E-Mail This Article to a Friend Oncoming storms Changes in the Explosion; Cave In side projects; plus Unearth, the Red Chord, and the Lot Six BY CHRIS RUCKER

When the Explosion hit Axis this week, opening for Rise Against, they’ll be without long-time guitarist Sam Cave — who, not for the first time, has quit the band. According to a post by bassist Damian Genuardi on the Explosion’s Web site, "there aren’t any hard feelings or bad vibes, though." He added that Cave "let us know a while ago that his heart just wasn’t in it anymore and that he’d like to pursue other things." Cave, who was the band’s chief songwriter, is being replaced on tour by Chris Gonzales of the Jersey hardcore band Let It Burn.

Metal Blade is beginning to amass a sizable New England roster, with Unearth and Beyond the Embrace, and now the label is getting ready to give a big push to Massachusetts maximum-assault-metal band the Red Chord. Consistently one of Boston’s most underrated underground acts, the band begins recording an album titled Clients with Mass metal godfather Zeuss (Shadows Fall, God Forbid, Hatebreed) this month at the producer’s Planet Z studio in Hadley. "We’re still a grind/hardcore/death-metal band," reports frontman Guy Kozowyk, "but I’d like to think this record is a more mature progression of what we were doing before." And with Clients, Kozowyk says, he’s attempting "something thematically different": a series of loosely linked narratives about the customers who visit a single store, with a "heavy focus on people with mental disorders and the idea of these characters’ fall from grace" over time. "Essentially, the idea is that there are so many people we encounter in our day-to-day lives who are bizarre in some way," he says. "Personally, I can’t help but wonder what they do in their spare time, just how they got this far, and how they got to be the way they are. Each song tells a story about a different experience in their life, but my writing style is pretty schizophrenic, and in the course of one song the story can be told from the point of the character firsthand, an outsider, and something inanimate like a vodka bottle." Look for Clients to surface in mid May. And in one other bit of Metal Blade news: if you happen to be in Canada next week, the aforementioned Unearth are on tour up there, opening for two Grammy-nominated bands (Killswitch Engage and Slipknot) while prepping for a re-release of their Metal Blade breakthrough, The Oncoming Storm. The disc is set to be issued March 8 with bonus tracks.

With Cave In on hiatus until sometime in the spring, frontman Stephen Brodsky is working on no fewer than three other albums. This month, the members of Cave In and Converge are re-convening at Kurt Ballou’s God City studios to finish up the first recordings by their godly Verge-In supergroup, an outgrowth of their co-headlining tour last fall. They already have five tunes in the can "with the proper concoction of foreign influences," Brodsky says, "such as Salem’s ghostly spirits and dusty vintage heavy-metal bargain-bin gems." Brodsky also plays with his old roommate (and Eulcid frontman) Mike Law in New Idea Society; the band has a long-delayed album, You Are Awake or Asleep, coming out January 25 on Magic Bullet (a label that’s also released Brodsky’s solo albums and a few great Cave In rarities). Though the material is nearly two years old, Law plans to tour both solo and with a band in the next few months, including some dates with Brodsky. And Brodsky has finally begun hunkering down on a new solo album. "I’ve had Kevin Shurtleff from Scissorfight play drums on the recordings of three songs," Brodsky says, "and his performances alone have sent a wildfire of excitement through my veins." He’s also putting together a band "to embellish what Adam [McGrath] from Cave In has described as being ‘kind of like Syd Barrett creating music for classic eight-bit video games.’ " A couple of recent Brodsky tracks have begun leaking onto the Web recently: search for "Kid Defender" on your local P2P network and you won’t be disappointed. As for Cave In, Brodsky says the band is only two or three songs away from finishing writing its next album.

In case you haven’t been downloading tracks from the Lot Six’s amazing new eight-song Get Baked on Youth Kulture from their myspace site, the EP is getting a vinyl-only release in 2005 on NYC’s Plastic Records (home also to discs by Comets on Fire and Major Stars). "We already have plans to hit the road as early as February and we plan to stay out for most of the year in the US and hopefully abroad," says TL6’s Dave Vicini. And while the band isn’t planning another album until 2006, he notes that "in typical TL6 fashion, I’m sure we will be releasing a bunch of one-off, highly collectible, totally pretentious, hard-to-find music. And by the way, [to] whoever is bootlegging us in Australia, you’re fucking dead!"

Chris Rucker is the host of New England Product, Sundays from 9 to 10 p.m. on WFNX 101.7 FM.