Anthony Murch (Guitarist for The Rock Dinosaurs and It’s Not A Phase Mum) has done a play through on his new YouTube channel AHM Music of the song Iron Lady from the 2014 album The Waystone.
Anthony Murch was the lead guitarist in Kaine from 2012 to 2015 performing on the Falling Through Freedom and The Waystone albums. He has since appeared as a guest on stage with the band and a guest solo for the single version of Black on Reforge The Steel.
Kaine (www.kaine-metal.com) has been recognised as one of the top 100 Heavy Metal blogs in the world by Feedspot (Feedspot Blog Reader).
Feedspot said: “I would like to personally congratulate you as your blog Kaine – British Metal Revival has been selected by our panelists as one of the Top 100 Metal Music Blogs on the web.I personally give you a high-five and want to thank you for your contribution to this world. This is the most comprehensive list of Top 100 Metal Music Blogs on the internet and I’m honored to have you as part of this!”
Kaine are listed alongside some of the biggest Heavy Metal sites and bands on the net including Metal Injection, Metal Underground, Metal Blade Records, MetalSucks.net, TeamRock, Decibel Magazine, Terrorizer, Loudwire, Metallica TV, Slipknot, Avenged Sevenfold, Iron Maiden, Nuclear Blast, Century Media Records, Judas Priest and more.
The website currently stands at 87th in the entire world.
The Waystone, Kaine’s second album first released in 2014 has made a profit £1,220.93 with 855 sales, 50,812 streams and 16 single sales. This is a huge achievement for the band, who after dropping their label prior to its release funded the album themselves and pushed it hard online and at their many shows.
Physical sales are still the bands strongest source of income for the album bringing in a total £7,835.66, with digital downloads at just £198.53. In terms of streaming income, and income from third party sources such as Spotify, iTunes, Amazon etc. despite the amount of streaming being relatively high (50,812) the return was just £178.23 (£0.0035 per stream/download) for the band.
The largest amount of cost for the album was the production/mastering which came in at £4,888.64 and the duplication/pressing £2,108.85. The total profit for the album now stands at £1,220.93.
Chris MacKinnon, drummer on The Waystone said of the news: “I’m still astounded. When we first released The Waystone, the thought of paying off the album expenses would dare not creep into my mind. There have been times over the years where my dwelling thoughts of the financial struggles of being in a band nearly became crippling. Every single time a fan would buy a CD at a show I would always thank them honestly, explaining how they really are the people that keep the band going.
We often earn criticism from ‘real’ musicians who tell us what we’re doing is futile and we’re approaching the wrong way of marketing our albums, but whatever we’re doing right now is working – to the extent where we are now earning clean profit on my first real album – and the glistening hope I’m seeing for the future makes me want to scream with joy.
This proves it. The blisters, the sleepless nights, the emotional frenzies, they are all worth the sacrifice if we can make the music we love and return a PROFIT! Today is a good day, I look forward to the ones to come.”
Rage Sadler, who performed vocals and guitar on the album, added: “When we dropped the label we knew we were taking a huge risk moving forward, we tried to find another label to put the record out on but they essentially wanted all the profit in return for the album, one offered us 100 free CD’s at no cost we could sell ourselves, which would have left us significantly out of pocket!
We were mocked in some quarters for not signing, some believing we were simply being arrogant in not doing so. We even had to drop a label after a month because they simply refused to print any physicals, despite us covering all the costs of the album ourselves.
What this says to me, despite what some are saying about Metal being dead and how no new band stands a chance because nobody wants what we are doing anymore, is firstly how wrong those people are and secondly that hard work pays off. We toured relentlessly to promote this album, we took it on the road from every corner of England, to Scotland, Wales and even across the sea to Ireland. We have received a great amount of support from Metal fans right across the world who love what we do.
After we released it, no major publication would cover it, no bigger festival would book us. We did this entirely off our own backs with the support of the people who genuinely love our music and that for me is the real achievement in this, because for a band our size to not only make a profit but bring in such a significant amount of sales and streams, but continue to do so nearly three years after the album’s release just shows the strength of that album and our live performances.
