So let's discuss the facts that have been released for now. The album is looking to be released [in North America] on April 8th, 2013 via Vertigo/Republic Records/Universal Music, which makes sense considering they are going on a US/Canada tour with Canadian rockers Danko Jones (which kicks off on March 6th in Dallas, Texas). Perfect timing to get some new tunes into the set list and get the vibe of the crowd. But let's be honest here... who has ever heard a bad song by Volbeat? You either like 'em or hate 'em but their fans love each of their tunes. They are hard as f**k, short and sweet, straight to the point and always carry a heavy dosage of riffs and double kicks. I'd like to see a single person going to a Volbeat show and not dance just a little bit on the inside by the end of the show. haha
So moving on, Jacob Hansen will be handling the master production duties of the album. Hansen has worked in the past with artists such as Cradle Of Filth, The Damned Things, Bleeding Through (R.I.P.) and Anthrax, among others. Hansen has also worked on the previous four albums for Volbeat.
The big news of this album so far has been the involvement of Rob Caggiano. For those unaware, Caggiano surprised the music world on January 4th with his departure from long time band Anthrax to focus on production work and other endeavours. It seems this will be his first major assistance since that announcement. Apparently since Caggiano has had such a great time working with Volbeat, he has graciously accepted the full time guitarist spot! Maybe this will be the creative outlet that he was looking for in the first place.
"We're back in the studio, this time breaking some of our old habits and this sometimes means leaving our comfort zone. We are recording in a new environment, producing with a new setup, breaking new sonic ground and it's exciting! Together with our longtime collaborator Jacob Hansen, we also have the honor of having producer Rob Caggiano on board in the producer's seat. Expect lots of surprises and some of our most rocking heavy songs to date. We feel more than ever that we are taking the VOLBEAT sound to another level without changing what we're all about. Can't wait for it to get out there!" -Michael Poulsen
As for some guest appearances on the album, the track 'Room 24' features a guest appearance from King Diamond (the legendary front man of Danish metal pioneers MERCYFUL FATE).
"I’m a huge fan of Mercyful Fate and King Diamond. Having King on the record is a huge privilege. Normally, it’s not something he does. He wrote his own lines, and it is half my lyrics and half his. It’s a weird, scary story, and he’s the perfect person for it.”
Other guest appearances include Anders Pedersen on slide guitar, Rod Sinclair on banjo and Jakob Øelund on double bass.
Album artwork for the new LP is quite in standing with their previous album covers.
Now the part that made my job easy today. Volbeat do a track by track guide into the album and what each song means to them and/or what you can expect to hear. Check it out below:
1. Let’s Shake Some Dust
“We weren’t sure if wanted to have an intro to the album originally, and this came out of nowhere. We’d asked Paul Lamb, who is a great blues harp player if he’d do something with us, and we were waiting for him to show up in the studio. We were checking some of his stuff out on YouTube, and I got so inspired that I said, ‘We should write an intro for the song Dead But Rising and let him play harp on that.’ We had 20 minutes to do it, so we sat in the kitchen in the studio with two acoustic guitars, jamming and switching ideas back and forth. Twenty minutes later Paul turned up and we said, ‘We just wrote an intro you have to play it on.’ It sounded huge, so we decided to use it as an intro for the whole record.”
2. Pearl Hart
“She’s a real character who was born in the 18th century. She got a telegram saying that her mother was dying, and that she had no money to buy medicine. So Lady Pearl, together with her husband, dresses in men’s clothes, jumps on a horses and stop a stagecoach. There’s an Englishman, an American and a Japanese guy on the stagecoach, and Pearl takes their money – but she leaves them one dollar each so they can at least buy something to eat. The money she gets should get medicine for her money, but Pearl and her husband get caught by the local sheriff and she ends up in jail. It’s a beautiful story. Of course, it’s wrong to rob a stagecoach, but she’s desperate and the money is for her mother. Somehow, you can see that it’s not all wrong.”
