Ever since Jim Malone announced that Arsis would be touring without him — the Dave Mustaine of Megadeth, the Trent Reznor of NIN, etc — we’ve been scratching our heads. Would it be weird? Would it be good? Would it still even be Arsis? If you were to replace all the boards of a ship one at time, would it still be the same ship? If not, at what exact point does it cease to be the same ship?

I saw Arsis Without Arsis open for Firewind in NYC a couple weeks ago, and although the band was ridiculously tight and sounded fantastic it was definitely really fucking weird to watch. I’m sure a few kids there had no idea anything was amiss — perhaps those kids will go on to become huge Arsis fans — but to me it was a strange sight. On a night where Arsis played without Arsis, Firewind were great but played in a venue way too big for them, and the crowd seemed disinterested in Nightrage, White Wizzard — whoever the fuck is in the band this week — were actually the most normal / best thing about the entire night. How crazy is that?

Anyway, here’s Arsis Without Arsis performing a new song called “Sense the Shadows” in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month. Like I said before, really tight, sounds great… just weird to look at.

-VN

Thanks: Fuzzy Dunlop

Firewind’s headlining tour of North America with Arsis, White Wizzard, and Nightrage begins in just a couple of weeks, and that’s a great line-up and I’m excited to go…

…only we just got a press release saying that Jim Malone won’t be touring with Arsis. Here’s a statement from the man himself:

“Due to professional and personal commitments I am unable to tour with Arsis at this time. For the upcoming tour with Firewind, rather than drop off the tour entirely, we’ve decided to hire live musicians, some of whom have long been associated with my band.  I have given Nick [Cordle, guitarist] and Noah [Martin, bassist] my blessing and am certain the lineup will be great. My sincerest apologies to anyone who is annoyed or disappointed by my absence. Please go and support Arsis and check out some of our new songs, which they will be playing every night!”

With all due respect to the other members of Arsis, that idea seems, well, totally bizarre to me — like, if Megadeth were to announce a tour without Dave Mustaine bizarre. Jim Malone isn’t just the key creative element in Arsis — he’s been the only constant in the band since its inception. In short, Jim Malone IS Arsis. And we don’t even know who these “live musicians” are! Is it someone awesome? Just some random dudes standing on stage? WHAT THE CRAP IS HAPPENING HERE?!?!

I’ll be kinda curious to see this Malone-free Arsis, but, mostly, I’m pretty bummed out by this news.

You can get tour dates here. Below, watch a video of Cordle discussing the tour, which, as kind of a way to appease us fans I s’pose, includes pre-production demos of some new material… which, in all fairness, sounds pretty frickin’ sweet.

-AR

(I have no idea what the current lineup of Arsis looks like, so here’s a picture of Jim Malone)

Arsis are nothing if not consistent; since 2004′s debut A Celebration of Guilt they’ve released an album once every two years, dotted by the occasional EP. But if the new demo for “Since the Shadows” posted on their Facebook page is any indication, they may actually beat their self-prescribed schedule. Here’s the message the band posted along with the track:

We are indeed writing a new ARSIS album and we want to offer everybody a glimpse into the music that we’ve been building for the last few months. This is a demo of a new one called ‘Since the Shadows’ and it’s from the first batch of songs for the album. It’s still early but a musical direction has emerged from the work so far and we think it speaks for itself without any grand pronouncements, so enjoy it and we will see you on the FIREWIND tour this fall!

Songs like “Since the Shadows” give us good reason to be optimistic. It’s instantly recognizable as Arsis; there’s something about the chord voicings and guitar melodies Jim Malone writes that are instantly recognizable and un-mistakingly distinguishable as being Arsis. This song has tons of Arsis-ness, if you will. There’s a word for that, ____-ness in the general sense, the qualities that make any individual thing unique… but I can’t for the life of me remember it. Any English majors out there?

-VN

Well, you can’t say that Jim Malone doesn’t have a sense of humor.

After admitting earlier this year that he’s struggled with anorexia, Malone and his band, Arsis, have announced the title of their new album to be Starve for the Devil.

Click to read more…

When Arsis main man Jim Malone released a statement last month explaining the band’s recent tour cancellations, I wrote that “you don’t have to do much reading between the lines to see what happened here.” That’s because Malone’s assertion that “there is no healthy way lose 100 pounds in four months, as I did late last year,” seemed like a pretty clear way of telling his fans that he had an eating disorder (and NOT, as some fans have hypothesized, a substance abuse problem).

Well, MetalSucks Maniac/fellow writer Carlos Ramirez as now confirmed as much in an interview he conducted for Noise Creep. Here’s an excerpt:

Click to read more…

When The Black Dahlia Murder announced earlier this week that former Arsis guitarist Ryan Knight had been tapped to fill the role vacated by John Kempainen just three weeks ago, a simmering side-story went mostly ignored: apparently at some point Ryan Knight decided to leave Arsis. WTF? Totally missed that announcement, unless the Black Dahlia announcement was meant to kill two birds with one stone.

The news officially elevates Arsis to new levels of the “ex-members of” department, rivaling only L.A. Guns and Guns N’ Roses in that vaunted arena; a game of “six degrees of Arsis” would make for some mighty fine death metal campfire chatter. The departure of Knight also marks the departure of Arsis’ 597th member, so we figured we’d reach Ryan via phone* to comment on the situation**:

Click to read more…

The times they are a-changin’. Maybe I was just totally out of the loop as a young snot growing up in NYC, but the idea of an awesome guitar player from an awesome metal band giving guitar lessons in between tours was unheard of; if I could have studied with Marty Friedman or Dan Spitz (I’m talking pre-Christian clockmaker “Dime stole my solos” Dan Spitz, when I still thought he was cool), I would have; alas, my guitar teacher was a dorky guy named Steve who became the punchline to the joke “What do you call a musician without a girlfriend?” (Answer: “Homeless.”)

ANYWAY, this is a very long way of letting you know that Arsis mastermind Jim Malone is giving guitar lessons in the NY area. In case you’ve had your head up your ass the past few years, Malone can SHRED like a motherfucker, AND he’s a mind-blowingly good writer of melodic technical death metal, AND he can do awesome death metal vocals. I’m saying you could learn a lot from the dude.

I have no idea what Malone’s rates are, but you can hit him up jamesarsis [at] hotmail.com. I met Malone once for all of two seconds, but his handshake said to me “I am a patient mentor who will not make fun of you for being retardedly bad at the guitar even though I myself am something of a god.”

It’s enough to make me wanna take guitar lessons again.

-AR

…but luckily the band is okay. In a statement, front man Jim Malone tells fans:

“Everyone’s fine. Hard to believe this happened during the day, but the road is solid ice. The trailer flipped, broke loose of the hitch, and is now stuck in a snow bank. Better the trailer and not us. We’re waiting to get it towed, since it’s unusable. It’s lodged in ice and we can’t get to our gear, but we’re sure it’s all smashed. We need to assess the situation and see how much of our gear still works before we can say anything about finishing out the rest of the tour. We can’t afford to buy a new trailer at this point. Again, we apologize to our fans. We’ll have an update soon.”

“We’re going to try to find a room up the highway in the next small town. Hopefully we won’t have to fight off inbred zombie cannibals… like we need that right now. We are all super pissed that this has happened just as we were getting back on this tour. This sucks a lot of dinosaur dick – and that’s a lot of meat!”

Mostly we’re glad that the band is okay, ’cause obviously this could have ended a lot worse. We hope they can get back up and running and out on the road ASAP.

In the meantime, you can check out our interview with Noah Martin here.

-AR