Loathe

We are (finally) going to release our debut full length album, Despondent By Design. We realise it has been a long time coming, but for the most part, what delayed us was completely out of our control.

Now we shall not dilly dally about all that could have been. We release Despondent By Design in summer, on the 23rd of July, a Friday, at one of the coolest places we will have ever played in! The Black Pearl, in Ta’Xbiex is a ship on land, and serves the triple purpose of being a great restaurant, a bar, and an awesome wooden host to our metal!

Details and flyer follow:

Entrance: €6
Entrance + CD: €10
Entrance + CD + T-Shirt: €15

On the night, cheapest possible drinks at the bar:

Local Beer @ €1.20
Foreign Beer @ €1.50
Foreign Wine by the glass @ €1.50
Standard Spirits (with or without mixers) @ €1.90

PS: Whoever had placed a pre-order on the Loathe website will be contacted soon to pick their CD up!

PPS: Don’t forget to visit the event page on Facebook!

After the London gig, we went our separate ways, or at least, I, your humble narrator did. We regrouped early in the afternoon and set off on the long drive to Birmingham, fully aware that pretty much the same drive must be repeated in the early hours of next morning.

The drive was as uneventful as all others, so as per usual everyone found their own to break the monotony. We got to Jake’s in Birmingham, discussed plans for the drive back and got set for the gig.

Scruffy’s is exactly as we left it. There’s a good vibe about this place, maybe owing to the fact that everyone here is very much into the metal, and so it should be too, given that this is Birmingham, home of all that is heavy metal.

Morgue Orgy, the first band on tonight are great guys and phenomenal musicians. Observed closely during their soundcheck, and looking forward to their set. They’re also a very humorous bunch, constantly ribbing Slab’s Big Jim with their nickname for him, Barbara.

We face a tough night after this gig. Celebratory drinks will of course be imbibed, but we do have to be out of Jake’s in Birmingham by 5 in the AM tomorrow so as to get to London Heathrow in plenty of time to allow for any shit we’ll get at the check in desk, plenty of which I’m sure will be available.

Update:

The gig went very well. Morgue Orgy are such an amazing band, very talented, and an extremely funny set of people. We’re really glad to have met them, and will keep in touch! Slab went down a storm, as expected, and after post gig drinks at Scruffy’s, here I sit now, at Jake’s with a houseful of people drinking and chatting. And we leave for London in 4 hours. No sleep.

Update 2: (written on an Airbus A 320 somewhere over France)

We dosed off from about 2.30 to 4.30 AM. Not enough. In pitch black darkness we left Birmingham for the last time on this tour, having bid our farewells to the Big Jim, the only Slab member of strong enough constitution to actually wake up. Well, we did have to heave our guitars over the top of his head.

Long drive back to London in darkness, stopping only for 20 minutes when we were an hour away. Massive hassle driving through London in Monday morning rush hour traffic to drop Karl off at a friend’s, and after that, yet another hassle with our kind car rental agency.

Loathe’s tip to traveling: DON’T. Airports and airport staff hate us. I am still boggled at how we left Birmingham with  7 hours to go until the flight leaves, and still, we managed to be the last ones on the plane, and the last ones to check in. Maybe it’s because the look we sport is not suited to international travel. Suffice to say that our hand luggages were taken apart by what was (at least) a very pretty girl.

Now we go home, and tonight we hit the Excelsior Hotel for the extraordinary general meeting of UKAM and PRS. We shall have many tour horror stories to regale to whomever cares to listen, but the vibe we carry down to Malta is, overall, very positive. We’ve met up with good friends, old and new, exposed our music to a lot of new people, exposed our bottoms to a huge number of bathroom stalls, and in general survived in the madness that is the band called Loathe.

Before anything else is said, we’d like to thank you all for the phenomenal response we got from you since we uploaded the first song from our new album, Despondent By Design. Be it on Twitter, Facebook or MySpace, you guys have quite simply rocked our world with your awesome comments! Thank you very much! We shall have a new song for you very soon.

Back to the album, this is some info about it.

It is called Despondent By Design, has 10 tracks on it and shall have a total run time of 41 minutes. The tracklist is as follows:

1. Hellfire
2. As Cold As They Come
3. November
4. The Devil’s Playground
5. Black Light
6. Children Of A Lesser God
7. This Respect
8. This Overwhelming Grasp Of Solitude
9. The Dark Diaries
10. The End Of All Things Good

Lyrically, this is what the songs are about:

• Hellfire deals with the story of a couple who push the boundaries of an unholy relationship and suffer the consequences thereafter.
• As Cold As They Come speaks of the abuse of a partner in a relationship, laying the blame on them for leaving, inventing faults and then leaving them hung out to dry
• November speaks of the loss of a dear person, Jade, in the month of November, of things planned and turned to shit and the regret and sadness from this untimely departure.
• The Devil’s Playground is the place we find ourselves in so many times, the crossroads of indecision, generally after betrayal and trying to take a next step with someone else after it’s over.
• Black Light is about the end of one’s life. Some people see death as dark, macabre and unwanted, but for others, though black, it’s also a guiding light.
• Children Of A Lesser God treats the endless cycle of physical and sexual abuse and that which stems from it.
• This Respect is about people who use the word respect as a punchline without ever getting into the merits of what respecting others really means.
• This Overwhelming Grasp Of Solitude is about the sense of despair one gets when they feel they are not understood even by the people closest to them and whom they love.
• The Dark Diaries is a dialogue between a shrink and a patient, in which the shrink repeats that it’s not so bad and it could be worse, while the patient screams that this simply isn’t good enough, this is not what he/she wants to hear, this does not lessen my pain.
• The End Of All Things Good speaks of a vendetta carried down through generations, owing to an a horrid act carried out long ago yet never spoken of or atoned for.

And speaking of the end of all things good, I think that’s more than enough positive vibes for the day I’ll leave you with our track Black Light for our enjoyment once again, and the promise of more new stuff soon!

Black Light by loathe

Hey again everyone! We are now precisely 24 days away from going on tour and we are really looking forward to it! The flyer is online in the previous post, however, here are the dates in text format, come check us out if you will.

24th October, Leicester, Exiles @ Redeemer w/Spirytus

25th October, Neath (Wales), The Duke

26th October, Stourbridge, Katie Fitzgeralds, w/Godsize

28th October, Wakefield, The Snooty Fox

29th October, Manchester, The Star & Garter, w/MWP

30th October, Wolverhampton, The Giffard Arms

31st October, The Unicorn, Camden, London, w/Nebukadnezza & many more!

01 November, Birmingham, Scruffy Murphy’s, w/Morgue Orgy

As a special bonus (not really, this is something we’ve promised for some time now, the new song is below in our soundcloud player. The song is called Black Light and is the first to be published from our new album “Despondent By Design”. Said album should be released soon.

Hope you like what you hear! Later amigos…..

Black Light by loathe