So once again I have been lazy and haven’t written a blog in a long time. It seems like so much stuff has happened as well. I’ll run through it in somewhat chronological order:
Finished the album: That’s right! Finally after around 12 months of writing, recording, mastering and many drinks later, we have finished our 2nd album. The album will be “Self Titled”, mainly because we couldn’t all agree on a title, but it does represent a new beginning for the band. Not only in musical direction but also because this is the first record we have all had equal input. Last time most of the record was written before Garth and Cam joined the band, however this time round we were all part of the writing process for every song! The record is still scheduled for a March 2009 release and we have just tee’d up Joe Whyte to do the illustrations for the album. We used Joe on the Pavour Nocturnus EP and he has done heaps of amazing art since then, including all the Boys Of Summer tour posters, so we are stoked that he is back on board. The final track listing for the album is as follows:
1. Addicted
2. Fighting For Our Lives
3. Armageddonouttahere (previously az16)
4. Death From Above
5. My Love
6. Coming Home
7. I Never Wanted This
8. This Is Who We Are
9. Stay With Me (previously rock ballad)
10. Miss Heartbreaker
New single out: So most of you would have heard the new single ‘Addicted’ on our myspace by now. It’ll be out via iTunes on Saturday 8th of November and it has just been added to Triple J. We are happy with the response so far, with most people having something positive to say. We realise that it is a bit different to our previous stuff but I believe it is still rocking and uncompromised. I hate hearing all those fucks that say we’ve sold out etc (I know I’ve touched on this before) cause we didn’t write this album for you or for radio or anyone else, we wrote it for ourselves. If everyone knew how much money we personal make from the band you wouldn’t be saying shit. But anyway. Enough of that.
Addicted Tour: We finally announced our first headline tour for this year. We can’t wait to get back out and play hour long sets and get to see all of our friends again. It’s been way too long but it’ll be worth the wait. If you haven’t seen the dates yet here they are:
SATURDAY 1 NOVEMBER - HA’PENNY BRIDGE, GEELONG (18+)
MONDAY 3 NOVEMBER – GERSHWIN ROOM @ ESPY HOTEL, MELBOURNE
FRIDAY 7 NOVEMBER – COOLANGATTA HOTEL, GOLD COAST (18+)
SATURDAY 8 NOVEMBER – THE RED ROOM, BRISBANE (LIC/AA)
SUNDAY 9 NOVEMBER – EMPIRE CHURCH THEATRE, TOOWOOMBA (LIC/AA)
WEDNESDAY 12 NOVEMBER – TRANSIT BAR, CANBERRA (FREE: 18+)
THURSDAY 13 NOVEMBER – CHILLI LOUNGE, WYONG (18+)
FRIDAY 14 NOVEMBER – HUNTER VALLEY BREWERY, MAITLAND (18+)
SATURDAY 15 NOVEMBER – MANNING BAR, SYDNEY (LIC/AA)
FRIDAY 21 NOVEMBER – FOWLERS LIVE, ADELAIDE (LIC/AA)
SATURDAY 22 NOVEMBER – CIVIC AND ARTS CENTRE, MILLICENT (AA)
There will be an under 18 show in Melbourne announced very soon. Also I’ve been receiving a fair few messages asking when will we be playing in Tassie and WA again and unfortunately it just can’t happen this year. It’s not because we don’t want to or that we don’t have time to, it’s that there aren’t enough venues available in November and December to meet the heavy touring demand at the moment. There is so much going on touring wise in Australia at the moment it is hard to get in anywhere!! However we will be back touring our album next year and we will be going everywhere possible!
For those of you able to come to the shows here is our setlist which we believe has something for everyone!
Shakedown
Game Of Life
Sometimes Forever Means Never
Addicted
The Bonesmen
The Art Of War
You’ve had your Chance
Fighting For Our Lives
-Secret Cover Song-
Death From Above
Empty Promises
Sorry Doesn’t Cut It
Bullets For Blood
Miss Heartbreaker
There are also a couple other surprises that you can’t miss.
Addicted film clip: So on Sunday we shot the first clip for the album. The idea was just to have a cool party clip at this abandoned mansion in St Kilda. We invited a bunch of friends down, put on a bbq and drank a whole lot of booze. As usual I may have drank a little too much but I guess that happens when you start drinking vodka at 9am and continuing through till about 8pm. I just hope I don’t look too drunk in the final cut of the clip hahah. We should have the clip up early next week providing everything goes to plan!
