Riverdogs Announce New ‘California’ Album
It's taken a little time to come together, but Riverdogs are finally almost ready to deliver their long-promised next album of new material.
The band broke the news in a social media update, telling fans that a July 7 release date has been set for the new LP, titled California. As previously reported, the album continues guitarist Vivian Campbell's reunion with the group; although he left the lineup in 1992, following the release of their acclaimed but commercially underwhelming debut, he returned to the fold when the band reunited in 2003, contributing to recordings later polished up and released on 2011's World Gone Mad.
As Campbell has pointed out, the record's long gestation period was partly a byproduct of "a limited budget and time frame" that was further complicated by the band members' far-flung locations. "We literally had Monday through Friday," he recalled. "So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we jammed and we wrote six songs. And Thursday and Friday, we went into the studio and demoed them. And then a month or two later, we did the same thing."
There's also the matter of Campbell's other gigs complicating things. He'll be on the road with Def Leppard for the group's package tour with Poison and Tesla — and he's already deep into preparations for his next record with Last in Line, with an eye toward getting that record out in 2018. And while the latter band is a Dio offshoot with a harder-rocking sound than some of Campbell's other efforts, he's cautioned fans to expect plenty of noise from Riverdogs' California LP.
"I've gotta tell you, it sounds great," said Campbell. "It's a guitar-intensive record; there's a lot of guitar on that record. Ironically, there's probably even more guitar on that record than there is on the Last in Line album."
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