Tickets are on sale NOW at Ticketweb… OR you can WIN a pair of tickets FREE, courtesy of Opus One Productions and Valley of Steel! Keep on reading to find out how…
Well, folks, you’ve been looking forward to this for several years, and it’s finally here: The Faceless have finally put out their third album!
Well, when I say “you” I mean “a LOT of you” — here’s a band that has almost 200,000 Facebook likes (compared with the typical band I write about, which might have several hundred, or a couple thousand at most). So yeah, that’s a lot of people, and probably a good chunk of my faithful readers, hence the reason I felt compelled to pass along the details about this new album when they popped up in my in-box.
Do you know who was not among those hundred-grand-plus anxiously awaiting? Yours truly. The news of new The Faceless material left me feeling pretty indifferent, simply for the reason that I’d never heard this band before. True story. Now, I’m not one of those über-elitist types who refuses to listen to anything that isn’t underground enough — I like to believe I’m more open-minded than most — but more often than not, the modern style of metal music that’s currently in vogue (without naming names, let’s just say I’m referring to the bulk of stuff that gets played on Liquid Metal, or the bands that seem to have the most rabid fans among commenters over at MetalSucks) just doesn’t do anything for me.
Or to put it another way, it seems like the more hype that surrounds a band or an album, the less likely I actually end up enjoying it. Not that I purposely dislike stuff because it’s popular, it just seems to work out that way a lot of the time. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, and so I would never totally dismiss something without first giving it a shot, but I also typically wouldn’t go out of my way to check something out if I got that sort of a vibe from it.
But part of that earlier post prior to the album’s release included a video trailer, and the small amount of music that was included in that preview didn’t really sound like all the other generic crap floating on the airwaves nowadays. In fact, it struck me as a bit intriguing. So I decided I wanted to check it out — to see what the big deal was.
So Autotheism officially hit the store shelves ten days ago (figuratively speaking, as I’m pretty sure they don’t actually have shelves at iTunes or wherever), and since then I’ve heard it from start to finish no less than ten times. At this point, I feel that I can confidently say, this is an amazing album and I strongly recommend you take the time to discover what it has to offer — I’m sure that you, too, will be glad you did.
Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I’m going to share some more new music with you, but first somebody out there has to promise to answer the question in the title of this post. Deal? Okay, good.
So our good friend Mihai, who is a guitarist/keyboardist/songwriter for Dirty Shirt (more about that band here), also has a solo career (using the name M.T.) as a remix artist. Now, I know what many of you are probably thinking: a “remix” just means taking a song and adding some kind of techno dance beat behind it, right? Well, a lot of the time that’s true, unfortunately, and admittedly there really isn’t much artistry involved there. However, the work that M.T. does is more like re-composition, because he generally takes the original vocal part, but very little else from the actual song; instead, adding instruments and sounds of his own.
Anyway, earlier this week I learned that he had taken a number of these creations and compiled them into a digital album called Rock RMX Collection. Due to legal complications (with the various copyrights on the original source material) this release will not be made available to download or to purchase in any format, but it’s out there in cyberspace for you to listen to, if you choose to do so.
Valley of Steel 