Posts Tagged ‘Reissue’

Listen: ‘October’ by Maybeshewill

Posted: 17 April 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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With the release of the 10th anniversary edition of Fair Youth landing next month, UK instrumental rock act Maybeshewill have shared a new stand-alone single ‘October.’ Originally slated for their 2021 album No Feeling is Final the band felt the song didn’t quite sit on the album tonally, feeling more of connection to Fair Youth.

Bassist Jamie Ward comments, “One of the first songs written when the band tentatively began exploring the idea of creating together again, ‘October’ has its roots in a voice memo jotted down in vain hope during the band’s rehearsals for their final tour before they disbanded in 2016. ‘October’ is a song about the creative spark, about rekindling friendships and an ode to keeping trying to explore your artistic passions even when that might seem futile. A rare piece of Maybeshewill history that has its significance despite ultimately not ending up being included as part of a larger body of work.”

Listen to ‘October’ here:

Maybeshewill celebrate a decade of their ‘Fair Youth’ album with a brand new 10th anniversary edition, available on the 3rd May 2024 (Superball).  Released as a special limited edition opaque hot pink & black marbled LP, as well as digitally, this version has been newly remixed & remastered by the bands own Jamie Ward. The band had this to say:

“Looking back on Fair Youth with a decade of hindsight, it holds a particularly special place in Maybeshewill history – not least because it was the first record that, start to finish, was a product of all five of us. It took us very literally around the world to play for so many new audiences, but was also the last record we made before taking an extended break. It was intended as an overwhelmingly positive record, and I think sonically, that remains true. It’s a record we all remain extremely proud of, and are delighted that it’s getting a beautiful new pressing courtesy of our friends at Superball.”

Jamie Ward comments of the new mix & master: “With 10 years more mixing experience under my belt I feel a bit better placed to conquer the wall of sound and get a little more separation between the instruments to really bring out the details of those arrangements. In general I’ve tried to make things hit a little harder and be bit a more vibrant and technicolour.”

Fans can hear the newly remixed version of the track ‘All Things Transient’, as well as pre-order the new edition here: https://maybeshewill.lnk.to/FairYouth-2024Mix

The band will also head out on tour in the UK in May, joining forces with Bossk for a co-headline run, before playing two European festivals this summer. Find the full list of shows below:

15th May – The Fleece, Bristol, UK*

16th May – Rescue Rooms, Nottingham, UK*

17th May – Gorilla, Manchester, UK*

18th May – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, UK*

19th May – The Garage, London, UK*

26th June – Resurrection Fest, Viveiro, Spain

31st July – Rockstadt Extreme Fest, Brașov, Romania

*with Bossk

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Photo credit: Fraser West

Mari Boine – Gula Gula – H​ø​r Stamm​ø​drenes Stemme

Posted: 5 December 2023 in Albums
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By Norse Music – 1st December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

First released in 1989, Gula Gula was Mari Boine’s second album proved to be her breakthrough, earning her a Norwegian Grammy award and providing the gateway to a career which continues over thirty years later as an international voice for the Sámi peoples. The album, originally self-released, would later come to the attention of Peter Gabriel, who would release it worldwide on his label Real World Records in 1993. But 1993 was twenty years ago already, and there are many – including myself – who will be unacquainted with this album, or even Boine’s work. This reissue comes with the added bonus of two previously unreleased tracks from the Gula Gula studio sessions which were only recently discovered.

That the songs of Gula Gula are primarily sung in the Northern Sámi language is both unusual and significant, being key to what her bio described as ‘the fight of preserving the culture of the Norwegian Sami people and the natural world. Two matters that lie close to Mari’s heart and are still threatened to this day. The indigenous people have a wisdom that says that the earth is our mother, and if she is harmed, we are harming ourselves.’

