Shotgun Messiah started out as a somewhat run-of-the-mill 80’s glam metal band. The Swedish band spent their first album mining the vein of Hanoi Rocks with some degree of success owing to moderate rotation on MTV. The band’s original singer split after the first album and bassist Tim Skold took over the lead vocal duties for their 1991 album Second Coming. The album was a fairly large success thanks to the heavy rotation of the anthemic hit single, “Heartbreak Boulevard.” However, the success would be short lived, as internal friction left only Skold and guitarist Harry Cody standing to make the band’s third and final record, 1993’s absolutely brilliant, groundbreaking, and ahead of its time Violent New Breed. The record saw the band completely abandon glam rock in favor of a souped up industrial metal hybrid. It managed to simultaneously alienate the band’s core following and be completely overlooked by its intended audience due to the band’s previous affiliation with hair metal, which was by then a huge taboo.

Never the less, Violent New Breed is an overlooked masterpiece that deserves to be heard by a new generation. Harry Cody went on to work with numerous artists, including Tom Waits. Tim Skold has had a great deal of success in the industrial rock genre that he helped proliferate with Violent New Breed. His solo albums under the name Skold and his work with KMFDM are required listening for students of the form. He was also, for a time, a member of Marilyn Manson as both a bassist and guitarist.

Here below is the audio for the blistering closing track of Violent New Breed, “I Come In Peace.”

X-Men fans united on last weekend for the Marvel Comics X-Men panel at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con, where the comics company discussed what will happen in the X-Men titles in the next few months.

Of course being that Second Coming just finished, the consequences of the event were discussed as well as the upcoming event Curse of the Mutants and a little bit of what is involved in this event.

The biggest thing that Marvel wanted to talk about was the reboot of all the Wolverine family books. Wolverine is starting over at issue #1 and the Wolverine Weapon X writer Jason Aaron will be writing it. Oh I know what you’re going to say, what is happening to Daken? Well, don’t worry, Dark Wolverine will be a separate series starting over at #1 as well. X-23 will also start a new ongoing series as well which has only been miniseries thus far and Marjorie Liu will be working on it as well.

Marvel has just released a teaser for the upcoming X-Men storyline, ‘Second Coming.’

Check it out here at right (click for larger, full view).

The image features X-Men leader Cyclops standing over an open grave and cryptically reads “One Will Die…An X-Man will fall in Second Coming.”

The image intrigues me, but we won’t know anything for sure until March when ‘Second Coming’ begins.