ARMAGEDDON TRIVIA
Trivia
The debut album Crossing The Rubicon came out on different labels in Europe and Japan. As Blabbermouth records, the European release was on the now-defunct W.A.R. Records, and the Japanese one on Toy's Factory — the Japanese label that was handling Arch Enemy's records at the time. The relationship with that label would get considerably closer over the two albums that followed.
The second album, Embrace The Mystery (2000), was a record you could only buy in Japan. Blabbermouth records that it too came out on Toy's Factory and was never made available internationally. The music had moved as well: the article describes a rather melodic and traditional metal approach. A Swedish melodic metal album on sale only in Japanese shops — a situation that would hold for nearly a decade.
The third album was Japan-only as well. Of Three, released in 2002, Blabbermouth notes that it too came out exclusively in Japan. As the title suggests the band was a trio: Christopher Amott handled all the vocals as well as the guitar, Daniel Erlandsson played drums, and Tobias Gustafsson of Eucharist came in on bass. Three albums into its existence, none of the band's records had been released outside Japan.
Armageddon began in 1997 in Halmstad, Sweden, as a studio project rather than a live band. At the centre of it was Christopher Amott, guitarist in Arch Enemy. As Blabbermouth records, it was launched as a melodic death metal act, and the debut album Crossing The Rubicon was a concept record with a science-fiction theme. Halmstad is also the town Arch Enemy came out of.
Christopher Amott did not start Armageddon because he wanted to play a different genre. As Blabbermouth tells it, he began his career in 1995 as a founding creative force and guitarist in Arch Enemy, and after that early success he wanted to express himself on a personal level within the same genre. That is when he started writing albums under the name Armageddon. Over the next few years, as Arch Enemy grew into an internationally recognised act, he wrote and recorded three of them.
Two of the musicians on Crossing The Rubicon went straight on into Arch Enemy. Blabbermouth names them as drummer Peter Wildoer (Darkane, Majestic, later also Pestilence) and bassist Martin Bengtsson, who both joined Arch Enemy and recorded, released and toured that band's 1998 album Stigmata. The younger brother's side project had, in effect, assembled the older brother's next line-up first.
The only place Armageddon ever played in front of an audience was Japan. Blabbermouth records that after Embrace The Mystery came out, the band supported In Flames and The Haunted on a Japanese tour — and that as of the time the article was written, in 2009, those remained the band's only live performances. A project that had started in a studio got on stage exactly once, and it happened in Japan.
The third album is where Christopher Amott first sang. Blabbermouth records that his own vocal stylings feature on the last of the Armageddon albums, that this was his first foray into singing, and that it was a spark of inspiration for his later musical ventures. A record sold only in Japan turns out to be documented as a turning point in his career.
The two Japan-only albums finally left the country in 2009. Blabbermouth reports that Embrace The Mystery and Three were packaged together as the double CD Embrace The Mystery & Three, released on 16 November 2009 in Europe and 26 January 2010 in North America through Century Media Records. The artwork was a revamped version of the original Embrace The Mystery cover by Niklas Sundin, known for sleeves for Dark Tranquillity, Arch Enemy and In Flames. The six bonus tracks were demos and rehearsal recordings plus covers of Iron Maiden and Mercyful Fate, with liner notes written by Amott himself — twenty-six tracks and over a hundred minutes in total.
On 5 March 2012, Christopher Amott announced he was leaving Arch Enemy. He was doing it to pursue his solo career, his statement said, and he would go on being very active in music across all kinds of styles — which did not rule out metal. The band said there was no drama behind the scenes and named American guitarist Nick Cordle of Arsis as his replacement; his brother Michael Amott described Cordle as his first choice, ticking the right boxes for musicality and technique as well as personality and dedication. Two years after that departure, Armageddon stirred for the first time in over a decade.
When Armageddon stirred again in 2014, the base was not Sweden but New York City. As Blabbermouth put it, the band had begun in Sweden in 1997 as a studio project, followed it with two more albums in 2000 and 2002 under different line-ups and in different musical directions, and had Amott as its only remaining original member. This time it came back as a band of players based in New York. The announcement arrived with a lyric video for the album's title track, Captivity & Devourment.
The 2014 Armageddon line-up contained a musician who would later join Arch Enemy. Blabbermouth lists Matt Hallquist on lead vocals, Christopher Amott on guitar and clean vocals, Joey Concepcion on guitar, Sara Claudius on bass and Márton Veress on drums. That Joey Concepcion became Arch Enemy's guitarist at the end of 2023, replacing Jeff Loomis. Musicians moving between the two Amott brothers' bands is a pattern that goes back to Armageddon's first album — and here it repeated itself nearly twenty years on.
