LotFP: Heavy Metal

Judas Priest – Screaming for Vengeance

2009-05-27T21:57:00.002+03:00

(Columbia/Sony, 1982, 10 tracks, 38 minutes, 50 seconds)

We saw a more bone shaking metal sound begin to develop with this album and particular position into Judas Priest’s discography as they began to refine their earlier metallic forays into something more headbang worthy. This offers a brief glimpse at one of the sounds they began to develop over the course of their career and does so spectacularly.

The first thing you’ll notice about Screaming for Vengeance is that the songs sound more metallic. This is an aspect that spills nicely into the entire presentation as we can see them taking a powerful approach and they stun you multiple times with pristine production values helping things along as they go.

The chorus’ on the album are particularly catchy as they chime in your ear for long periods of time after the listening period. One can see themselves chanting “Riding on the Wind”, for example, multiple times after many listens and this can be attributed to the style the album takes which is fun, but not overly simplistic.

Yes, the dynamics of the album are still interesting as can be seen from the title track “Screaming for Vengeance”, which takes many twists and turns as it goes through its length quite effectively. There’s a certain flair to the songs which gives them a memorable quality leading to multiple listens and eventual worship of what’s on display.

In terms of placing the album in the overall flow of their discography, it’s probably my second or third favourite as Sad Wings of Destiny and Stained Class are possibly better than it, but the race is very close. It brings a more streamlined approach together than their seventies classics, but remains a very compelling release regardless.

The lyrical material of the album is interesting. There’s a flavour of wanting power and the ability to be above other things and this just adds to the metallic touch of Screaming for Vengeance quite effectively. We always feel at home to the manners that Judas Priest have of pulling you into their fierce world.

The band is just at an intense peak on Screaming for Vengeance and plays with a passion for their music that is unparalled by most of the music world. They just show their ability to make a song catchy and yet entertaining at the same time quite well on this album and makes for one of the most all around great albums in the band’s discography.

Chokehold – The Sweet Smell of Genocide

2009-03-15T22:32:00.006+02:00

(Self-Released, 2008, 9 tracks, 42 minutes, 30 seconds, by Adam McAuley)

This is a harsh platter of riffs that has a hardcore background. The band make a point of crafting the more abrasive type of metal possible within their style ranges and they crank out a hardcore approach of their own. Do the band have enough of a presence to hold their own within the metal genre, however?

A great comparison to Slayer can be made as they rummage through the soundscapes they create to form a backbone of aggression. The speed of the album can be slightly less than that of Slayer’s finest works, but manages to maintain its own regardless. Chokehold are able to copy a style to some extent, but keep theirs as well.

The ability to have a break down is present on the album to a great extent as the band are able to groove their way towards their own liking. This can be seen to run through their veins as they move along to their own riff styles quite effectively and this shows them to be quite versatile.

Thus one tries to find interest in the Slayer-like styles of the riffs and this is what turns you onto the band. They are capable of finding a distinctive voice within the genre and it has enough to turn you into a big fan. One expects a lot of a certain frequency of aggression and they tune right into what they can produce although it may not be the deepest of music possible.

The problem with Chokehold is that some people might find them to be somewhat generic sounding and repetitive. The lack of distinctive identity might make them also difficult to like as its difficult to pin down whether the band is going for a thrash style or more of a grind one overall.

This lack of an interesting tangent might make it difficult for some people to embrace them that think this might need a couple of notches of technical accompaniment to make a better work. There’s enough of a vehement approach to be found here, but a rather empty exterior makes them seem like they could hold more passion within.

If you can get past the seemingly generic exterior, than you’re left with a fun band in the form of Chokehold and they’re capable of tearing your head off with the musical meanderings they upheld. Anyone interested in an aggressive piece of music should get a lot out of The Sweet Smell of Genocide.

Ordering Information

2009-03-01T22:23:00.004+02:00

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Enslaved - Vertebrae

2009-02-26T20:25:00.003+02:00

(Nuclear Blast Records, 2008, 8 tracks, 49 minutes, 07 seconds, reviewed by Adam McAuley)

Enslaved have evolved nicely into a machine capable of churning out the most interesting of music within the metal genre these days and Vertebrae furthers the quality of their outpourings considerably. We can see a more refined progressive sound here that was started to develop around the Mardraum: Beyond the Within album and the amount of diversity they display is mesmerizing.

