So while The Spiral winds down from their exciting first public performance, and gathers forces to begin the takeover of Minneapolis (and the World eventually, natch) there’s no lack of things to do; website updates and hashing out content ideas, video editing (Shh! Its a secret!), Days From Evil art concepts, credits, thanks, and thinking up ways to pay back all the good and nice people who helped us make a good and evil recording.
Although nine tracks from Days From Evil are now permanently etched in digital bits, don’t you dare think we’re out of ammunition. Not even close. In fact, we have enough raw material to make a second album! I actually have a CD pressed with all the rough track outlines, labeled mysteriously “V2”.
Lyrics and structure are locked down for three of the songs (Lament Part One, Push Me, and God Hates Emo, all of which debuted at the Halloween Party on Oct 27th, 2007) and rough lyrics are done for three others: Dragonslayer, Bad Kitty, and Horrorcloud. A handful of other tracks are just outlines now: Loon, Reign and Swap Meat. [Note: If you have a problem with the song names, talk to Colin – Z] but as we are working to put together a full set, I have no doubt these songs will pull together over the next couple months.
So how does the new stuff sound? Well, I’ll put it this way, the e-mails have been flying between band members about how to describe us, and what Genres we can actually fit into.
Looking at the list of bands we think we sound like (Black Sabbath, Tool, In Flames, Machine Head…) parks us pretty far into Heavy Metal territory, although I’ve never thought of us as a Metal band. Actually, I’ve never thought of Jagged Spiral as anything but “Jagged Spiral”. I don’t think bands should let genres push them around too much, but you do have to pitch your band, and here’s how you do it:
“Hey, listen to our band, [Band Name] we are a [Genre] band from [City] and we have one [instrument 1] and a [instrument 2] and a [instrument 3]”
Obviously, genre is a big part of any band’s identity, so it’s been interesting to look back at what we’ve done in such a short time and try to define it. After all the investigation, I’ve decided that Jagged Spiral exists on a plane between “Heavy Metal” and “Hard Rock”. Since we don’t fit neatly into either one, we made up our own genre: “Northern Rock”. So when people ask us what genre we are, we will say Northern Rock, which answers very little. Intuitive folks might pick up on the fact that we are Loud and Cold. If they press further, or require us to pick from the existing genres, we will say Heavy Metal, but you should really listen and decide for yourself.
Yours Darkly,