3. The Nameless One
“This is a fictitious story about a young couple who are flirting with spiritual cards and ouija boards to get in contact with spirits or demons or something from another dimensions. Somehow they make contact with some ghouls through some tombstones from 18th, and they end up selling their souls to The Nameless One. Suddenly they wake up in the 1800s, inside a casket, and an outlaw ghoul is crashing their casket with his cane. He pulls the couple up and says, ‘You’re on your way to The Nameless One, you have a deal…’, and he takes them along with his riders. On the next album you’ll find out who The Nameless One is.”
4. Dead But Rising
“The opening riff is very old school metal – it could be a Slayer riff. The lyrics are about the first time I was travelling through the US, to visit Graceland and Elvis’s grave, and Tupelo, Mississippi, which was Elvis’ birthplace. My father had passed, and he was a huge Elvis fan. He had always wanted to visit Graceland with my mother, but had unfortunately never made it. I had rented a car and was driving towards Tupelo when the navigation just went out. This was the first time I had driven in the US, so I wasn’t comfortable. Then I noticed an eagle that had been following the car for a while. I said, ‘What is it with that eagle? Is my father trying to tell me something?’ I got emotional about it and I decided to follow the eagle. It went one way then the other, and the next thing I knew I was in Tupelo, Mississippi, and the eagle just took off. That was some strong shit. And that’s what Dead But Rising is all about – it’s about me, today, trying to reach out for that eagle.”
5. Cape of Our Hero
“Every young kid wants to be a hero – whether it’s a cowboy, an outlaw, a policeman or a superhero. Superman or Spiderman or whoever. We all had those action figures we’d play with. “This song is about a little kid who loses his dad. He played with action figures with his dad, and he looked up to his dad as a hero. When he loses his dad, he starts losing his belief in his superheroes too. He’s trying to figure out how to get in contact with his superheroes – he’s thinking if angels exist, maybe he could fly away with them, and they could show him where those superheroes are – or at least where his dad is out there.”
6. Room 24
“I’m a huge fan of King Diamond, so having him on this track is a huge privilege– it’s not normally something he does. It’s based on something that happened to me when we touring the US. I woke up in the middle of the night in a hotel room and I couldn’t move – I felt paralysed. I thought I was going to have a heart attack – it felt like something was sitting on my chest, pushing me down on the bed. I felt that was something in the room. I told King Diamond and he said, ‘Have you heard of sleep paralysis?’ So I looked into it, and every person who has had it has the same story – they feel that some kind of hag is sitting on top of them, some dark force. I asked King if there was any way he could tie that Dark Force to my experience. So he did his thing, and it worked out great. And of course the room it all happened in was Room 24…”
7. The Hangman's Bodycount
“A lot of people had heard those ghost stories about the Hangman from the OldW est, and I wanted to do my own. The blind Hangman with a raven on his shoulders as his eyes is out there, walking through the valley, judging who is good and who is bad. You’d never know he was there – you could only hear his boots. He picks out the sinners, and they’re told while they’re in bed that that raven will come and knock on the door, and the should follow the raven to the Hangman…”
8. My Body
“This is a cover of a song by a band called Young The Giant. When we were in the US, we were driving around in a taxi and this song came on the radio. I was, like,‘Who is that? That’s an amazing song?’ My tour manager found out that it was Young The Giant, so I checked them out on YouTube, and I thought, ‘Why haven’t I heard of this band?’ I could hear Volbeat playing this song. I thought it would bean interesting song to do, so I let’s put our own twist on it. I hope these guys take it as a compliment when they hear it.”
