AT ALL COST’S MIKE CARRIGAN JOINS DARKEST HOUR

We’re late to the party on this one, but Darkest Hour have parted ways with guitarist Kris Norris. It’s very sad and blah blah blah and honestly, I don’t care that much. I like Darkest Hour but I’m just not emotionally involved enough in the idea of Norris remaining in the band for this to phase me the way, for example, news of Mark Morton leaving Lamb of God might.

What I do care about is that Norris’ replacement is Mike Carrigan (pictured above), a.k.a. lead guitarist for MetalSucks’ favorite underappreciated geniuses, At All Cost.

The state of At All Cost’s future has been unclear for some time now – the band is without a label, without a manager, without 2/5ths of their original line-up, and, by their own admission, not currently up to anything. I can’t imagine that Carrigan will be able to split his time between the two bands, but I also can’t imagine he’d just ditch AAC – so I take this to mean that At All Cost are officially officially done (Yes, twice as officially done as they were before.).

That’s sad, but it’s not like we didn’t see it coming – and the silver lining is that not only does Carrigan now not have to go to work at a Guitar Center or whatever, but a much wider audience will now get to appreciate his talents. And make no mistake: the guy is a killer guitar player and insanely fun to watch live.

Of course, Carrigan is gonne be “the new guy” for awhile, so I don’t know what contributions, if any, he’ll get to make to the next Darkest Hour album. But I’ll tell you one thing: Darkest Hour now have my full attention.

-AR