One issue this does highlight is the amount a band our size gets in return for streaming services such as Spotify and YouTube, or sales from places such as iTunes and Amazon. Despite having over 50 thousand of these streams/sales, which is incredible, it brought in less than £200. These are big companies turn huge profits out of music, but it really isn’t filtering down to bands like ours and that’s the only negative out of today’s announcement.
This is an amazing moment in Kaine.”
Kaine are currently gearing up to record their third album later this year as a follow up to 2014’s The Waystone.
Kaine founders Rage Sadler, Dan Mailer and Josh Moreton will finally reunite for a one off show at The Smokehouse in Ipswich on May 20th 2017. They will play a set of material drawn from the recently re released Falling Through Freedom and The Waystone albums.
The opportunity for the reunion arose from The Elimination 10 year show which Kaine were asked to play as support, however Kaine couldn’t do the show. Dan Mailer and Josh Moreton were already playing as part of the Elimination line-up, so it offered a perfect opportunity to the three original members to reunite for a set for the special show. It will be the first time the founder members will have played together officially since 2012.
The three members recently joined each other on stage for a rendition of Iron Lady alongside the current Kaine line-up at Asylum on February 28th.
Joining the founding members will be AJ Kemp, who is currently playing in Dismanibus alongside Josh Moreton, on lead guitar. The band will be billed as “The Immortal”. The show is just £3 and doors are at 8pm. You can find more information here.
The fourth edition of The Waystone CD has been released by Kaine and is available to purchase through Bandcamp.
This version of the CD contains the Justice, Injustice single, When Will They Return originally by Dismanibus which was a cover originally released on the Writers Block Album and finally Quality of Madness which was also recorded last year.
These additional tracks are the last tracks recorded with Dan Mailer [Bass] and Anthony Murch [Lead Guitar] before their departure from the band. This fourth version of the CD now contains the complete works of that line-up released together on CD for the first time with interchangeable artwork with the Justice, Injustice single.
The band has also made the following released subscriber exclusive;
You can order the CD here or on the following link.
Kaine’s second album The Waystone sold out on CD for the third time since it’s 2014 release after a successful show at The Portland Arms in Cambridge yesterday. 13 copies are still left to purchase on vinyl.
The show at The Portland Arms marked the bands 200th overall since 2009.
Akis Kollaros – Producer of The Waystone (1980-2015)
Yesterday I covered 2013 and the main writing/rehearsal thrust for the album, signing with MGR and our image change. Today I am going to write about the recording process.
I am trying to keep things balanced so while the MGR thing ended up losing us thousands of pounds, but as I said in the previous blog the image changed did help and the second thing that helped us greatly was having access to Akis Kollaros.
Akis of Angry Bee Studios in London was the house producer for MGR, like Peter Ellis, was Greek and had been working with Monument on their releases. Akis called me as soon as he found out he was working with us and asked to hear our demos which I duly sent. He was impressed with what we had written and said he didn’t really need to alter what we were doing songwriting wise as we appeared to understand our direction and he didn’t need to alter the songs.
In January of 2014 I and Chris entered the studio to record the drums for the album. Chris had just one night to lay down all ten tracks and he had to run through them several times, literally working until the next day. Akis was immediately very personable, dedicated and confident in what he was doing. He worked hard with Chris to get the best out of him, even though Chris was starting despair having to do another take due to tiredness and as you can imagine wasn’t the easiest task given the lengths of some of the songs, but especially The Waystone. Chris performed exceptionally on all of the tracks in the end.
Chris MacKinnon begins recording the drums in January of 2014
After the drums were done, Akis spent the week editing them into a drum sound I think is easily one of the best I have ever heard. After the drums were done, I and Dan went down to London for Dan to record his bass parts and again it was an all-nighter with Dan working on takes until the next day. Dan is an amazing bass player and nailed his parts in the studio that night. Near sleepless we returned to the studio the very next day so Anthony could start recording guitars and finally on the Sunday I laid down my guitar parts for the album. Anthony as with Chris and Dan did a sterling job recording his parts, harmonies and solos which frankly were impressive. Akis like with all of us worked him hard to get the perfect takes.
