Blog By James

Unfortunately I didn’t discover After Forever until they had released their self-titled and sadly, last album back in 2007. I’ve always been a big fan and supporter of the female voice in metal, but front woman plus heavy guitars does not always equal good music. However, in the case of Floor Jansen and her band mates in After Forever, what they created together was absolutely the good stuff.

After only a few listens of the After Forever album, it quickly became one of my faves and I made a point to follow Floor’s work in hopes of a new project. The time has come for ReVamp and I couldn’t be happier about it.

ReVamp is Floor’s new solo project with almost all new musicians, all of which play their asses off on this debut recording. Although I enjoyed the album upon first listen, it didn’t really sink in until after I’d heard it the third or fourth time. In my experience, that’s how it goes for all of the really good records.

Floor has a very dynamic and versatile voice with the kind of power that is ideal for this style of music. As an example, check out the bridge of “Break” in the studio report below at about 4:40:

I like the overall production and I especially dig the guitar sound. Check out a few of the tracks at the official site here. I really hope Floor and the band make it over to the US at some point.

Alli had a work trip to Denver this past week and I decided to take a little vacation and join her. I enjoyed Denver and while Alli worked during the day, I wandered around on my own and took in as much as I could. On Thursday we made our way down to what I consider to be one of the best breweries in the world, Great Divide Brewing.

I can confidently say that I thoroughly enjoy every single beer they brew. Every style they take on is perfect and I’ve always loved their unique label design. So getting to visit the source of all this goodness was a treat indeed. The only time we could get down to the brewery for a tour was at 4pm Thursday afternoon which to my tremendous disappointment, they canceled it as we arrived. We hope to someday make it back for a tour.

We made the best of it and not only did I get to finally try the “Hades”, their Belgian-Style golden (unavailable in Baltimore so far), I experienced the 16th Anniversary Wood Aged Double IPA which is absolutely exquisite. Below are the shots I managed to take while we were there. Some of the images are a bit fuzzy because of the dirty glass, but you can at least get an idea of what the Tap Room and front section of the brewery is like.

While we were doing the main tracking for our upcoming CD back in November, I threw up a camera behind the drums and manged to get footage for a few songs. Now that we’ve got final mixes for 6 of the 10 tunes, I put together the below clip of “Camel’s Back”. Thankfully my lovely wife had experience with Adobe Premier and between the two of us, I think it turned out quite well. Ryan had a camera up at the time as well so we’re hoping to get some more footage edited and posted of the guitar tracking soon. I think I’ve got two more songs worth of drum footage and plan to put them up later on my YouTube channel.

I want to say thanks to Dave at Invisible Sound Studios here in Baltimore for making everything sound so awesome.