Love and Death-"The Abandoning" Single

Tooth & Nail/EMI
2012 


You might want to hold on a second as this one is a bit hard to explain. Love and Death, not to be confused with the country band Love and Theft, is the new band led by former Korn guitarist Brian "Head" Welch. Apparently the group is a re-branding of Welch's own touring group that backed him while he was out and about promoting his first post-Korn solo album, 2008's "Save Me from Myself" (also the same of Welch's autobiography). Although I apparently missed this bit of news, as it was formally announced back in February of 2012, Love and Death album have an EP to their name ("Chemicals" was released back in April of this year) and a new album set for 2013. "The Abandoning" is the first single to be released from their new album, "Between Here & Lost", and, despite only being a hair over three minutes in length, it sounds a masterpiece of rock art compared to Brian's last band. In case it isn't obvious I am not into nu metal fan and I am most certainly not a Korn fan. Quite weirdly the only thing that Korn ever brings to mind for me is when, in a time before kids (but post-marriage), I offered up my services, as a street-level therapist,to talk to a couple's teenage son who was headed for nowhere good. It was just incidentally that he was a Korn fan and, instead of sitting down with this kid, I talked to his parents about him and the problems teenagers faced at that time. I also remember that around that same time I knew younger kids who were into the band and tried to persuade me that nu metal/Korn was going to turn metal on it's head and then, as a result, put an the end to "boring heavy metal" (as they put it). Of course that never happened, but I did get my fill of Korn from these kids and the fact that they were tearing up FM radio. Thankfully nu metal faded away. Sometime after that wondering moment Brian "Head" Welch found God and the rest is, as they say, heavy metal history. So, back to this single and Love and Death. Well, I never heard any of Brian's solo work and truthfully I had no clue who this band was when the single showed up. From the sounds of it Love and Death isn't hanging on to nu metal's tired past as much as they are playing something between nu metal, radio rock and modern metal. It isn't anything to stop the presses over, but it doesn't annoy me as much as I would have expected it considering having an ex-Korn member involved and all. Maybe just maybe I'll have to put in for Love and Death's new album and rethink my position of at least Brian "Head" Welch.