Hail to all ye Brethren of the Hammer,
It is official now, Manilla Road will be headlining the Friday June 29th show at the Warriors of Metal festival in Ohio. Helstar will be headlining the Saturday show on June 30th at the WOM also. This should be a great time with lots of great bands. It has been since 1988 or 89 that Manilla Road have played in Ohio so it will be good to return. We also are confirmed for playing at the Muskelrock festival in Sweden on June 2nd with a show in Finland the night before. More details about these shows will be up on our tour dates page soon. We also tentatively scheduled to headline the Up The Hammers festival in Athens in October of 2012 which we will give you more information about that also in the near future. We are planning to do a little more touring as well but at the same time we will be recording a new Manilla Road album with Andreas coming over to Midgard Sound Labs to do his parts. So it appears the Road will be having a busy year and we are all looking forward to raising the hammers high.
Down The Nails
Shark
Hail to all ye Brethren of the Hammer,
There is one thing that remains constant in the universe and that is that change is inevitable. Well this law of life is no different for Manilla Road either for change is in the wind again for the band. It saddens me to inform you all that Cory Christner and the other members of Manilla Road have come to an impasse on a few topics which has led to a changing of the guard in the percussion department of the band. We had a good eight years with Hardcore playing incredible drums for the Road and we will miss his expertise. But the time has come to make a change and so we in Camp Manilla have endeavored to make what we think is the best choice for the drummer slot in Manilla Road.
I am proud to announce that as of now the new drummer for Manilla Road is the one and only Andreas Neuderth (Neudi) who has become renowned for his drummer skills with bands like Viron, Roxxcalibur, Savage Grace and Griffin. He is also the host and producer of the metal show STRIKE! on Streetclip TV in Germany. I have known Neudi for many years and we became good friends a long time ago. Recently we spent a lot of time with Neudi in Germany and he played with us at the Hammer of Doom Festival this last October. If you saw the show then you can immediately understand why Neudi was the obvious and best choice of drummers for Manilla Road. He totally kicked ass at the HOD and earned his wings with the Road. Change is always awkward and sometimes difficult for the band and for our supporters as well but in this case I think that, with your support, the addition of Neudi to Manilla Road will have a very positive and glorious result. So please welcome Neudi into the realm of Manilla Road with the arms opened wide. There is much to come in the future from MR. We are working on new music for a new Manilla album and there will be touring (for sure) in 2012. We are in the process of confirming dates in Finland and Sweden right now and we will also be making a trip back to the south of Europe to do shows in Greece and Italy among others. So keep an eye out on the tour dates section of manillaroad.net for all the relevant news about our upcoming tour dates. It is an honor to have such a great individual and musician as Neudi joining our ranks.
Up The Hammers & Down The Nails
Mark The Shark Shelton / Manilla Road
Hail all ye Brethren of the Hammer,
First of all I would like to thank each and every one of you, that have checked out this new site and come to support Manilla Road. You have all made the launch of manillaroad.net a great success. Once again I wish to extend a hearty welcome to anyone visiting the site for the first time and remind all of you that this is the true official website for Manilla Road. We are running this site ourselves so you are insured that if you purchase anything from manillaroad.net that the proceeds will be going directly to the running of this site and helping build the Manillan Empire.
Even though we have just released a new album (Playground of the Damned) we are already back in the studio working on new material. As a matter of fact the studio (Midgard Sound Labs) has been just pumping out the tunes for the last month. We are working on several projects at once and it is a really glorious time for us all in the Manilla Camp. I will give you a bit of a run down of what we are working on: First of all I am working on a band project called Miskatonia with ex-Manilla Road members Scott Peters and Mark Anderson. You might remember them from our Atlantis Rising and Spiral Castle releases. Anderson is writing the riffs and some of the lyrics and I am writing the vocal parts and some of the lyric content also. Scott Peters is doing the drums and I am singing all the vocal parts. It is very doom like and does not really sound like MR but it is cool music and I am honored to be working with these guys again on this project. Next I would like to tell you about a new band that I have formed with E.C. Hellwell called Hellwell. I have spoke of this before but would like to let you all know that the first album is completely recorded and mixed and we are now working on the mastering and the artwork for the release. It should be out on High Roller and Shadow Kingdom come the Spring of 2012. This is somewhat like MR but with synthesizer and keyboards added. It is a very heavy and aggressive project and we are all very pumped about this one. It is one of those type of projects that I really love every single cut on the project. Keep an eye out here at manillaroad.net for more details as we approach the release date. We are also working on new songs for the next Manilla Road album as well and so far all the stuff we have come up with is totally cool and I am so excited to be working on new MR music again.
