Kaine have released an early image of artist Silencer 8’s work on the artwork for the new Kaine album. Silencer 8 has provided artwork for every Kaine album since the bands beginning all of which can be seen in the gallery below.
The Underground Power EU print of A Crisis of Faith has sold out in the UK. The album was written between 2015-2017 and recorded in 2017 for a 2018 release and is the only studio release from that era of the band. The live album version recently sold out on CD as well. The album is still available in it’s UK format on CD and vinyl from here.
The Underground Power CD’s were only available in a limited run in the UK and have now sold out for good. Some copies are still available online some of which can be found here.
A Crisis of Faith Live has finally sold out on CD. The band will not be reprinting any more of these and the digital version of the album will become a members only release on Bandcamp which can be accessed here. The album was recorded live at the Asylum Chelmsford by Short Stack studios and features the A Crisis of Faith album in full and includes two tracks from The Waystone that features founding members of the band Dan Mailer and Josh Moreton.
There are only 5 copies remaining of Reforge The Steel available on CD. The album was released last October and is close to selling out for the first time. The album will not be printed in this format again, so if you wish to order one of the first prints of the album before they are gone for good please click here. The album will be reprinted in a different format for the second print run at a later date.
Stocks are also low for the following items which will not be printed again:
These can be ordered from here.
We now only have the following numbers of each item left in stock:
Every item bar Reforge The Steel CD will not be printed again though the next Reforge The Steel CD will be released in a different format to the 1st print. All the albums bar Reforge The Steel will become Bandcamp members only once they have sold out with some limited availability for A Crisis of Faith and The Waystone EP on some select streaming sites.
The earlier prints of the CD and Vinyl are very expensive on re-selling sites so to get the merchandise from the band at the best price please click here to order now. Once its gone, its gone for good!
We’ve dropped all our merch prices to £10 and below to coincide with Bandcamp dropping their fees for items sold on their site for 1 day only! That means in some cases you can get our merch for anything as low as £2-3! We’re also offering all our digital albums for £1.
There are less than 100 of most of the items here so please feel free to grab them while they are affordable.
All digital downloads £1
+ One Free Download for anyone currently unwell or in isolation
Order Here – https://kaine.bandcamp.com/merch
Yesterday I wrote about how the album was promoted and how it performed in terms of sales. Today I thought I’d take a look back on the background of the album and how it was written.
The album has its origins in August 2015 when a year after The Waystone, Dan Mailer (bass and vocals) decided to move on from the band and we recruited Drop Dead Fred bassist Stevo Ellis to join the band. At this point in time the band was still a five piece and we had been writing music for a follow up album to the Waystone, we released one of tracks as a single as a taster for the new record which was Justice, Injustice however when Dan left the band this was all scrapped. We remained as a five piece until the end of 2015 and in that period, we had brought Voice in Hell into the live set, as well as started to write songs such as Afterlife, Fall of Jericho and A Night Meets Death. I had written Voice in Hell, Chris had written Afterlife and Fall of Jericho and A Night Meets Death were Stevo’s work. We had taken most of January off to begin writing the next album in full when Anthony decided to leave the band also for personal reasons.
Going into 2016 we decided to remain as a four piece and to work solely on new material, which is what we did for the next year and a bit. We put hours into rehearse and refine every little detail of everything we wrote because we knew how important this release would be for us, being our third album and it being a brand-new line-up. Much of the rehearsals were done at Pioneer Music in Colchester, with some also work being done at Unit One.
We demoed the songs, would practice the songs, play them live, alter and so on until we were happy. Saxon brought the song Heaven’s Abandonment to the table, while Stevo added to it with the intro, Chris wrote Afterlife and The Mind is Willing, which saw him perform lead vocals for both for the first time. Stevo wrote A Night Meets Death with Saxons input, Fall of Jericho and of course “Stephens Song” which was a n old Drop Dead Fred song which Stevo and Chris had done in that band together before being ejected from that band, which we turned into Frailty of the Blade. My contributions were Voice in Hell, Crisis of Faith, Alone, Behind the Preacher’s Eyes. I wrote all the lyrics bar those for Afterlife and The Mind is Willing, however Stevo helped me with some of the melodies for A Night Meets Death. Of course, we all had a degree of input on all of the material written but the original ideas came from essentially one of us having the bulk of an idea and taking it to the band and working it from there.
The ambition really was to write the best album we could and try and push it to the moon and back once it was released, and try and improve upon what had happened in the past, we gave ourselves the time to write and flesh ideas out whereas on The Waystone we were pressured by a label to do things much quicker than we would have liked.
