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>> D.C. BAND HAS A FASTER GUITARIST AND A FRESH OUTLOOK, BUT MAINTAINS ITS IDENTITY DARKEST HOUR IS WHAT IT IS: METAL

December 18, 2008 12:36 am

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.

"Mike has really helped us change our perspective," Schleibaum said. "He came in and he could just rip this stuff right away and it made us think, 'Oh [expletive], maybe we're not so awesome.'"

Darkest Hour is a band known for being open to its fans. You can send one of the members an e-mail and expect a reply, or go to Schleibaum's Web site, AskTheDude.net and keep up with him on the road.

Schleibaum said that the Internet, which wasn't in wide use yet when the band started out, has changed things drastically.

"The world has changed so much in the years since Darkest Hour has been a band, with the rise of the Internet, the rise of Internet marketing, the rise of MySpace, the rise of illegal downloading--to the change of perspective on record labels to go from trying to develop artists to just trying to squeeze as many dollars right away," he said.

"It's definitely evolved into this feeding frenzy, shark's pool type of thing. And I'm sure it was pretty cutthroat before, but definitely metal has followed the path of all other modern, popular music, to my dismay."

Ryan Brosmer is a freelance writer and student at Virginia Commonwealth University. Reach him at
Email: brosmerra@vcu.edu.