We have a band that can play catchy riffs as well as more mind-numbingly complex ones to great result. They show the ability to switch nicely between more mid-paced sections and faster ones here and likewise the vocals display an ability to deviate nicely between harsh and lighter ones making for an all around stellar instrumental performance.

The passages here are not longer than previous ones, but they manage to maintain their intensity throughout. This makes for a varied style that they are able to fit into parameters of their own liking. We can sense Enslaved constricting their sounds enough to fit their views, but also allowing enough room for experimentation.

The songs are excellent outpourings of musical edginess from the band who continue on their trek towards perfection. "Ground" features a catchy riff that will mesmerize your attention. The final track "The Watcher" shows a great ability to voraciously close the album. Longer tracks are present and they have a larger progression in them.

A great deal of interest is upheld by the band throughout, but is there anything they could possibly improve upon. Well, it seems they have a formula down and it would only benefit them to continue with it, but we could see a greater need for more open-ended sections blended amongst their repertoire.

How will fans of the band react on the whole to the sounds presented on the album? The progressiveness displayed on it is not up to the point of Mardraum, for example, which features slightly more experimental workings, but is rather refined to a premium that should be appreciated at this juncture of their discography.

Lyrically, the album features a very poetic like standpoint that contributes nicely to the manners that epic landscapes are described. This bodes nicely for Enslaved’s sound which is somewhat epic in scope and needs the types of lyrical swagger given to them for their progressive approaches.

Overall, Vertebrae will please people looking for a more well-rounded nature to Enslaved’s work as they excite on many levels and come across with another winner. One of the better albums of 2008 is found within the confines of Vertebrae and you owe yourself to check it out.

Forbidden - Twisted Into Form

2009-02-12T20:42:00.002+02:00

(Combat/Under One Flag, 1990, 9 tracks, 41 minutes, 9 seconds, by Adam McAuley)

After a calming acoustic intro, we are introduced to some of the finest thrash you’ll hear via acrobatic riffing that evokes the name of the album quite well. Forbidden shared a style similar to many of the 80s and early 90s thrash bands, but added a few complexities to their approach to give them their own sound. Twisted Into Form is one of the most interesting entries into the thrash genre.

It all starts with an appealing approach to riffs that makes them seem at different times distorted. The creativity present in their thrash style is evident throughout and they often use multiple layers of guitars to craft a presence all their own. We remain interested in the band because of the slightly different things they are able to bring to the thrash table.

The band usually use a rather technical approach which brings twisting riffing into their palette at all times and infrequently makes use of acoustic guitar, though they never go into ballad form frequently as earlier Metallica would, for example. Forbidden keep an edge of your seat pacing throughout most of Twisted Into Form.

Further comparing Forbidden to other bands within the genre such as early Metallica and Overkill, again, we can see that they take on their own style more and more gradually as you listen to them. The band are complex, for example, whereas Overkill can show a more aggressive side, so they’ll be suited towards certain thrash fans in particular.

Standout tracks on Twisted Into Form are difficult to come by, but we can sense the title track making a bit of a presence. It has a repeating vibe that is compelling and develops into some nice solo work which elevates it at points then finishes strongly with the occasional chant of the title making it more powerful.

The lyrics on the work display themes of perseverance towards a goal being a difficult matter, but worth pursuing. There is a conflict between things like evil making for a further need to make your persevering pay off. All of these make a splendid backdrop for the thrash attack that Forbidden push forward.

Altogether Twisted Into Form is a slight classic within the thrash genre showing enough nuances to make one fall back with splendour at the surrounding elements making such a presence towards you. It has enough chops as well to stand in the forefront of the genre as we wish there would be more thrash albums like this one these days. Overall, greatly worth picking up for metal fans.

Interview with Napalm Death from 1999

2009-02-12T10:48:00.000+02:00

Napalm Death is coming to Helsinki on Monday... so this week, I think I'll reprint my earlier Napalm Death articles. This one was printed in summer 1999 from LotFP #3:

Interview with Mark Greenway by James Edward Raggi IV [2009 note: this interview was conducted in person at the Masquerade in Atlanta, Georgia. The original file of the transcription has been lost, and this was recovered by scanning in the newsprint zine... any really weird words or errors is likely a scanning issue I didn't catch while reformatting for this post... wow, I repeated a couple things between 1999 and 2001, eh? And wow, I don't know that I'd say much of the same things that I did ten years ago...]

Napalm Death. Do you need an introduction? Here's Barney talking about everything BUT their new album, Words From the Exit Wound out on Earache...

