By Martin Popoff
The name of the new record is Waking The Dead, an appropriate moniker for an album this brightly shining metallic, an album stuffed with riffs and mre thatn its share of all-out screaming from the band's resident Brit, Phil Lewis, who explains that "Waking The Dead isn't about running around cemeteries. It's a metaphor for music, the way things are right now, the sad state of the music industry, the sad state of radio, generally the whole media. It's very difficult being a band like us at the moment. We put out a new record every year, and it gets bootlegged (laughs)."
"We've been conditioned for a long time," continues Lewis, "bands being asked for what the company thinks would be hits or what would be played on the radio. We've done that a lot and we did it a little bit with Man In The Moon. And it was really nice not having to do that, and not having songs lying around thinking, 'Oh, this can be a really big hit.' We started the whole album from scratch without a single song written, just a bunch of riffs. And it was my job to sift through the riffs and pick ones I liked, patch them together, record them, and then we went on tour. We went in and recorded all ten songs, without a single lyric, not even a title, just music."
I mention that amongst scribes, Vicious Circle is getting a lot of recognition as a great L.A. Guns record. "Well, Vicious Circle was the record that was right on the end," notes Lewis. "It was no accident that 'Kiss Of Death' was the last song that we did, and that's pretty much where the band ended. And I feel very much like this band, the new L.A. Guns, started with Man In The Moon. I really feel like this is our second record; there's a lot of freshness to it."
L.A. GUNS - "I Want A Metal Record!" Page 3