Formed in the tumultuous fire storm that was the eighties Thrash scene, Maelstrom erupted forth with a pyroclastic ferocity matched by few of the time. Taking their Que from the rapidly expanding European underground, Maelstrom blended classical melodies with thrash laden riffing, punching memorable rhythms, and theatrical, hauntingly dominating vocal progressions. With their signature sound honed Maelstrom began to dominate it..s local thrash scene and expand well beyond domestic borders. Becoming the certified top drawing local act for two consecutive years and making significant strides within the worldwide underground movement. Including charting in the metal forces - readers select - top 10 demo section, with their now underground classic demo " This Battle to Make History... Yet History Never Comes".
As the decade turned and scene shifted to extreme death metal and Seattle grunge, the storm that was Maelstrom began to loose focus. Their eventual break-up spawned new life, with members continuing on to play in other formidable acts, including spOOge, Soilent Green, and most recently [CARBOMB] of Relapse Records.
However some storms only recede, stock their strength and return with unbridled vengeance, and such is the case with Maelstrom.
Re-imagined and re-constructed by founding vocalist and lyricist Gary Peter Vosganian, and Founding Guitarist and chief songwriter, Juilliard guest lecturer, and Guitar Player Magazine guest columnist, the renowned Joey Lodes. Together with Daniel Kleffmann handling percussion, Maelstrom..s storm was born again. Commencing a recording project of epic proportion Maelstrom are now releasing a three song sampler from the forthcoming album. This three song sampler is entitled "It Was Predestined".
For founding members Joe and Gary this became a journey that they both needed to take, rather then one they simply 'wanted' to trek upon. A project of extreme passion and fury for them it is the pinnacle of their collective hearts, souls, and imaginations, culminating in a piece of work that..s greater then the sum of its parts and has a breath and life of its own.
Musically Maelstrom have woven a tapestry whose weft is increasingly complex, thick and multi-layered. Music that both captivates and inspires its listeners to immerse themselves in the world Maelstrom has created for them. Playing out more like a cinematic experience rather than simply songs, Maelstrom..s creations conjure images of sweeping vistas, and deep, dark and cavernous voids. Epic arias prophesying battles of glorious victory and the melancholy laments of the forsaken and forlorn await the listener. Lyrically a grand tale of fantasy has been crafted for those who enter the landscapes which Maelstrom has conjured.
From the perspective of production Maelstrom leaves no stone un-turned. Sonicly a crystalline masterpiece, the drum recording was charged to the late Greg Marchak of Audio Labs in Tampa Florida. The original engineer of many of Maelstrom..s lives performances as well as the man behind their aforementioned chart topping "This Battle..." demo. Greg is known for his work with Trans Siberian Orchestra, Jon Olivas Pain and Nocturnus. After Gregs untimely passing the reigns were passed to Vudu Studios of Freeport New York to handle the capturing of the guitars, bass, keyboards, and vocals. Vudu is renowned for their work with Victory Records and Trustkill Records. Solos and Accoustic recordings was cared for by Steve Booke. Mixing and Mastering has been handled by none other than the now legendary, award winning Tue Madsen of Denmark..s Antfarm Studios. A veteran of the scene Tue has been behind some of the worlds greatest metal acts including Dark Tranquility, The Haunted, Behemoth, Halford, and Himsa.
Join us and come and navigate this epic vortex, ride upon this devastating whirlwind, and venture straight into the eye of what will surely be considered the storm of the century. Inevitably you will be drawn into the experience that is Maelstrom. It was Predestined.
Maelstrom - The Monks Of 1988
By Martin Popoff
OK, I don't know much about the Monks story, but my quick understanding of it is that they were a bunch of Europe-based US army guys in the mid '60s who were way ahead of their time, forefathers to the punk movement, ignored then, and now, well, there's a movie about how cool and visionary they were, as if they were from a different planett.
Same damn thing here with Maelstrom. Formed in 1988 as mere slips of idealistic (and fiercely talented) teenagers, the band never got past the demo tape trading stage, essentially killed off, as vocalist and lyricist Gary Vosganian says, by grunge, but also by the fact that, even if Maelstrom was very heavy, "if it wasn't Suffocation heavy, you weren't going to get noticed."
