A BandsInTown x Billboard tour chart, some recent BRIT🇬🇧 sales certifications, congratulations to some metal media folks, and musings on a new box set.
BandsInTown x Billboard
Global Rising Artist Index - Week of February 12, 2022
Hard Rock/Metal/Punk(ish) Tours
This chart is driven by the interest in different tours as measured by BandsInTown. Billboard believes that means… something?
Knotfest (No. 1 overall)
Trinity of Terror Tour (No. 6)
Point North (No. 10)
W.A.S.P. (No. 11)
Spiritbox (No. 15)
SeeYouSpaceCowboy (No. 18)
The Warning (No. 32)
Failure (No. 44)
Sullivan King (No. 48)
The Knotfest Roadshow features Slipknot, In This Moment, Jinjer on the first leg; Slipknot, Cypress Hill, H09909 on the second.
Trinity of Terror is a triple-headlining bill featuring Black Veil Brides, Ice Nine Kills, and Motionless In White.
Point North support comes from Lil Lotus, Concrete Castles, Cherie Amour, The Home Team.
W.A.S.P.’s 40th-anniversary tour includes Armored Saint as well as Michael Schenker on select dates.
Spiritbox replaced Every Time I Die as direct support to Underoath. Openers are Bad Omens and Stray From The Path.
SeeYouSpaceCowboy is on tour with Senses Fail and We Came As Romans.
After opening for Foo Fighters, Mexican power trio The Warning will embark on their first headlining tour
New Brit Certifications🇬🇧
A DAY TO REMEMBER
“All I Want” (Victory) 2010
SILVER SINGLE
THE CLASH
“London Calling” (Columbia) 1979
PLATINUM SINGLE
LINKIN PARK
“Papercut” (Warner) 2004
“Bleed It Out” (Warner) 2007
GOLD SINGLES
PLACEBO
Sleeping With Ghosts (Hut) 2003
SILVER ALBUM
RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS
“Californication” (Warner) 1999
PLATINUM SINGLE
WEEZER
“Say It Ain’t So” (Island) 1994
SILVER SINGLE
Further Seems Forever
The Moon Is Down 🌕
In the late 90s, my old metalcore band, Burn It Down, played a show with a new group from Florida advertised as “featuring members of Strongarm.”
Further Seems Forever was pretty incredible, and I found their vocalist, Chris Carrabba, super talented, earnest, and charming.
At their merch table, he handed me a burned CD-R and said, “This is my acoustic side project.” The words “Dashboard Confessional” were scribbled on the disc in marker.
Chris and I kept in touch. I profiled Further Seems Forever in my fanzine, Superhero. He didn’t tell me this at the time, but as it happened, that long-distance phone conversation was the first interview Chris had done in his life.
Shortly before I moved to California in February 2001, Tooth & Nail Records sent me a promo copy of Further Seems Forever’s The Moon is Down. That CD stayed in my Sony Discman for quite some time. While it fits in with certain “post-emo” bands like Texas Is The Reason, Jimmy Eat World, and Chamberlain, the music was muscular, arty, complicated, yet tied together by Carrabba’s incredible voice. I don’t know how he managed to build big hooks with those songs, but he did.
The cover artwork, with its view through an airport window, and themes hit me at the exact right moment, as I boarded a plane myself with $500 to my name, eager to make my way from Indiana to California with my own version of W. Axl Rose stepping off the bus in “Welcome to the Jungle.”
The Moon is Down arrived in stores and online a month after I got here. Exactly one week prior, Dashboard Confessional’s The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most came out on Vagrant Records. See, Chris exited Dashboard before FSF’s debut was even released, though he did record vocals for the record.
Later that year, I wrote my first cover story for Alternative Press, on Dashboard Confessional, right around the time I took a full-time job at MTV News. It was the first cover story anywhere for Chris, too (we beat Spin by a month or two).
The following year, he and I did another one together. FSF continued on with another singer, a second album, then a third singer (the late, great Jon Bunch of Reason To Believe and Sense Field), and a third album. Chris returned to the band for a fourth record, Penny Black, released in 2012 via Rise Records.
When Ryan Clark, one of my closest friends on earth, told me he’d been tasked with putting together an exhaustive box set deluxe vinyl edition for the 20th anniversary of the first Further album, I wanted in. I pitched an Oral History. The label and band were into it. I set about speaking with all five of the guys who performed on the record, as well as producer James Paul Wisner.
The result is a lovingly detailed 80-page book full of photos, liner notes, and that Oral History, in which the guys speak candidly about each of their early beginnings with music; the journey of Strongarm and the Vacant Andys; the origin of Further Seems Forever; and the awkward dissolution which improbably led to a debut album cherished by myself and many other people.
Preorders for that box set are available now at this location.
Congrats to the wonderful Robert Pasbani (Metal Injection), Ben Umanov (MetalSucks), and Matt Goldenberg (MetalSucks), who positioned their respective DIY-blogs-turned-heavy-music-media-brands with Sony’s The Orchard. The Orchard is already home to Century Media Records (Sony acquired the label in 2015 and merged Red Music with The Orchard in 2017) and distributes several labels in the genre, including Solid State Records.
Excited to see what they all do next. Metal Injection cofounder Frank Godla stays on as Company Director for both sites and the Blast Beat Network.