The cover of Captivity & Devourment is an oil painting. Blabbermouth records that the artist, Paolo Girardi, made it after reading the album's lyrics and the story written by the band's bassist, Claudius, and painted the scene of total destruction the album describes. The band explained the choice bluntly: they strictly did not want the uninspired digital photoshop album art that is so prevalent these days. This, they said, is a hand-painted vision by a man inspired by the music.
The cast on Embrace The Mystery was formidable. Blabbermouth lists Rickard Bengtsson of Last Tribe on vocals; Dick Lövgren on bass — later a member of Meshuggah, and before that a touring bassist for Eucharist, Arch Enemy and In Flames — and Arch Enemy's Daniel Erlandsson on drums, himself previously active in Eucharist and In Flames and later a member of the reunited Carcass. A cross-section of the Swedish scene on a single record.
Christopher Amott issued a comment of his own for the 2009 international release. He called it a great pleasure to be putting the two albums out in Europe and the US for the first time, and suggested that anyone who likes melodic hard rock and shred guitar should hear them: both records, he said, are full of strong instrumental performances and epic songs. He had recorded them in 2000 and 2002 and put a lot of work into them at the time, and was glad to see them come out.
On 6 October 2014, Armageddon announced a deal with the French label Listenable Records, with the fourth album Captivity & Devourment set for 26 January 2015. Christopher Amott said he and label head Laurent Merle went back a long way and that he was looking forward to working with him and his staff to make Armageddon the best it could be. It was the first time since the 1997 debut that the band would release new music through an international label.
Captivity & Devourment was mixed by Fredrik Larnemo at Studio Recordia and mastered at Stockholm Mastering. It runs to ten songs, described by Blabbermouth as heavy, melodic, technical and groovy — creative metal songwriting. The band's base had moved to New York, but the finishing of the record still happened in Sweden.
Between finishing the album and touring America, Armageddon changed singers. Blabbermouth reports that Matt Hallquist, who sang on the record, left in December 2014 for personal reasons. The man who fronted the band on the US tour that began in February 2015 was Antony Hämäläinen of Nightrage, Nervosia and Meridian Dawn, and on 6 March that year he joined as a full member. He brings great energy to the band, on stage and off, was how they put it.
Antony Hämäläinen had been working on both sides of the Atlantic long before he joined. Blabbermouth records that from the early 1990s he played bass and drums and sang for several bands in the USA and Finland, providing vocals for the Arizona death metal band Slaves For Scores and then joining Nightrage in 2007. A Swedish band reassembled in New York, fronted by a Finn: by its fourth album, Armageddon was a different proposition even in terms of where its members came from.
The reactivated Armageddon actually played live. Blabbermouth's October 2014 report carried fan-filmed footage of the band performing Equalizer at The Hub in Island Park, New York, on 6 September that year. A band whose only live appearances as of 2009 had been a Japanese tour was now playing in America, nearly fifteen years later. A US tour followed in February 2015, taking in Revere, Massachusetts and Portland, Maine among other stops.
From around 2008, Christopher Amott began writing songs with a different atmosphere. As Blabbermouth describes it, his guitar playing turned away from technical ecstasy towards a chord-based blues rock ambience, used as a foundation for more prominent vocal and lyrical ideas. What came out of it was Follow Your Heart, the solo album he released under his own name in 2010. The starting point of that line is the singing he first did on Armageddon's third album.
Christopher Amott's range kept widening. In February 2020, Blabbermouth reported the release of his synthwave album Electric Twilight. He had worked on it on and off for a few years, producing most of it at his home studio in New York with additional recording in Sweden, and playing every instrument and singing everything himself. Three of the tracks — Agenda, Symphony Of Home and Stellar Paths — were written with his brother Michael Amott. The same article describes him at that point as a former Arch Enemy and current Dark Tranquillity guitarist.
2012 was not the first time Christopher Amott left Arch Enemy. Speaking to the band's official fan club in February 2006 about an earlier departure, he said he had stopped feeling creative musically and stopped having fun. Arch Enemy is a hard-working band and touring is great, he said — but there is no point if you are not enjoying the shows. Asked whether he regretted the decision, his answer was no. He also said he considered Arch Enemy one of the top five metal bands in the world and was proud to have been part of it, and that since he had drifted away from that kind of music it was better for everyone that he did his own thing.