Still, the band were minor, very localized sensations in the New York area, playing to big crowds who obviously got the hot tip that something special was going on here.
Cut to 20 years later and Gary is a Creative Director at a New York ad agency, and Joey Lodes (guitars - and Guitar Player magazine guest columnist, plus Julliard School Of Music guest lecturer!), is a chiropractor currently out of the country studying for his full MD. And yes, all these years it had been haunting them, this idea of unfinished business, namely the release of a full-length album.
Who cares, right? I mean, it probably happens a lot.
But hold your horses, this is actually a remarkable story, or, actually, not the story itself, but more so the fact that nothing less than musical treasures, nay, masterpieces, turned out to be buried back 20 years, known by but a privileged few. Ergo, what Maelstrom has done is this. Rather than do what normally would be the judicious thing, i.e. write some new songs if you're going to put out your goddamn first album, in your late 30s (COMING OUT OF RETIREMENT, NO LESS)... no, what Gary, Joe and new drummer Daniel Kleffmann have done, is dare to polish off their OLD songs, make a few limited changes, re-record them and put them out there.
The results are astonishing, the fact crashing in that this was a band way ahead of their time, or as Gary modestly and charmingly puts it, "Maybe we were a little too much for what people wanted."
And yes, the sky-straddling result, the illuminated manuscript of a brain-scraping revelation, is that Maelstrom are indeed, no less than the Monks of 1988. Man, one can only surmise, but it looks very much that the gorgeous, completely new hybrid of superlative metal one witnesses on this thrilling 18 minutes of a tantalized taster, must, ahem, arise from the magical confluence of two things: visionary and singular writing talent from teens operating wholly in a world of their own creation, crossed with 20 more years of quietly cultivated skill surrounded by the same number of continued years of intense, constantly kept current, metal fandom.
To describe the sum total of the three songs you have in your grips now (these being "chapters 1, 4, and 9 of a 10 chapter story," says Gary), one would have to call it the headiest, fjord-borne highs one could ever imagine from Viking metal spanning Tyr, Unleashed or Korpiklaani, crossed with technical death and European thrash, executed with the heart of Manowar, the ferocity of Slayer and the ability Cynic, all at once ensconced in a desperately dramatic headspace. And then gloss awash in there the cream of power metal moves, and only the ones that rise to grandeur (Falconer comes to mind), and man... like I say, it becomes insanely moving that a) anyone could come up with this even now and b) that the vast majority of what you are hearing here was in place before Pantera stopped drawing their own album covers with pencil crayons.
Vosganian, answering as to influence, offers only a sense of where all this could have come from. "Our big inspirations would have to be Kreator, Sabbat - you know Martin Walkyier and Andy Sneap - old Corner, as well as good ol' US thrash like Testament, Flotsam and Overkill. I guess from a little more modern sound, Dark Tranquillity. But that's more an influence now, because, as we've discussed, this stuff was written 20 years ago."
We won't go into the protracted history of the band for the few short years they existed, or the even more protracted story about how both death and creating a life through career has caused the stupendous production you are hearing now to come to pass. Briefly, it was a three year process, with many studios and many sessions, and the immense Tue Madsen to pull it all together in the end. No, more important is the end product, which again, is a symphony of progressiveness the likes of which has pretty much never been articulated, invented, heard, before now.
Amidst a bit of banter that brings up a Nocturnus connection to Maelstrom (a eureka moment to be sure, as Gary says the band was often compared to the obscure Florida progressive death pioneers), Vosganian responds to my assertion that his vocals are powerfully no less than one of a kind. Again, the swooping charge and retreat of Vosganian's aggressive yet thespian pipes... there currently isn't a metal singer singing with such insistent force today - and this is, again, from a 37-year-old reliving an old dream amidst family and a fast-paced career in Manhattan.
