Annihilator - coming back with a vengeance

“I’m going nuts! Insane! That’s where I’m at,” advises Jeff Waters, founding member and guitarist for Canada’s metal export, Annihilator. “My band just flew in here from all different parts of Canada to start rehearsing tomorrow for a festival we’ve got in Greece. Right now it’s just ridiculous because everything is just nuts. Then all of a sudden you get on a plane, kickback, look out the window and say, ‘Ah, there we go.’”

It’s been nearly 20 years since the release of their debut album, Alice In Hell but, with no signs of slowing down, Jeff and company have unleashed a guitar shred-fest with their recent Metal CD. With a new release, most metal fans would expect to see Annihilator’s name on the marquee of their local venue.

“We’ve already done shows for the Metal album, but none have been in North America,” notes Jeff. “We’ve been out on the scene in North America since 1993. That was our last tour and for our third record. We just bailed when metal went underground,” adding, “no clubs were backing metal and nobody wanted to even hear the word metal. When most metal bands lost their (record) deals, we had a great following in Europe, Japan and Asia,” relates Jeff. “We just said, ‘Well, okay, our home country Canada doesn’t want us, and the States doesn’t want us either; so we’ll just go overseas. And we never came back, so to speak.”

Annihilator may have been out of the ‘metal’ scene in North America, but they’ve come back with a vengeance on the aptly titled Metal. “I called it Metal for a couple of reasons,” Waters explains. “First of all, one was, I must have been lazy, because that’s not exactly a very hard name to come up with. Annihilatormetal.com has been our website address since the nineties, and it was sitting in front of me every day on the computer.”

“I had a bunch of guests come in at the end of the record to do some (instrumental) solos and had two people singing on it — Angela (Gossow) from Arch Enemy and Danko Jones. When I read the list of credits, I was like; ‘Wow! This is like all people who love metal and most of them play metal and do well at it. But they’re from all different types of metal bands, even though they are metal bands.’ That’s the one thing they’ve got in common. They’re metal,” he says with excitement.

Expanding more on the incredible guest list, Jeff explains how the dream became a reality. “I was at the end of recording and, to me, it was just another Annihilator record. I was all happy about it, but it was just nothing different than what I had been doing,” he states. “Corey (Beaulieu) from Trivium called me up from Florida where they were recording, and he asks how the new album is coming along. Then he says, ‘Hey, if it’s not done, can I do a solo on it?’ I thought he was joking, but that was it,

“Then, I was talking to Michael Amott (Arch Enemy) later that day, and I thought in the back of my mind, ‘Wait a minute. If Corey would do it so quickly, I wonder if Michael might want to do a solo?’ So in one day I got two really good guitar players I like, offering to play on the record.”

“I woke up the next day and came up with my dream list. I remember sitting at breakfast making this list up, all excited. I put Alexi Laiho (Children Of Bodom) down and a bunch of other people I know from The Haunted and Lamb Of God. They’re basically just friends of mine that I talk to and see at shows or on tour. And I like their music, and they like my music.”

With Metal is finally available in the States, guitar fans will be in six-string heaven. “I just hope everybody gets to at least check this out,” he says of the new album. “It’s not exactly representative of our career, but it’s okay and it’s definitely got some people on it that some of these kids will know and recognize. There’s some screaming guitar stuff on here. I’d give it at least a B+.”