9. Lola Montez
“I’m very inspired by Mike Ness of Social Distortion and Bruce Springsteen, though Lola Montez is definitely not their kind of woman. She’s another real character – she was always on the run, working for herself to earn money. She worked in a small circus, where she made up her own show, where she would dance with spiders. She’d show her legs… and a little bit more, which was outrageous back then. Men were totally paralysed by her, they’d throw gold in front of her feet when she was dancing, and she’d lift up her skirt so they could see more, and there’d be more gold. She was a dangerous woman…”
10. Black Bart
“We call it our “country Motörhead” song. Black Bart is a true character, an outlaw in the 1800s who robbed Wells Fargo coaches. He’d ask the driver to throw down the Wells Fargo box, and he spoke like a gentleman: “Please, sir, throw down your box.’ The women in the coach would throw their pearls at his feet, but he always said, ‘I don’t want your pearls and your money, ladies, please take them back.’ He wore a sack over his head so no one knew who he was, and he always left poems for the stagecoach driver. He was an outlaw gentleman.”
11. The Lonesome Rider
“This is a country-rockabilly song. When we started rehearsing it, I thought that that it needs something else – a female voice. I had ideas for the lyric where it would have been cool to have a female singer. So I emailed Sarah Blackwood, who is a great Canadian rockabilly singer. I was a fan of her old band, The Creepshow, and her current band Walk Off The Earth are great too. The lyric is about a cowboy who goes to war, and when he finally comes home, he cannot find his wife. The house is empty. What he doesn’t know is that he’s dead – he thinks he’s survived but he’s dead. And the thing is, his wife has passed while he was at war too. So she makes a deal with The Reaper to find her husband and bring him over to the other side…”
12. The Sinner Is You
“This has a little bit of a modern country feeling. It has a mood that we’ve never touched in Volbeat before. Sometimes we don’t understand why people die around us – it doesn’t make sense. I’m singing about a spiritual world, where there is some kind of reaper who punishes people for not treating themselves and the people around them well by taking a random soul. We’re left here, not knowing why that person has died. The reaper is saying, ‘I’ll take a random soul, and you are the sinner without knowing.”
13. Doc Holliday
“I don’t think I need to say too much about Doc Holliday – everybody should know who he is, and his relationship with Wyatt Earp. This is one of the first songs we flirted around with live, to give people a snippet of what they could expect. It’s a metal song, but then it suddenly come to the chorus and there’s banjos! People are, like, ‘Wow, can you do that?’ Of course you can do that!”
14. Our Loved Ones
“We have slow songs, but this is the first time we have done something that’s close to a ballad. It’s about a feeling that we all know, when we feel vulnerable and we want to open up to certain people but we’re afraid to because we’re afraid of losing some of ourselves, like, what if the person you’re giving the information to is not ready to hear stuff like that. It’s about giving and receiving, and how to deal with that in good and bad ways.”
15. Ecotone (*bonus track*)
“The first time I heard the word ‘ecotone’, I was, like, ‘Wow, that’s a cool word.’ It means the line that is between two things – it could be the line between water and solid ground, between wilderness and civilization. A flower might grow here but it might not over there – that’s an ecotone. And I thought, ‘What if the ecotone was a person?’ Sometimes you don’t think you belong anywhere, you think you’re somewhere in the middle. You feel alienated somehow. It’s something that lives inside every one of us.”
***
"I know everyone says this, but this IS the best album VOLBEAT has recorded — at least until the next one! I set myself a number of goals for this record, and all of them have been achieved, so I couldn't be happier, and having Rob on board has really worked out well.
"You know, I was really impressed with the sound of the new ANTHRAX album, which he worked on, so we discussed maybe working together in the studio on a couple of songs, but it's now gone way further than that! Rob really knows what he's doing…
"One of the things I'm most happy about this time is the contrast in the material, the range of the music; on the one side, you have the western motifs, the rockabilly/country songs, and the real emotional melodies, and on the other, some of the heaviest — actually, THE heaviest — songs we have ever recorded. There was a record company guy in the studio the other day, and he was absolutely blown away by the ultra-heavy stuff. He said he wasn't even sure he was listening to VOLBEAT!" -Michael Poulsen
More information as it comes in folks. Stay tuned!
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