You guys are basically the reason I'm doing this magazine, you're the reason I've got 600 CDs on the wall. Back in 1992 I wasn't really listening to music. You had Metallica's Black album, Nirvana was just hitting, it was cool, but I wasn't really into it. So here I am at my Grandmother's house watching Headbangers Ball one Saturday night, and here's Riki Rachtman with the Triple Thrash Threat...
Yeah, he's a fucking twat. huh?

First up, Megadeth's Peace Sells, pretty cool but ehhh, then Slayer's War Ensemble, oh yeah, cool. Then The World Keeps Turning off of Utopia Banished, that came on and snap, that was it for me. My life was ruined at that point. I went out and got Utopia Banished (actually my grandmother bought it for me!) and it completely blew me away as far as never hearing anything like this before! It led to me always being broke buying CDs and now publishing the magazine.
Hey, well, you manage to get shit for free, you know?

That's the tradeoff. But I do want to thank you, it was that roar that did it all.
That's alright. I appreciate the comments!

So to get the boring stuff out of the way, how's the tour going?
It's alright, man. It's been up and down, but it's been good. There's been a couple of gigs, you know, not many people showing up, but it's been OK. Surprisingly so, because the last time we came here it was a bit dead.

I remember last time you played on a Sunday...
That's right! We played in the afternoon.

Yeah, and as soon as you were wobbling off the tour bus I'm shoving CD booklets in your face to sign, like that 10 year old Benediction CD and stuff. Do you guys get a lot of those obnoxious fans that want to crawl up your butt?
Anyone into that son of stuff I don't consider obnoxious. The point of the matter is if they hadn't bought the records we wouldn't be out here, so right there you got to have gratitude.

How was the tour with Cradle of Filth and Borknagar? That was a weird bill.
It was really good! I mean, Cradle and Borknagar are probably closer to each other than they are to Napalm. It was good too, but a lot of the kids were those stereotypical black metal kids that just didn't get what Napalm was about. The link between the bands, at least us and Cradle, was that we make really fast music, you know? But ours is obviously a lot more politically charged so a lot of the kids really didn't get that part of it, especially the stuff we said between songs. Hey, you know. If you keep on preaching to the converted you're not going to get anywhere.

That's the one thing about Napalm Death. It wasn't just the fast musk, it wasn't just the roar, the lyrics really had something to say. That's why I kept with it. A lot of bands make a statement, but Napalm really has something to say. It's not just surface protestations, it's in depth... In interviews you're viewed as politically active.
I don't like the word politics. It suggests this stiginatic label that makes you sound pompous. I prefer terms like humanitarian. That's what the band is. I guess left wing, you know, but humanitarian.

What I want to do here is not have the usual on tour/music kind of interview, but maybe dig in to some recent political happenings. Maybe the people reading will get into it and exercise a little mere brainpower. It's a little bit out of date now but I've asked half the other bands in the world about it, so... what do you think about the Clinton scandals from last year?
I don't particularly like Clinton. I don't think he's an alternative to Bush or Reagan. OK, Reagan was a crazy right wing freak. But Clinton probably less so. But with all the bombings and stuff, I see him in the same light. But aside from that, that whole business was run from a lawyer, this Ken Starr guy, one of these fundamentalist, family value idiots. And if you're going to run your country on those principles then you better prepare down the line for serious military state enforcement. That's crazy, trying to change a country's system through fundamentalism like that. OK, whatever, there's the scandal and the rest of it but that sort of thing you shouldn't be giving a shit about. Let him do what he does. The man is a fool and doesn't need any help to look like a fool. Who really fucking cares that much?

The thing is, and I agree with you about Ken Starr and the people going after Clinton- look at what that whole Larry Flynt thing turned up- but at the same time, here is a man that is considered in this country at least, the leader of the free world. He doesn't seem to be anything but a real slimy kind of guy.
If you're going to fall into the trap of judging people by their sexual habit', then that's dangerous in itself, point A. Point B, I don't consider him to be the leader of the free world. Right now to enforce your ideals on a lot of countries that don't want it. That's not a free world.

It's not so much what he did, because it seems Hillary didn't care. Monica Lewinsky is milking it for all she's worth. She was out in England doing book signings. She turns up at Hollywood parties, I mean come on. My thing is he's looking straight into the red eye of the camera and straight out lying to everyone. He can't the the truth.
He's a fool! Just as much as everything as you've had before. The country really needs an alternative to the Clintons, the Reagans, and the Bushes. I follow American politics, I don't pretend to understand it. When I heard Clinton was getting elected, I thought there might some hope, you know? But after all the shit that's happened it's no better than the rest of them. What this country needs is someone to shake things up. Do something about this poverty. This glut of poverty in this country. Nobody has done anything about it. There's been all these token gestures, but nobody's really done anything in the grand scheme of things. England's the same, to a lesser degree.