These feel more salient now than ever, as we witness the effects of global climate change and a world riven with cultural conflicts whereby dominant cultures continue to oppress and obliterate older, indigenous cultures in the name of ‘progress’ – as if the most brutal applications of capitalism are the only way. This album’s reissue happens to land in the same week that Israel resumed its onslaught to decimate the whole of Gaza in the name of defending itself against a minority terrorist organisation, while the UK government slammed down some truly brutal plans to slash immigration under the premise of benefiting the economy. This determination to stamp out difference is diabolical, but somehow accepted as reasonable by many. But in taking such destructive paths, it should be apparent that the harm goes far deeper and wider than the claimed intent. Similarly, those who vent their ire against the likes of Just Stop Oil and XR for employing methods which are disruptive and argue that these methods turn people off from their message are missing the point that a) non-disruptive protest hasn’t achieved anything like enough b) there should be no debate when it comes to their message. What they’re objecting to, then, ultimately, is that these protesters are trying to force them to face uncomfortable truths. The saddest fact is that those objecting to the protests don’t give a fuck and just want to get on with driving their SUVs to the McDonald’s drive-thru.

So, at the heart of Mari Boine’s songs is a certain tension which may not always be immediately apparent from their melodic musicality, especially if you’re not fluent in Northern Sámi. For that, you can be forgiven, and whether or not you’re versant in the sociopolitical aspects of their context, it’s easy to appreciate the music on a more superficial level.

The songs of Gula Gula are quite simply arranged, and are, fundamentally, manifestations of folk music. But while the instrumentation is predominantly acoustic, and serves to provide a backing to Mari’s voice, which while always melodic, shows at times a stirring degree of ferocity and passion, as on ‘Vilges Suola’ while the piano-led ‘Eadnán Bákti’ is a soft ballad. ‘It Šat Duolmma Mu’ brings both raw power and some intricate musicianship melded to a thumping subterranean groove.

‘Oppskrift for Herrefolk’ (‘Recipe for a Master Race’) finds Mari singing in Norwegian on the album’s most overtly political song. Musically, it marks something of a departure, too, with a screeching 80s rock guitar solo slicing through the trilling folksiness. It’s almost as if it’s there to reinforce a point. And it works. It’s worth considering for a moment that there are places where such a song could lead to arrest, and worse. This isn’t to say that the Sámi have it easy, but to highlight the fact that these struggles are real and often go widely unreported, unacknowledged, the voices unheard.

Whether taken in, or out, of context, Gula Gula is an enchanting and powerful album.

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Watch: ‘Pagan Plains’ by Dawnwalker

Posted: 22 November 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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London-based progressive metal collective Dawnwalker have just shared a new music video for the track ‘Pagan Plains’, which is taken from the band’s third studio album Human Ruins recently reissued by Room 312.

Watch the video here:

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Originally released in 2018, the album has been partly re-recorded, expertly remixed by No Studio‘s Joe Clayton and remastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege.
The album is now available on vinyl for the first time in a deluxe 2xLP gate fold edition with expanded artwork, and represents a fully realized version of the original. ‘Human Ruins’ charts a journey across an ancient landscape over the course of a calendar year. It’s a journey through the seasons, guided by flora, fauna and the phases of the moon. Set in a time of myth and magic, it blends lush soundscapes, joyful post-metal and searing black metal ballads into an epic journey across a forgotten world. Orders are still available at location.

To celebrate the release, Dawnwalker will head out on their first UK tour in a co-headliner with Edinburgh’s HEALTHYLIVING fresh from their recent live debut at Roadburn festival, and featuring members of Maud the Moth, Ashenspire and Falloch. With additional support from bands cherry-picked from the U.K.’s rich heavy music underground, each show promises to be a unique mix of heady and emotive post-metal. Check out the confirmed dates below:

07.12 – Le Pub, Newport
08.12 – Retro Bar, Manchester
09.12 – The Flying Duck, Glasgow
10.12 – The Black Heart, London

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Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung – Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung

Posted: 27 September 2023 in Albums
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Sub Rosa  – 22nd September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

So many reissues recently have taught me a valuable lesson. I don’t know nearly as much music as I thought I did. Of course, it’s impossible know all the music, and despite feeling I’m reasonably knowledgeable, and compensating what I don’t know with enthusiasm. Time was, I was worried about knowledge gaps: they made me feel stupid, ignorant, and I’ve spent evenings with people who have reeled off bands in genres I’m interested in and not recognised the name of a single one, let alone heard them. I felt like a fraud claiming to be a music enthusiast and worse still, a music writer (I never proclaim to be a music journalist. I write about music, and do so very much from a personal perspective. Sometimes, I stab at maintaining an element of objectivity, but the appreciation of art isn’t objective. As I’ve written elsewhere, the reason we appreciate art is because of the feelings it stirs in us, the way it speaks to us, not first and foremost because of its technical proficiency.

