Survive has made two announcements today, one in which they announced that they have found two new members, and the other about a benefit gig they will play on short notice. Since January Survive has been undergoing some changes regarding the line-up, and today they announced their new drummer and guitarist. Who they are is not yet known, but they plan to release that info shortly.

They also said they will participate on the 'Juu Ongaku Sai; Benefit for OUR JAPAN' concert that will be held on April 9 at Club Citta' in Kawasaki. The concert will be held to benefit the Northeast Kanto area that was struck by the earthquake. In total about 30 bands will appear.

http://www.rebel-survive.com/

http://www.juongakusai.com/pc/

Black metal act Fatal Desolation from Sendai will be releasing their first full-length studio album, entitled "Cold, Starless, Moonless" on April 9, 2011 through Zero Dimensional.

Next to the regular edition, the limited edition (66 copies), which comes in dvd case, contains their album plus their third demo entitled "Epicedium (For My Autums)".

Visit their official MySpace.
And the website from Zero Dimensional.

Reborn thrashers Shellshock (with the addition of guitarist Saeki Norikazu) who reunited in 2009 in the midst of a reunion wave, are working on new material at the moment. Since their live show at Club Heavy Sick in Hatagaya, Shibuya on January 29, they are taking some time to record new songs: "Recording is going well, however there will be no lives for a while" says Akira, Shellshock's guitarist and vocalist, adding "who would have thought five years ago that Shellshock could be releasing a new album?"

One of the more disturbing events that took place five years ago was the murder of Akira's brother, Fumio, who was the guitarist and vocalist of nearly identical sounding thrash-band Cassandra. The reunion of Shellshock saw them cooperating with Revontulet records to release 'Abstract Discord', a bundling of their second, third and fourth (and also final) release on October 24, 2009. This was at a time when Shellshock was still pursuing a japcore sound like that of Noise Distraction and having Masami Chiba in the band, then freshly from Gigatic Khmer, helped achieve that on only a handful of tracks however.

What the new sound will be remains unknown for now but if Survive's cover of the classic Shellshock song 'Endless War' is any indication of what it could be, then I wholeheartedly accept it!

http://twitter.com/akillait

I have been absurdly busy with work lately so I had to leave it up to my metal mates to cover the news (remember that you can submit your own news stories, scoops and editorials to us any time!). Last week online shop Joshin reported that Vow Wow will once again be re-releasing their six albums. They will be re-remastered and recorded onto a blu-spec disc;

Blu-spec CD describes an Audio CD manufactured by a proprietary process introduced by Sony in late 2008. Its name derives from the similar manufacturing process to that used to create Blu-ray Discs. Instead of a traditional infra-red laser, a blue laser is used for recording the pits on the CD master that is needed for disc replication. The blue laser creates more precise pits, causing less distortion in the optical read-out process. A Blu-spec CD can be played on all CD players and does not require a blue laser to be read.

Opinions on wether the average Joe can identify the change of quality between a regular CD and a Blu-Spec CD are divided:

"Masaki Sato, lead engineer and designer of the brand’s high-end AV receiver, adds ‘while this is not a new format it does mean we can make CDs better than they have ever been made before - and this is really significant. Will audiophiles hear a difference? Possibly...’What has far more impact on the sound performance of a compact disc, according to Sato, is not the refinements in disc mastering process, but the colour of the dye used for the on-body label printing. ‘We have found that using a green colour dye makes a big difference to the audio quality of the music, as it mitigates the reflectivity of the laser on the disc.’ ‘I think the best possible combination would be Blu-spec CD disc mastering combined with this green label.’"

The marketing side insists with simple statements that the Blu-spec CD will be an improvement in audio quality. The consumer only sees the improvement of longevity and less read errors and would much rather stick with SACD:

"But it will make no difference to the sound as heard by the punter, no matter how good their equipment is. A CD has 16 bits, and samples at 44.1khz, thus giving a theoretical dynamic range of 96dB & 0-20kHz frequency range. Servo jitter is caused by keeping the laser following the pits as the disk spins, its not the sharpness of the edge that causes most of this jitter, but the eccentricity of the spiral of pits, the blue laser will not improve this. Hybrid SACDs will play on any normal CD player, and it is possible to have a stereo CD mix, a stereo SACD mix and an SACD surround mix, all on the one disk. Thus providing a single inventory, one disk that plays on all players. Sony should put their efforts in promoting SACD."

Vow Wow already released these six albums (Beat Of Metal Motion, Cyclone, III, V, VIBe, Mountain Top) in 2006 with Toshiba EMI, using the regular CD format. On January 12, 2011 Bow Wow re-released a portion of their post-70's albums including Hard Dog, X-Bomber (with E-Project), Telephone and Glorious Road, also on regular compact discs. The discography of Bow Wow and Vow Wow is now divided on all kinds of media with the addition of these Blu-Spec CD' releases and I do not understand why they did not choose for Blu-Spec when they redid the Bow Wow albums since both batches are released by BounDEE, inc. I wonder how many more re-releases we will see in the future.

The albums will be released on April 20th by BounDEE. If I may suggest an alternative purchase on this day, then please follow this link (DiskUnion will have a special package including the album, a logo cap & bonus dvd-r with rehearsals, recording footage and a message from the members).

http://joshinweb.jp/top.html

Power metal act Aldious from Osaka will be releasing their brand new single "Mermaid" on April 6th. It comes with lyrics and sheet music for "Mermaid" with vocal and guitar tabs. You can order it through cdjapan.co.jp and it will be shipped on the mentioned release date.

