Here are some arch-ie things I spotted this morning.
ARCHSPIRE
Spencer Prewett is the drummer for Canada’s Archspire, whose new album The Lucid Collective we reviewed here in April. On a superficial level, he appears to be human — two arms, two legs, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, realistic looking skin and hair. But appearances can be deceiving, because based on the video I’m about to show you he is clearly a Cyberdyne Systems model T-1000 cyborg. Fortunately, John Connor can rest easy because Spencer Prewett was sent from the future only to destroy drum kits.
In this drum play through, the song you’ll hear is the new album’s first track, “Lucid Collective Somnambulation”. I dropped my jaw and the damned thing bounced somewhere I didn’t see because my eyes were glued to this video. You watch it while I go look for my damned jaw.
(thanks to DGR for linking me to this. He prefaced the link in his message with this:
“WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”
http://seasonofmist.bandcamp.com/album/the-lucid-collective
https://www.facebook.com/Archspireband
ARCH ENEMY
We’ve already reviewed the new Arch Enemy album, War Eternal. This isn’t about that. This is about two cover tracks that Arch Enemy recorded for the DECIBEL magazine Flexi-disc series. It will be included in the August 2014 issue, which can be ordered here.
The two songs that Arch Enemy covered are “Nitad” by Moderat Likvidation and “When the Innocent Die” by Anti Cimex. I’m not familiar with the original songs, but The Font of All Human Knowledge tells me that Moderat Likvidation are a Swedish hardcore punk band that existed between 1980 and 1985 and reunited in 2007, and that Anti Cimex (who I’ve heard of) were another Swedish hardcore punk band who date back to 1981 and whose second 7″, Raped Ass, “is considered to be a subgenre-defining D-beat record”.
The Arch Enemy covers, which are combined into a single track, sound nothing like Arch Enemy — but they kick massive amounts of ass. The second cover includes an incendiary guitar solo, and the vocals by Alissa White-Gluz are seriously pissed-off and thoroughly jugular bursting. If the band ever grow tired of melodic death metal, they have a bright future in slaughtering d-beat crust.
Go listen here:
https://soundcloud.com/decibelmagazine/arch-enemy-nitad-original-by
(thanks to Leperkahn for pushing me to listen to these covers)
7 Responses to “ARCHNESS: ARCHSPIRE AND ARCH ENEMY”
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But seriously: as a moderate fan of AE’s current incarnation, they would be SO AWESOME as a band in the vein of those covers (though they would sell way, way less, so it’s never gonna happen).
the Arch Enemy covers are crazy good 🙂
I’m not even joking when I say that these covers are my favorite thing AE has ever done.
…and like most death metal drummers he barely touches the drums, especially the bass drum. I still prefer drummers that can actually hit a drum properly to drummers that play so fast that it makes it impossible.
Im curious about this argument, because as far as I’ve known it, that’s the technique that you need to play with in order to move that fast. Specifically in regard to the gravity blast work he has going on. There’s actually a lot of power behind those hits if done properly, as far as I’ve seen and remember from my time behind the kit.
Well that is kind of the problem with that type of music, it is sometimes so fast that it is physically impossible to get decent hits out of the drums – and as I said before – especially with the kick drums. Don’t get me wrong, I listen to a lot of death metal, but I’m getting tired of drummers that barely hit the kick and has to use triggers with typewriter-like samples just to get an audible sound out of them. Also a snare drum always sound better and more powerful when you hit it with a rimshot so that the stick hits both the rim of the drum and the drum head, the problem with many technical death metal drummers is that even in the slow parts they hit those weak snare hits. Maybe this is because so that the difference in sound and volume between the slow and fast parts is minimized, I don’t know.
What I do know is that some drummers, like Dirk Verbeuren, hit hard and play fast and what a difference it makes sound wise.
Dirk uses triggers as well.