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Nieuws

08 september 2016

Testament hakt er weer lustig op los

Geschreven door: Richard Verbrugge

Label: Nuclear Blast

Momenteel is er in metal kringen wat opwinding over het nieuwe nummer van Metallica omdat het viertal terugkeert naar hun thrash roots. Die roots heeft Testament, stadgenoten van Metallica uit San Francisco, nooit verlaten. Sterker nog, Testament maakt al dik twintig jaar betere albums dan Metallica. Het elfde album van de band is inmiddels ingeblikt en verschijnt op 28 oktober bij Nuclear Blast. Het album heeft de titel Brotherhood Of The Snake meegekregen. Onder aan dit berichtje kun je alvast een zogenaamde lyric video van het titelnummer beluisteren. Alle Testament ingrediënten zijn aanwezig: hakkende riffs, het imposante drumwerk van Hoglan en natuurlijk de brulstem van Chuck Billy.

Het album telt tien nummer en werd geproduceerd door Juan Urteaga die eerder werkte met Exodus en Machine Head. Hij werd bijgestaan door gitarist Eric Peterson en zanger Chuck Billy. Andy Sneap tekende voor de mix.

Eric Peterson schreef alle nummers en vertelde over de muziek: “The only difference on this one is we’re trying to be a little bit more organic, and getting away from Andy’s perfection sound, and get more of a looser… you know, still keeping the slickness of it, but trying to get a little bit more raw. So it’s kind of a hard way to describe it. But we don’t want it too perfect. And I didn’t record four guitars; I did two this time. So there’s a lot more air going on with the rhythms and stuff like that.”

Er zit maar liefst vier jaar tussen dit album en het vorige, Dark Roots Of Earth. Billy verklaart “It was a long four years. We started working on it a few years ago, and it just took some time to get done. And a lot of frustration and anger were put into this record, trying to get it completed. At the end of the day, we’re very proud now, sitting back and now that it’s finally finished. We’re feeling that it’s one of the strongest records we’ve done, I think, to date.”

Over de teksten op het album zei Billy: “Well, it’s kind of like a concept record. I know, going into it, the past records, I was writing songs that were more personal and there were topics that were kind of real — losing a family member or anything that’s real; that’s what we were kind of writing. And Eric really wanted to kind of get back to, ‘Let’s write some cool stories and cool words and cool lyrics.’ And so I was, like, ‘Okay, that’s cool.’ And then, I kind of, at the time, was watching a TV series; it was a show called ‘Ancient Aliens’ that was on once a week. And it showed a lot of the connection between aliens and religion. And it kind of got my attention, because there was different religions all around the world, different spots in the world, where there was always the same alien being with big heads and strange bodies and flying objects in the sky. And it kind of made me realize, wow, how, that many thousands of years ago, did they communicate and see these same things unless it was real, unless there’s something about it. So it really made me think, maybe there is something to these aliens and our existence and religion and everything. And then I stumbled on to the ‘brotherhood of the snake’ and the story of that. And that was about a secret society over six thousand years ago that were out on a crusade just to dig down religions. And there was an alien king, Anu, who basically created mankind as a slave for them to mine the minerals and gold from our planet earth. So it was kind of, like, ‘Wow!’ From an ‘Ancient Aliens’ show to this… There’s something there that we can kind of run on and get the lyrics going and tell the storyline about. So that kind of got the ball rolling.”

Testament zal haar nieuwe album promoten tijdens een Europese tournee in de herst. Dat wordt een co-headline tour met Amon Amarth.