MINSTRELIX - New Demo Song Available For Streaming
December 21, 2009, 14 years ago
Japanese - American "dramatic speed metal band" MINSTRELIX have posted a new demo entitled 'Splendor' on their official MySpace page. Go to this location to check it out
As previously reported, MinstreliX released their new mini-album, Reflections, in Japan via Black Listed Records back in March 2009. BW&BK; scribe Carl Begai caught up with vocalist Lola, an excerpt from the interview is available below:
The sleepy town of Topping, Virginia – population 1,766 if you believe the internet – is the last place you’d expect to find the singer of a neo-classical metal band. And you won’t because she’s been calling Osaka, Japan home since 2006, much to the benefit of self-styled “dramatic metal” shredders MinstreliX. Founded in 2004, the band cut a limited run four-song single with former vocalist Leo Figaro only to have things fall apart two years later, forcing the search for a new singer. Enter Lola, former resident of a U.S. town so small Google Earth has issues finding it, living and working in Japan with absolutely no designs on joining a band. Or standing on a stage, for that matter. New environments often bring with them changes both necessary and inspired, however, and when fate threw an unexpected opportunity to join MinstreliX at Lola she took it.
“Coming to Japan was a big change from that rustic scene, but I’ve always been open-minded and flexible so at first it wasn’t so hard to adjust to the changes,” she says of the move from to Osaka, which added well over two million people to her neighbourhood. “It’s so strange because the culture is so different in Japan compared to the States, but you don’t feel the culture shock until you’ve lived here for a while. For a foreigner who can speak English, Japan is a paradise. Work is easy to find, pays well, and you get a lot of paid holidays. The food is delicious and healthy, the people are beautiful and generally very mild tempered and nice, and the Japanese are very hospitable. After you have lived here for a while though, you start to realize the big differences that you can’t see until you start to understand the culture. And the differences are so vague and difficult to describe it would take me ages to go into details (laughs). The hardest thing about living here is holding back. I’m a very open and direct person and I like to express my feelings, but the Japanese are intimidated by bluntness and I tend to be too forward and scare them off (laughs). But, they like to see that side of me when I’m on stage so it’s a good thing sometimes, too.”Go to this location for the complete story. Click here for Reflections audio samples
