Katorz

Katorz came out on 25 July 2006 on The End Records in America, with Nuclear Blast issuing the European edition on 28 July and Victor Entertainment the Japanese one as VICP-63447. Demos had been made, but in August 2005, before proper recording could begin, guitarist Denis "Piggy" D'Amour died of colon cancer. The guitar and bass were already recorded, on Piggy's own Mac at Newsted's house in California. On the Pro Tools discs he sent the band he had written "Katorz", a phonetic spelling of quatorze, French for fourteen. That became the title. After his death Away and Snake put drums and vocals over those tracks. Glen Robinson produced it with the band and Howie Weinberg mastered it; Ramachandra Borcar plays on the interludes. Ten songs run to forty-five minutes, shorter and more direct than anything the band had made, with almost no ornament. The ninth, "The X-Stream", was included in the video game Guitar Hero II. Several Spotify entities exist for this album and none of them plays in this territory, so this page shows the sleeve instead of a player.