Rich from Stuck Mojo thinks the welfare system isn't working as it is, but he thinks these people need to be helping themselves instead of getting the government handouts.
The point is these people living in ghettos, I've driven though them, I've never lived there so maybe I'm not one to say, but it doesn't take a fucking brain surgeon to tell that them places are pretty fucked. People purposefully want these ghettos as they are because it keeps those people away from the rest of suburban life. That is so wrong. How can these people help themselves? They're not getting any fucking help! They're getting a bit from their welfare check, but that is NOT help! You've got to put money into the fucking projects. I mean truly spend money, instead of spending money on weapon- systems and all that. I really truly believe that.

Well my point of view is, I grew up in the projects. After I left college, I was living in shitholes around Atlanta, and here are these people spending money they DO have on drugs, buying alcohol, the woman is pregnant AGAIN...
I don't think you can contain everyone with that one brush though...

Well no you can't, but there is a reason why that's the stereotype! It's not like you go in to these places and have to wonder, 'Where are all these people like that, why can't I find them?' They're all over the place! That doesn't help them when the people with the money see this...
When you're born into a shitty situation like that and you're fucking desperate, what are you going to do? I know I would given that choice. If I was starving I'd go out and deal drugs. Even with this horrid shit with kids dying from heroin, all die same, fuck. If I were in their shoes I'd be out stealing cars and all sorts.

I guess I have a different perspective because growing up my father left really early, and mother was out drinking quite often... I don't know, I don't drink, I've never had a drink in my entire life.
More power to you.

All I did with that time is read. I started getting into Tolkien, and all that, and had this whole other world there instead of just throwing my brain into oblivion. When these political conversations come up I think of what I did in that situation and wonder why there's this expectation that people in poor situations HAVE to be criminals?
Not everyone's the same. There's all sorts of good and bad. It's a diverse place. Everyone's an individual. We've all got our different aspirations, different tolerance levels, different extremes as to what we will do, or what we need to survive. It's a difficult debate. I wasn't brought up in any projects, none of us in the band were rich, but I come from a working class family. For the first few years of my life, we had a kitchen in our house in England without a roof on it! Whenever it rained it all flooded out and shit like that. Not the projects, but...

Next subject. This mess in Kosovo. What is your take on it?
It's a double edged situation. There's genocide going on, nobody denies that, and that's got to stop. That has got to fucking stop. Again, you don't solve it by throwing more bombs at it. They are bombing Belgrade. What is the fucking sense in that? It's not even happening in Belgrade! You're basically killing more people in addition to those already being killed in the genocidal situation.

I've been entailing up in Canada for awhile that's half Serbian...
I've got a Serbian friend as well.

It's interesting that there is a bunch of bullshit that's going on within that country, but at the same time do you really if the Albanians were the ones in political and military power, that the same thing wouldn't be happening the other way? We're doing the same thing we're bombing the other guys for doing!
It is a funny situation. Obviously there's ethnic cleansing going on, and thinking back to 1939 to 1945, and you know... it shouldn't be like that. Someone presented this argument that was just fucking ridiculous. The other day I heard this guy 'Well you know with the Earth's overpopulation, maybe it's a good thing. ' That's fucking stupid. Just think if it was you!

I'm thinking maybe birth control is a better way to handle over population...
Ah, birth control. IVe got a thing or two to say about that!

OK, go ahead.
I was talking to my girlfriend the other day, someone mat I just met that's really cool...

They all are, in the beginning.
I mean she's had some problems. She went to this woman's clinic and described the whole scene, with bulletproof glass and things like that. That's just fucking stupid. I've got no reasoning to give to you behind what I believe, but women should have the choices about their own fucking bodies!

I completely agree with you.
For these human life institute people to come in and start shooting doctors and bombing clinics that is just total hypocrisy over what they preach in their fundamental Christian beliefs. That is total and complete hypocrisy. They're shooting someone that was born, just a more advanced stage of who they're trying to save! It goes back to the Christian fundamentals.

