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D.C. metal band Darkest Hour becomes more established in its identity, despite many changes Date published: 12/18/2008
BY RYAN BROSMER FOR THE FREE LANCE-STAR Since 1995, the members of Darkest Hour have built their band around the punk, hard-rock and metal sounds of their native Washington. The band has seen its last two albums break into progressively higher spots on the Billboard charts--no easy feat for a heavy-metal group on an independent record label. In a recent phone interview, guitarist Mike Schleibaum said the band he co-founded almost 14 years ago has finally found its sound. "If a band stays around for long enough, it becomes kind of its own identity," Schlei-baum said. "And musically, that's what we're trying to go for." Darkest Hour is bringing that solid wall of heavy-metal sound to a headlining show at the 9:30 Club on Sunday. If you can't make it to the show, Darkest Hour will be returning to Richmond at the end of January with As I Lay Dying. After working with Devin Townsend on the past two albums, "Undoing Ruin" and "Deliver Us," Darkest Hour changed producers for the new album, currently in the works. The band also brought things back home and will be recording in Maryland. Using the same producer three times in a row "would have been too much of the same," Schleibaum said. "We needed to shake it up." The forthcoming album is going to be harder, faster and something more akin to what you might expect to come from the death-metal hollows of Sweden, he said. "The new material is a thousand times more fast, more aggressive it's definitely a Swedish-influenced new wave of American heavy metal, that is what it is," Schleibaum said. "We're not trying to combine elements of jazz and prog-rock with death metal. We're just trying to put out a sick, thrash, death-metal record." Darkest Hour has gone through myriad lineup changes over the years. The latest came following the recent departure of guitarist Kris Norris, with Mike Carrigan taking his place. With each new member, Schleibaum said, there's always the question of whether it will work out. In the case of Carrigan, band members' only fear was that they wouldn't be able to keep up.
Date published: 12/18/2008
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