We’ve decided to do something a bit different for the forthcoming Bandcamp sale and offer a unique compilation album for 1 day only for just £5 to try and encourage more people to buy the music and hear our most recent albums. Reforged In Faith is a digital only compilation album featuring a combination of tracks from A Crisis of Faith (2018) and Reforge The Steel (2019).
The compilation will go on sale on Friday, May 1st 2020. It will also be available to our members and in the full digital discography special price for that day. If you have not bought these albums previously this is an opportunity to own both in a unique compilation for a reduced price.
The artwork is taken from The Seventh Seal, a 1957 Swedish historical fantasy film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman on which the track A Night Meets Death is loosely based. Disillusioned knight Antonius Block and his cynical squire Jöns return from the Crusades to find the country ravaged by the plague. The knight encounters Death, whom he challenges to a chess match, believing he can survive as long as the game continues.
The album will be available to order from here as soon as it goes live.
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.
The Waystone Patch – £2
Kaine X Shirts – £3
The Waystone + Justice, Injustice CD – £5
A Crisis of Faith CD [UK] – £5
A Crisis of Faith CD [EU] – £5
A Crisis of Faith LIVE CD – £5
A Crisis of Faith T-Shirt – £5
Reforge The Steel CD – £8
A Crisis of Faith Vinyl – £10
X Double Live Album CD – £10
X Double Live Album DVD – £10
All digital downloads £1 + One Free Download for anyone currently unwell or in isolation
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.
A Crisis of Faith is being re-released in Europe with brand new artwork on CD by Underground Power Records in Germany. The artwork is exclusive to this release, and we have a limited number of these to sell in the U.K.
If you wish to get ahold of the CD with the exclusive artwork click the link below, however once they are gone, they are gone for good. CD’s can be signed on request and each purchase online comes with the digital album for free, plus for every additional order you get free shipping. Members get 10% off all CD orders on our bandcamp.
So, as you will recall towards the end of 2017 the band had just finished recording A Crisis of Faith and we were in the final mixing stages. I was in the process of sending the album to as many labels as possible in the hope someone even listen to it and to help promote the album throughout 2018 I had booked us a run of regular shows where I would hire the hall and promote myself due to the lack of active promoters on the scene in the hope that once the album was out that those shows would in fact act as our “market stall” as it were to draw people in, usually for free entry shows and then sell them an album and general merch on the night to help cover costs. However, the album was slightly delayed in it’s release so the first few shows we did we didn’t have an album to sell.
We started out in Stamford, the attendance on the night was reasonable given the fact the Voodoo Lounge charges on the door and we met a number of new people who would go on to become regulars at our shows throughout the rest of the year. We then did a couple gigs in Norwich which were also both reasonably well attended and then we were in Hertfordshire at St Albans and Welwyn Garden City, the Welwyn gig was a particular good one as it was rammed but it was the Friday before our biggest gig ever so initially 2018 started shaping up really well for the band leading to the album release and immediately after.
We released the album digitally through YouTube on February 4th. We did a special pre-order price of digital copies for £3 and £8 for the CD along with other options which did well. We did think more people would take a chance with the album for £3 then we actually made in terms of digital sales, purely as it was so cheap and while it did okay it was disappointing, we couldn’t sell more digitally at that price. CD’s continued to be the stronger for sales for us overall.
On February 18th we played a sold-out Birmingham o2 on the main stage for Hard Rock Hell Metal, for what was our biggest ever gig. It was utterly surreal and even thinking back I still don’t know how or why we were there playing the same stage as Grave Digger and Alestorm, but it happened and will easily be one of the best moments of my life. A few people assumed that this would launch the band onto the next level as the reviews of the set were all strong, people really got behind us on the day and it felt like something special had indeed happened. Sadly, this wasn’t the case and we didn’t get any bigger bookings, tour offers, label offers, management offers or the like off the back of doing that. While I was on the stage, I took it as a once in a lifetime experience, I knew that I probably wouldn’t get another shot at it so enjoyed every moment of being up there playing our music to such a big audience and on an amazing stage.