As you have most likely already seen we have some shirts up for sale on the site now and there will be more styles to come in the near future. We are looking to continue to add different styles to the merchandise page as time goes on. Once again rest assured that everything that you get from this site is official MR merch and not bootleg.
I will be continuing to post updates here to let you all know what is going on in the Manilla Camp as time goes on. We are currently working on scheduling tour dates for 2012 and I will let you all know those secured dates as they are confirmed. Thank you all for your undying support of Manilla Road and May The Lords Of Light Be With You!
Up The Hammers & Down The Nails
Mark The Shark Shelton
Hail to all ye Brethren of the Hammer,
Well the Hammer Of Doom festival is behind us now. But not the thundering in my ears that is the ringing still going on from all the great metal I heard at the show. I had a bloody blast at this festival. Congratulations to Oliver for putting on such an event.
For me it was almost like a family reunion. To be sharing the stage with my friends in Doomsword and BattleroaR again. It was glorious for me and my mates in the band. First of all I have to express my thanks to Josh for all the time he has put in with me rehearsing for this show. He just stormed right on through all the songs live like he had been playing them for years. Great Job. Hellroadie as always came through in the pinch. He got sick almost right away when we got to Germany but he battled on like a trooper and did a great job singing at the show. And then comes something near remarkable. Neudi had 3 days of rehearsing with us to get ready for this show. 3 days to figure out 25 songs with most of them being real buggers that were originally played by Randy Thrasher Foxe. No small feat that we have asked of this man. But Neudi came on like an exploding volcano and erupted into a great demonstration of what metal drumming is all about. Man he did a great job. We did 25 songs that lasted slightly over 2.5 hours. It was brutal but the audience kept us going. And that brings me to the audience. By the beard of Zeus they were amazing. This was a true magikal moment for me at this show. I felt so much appreciation and love from the audience that I would sometimes just find myself spinning around in a swirl of music and then I would realize that I was supposed to be at my mic and I’m still 10 feet away…hahah. I felt like I played pretty good and we all had a few mistakes here and there but for the most part they were very minimal and covered up really well. I cannot express enough my emotions about the crowd that was before us and the respect that they gave us. It was a monster moment in my career as a touring musician. And it felt really good to crank out so many of the old songs from Open The Gates, The Deluge and Mystification. If you did not make it to the show then you missed out on one bloody hell of a good gig. If you were there then I must thank you from the bottom of my heart for such a great time. We are currently working on putting together our tour schedule for 2012 so just keep watch here at manillaroad.net and we will announce everything as it unfolds.
Up The Hammers & Down The Nails
Shark
Hail to all ye brethren of the Hammer,
Shark here with a hearty welcome to manillaroad.net. From now on this is to be the springboard site for all information and contacts for Manilla Road releases, merchandise, bookings, interviews and all general information about happenings in the Manilla Road camp. It has been a long time coming but the Road finally has a site that is primarily dedicated to Manilla Road and run by myself and a chosen few from Midgard Sound Labs and the Manilla Road crew. All the products that you can purchase from this site or products that lead you to another site for purchase (such as Rockadrome, High Roller or Shadow Kingdom) are official Manilla Road products. This is the place you want to go if you are looking for the official news and products from the band. So welcome aboard and fair sailing on the good ship manillaroad.net.
I’m excited about doing this first Shark’s Mouth installment for our new site. So much has happened in the last couple of years that it would be a novella if I spelled it all out here. So I will try to be brief but informative.
We had helped start a site called Fountain Street Productions that was put together by many people with the idea of being sort of a facebook for bands and musicians. After we got the site up and running many of the founders of the company bailed for one reason or another and it became impossible for just the few of us left in Manilla Road to run the site the way it was intended to be. So we decided that we should abandon the Fountain Street site and just concentrate on a Manilla Road site. And with the blessing of Dennis at Rockadrome Records he turned over manillaroad.net to us so that we could put up our own Manilla Road site run by us. Thanks man.
