CIRITH UNGOL - Live At The Roxy - 2LP - Black Vinyl + DVD [APR 25]

2LP - Black Vinyl + DVD. 

One of the world’s most iconic music venues—the Sunset Strip’s Roxy Theatre—hosted a legendary 2024 gig by one of the world’s most iconic metal bands—Cirith Ungol. The one-night-only performance was an album release show for the band’s 2023 Dark Parade LP. It captured the line-up at the height of its considerable powers, performing Dark Parade in its entirely, along with a set of classic songs including “Join the Legion,” “Frost and Fire,” “Black Machine” and “Atom Smasher.”  

The end result is a stellar live album and DVD, band co-founder and drummer Rob Garven saying, “I think we are playing better now than we did back in the day, circa King of the Dead. Onstage I wear in-ear monitors and have felt tears in my eyes when the music sounds so accurate to what we recorded so many years ago!” 

Cirith Ungol played the Roxy previously, on another landmark occasion: “On January 19, 1983, with Bitch, Malice and Pandemonium,” recalls Garven. “Metal Blade founder Brian Slagel may have had something to do with the show, as it was four bands from Metal Massacre 1, which was released the previous year.”

There was no choice other than the Roxy for Cirith Ungol to record this momentous live collection. “It’s owned by a Hollywood music legend, Lou Adler, and next door to the famous Rainbow Bar and Grill. It’s a landmark Hollywood club, which includes the Whisky and The Starwood (now gone) so every time we played one of these historic venues, it was a special occasion,” Garven says. “It was great to see many of our friends and fans from all over the world at the show.”

Cirith Ungol are thrilled that another Michael Whelan masterpiece, “Demonslayer” is gracing the Live at the Roxy cover. Each studio album's cover art is taken from the cover of a DAW Books edition of a book in Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné saga; the art is by Michael Whelan. The backstory on the Live at the Roxy art is classic: “Around 1984, Michael was at a fantasy convention in Los Angeles and came up to Ventura for a visit. He brought this illustration “Demonslayer” to my parent’s house, the location of our original band room, and we left it on the staircase, and went out to dinner, not knowing that someday it would grace another one of our album covers!”

The classic Cirith Ungol tracks played at the Roxy meshed perfectly with Dark Parade songs, which drew raves from the packed crowd. In writing Dark Parade’s songs, vocalist and lyricist Tim Baker recalls, “Like the best horror writers, our main goal has always been to make something totally dark and doomy all the way through -- an unrelenting journey into the particular chaos which is Cirith Ungol.” That album garnered press praise, including on that noted Dark Parade’s “enormous pieces of classic proto-metal, on par with and as vital as their early works.”

Baker’s inimitable, scorched nails-on-chalkboard voice has earmarked all of the band’s albums across the canyons of time, from their audacious 1981 debut Frost and Fire to their triumphant 2020 comeback Forever Black, which followed a 29-year-long recording hiatus. Dark Parade’s singles, including “Velocity,” offers a metallic soundtrack of societal decay and environmental collapse that foreshadows nothing less than total extinction. Despite the fantasy-inspired art on the band’s albums and their Tolkien-derived name - Cirith Ungol stopped exploring sword and sorcery-related themes in the mid-‘80s. Most of the subjects they’ve addressed since then have been far more real and frightening than any ravenous make-believe creatures fighting sword-wielding warriors. 

Cirith Ungol’s Live at the Roxy holds its own against other legendary live records. “The Who made an extremely powerful album with Live at Leeds, and my favorite band of all time, Mountain, had several pretty spectacular live albums. And 1993’s Uriah Heep Live is another outstanding live album! It’s hard to capture accurately all the sound and feeling of a live concert. I think these bands achieved that, and I think our Live at the Roxy does also.” Thrilled as they are about the Live at the Roxy double album set and DVD, Cirith Ungol is already looking forward to making a new record., as Garven concludes, “This will make fans happy until our next devastatingly heavy seventh studio LP!”

Vinyl Tracklist: 

Side A:
1. Velocity (S.E.P.) (live) 05:16
2. Relentless (live) 04:25
3. Sailor on The Seas Of Fate (live) 07:31
4. Sacrifice (live) 04:53

Side B:
5. Looking Glass (live) 04:33
6. Dark Parade (live) 06:13
7. Distant Shadows (live) 05:53
8. Down Below (live) 05:26

Side C:
9. Atom Smasher (live) 04:26
10. Frost and Fire (live) 03:47
11. Chaos Descends (live) 04:48
12. The Frost Monstreme (live) 05:24
13. Fire (live) 02:52

Side D:
17. Death of the Sun (live) 03:56
18. Master of the Pit (live) 07:25
19. King of the Dead (live) 08:19
20. Join the Legion (live) 07:04

DVD Tracklist:
1. Velocity (S.E.P.) (live) 05:16
2. Relentless (live) 04:25
3. Sailor on The Seas Of Fate (live) 07:31
4. Sacrifice (live) 04:53
5. Looking Glass (live) 04:33
6. Dark Parade (live) 06:13
7. Distant Shadows (live) 05:53
8. Down Below (live) 05:26
9. Atom Smasher (live) 04:26
10. I'm Alive (live) 05:16
11. Frost and Fire (live) 03:47
12. Black Machine (live) 04:19
13. Blood and Iron (live) 04:02
14. Chaos Descends (live) 04:48
15. The Frost Monstreme (live) 05:24
16. Fire (live) 02:52
17. Death of the Sun (live) 03:56
18. Master of the Pit (live) 07:25
19. King of the Dead (live) 08:19
20. Join the Legion (live) 07:04