This is a lengthy circumnavigation to the confession that Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung completely bypassed me in the day – in fact, until today, the week of the reissue of their 1995 self-titled full-length debut. I suspect that they didn’t get much coverage in the UK music press, and this was still a while before the advent of the Internet as we know it – and I was a relatively early adopter, setting up my eBay account in 1999 following the demise of Yahoo! Auctions.

As the accompanying bio outlines, ‘The band consisted of four young, ‚classically derailed’ musicians who played their own compositions exclusively their with acoustic instruments such as violin, cello, clarinet and accordion… Their work contained influences from Roma music, Eastern European folk, klezmer and jazz, but was performed with the energy, rebellious spirit and Sturm und Drang of a bona fide punk band. DAAU was part of the fertile Antwerp scene, which also produced dEUS, Zita Swoon and Kiss My Jazz, and soon signed an international record deal with Sony Classical.’

dEUS may have briefly made a mark here in the UK in indie / alternative circles, but the others, not so much, and I suspect that even with its first vinyl pressing, this re-release will likely have a bigger landing in Germany and, indeed, the rest of mainland Europe, than this pitiful island that still celebrates Britpop, and which spent 1995 dominated by turgid sludge by the likes of Oasis, whose pinnacle release (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and Blur’s Great Escape (which was anything but great); the best we got was The Bends, while Robson and fucking Jerome dominated the singles charts for half the year. As if we needed further proof that we’re a small, crappy island with an overinflated sense of self-importance that the longest hangover from the Empire ever. It’s embarrassing, as is the fact that this domestic Brit-centric bullshittery has denied us introductions to many great bands. Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung is a perfect example.

It’s perhaps not hard to grasp why this extravaganza of neoclassical extravagance and its wild woodwind and unpredictable compositional forms didn’t grab the attention of the British Music press, but they missed a work that’s hugely innovative and belongs to no one genre. It’s wild and it’s challenging , but these are positives.

Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung is droning strings, it’s by turns melancholy and slow, and remarkably lively. It’s an untamed beast almost with a life and energy all of its own. But the compositions aren’t in sequence!

‘V Drieslagstelsel’ is the first track, the first of five ‘Drieslagstelsel’ pieces, and it’s followed by the frenzied yet droning folksiness of ‘II Drieslagstelsel’: it’s pretty, but it’s strange. Or, it’s pretty strange. I’m on the fence, while it sounds like they’re stripping the fence with some frenzied violin work. ‘III Drieslagstelsel’ scuttles in with some cheeky chamber stylings before popping in all directions, and it’s kinda cheeky – and perhaps tongue-in-cheeky – jaunty, incredibly busy, and extremely varied. It isn’t the kind of explosive, head-spinning jazz I sometimes find myself wrestling with here, but it covers a lot of terrain in just five and a half minutes, with stage musical qualities pushing to the fore before dipping back down to something altogether less ‘production’ orientated. The last of the ‘Drieslagstelsel’ sequence is ‘I Drieslagstelsel’, and following the frenzied strings and dramatic orchestral sculptures of ‘VI Drieslagstelsel,’ it’s a compact piece of neoclassical music which fulfils the oft-underrated and oft-overlooked purpose of entertaining. It’s a fun and often frivolous piece, in parts a wild hoedown with wind instruments, with an eye-popping energy which delves in to drones and darker territory at times.

What happened to IV? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Rounding the album off is the eleven-minute ‘Doorloop’, which appears to be a traditional track, and its slow, drawn-out notes are funereal at first, before thing go g=crazy and there are even vocal.

Over the course of these six pieces, Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung brings massive range. Back in 95, I probably wouldn’t have appreciated it, and nor would anyone else I knew. But here we are, looking at an accomplished album with much texture and range.

And now, I appreciate it. Perhaps I wasn’t ready, perhaps it was out of step with the times for all but a few – and even fewer here in Britain – but Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung is a remarkable album, and one which is timeless.

