MACHINE HEAD - Welcome Home...
by Martin Popoff

Ah yes, Machine Head. With a sledge of concrete ten years ago called Burn My Eyes, Robb Flynn and his rockscrabble crew were gonna save metal. Many would say it's been all downhill ever since. Well, now it's time to bite back. The band's latest album Through The Ashes Of Empires is a slamming, challenging, sonically vicious piece of metal mayhem that puts the band back in the good graces of pure metal aficionados everywhere.

Robb offers a few comments on the frightening new album, which reunites Flynn with his Vio-lence bandmate Phil Demmel. "The whole writing process started out as a three-piece. We had basically, you know, found out that we were unsigned. Ahrue had decided to leave and pursue other things, and the three of us just kind of got together and started asking ourselves a lot of questions like, 'Why are we doing this? What are you try to get out of this?' And this was kind of an ongoing conversation we had for a month or two, and at the end of the day, it just kind of became that we really wanted to make music that was going to take the listener on a journey, and not necessarily be aware of songs structure, or having to be verse/chorus, verse/chorus, something/chorus."

"In a lot of ways, it just kind of freed up everything. We were open to try everything. We knew we wanted to refine what the Machine Head sound was and also try bring new things we had never done, and challenge ourselves as musicians, and try write something that wasn't going on at the time that people might have been scared to try. So that was kind of the beginning of it. When Phil join the band, probably about four months prior to recording the record... then it became about riffing (laughs). At that point we saw how much more we could do. I mean, we always intended to have another guitar player, but there is just so much more he brought to the band. Him and I had already had a history, and a lot of that was based on trying to follow those classic guitar teams, the King/Hanneman, Downing/Tipton thing. We always tried to model ourselves like that. And that instantly came back in; there were harmonies, runs, and riffs just started getting more complex, and we were in the headspace for it."

MACHINE HEAD - Welcome Home... Page 2