interstate live music

Grammy-nominated rockers Anthrax - Scott Ian, Charlie Benante, Frank Bello and Joey Belladonna - have announced that Shadows Fall guitarist Jon Donais will step in for the departing Rob Caggiano.  Donais will temporarily fill in for Anthrax’s upcoming tour dates in India, the series of Soundwave Festival shows in Australia, and the North American Metal Alliance Tour (dates below).

Ernie Ball is proud to announce the 2013 Play Crossroads contest, where the legendary string company will be partnering up with Guitar Center, Guitar World, UltimateGuitar.com and ReverbNation.com in a global search to give the next best undiscovered guitarist a chance to perform live on stage at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival 2013 at Madison Square Garden on April 12th-13th.

In the early morning hours of Tuesday the 8th January, Iso/Columbia Records released a new single by David Bowie titled ‘Where Are We Now?’ exclusively launching in the iTunes Store in 119 countries. David Bowie’s first new album in ten years and his 30th studio recording, THE NEXT DAY is also available as a pre-order on iTunes with a wide release scheduled for March. January the 8th is of course David Bowie’s birthday, a timely moment for such a treasure to appear as if out of nowhere.

Some say hair metal is dead….that 80’s big hair rock n roll is a thing of the past. Well, not if Hessler has anything to say about it. Although they call Chicago home when they’re not on the road, they look, act and sound like they stepped straight off Sunset Strip circa 1987. And they have a mission. They want to create the same hair metal explosion that rocked Hollywood over thirty years ago, only they want to do it in Chicago. You never know what might happen, because if other hair bands in the Chicago area see Hessler doing their thing, having fun and meeting with some modicum of success it might be hard for them not to jump on the band wagon (pun intended).

Get in the middle of any punk rock crowd and bring up NOFX and you’re likely to hear people say how much they like them or how much they hate them. But love them or hate them no one can deny the fact that after twenty five years they can still pack large venues, or the fact that they are one of the highest selling, most successful independent bands of all time selling over 6 million records worldwide without ever being signed to a major label.

Steven Adler, former drummer of time-honored, notorious and highly influential hard Rock band, Guns and Roses, has launched a new project: Adler. (Formerly Adler’s Appetite)

Their debut album, called aptly “Back From The Dead” was produced by Jeff Pilson, formerly of Dokken and features guest performances by Slash and John 5 (of Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie).

You may or may not know that in the past four years these Pennsylvania hard rockers have had a string of charting rock singles and both studio albums have been in the rock charts with “The Strange Case Of…” staying in the charts for thirty three weeks and peaking at number one on the US hard rock charts. Not bad for a band that started out as a brother/sister duo at the tender ages of ten and thirteen respectively. Those are also pretty good stats considering most of the nation had no idea who Halestorm was before their self-titled debut album in 2009. So in four years Halestorm has become one hot commodity in the world of rock n roll, playing shows with the best of the best, and more recently headlining their own gigs as they did last Thursday night at Summit Music Hall.

Soleil Moon was another new to me group. Vocalist Larry King gives self-assured, stellar vocals, complete with rock and roll burr; the instrumentals (John Blasucci) are flawless, and the content is rich and varied. That pretty much sums it up, but let’s cover each track. On that, I’ll say right now that this album has a lot of songs that WILL be covered!