American Head Charge 'The Feeding' album

The members of American Head Charge slam home their unique brand of maniacally heavy music with a fury you can't deny.

They make music as if their very lives depended on it, which indeed they do. Ask main-men Chad Hanks (guitar) and Martin Cock (vocals) what drives them to make sounds this impossibly raw and intense and the answer is simple: "If we weren't doing this, we'd be dead."

The brazen and relentless all-out emotion of American Head Charge may be extreme, but it comes from a real commitment to a hard-earned, last-ditch choice: Chad and Martin met by chance (or fate, as they both say) at a treatment/rehab center in Minneapolis where they wrote their first song together, a project required of Chad in order to secure his release. While living in Los Angeles (he grew up in Hollywood), Chad had been in various bands, ranging from glam/metal to Ministry/Killing Joke-influenced industrial metal, and had reached the desperate point of selling all of his gear to feed his various vampire-like vices.

Growing up in Washington, DC, and the San Francisco Bay area, Martin had started early down the same hard road, eventually dropping out of high school while living in Baltimore, where an "intervention" saved his life. That act (performed apparently by the same once-famous rock musician who had also, completely by coincidence, intervened on Chad's behalf) led Martin to that rehab in Minneapolis where he met his future bandmate. Martin had been playing guitar and singing since an early age but never had the confidence to use his talent until he met Chad (whom he thanks in the album's credits for showing him his self-potential). Following their release, bonded and determined, the pair threw their entire lives' energies into working on American Head Charge. Seizing the moment, they raised themselves out of their own personal hells and devoted themselves to creating a band with born of the raging instinct to survive--all the ingredients of a real American success story.

"Most singers are pretty much leashed to one way of doing things," says Martin. "They stay in the same tonality. I want to always expand, always push myself into someplace new." This statement applies not only to the amazing vocabulary of his voice, but equally to American Head Charge's sound as a whole. "Each of us is very much his own person, but we're really like a disciplined military unit when we play. Total catharsis." says Chad.

They attack their music "leveling everything in sight," as Chad says--with the power of someone fighting for his life or sanity. American Head Charge is in it for the long run, and, judging by the fanatical, near-religious fury with which they throw themselves into their sound, there's absolutely no stopping them.

American Head Charge has toured the globe with the likes of, System of a Down, Slipknot, Rammstein, Mudvayne, Slayer, Marilyn Manson, Ozzfest, Pledge of Allegiance Tour, and many others.

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American Head Charge - The Feeding