Armored Saint: Made In . . . Italy?
by Martin Popoff

It's the usual turn of events in today's rockscrabble metal community. The loyal few on this side of the pond will care about an Armored Saint reunion, but the vast majority of hard rock fans will be slamming over at the Slipknot/Kittie show. Europe on the other hand, happens to be a good chunk of why this happened in the first place, Joey Vera, along with Gonzo, his brother Phil, returning Anthrax vocalist John Bush, and Jeff Duncan (the Symbol Of Salvation line-up to perfection) finding rabid interest in the Saint o'er there in the world's best metal market.

Vera couldn't believe it either. "I've only done a few interviews over here so far, but Gonzo and myself just got back from Europe on Sunday and we did something like 153 interviews. We were in Germany and in Paris. A lot of this had to do with the response coming from Europe. When I was touring with Fates Warning, and when John was touring with Anthrax, we were going to places where Armored Saint never went to, Italy, Switzerland, and there are just tons of people bringing Armored Saint records for me to sign. And I was just blown away. This was like eight years after the band had broken up. In fact, we ended up asking the Europeans to suggest our set list. We took a poll to find out what the most popular songs are. And from that poll we're going to choose our set."

Appropriately, there's a new record to go with all of this, Revelation being the slab in question, a traditional collection of hard and stern metal, more in tune with a no-nonsense type of '80s vibe than anything new and trendy. "For lack of a better term, call it power metal," laughs Vera. "I don't know, that's pretty general. I produced the record myself. So I had this kind of vision from the get go. And what I was really trying to strive for was an old school record. My aim was something like Killers by Iron Maiden, almost a raunchy sort of record. So the record is really dry, there aren't a lot of effects. It's not like one of these big '80s records. Very much the opposite, almost like a live record. One of the things we had a problem with in terms of just about every record we've made, is that the records never really represented what we sounded like live. Something always got mixed up in the translation, with the producer or whatever. And I think we really accomplished this live sound, this old school record idea. We wanted to stay away from anything too modern. There are a few songs that have some modern influences, but I swear, we were trying to make a classic Armored Saint record (laughs)."

Armored Saint Interview Page 2