty neat. I was playing with this over the weekend and announced it all over Facebook, but if you aren’t one of the select few that get to see my posts in your news feed — or even worse, if you somehow forgot to “like” my page in the first place! — I figure I ought to say something about it here, too.
So there’s officially a Valley of Steel Youtube channel now.
Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/user/valleyofsteelDOTnet/videos. There’s just a handful of videos there so far, but feel free to subscribe to it, because my plan is to continue adding performances from all the great bands and shows I’m constantly telling you about.
Winter’s Wake Thursday Pre-Fest Show
*** NOTE: ALL THE FINAL DETAILS FOR THE WINTER’S WAKE FESTIVAL HAVE BEEN COLLECTED AT THIS LOCATION: https://valleyofsteel.net/2013/01/28/winters-wake-2013-presented-by-allure-of-the-earth/ ***
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So are you excited yet!?? The Winter’s Wake festival will be taking place in exactly ONE MONTH, right here in Pittsburgh!
Venue and ticket information will be released for the two-day show later this week. (I know, it seems like we’ve been waiting a long time for these details, but I’ve learned that the folks who run the production company sponsoring the event, Allure of the Earth, have been dealing with a sudden tragedy in their family — so I think we can certainly forgive a bit of a delay…)
Anyway, the full list of bands playing on Friday and Saturday (the 22nd-23rd of February) were announced last month, so really all we’re still waiting for is the exact schedule order for each day, as well as where and when we can get tickets…
…plus the details for the Thursday night show!
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Kongh: New Album Details + Pre-Orders Now Available
Hello again, folks. You might not remember, but last summer I was happy to report that Kongh, Swedish titans of heavy doom, had signed a deal with Polish label Agonia Records — and especially excited about the news that the band was working on a new album, their third overall!
Well, I haven’t forgotten — I’ve been excited about that news in the several months since then, and I’m glad to say, my most-anticipated album of 2013 is finally almost here!
Vesperia Now Have A New Guitarist; New Album On The Way Soon!
Good afternoon, readers! I hope your day is going well. In my opinion, this Monday doesn’t seem to be coming to an end nearly quickly enough! All I’ve wanted to do all day is go back home and get back in bed. Oh well, only a couple more hours before I’m able to do that.
In the meantime, I’d like to share some news with you. It’s been a few months since we mentioned Vesperia — the Canadian black/folk/pagan metal band who used to be called Bolero — and as you might have guessed, they’ve been as busy as ever during that time!
Following the release of their first demo EP under their new band name, the re-release of their 2011 full-length album, and the announcement that they were searching for a new guitarist, it turns out that they now have filled that missing spot in their line-up, and have been spending this winter working on more new material!
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Happy (Belated) New Year!
* Happy National Day (for those who live on the island of Menorca)!
* Happy Feast Day of Saint Achilles the Confessor (for those who follow the Eastern Orthodox Church)!
* Happy Birthday to Benjamin Franklin “The Guy on the Hundred Dollar Bill,” James Earl Jones “The Voice of Darth Vader,” comedian Andy Kaufman, bassist Andy Rourke, boxer Muhammad Ali, actress Betty White, FLOTUS Michelle Obama, and singer Eartha Kitt!
* Let’s also commemorate the passing of music producer Don Kirshner, chess player Bobby Fisher, and former U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes!
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If you can’t tell, I’m sort of reaching here, for any sort of a special occasion or commemoration to celebrate today. Since we’re now so long past the beginning of the year, I feel stupid saying “Happy New Year!” to you. But 2013 is still relatively new (and the majority of it is still yet to come), so I guess it really doesn’t hurt to still wish you a happy one.
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Solarburn – 13
Solarburn – 13 (self-released, 14 September 2012)
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you — in my opinion — the #1 CD from all of 2012. Not only one of the best bands I’ve ever heard in Pittsburgh, but one of the best bands I’ve ever heard. And I stumbled into being a huge fan of theirs, almost by accident. Or some might call it fate.
See, these guys had included one of their songs (“C-Section”) on the Innervenus Music Collective‘s free Pittsburgh metal sampler, Iron Atrocity V.2 — a collection which I heard and wrote about when it was released last summer.
At the time, I was impressed by the Solarburn track, given that I’ve always been fond of instrumental metal music anyway, and (as I said in that article about the compilation), this song sounded “way heavier, more ballsy, and well, just plain more interesting than a bunch of the aimless noodly shit that’s out there.”
I also recall somebody involved with Innervenus talking about this particular song when the compilation was made public — I can’t find the exact quote, now, so I will paraphrase — playing the song for another person, that other person reportedly said something about how the song was absolutely perfect, and he kept hoping that nobody would start singing and fuck things up.
I was also intrigued to learn that the band had been working on a full-length album (which was to be unveiled at a show in mid-September), and thought that I might want to check that out — the new CD at least, even if I ended up not being able to make it to that show.
Anyway, within the next few weeks I heard about what was called the R.A.N.T. (Rock All Night Tour) in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh. I wrote an announcement that this all-day free music festival was happening, and what really caught my eye was the fact that the renowned local pirate rock band, The Bloody Seamen, were playing a show that evening. I’d been wanting to get a chance to check them out ever since I’d seen a few of their videos, so that’s just what the wife and I had planned on doing.
Well once we got to the Thunderbird Cafe, where the “punk” show was taking place, it was already extremely crowded for such a small area — and people just kept coming and coming, to the point where we felt pretty claustrophobic, and couldn’t find anywhere to stand where we weren’t constantly getting stepped on. Frankly, it was kind of miserable, so we were talking about just heading back home — when I pulled up the Valley of Steel post about R.A.N.T. on my phone. I saw that the “metal” show was taking place at a bar called Cattivo, just a few blocks away, and it had a slightly later start time — so we decided to see what that was like, before just giving up on the evening.
It happened to be much more spacious there, and there weren’t nearly as many people (at least at first). So we grabbed a couple drinks, found an empty table, and waited for opening act Solarburn to take the stage.
Gay Kiss – Fault (Free Download / In Pittsburgh Tonight!)
Gay Kiss – Fault (Anxiety Machine Records, 21 December 2012)
HELLO OUT THERE! HAPPY 2013!! How’s life been treating you, dear readers?
I wish I could say that flipping the calendar over to a new year has also turned the page on all the problems and stresses and worries and other crap that infringes on my time I’d rather be spending with fun stuff like listening to music and writing about music and all that.
So far, that has not been the case. And at this moment I almost literally feel like I am bursting at the seams with stuff I want to share with you, because you’ve all been such wonderful, loyal readers for so long, I feel like you really deserve to be rewarded with some good music you can listen to.
For my first post as we enter into the thirteenth year of this millennium, I want to tell you about an up-and-coming group of young men who come from the city of Tempe, which is just outside Phoenix and is also the home of the ASU Sun Devils.
That band is called Gay Kiss.
Valley of Steel 