The album did well with reviews, but we were rejected by all the labels we sent it out to, as well as management and what not. I even gave a copy to Tobias Forge of Ghost in the hope he well may listen to it as he’s the biggest thing in Rock right now. We haven’t been helped by the way social media has changed since the last album. It’s become a battle of trying your posts to be seen and I expect theres a ton of people who are still unaware we even put the album out because platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like simply don’t show them our posts, even if its paid advertising.
In fact, I am suspect even with the paid advertising about how many real people actually see it. Facebook used to be really good for targeting audiences and getting the right people to see your product but now it’s very hit and miss. We were even banned from promoting posts at one point and they couldn’t give us an explanation other then they didn’t support our business model. I did a lot of follow up trying to find what that meant and eventually they saw sense and let us promote our posts again, but still, very few people are seeing what we do and that’s a shame as we now have over 11k people on the page, of which a few hundred see what we do, and less than 50 will interact with it. Changes to social media platforms have in reality made them pretty useless for bands without huge budgets to be frank.
The majority of gigs we did in 2018 were self promoted. The idea as I said was to use these gigs as an opportunity to sell merch and the new album. The majority of the self promoted events were well attended, although we did have a few stinkers as everyone does now and again. I won’t be continuing this model as we didn’t sell as much merch as we would have hoped and most nights we were running at a loss after hire, soundman and promotion was paid and that’s even when the venues were rammed.
The only people benefitting from our shows were the venues themselves who were making on the bar, but they weren’t actively promoting the events it was all on me which is hard work even without taking into account all the organisation that goes into running a gig anyway. I can’t afford to keep losing money on running gigs and to not even cover costs means we simply cannot continue that. I do appreciate the venues allowing us to run shows with them, but equally they don’t even tell their own customers the events are on let alone do anything substantial on social media to promote them, so for them to have a well attended night and sell plenty of drinks on an event I have essentially paid for, promoted and organised to make a loss just seemed a touch unfair. It generally comes down to the problem many bands have in that music can be a hard sell, where as drink tends to be more popular! Iron Maiden were smart enough to get into both!
I don’t want to get into this next bit too much as I have covered it several times, but we had played a great show in Ipswich at the end of March and I had invited the guys over to sign a ton of CD and merch orders we had online when the walls started to fall in. We had taken the April off to write the follow up to A Crisis of Faith so all the plans were in place to begin. Chris after the signing then informs us, he has to leave the band to be able to make a living elsewhere, he had been in the band 6 years but through everything we hadn’t “made it” and he needed to get his life on track and simply couldn’t afford to be doing what we were doing any longer. I thought the band was dead at this point and had pretty much told him that had probably killed us, not long after the album release it was a body blow that the majority of bands wouldn’t recover from.
I talked about continuing with Stevo and Saxon and we tried out Liam on drums during the April break, playing our first gig with him on the 20th at the Dev. It was at this point that Saxon called me to say he was also leaving the band as he had decided to in short, leave the country. After I got off the phone with Saxon I called Stevo to offer him his release from the band, as he hadn’t been happy with the fact Chris had left anyway and I am of the view that you simply cannot continue with an unhappy camp and it’s best just to end it. I know a few people still believe there are personal issues between us, and that I was somehow to blame but it really isn’t the case and we are all still friends and are in regular contact even to this day. I then called Liam and explained what had happened, we agreed to try and find a new line-up but accepted the band was probably dead.
We played our final official gig with Stevo and Saxon on May 4th, Chris even joined us on stage for a bit. I actually broke down in tears on stage and after, I thought, well, this is it, after 9 years of solid graft to build this band, it was dead. I had written my retirement statement shortly after, ready to post, and my plan was to entirely give up music and vanish into the background. It was over, I was now a 32 year old man who’d been trying everything to make it a success but had ultimately failed and it was time to accept my fate. I do believe that the fact the line-up ended so quickly after our album release as one of the reasons the album was slow to sell to begin with as people had assumed it was game over.
