Black Earth, the band featuring original Arch Enemy guitarists Michael Amott and Christopher Amott, vocalist Johan Liiva, drummer Daniel Erlandsson and bassist Sharlee D'Angelo (who was preceded by Martin Bengtsson), have been touring Japan for a few years now performing material from the first three Arch Enemy records – Black Earth, Stigmata and Burning Bridges.
According to Michael Amott in an interview with Masa Ito's Rock TV, Black Earth is issuing a compilation of remastered tracks from those records alongside two new songs recorded with the very same lineup. Which is extremely exciting.
"Together with Trooper Entertainment, we've put together a compilation of our favorite tracks from the first, second and third album that featured these guys — with Johan and Chris and everything. And we've put together a compilation album of that '90s material. It's been remastered here in Japan. I actually attended the mastering session last week, and it sounds incredible. It really brought the old tracks… it gave them a new life. And then we actually recorded two new songs in Sweden. So we've been quite busy with that."
"It's quite complicated getting everybody together to do that. But we wrote these two new songs. I wrote one with Chris, and then I wrote one myself. They're called 'Burn On The Flame' and 'Life Infernal' — two brand new tracks that are kind of in the style of what we used to do, I think. And they turned out really amazing too. We actually went back to Fredrik Nordström's studio, Fredman, where we made the first three records. So we worked with the original producer. And he mixed it, and it sounds really powerful — very cool."
Frankly, I really hope Black Earth ends up reissuing the first three records under their new name and carries on as Black Earth. The old material is so different from the new stuff that having effectively two Arch Enemy's floating around wouldn't really cause much of a clash, and it's not like they named Black Earth something dumb like Arch Enemy A.D. or Johan Liiva's Arch Enemy. Also, Michael if you're reading this, bring Black Earth to the U.S. and make sure we get some copies of that reissue.
