Armored Saint Reluctant to Hit the Road for Comeback Tour

The new Armored Saint album, 'La Raza' may be Spanish for 'The Race,' but the band members -- vocalist John Bush, guitarists Jeff Duncan and Phil Sandoval, bassist Joey Vera and drummer Gonzalo 'Gonzo' Sandoval sure took their sweet time writing and recording the album. Fortunately, the wait was worth the while. The disc, the band's first album since 2000's 'Revelation' is a turbo-fueled torrent of classic metal that takes corners like a NASCAR racer and leaves the scenery behind in a multicolored blur.

As energetic and kinetic as songs like 'Loose Cannon,' and 'Get Off the Fence' are, the entire album was almost an afterthought. And while 'La Raza' lights a fire under the breakdowns of all the bands who are trying to be contemporary, it's not a record that comes from any desire to influence anyone and change anything, but just from the need to rock out and feel good doing it.

"We are not setting out to reclaim our career or trying to rekindle anything from the past," bassist Joey Vera told Noisecreep. "It's kind of like we got together to make this record. It's here and we're done, and it's a great representation of where we are now, 10 years later than the last one we did. It's a bit of a strange thing with this band. We stopped working as a regular band, making and album and then going on tour, writing another album, touring and doing it all over again -- we pretty much stopped doing that with [1991's] 'Symbol of Salvation.'"

In other words, don't look for Armored Saint to be getting in the van and blazing trails across the country in order to win over followers in small rock clubs across the nation. They've been there and done that. They're 19 years older now, they've got houses and families and other commitments.

"It's funny because it's not even so much a question of are we able to tour," Vera said. "Believe it or not, it's a question of do we really want to tour? And we're very reluctant to just say yes to that. And the reason is, we're not a band like Metallica where we can go away for 10 years and come back and make a record and go on tour and everything will be find and dandy. We would have to be involved in another tour as an opening band for a decent amount of people.

"We don't have that much desire to get on a tour bus and spend loads of money driving around playing to good crowds in big cities, but playing to 100 people in all the cities in between. That is just not that appealing to us, having already done that for so many years. It's not as easy as it was when we were in our 20s. It doesn't mean we don't want to go play shows. We enjoy playing onstage, but when it comes to the idea of doing a huge tour, for a band like us which, for all intents and purposes, almost abandoned our career 10 years ago, it's hard for us to get back up and go back and do it all over again."