As for the band it has been a couple of years of chaos that have been a real test for the Road. When we started working on the Playground of the Damned recordings Vince was playing Bass for us, and doing a great job at it also. Vince was one of the best live showmen that I have ever shared a stage with. And his bass playing is rather special also. Unfortunately after he had recorded only two songs with us in Midgard Sound Labs he developed a physical problem with his left hand that was making it impossible for him to play at the time. He was already dealing with an inner ear disorder that was making it difficult for him to travel and tour with us so the hand thing was like the straw that broke the camels back for Vince. He decided to bow out gracefully and not make the band wait for him to recover (which was an unknown amount of time). So all of a sudden we did not have a bass player to finish the album with. I was already starting to work on a side project with a friend of mine that plays keyboards and bass and has been a horror writer at times. His name is Ernest Cunningham Hellwell but he goes by E.C. Hellwell. So I asked him if he would be interested in doing the rest of the bass parts on the new Manilla Road album and he agreed to do so but did not want to tour with the Road because of other obligations including, but not limited to, our side project that we are calling Hellwell. So E.C. Finished the album with us but we were still faced with needing a bass player for our live shows. So enters our savior Joshua Castillo. We did a show with him back in November in Wichita at a cool place called The Port of Wichita and it was a sellout crowd and Josh did a stellar first show performance with us. So he earned his spurs or his wings, whichever metaphor you prefer. So Josh will be playing live with us and most likely be on the next Manilla Road album as well. Unfortunately Cory is also having some personal issues in his life right now that are keeping him from being able to tour also so we are only doing one show this year and that is the Epic Night at the Hammer of Doom festival in Germany the last part of October 2011. Andreas Neuderth of the bands Viron and Roxxcalibur will be drumming for us at that show and we will be primarily doing older Manilla Road songs from Crystal Logic to Mystification and maybe a song from Courts of Chaos thrown in as well as a couple of songs off the new album. But most of the show will be from Crystal, Open the Gates, Deluge and Mystification. I think maybe we are doing a song from the Metal album also.
Playground of the Damned was an effort of love for the music. There was so much chaos going on in the life of the band that the music started taking on a darker aspect as we progressed through the recordings. The song Abattoir de la Mort is actually one of those dual topic style of lyrics. I suppose you could take the song as being about sacrificial rituals of the occult but in actuality it is a song about the blood and sweat and horrific yet majestic writings that have occurred in Midgard Sound Labs. We have worked very hard to achieve a more balanced and better production sound on this album (as well has been our intention on every new project). I know that some think that we should have the huge production of some ginormous studio with hot shot engineers and producers. But I say to all of those people that yes it would sound different and more like all the other bands that are out there but tell me this – Why would I want to sound like all the other bands out there. I want to sound like what I hear in my head. I think that if we turned over too much of the recording aspects to someone else it would no longer sound like Manilla Road’s vision. The drums are always going to sound different than most other recordings because we don’t use triggered or sampled drums on the albums. We did that once on Courts of Chaos and I will never use sampled or triggered drums on a Manilla Road album ever again. When it comes to the drum production I do like a little more wet drum mix than Cory does so the amount of verb or room sounds that I use on the drums in the mix is not as heavy as some would like but I must say that it does make it so you can really hear all the cool stuff Hardcore does on his parts. I know that we can’t please everyone all at the same time so we just continue to try our best to make it sound the way we are envisioning it. Most of the songs on Playground are not really inter-related but some of them do sort of cross over to each other genre wise. We recorded the album over such a long period of time and had so many changes going on that each song had it’s own recording session really. The best way to record drums for an album is to do them all at the same time so that your microphone placements on the set are consistent. When you are writing and recording one song and then taking the drum set out of the studio for shows and then coming back and setting the drum kit up all over again you are starting over on the mics as well and it is near impossible to get them in the same exact spot on the drums or have the drum heads sound exactly the same either. This is a problem we would never have if we used triggers but then it would not sound like live drums. Even though each songs recording happened at different intervals I am still really pleased with the way the album came out. It helped to give each song it’s own individual personality. We have not toured since our Scandinavian excursion during All Hollows in 2009 and with a bit of a rest from touring it appears my voice has strengthened and of course Bryan’s is stronger than ever. We are hoping that 2012 will prove to be a good touring year for Manilla as long as all our personnel problems don’t plague us too much.
So there you have it. I hope you enjoy the site and check out the new album. As always we wish to extend our deepest gratitude to all our friends and supporters for their undying devotion to the Epic Metal cause and Manilla Road. All hail the Brethren of the Hammer.
May The Lords Of Light Be With You
Up The Hammers & Down The Nails
Blessed Be
Shark
