Architects (UK) are one of those bands who have kind of snuck beneath my radar over the years; I’ve been kind of aware of them and even listened on a couple of occasions but nothing’s ever stuck with me, in small part perhaps due to the whole Architects name confusion thing. So when Heavy Blog is Heavy posted that Architects (UK)’s new album The Here and Now is streaming on full on their MySpace page I figured I owed it myself to check them out. NOTA BENE: the first song in the player is not from the new album.

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So Architects (UK) have a new video, for their song “Day In Day Out.” I don’t really have anything to say about the visuals. If the director’s goal was to prove that he can shoot a commercial for Levi’s, well, mission accomplished.

I do wanna talk about the music, though. And everything I wanna say about the music can be summed up in this e-mail exchange we had with reader Keith Brown this past October:

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Here we had this entire week devoted to hair metal, and I feel like we only scratched the surface. Let’s do this again real soon, okay?

Here’s some of the fun we had this week, be it hair-metal related or not:

• Cynic’s Paul Masvidal taught us to be mind-less, Antagonist’s Carlos Garcia taught us about the song “Sasha Grey,” and Trap Them’s Ryan McKenney taught us more about corporate-sponsored live shows.
• Anso and Allyson from Bring Back Glam! counted down the Ten Best Must-Have Glam Metal Albums.
• We counted down the Top Ten Bands Most Often Miscategorized as Hair Metal.
• Vince spoke with Serj Tankian, Gary spoke with Frankie from Emmure, and Sergeant D. spoke with Samantha Maloney from Brother Clyde/Shift/Hole/Motley Crue/every band ever.
• We debuted a new track by The Binary Code!
• Leyla Ford counted down the ten worst and best hair metal band names.
• Sammy checked out the new release by Eibon.
• Dave Mustein checked out The Cool Tour.
• Someday, this little girl is going to make Sergeant D. very, very unhappy.
• I can’t tell the difference between all the members of Mushroomhead, can you?

I wanna especially thank Allyson from Bring Back Glam! for all her help this week — we love you, Allyson! Come back anytime.

Monday we return, but we’ll have a little less Aqua Net in our hair, a little less eyeliner on our lids, and a lot less skip in our step. See ya then.

-AR

I was pretty skeptical when I first saw the Cool Tour lineup. Actually, I was more than skeptical: I was pretty much positive that I wasn’t going to attend. It seemed to break down as 50% Christian screamo, 25% hardcore, and 25% good bands, which meant that there would be a lot of obnoxious hardcore, scene, and straightedge kids. But when the opportunity arose to go to the tour, I just decided to do it despite the high scene-kid-to-normal-metalhead ratio, because I had never seen either BTBAM or As I Lay Dying live.

As it turned out, I made the right decision. Although I did skip the first four bands (War of Ages, Cancer Bats, Architects, and The Acacia Strain) because I’m not a fan of any of them besides Architects, I hear that all of them save for War of Ages put on a pretty solid showing. The Acacia Strain apparently managed to work the crowd into more of a frenzy than any other band, probably because it was a hometown show for them.

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When we announced the Summer Slaughter 2010 line-up last week, Vince wrote the following:

“Summer Slaughter is by far the best metal tour of Summer 2010. Rockstar Mayhem is lame, Ozzsharonfest is surely gonna be lame, and ‘The Cool Tour’ is, uh, not cool at all save a couple of bands.”

At least one reader asked, “What the heck is the Cool Tour?” While rumors of the package trek have been floating around the net for weeks, it was only officially announced at midnight: The Cool Tour seems to be the next of what could reasonably be called “The Ozzfest Second Stage Tours” – basically mid-sized package tours that take the best part of Ozzfest (the second stage – duh) and do away with the rest. And while any tour with that many bands on it is bound to have at least a few you don’t like (this year’s Summer Slaughter being a pretty remarkable exception to that rule), I have to agree with Vince: The Cool Tour does not really seem all that cool.

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UK metal band and recent Century Media signees Architects might want to consider contacting the Guinness Book of World Records. The band recently played a show at which the band members jumped into the audience to get directly involved in quite possibly the single most impressive “wall of death” in the history of metal. See for yourself.

-VN

[via SMNnews.com]