Yesterday Toby Woods and Rage Sadler finished tracking the remaining solos and guitars for Reforge The Steel. The album will now move into the mixing and mastering stage before going to release.
Rage spent last week in the vocal booth at Pointy Halo, based out of Redwall Studios in Bury working on the new album. The vocals have now been recorded for the album with only the guitar solos remaining to record before it can be fully mixed, mastered and then released. There has been a different approach to the vocals taken for this album which differs greatly from the approach taken on A Crisis of Faith.
Rage said: “I have spent a lot of time working on my voice to become a better singer for this album. I recognise one of the reasons many have dismissed us in the past has been the fact I am not a naturally gifted singer; I have always been more of a guitar player who happens to also sing rather than a singer first and foremost. I have put a lot more focus on the vocals this time, especially trying to improve my voice ahead of the recording, and having written the material for the album its been a lot easier to write for my own voice. Theres still a lot of variation in vocal style on this album and I hope I will surprise a few people also. Those who have heard it in its raw form have already been impressed and some of the live reviews coming back have also praised my voice, which is a nice change from the past.”
Rage after a week away, re-united with his bandmates on Sunday for a show supporting Twisted Illusion alongside Salt Hill at Whittles in Oldham before returning home on Monday.
Kaine over the past four days have finished tracking the majority of guitars and bass for their new album Reforge the Steel, as well as completed further work on the drum edits for the album. The tracking again took place at Redwall Studios in Bury, Greater Manchester.
The team at Pointy halo Productions, Carl Brewer producing once again from Crisis of Faith with Sheldon Jolly also assisting with much of the tracking including writing contributions to the new songs for what should hopefully be the biggest and best sounding Kaine record yet.
The album is the recording debut with the band for Liam Etheridge, Toby Woods and Isaac Healy who have all worked with extreme professionalism throughout the process so far having only been the bands line-up since May of 2018. It’s also the first album that all three band members have recorded.
Kaine, now revitalised will now take a brief break from recording the new album to play a show in London at the legendary Cart & Horses as guests of NWOBHM legends Satan’s Empire this Saturday. The band will resume recording the new album as soon as possible.
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.
The album is now in the very final stages of mixing and mastering ready for release. As of today the £13 CD/Shirt pre-order has now been taken down as the shirts are soon to be available on general sale. Thanks to everyone who took advantage of the discounted price, as these early sales helped fund the album recording.
The band issued the following statement on social media earlier today..
We’ve been busy working on the mixes of A Crisis of Faith alongside Pointy Halo Productions and we can confirm we are close to a release.
We return to the road next week with the following shows..
Saturday, February 3rd – B2 VENUE NORWICH
Sunday, February 4th – The Horn, Saint Albans
We hope to see you at those shows, if your coming please let us know below and thanks for the continued support.
The new shirts will be available to purchase online in the coming weeks in a variety of sizes.
2017 started off greatly optimistic, the band in the new format had been together a year and we were planning to release an album later in the year, and while the big time hadn’t come calling in 2016 we were hopeful with the new line-up and album we could make huge strides forward in 2017.
Our first show of the year was at the B2 in Norwich, which was quickly followed by an intimate show at Sound Academy in Braintree. For those who do not know what Sound Academy is, it’s free music lessons and workshops for young people held at Braintree Foyer and it was really good to play there and meet with them there after our set.
We re-released Falling Through Freedom in a remastered format. It’s since nearly gone on to sell out again on CD. It will remain to be seen if we have another run of these CD’s done but it was fun to revisit that album, and we played some of it with both Josh Moreton and Anthony Murch who appeared on the original album in 2012 at a special show in support of Elimination’s 10 year anniversary at The Smokehouse, Ipswich in May.
Throughout the year we played bimonthly Metal shows at the Asylum in Chelmsford. The idea behind these shows would be ourselves headlining but the bands underneath us would change every show, and these would be a mixture of genres, a successful system we had promoted before out of the Soundhouse in Colchester before the new owners there came in and ended the shows. We were primarily running the shows, which were free entry, to help support the Asylum venue and keep it open in Chelmsford. The shows there were a success and every night we had was well attended, but sadly we were unable to keep the venue going with these shows alone and they closed before our final show there in December.
Other notable shows through the year were headlining a show with V1, which features Dennis Wilcock and Terry Wapram both formerly of Iron Maiden which James Balcombe joined us on drums for, Breaking Bands where we played the outside tent to an enthusiastic audience, many of which also saw us at Mearfest later that year as part of The Rock Den travelling group, who not only support those events in Hatfield but travel all over supporting gigs up and down the country.
In addition to having the honour of playing a show with ex-Maiden members, we also did a number of gigs at the Cart & Horses in Stratford throughout the year.
We recorded a live album at the Asylum earlier last year which will also be released later this year, which features the new album played in its entirety and two additional tracks featuring Dan Mailer on Vocals and a one-off appearance for Josh Moreton on drums which will be a very special release.
