Hail to all ye brethren of the Hammer,

Shark here with a hearty welcome to manillaroad.net. From now on this is to be the springboard site for all information and contacts for Manilla Road releases, merchandise, bookings, interviews and all general information about happenings in the Manilla Road camp. It has been a long time coming but the Road finally has a site that is primarily dedicated to Manilla Road and run by myself and a chosen few from Midgard Sound Labs and the Manilla Road crew. All the products that you can purchase from this site or products that lead you to another site for purchase (such as Rockadrome, High Roller or Shadow Kingdom) are official Manilla Road products. This is the place you want to go if you are looking for the official news and products from the band. So welcome aboard and fair sailing on the good ship manillaroad.net.

I’m excited about doing this first Shark’s Mouth installment for our new site. So much has happened in the last couple of years that it would be a novella if I spelled it all out here. So I will try to be brief but informative.

We had helped start a site called Fountain Street Productions that was put together by many people with the idea of being sort of a facebook for bands and musicians. After we got the site up and running many of the founders of the company bailed for one reason or another and it became impossible for just the few of us left in Manilla Road to run the site the way it was intended to be. So we decided that we should abandon the Fountain Street site and just concentrate on a Manilla Road site. And with the blessing of Dennis at Rockadrome Records he turned over manillaroad.net to us so that we could put up our own Manilla Road site run by us. Thanks man.

As for the band it has been a couple of years of chaos that have been a real test for the Road. When we started working on the Playground of the Damned recordings Vince was playing Bass for us, and doing a great job at it also. Vince was one of the best live showmen that I have ever shared a stage with. And his bass playing is rather special also. Unfortunately after he had recorded only two songs with us in Midgard Sound Labs he developed a physical problem with his left hand that was making it impossible for him to play at the time. He was already dealing with an inner ear disorder that was making it difficult for him to travel and tour with us so the hand thing was like the straw that broke the camels back for Vince. He decided to bow out gracefully and not make the band wait for him to recover (which was an unknown amount of time). So all of a sudden we did not have a bass player to finish the album with. I was already starting to work on a side project with a friend of mine that plays keyboards and bass and has been a horror writer at times. His name is Ernest Cunningham Hellwell but he goes by E.C. Hellwell. So I asked him if he would be interested in doing the rest of the bass parts on the new Manilla Road album and he agreed to do so but did not want to tour with the Road because of other obligations including, but not limited to, our side project that we are calling Hellwell.  So E.C. Finished the album with us but we were still faced with needing a bass player for our live shows. So enters our savior Joshua Castillo. We did a show with him back in November in Wichita at a cool place called The Port of Wichita and it was a sellout crowd and Josh did a stellar first show performance with us. So he earned his spurs or his wings, whichever metaphor you prefer. So Josh will be playing live with us and most likely be on the next Manilla Road album as well. Unfortunately Cory is also having some personal issues in his life right now that are keeping him from being able to tour also so we are only doing one show this year and that is the Epic Night at the Hammer of Doom festival in Germany the last part of October 2011. Andreas Neuderth of the bands Viron and Roxxcalibur will be drumming for us at that show and we will be primarily doing older Manilla Road songs from Crystal Logic to Mystification and maybe a song from Courts of Chaos thrown in as well as a couple of songs off the new album. But most of the show will be from Crystal, Open the Gates, Deluge and Mystification. I think maybe we are doing a song from the Metal album also.

Playground of the Damned was an effort of love for the music. There was so much chaos going on in the life of the band that the music started taking on a darker aspect as we progressed through the recordings. The song Abattoir de la Mort is actually one of those dual topic style of lyrics. I suppose you could take the song as being about sacrificial rituals of the occult but in actuality it is a song about the blood and sweat and horrific yet majestic writings that have occurred in Midgard Sound Labs.  We have worked very hard to achieve a more balanced and better production sound on this album (as well has been our intention on every new project). I know that some think that we should have the huge production of some ginormous studio with hot shot engineers and producers. But I say to all of those people that yes it would sound different and more like all the other bands that are out there but tell me this – Why would I want to sound like all the other bands out there. I want to sound like what I hear in my head. I think that if we turned over too much of the recording aspects to someone else it would no longer sound like Manilla Road’s vision. The drums are always going to sound different than most other recordings because we don’t use triggered or sampled drums on the albums. We did that once on Courts of Chaos and I will never use sampled or triggered drums on a Manilla Road album ever again. When it comes to the drum production I do like a little more wet drum mix than Cory does so the amount of verb or room sounds that I use on the drums in the mix is not as heavy as some would like but I must say that it does make it so you can really hear all the cool stuff Hardcore does on  his parts. I know that we can’t please everyone all at the same time so we just continue to try our best to make it sound the way we are envisioning it. Most of the songs on Playground are not really inter-related but some of them do sort of cross over to each other genre wise. We recorded the album over such a long period of time and had so many changes going on that each song had it’s own recording session really. The best way to record drums for an album is to do them all at the same time so that your microphone placements on the set are consistent. When you are writing and recording one song and then taking the drum set out of the studio for shows and then coming back and setting the drum kit up all over again you are starting over on the mics as well and it is near impossible to get them in the same exact spot on the drums or have the drum heads sound exactly the same either. This is a problem we would never have if we used triggers but then it would not sound like live drums. Even though each songs recording happened at different intervals I am still really pleased with the way the album came out. It helped to give each song it’s own individual personality. We have not toured since our Scandinavian excursion during All Hollows in 2009 and with a bit of a rest from touring it appears my voice has strengthened and of course Bryan’s is stronger than ever. We are hoping that 2012 will prove to be a good touring year for Manilla as long as all our personnel problems don’t plague us too much.

So there you have it. I hope you enjoy the site and check out the new album. As always we wish to extend our deepest gratitude to all our friends and supporters for their undying devotion to the Epic Metal cause and Manilla Road. All hail the Brethren of the Hammer.

May The Lords Of Light Be With You
Up The Hammers & Down The Nails
Blessed Be
Shark