The News Review:

- Mimicking Metallica ‘¢ Take That to the Bank
- Burnishing the metal on the blues
- So Metal It Hurts
- What’s filling the nightlife void? We look at the options

Mimicking Metallica ‘¢ Take That to the Bank
Boise Weekly – Apr 23, 2008
Mimicking MetallicaYou may love them you may hate them but you can’t deny Metallica’s influence on contemporary metal music. This weekend Hellbound Clothing—with some help from 1332 Records and The Guitar Center—presents two shows with Spokane Wash. -based bands Character Flaw and Sanctified Sin and Boise’s Midline and Heibarger paying tribute to the masters of metal. I don’t know much about Character Flaw and Sanctified Sin (except what can be heard on their Myspace pages) but I do know that with Midline and Heibarger representing Boise this show promises to be a seriously rocking good time.

Burnishing the metal on the blues
Prague Post – Apr 23, 2008
” As co-founder of Twin Dragons Cane has tweaked a few blues purists’ eyes and ears by affiliating himself with former members of Venom Carcass the Plasmatics and Black Sabbath. Yet for Memphis-born Cane his music and his life are one continuous weave where “everything has been changing. It’s the sound that reacts to the way the world is with all this anger about war rebellion and drug dealers where up is down and down is up… ”Cane says that he’s found a similar near-telepathic connection in Twin Dragons with the Italian guitarist Fabio Cerrone. Playing with Cerrone Cane says “is like jammin’ with Miles — you don’t have tell him what key it’s in he’ll find out. ” n this tour Twin Dragons has also added the tasteful metal riff maestro Martin Mike Hickey. “Now I’ve got two guitar players who can play anything” Cane says happily. With former Plasmatics drummer T.

So Metal It Hurts
PC World – Apr 23, 2008
Pedal Metal sells a piece of custom cut diamond plate that screws onto your broken Rock Band pedal holding it together and hopefully preventing further damage. I went for the basic $15 model which just goes on the pedal itself–you can also pick up one with a small plate for the base of the pedal and one that replaces the hinge as well. The plate arrived Wednesday complete with the necessary screws and illustrated instructions. Altogether it probably took only about ten minutes to… The RDX-HX1080 features a 500GB drive that Sony claims can hold up to 1420 hours of standard definition television plus analog and DVB-T digital tuners. The slightly lower range HX series have analog tuners only. All models include a new HDD camcorder connection for use with Sony’s Hard Disk Drive based camcorders as well as USB connections for transferring music. And the boxes can use magical technology to upscale your existing DVDs to 1080p. Right now it seems like these bad boys are targeted primarily at Europe (hence the DVB-T) and we don’t have any prices immediately available but hopefully they–or their reasonable equivalents–will show up on US shores soon so I can take my television watching into the next century.

What’s filling the nightlife void? We look at the options
mlive.com – Apr 23, 2008
– ver the past 14 months the Kalamazoo music scene has been hit with a slew of venue closings. In response several venues event organizers musicians and music fans are adapting. Since the milestone closing of Kalamazoo’s Club Soda last February venue after venue has shut its doors:– Kraftbrau Brewery which picked up much of Club Soda’s slack closed in November. — Blues and hard rock fans lost their home last May when Wonderful’s Funky Basement and The Doghouse above the blues venue closed their doors. — Country fans were dealt a huge blow when tsego’s Bresa del Rio burned down around Thanksgiving… n the outskirts of Kalamazoo sits an old warehouse once used for processing celery but it now houses a completely renovated bar the Lamplighter in the front and RedruM an old bar in the back that has become the new haven for hard rock and heavy metal. “That’s real velvet” RedruM co-owner Tara Skaggs said referring to the gold and velvet wallpaper that lines the entire interior of the bar. The heavy metal venue which looks like it was built with the genre in mind was built in the ’70s Skaggs said. Featuring a unique multi-level layout — a sunken bar gothic-style lighting and antique photographs lining the walls — the venue opened about a year ago. Skaggs and her husband Bruce began managing RedruM 5301 Comstock Ave. after The Doghouse closed. “When Wonderful’s closed we were forced to close but we immediately began looking for other venues” Tara Skaggs said.