Long-running heavy metal supergroup DOWN, featuring vocalist Philip H. Anselmo, guitarists Pepper Keenan and Kirk Windstein, drummer Jimmy Bower and bassist Pat Bruders, has announced its first concert in nearly two years. The band will perform on Thursday, June 20 at Inn of the Mountain Gods Resort And Casino in Mescalero, New Mexico.
DOWN‘s last concert took place in September 2022 at the Blue Ridge Rock Festival in Alton, Virginia.
In a recent interview with Concrete Spew, DOWN guitarist Kirk Windstein spoke about the musical direction of the material he and his bandmates have been working on for their next release. The supergroup hasn’t issued anything since the arrival of the “Down IV – Part Two” EP in May 2014.
“It just sounds like DOWN,” Kirk said. “I mean, it sounds refreshing because we haven’t done it in so long, gotten together with me and the guys and done it in — fuck — 12 years or something. So it sounds like DOWN, I think, to me, it sounds more old-school DOWN. And the reason I say that is I think we got to a point where… Like, the ‘NOLA’ record is so simple, and it just wrote itself; it was so simple. And that’s how this is coming about, which is great. We’re not overthinking it. We’re not trying to make things too complex. Phillip‘s [Anselmo, DOWN singer] not trying to write so many lyrics and things. We just kind of got away — I hate to say ‘got away’, ’cause anything we do is DOWN, but, to me, we kind of got a little bit… We needed to go back and look at each other and just go, ‘Let’s just get in a room and do it like we did from the beginning.’ And that’s what it feels like to me. It’s very magical. The ideas and the working together, just bounce off of one another, it’s a natural thing.”
Windstein went on to say that DOWN has “seven songs” written “right now,” but he noted that he hadn’t heard them with lead vocals yet “because I was on tour with CROWBAR in the U.K. and Ireland. And so Phil and [his wife] Kate had [a get-together] over at the house and on the property where the studio is and all while we were on tour. And everybody got to hear it with vocals, except me, and I haven’t heard it. So I guess I’m gonna have to try to make a trip over there. But Pepper [Keenan, DOWN guitarist] also built kind of a home studio thing in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. He’s got like a beach house out there — well, really two that are next door to one another. And I talked to him about that right before we left. So we wanna do guitar solos, at least demo ’em or whatever, have ideas, and what we call sweetie tracks, which is little licks and things between vocal lines. So in order to do that, we’re gonna have to get have the vocals, ’cause nobody’s got the tracks with Phil‘s vocals except Phil.”
Last month, DOWN drummer Jimmy Bower told Shawn Ratches of Laughingmonkeymusic about the progress of the songwriting sessions for the band’s new release: “We got together about a month or two ago, and we were practicing with just me, Pat [Bruders, bass], Kirk and Pepper. Phil lives on the other side of the lake [in Louisiana]. We got together over at his house for a weekend, and we have seven songs, man. We’re supposed to get together again in April, and then talk about recording, trying to get this thing out.”
Asked whether Anselmo, who has spent most of the past year and a half touring with the reformed PANTERA, comes in with a book of lyrical ideas when they are working on music, Bower said: “He’s got notebooks and stuff that he definitely writes and keeps stuff for, but he’s generally a writes-for-the-song kind of thing.
“Phil‘s amazing to write with because he’s really good with arranging, and he’s just really witty with his arrangements and bridges and stuff like that, that, I’d be, like, ‘Damn, I would have never thought of that.’ And that’s the beautiful thing about DOWN — it’s a room filled with dudes that are witty with their songwriting and stuff like that. We can write all day without Phil, but…
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