Rolling into 2017 we were ready to record the album, having already played all of it live as heard on our A Crisis of Faith Live album, which was recorded before the album was even released. In terms of finding somewhere to record, Stevo had performed bass on the Twisted Illusion album Insight to a Mind with a Million Faces album and had recorded at Pointy Halo with Carl Brewer based out of Red Wall Studios in Greater Manchester and suggested we use him. We listened to his work and agreed that he would be ideal for the new release, in order to give us a much more modern sound to fit the new band as well as move away from being stuck in that old school bracket production wise, as well as musically speaking we wanted to move away from more of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal influenced stuff and stamp our own sound on the album as much as we could while keeping true to our music roots and I think we did deliver that, and given much of the NWOTM online scene loathed the album, the evidence was clear we had achieved that distance.
We recorded over the course of several months in 2017 after demoing the album in full, we did release the demos as a special one-off Ghost Edition which sold out in under an hour. Once in the studio and after the bulk of the recording had been done we spent a lot of time mixing it with Carl and Sheldon, adding in orchestral elements, making a lot of effort to ensure the vocals were strong, that the instruments sounded to as we wanted which is why we didn’t release the album until February of 2018, because we really spent the time on it. Chris in particular took a lead role in all of this, putting those elements together as well as the orchestrations, hidden tracks and even the track listing.
Ultimately the release was a team effort and I really hope this shows throughout the album.
So, it’s been exactly one year since the release of our last album A Crisis of Faith, it’s been a very challenging year, from line-up changes to continuing to push the album as hard as I can using my own personal budget, and of course the bands gigs to try and promote the album.
When we released the album, we sent it out by e-mail to over 8000 people, friends, family, fans, industry contacts, everyone we could. Unfortunately, the response rate to those contacts were pretty poor, I think less than 20% of those people we sent to the e-mail to actually opened and read it and even less checked out the album! We of course pushed it hard through Facebook, but social media like e-mail is getting harder and harder to get people to both see and then interact with you on. We followed up the e-mail with a press pack to record labels, festivals, management, whoever we could think of and it was sadly rejected by all we contacted but we did our best to push it as hard as we could.
Reviews wise, most seemed to enjoy the album with only a couple of bad reviews out of them all, but the album didn’t feature in any major outlets top ten lists or essential Metal albums and the feedback on the album dissipated fairly quickly this time, whereas the Waystone which got panned much harder seemed to rumble on for a lot longer. We tried a music video for the album, after contemplating it for years which got a couple of thousand views, but it didn’t prove to be a very successful outlet to market our music as again, trying to convince people to try and watch the video was a real challenge for us as it either wasn’t seen when we promoted it, or ignored.
In terms of playing gigs to support the release, we booked 41 shows, many of which were self-promoted in the hope that those who attended the nights would also buy the album. These went broadly well with only a few bad ones now and again. The main difference between A Crisis of Faith and The Waystone is that more people bought that album on the gigs to begin with than A Crisis of Faith, but overall the initial release of A Crisis of Faith performed stronger online, however it picked up towards the end of the year. In terms of Spotify, we’re still struggling for plays there so we typically don’t focus on it. We did try and encourage digital sales by offering them for just £3 too. We offered packages which included t-shirts, vinyl’s and everything we could do.
I have been criticized in the past about writing about how well or how badly our albums and tours have done, one being was when I wrote about the Waystone which caused a lot of the local music scene to engage with a lot of slagging off and insulting of the band, in particular myself, but I am not one to hide from this sort of thing, these things are what they are and I am not going to pretend to be a successful musician just to appear bigger than I am online.
So how do the stats look a year on from release?
• Steaming/Downloads – 31,356 = £441.06
• Physical Sales (CD, Vinyl etc.) – 434 = £6,338.03
So that’s where we are after exactly one years, naturally this isn’t pure profit as the costs of the recording, printing CD’s, pressing, marketing and everything else. As you can see the amount of streaming massively outweighs the sales, but it pays so little in return that despite the fact we have been downloaded and streamed over 30 thousand times, that’s only paying £0.0140662074244164p per play. It’s another challenge with more people moving to streaming such as Spotify, YouTube, and everything else and less people even owning the means to play a CD or vinyl for a band our size to rely on streaming to fund albums. This is the future and in 10 years’ time the whole landscape will have changed entirely again with more people streaming albums, rather than buying. At least in America there have been moves to improve the situation in terms of artists being paid fairer for streaming but no one has taken up the mantle in the U.K. as of yet to push for a bigger share of the income. We’ve also seen HMV go into administration after losing something like 80% of their physical DVD/CD sales in just a year which gives you further indication of how the game is changing.
I have been told that many do find the insight helpful. It’s a sign of the times when a band has tens of thousands of streams, over 11 thousand social media follows and whatnot and the real strength in terms of income is still gigs and physicals such as CD, as they were ten years ago, without those physical sales we wouldn’t have even made £500 on the album.
