Its been 8 weeks since we left home. So much has changed in that time. Big companies have gone out of business, we’ve elected a great man, Barack Obama to be the first black president, gas prices have gone from over $4 (in California when we left) to $1.49 (2 days ago in Kansas city) and the leaves on the trees have all turned brown and fallen to the soil. It has truly been an amazing time to be touring this country.

For the band, this tour has been huge. Dredg has an amazing following of fans who truly love music and they actually come out early to check out the opening bands. They seem to like Judgement Day too. We’ve been playing some amazing clubs and theaters and getting great responses. One of the coolest parts about the end of the tour was that when we returned to the towns that we had played earlier in the year we actually had our own fans show up! And they brought friends! As an indepent band there’s nothing more that we could ask for. Thank you so much for spreading the word and showing your support!

For the first week after the election we played the national anthem every night to celebrate. That was fun. We restocked merch in New York which was a relief because we were almost out. The new pressing of Dark Opus looks quite a bit cooler than the old one. The jewel cases are gone and the new packaging is all made from recycled cardboard with soy ink. It was the greenest packaging that we could find.

We’ve been joining dredg on stage every night to jam on part of the set. That has been pretty interesting. We didn’t get a chance to practice with them so we kind of had to figure it out on thr fly at soundchecks (and during the first few shows!) but now we’re totally on top of it and its actually been really fun.

The biggest difference between dredg and the other bands that we’ve played with is that they are LOUD! We’re talking double guitar stacks and gigantic bass cab. Dino, their drummer, hits the skins really, really hard, like a hard-hitting drummer filled with muscle milk who just had his best friend sleep with his younger sister. It has been quite a challenge getting the strings to be loud enough to compete but when we get the mix right, when we get the strings up to the levels of the guitar on stage, it just feels amazing. You play a note and this huge, epic sound comes out. Its awesome! We’re finally starting to understand why eveyone wants to play a heavy metal solo in Guitar Hero. Playing heavy rock at giant-stack volume is probably the closest thing you can get to operating a wrecking ball or shooting a missle launcher with out actually breaking anything or blowing anything up.

The other thing that’s pretty amazing about dredg is how tight they are as a band. These guys have been together since THE EIGHTH GRADE! And they’ve been touring for 8 years. So they have their thing down. They are also open to jamming out the trippier parts of the songs, which happens to be Judgement Day’s specialty. It’s been fun. One of my favorite parts about playing with headliners is that when Judgement Day has a rough set we still have a good show.

Tonight is the last show. We are in Salt Lake City. It’s a little bit sad. We’ll miss all of the friends that we’ve made out on this road. This is not the end though. It’s the beginning.

-ap + jd

We are officially on tour with Dredg now. It is going really, really well. Its going so well that we’ve sold out of Dark Opus cds and we’ve been burning cdrs to sell until the new pressing comes in.

The first four shows were all in Florida and the weather was absolutely amazing. On our day off between Ft Lauderdale and Orlando we drove up the coast for a bit and saw some truly breath-taking scenery. I saw a dolphin jump out of the water and we saw live aligators at a miniature golf course.

We’ve been having fun staying with people and partying. Lewis has alot of friends on the east coast from his school so it’s been easier to find places to stay but we’ve also been meeting a bunch of really cool new people. Halloween was fun. Lewis was a clone trooper, Jon was an 80’s rocker and I was Sideshow Bob. If we get our hands on any photos of that stuff we’ll be sure to post them.

We had one slight mishaps on the way down to Florida which is kind of funny (at least to me since I didn’t loose anything). We have a camper shell on top of the van that we keep our clothes and sleeping stuff in and at one of our stops we forgot to close it. We didn’t realize it was open until another driver got our attention and pointed to our roof 10 MILES DOWN THE ROAD! We pulled over to the side of the highway and Lewis jumped out to see what the damage was. Two sleeping bags and two mats were gone. We decided to go back and look and we actually found Lewis’s sleeping bag on the side of the highway but that was it.

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We’ve been recording some of our shows with Jon’s minidisc and some of the recordings sound really good so we just posted a live set from our Indianapolis show as the first song on our myspace page. Check it out.

Next target: New England

Last thing – VOTE!

Anton and Judgement Day