So I guess that is about it…..I will do some kind of tour diary thing while I’m away, but considering I am placing a drinking ban on myself it will in no way resemble Kelly’s tour diary, which is unfortunate.
So yes it has been a while between blogs, not between drinks though! At lot has happened and then again not much at all. This may sound confusing, and I assure you it is.
First of all we just got back from touring with Disturbed, POD and Alter Bridge. It was a bit of a weird tour for us to be on as we dont share a whole lot in common with any of the bands: Christianity, nu-metal and gold records. However it was the best support tour we have ever done. We were looked after like gods. Every night on the tour we received 1 slab of Coronas, 1 slab of Pure Blondes, 1 bottle of Bourbon , 1 bottle of Vodka, occasionally a bottle of red wine, a sandwich platter, assorted chips and a cooked meal for each of us (which was usually a choice of steak or pasta). It was ridiculous!! For once I ate better on tour than I did at home! Plus I in my mind I thought that I'd go home with at least 2-3 bottles of vodka, but in reality I drank a bottle of vodka every night of the tour.....my liver has never hated me so much. I drank so much probably because we only had to play 15 minutes every night which left a lot of time for more recreational activities. Dont get me wrong though, this was also one of the hardest tours we have ever done (here I go again with juxtapositions). Our tour schedule was this:
Day 1: get up at 3:30am to catch a 6am flight to perth. Hang out all day, since to save money on this tour we stayed at friends placecs. Play at 7:30pm. 11pm go to Ryan and Issacs house (elora danan) to sleep. Day 2: get up at 7am to catch a 9am flight to adelaide. Day off at Azza's mum's place. Day 3: get up at 8am to pick up Yates (our guitar tech) from the airport. Hang out then play at 7:30pm. Home at Azza's mum's place at 11pm. Day 4: get up at 5am to drive Cam to the airport (yes that's right he flew to Brisbane while the rest of us drove!! fucker). The rest of us then set off for our 1,969 km trip from Adelaide to Brisbane in a tarago. Day 5: get to the venue after 27 hours of driving. oh balls! Play at 7.30pm. Get real drunk then leave at 11pm to drive to Sydney. Day 6: get to the venue at 10am and hang around all day. play at 7:30pm then go to Kelly and Snarez place to drink. Day 7: get up at 10am and drive to Newcastle. Play at 7:30pm. Leave at 10pm and drive to Melbourne. Day 8: get to melbourne at 8am. Day 9: play at 7:30pm.
fewwwwwwwwf. Those drives were killer!! But the shows were awesome! Uwwwwww wah ha ha haaaaawwww.
Before the tour we were in the middle of mixing our new album, and in true BCE style we were running behind schedule! We had already mixed 8 of the 11 songs and on the last day Richard (our producer) informed us that he was going to be away for the following 3 weeks recording After The Falls new record. Usually when we are running behind we would just continue on until the record was done, but with Richard away it meant that we had to postpone mixing those 3 songs for a few weeks. This record has taken so long to write and record and we finally get to the home stretch just to have to wait almost a month longer to have it all finished. It becomes pretty frustrating cause all you want is to hear the completed product and start showing everyone what you have been doing all year! You start to feel like it will never get done, although i'm probably just being melodramatic. With all that aside we are to go in and finish up this coming Monday. Thank fuck! hahaha. The good news is that the record is sounding amazing! We have had the 8 songs (unmastered) to listen to for the past 3 weeks and i'm so stoked on it! It is a fair bit different to A Revelation For Despair but it will really please fans of our older stuff (think demos/art of war stuff). I have some good and bad news for you guys though.
Good - The single, 'Addicted' (which we played live on a couple of the Disturbed shows: Adelaide and Perth), will be mastered this Thursday and hopefully out on radio just after the 24th of sept (2 weeks....oooo exciting). In the next two weeks we will be shooting a video for Addicted and taking some new promo shots etc. Soon after that we will announce a national tour that will take place in November. You have no idea how keen we are to get back out and tour our own headline shows!
Bad - Our album wont be released till early march 2009. If you think it is bad for you guys it is 10 times worse for us! We want to show everyone as soon as it's done (I might have to leak it onto the internetz haha) but instead we have to wait 5 months :(. We have to release it next year cause the last date for release this year is November 8th (or something close to that) and we just wouldn't have had it ready in time (little own enough time to promo it). So it sucks but it'll be definitely worth the wait! promise! Plus we'll be putting it up on myspace a week or so before it is released and we might even try to debut some of the songs over a period of the next few months.
