ONCE – THE MUSICAL
Alright, so it’s not exactly rock but I checked out Once – The Musical at The Princess Theatre on opening night this past Saturday and if you’re into musical theatre you should check it out. There are some great vocal performances and some really beautiful orchestrations. Everything is performed on acoustic instruments by the actors, and if you’re a guitar nerd like me there are plenty of nice Martins to ogle. The season runs until December 31 and you can get tickets from http://oncemusical.com.au
ADELAIDE UNDERGROUND PRESENTS…
Gather round ye brigands of the southern hemisphere and batten down the hatches! The Cauldron Black Ram will raise the black mast and set sail in league with the ramshackle marauders of Denmark’s barbarous Undergang, deliverin’ a pitiless chain shot of outlaw death metal to the hapless Australian continent. Supportin’ their sordid ‘Stalagmire’ LP the Black Ram steer the Ghost Galleon to seven cities marked for pillage and plunder with Undergang at the cannons. So prepare the grog and pray to your heathen gods that Cauldron Black Ram and Undergang spare your worthless lives when they drop the anchor 8pm, Friday October 10 at The Bendigo Hotel in Collingwood! Tickets are $15 and there’s an amazing support line-up of Altars, Voidchrist, Headless Death and Terror Strike.
HEAR NEW KING PARROT STUFF LIVE!
Aah yes. I’ve been waiting for this. King Parrot have been terrorising North America over the last few months, recently completing a massive tour playing alongside bands such as Origin, The Faceless and Beyond Creation. The busiest band in Melbourne have also spent close to a month hibernating in the woods in Vermont writing new material for their second record scheduled for release in 2015. Australian audiences will now get a chance to witness some of this new material at six exclusive shows starting on October 31 and continuing throughout November. Before they return home they’ll be hitting CMJ festival in New York and Housecore Horrorfest in Austin, Texas, sharing the stage with Danzig/Samhain, Gwar and Napalm Death. By the time this year’s done King Parrot will have completed three Australian tours and four North American tours as they are headed straight back to the US in December to take part in the “Punk Rock But Kinda Not Tour” alongside Down, Orange Goblin and B’last. They’ll be showcasing their brutal new material from their forthcoming album in what will be their only shows in Australia before they release it. And you can catch them at Pelly Bar, Frankston on Friday October 31, Your Break in Warrnambool on Saturday November 1 with Severity and Wounded Pig, and Plastic in Melbourne on Monday November 3 with Scar The Surface and Oedipus Rex. These are all 18+ shows.
STONE SOUR RECORDING COVERS ALBUM
Stone Sour is currently holed up in a studio in Burbank, California studio to begin recording a covers album planned for release early in 2015. They haven’t released any further details yet but on their recent US tour they played a different cover song each night, including Metallica’s Creeping Death, Black Sabbath’s Children of the Grave, KISS’s Love Gun, Judas Priest’s Heading Out to the Highway and Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes. It’ll be the first Stone Sour album not to include guitarist Jim Root, who was fired from the group last year but still works with vocalist Corey Taylor in a band called Slipknot who you may have heard of.
YNGWIE MALMSTEEN RETURNS!
The mighty neoclassical guitar overlord Yngwie J Malmsteen is heading back to Australia for his first tour in almost ten years (although he was here last year for a guitar masterclass tour). “It’s gonna be high excitement, high energy,” Yngwie told me last week. “A perfect example is the concert DVD I just put out. That was from Orlando, Florida, and they’re two days apart. No two shows are going to be the same. If you see two shows, they’re not going to be the same. But obviously, having said that, I’m going to play the songs that you guys would expect plus some other stuff too. It’ll be what you expect but with some different nuances.” He’ll be at The Forum on February 7.
DEVIN TOWNSEND – WIN A COPY OF Z2
Have you got your ticket for Devin Townsend’s masterclass yet? He’ll be discussing guitar, production and vocal stuff, and organisers Thump Music have ten copies of Devin’s new record Z2 up for grabs for those who pre-purchase a masterclass ticket. He’ll be at St Kilda Town Hall on October 22: get there at 7pm for a 7:30pm start. And Devin has also just launched ziltoid.com which sets everything up for the mayhem that will be unleashed when Z2 is released on October 31 via Century Media/TeamTrick. Wait till ya hear this album, man. It’s two discs: Sky Blue (a new Devin Townsend Project album) and Dark Matters (the sequel to Ziltoid The Omniscient). Each disc is amazing but when you take the two of them together and just bask in the frigging immensity of the whole thing, well… ah you’ll see.