In March we parted ways with our management, Distilled Entertainment in America. This was a mutual decision as we simply couldn’t afford to progress the band in the way they wanted, which was essentially to buy onto a bigger bands tour, which would have both cost us a large amount of money in terms of the buy on but the addition costs of renting vehicles, fuel, food and board while on the road, with even in some cases just a doors slot for our trouble. We would have had to have taken time off of work to have done it, and possibly take unpaid leave and having toured in the past we knew the payback from the tour itself wouldn’t have amounted to the losses we would have made on the road.
We had also hoped to return to Scotland for the fourth year running but sadly we couldn’t find any festival or promoter who would book us up there this time, so we have made sure that in 2018 we will return and have booked two shows in August which will feature Scotland’s very own Midnight Force and special guests on the Glasgow date will be our very good friends, and one of England’s leading progressive rock outfits Twisted Illusion.
So while we didn’t get picked up (again..) by any of the medium and major festivals in the U.K. or Europe we did play 33 shows total right across England.
On the album, we first entered into the studio in June and finished recording in September. We decided to use Pointy Halo Productions (Carl Brewer and Sheldon James) based at Red Wall Studios in Bury, Greater Manchester after Stephen Ellis had worked with them while recording bass for Twisted Illusion’s Insight to the Mind of a Million Faces. We liked how the record sounded and Stephen believed that Carl could get our next record sounding the way we wanted with the new direction of the band.
The album is still being mixed and mastered, the delay coming due to the studio being very busy towards the end of the year and the Christmas/New Year period. However significant progress has been made in the last few weeks and we expect a release very soon.
One highlight from the studio wasn’t even music related. Chris, who is somewhat bothered by the paranormal decided that while in the studio rather than face the ghost sober he would get blind drunk. The end result was he ended up sleepwalking all over the studio, and at one point decided to take a piss all over one of the sofas, which is amusing enough but it was caught on CCTV for everyone in the studio to enjoy later that day.
We also ended up staying in a low budget hotel and we’d brought some video cameras along to film our studio progress and the people the hotel in Salford assumed we where there for “the usual”. When we saw the room, it was odd to begin with, one of the beds was sunk in one side and the shower head was covered in pubic hair. After returning from the studio for the second night, the room was still in a state so we decided to ask for housekeeping. We were then informed that it’s only ever a request to have the room cleaned and they assumed we were there to make pornography. That being the usual. This is why we don’t have a DVD.
Working with Carl and Sheldon was fantastic, they were very patient, and all the guys (Dean and other Carl) at Red Wall were very supportive given the time we spent knocking about the studio hearing our mostly nonsensical East Anglian chatter. Also Chris’s desecration.
Another landmark in 2017 was The Waystone turned a profit. Now we got a lot of hate from some of the local music scene for this as we decided to post the costs related to the album online. Although there was a lot of abuse aimed at us we didn’t get too upset by this as the people commenting weren’t really aware of the whole facts although some of them decided to go one further and post abuse on our band page on Facebook, probably not seeing the irony of their very own Love Trumps Hate Facebook posts ….
The reason the costs with the album were so high was simply due to the fact it was what MGR Records had outlined (as well as the sound) for us all the way back in 2013, as they managed the recording before we had a falling out and we had to self-release. Another reason for high costs is we don’t have a whole lot of money to bulk buy CD’s and press vinyl’s, so generally smaller runs of CD’s and vinyl’s are more expensive to produce. Having said that, to achieve a profit and sell as many copies as we have was a huge success and something our detractors can never really take away from us. It’s an album that continues to sell well even to this day.
To finish off, while 2017 wasn’t a major leap forward for the band in terms of playing bigger shows, festivals or being signed etc. It was a success in terms of the band becoming an incredibly tight live unit and for the new line-up to finally get into the studio and record the new album. What does 2018 hold for us? I expect much of the same, but we will get this new record out and continue to play shows as and where we can, and we are most grateful for everyone who supported us up unto this point. The pre-orders helped pay for the album recording, and having so many of your turn out for show after show up and down the country is always incredibly humbling. So while we may not be the next Iron Maiden or Metallica, we will continue to work hard on the underground and bring old school Heavy Metal to you!
As I said, we won’t be appearing on tour, at any big festivals, so if you want to see us in 2018 check out our dates and come along to one of our shows!
Love, Rage
You can now get special made to order A Crisis Of Faith logo t-shirts, hoodies, caps and bags from Dizzyjam. These are high quality merch items produced and priced exclusively by Dizzyjam and come in a variety of colours and sizes. Click here to order.
There will be an official album t-shirt made available direct from Kaine closer to the album’s release later this year. It can currently be preordered alongside the album for just £13.
Kaine have finished tracking guitars and bass for the new album A Crisis of Faith. The band headed up to the studio on Tuesday the 11th of July and returned home after 5 days and nights of solid work on the new record. The album is being recorded and produced by Carl Brewer of Pointy Halo Productions based at Red Wall Studio’s in Bury, Greater Manchester.
You can pre-order the new album from just £3 here.
