Angels of Babylon, the new project that includes Dave Ellefson (bassist of Megadeth), and Rhino (ex-drummer of Manowar), will be releasing their debut album, Kingdom of Evil, on July 27.

Now I’m not normally one to question someone’s religious beliefs — OK, that’s complete bullshit — but Ellefson seems to have taken a nose dive into Christianity lately. Mustaine has as well, but thankfully the religious elements have been kept out of Megadeth thus far. Ellefson also joined Hail! — with Ripper Owens (Judas Priest, Iced Earth), and had names like Mike Portnoy (Dream Theater), Jimmy DeGrasso (Suicidal Tendencies, Lita Ford, Ozzy Osbourne, Y&T, and a fuckload of others), and Andreas Kisser (Sepultura) thrown about as touring musicians — and they appear to have a religious bent.

While I’m a fan of Rhino, I’m not sure I’ll bother with this album. The religious implications are enough to sour it, but it’s not blatant Christian music, so that’s not so bad. It is, however, fucking boring, slow crap. They’ve got a few tracks online at the Angels of Babylon MySpace page, so take a listen. You can pre-order from Amazon, and there’s a link on their blog, but I’ll just increase the search engine ranking of that page if I link directly to it. I’m sure after listening to the tracks, you won’t get as far as clicking any order buttons.

Well, things really are heating up. I have no idea where the sources come from, but both Blabbermouth and Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles are reporting that Rock Feinstein and Manowar‘s director Neil Johnston are slinging words over Magic Circle Music’s Dio tribute CD.

The first salvo was Wendy Dio’s post on ronniejamesdio.com, and the second salvo was Dave ‘Rock’ Feinstein saying that he never authorised any of his tracks to be on the CD:

“I just found out that Magic Circle Music stated on their site that I was contributing a song to their proposed tribute album to RONNIE JAMES DIO. It also states that I specifically wrote this song for Ronnie. This is totally UNTRUE!

I am NOT a part of this Magic Circle tribute album, and will ONLY be a part of any tribute to Ronnie that is sanctioned by Niji Entertainment Group, and Wendy Dio.”
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Wendy Dio, wife of Ronnie James Dio, has slammed forthcoming tribute CDs dedicated to her late husband as disgraceful.

“Dear Friends and Fans of Ronnie, I have seen lately on Blabbermouth.net a lot of announcements of bands releasing “so-called” Dio Tribute CD’s.
Please do not be fooled by thinking they are doing this for the Ronnie James Dio Stand Up And Shout Cancer Fund, the money is going in their pockets and not to the Fund.

I find this totally disgraceful and upsetting that they are trying to make money off of Ronnie’s death.

Wendy Dio”

Now personally, I think that there will be a few people who are doing this to cash in, but I think she should be flattered. Where are the Michael Jackson tribute CDs when he passed away? Where are the ones dedicated to Paul Gray, bassist of Slipknot who recently passed away? Well, OK, Slipknot are shit and nobody of substance cares about them, but Jackson was the king of pop a far bigger throne than the king of heavy metal.

Look at the number of people who publicly said something about Dio for days after his passing. News sites were constantly publishing personal notes from other artists. Nothing like that has happened for anyone else. Not in the sheer numbers that people were coming out for Ronnie. I think it’s great. To me it shows how much of a real impact Dio and his music had on the world.

source: Dio official site

Music Radar has a long interview with Gus G, the new guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne. He knows that naturally, humans being the pathetic beings we are, he will have a lot of people hating him because he's not Zakk Wylde.

But Gus expects that regardless of what he does, so he takes it in his stride. A lot of people are crying that Gus G is a relative unknown and that it doesn't make sense, but Wylde was also an unknown before Ozzy got hold of him. But what it comes down to is that people need to harden the fuck up about things that don't concern them. I mean, whose band is it? Who gets to make the decisions?

Jesse James Dupree, of Jackyl, has apparently spent the better part of a decade coming up with a way for radio stations to get realtime feedback on the songs they’re playing. The technology is called MIXER Media Interacting & Xchanging with End users in Real time.

I wonder if anyone’s ever told them about the Internet. Online radio stations like Last.FM are doing this sort of thing, but the info is currently only being used to build playlists. Of course, MIXER is different because it uses old-style radio that works over airwaves, but it strikes me as odd that they would spend so much time working on something that in a couple of generations may not even exist. Radio stations will surely still exist, but they’ll all be streaming over the net. It’ll only take so long because 1) old media men and women are ignorant and resistant to change; and 2) the technology needs to be advanced enough that people can play Internet radio in their cars.

This blows my mind. It’s a step backward. Or perhaps, it’s just a very expensive and time-consuming no step at all.