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Grails – The Burden of Hope (reissue)

Posted: 25 September 2023 in Albums
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Neurot Recordings – 29th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

I’m finding myself on something of a Neurot trip this week, following my fervent frothing over the mighty new album by Great Falls. As if to prove that the label has been putting out outstanding records for a very long time (and with unstinting singularity, presenting a broad stylistic range, too: this is anything but heavy), twenty years on from its original release, Grails’ debut is getting a reissue. While the nice coloured vinyl pressings (in ‘Coke bottle clear’ and ‘beer’ hues) aren’t necessarily for everyone, the release does afford a timely opportunity to reflect on the debut release of a band who have gone on to forge a significant and varied career, with their latest album – number eight – being released next month.

Steve Von Till’s comments about hearing the demo for the album, on which the offer of’ the release was made, reminds us of the musical landscape of the time in 2002: ‘Most instrumental music at the time was trying to emulate Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Mogwai, but this was different. This seemed to have elements from more diverse sources that I loved such as Dirty Three, Comus, Richard Thompson, and Neil Young, not to mention, who in hell would dare to cover Sun City Girls?’

There was a lot of instrumental post rock around, and while there was a wealth of great bands around, locally as well as nationally and internationally, it’s fair to say that a large proportion of it was much of a muchness, with myriad explorations of chiming guitars and slow-building crescendos.

The prominence of acoustic guitars, softly picked and strummed, and rather unconventional use of violin creates an unusual dynamic on these compositions, which tend to be sparse in arrangement and with considerable space between both the instruments and the individual notes, and the crescendos are few and far between – the first doesn’t arrive until over halfway through the third track, the slow, meandering ‘The Deed’, when the swell of guitar pushes upward through yawning strings and finally the full drum kit crashes in. But the impact is less from whacking on the gain on the instruments, but the musicians utilising the dynamics of playing, and the simple equation that playing harder is louder. Against the prevailing tide of pedal boards as big as drum risers packed with effects, this stands out as being not only very different, but bold, the emphasis on the tones and timbres of the instruments in unadulterated form, the sounds the result of technique.

The soft piano of ‘In the Beginning’, when paired with picked guitar has an almost pastoral feel; the heavy smack of a drum feels incongruous before a soft yet almost clumsy waltz emerges briefly, and structurally, the pieces seem to belong more to jazz than anything else, although ‘Space Prophet Dogon’ (the Sun City Girls cover) draws together elements of Celtic-influenced folk and psychedelia, and goes for a long toe-tapping groove over a crescendo by way of an extended climax. It takes a certain courage to fly in the face of fashion in such an obtuse fashion, as well as to play in such an intimate way that you can hear the sweep of a finger across a fret, where natural reverberations become as integral to the sound as the notes themselves. This is nowhere more apparent than on the hyperpsarce intro of ‘Broken Ballad’, a sedate almost country-tinged tune and one of the album’s more conventionally-shaped pieces. The slowly-unfurling ‘White Flag’ shares a certain common ground with later releases by Earth: slow, spacious, revolving around a simple, picked guitar motif, but it does swing into an exhilarating full band finale that’s different again.

Closer ‘Canyon Hymn,’ presumably a reference to Laurel Canyon, the name of the and when they recorded the demos which would become The Burden of Hope, is by no means an anthem or a theme, but encapsulates all aspects of the album’s range within a soothing five minutes. If the title, The Burden of Hope, implies a certain weight of responsibility, the music it contains sees that hope take wings. Twenty years on, The Burden of Hope sounds uplifting, and still fresh.

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Watch: ‘Destroy the Family’ by Stewart Home

Posted: 14 April 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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The track is from the album Stewart Home Comes In Your Face (Sabotage Editions 1998). The song was written in mid-80s and performed live then. It has a cameo in Stewart Home’s first novel Pure Mania (Polygon Books 1989). The first studio recording wasn’t until the late 90s. Pure Mania (which goes for anything from £30-£85 on the secondhand market now) and Stewart Home Comes In Your Face are being reissued in 2023 by Leamington Books and New Reality Records respectively.

This follows on from New Reality Records stepping up to publish Home’s riotously funny and ultra-kinky novel Art School Orgy after no conventional book publisher would release it.

Ahead of the reissue of the album, in true punk style, Stewart’s produced a DIY zero-budget promo video for ‘Destroy the Family’, shot entirely on location in Motherwell, Scotland.

