Rock Report 9-2-21

Sweden’s theatrical metal masters Avatar have debuted two new songs — “Going Hunting” and “Barren Cloth Mother” — in advance of their headlining U.S. tour, which kicked off yesterday.

This pair of fresh tracks also comes as a means of celebrating their signing with Thirty Tigers and starting up their own imprint, dubbed Black Waltz Records, named after their 2012 album, Black Waltz.

Bonnaroo Arts and Music Festival has announced the cancelation of its 2021 Fest, an outcome many live music events have again faced this year because of the protracted COVID 19 — though Bonnaroo got shut down for a different reason.

The annual event in Manchester, Tenn., was scheduled for this week and weekend,  But a deluge of rain from Hurricane Ida has made the grounds too wet to accommodate the many thousands of festival goers that Bonnaroo brings.

Michigan rockers POP EVIL are amped to resume their headlining U.S. tour after a brief hiatus due to vocalist Leigh Kakaty testing positive for COVID-19. The band returned to stages last Friday, August 27 in Virginia Beach and will continue their tour, including rescheduled dates for previously canceled shows, throughout October 8 where they will appear at Aftershock festival alongside METALLICA.

You can listen to “Versatile”‘s “powerful and uncompromising modern rock sound” (Modern Drummer, May 2021) as you play along with POP EVIL‘s new computer video game “The Cube”. Head over to game.popevil-versatile.com and see if you can beat the band’s high scores as you solve a scrambled digital Rubik‘s cube that gets more complex in each level.

“Over the last few weeks, I played the hell out of this game during my COVID isolation,” shares Kakaty. “Just warning everyone, it’s not an easy game to nail down. Good luck beating Hayley‘s score; she currently has the highest score on the bus…”