SPRITUAL BEGGARS' new album Return To Zero - featuring ARCH ENEMY's Michael Amott (guitars) and Sharlee D'Angelo (bass) - will be featured on Metal Express Radio's 30 minute Daily Album Premiere today (August 19th), offering the fans a listen to some of the material. Tune in here at 18:00 CET (12:00 noon EST) to check it out.

Following is an excerpt from BW&BK;'s recent interview with Amott:

“I was away from it for five years, so it is different,” Amott agrees, “but somehow I just morph into that role. It’s always obvious to me where the music is going to go when I’m sitting there with a guitar jamming. It’s very clear whether it’s going to be an Arch Enemy thing or a Spiritual Beggars thing. It’s fun because these guys are great musicians. There’s a great vibe between me and Ludwig (Witt / drums). He lives close by so there’s a place we go to jam, and now Sharlee (D’Angelo / bass) is in the band as well, so it’s very comfortable.”
“It’s mostly my writing, so everybody kind of waits until I’m ready,” he adds. “The problem was, with Per (Wilberg / keyboards) playing in OPETH, Ludwig’s involved in a number of things including FIREBIRD, me and Sharlee doing Arch Enemy, it’s a bit crazy trying to synchronize our schedules. It’s quite obvious that I need to do this band as well, although when everyone else goes on vacation I go into the studio to do pre-production (laughs).”

Having surfaced in 1994, Spiritual Beggars pre-dates Amott’s rise with Arch Enemy by two years, yet he’s best known for the latter’s death thrash sound over his comparatively sedate rock side. There’s always been a need for the Beggars as his other musical outlet, even if it can take up to half a decade to get around to putting an album together.

“When I quit CARCASS, Spiritual Beggars was my only band for a couple years. I never planned it that way. I just thought that if I quit Carcass I didn’t want to jump into something similar, so I decided to take music from a different angle. I’m just a big fan of traditional hard rock and early heavy metal, ‘70s rock and I guess what you’d call classic or vintage rock,” says Amott. “I got into that later, though, because I was listening to SLAYER before I was listening to UFO. I completely missed out, so I basically went backwards. When I started to seriously get into music it started with ’82 punk rock, hard core, thrash metal, death metal, and by the time I was in Carcass I started to become curious about the origins of hard rock and metal. I loved BLACK SABBATH, but somebody gave me a tape of stuff like CACTUS and CAPTAIN BEYOND that opened my mind. I had no idea that there was this whole scene. It was a treasure chest of music, and after a while I got greedy and said ‘I want to do that’ (laughs).”

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