I've read parts of the bible. I'm not going to say I'm an expert but I think it is a good, legitimate philosophy. When you put divinity into it and smash everyone of different beliefs, THAT'S the problem!
Two things: there's an alarming and growing movement of pro life bands in the metal movement. OK, it's an opposing viewpoint, but that's not good. Secondly, I come from a Catholic background, I do believe in God. I consider myself to be to from Catholic beliefs and I do believe in being a good person. But I don't enforce it. And the abortion issue, one of the linchpins of the Catholic religion, I totally don't agree with their stance on it. If you cant have conflicting opinions within your faith that's wrong too. Why should you agree with everything?'

There's a lot of Christians who don't even consider Catholics to be Christian.
Because they're not hardcore enough?

Because they say they worship idols, and have the Virgin Mary as a toy figure and all that... I haven't gone to church since I was three or four years old.
I've actually been. I've got to say, I've been to midnight masses, Easter vigils, and I find it really calming. A lot of it has to do with my grandfather. My grandfather was strict Catholic. Even though he really didn't give a shit about the abortion issue, he was a strict religious man. He was such a good guy. I'm not saying it's entirely due to him being Catholic, but if you could pick all the good points of the Church he was that. I miss him like fuck.

The whole idea of God to me is irrelevant As long as I try to live a good life and I don't fuck around with anyone, then when I die the God thing should take care of itself. If I die and he's sitting there 'Well you've been a good person but I wasn't in your life constantly' then what good is it?
It would be nice if at the end of everything some guy did come along and did say 'You've all been really good people lets go and enjoy ourselves for eternity. ' That would be great. But I would hope also that he wouldn't chastise the people who fucked up a couple times. It would be nice if for once we could all live together in fucking peace.

OK, third big issue I wanted to move in on. A few days ago with the school shootings in Littleton, Colorado?
Yeah, I haven't been able to hear all the details while out on the road though...

These guys were part of this...
That Trench Coat Mafia, right?

One thing everyone brings up is the gun control issue. I don't think it's the access to guns as guns have been around just as accessible for the entire life of that nation, but something is making them go off now...
If you do minimize the guns, then that threat is minimized. In England, we get robberies like anyone else, but as far as the gun stuff, nowhere near. Lets face it, if you've got a gun and you are going out to commit a crime, the odds of someone getting killed rockets up. You've got to get rid of the fucking guns. It's too far down the line, there's too many of them out there. It's too easy to get them.

I was reading through some of the old Napalm Death lyrics, and a lot of the things are very angry. If someone .whose mind isn't as settled heard some of this stuff, what if they hear one of your lyrics, think, 'Yeah, yeah, I can fight back too!' and they do something like this and some note or whatever that they wrote points to something you wrote as the trigger for doing that?
Oh man. I really can't say. All I can say is that we try as much as we can to tell people that what we're trying to do is... yes it's angry. Yes it deals with a lot of negative issues. A lot of people might find this fanciful, but the whole objective is to create a positive end result, that being a world where people can be together and enjoy themselves. A lot of political bands are these miserable fucking things, but the whole point is for people to go out and enjoy themselves. Everyone gets an equal chance. That's all I can say. And if you look at the lyrics, are they really that negative?

I don't think so! I've always found them to be positive.
Primed Time off of Fear, Emptiness, Despair, all it is about is when you walk past someone on the street, you look at them in the eyes, and people are so nervous about each other it's almost an aggressive thing. You'll pass them and never see them again. But maybe you think 'What if I got to know that person?' Try not to be negative about people that you see. It's starts off with the line 'I've walked to the ends of the Earth' or something like that.

The one song I'm thinking of for my example is Cause and Effect off of Utopia Banished. About a civilized person who just gets pushed and pushed enough to the point where they lash out.
You totally hit that right on the head. It deals with a one to one situation where you might want to fucking punch someone out. The person, well me, does actually hit the person but totally regrets it afterwards.

Well what if one of these unbalanced people sees this, thinks 'Yeah, there's nothing wrong with me and people don't leave me alone...'
Yeah, yeah.

I remember dating this one girl, her parents did not like me. I'd wear a Napalm Death shirt over to their house and I think the band is a positive thing, but they are totally freaking out. That nailed head shirt probably wasn't the best choice, but...
That one is a particular favorite amongst the parents!

Even though you know what you're saying and I'm taking it as positive, people are going to see what they want to see in there.
This kid came up to me recently, and he was a down syndrome kid. I find those people will speak the truth that regular people don't! He said to me, and I fucking laughed when he said this, he said 'I fucking love your band! My mom doesn't like you. She says you're a bunch of communists and stuff. ' That was funny, man. But we're either too evil, or too pinko. There's no middle ground. You're not allowed to be anything if you're seen as left wing socialists.