I’d say overall what we have achieved with this album has been successful for a band our size although our critics will point to the fact we’re now 10 years old and are still at this level. Naturally we’d liked to have done better with it (as anyone would) but relying on your own budget to promote and gig you can only afford to do so much between affording to live, but we worked hard (that is both line-ups) and the response overall was positive so I don’t have any complaints. The album has proven popular enough it’s being re-released in Europe by Underground Power Records and I hope it is really successful there so we can emulate the likes of Toledo Steel, Seven Sisters and Midnight Force on the continent and hopefully do more that side of the sea moving forward.
As ever thanks for reading and to those who supported the band by buying the album I truly appreciate the support.
Saxon will be rejoining Kaine on stage this Saturday at the bands free entry Scruffy Murphys show in Birmingham, fresh off his performance with Twisted Illusion at Manchester Academy. He will be joining the current line up to perform songs from The Waystone and A Crisis of Faith. Kaine will be joined by Midnight Prophecy and The Mighty Wraith.
Saxon Davids performed in Kaine between 2014 and 2018, first appearing on the bands tour with Mordred stepping in to fill in for Ant Murch on lead guitar. He then remained with the band as a five piece until 2016 when the band reverted back to being a four piece once more. He appears on the later pressings of The Waystone and wrote and recorded the most recent album A Crisis of Faith with the band before departing earlier this year.
Kaine recently released A Crisis of Faith live, the final release to feature Saxon on lead guitar which can be ordered from the shop link above.
So, it’s roughly 9 months on from when the walls started to fall in on Kaine, with Chris, Saxon and Stevo departing in quick succession after releasing the A Crisis of Faith album. I thought it would be a good time to update people on exactly where we are now. I had taken then band off the road during April to begin writing the new Kaine record when it all fell apart.
In the months that followed the departures, we put a lot of time into rebuilding the band and getting the new line-up to gel. We have been rehearsing pretty much constantly since the new lineup formed, we had our first gig together in Norwich on May 26th and have played 22 shows together since this band got together. We have gradually eased the A Crisis of Faith material out of the set and have replaced it with new material. When the previous band split up, I decided to start working immediately on a new record and wrote a number of songs that I have been revising since May, and that the band have been rehearsing and playing live. We are now playing sets almost entirely comprised of this new material, we have almost finished the final demos for the new album and we’ll starting to record it at the end of this month.
I said in a previous blog that if I could turn it around and save Kaine after the entire line-up split up earlier this year that would be my greatest achievement in music. I can safely say hat so far it has been, and to be frank it has been nothing short of a miracle. I can honestly say my “retirement” speech was typed out and ready to go live, and I’d already talked to Liam, who joined in April, about the end of the band. My intention was to call it quits and leave music entirely.
Fortunately, we were able to save it. It has been a lot of work, many long rehearsals and naturally we’ve been trying to convince people the band is still as good as it ever was on the road, which many people agree it still is but some I can tell still need to be won over, but this is to be expected with such a radical change. There is a mentality about line-ups that still exists within the minds of many music fans, that somehow the line-up is almost sacred and when that changes so does the band, and in some cases that is right but people will find the new material will sound very much in line with what we have done in the past. Many also didn’t realise that I was the only original member in the past line-up anyway.
I am looking forward to getting this new record out there and hopefully the band can recover and push on from here. We’ll be entering our tenth year come 2019, and it’s been a hell of a ride so far even if we haven’t quite made it yet. We’ll be celebrating the 10th anniversary with a show at Colchester Arts Centre in April, which will be supported by A Bribe for the Ferryman and Osmium Guillotine. Dan and Josh will be joining me on stage for some early Kaine material as well as the final ever performance of the A Crisis of Faith line-up. We’ll be giving away a live album and a t-shirt with every ticket, which can be ordered here.
Alongside writing, rehearsing and preparing for the new Kaine album, I have been doing the washing up in the background of all the follow up releases from A Crisis of Faith. I was able to design and release the new vinyl with the help of Pointy Halo Productions to ensure that sounded top, and I have to say it’s the nicest thing we’ve produced merch wise to this date and of course I had to release A Crisis of Faith live. This was recorded last year early on in Chelmsford at the Asylum by Short Stack Studios but with everything that happened, had to be put on a back burner while I rebuilt the band. Previously Dan and Chris were the bands two audio guys, I never dabbled in mixing or editing, anything like that but with those talents both departing I had to learn and thus the live album is my first ever go at doing any production ever. You can grab a vinyl from here and a live album here, both are limited and once they sell out, we won’t be doing any more.
Finally, the new album is coming and will be released next year – the theme of the album is the re forging of the band, rebirth and moving onto the next stage. There is a lot of optimism and hope with the new line-up that we can in fact turn it around.
As ever, I thank everyone who stuck by me over the last 9 months and offered their love, support and guidance to keep going and I hope sincerely that I haven’t let you down. I really hope you enjoy this new album.
Love, Rage