MENDEED - UK

This War Will Last Forever - 2006 - Rising
The Dead Live By Love - 2007 - Nuclear Blast

Mendeed image
  
 
Members
Vocals
DAVE PROCTOR

Guitar
STEPH GILDEA - STEVEN NIXON>>Anterior


Bass
CHRIS LAVERY

Drum
Madman Is Absolute>>KEVIN MATHEWS>>Madman Is Absolute





History & Biography
The metal scene has become more manly in recent years what with bands like Mendeed, Man Of The Hour, Man Must Die and the like. Let’s not forget Madman Is Absolute. Mendeed professed to metal and exercised metalcore up in Scotland from 2000 to 2007. Schoolmates Chris, Dave and Steph from outside Glasgow formed the band. In this time, the band issued two albums on Nuclear Blast Records (one being a re-release with new artwork), which was eager to jump on the bandwagon of the time.

Following two demos, the band had issued an EP on Casket Records called Killing Something Beautiful. Then came the From Shadows Came Darkness EP on Rising Records, which featured female vocals courtesy of Sarah Jezebel Deva, which had worked with Cradle of Filth as well. The band has earlier opened for Cradle Of Filth. Karl Groom of Threshold had produced The Dead Live By Love.

The group split up in September of 2007 due to "irreconcilable difference with our manager." Nixon quickly joined Welsh band Anterior. Rising Records issued a sampler of the band called Shadows War Love posthumously.


Reviews

MENDEED - THIS WAR WILL LAST FOREVER - NUCLEAR BLAST  
First, Mendeed’s This War Will Last Forever was issued a year earlier through Rising Records with a better cover minus two songs on the Nuclear Blast Records’ edition. As if indicating its going corporate this edition features the band in suit and tie, versus the original fantastic drawing.
This War Will Last Forever begins (and ends) with bagpipes in order to emphasize the band’s Scottish origin. OK. The rest of the album is a veritable metalcore salad complete with every single stereotype of that genre. Screamed vocals, Pantera vocals, growls, clean singing, gang chants, keyboard cameo appearances, ridiculously powerless bass drums, Iron Maiden riffs and solo galore and more. If one gets the feeling that it has all been done before to death, one would be accurate. It is too bad the guitar soloist does not apply his talents in a real metal band for he occasionally whips up good leads that could be on a NWOBHM record.
Unfortunately, Nuclear Blast is late to the trend. Why not stick with Soilwork? Sure, diehard fans of All That Remains, As I Lay Dying, Avenged Sevenfold and Trivium will find this cool, but everyone else will visit a psychologist seeking an explanation for the persistent feeling of déjà vu. - Anna Tergel

MENDEED - THE DEAD LIVE BY LOVE - NUCLEAR BLAST  
Could somebody please trademark the phrase 'heavy metal' so every commercial label and crackpot scenester wouldn’t expropriate it for its own diluted, watered down and subversive ways? Mendeed, is indeed a pop band bastardizing heavy metal to the tune of poppy shleck. As if seeing the band’s Soilwork cover artwork did not suffice, the songs are cutesy, sterile and above all toothless odes to the power of imagination. How else would five kids-too-young-to-know-any-better consider themselves metal? Thirty points for the necrophiliac title! - Ali “The Metallian”


Interviews







Mendeed