Saving the band at this stage was my biggest ever challenge and by some miracle it actually happened. Toby had gotten in touch on the morning of the resignation announcement of Saxon and Stevo, I hadn’t slept very well given what was going on and woke up to see he was asking to try out, I said that was fine and arranged a rehearsal for the Saturday. Saxon sat in on the try out to help out, along with Stevo and Toby performed amazingly well so we offered him the spot in the band. We then asked, “you don’t know anyone who can play bass do you?”. Turns out he did, so we played our next show on the 19th with Toby, but in the morning, we had in fact tried out Toby’s friend Isaac on bass and invited him to join the band. We played that last show with Stevo and the new band debuted in Norwich just 7 days later. The miracle had happened, the band had been saved. To be fair on Chris, Saxon and Stevo they had all said they’d remain with the band until a new member could be found so there was never any threat of the band cancelling gigs, and they did just that, it just happened a lot quicker than many would expect.
What I will say, which isn’t well known is that when the members left, I had, out of respect for those musicians, offered the spots firstly to the members who appeared on Falling Through Freedom. Naturally they declined for a myriad of reasons as they all had projects and situations that would prevent them from re-joining the band at that time. All three of those guys, Josh, Dan and Anthony put a lot of time, effort and money into Kaine and I wouldn’t ever not offer them a spot in the band because I appreciate what they did to help create it, and the music we are known for now. It’s the same for the Crisis line-up. While I am the guy people know Kaine for, the reality is I would have been nothing at all without the other musicians that contributed to the band over the years.
People were surprised and cautious about the new line-up arriving so quickly after the old one. There was an expectation that the band wouldn’t be as good or would sound so radically different it wouldn’t be the same. Those who saw us, were very surprised that not only was this band was good but it still sounded like Kaine.
Proving myself again was the main focus after the line-up had been put into place and I decided to write an album which over the last few months I’d been teaching the new members and rehearsing it with them every Saturday since. We have since played 22 gigs with that new line-up, we’ve had guest spots from Dan, Anthony, Chris, Stevo and Saxon since too. There have only been a few bad gigs out of those 22 we had, the worse two was a show in Swansea attended by two people and where we had merch stolen and we played a Skatepark music day which every had left by the time we played, including the event organiser, and played to four people! My amp also died so that was a top night. We’ve also played in London more regular with this line-up which has been really fun as we’ve started to connect with the scene down there more than we have had for years.
This month we have started recording the new Kaine album with the material written and rehearsed over the last few months. I am still a bit in disbelief that we pulled it off. We spent two days tracking the drums last week and Liam performed amazingly well for his first say in the studio and impressed throughout. The new Kaine music, still sounds like what we had done in the past, but I have gone for a more straightforward Metal direction on this album with big chorus’s. I really look forward to finally recording it, I have been really working on my voice so it’s even better for this record too as I need to be able to deliver on this album, as well as my guitar playing probably being my best ever right now.
Finally thank you to everyone who stuck with me and offered support throughout 2018, easily the hardest year I have had with the band and thanks to Liam, Toby and Isaac for coming on board and helping me continue the band. I am going to start pushing the 10 year show again after the new year, if you haven’t got tickets and want to see all the band members again one last time and help us celebrate in a great venue as well as get a ton of merch for free I encourage you to buy tickets for this event.
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.
A Crisis of Faith Live is now available for a limited time on CD and Digital. Kaine members and Elite album buyers get the album for free – to order your copy please click here.
Kaine are to release new live album tomorrow on CD and digital. The album will be available for a limited time only and much like the Ghost version of A Crisis of Faith, once it’s sold out there will be no more made available after.
A Crisis of Faith Live is the final release from the A Crisis of Faith line-up, recorded at the now closed Asylum venue in Chelmsford during 2017, featuring early versions of the songs on the then yet to be recorded A Crisis of Faith, including two additional tracks from The Waystone featuring the bands founding members in guest appearances.
To get 10% off the CD order, and the entire back catalogue for free on digital you can join as a Kaine member here in advance of the release. The 10% off will apply to all future orders and you will receive all albums for free digitally in the future. Elite buyers of A Crisis of Faith will receive the album on CD for free. Membership also includes items no longer for sale such as the original Kaine EP, Breaking the Surface Live, Killotine, Rock The Castle, Live at the Soundhouse, the Ghost tracks and more.