Back to the neo Nazi issue with these guys in Colorado, the first thing you hear is 'What can we do to intervene in the lives of the children? What laws can we pass to stop this?' Where is the point where it is good to be an individual, and when does that move into a situation where major intervention is needed?
You just deal with that when it comes to it. It's a matter of individual. I know that doesn't help when it comes to a law situation. But if you block out people, you're never going to understand the intricacies of people.

I know it's not practical to deal with every single human being, but what is the answer then? With the Nazi memorabilia being in their house, there's been a thing in Metal Maniacs recently about Lemmy of Motörhead's collection, what has sometimes been called a shrine to Hitler.
Yeah, yeah. It's not a shrine. He just collects the memorabilia. Lemmy is a crazy old goat. I don't consider him to be... look, I got this on my leg (A nice Motörhead tattoo!]. Lemmy just has a genuine interest in it. Of course I find the death head, the Waffen SS fucking offensive. Lemmy is by no means a Nazi or anything.

If someone has this interest, how far do you let it go and still call it an interest? When does it pass that point?
There's no straight answer to something like that. You know I'm as anti-fascist as the next, well, uh, anti fascist! An editor of a magazine should be balanced enough to respect that. He should have talked to Lemmy. Lemmy has been quoted as having said that Hitler was a fucking fool. (He's also been quoted as saying 'Hitler was the first rock star'... said to the editor!)

They had this article about fascism in music, actually you were in that article! They said they couldn't contact Lemmy. They did mention he did deny being a Nazi in the past.
Because he's not! The thing you have to watch out for is, it's a case more of the buying public... Look. If you know a label such as Resistance Records is putting out these kinds of records and you're buying their records, those dollars are going towards fascist causes.

The one right now I have problems with is No Colours. They have advertisements and reviews and interviews in Pit magazine. They have interviews with Graveland, for instance, talking about how negroes are ruining the US, and Thor's Hammer.
Yeah, talking about how the NS hordes are rising up and will take over.

I have a subscription to this magazine. It's always the same author that does these interviews and reviews. How am I supposed to feel that is has that shit in there without editorial comment?
I've done interviews with Pit magazine in fact. I didn't realize any of that. That's an issue I'll have to address. They should know not to take the dollars, don't take the fucking adverts. The buying public as well, don't buy the albums! I've got to say I've heard a lot of these albums and they are fucking crap anyway. Why anyone would want to buy it, it just shows you the brain capacity of these fucking nazi bands and their music is shit! Everyone talks about Skrewdriver being this classic band. They were fucking crap. Someone might go back and listen to From Enslavement to Obliteration, with those recording levels, you know? I was outside of the band at that time so I think I'm allowed to say From Enslavement... was a classic album! Fucking Skrewdriver 7" records are not! They're brainless pieces of sub heavy metal crap! They are! With a bit of punk thrown in!

...OK, everyone knows how you're different. But how are you similar to Barney the Big Purple Dinosaur?
Very similar! I'm a cuddly loving kind of person! Everyone sends me videos, joking around. I get videos, toys. The little boy of the girl I'm seeing when I'm on the phone she says 'It's that purple dinosaur on the phone again!' I love it. Someone talked about doing a shirt with the purple dinosaur but with my head on it!

What about Barney Rubble?
That's my nickname that's been around for years. I used to be a fucking drunk before I went sober. I used to cause all sorts of accidents when I'd fall over and shit around. I'd cause all this rubble and that's where it came from.

I remember when I first moved on to college I'd play the From Enslavement tape in my headphones as I went to sleep. One night my roommate wakes me up in the middle of the night just to ask me, 'Are you listening to running water?'
Yeah, in the headphones there must be that chchchchch noise!

You took a dump and fedexed it to someone?
Yeah, to John Finnberg because he's a fucking scumbag. I shit in a ziplock and sent it in a Fedex tube, and it was real snowy then so it must have frozen. I put 'From the David Geffen Co. ' on it so he'd be all excited about it.

I understand you don't like touring the US?
I actually don't mind it so much these days. I don't like touring nonstop for any amount of time anywhere, because I get burnt out. I'll be the first to admit that. The humdrum from day to day, coming up with things to do, it drives me crazy.