Watch it here:

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KILN – Holo [2022 Remaster]

Posted: 7 March 2023 in Albums
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Keplar Keplar – 3rd March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

However much you think you know about music, there is always more to learn. And so it transpired that Holo was first released in 1998 and is ‘one of those rare records that managed to carve out a niche of its own while also building bridges to variety of genres like Chicago-style post-rock, the ambient mysticism of projects like Rapoon or the music made at the intersection of shoegaze, and electronic music in the late 1990s.’

Where have I been? Living in a cultural vacuum? Hardly. And yet this is my first encounter with KILN. And I’ve not heard of Rapoon and have no knowledge of Chicago-style post-rock either. Chicago house, I’m aware of, but… well, I daresay I’m not alone, and so this reissue off Holo may well prove to provide an introduction, and an entry point to the trio’s supposedly niche-carving brand of ambience.

It’s an album that’s rich in detail and texture, from clanking, clattering tin can percussion and big sweeps of amorphous sonic clouds that wash and crash in waves.

It’s hard to decipher precisely what’s what – is that a didgeridoo or just a digital drone? It’s impossible to unravel the layers and determine the individual sources as glugs and gurgles slide in between soft dulcimer-like notes and easy beats that bubble between all kinds of textures and tones which drift and slide and groan and drone in and out of the ever-shifting fabric of this fascinating album. Guitars and extraneous sounds flit and flicker in and out while instant drums nag and boom. At times it’s new age, at times it’s more tribal, and Holo pushes ambience in numerous directions.

There are segments – interludes, breaks, fragments – where this is a catalogue of challenging source materials melted together. At others, it’s altogether less challenging and simply washes of you in a soft breeze.

For an album that’s so chilled, there is much happening on Holo¸ and as much as it is an album to chill to, first and foremost it’s an album to explore.

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BL’AST! – Manic Ride

Posted: 5 March 2023 in Albums
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Southern Lord –10th March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Ask people to name a hardcore band and any money they’ll say Black Flag, but anyone who knows their stuff will likely also mention BL’AST. BL’AST stand as one of the definitive hardcore bands, formed in 1983 and releasing their first album, The Power of Expression in 1986, having recorded it three times.

The story goes – according to the band’s bio – that in June of 1988 BL’AST! went into the studio with Black Flags’ live sound GOAT: Dave Rat (RATSOUND), and the breakneck Take The Manic Ride was recorded. This version was later destroyed after the band was dissatisfied with the original production, with a rerecorded version being presented to the public in 1989.

It perhaps seems ironic that a band as raw and immediate as BL’AST should spend so much time faffing about in search of achieving the ‘perfect’ recording, when the finished article sounds so… unpolished. But of course, that’s the point and the key issue: many bands who are live acts first and foremost find their sound stunted, diminished, compressed and ultimately rendered weak and lacking in bite when attempting to capture the experience in a studio setting. The studio is a sterile environment, clinical, and few producers really get the concept of not actually producing a band. Hardcore is about tearing your guts out with vitriolic rage. The studio is never going to be the best environment for channelling it.

This is the stuff of music legend: the master tapes for that first version were destroyed and were never to be recovered, but as Southern Lord detail, ‘Through some incredibly magical surgery a new heavy as fuck version of the album has been produced.’

Perhaps predictably, Manic Ride is a mess of furious noise and aggression, abrasive and angry. While the Southern Lord reissue isn’t leagues different from the Blast First original, it’s very clearly a different mix. Hardcore (sorry) fans will likely be divided over the mix, whether it’s better or worse or whatever and there’s no right or wrong really. This version is crisper and clearer but also fuller.

What really matters is that this key album is back out there, and if it divides fans, fine. It’s back in the public domain, and will, with any luck, introduce new listeners to the band and their legacy.

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Lisa Hammer – Dakini

Posted: 28 October 2022 in Albums
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The Circle Music – 9th September 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Dakini, the debut album by Lisa Hammer (Requiem In White, Mors Syphilitica) was originally released back in 2009. It’s been described as ‘music for ritual, introspection and awakening of the senses’, ‘a complete manifesto of inner search in which a lot of influences from different genres of music’, and that it was ‘designed to carry the listener away from the manifest world and into a deeper space’.

Re-released here on limited coloured vinyl as an expanded release with three additional tracks, it provides an ideal opportunity for existing fans to re-evaluate, and reacquaint themselves, and for latecomers to be introduced.