So anyway.....that's what has been going on.
I hope next time I blog I'll have some cool stuff to show you (ie a video or song :).
Anyway we started mixing yesterday at Sing Sing Richmond in the ‘K’ room. The desk is a SSL XL9000K (72 channels) and is one of the best(and most expensive) mixing desks in the world. I think there are only 3 in Australia, so we are pretty lucky to be using this amazing bit of gear once again!
I’m pretty damn excited that we have started mixing. It has been such a long, yet surprisingly un-tumultuous process, and it feels weird tobe at this stage `already` (considering we have spent the better part of a year writing and recording this new album that comment seems a little contradictory).I’m about to head into the studio to hear the first mixed song, “Miss Heartbreaker”. I can’t wait to hear it as not one person in the band has actually heard the whole song with every part. Hard to comprehend I know, but this is the way recording worked best for us this time. We would each go in, most of the time separately, and lay down our parts. It has been really cool doing it this way since every time you go in the song has changed and grown so you never get tired of hearing it over and over. It has meant that we are less burnt out than last time and have a better, almost objective, perspective of the songs.
Although the record will be completely done (mixed and mastered) in the next couple of weeks we won’t be releasing it till early March of next year. I know this seems like so fucking long away (and believe me it is if you are in our position since all you want is for people to hear your new stuff!) but we will be releasing a single within the next month along with anew video! We will also be touring our own headline shows about a month or so after the Disturbed tour (keep checking our myspace for dates!). We have already started throwing round ideas for supports and venues and it is going to be such a cool tour! We always pick bands that we love and want to listen to every night as supports. It is awesome to be in that position where we are paid(albeit not much) to get drunk with our friends and watch great bands hahaha!
So I’ll try to keep you updated about the mixing over the next couple weeks and also the low down with our video and the new single!
Yes that's right. We are touring with the band that brought you such Goo (alternative Melbourne nightclub back in the day!!) classics as 'Down With The Sickness' and 'Stupify'. I'm not particularly into Disturbeds music, however I am fond of the drunken 4am, last ditch effort to pick up, dance floor soundtrack it provided for my younger years. I'm hoping that every night I see them on this tour I will be in a state that is reminiscent of all those Thursday nights I spent at Goo, as will much of their crowd, so I think I'll be in good company.
When we were asked to do this tour we had a massive chuckle at first that we would be playing a Nu-metal show (however this may not come as much of a surprise to people who listened to our last record haha). Then we heard what venues it would be in and that they had just scored not only the number one spot on the US charts (selling 250,000 records in the first week) but also the number 1 spot on the Australian charts (selling over 10,000 in the first week) for their 'nu' record Indestructible. I mean who'd pass up the opportunity to play with one of the biggest alternative acts in the world.....not us! So after the initial chuckle we took this to be an awesome option to do this tour even though our styles are a fair bit different, especially on the newer stuff. With that said though, we will be playing a good 3 or 4 new songs on this tour, so those of you that are going will get a taste of the new BCE record! The dates for the tour are as follows:
29 Aug 2008 - Metro City - 18 - Perth, Western Australia 31 Aug 2008 - Thebarton Theatre - All Ages - Adelaide, South Australia 2 Sep 2008 - Brisbane Entertainment Centre - All Ages Brisbane, Queensland 3 Sep 2008 - Hordon Pavillion - All Ages - Sydney, New South Wales 4 Sep 2008 - Newcastle Entertainment Centre - All Ages Newcastle, New South Wales 6 Sep 2008 - Festival Hall - All Ages - Melbourne, Victoria
Tickets go on sale this Thursday and will sell out really quickly, so make sure you get in early if you wanna be down (with the sickness....ahhh never gets old).
For those of you who dont really like Disturbed, never fear, as we will be announcing (if all goes well) a headline tour of our own to coincide with our new single (which again, if all goes well will be out in September).
In recording news we have had a week off. Slack fuckers we are!! But all is going well. I have had laryngitis for the last couple weeks, which has not allowed me to do any singing, which for a singer sucks major donkey dick! Alas I am feeling a lot better now and will be back in the studio finishing off the album starting Monday! We have about 2-3 more weeks total and everything will be done! So pumped! It has been a long 10 months or so of writing and recording for this album but I think all the hard work has been worth it. It is definitely our best stuff so far. And Richard Stolz (our producer/engineer) is pulling some amazing sounds that are going to make you shit your pants forreal!