That's another thing I wanted to bring up, with the shootings, games like Doom and Quake have been brought up as possible influences. There are lawsuit's against the companies...
I know. It's a heap of crap. It's a rendered digitized image. It's a fucking game. In all honesty, these things help to relieve people's tensions. There's nothing finer than Sega Saturn's House of the Dead, on the fucking television blowing off people's heads. Do it! We need more of! What do you want more of, virtual shootings or more real ones in a fucking school?

It's the same thing with metal, people say they do this and that because they listen to metal. With Judas Priest and Iron Maiden coming out on major labels in the US later this year, it's going to be fun seeing what is going to come of real mainstream metal again.
I was there! I was there when they made the official announcement of the Iron Maiden reformation. I do a radio show in England and I was there when they all got together in that room! There's a bit of history for you.

You guys had an opportunity to hear the Nasum record [Inhale/Exhale] when you were making your new one?
I have the Nasum record! I absolutely fucking worship that record. If you want a 90s definition of brutality, that is it.

I'll wrap this up...
That was a killer interview. That's the best interview I've done on this tour! It's nice to talk to someone who is stimulating and doesn't talk about all the same shit.

Interview with Napalm Death from 2001

2009-02-11T12:33:00.000+02:00

Napalm Death is coming to Helsinki on Monday... so this week, I think I'll reprint my earlier Napalm Death articles. This one was printed in October 2001 from LotFP Weekly #1:

Ironic that the first interview presented would be with NAPALM DEATH concerning their latest album, Enemy of the Music Business. But it’s fitting. There wouldn’t be any Lamentations of the Flame Princess without NAPALM DEATH. Hell, there wouldn’t be a lot of things without NAPALM DEATH! The flagship of Armada Earache as it exploded in the late 80s/early 90s, NAPALM DEATH is a highly influential beast in the most extreme of metal. Not only did the band serve as proving grounds for musicians who went on to form bands like CARCASS, CATHEDRAL, GODFLESH, SCORN, and more, but the sound… the sound! Crafting not just extreme noise, but songs out of it, that still stand to this day, such as Suffer the Children, Unchallenged Hate, Scum, Siege of Power… some written as the extreme metal scene was still delineating itself from the thrash movement, and NAPALM was there on the ground floor. Fast forward many years, and some not so great albums in the interim, and we have a phoenix rising from the ashes. NAPALM DEATH had become something less than worthy of such a name, but somehow, even retaining the same lineup from the previous five albums, came crushing with Enemy of the Music Business, a genuinely angry, destructive album that wasn’t just NAPALM DEATH, but NAPALM FUCKING DEATH! It was my honor and privilege to be able to speak to one of my heroes, vocalist Barney Greenway, for a lengthy discussion last summer, which is probably for the best as just like my first talk with him was dominated by speculation about the then week-old Columbine incident, this probably would have been talking about terrorists if the interview was done this month. But music counted here, and for sure, the message behind NAPALM DEATH is surely more relevant now than ever…

(interview by James Edward Raggi IV)
So how are you this late evening out there?
Yeah, I’m pretty good man. A rare moment of relaxation to be honest with you. I’m just taking advantage of a few hours to myself. We just did a British tour. The European tour was a few months before that, and we just did Japan and Malaysia.

How is Malaysia for playing shows?
Very sort of strange at first. There’s all these typical garish horrible multinational signs like in Tokyo. And then you’re in the jungle! It was good. The gig itself was great because not too many bands get down there at all. We were one of the first since FUGAZI got there.

Did you get a taste of what the local scene was like there? I suppose you got handed a lot of tapes.
Actually I’m surprised I didn’t get too many. I got a couple I haven’t listened to yet, because frankly I’ve still got half the tapes and CDs in a stack from when I was in Europe! I do listen to everything but it takes time. I’ve still got a couple things to listen to. We played with one band, I can’t remember their name, they were silly crazy! They were full percussion, bongos and everything, and a seik playing the bongos and they played metal over it. But proper percussion!

How many dates can really compose a British tour?
You can do two months just in Britain if you wanted to. People just tend to play in pubs. We just did eleven shows.

In the US, you’re in one spot one day and 500 miles the next.
People complain here if they have to drive two hours to a show, and in the States you have those crazy 15 hour drives!

