The single is available here and you can check out the video here at RAMzine.

One of Ontario’s most successful musical exports, Mark ‘Kaz’ Kasprzyk, is no stranger to comebacks. With over two decades spent slugging it out in trenches, refining, reinventing and rtuning his craft, the Los Angeles transplant now arrives with In Our Blood — the latest full-length outing released through his riff-powered band alter ego, Redlight King. 

Born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario — a hardened Canadian steel town tucked away at the far western corner of Lake Ontario. His father taught vocational school and his mother was a registered nurse. “I grew up in that era where everything was tough,” he explained. “You had to work hard to get by, people argued and screamed and swearing was the thing. Ha, ha. It was blue collar as hell!” As young men in clustered cities are wont to do, fighting was very much a part of Hamilton’s culture and he proved himself uncommonly gifted in that regard. So much so that he went on to study judo at an early age, ultimately winning medals for Canada in both the Pan American games and the Commonwealth games. He spent four years on the national team, and would have had a shot at making the 2000 Olympics but Canada didn’t send any fighters in his weight class. 

Beyond his enduring commitment to sport, in his late-teens, Kasprzyk channelled his energies into his first band, a scrappy rap outfit called The Raccoons. While they failed to survive, the band served as a launchpad for his career and songwriting. Synthesizing his adrenalised hip hop stylings with traditional hard rock, he formed Kazzer in the late-nineties, backed by a core of versatile musicians from Hamilton’s burgeoning local scene. Kazzer fused the arresting rap brilliance of bands like A Tribe Called Quest and Lords Of The Underground with the grimy, bare-knuckled menace of AC/DC. He released a highly-acclaimed debut (Go For Broke) and scored a nomination at Canada’s 2004 Juno Awards for New Artist of the Year. 

With a steadily-growing appetite for giving voice to his modern rock inspirations, he formed Redlight King in 2008. The name refers to two of his great passions — cars and drag racing, which he explained, are family traditions. “The name Redlight King comes from my dad’s first race car,” adding, “His first real drag car was called the Redlight Bandit. I tinkered with that name at first but felt like Redlight King had more of a ring to it.” 

With long-time friend and collaborator Julian Tomarin, Kasprzyk has built Redlight King into a stridently modern rock band whose music has spent considerable time on the Billboard charts, including multiple top ten appearances. It was ‘Old Man’ — His reimagination of the enduring Neil Young classic, where he tells a story about his own father while sampling the original — that catapulted him onto the international scene. ‘Old Man’ propelled their debut into the number 3 slot on Billboard’s Heatseeker chart and paved the way for ‘Bullet In My Hand’, that peaked at number 3 on the US Mainstream chart. Redlight King would follow Something For The Pain with Irons In The Fire (2013), Helldiver EP (2015) and Moonshine (2020), both of which expanded the band’s vision, pushing the sound deep into the heart of mainstream hard rock. 

Furthering that sonic evolution, In Our Blood sees Redlight King notch soaring new highs with a clutch of revved-up, guitar powered bangers. Kasprzyk explained, “I wanted fast, heavy rock songs and I wanted it to seamlessly translate to the live show, with a full rock band — something that was well-recorded but nothing too slick or overproduced.” Mission accomplished. In Our Blood opens with the taut double-barrelled swagger of ‘Cold Killer’, showcasing the band’s serious groove rock credentials. There’s a renewed creative spark evident in the boogie-drenched intensity of tracks like ‘Raise The Dead’, and ‘Do You Wanna Live’, one of the album’s most introspective and catchiest tracks. 

What separates In Our Blood from so much of mainstream rock today is an unguarded sense of optimism. These are challenging, complex themes, yet running through all eleven tracks is a defiant undercurrent of hope. “I feel like my music has always been about telling people’s stories and saying what’s really going on from the grass roots perspective, with a bit of hope in the message,” Kasprzyk said. It comes across loudly in the title track, an absolute haymaker with mighty hooks and a towering chorus. Elsewhere, on lyrically-poignant cuts like ‘Paid Off’ and ‘Evil Lies’, he takes aim at political hypocrisy and the erosion of truth in today’s divisive landscape. For a double dose of driving riffs and searing blues rock vibes, ‘King Again’ and ‘Eye Of A Hurricane’, pair turbocharged tempos with some of the vocalist’s most personal lyrics yet. ‘Heavy Heart’, written after losing his marriage, is a captivating slice of balladry, rendered in lush melodic textures, and closer ‘My Execution’ considers the perspective of a man making his final steps towards his last moment on earth. Producing nearly all of the tracks himself, he explained that the journey of In Our Blood was more personal and challenging than anything he’d worked on before. “Being the writer and the arranger and having to get my engineering chops to a place where I could trust myself to get a take the way I needed it,” he said. “Being able to put it down and walk away from it quickly. I’m used to running my ideas by lots of people and having another producer and mixer in the room.”

