The Black Dahlia Murder Reportedly Touring Without Drummer Shannon Lucas
UPDATE, 2:30pm EST: Mystery solved! Ex-Abigail Williams Member Alan Cassidy is the New Drummer in The Black Dahlia Murder. Read all about it here.
Original Post:
The Black Dahlia Murder are currently on tour with Dethklok, Machine Head, and All That Remains, and since the tour kicked off last week, MetalSucks has received multiple e-mails from concert attendees saying that Shannon Lucas — the nineteenth best drummer in modern metal! — isn’t on the tour. It’s not presently clear if Lucas has left the band permanently or is just sitting out this tour for whatever reason.
But it’s interesting to note that this is the second time this year that the band has had a new member on tour with them without any prior announcement regarding that member: new bassist Max Lavelle made his live debut with the group in January, a full three months before it was announced that his predecessor, Ryan “Bart” Williams, would remain in the band as a writing and recording collaborator only. This is actually a clever way to transition members while avoiding any potential fan backlash — folks will see and hear the new guy before they have a chance to bitch about him, and after seeing and hearing him, they probably won’t bitch about him. And I say that as a massive Shannon Lucas fan.
To wit: here’s a brief video a reader sent us of the band performing “I Will Return” in Silver Spring, MD this past Friday night. The quality isn’t top-notch, but you can kinda see that the drummer, whomever he is, has long, blonde hair, which Lucas does not. But what’s more important is that the dude sounds like he can more than handle his shit. And since a) the group has had a gajillion other drummers already, and b) their key members — namely principal songwriter Brian Eschbach and larger-than-life frontman Trevor Strnad (to say nothing of ridiculously talented lead guitarist Ryan Knight) — are still in the group, it’s not like we need to worry about BDM’s next studio release.
We’ve requested additional info from the band’s camp and will update this story as soon as we receive a response. In the meantime, as soon as anyone else knows what the deal is, please feel free to drop us a line!
