MetalSucks

Watching Peter Wichers play with Soilwork last month at New York’s Highline Ballroom was like witnessing a homecoming of sorts. Sure, it wasn’t the very first show back for Wichers, a founding member and key songwriter who recently returned to the group after a four-year hiatus, who had already been playing with the band for weeks on tour with Darkane, Warbringer and Swallow the Sun. Still, it just felt so right. Without Wichers, Soilwork was like a lumbering beast doing its best Soilwork impersonation… but it wasn’t quite Soilwork. Sworn to a Great Divide was a decent album, but “decent” was exactly as far as it went. Before the show I caught up with Wichers to ask him about the circumstances leading to his return to the band, balancing life on the road and life with a family, what it’s like to play someone else’s material in your band, his production work on the Nuclear Blast Allstars project and Warrel Dane solo record, and what the future holds for Soilwork. Our chat, after the fold.

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What was already shaping up to be one of the most exciting tours of early 2009 just got even better. The North American jaunt, headlined by Soilwork with support from Darkane and Swallow the Sun, just added North Carolina’s princes of gloomy-death-doom Daylight Dies (read Chris Roddy’s glowing review of Lost to the Living) in place of Warbringer, who were forced to drop off due to recording obligations. It’s not that we don’t like Warbringer — in fact, they’re one of our collective favorite bands of the current re-thrash movement — it’s just that… dude, Daylight fuckin’ Dies!! And Swallow the Sun! On the same bill! Headlined (finally!) by a newly re-Peter Wichers’ed Soilwork!! Dude.

Head exploding. For serious. Full list of tour dates after the jump.

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According to a recent post on SMNnews.com, ex-Darkest Hour guitarist Kris Norris will now be pursuing a career in producing in addition to putting out his recently completed solo album. While we certainly wish him all the best, the realist in me is privy to think that Norris’ career arc as a producer will closely follow that of Peter Wichers’, who left Soilwork in ‘05 in favor of the producer’s chair only to rejoin Soilwork last month. Not that it can’t be done — Fear Factory’s Christian Olde Wolbers is someone who comes to mind as an example of a metal musician who’s made the successful switch — it’s just that the paycheck ain’t as reliable as the perpetual cycle of touring, merch and album advances (then again, Darkest Hour are on Victory Records, so all bets are off in the advances department). And it certainly isn’t as much fun!

The idealist in me, however, really hopes Norris succeeds, not just because of the warmth in our collective hearts but because ex-At All Cost guitarist and friend of MetalSucks Michael Carrigan (ex-Throeald) has been tapped as Norris’ replacement in DH, and that motherfucker is a sick guitarist deserving of his call up to the big leagues.

-VN

The chill of fall is in the air but the gossip mill never cools off at the MetalSucks Mansion. This week’s notables and quotables included:

• Original guitarist Peter Wichers returned to Soilwork and ex-At All Cost guitarist Mike Carrigan replaced Kris Norris in Darkest Hour; we rejoiced that great Soilwork music will once again be made and that Mike’s got a job. But the good was tempered by the bad as Christian Alvestam left Scar Symmetry and Spineshank reunited. There is no justice.
• Winds of Plague’s Kristen Randall showed the world her bewbs!
• We reviewed solid new albums by Into Eternity, Enslaved and All Shall Perish, and waxed ecstatic about Burst, Vince’s new proverbial wet dream.
• New videos from The Human Abstract and Amon Amarth are unbelievably epic.
• A scandal erupted involving the audio quality of Death Magnetic, alternate Guitar Hero mixes, and the now infamous “Better, Shorter, Cut” abridged edition.
• Vince & Axl [almost] reveal their true identities.

See ya next week.

How many of you snoozed on Praises to the War Machine, the excellent solo CD released this past Spring by Nevermore crooner Warrel Dane? The Peter Wichers (ex-Soilwork)-produced effort, while not necessarily living up to the best of Nevermore, was a damn fine disc. As perhaps the album’s slowest number, “Brother” wouldn’t have been my choice for a video to represent the whole album — but it does capture the ethos of the disc pretty well while indulging in some of the finest metal cliches known to man (Warrel sitting in a leather arm chair surrounded by candles in a dark room = unequivocally METAL). Interestingly (and Dane deserves major props for this), the movie footage cut into this video is real stuff from his childhood, relating to the [depressing] subject matter of the song.

-VN

October, 2007 will go down as an interesting month for Gothenburg metal; we’ve effectively seen the release of two Soilwork albums. One, which bears the Soilwork namesake, is the first album written and recorded by the band without ex-guitarist and primary songwriter Peter Wichers. The second is essentially a Peter Wichers solo album released under the Nuclear Blast All Stars moniker — Wichers wrote, produced and played guitar and had a host of other musicians contribute their duties, including an A-list roster of singers, one for each song. Anders Friden (In Flames), Peter Tagtgren (Hypocrisy), John Bush (Anthrax), and Bjorn “Speed” Strid (Soilwork) all contribute vocals. Out of the Dark ends up being a solid listen, if not so much a proper album as a collection of songs. Nuclear Assault has drawn on their rich history to assemble a disc that’s a much more interesting — at least to these ears — version of the Roadrunner United compilation put out a couple of years back.

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