We have also made another studio diary so check it out:
And lastly we have some new merch up in the kys store: check here! ps Clints GF is hot ;) hahahah
It has been a pretty busy 2 weeks. We moved from the luxurious Neve Room at Sing Sing studios in Richmond after finishing drums, to the not so luxurious Tom Larkin (Shihad) studios in Brunswick. Although this studio isn’t kitted out with pool tables, table tennis tables, plasmas and leather couches, it is an awesome little space which is perfect for tracking vocals and guitars! Apparently we are here to make a record and not become leet table tennis players (which is kinda what happened last time hahaha). So after a day of settling in Garth sat down and smoked his bass tracks in a couple of days! He had about 45 bass heads in there (ok maybe there was 5, but that’s 4 too many if you ask me haha) and a couple of sans amp style D.I.s, which made the bass sound huge!
We then began tracking guitars and vocals. The idea was that we would track guitars for a song during then day then I would come in and bust some vocals of a night time with the aim to have a song a day completed. This was thrown out the window to a certain extent since throughout the whole rhythm section tracking process Az has been over in sunny California soaking up the good life! He left the day after pre-production finished and spent 14 days travelling around Las Vegas, LA and Hawaii, and got back a day after we were to being guitar tracking. So what ended up happening was that Kevin just started laying down most of his stuff and then a few days later, once Az had some rest, we would try a song-a-day style schedule. So far it has worked out fairly well. I have sung 3 songs: Fighting For Our Lives (formerly Godzilla, or as user JessieHyphonLee suggested “Azilla”), Death From Above and Miss Heartbreaker. They sound massive!!!
My typical day involves getting up at around 9 or 10am, having a coffee and starting some work (I work from home as a web programmer. I built the functionality and CMS for Killyourstereo, not the design though). Around 12pm I go down to the gym (yes I finally joined), work out for bout an hour and then sit in the steam room for about 30mins (it is good for my throat). I then go home eat lunch and hop on a train to Bruswick. I get to the studio around 5ish and start recording vocals till about 11pm. Depending on what day it is I will replace gym with a vocal lesson. I have just started (well for a couple months now) vocal lessons with this girl called Lisa who teaches SLS (speech level singing) and it is awesome. She is not only an incredible singer but also an amazing teacher. I discovered things about my voice that I never knew I had and I was also warned about the perils of screaming. She said that it does damage your voice and one day, it may not be a year or 10, but one day it will really fuck your voice. So be warned aspiring screamers it won’t be so cool once you cant talk at all hahahaha.
Anyway, as you can see from the picture we are using a whole range of different guitars this time, whereas last time we only used 3 guitars for everything. It allows us to create cool individual tones for every song, making the album as a whole feel less repetitive and allows us to best represent each song. We have a couple of Gibson Les Paul’s (one a vintage 1969), a Gibson SG 1998, a Gretch, a Music Man, A Fender Jaguar, a couple of Jacksons and an LTD. Combine that with our 2 Orange Heads (AD30 and Retro 50), 4 Mesa Boogies (Mach 1, Mach 3, .50, Dual Rectifier), 2 Framus` (Cobra and Ruby Riot 1) and a Vox Twin, and that is a lot of different sounds! We are going for a more authentic, less processed, 80’s rock guitar sound (think Slash, G’n R and you’re on the right track) which is amazing! We really wanted this record to have a unique sound when it came to guitars. Something no one else is doing. All to often, as we have in the past, bands/producers are going for a more metallic sounding guitar rather than creating those amazing valve tones of the past!
So it’ll be a couple more weeks until we complete recording everything then we’ll be spending 8-10 days mixing and a couple days mastering!!! Hopefully it’ll be all done by the end of July! So fucking excited.
Oh one more thing before I go, keep an eye out over the next couple weeks as a support tour will be announced and hopefully, if all goes well, a single tour will follow shortly after ;)
I was going to do a massive George Carlin style monologue but I cant be fucked! I sing for a screamo/trendcore/emocore/emo/fagnuts/xXx/mosh band called Behind Crimson Eyes. I like to drink. I smoke but shouldn't. I plan on going to the gym this week, as I plan to every week. I part own KYS with 3 friends, which I have invested 1000's of hours into for well over 4 years with no pay. I live with Jarule. I am a CMS programmer (php/mysql) and a full time n3rd. I play Counter Strike Source, mostly on internode #21-#23. I pwn you all! I was bitter and now I'm just better!