Personally baffled by Gary's assertion that he had never heard Fates Warning (the only singer of his day or even today that can match this three song tour de force for sophisticated, off-kilter vocal melody choice matched by difficult phrasing is John Arch), Gary's mention of Martin Walkyier hits like a lightning bolt, my desire for an anchor, at least one term of reference, momentarily satiated but still wonderfully undernourished.
"I appreciate that you think it's kind of unique," begins Gary. "You said unprecedented and wow, that to me is just an incredible thing to hear - you make me weep (laughs). My biggest inspirations are pretty much the guys I just mentioned, Mille, Martin, and probably Bruce Dickinson, although I don't really sing like Bruce Dickinson. I certainly don't have the training that a Bruce Dickinson has, but I would say that Bruce... Bruce has a certain vibrato in his voice. You know what it is? Bruce is just theater. In music. And I'm really into that kind of thing. I just try to encapsulate, you know... I write very conceptually; it's all a story line, very fantasy-based, as you can tell by the album cover. And basically I just try to become the characters that I'm writing about."
And you know what? It all makes Gary sound like some sort of death metal Viking who has discovered opera, Vosganian projecting with gruff power yet colour and hue and dimension which practically writes the difficult narrative through sound alone. I can't stress this enough - over a symphony of hugely dramatic, locked-down, unexpected epic moments of, you would think, unachievable heaviness and virtuosity combined, there's those vocals, crumbling mountains and then providing shafts of magic light.
O'er at the guitar end of things, Lodes puts on a showcase of fluid axe mechanics crashing against monster riffs, his choices and voices of tones enough to send Eddie Van Halen back to the woodshed for another five years. Seriously, Joey just seems to intrinsically hit the same complicated hybrid with his playing that Gary finds through his voice - these riffs are hugely epic yet still bloodthirsty and clanging like a tank tumbling down a cliff. Drummer Kleffmann cannonates along like Dr. Killdrums off of the first Savatage album, adding pounding accent in choice spots like Keith Moon in spirit locked up with the note-dense discipline of Gene Hoglan - Kleffmann has also seemingly spent dozens if not hundreds of hours getting each piece of the kit to sound both pristine and powerful. What falls out of the experience of living with these 18 metal minutes is a feeling of great expanse and expense.
And if senses were not overloaded with class, acumen, and a sense of impressive domination already, there's the band's squarely power metal cover art and lyrical filter placed on top of music seemingly too fortified, note-dense and event-packed to support it.
As concerns the plot, Gary explains that, "The premise is basically the destruction of the planet. Essentially it's kind of a look at God, or more so gods and demons and man, and the way that they fundamentally manipulate each other. It's not really an antireligious kind of thing, more so a fantasy-based story. Its about disrupting and ultimately re-balanceing the natural world. The first song, 'Arise,' is looking at a godlike creature, you could say, which is trying to call to life an avatar to defend the remaining life on the planet from this force of evil that is trying to take over. I mean, it's classic good and evil stuff. There are these two gods, or a God and a demon, who are trying to play out their own astral battle on earth, and they are fundamentally puppeteering the remaining humankind against each other, pitting them against each other, and forcing sides to be drawn. What happens throughout the course of the story is that, as time goes on, it comes to a revelation that all this has been a deception, that there is no defined good or evil, that there is both and both are in every living thing and that there is only perspective. Finally in response to this revelation, one of the surviving humans on the side of the light, a divine mortal, basically the guy that is depicted on the cover, riding that horse, comes and ultimately destroys both the God and the demon."
Ultimately, "Arise," "A Futile Crusade," and "Predestined," I think you will agree, comprise an (agonizingly truncated) milestone in metal. These songs excel in that swashbuckling, conquering way those of the first three Queen albums did - you just gather 'round, lift the hood, and all gaze admiringly at the engine, immensely pleased that someone eventually found a way again to deliver more power and passion than previously thought possible. So yes, strap yourself in, 'cos Maelstrom - with our without the industry behind them - are hell-bent ..ing the full-length masterful opus to which this taster so inevitably and obviously (but still hopefully) leads.
- Martin Popoff, Editor In Chief, BW&BK
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