Apocalyptic hardcore icons Integrity roared back earlier this year with their 12th studio album Howling, for the Nightmare Shall Consume. One of the album's highlights is "Burning Beneath the Devils Cross," a feverish ripper powered almost single-handedly by guitarist Domenic Romeo's thunderstruck riffs, which includes a solo he thought up on the spot.
Today, the band has teamed up with Revolver to unveil the track's playthrough visual, featuring an up-close-and-personal encounter with the axeman himself. Although Romeo doesn't reveal any secrets or offer any specific lessons, eagle-eyed viewers will surely benefit from the video's tight camera angles, which capture every chugging power chord and solo note coaxed from his B.C. Rich in perfect detail. Check it out now.
"'Burning Beneath the Devils Cross' was the last song to come together while writing for the Howling LP," Romeo explains. "I was on a bender listening to Alessandroni's Il Tempo Dello Spirito album over and over again, and feeling totally inspired. That record consists of mostly church organs and choirs, and it just took me to a time and place where as a young child I was terrified and mystified by religion. My grandparents were old-school Italian Catholics and would often tell me stories of religious festivals, spirits and demons that filled my mind with awe and wonder that continues to this very day."
"So anyways," he continues, "I spent a good week listening to nothing but this Alessandroni LP, and I woke up randomly in the middle of the night. I got out of bed and went downstairs to my home studio and ran the album through the studio monitors and just played whatever spontaneous ideas came to me over it and into a tape recorder." By the next morning, he says, the song was complete, perhaps owed to some supernatural help. "I like to think that I was visited by the spirits of my grandparents that night, and their presence was channeled into everything that ended up on that tape," says Romeo.
