IT’S A CHRIS PENNIE KINDA WEEK, I GUESS
Yesterday I interviewed Greg Puciato, Liam Wilson, and Billy Rymer from The Dillinger Escape Plan (transcript coming soon); because Rymer is the band’s new drummer and this is his first album with DEP, it should go without saying that a portion of the conversation was devoted to how he joined the band, his experience as “the new guy,” and his predecessors – namely Gil Sharone and, of course, Chris Pennie. Unless you live under a Dino Cazares, you already know that Pennie is now the drummer for Coheed and Cambria; since I’m a wwwwaaaaayyyyy bigger fan of DEP than I am of C&C, I don’t spend much time thinking about Pennie these days. Which isn’t to take away from his incredible talent; I’m just saying, it’s unusual for me to have Pennie on the brain at this particular moment in time.
But now here we are, I was just thinking about him yesterday, and he’s already back in the headlines! It turns out that Pennie is in the whole other band I didn’t even know about, Return to Earth, who released an album called Captains of Industry in 2007; now they’ve signed with Metal Blade, who will release their sophomore effort, Automata, sometime this summer.
Of course, there are other dudes in this band besides Pennie, but I’ve never heard of them and, let’s be real, Pennie is gonna be the reason 99% of anybody pays attention to this band – at least for now. Even Metal Blade head honcho Brian Slagel’s statement regarding the signing of the band is a brazen admittance of this fact: “I have been a big fan of Chris Pennie for a long time and we all at Metal Blade are very excited to work with Chris and the rest of Return To Earth.” In other words, Pennie is this band’s Cristina Scabbia. Except, like, way hotter.
ANYWAY, the stuff on Return to Earth’s MySpace page is actually pretty interesting; it moves from some very poppy hard rock in the vein of Faith No More, Nine Inch Nails, or System of a Down to a way punkier/mathier style in a heart beat. I’ll definitely be curious to hear Automata when its released. If nothing else, we know it will have amazing drumming!
-AR
