JazzMetal
The New Yorkers, the instrumental jazz-rock band Chris Poland and Gar Samuelson played in before joining Megadeth, are finally getting a record. Brooklyn label Psychic Reader Records releases “Low-Temperature Delay”, an LP of previously unreleased studio demos and live recordings, on 4 December. It comes with an eight-page booklet of photos and notes and a fold-out poster.
Despite the name, they were a Los Angeles band in the late seventies. Poland and Stew Samuelson played guitars, his brother Gar drums, Robertino “Pag” Pagliari bass and Don Roper horns. They were barely into their twenties. “None of us had ever seen a studio before,” Poland told Decibel, which premiered the first track, “I Only Cry For You”, on 4 November. According to Pagliari, the first session took place in a third-floor room on Hollywood Boulevard, between one and six in the morning.
With Megadeth, Poland and Samuelson recorded “Killing Is My Business… And Business Is Good!” (1985) and “Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying?” (1986), and both left in 1987.
Gar Samuelson died on 14 July 1999, aged 41. Back in 2022 Poland put it like this: “Gar and his brother Stew were the heart and soul of a heavy instrumental jazz/rock project called The New Yorkers. It was everything we could do just to keep up.”
Jim Gifford and Wesley Reno remixed the recordings at Narwhal Studios. The vinyl is $32 on the label’s Bandcamp, and the digital version $10.
Text by Aina Torrents