The first single ‘In Our Blood’ and its accompanying video are out. Planned are more tours, television appearances and down the road, more albums. But he doesn’t want to plan too far into the future. “I’ll tell you this. I don’t know and it’s OK to not know. I spent a lot of years projecting that exact question and it’s set me up for nothing but heartbreak. So, I refuse to say that I want to be here or there, but I know that if I’m breathing, I’m making music.” 

In Our Blood can be ordered from AFM Records here.

The post Redlight King in the Eye of a Hurricane appeared first on RAMzine.

“‘Cold Killer’ is about the moment in my life when all dues have been paid, where passion and will meet with wisdom and age,” explained maniman Kaz. “It’s about taking one of my biggest and darkest character defects and flipping it on its head.  The song is about capability. There is nothing more dangerous than a man possessed. Oh, and it dances…”
 
Regarding the new album, he said: “I wanted fast, heavy rock songs and I wanted it to seamlessly translate to the live show, with a full rock band—something that was well-recorded but nothing too slick or overproduced.”

You can check out the video the single her at RAMzine and stream/buy it here.

The album was written and produced by frontman Mark ‘Kaz’ Kasprzyk at Wax Studios in Los Angeles, CA with long-time collaborator and guitarist Julian Tomarin, who also co-wrote a few tracks, alongside drummer Randy Cooke.  

AFM’s Senior A&R Director, Nils Wasko, commented on the signing, “I am thrilled that Redlight King has chosen AFM. My team and I couldn’t be more excited to work with Kaz, Julian, Brian and Mark to delight people with their authentic music and leave a footprint on the world.”

Previously the band released the title track as a single.

 “’’In Our Blood’ is not about religion or politics or money,” explained Kasprzyk about the new single. “It’s about heart. It’s about family. It’s about never giving up.  The song was first imagined by our guitarist Julian, who laid down the riff and a killer melody in the hook. It continued to build with a vengeance, so we kicked it into high gear with a four on the floor beat and a traditional rock n’ roll approach to scoring the lyrics.”
  
He continued, “For me, ‘In Our Blood’ captures the human spirit and gives a sense of hope that we can break through the generational cycles of classism set in place to divide us.  When I sing the song I think of my family, I think about my grandfather fighting in WW2, the things they went through, the sacrifices they made and that my parents made as well.  I think of my bandmates and the audience we play for.  We are all trying to make the best of this journey. We all bleed the same colour and we’re all in this together.”

Formed in Hamilton, Onatrio by Kasprzyk, Redlight King made waves in 2011 with the release of their debut album Something For The Pain on Hollywood Records that included the #3 Billboard Mainstream Rock single ‘Bullet In My Hand’ and a reimagined version of Neil Young’s ‘Old Man’ that Young approved the band to use a sample from his original song.  

Their second album, Irons In The Fire, followed in 2013 and featured the single ‘Born To Rise’ that is heard in the end title credits for the Lionsgate sports drama blockbuster Draft Day. Additional music from the band has been featured in movies and tv shows such as The Avengers, Iron Man 3, The Italian Job, FOX’s Malcolm In The Middle and CBS’ Person Of Interest in addition to being licensed across sports networks including ESPN, Nascar, NFL, CFL, NHL, NBA and MLB. 

For their third album Moonshine, the band went back to basics and recorded a very analogue traditional rock sound with songwriter and producer Jimmy Messer (Foreigner, AWOLNATION) who released it on via his independent label, Parts & Labor Records.

You can check out the video for previous single ‘In Our Blood‘ right here at RAMzine, and purchase it here.

The post Is Redlight King a Cold Killer? appeared first on RAMzine.