Visit their official website right here.

On April 13th, 2011, melodic death/thrash metal band Arise in Stability from Yokohama/Kanagawa will be releasing their first full-length studio album, entitled "The Future That Amnesiac Draws". The band has released three demo's between 2006-2009 and this will be their debut on Last Fort Records. It features ten blistering metal tracks. A special made video trailer for the album was released on YouTube on February 10th. It showcases the video done for the song "Creation of Ruin". Arise in Stability takes their influences from bands like Cynic, King Crimson, Meshuggah and more, respectively.

Visit their official website right here.

I am not sure if this is appreciated, but I thought it would be a nice idea to go back in time to revisit some of the bands we know, but know nothing about.

Before Z-Sect was formed, there was another band called Paranoia. After going strong for a year, mainly in Osaka, with at least one national tour for the promotion of their album "Come From Behind", Paranoia started to fall apart due to staleness in performance and differences regarding the music and musicality. Because of this NOV decided to leave this band at the end of 1987 with his last gig being in January.

Ex-Aion vocalist, Hisayoshi Hiraga's predecessor, Satoru Sasano took over the microphone a fortnight later. Paranoia, now fronted by Satoru, would play on March 13th together with Aion in Hisayoshi's first gig with the band at Neyagawa Vintage Bar. But it would only take 4 months since the line-up change before the band announced it's dissolution. As of May 1988 the band was no more. The official reason was given as mentioned above.

At this time in April, NOV had formed Z-Sect with Hyde on guitar, Lunatic Luna on bass and Sheen on drums. The band was in various ways a decendant from Paranoia because they sought to play in the same aggressive style, sometimes refered to as being a 'hard-liner'. Almost immediately the band decided to record an EP. Even though their repertoire was small and consisted of unfinished tracks, they managed to find four songs they declared ready for recording. This is mostly courtesy of Hyde who was quick in writing most of the music for the band and took care of the melody and chords etc. Without wasting any time they recorded the songs in June, sent it off to Night Gallery records (Paranoia's label) and told them they could make the design for it as well.

Z-Sect wanted to create a unique sound that was above all "sharp". They didn't want to fit into a certain category like power metal or thrash metal and they tried to reflect this style in their lyrics which they called fantastically suspenseful and mysterious.

The EP was released as a picture vinyl in October 1988 and later rereleased on CD by UK Project. Simply named "N.O.V." it featured four tracks; Emergency, Back Wash, Desolate Night & From Beyond The Shadow (Inori). The reason for the pictured vinyl type was because of it's impact, so they thought. They felt at that time that Osaka needed bands such as Z-Sect. Both Aion and it's reincarnation Mein Kampf were well received by critics and coverage in magazines was sometimes better than some counterparts from Tokyo. The fate that awaited Paranoia and Z-Sect also seemed to have hit Aion and Mein Kampf, who were together for just over a year, until Aion reformed in mid-1986 to become one of the most succesful bands out of Osaka.  But it didn't really get off the ground for Z-Sect as they had hoped and the release of their EP did not leave them with a feeling of satisfaction.

In February of 1989 Z-Sect had retreated back to Osaka to play live houses there. They had hopes of organizing a national tour around April. But because they were unsatisfied with the bands sound they opted to wait to try and see if they could change or optimize their sound so that visitors could hear and see that Z-Sect was truly one of a kind. They were not at all bad at performing. They decided to take a chance at pulling off a tour after they had regained their confidence.

It's unclear to me at this moment how Z-Sect ended exactly, but it would not be strange to think they ended the same way Paranoia did. Since Hisayoshi left Aion in June and would reform Rosenfeld with Youichi Horizoe shortly after, NOV joined and has been with the band ever since.

 

Bang The Head Records (BxTxHx) will soon start releasing six titles from ex-Bronx and ex-Lance of Thrill guitarist Atsushi "Jet Finger" Yokozeki. On March 23rd his second, third and fourth solo album will be re-released, and on April 20th his fifth and sixth solo album will be rereleased together with 'Raid', a release from the Atsushi Yokozeki Project. The last featuring many different artists including Jake E. Lee, Carmine Appice, Frankie Banali and many more. Next to these six releases, with information on each album to be found on the labels website, they have recently also released Eizo Sakamoto's new best of solo album with various collected works (i.e: Showa Handsome Man, Nerima Machoman..) and new arrangements under the title of Handsome Universe.

With last years releases including Jurassic Jade's Gore, Sqid's Dead-Banging and Sacrifice's Crest Of Black let's hope they take it easy on the loudness while "re-mastering" Atsushi Yokozeki. Even though a band such as Sacrifice can take the harshness of modifying the waveform to sound re-mastered, I feel that this should not be done with instrumental albums. At least BxTxHx seems to take slightly better care of these manipulations to the masters than King Records does, who completely destroyed their re-release of Ground Zero (even though the bands playing style almost seems to compliment this).

Visit the official BxTxHx website right here.

(BxTxHx don't update their 'New Releases' page so it's easier to check their News page or search for them on sites such as Disk Union)