Monday, December 31, 2007

ND Scum & FETO on Vinyl LP?

Question: I have been looking for copies of the first two Napalm Death albums on vinyl, and I noticed that on your site for the European store, you had a picture disc vinyl of Scum available, however this was absent from your U.S. store. What is the deal, and is there any chance of you sending some copies to the U.S. store sometime soon? Also, do you have any plans for a From Enslavement to Obliteration vinyl re-release in the near future? Answers to these questions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Answer: Both the first 2 Napalm death albums were released on Vinyl LP inthe UK in the 80's, the first pressing of FETO was gatefold actually with a free 7inch disc. A few years later a pic disc of FETO was issued, again in UK, about 2000 copies, but Scum had wait till over a decade later for its pic disc.AS you say, its available to buy from our UK store as it was made in UK, and most of the time we do swap products between the UK and USA stores- but this must have been missed.We currently have no plans to issue FETO on vinyl again.Our interest in vinyl is sporadic and depends on demand, Napalm death's first 2 albums are classics of grindcore genre so probably will be issued again at some point. My advice is- grab them when you see them!

MISERY LOVES Co. DVD?


Question: I have the CD MOSH200, NEXTGEN Tour, which was an excellent tour. I have two versions MOSH200 and MOSH200A, the Pulkas tracks are the only ones that differ, is there a reason for this? Also since your re-issueing classic albums how about re-issueing Misery Loves Co debut album with their NEXTGEN perormance as a bonus DVD?


Answer: Wow, you are going back to 1998 with this one...it was a good year, and as you say that NEXT GEN tour was pretty exciting..sadly none of the bands on that tour went onto major long term careers tho,in fact most split up soon afterwards- which is disappointing, looking back.Anyways, the 2 versions of the comp are because Pulkas started to play legal antics with us, in an effort to get off the label- some demo tracks were removed, as the ownership was in question.This was answered elsewhere a while back on this blog. As for classic albums- yeah i agree with you! MLC debut was and still is a classic (i liken it to Fear factory's demanufacture, but more experimental)- like a lot of Earache titles, its now considered classic but at the time was not really picked up on by fans in mass numbers- only those that truly know about music tend to delve into the underground where earache resides.yeah we have the footage from that 1998 show and might consider it for a DVD release. Singer patrik from MLC is now a respected music journalist in sweden.

A&R opinion of bands on Myspace

Question: Surely you guys receive more demo submissions than you probably know what to do with... When Earache looks at a MySpace link from the demo section, are things that coincide with the music such as view count/image/presentation as important to you as other mainstream labels? Or does Earache rule so much they just like what they hear?

Answer: Nearly every band we look at on myspace now has 10,000 friends and 100,000 playcount and a neat CSS background and cool graphics and merch.Bands tend to blend into one another ans almost look and sound identical BUT we pretty much judge bands on the quality of music- the style, originality, level of professionalism.When we started to sign the new school Thrash bands the only place they existed was on myspace, but none had a great many plays or slick web pages- what attracted us was the music- it was good old fashioned A&R skill and sleuthing that alerted us to the potential of these bands.
To be honest most labels nowadays are doing A&R solely by myspace play count...or a basic search of myspace "unsigned" by descending playcount order- any monkey could do that, and many labels have hooked up with many bands in that fashion.

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Earache PS2 Game in USA?

Question: I have been waiting almost 3 years for the PS/2 version of \"Extreme Metal Racing\" to be released in the USA. Is it finally going to be released next week or not?


Answer: Sadly the publisher of our game in the UK-METRO 3D is mostly a publisher of kids and budget range games (we knew this when we signed on with them for the earache extreme metal racing game) so has no major distribution outside UK.However, recently it announced a series of Wii games for the USA, but strangely did not include the Earache game in the bunch to be released. So we have no date for the USA release, sorry.