Dan Mailer laying down the bass for The Waystone
Recording overall was a fairly smooth process aside from a couple of snags here and there. Akis showed me a better way of playing certain parts which was a huge help as he had an extensive knowledge of music and music theory where as I hit strings and am lucky if a tune comes out. He did it with all of us really and pushed us to our limits.We were able to get a lot done in a short amount of time due Akis’s work ethic.
Anthony Murch working on the Lead Guitar for the album.
After another week or so of editing I and Dan headed down to London for the final recording sessions to do the vocals. We did them over two days with me taking the first and Dan taking the second with me doing a few overdubs. These were again recorded into the night and ideally we should have spent a little more time on them, but we were under pressure both financially and for a release later in 2014. Overall I think we did a fair enough job given the constraints. One of the highlights was when I was doing the scream on Iron Lady, Akis kept pushing me to do another. It got to the point I was seeing stars and nearly passed out on the floor. As I was fading from reality I heard in his Greek accent “One more take, just one more take”. We had a laugh doing those vocals!
Me, Rage, butchering the classics on one of Akis’s many fine guitars.
Another Akis story is he asked myself and Dan if we wanted tea or coffee. We said tea and he proceeded to poor two black teas for us both. I and Dan looked at each other and then over at Akis who looked back us and said “I forgot you are English, I don’t have any milk”. He also loved Turkish food and would advise me and Dan to go and get a Turkish wrap from around the corner every time we went to get food. I can only imagine the disaster recording vocals on a belly full of that would have been for me and probably my underwear.
Akis then mixed the tracks with Peter Ellis’s guidance using the “Monument” formulae and sent them back to me. I wasn’t happy with the guitar sound at all and I ended up having a dispute with MGR over that as I wanted a much heavier guitar sound for that album (and still wish it was). In the end we ended up with a compromise on the guitars, and for the bass and the vocals. Had Akis been allowed to just work with us on those we would have sounded a lot better but these things happen in music. The reality is Kaine may be a traditional Metal band but we are also a heavy band. Our guitars have a bit of anger to them as well as melody, the bass is a prominent thing in all our music and my vocals are raw and are meant to be that way. Despite everything the album still sounds good and that’s entirely down to Akis’s hard work.
The album was then sent off to Z-Plane for mastering and everything was essentially done in March of that year. Akis encouraged us to release it right away but MGR didn’t want it to conflict with the Monument release. We did however get it printed early and started selling it as a pre-order before release and would later sell them to audience members out of a bag on the first tour we did which I will elaborate on tomorrow.
After the recording of the album we stayed in touch with Akis. I had already started bouncing track ideas off of him looking for guidance on the third Kaine album and we all became good friends with him. I stayed in close contact with him when he was in hospital in Greece and the last time we saw him was in June of that year. We had a really long chat about everything to do with the band, MGR and he gave us pointers on our live sound as we had just played a gig at the Boston Arms. He even signed albums for people who bought them on the night which was really cool. Akis even made the effort to phone and text me in December and January next year after my Facebook account had been removed maliciously just to ensure I was alright with everything. He was a very genuine guy.
Akis was sadly killed in an accident just over a year ago and is sorely missed by everyone who knew him. I believe our album was the last he ever worked on. His favourite song from the record was Wanderer, he liked it because it reminded him of Deep Purple’s Perfect Strangers, one of his favourite albums. I wrote the track to begin with a Ritchie Blackmore vibe so it was cool he heard the influence in the song. I still miss Akis and it’s such a huge tragedy that he was taken so young. We did support the campaign to have his body returned to Greece and pledged money to ensure he got home and had decent funeral. A special thanks is worth recording for his good friend Jo Lord for keeping us updated on everything to do with Akis’s funeral and family. It’s greatly appreciated by the band.
As ever… Love, Rage
Kaine will be releasing the second single from the upcoming album “The Waystone” on May 1st. The track is titled “Resistance” and follows the successful release of the first single “Iron Lady” which has been praised by critics and fans alike being compared to the golden era of Iron Maiden and the NWOBHM movement of the late 70s and early to mid 1980s.