LICK THE BLADE Debut To Receive U.S. Release

Cleveland traditional, classic metal band LICK THE BLADE will release its debut album, "Graveyard Of Empires", this month via Auburn Records. The CD was recorded at Noise Floor Studios in Cleveland with engineer Mark Klein (BREAKER). Cover art was designed by German artist Frank Fiedler.

"Graveyard Of Empires" track listing:

01. Prelude To War
02. Thanatos
03. Royal Blood
04. Resistance, Rebellion, And Death
05. Graveyard Of Empires
06. From Pandemonium To Chaos
07. Red Warning
08. Sea Of Apathy
09. Voyage Of The Damned
10. Rex Mundi
11. Stalker
12. Lick The Blade

"Graveyard Of Empires" is available in the U.S. through Century Media, The End Records, Sentinel Steel, Amazon and CD Baby.

"MAIDEN, PRIEST and you could throw in RUNNING WILD and MERCYFUL FATE in there too," says guitarist Tom Mowcomber, when asked whose fans might also get into LICK THE BLADE. "We don't want anything modern in our sound. We love classic metal! Even the bands that are doing classic metal seem to throw in this modern stuff, or things from other genres. We just want to do 100% pure classic metal, for people that want to hear that."

LICK THE BLADE performed this past July at the sold-out 2009 Headbangers Open Air festival in Brande-Hörnerkirchen, Germany as part of a special Auburn Records 25th-anniversary celebration. At the end of their regular set, the band was joined on stage by members of DESTRUCTOR, BREAKER and ETERNAL REIGN to perform past classic songs from the Auburn catalog.

The band appears on recent compilation CDs from Germany's Heavy and Poland's Hard Rocker magazines and is quickly establishing a strong underground overseas fan base. They were also featured in the November 4 issue of Cleveland Scene magazine with a full story written by legendary Cleveland rock journalist Anastasia Pantsios.

LICK THE BLADE is:

Tom Mowcomber – guitar
Brian French – guitar
Ted Anderson – vocals
Mike Kurtz – bass
Greg Behnke – drums

Mowcomber recants the story on how the band came up with their rather unique and unusual name: "Our old guitarist, and I were watching the original Halloween one night with some friends. We were partying pretty hard that night, and after watching the movie, we had the bright idea of using a butcher knife to stab the hell out of a watermelon that we had just cut open and filled with booze. At some point during all of that chaos, a friend of mine took one of his stabs at the watermelon and licked the guts off, after retracting the blade, and suggested that LICK THE BLADE would be a great band name. And thus, the name was born. The name referred to licking the blood off of a knife... nothing more, nothing less. I think the name really does a good job of representing the aggressive, relentless, powerful nature of heavy metal. Although, the story of its development is quite ridiculous!"

The "Graveyard Of Empires" album was made available overseas this past summer. In celebration of the CD's U.S. release, LICK THE BLADE will host an official CD-release party on Sunday, November 8, 2009 at the Hi-Fi Concert Club in Cleveland. VENOMIN JAMES, SHADES OF REMEMBRANCE, THREEFOLD LAW and Chicago cellist HELEN MONEY open. The show starts at 7:00 p.m. Admission is only $5. Germany's Daniela Vogel, who is visiting Cleveland for the first time, will be the guest MC for the evening.