Conducting From The Grave and With Passion merge

With Passion has added no less than three new members, essentially merging with Sacremento act Conducting From The Grave. Guitarist Jeff Morgan, formerly with Conducting From The Grave gives this update...

"The three remaining members of Conducting From The Grave (John, Greg, and myself) have joined local Sacramento band With Passion on Earache Records. We have spent the last couple months preparing for tour and writing new material with the two remaining With Passion members, Shaun and Mike (Shaun is now on vocals instead of guitar).

All of the official news should be posted within the next week through With Passion's myspace and website. This includes 2 NEW SONGS, new promo pics, and tour dates. We are scheduled to hit the road in a few weeks with Nile, Hypocrisy, Soilent Green, Decapitated, and Raging Speedhorn.

We will be playing two more shows as Conducting From The Grave with most recent vocalist Drew Winter. These may possibly be your last two opportunities to see us as Conducting From The Grave, although when we play as With Passion we may throw some songs from our Trials of the Forsaken EP into the set."

The dates for the final two Conducting From The Grave appearances are as follows:

Dec. 30, 05 @ Club Retro, Orangevale, CA
Jan. 4, 06 @ The Boardwalk, Orangevale, CA

Meanwhile, guitarist John Abernathy had the following to say about the new union...

"We aren't breaking up if you really think about it, its more of a name change. Some of you have expressed dissapointment over us three remaining members joining up with With Passion, but it truly is for the better. Greg Jeff and I are the founding members of CFTG so obviously the new With Passion songs are going to sound very similar to what we were writing, only way crazier because we have advanced as musicians in the almost 2 years since writing the songs on Trials of the Forsaken. Shaun Gier (guitarist of With Passion) was originally our vocalist and wrote 90 percent of the lyrics and vocal phrasing on Trials of the Forsaken, so the vocals will still be very similar as well. Plus we still use some riffs he writes in our new songs even though he is no longer on guitar. It makes perfect sense: CFTG needed a bassist and singer, With Passion needed drums and guitar. Tryouts were not going well for either band, so since we were already great friends with them we met up and decided it would be in the best interest of everyone if we merged together so we could have a full line up of good friends instead of having to keep trying out strangers. So for the last two months we've been hard at work learning the songs on With Passion's EP "In the Midst of Bloodied Soil" and teaching Mike how to play some of the songs on our CD so we can throw them in our set at With Passion shows from time to time :-) Plus we have been hard at work writing new songs, two of which we recently recorded demos of and will be online in the next few days.

Hopefully that clears everything up so everyone will be as stoked as we are about our current situation. Look out for the new demo songs to be online on With Passion's myspace soon, as well as new promo pics of the new line up, full information on our tour with Nile and Hypocrisy during January/February, and also be ready for a debut With Passion full length that should be ready to hit stores on Earache records sometime during fall of next year.

Conducting From The Grave released their debut, "Trials Of The Forsaken" in April 2005.