It happens that I’m in the latter camp, and so am coming to the album with fresh ears, and only the facts that it’s pitched as being for fans of Dead Can Dance while promising ‘unprecedented vocals, sometimes angelic and sometimes damned as if they come from another period forgotten by the time.

Now, one might ask, if the original release was a ‘complete manifesto’, is the inclusion of additional tracks not gilding the lily? Especially when considering that ‘the Indian ragas correspond with times of the day, so the album represents a condensed 24 hours, which is perfect for ritual, or any emotional and spiritual trip.’ In context, there is the question off how to assimilate the additional material in the least obtrusive way, with the least impact on the flow that is so integral to the original concept?

Opening the album with a new, seven-minute ‘Alte Clamat Epicurus’ works nicely; it’s an evocative vocal incantation with a sparse droning backing. It sounds – in the mind’s eye, and with a small soupçon of imagination – like a sunrise, like an awakening. Hammer sounds both otherworldly and most incredibly earthy, which is no small feat – but then, I find that this is something particular to music, particularly vocalisations, which tap into echoes of ancient spirituality. While exalting the heavens, there feels as though there is a deeper connection with the ground, the rocks, trees, the elements. It paves the way perfectly for ‘In Taberna Quando Sumus’; simple, rhythmic, repetitive. As the album progresses, one becomes attuned to the sense of an arc, of a cycle, and Hammer leads the listener on a journey inside. Some of the musical arrangements are so minimal as to be barely there, the sound of the wind and cavernous reverberations, while others are centred around hypnotic percussion and wordless choral vocalisations, as on the powerful ‘Samsara’ and the lilting, ethereal ‘Vajra’.

That flow is disrupted somewhat with a dance mix of ‘Chant Nr 5’ dropped as the fourteenth track at the end of side three. In the sense that it bookends the side, which opens with the original version, it makes some sort of sense, but still… it’s incongruous, sweeping away the drifting incense with a busy beat and quavering organ tone. Perhaps this is why I’m always hesitant to use the term ‘world’ music: it’s such a western-centric view of the globe, where ‘the world’ is vast and the west occupies only a sliver of it, both geographically and culturally. In the west, the west is the world and perceives its cultural dominance as such. It’s a badly skewed perspective.

While Dakini incorporates elements of what would commonly be described as ‘world’ music, it’s really ‘world’ music in that it truly embraces music from the world in its full breadth, with the delicate sing-song of ‘Lullaby’ perhaps owing more to western traditions and showing that for Hammer, all sources are equal, and it makes for a rich and moving listening experience.

Side four ends, and closes the album, with the third and final bonus track, ‘Hurdy Gurdy Gavotte’. And there, it sits perfectly.

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Watch: ‘One Twenty Two’ by Botch

Posted: 25 August 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Tacoma, Washington mathcore/metalcore greats Botch have released a new song and video, ‘One Twenty Two,’ their first song in twenty years.

The track will be included on the re-issue of their wildly influential second album, We Are the Romans, which was also announced today, available as a 2xLP and CD on November 4th via Sargent House.

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There was never any intention for the band to release anything else, but when guitarist David Knudson went to write his debut solo album, it made sense. He explains:

“During Covid, I was writing my debut solo LP, and mentally, I was sick of everything in quarantine. Lots of frustration had set in at home, and I figured the best way to deal with it was to write something heavy. I had no intention of writing anything for Botch, but when I was thinking of a singer to collaborate with, I thought, “Hey, I know the best hardcore singer ever to do it,” so I hit up Dave V. He was super excited and so it just kind of snowballed from there. There was never any intent or conversation about getting back together or writing. It just happened so naturally and was a great release for all of us to make it happen without any of the traditional pressure an “active” band faces.”

Bassist Brian Cook, guitarist David Knudson, drummer Tim Latona, and vocalist Dave Verellen formed Botch in 1993, becoming one of the most ground-breaking and influential bands during a pivotal shift in heavy music. Their final show was June 15, 2002, the same day as the release of their final EP, An Anthology of Dead Ends. The members would go on to play in These Arms Are Snakes, Minus the Bear, and Russian Circles, among others, with acclaim for the band coming mostly post-breakup. We Are the Romans went on to become one of the most influential albums for the genre garnering posthumous acclaim across the board.

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