MANILLA ROAD - Playground Of The Damned CD

This is what a lot of fans have been waiting for for such a long time: A new studio album by one of the most legendray US Metal bands of all time. I am talking about Manilla Road and their brand new album "Playground of the Damned". If you count "After Midnight" and the Circus Maximus project as regular Manilla Road longplayers, then it's their 16th studio album. This is how Mark "The Shark" Shelton views "Playground of the Damned" in comparism to 2008's epic "Voyager": "Well, first of all 'Playground of the Damned' is not a concept album. Some of the songs could be considered inter-related though. Our last two albums were huge conceptual projects and I thought it was time to not be so long winded with the story lines. The song 'Art of War' has some Viking philosophy within it so I guess that comes within the realm of the 'Voyager' theme but lyrically the rest of the album does not have much in common with 'Voyager'. As for the music; every album the Road does turns out a bit different than the others while oddly enough retaining a certain amount of familiarity with the bands overall style which has taken three decades to create. This album follows that path as well as any other that we have done. I think this is the best production we have achieved yet in Midgard Sound Labs and I am more than proud to put my name on this project. It's always difficult for me to describe or compare my music. The lyrics are primarily dark in nature but there is an air of moral warnings within as well. The music is heavy and aggressive with not very many mellow parts (a few though). I think we paid a little more attention to melodic content on this project than we did on 'Voyager'. 'Playground' does not have as much Thrash-like content as 'Voyager' with a little more attention to groove and hook but the project is still very heavy with some pretty intricate parts in several of the songs. The other main difference is that we did not scream as much on this album as we did on 'Voyager'. More singing and less growling. I am personally happier with the solos on this album than I was with 'Voyager'. Once again more attention to melody than just shredding. Although there is ample fast and shred-like soloing going on in 'Playground'. The bass parts sound different also because of using different musicians since Harvey is no longer with us."
There are only eight tracks on the album but some are rather epic, as you can expect from a band like Manilla Road: "Three of the songs are seven minutes plus but the others are around five minutes. Most of our albums in the past have pushed 60 minutes or longer but this time we actually made the album fit the traditional time frame for albums. We have always run into troubles with having more material on our CD's than what we can fit on a LP. So this time we paid really close attention to our times on the songs so that we did not have that problem again. The whole project is a little less than 50 minutes long so you don't have time to get bored with it."

Tracklist:

1    Jackhammer    5:27
2    Into The Maelström    4:47
3    Playground Of The Damned    4:27
4    Grindhouse    7:50
5    Abattoir De La Mort    7:14
6    Fire Of Asshurbanipal    4:40
7    Brethren Of The Hammer    5:02
8    Art Of War    7:16

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