The Best Of 2011 – #10 – Charred Walls Of The Damned – Cold Winds On Timeless Days

Charred Walls Of The Damned – Cold Winds On Timeless Days

1. Timeless Days
2. Ashes Falling Upon Us
3. Zerospan
4. Cold Winds
5. Lead The Way
6. Forever Marching On
7. Guiding Me
8. The Beast Outside My Window
9. On Unclean Ground
10. Bloodworm
11. Admire The Heroes
12. Avoid The Light

Charred Walls Of The Damned is:
Tim “Ripper” Owens – vocals
Jason Suecof – guitars
Steve di Giorgio – bass
Richard Christy – drums

After a very promising debut album in 2010, Charred Walls Of The Damned are back already with their sophomore album, entitled “Cold Winds On Timeless Days”. For everyone who’s never heard of this band before: They play an energetic blend of Power and Thrash Metal, with little pinches of Black Metal (especially Blast Beats) to spice up the mixture. The mastermind and initiator of this band is drummer Richard Christy (ex Death, Control Denied, Iced Earth) who is, when not busy with CWOTD, the show drummer on The Howard Stern Show. Singer Tim “Ripper” Owens should be known to a broad audience as a temporary replacement for Rob Halford in Judas Priest and being the lead singer of Iced Earth for two albums and the respective live shows. Bassist Steve di Giorgio has quite an impressive curriculum vitae as well, as he’s been involved in bands like Testament, Sadus, Iced Earth, Control Denied and Death, leaving guitarist Jason Suecof as the least known member of the pack. However, this guy has quite an impressive track record of bands who he worked with as a producer. Among those you can find names like Trivium, The Black Dhalia Murder, Chimaira and Dir En Grey.
You can gather from this little bit of name-dropping, that this band amasses quite a bit of musical talent, and they are not afraid to show and use it.

There and back again (A switcher’s tale)

What does read as the title of a fictitious book that is mentioned in a well-known fantasy story of some English philologist from the last century, is actually some kind of personal journey through the digital world. Having started with a family computer, the legendary Commodore C64 my first real, very-own computer has been a Intel Pentium 4 machine, that I bought when I started my university years in late 2001. Of course, that machine did run Windows XP.

Windows XP has been, at that time, the best operating system out there (after a few patches), combining performance, security and easy accessibility for the user. I did stick to Windows XP and PC systems for quite a few years, switching back and forth between desktop and portable machines, until early 2008. However, when it get’s to mobile devices, I started as an early adopter for the classic Apple iPod, of which I owned two until today. Besides that, a good friend of mine has been an avid Apple/Mac/OS X user and fan for quite a few yeras, and I was always pretty amazed and impressed by his PowerBook G4. So, when 2008 came and I was in need of a new machine, I was, for the first time ever, seriously considering switching from a PC system to the Mac and OS X.