World War II: Metal of Honor is the name of Steel Assassin's brand new studio album. As you might have already guessed, it is a concept album. Guitarist Kevin Curran put a lot of effort into researching the concept: I did quite a bit of reading, and did the research on selected subjects. I've always had a strong interest in World War II, and have a good collection of books on the subject. Some of the books I read were 'Guadalcanal Diary' by Richard Tregaskis and 'Four Stars of Hell' by Laurence Critchell to name a couple. World War II is such a vast topic, it is no wonder Steel Assassin had to find their own approach to the subject. Kevin explains: The angle is that we attempted to tell a few different stories and cover some of the key theaters of operation. It is so vast a subject that we couldn't possibly cover all of it. For example, we had a song called 'Exodus' about the Bataan death march, but decided that we would cover the Pacific Theater differently, with 'Guadalcanal'. We could have done three records on the subject. War and especially the second World War is also a subject which has been touched upon by a few other metal bands in the past. Iron Maiden wrote The Trooper, the whole concept of Tank is based on war-related topics and Lemmy Kilmister is a big collector of (German) war memorabilia. So Steel Assassin did not really enter uncharted waters here. Kevin Curran puts everything into perspective: Iron Maiden, Priest and Thin Lizzy have been big influences for us in the past. Although we weren't thinking of specific songs like 'The Trooper', songs like that are part of our 'metal DNA' so to speak. 'Aces high' and 'Where Eagles dare' have always been favourites of mine. Motrhead has also always been influential and inspiring for me. I'm not a collector of memorabilia like Lemmy, but collecting books on the subject is one of my interests. It is a mere coincidence that German band Accept called their new album Stalingrad (no joke!). The live show will include a German tank as a stage prop (no joke either - although it sounds a bit too Spinal Tap for me!). For bassist Phil Grasso this is a case of bad timing: That will be interesting. Hopefully we'll get this album released before theirs so people won't think we're copying them. Oddly enough our band photo for the album was taken on a tank! And, staying with the Accept connection for a second, the subtitle of Steel Assassin's new album, Metal of Honor, was also an album title by US Metal band TT Quick. Phil explains: I know it now, but we didn't at the time. Greg actually came up with the 'Metal of Honor' part. We were going to just call it 'World War II', but felt it needed a bit more. I didn't know about the TT Quick album until I saw the singer interviewed on 'That Metal Show' in America after he was named Accept's new singer. By that time we already had settled on the name for our album. And since the 'World War II' was part of the title it wasn't exactly the same. Plus I don't believe the TT Quick album's songs were military based, were they? No, they weren't! Before World War II: Metal of Honor Steel Assassin released a 7' single on High Roller Records. The title track CA-35 was supposed to be on the new album but the band decided otherwise. Phil Grasso: That's correct. Both songs on the single are 'World War II' based songs that originally we were going to put on the new record. But because we had so many other songs and they wouldn't have all fit on a single album format, we decided to keep them off the album, when we did War of the Eight Saints, that was not a consideration Speaking of War of the Eight Saints, where are the main differences between Steel Assassin's last album and World War II: Metal of Honor? Guitarist Mike Mooney knows: I guess musically there is not much of a change of direction in comparison to say 'War of the Eight Saints', or is there? Well, from our perspective, there has never been any conscious shift in direction or sound, but I think if you look objectively from our earliest recordings, all the way
