BALLS mixed and ready

Finally the BALLS album is mixed and ready. The first "single" "Lover of the 3rd Degree" has been sent to some radio stations, so we'll see what happens. The aim is to have the album out in the fall. Listening to it now I must say it's one of the albums I'm most proud of so far. I think we managed to capture the simplicity we were after, but still with a twist. It was also both challenging and fun to play together with one of Sweden's number one guitarists - Micke "Nord" Andersson. Man, he's really got his shit together. An outstanding wonderful person and a truly amazing guitarist!

The Overdrive DVD went down the drain. The sound couldn't be saved and we refuse to make any post re-recording. We'll keep the film and use it to make some music videos to post on YouTube.

The Constancia album is also finally in the making. Michael Mueller will add his bass this weekend and David has started working on the vocals. Time for me to get the guitar work going then. Fuck, time just seem to fly... I promised some friends at work I would help out in our internal Avalon Rockstars band... which ended up in me getting all the songs and mucicians together and playing guitar. It's fun, I must admit, but i t t a k e s t i m e!! Time I don't have.

The encyclopedia is also coming along nicely. But the more information I find about "old" bands, the more NEW bands I find! I've now reached 2500 bands!! This will be a HUGE book. This time I also have to scan and re-scan ALL covers, as this one will be in colour. It's truly a labour of love.

When it comes to new stuff, I've received some really great stuff. Here it goes:
CLOUDSCAPE - Global Drama - Their best so far! GREAT album! Heavy semi-prog with great songs and hooks. Highly recommended!!
BLINDSTONE - Freedom's Calling - Danish heavy funk:sih riffsters! Killer stuff!!
BIG JIM SLADE - It's Delicious - Their fourth and best! Great riff-oriented southern oriented hard rock
HEALING SIXES - One More Friend To Ignore - Oustanding melodic southern oriented hard rock. Jason Bonham played drums on their two first albums, not on this, but the feel is still there!

Short but sweet

The headline of course refers to the Swedish summer... Found a great new beach (not really a beach as it's an old quarry) which was awesome. Burned myself nicely and read a really awesome book I can recommend if you're into the quirky type of humor of, for instance, Douglas Adams, you may love this one! The author is Christopher Moore and the book is entitled "Lamb - The Gospel According To Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal". It's totally hilarious!!

I've also spent quite a lot of time working on the new (and third) encyclopedia. Holy crap! I thought I had a pretty good view of all new stuff since my last book in 2002, but nope. There's soooo many obscure black metal bands that have had stuff released on even more obscure labels!! My estimation is there will be around 2500 bands in this one!

On the musical side of things we did a show with Overdrive on July 17, which we recorded on DVD + sound. The sound was a bit fucked up by a an ignorant sound engineer (not all his fault tho' as there were some mis-communication berween the stage manager and the sound company), but we'll see if we can use it. We've decided to go ahead and finish the Constancia album, so that's what I'm up to in the next few days.

Recently got my Orange Tiny Terror amp which is a little power pack, to say the least!

Listening recommendations:
Big Jim Slade - "It's Delicious" - Great southern-tinged ballsy hard rock
Healing Sixes - "One Less Friend To Ignore" - see above
The Muggs - "On With The Show" - The 70s revisited!