VOLBEAT: 'Beyond Hell/Above Heaven' Certified Gold In Germany

March 4, 2011

"Beyond Hell/Above Heaven", the latest album from Danish metal rock 'n' rollers VOLBEAT, has been certified gold by the Bundesverband Musikindustrie (BVMI) (The Federal Association of Music Industry) for sales in excess of 100,000 copies in Germany.

Commented VOLBEAT guitarist/vocalist Michael Poulsen: "Gold status in Germany sounds pretty good to me. That's a whole lotta CDs, and these days it's not an easy achievement. I'm really proud, and everyone in the band is happy about it, because particularly the German fans have supported VOLBEAT right from the beginning. Thank you people, YOU ROCK!"

In a recent interview with Christina Fuoco-Karasinski of Soundspike, Poulsen stated about "Beyond Hell/Above Heaven", "It's our new release and style-wise we're doing pretty much the same as we did on the three previous albums, flirting around with a lot of different styles. It's not easy to say what kind of style VOLBEAT actually is. You have so many different elements from punk and metal and rockabilly and country. For us, it's never been important to be 100 percent one genre or one style."

On sounding like a cross between METALLICA and ELVIS PRESLEY:

Poulsen: "Mostly my parents would play all music from the '50s. We were listening to Elvis, Johnny Cash, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, all the legendary singers from the '50s. They were listening to them all the time. All those kind of melodies, they were always spinning in my head. Even though as a teenager I was really dedicated and hooked on heavy metal, it seems like later on all the melodies form the '50s continually showed up in my mind. So, it was very natural to mix it all up."

On VOLBEAT's start on a small label:

Poulsen: "I'm happy we started on a small record label where we were able to build it up from scratch. We're a big act in Europe. We can easily pull around 10,000 people. The label said, 'There's nothing we can do for you anymore.' We definitely needed to be on a bigger label. We were [talking] with a lot of different labels and Universal came up with a really cool deal. They didn't want us to change anything. They really didn't want to be in command of anything. 'The way you do it is amazing. We're not going to touch that. You tell us what to do and we work around it.' That's the way to do it."

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