Review: SHAKE WELL BEFORE - Goliath EP

   Shake Well Before must be familiar to those who follow Playdeadnation regularly, or just those who've heard their stuff. As you might know, an interview with the guys hosted here recently, if you missed it, you can check it out here! 

   The sudden success of their EP called Goliath popped up in a big part thanks to their single 'Insomnia', which is the second song on the EP, but the first I want to talk about, since that was their first song that had an impact on me and made me fall in love with the music of Shake Well Before instantly! It comes with an interesting video, which avoke my curiousity in the first place. Needless to say, I liked it. But I will let you check that out! The song starts off energetically, like all their other songs, with loud and angry vocals, just the way we like it, and the solo will make your ears bleed as well. The message is rebellious, one of deception and existential questions, which also makes the anger in the vocals and rhythm righteous. The first song is 'Bear, Give My Steak Back'. Among other things, this song talks about regrets and the frustration we all often encounter, due to not being able to change the past, and how life is, in the end, what will slowly kill us. Thus, the sorrowful lyrics are 'slightly' in contrast with the comic, yet symbolic title. Nonetheless, the voice and instrumental are definitely wild in this one as well. Then we bump into the third song called 'When Anger Meets Rage', the title being a very suggestive one, I don't think much explanation is needed about the topic, thus you can use it as an energy drink anytime, especially in cases in which you can relate to it! The next song on the is 'S.S.D.D.', it is about waiting in vain for things to happen, being superficial, constantly struggling for perfection, never being satisfied and we waste our lives searching, not realizing we're standing on the edge and we could fall any minute. Last but not least, we can listen to 'We're Melting Away', which presents the disintegration of the only path we have, the fact that this world is quite unfair since the bad people are supported. It tell us about human decay - in a nutshell. 

   This EP was very well-received, and that is not a surprise at all. I think every hardcore/ metalcore fan will be delighted to listen to this masterpiece over and over again!

https://www.facebook.com/shakewellbefore
http://www.youtube.com/user/swbmosh
http://www.myspace.com/shakewellbefore

Interview: SHAKE WELL BEFORE

   Shake Well Before is a hardcore metal band from Italy, that I have discovered recently and, as stated below, immediately fallen in love with their sounds! Power, energy, brutality and creative videos. They were exremely nice to grant Playdeadnation this interview!

pdn: Hey there! Just so you know, your band is one of those you fall in love with at first audition! How did you come up with the name for the band?

SWB: Hi, first of all we would like to thank you for this interview and your compliments!  Actually there is no deeper meaning behind it. The idea came from our drummer Sbatta. We all had different music styles so our music was like putting different styles together, shake it and you have us. We decided to keep the name also after we changed genre. We know it doesn't sound that good to everybody,but it's just us,SWB.

pdn: How did you guys meet and how did it all start?

SWB: The project started back in 2008 with Simone, Sbatta, Silvio and our former guitarists Albi and Milo. We started with a mix of almost every genre that has nearly to do with metal. It was something between metalcore  and nu metal, but we weren’t good at all at the beginning. Albi was the first one to leave the band because of his studies, then Milo. Sometimes it’s difficult to have a job and play in a band at the same time. We replaced them with Matteo, who played in tribute bands of Slipknot and Rammstein and Alessandro, who is getting graduated in guitar studies and has shecter guitars endorsment.

pdn: It isn't always easy to get started with a band; were there any prominent difficulties you had to face so far?

SWB: Our former guitarists left us, but the band didn't lose any quality. The main problem is that we have to respect our jobs outside of Shake Well Before, sometimes we were forced to cancel dates.

pdn: What were some people/ bands that have inspired you to become a musician and well, to choose this genre?

SWB: We listen to a lot of other stuff from every genre…but you can clearly hear inspirations from bands like As I Lie Dying, Parkway Drive, August Burns Red, may be also some Lamb of God or even Pantera. It was a natural evolution of this band to play this genre.

pdn: Do you have any other meaningful passions, preoccupations except music?

SWB: Music is our main passion that connects all band members. Music is becoming our life, but unfortunatly the music business is not working well and we invest lots of money altough we don't know if it will ever come back. But we deeply believe in ourselves, in our fans and in what we are doing.

pdn: If you could pick any bands to share the stage with someday, who would they be?

SWB: There are too many bands we could mention, of course the bands we mentioned as our inspiration included. But we are happy to share the stage with every band, from the biggest band of the world to the newest underground garage band from our neighborhood.

pdn: What are your aspirations, personally and as a musician?

SWB: As musicians we are trying to get better and better everytime we take our instruments in our hands. We work very hard to play complex riffs and try to give something new although we don't want to change genre. It's difficult to tell what our personal aspirations are. We are all still young and still need to find our way through life. Music is without any doubts the most important thing for us and through music (playing concerts and on the internet) we met a lot of nice people from outside our city and country we would never have met without music. 

pdn: Any plans for the near future? Concerts, new songs maybe?

SWB: We want to make a tour and are working on it. On 30^th  of March we will have the release party of our EP in our hometown, Genoa. The Ep will be avaible in a few weeks on itunes. We are very excited to see what our fan's reaction will be, but we worked a lot on that EP and we are very proud of what came out. We're also working on brand new stuff,probably a full lenght album, probably a new video,  but that's all future stuff

pdn: Thank you so much for this interview, and sincerely wishing you the best of luck further! Any final words you would like to add for your friends and fans?

SWB: You're always welcome! We want to thank anyone who took his time and was interested in reading the interview, we want to thank every fan of ours who believes in us and keeps supporting us and we hope to gain new fans through this interview. 

http://www.facebook.com/shakewellbefore

www.myspace.com/shakewellbefore

www.youtube.com/user/swbmos