The Pre-Valentine Massacre 7 has come and gone, and as happens every year, we are humbled and grateful for the great turnout and vibe we had.

This year we hit Gozo with our buddies Knockturn Alley, and regardless of late venue changes and other assorted annoyances, we had a great time playing at the Prekursur Band Club in Xewkija. We drank lots, and if you’re in Knockturn Alley, ran up walls.

Three days later we played at the customary Pre-Valentine venue, Remedy. Thrashers Angelcrypt dropped out due to sudden illness, and we wish the dude a speedy recovery.

The gig was great, with non-stop pits and quite a few of the Gozitans from the weekend returned and moshed along! Truly a great atmosphere, and we can’t thank you enough for it.

Here’s a few photos from both nights. They’re all by Audri, except for the Loathe and Knockturn Alley shot, I don’t who that’s by. But thanks! If you have any more pics, send away!

We also want to thank Eve at Remedy, Steve Lombardo, Matthew Natoli and the guys at Xewkija. Cheers all and we’ll see you at the Shellshock Festival on the 12th of March.

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We carved the letters into the rock for demonstration purposes

Well, that’s going to change as of today month! We have decided to kick 2011 in the nuts very early on!

It is the seventh year running in which we are going to keep our appointment for the Pre Valentine Massacre, but this time, we’ve added another leg to it, a date in Gozo!

The date is the 5th of February, the venue is a cool as hell new club in Rabat called Mirage, across the street from Mc Donalds in Arkadia.

Entrance fee is €6, but get this, if you come to the Gozo gig, you get into the Malta gig 4 days later for free!

That’s right, €6 buys you entrance to both nights!

This is Loathe at the Pre Valentine 6 in 2010. You know not to expect any less.

As is our yearly tradition, we shall be playing with our best buddies Knockturn Alley. We have also recruited DJ Dunk, or Matthew Natoli, the organiser of many metal nights in Gozo to spin some quality tunes for you before we get on stage.

Facebook event for Gozo gig here: http://on.fb.me/pre-val 7_in_gozo

As to the Malta gig, it’s happening at Remedy, and apart from Knockturn Alley, we also have legendary thrash metal band Angelcrypt joining the fray. Price is again €6, or free if you came to the Gozo gig.

Facebook event for the Malta gig here: http://on.fb.me/pre-val 7_in_malta

We’ll have merchandise available on both nights, although if you want something specific, it may be best to get in touch with the band beforehand and let us know, so as to avoid disappointment.

Hope to see loads of you out there!

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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!

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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.

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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

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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

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New album (we are listening to the unmastered mix right now, and it sounds sickeningly good. Not blowing our own trumpet here, we’re just in love with how it sounds, and very satisfied too!)

New video (y’know, snippets of our idiocy at the studio while recording the album) New website (which should be like a town centre to all our profiles across a bunch of sites. Pretty cool looking so far. Still coding right now, but promise to have it online soon)

New tour dates (we do have them, we just need to get moving on a flyer, and then all the dates will be published. UK be warned)

New gig (yeah that doesn’t sound right does it? Anyway, we figure we ought to play live at least once every six months in Malta, so once the damn summer tapers off and things chill a little, get ready to see our drunken selves on stage)

That’s pretty much it for now! We’ll be touch with a checklist of what’s done soon!

Looking forward to seeing you all!

love

the Loathe boys

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Some of you may know, summer in Malta is a very particular kind of experience. To give you an example, the temperature today is 30 Degrees Celsius or 86 Fahrenheit, sun is shining, not a cloud in the sky, and essentially, very, very hot. This continues for most of summer, and only gets worse come September, when temperatures fall slightly but humidity almost doubles.

As you can imagine, this is not the ideal weather to play our brand of metal. More so in our practice space, which is a one car garage, completely soundproofed, with no air conditioning, and a number of valve amps inside. It’s fair to say that while the Swedes have their saunas and the Turks have their baths, we get down to practice in our little hot house.

All that said, we haven’t been inactive. The new album, ‘Despondent By Design’, has been recorded for a few weeks now, but we haven’t rested since. The artwork is getting drafted by our good friends Cedric and Clint at MadMadeMedia (formerly Gloryhole) and we have some really good ideas, all of which we can’t wait to unveil. A tour in the UK is also in the works, courtesy of our best friends Slab, and this should cover a lot of the United Kingdom come October.

We have also been practicing regularly throughout the week, and a new song, one that came too late to be on the album is now complete too. The song carries the working name ‘Wakkafew’, which really is an inside joke too complex to ever explain.

We may also be playing a few festivals locally, however a lot of that is still shrouded in secrecy (or uncertainty?) so I can’t at all be too definite about those.

And within the cool confines of air conditioned offices and houses, we’ve been busy with ideas for the new website, which will replace this one at this location, getting new people to listen to our stuff on Twitter, ( @loathetheband anyone?) and our facebook page: www.facebook.com/loathe

Finally, as a bonus to you loyal readers, here goes with a few live pics of the band from over the years. We’ll be sharing more media soon, and hopefully will have tracks for you from the album very very soon!

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We’re going to have a short break (maybe a week?) from the CD so that we can approach it with a fresh mind set when it comes to hearing the mixes and then decide what we want changed at mastering level. Meanwhile, our good friends Cedric, Clint and Max from Gloryhole will be creating the artwork for us. We have basically given them carte blanche as to what they may do, as we are sure that their creative juices flow best this way, and are expecting something awesome from them.

We shall keep you updated with any progress, and promise to post a few pics and a video on here sometime next week. We have loads of footage from the studio, now there is the slight matter of sifting through it and choosing the best, and most idiotic. Also, be on the lookout for a new blog at a new URL, but more of that later!

Also, check out our best mates Knockturn Alley’s new drummer at this link: http://knockturnalleyband.com/blog/2009/07/new-medusa-review-drummer-video/
Their album, Medusa, a bone crushing piece of melodic metal in my humble opinion, has been receiving rave reviews from around the globe, and this is very well deserved.

Finally, if you’re local, or are currently in Malta, do not forget the gig at SKY club tomorrow. The much expected return of Coalition to the Sun (formerly Tendency Charge), coupled with the sheer ear splitting force of Abysmal Torment and groovy takedowns from In The Name Of ought to make for a great night of uncompromising metal music. More event details follow at this link: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=logo#/event.php?eid=209944260716&ref=ts

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