I guess we should get properly into the interview here. I’m at the point where I have well over a thousand CDs. Not counting cardboard sleeve promos, not anything I’ve traded away. Just full CDs in my collection now. And through it all, the band I have the most CDs from, is NAPALM DEATH. I’ve got 15 NAPALM DEATH CDs plus the split with COALESCE. It’s amazing how you’ve just kept going through the years.
It’s been a real up and down, to use the horrible cliché, roller coaster ride. There was a point for me, the Harmony Corruption time, when we heard that America for us had exploded. It was a crazy time. And then the last few years before this album when the label had completely given up on promoting us. We were going to places and people didn’t know we were still together or that we had any albums out since 92! It’s been a mixed time, that’s for sure!

The first time I saw you was on the OBITUARY tour in 94…
With MACHINE HEAD.

MACHINE HEAD didn’t make it to the Atlanta show so we got MEATHOOK SEED.
Ah yeah, that’s right, they did an impromptu thing.

And then there was the last tour for Words From the Exit Wound where there was hardly anybody there, that goes with what you said…
It’s funny. Was it at the Masquerade? Some years we go there and have these huge crowds, and then we go there another year and that’s it! It’s kind of weird.

You’re not coming to Atlanta on this coming tour. [Talking about the summer tour.]
We might at one point. What we’re doing, because of all the damage that had been done with the label situation and the management situation, is just dipping our toes in the water again and see how it is when we get out there. We’ll play anywhere, anytime, under any conditions. We’ve done that in the past and we’ll continue to do that, but we want to gauge exactly what’s going on.

Let’s back up and do some history. The last I saw of any historical perspective was five years old so I want some current perspective on how you view the history. What was the time like when you were first becoming aware of what NAPALM DEATH was?
For me, probably around 1986, 1987. I actually saw them more or less the same time Shane did. I saw them at the Mermaid, at an all day show with bands like, well nobody you’d probably know, just obscure sorts of bands. Just this crazy noise! It was an all day gig for a couple of pounds, all sorts of memorable bands from the scene. I’d known about them before that. They were a crass band, I don’t know if you were aware of the crass movement? It was like a socialist-anarchist type of moment. CRASS was a band also that put out these ultra political albums and NAPALM was part of that. I knew them through that. When I saw them for the first time I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, it totally blew me away. I saw them around that period as a three piece, they played a gig in Birmingham in this place with these big windows and they were rattling so hard I thought they were going to go! From way way back I remember them.

From that time they were signed to Earache, you always read ‘innovators of this, innovators of that’, how was NAPALM DEATH different musically from the whole scene they were a part of at that time?
Well, yeah, before 86-87, they were more punkified. They were not super fast at that time, just a real dirty sort of gutter punk. Not particularly fast. Still totally political. When Mickey [Harris], the drummer, came into the band in 86-87, is when they started to speed up and that’s when it started to become a semblance of what you know as NAPALM DEATH today. It was still innovative. You could tell when you watched them that there was something different about this band. It wouldn’t necessarily be different stylistically but there was this spark about NAPALM DEATH. They were so vibrant. Even then they were completely fucking noisy and people would be captivated by them.

Scum itself, it’s been out 14 years now and you put it on and it doesn’t sound old!
No no! From a fan perspective, which I was before I joined the band, it’s still this great thing. You listen to it and it’s one of those albums that just takes your fucking head off your fucking neck! Definitely! Both the first two albums.

I like the first one better, I don’t know if it’s because the sound on the second one seems to be a bit rougher.
I like both of them. They both have their own qualities. I like them both equally. People always point to as the definitive album but I think they’re both of equal merit, both Scum and FETO.

From Enslavement, a lot of my favorite songs off of that are on Death by Manipulation and the Peel Sessions so when I want to hear those songs it’s usually not the second album that I pick up.
That’s fair enough. Horses for courses.

How old was the band when the photos were taken for Scum?
I would imagine about 19 or 20 or something like that. Bill [Steer] was younger. Bill might have been 16 or 17.

You were in BENEDICTION before NAPALM DEATH.
I formed BENEDICTION, it was me and the guitarist and the bass player. We got together and did it.

How might history have been different if Nuclear Blast was as big then as they are now?
No, when NAPALM came along… BENEDICTION was a straight up death metal band as you probably well know. To be honest, when I got the chance to join NAPALM, the whole essence behind it interested me a lot more. That’s no disrespect to the BENEDICTION guys at all, but the politics and stuff like that as well as the music… The music was more extreme in NAPALM, that appealed to me more, and the politics and being able to incorporate that into the music appealed to me a lot more as well because that’s the kind of guy I am. Even if BENEDICTION had picked up a really big deal, I still would have gone with NAPALM. In fact, I did BENEDICTION and NAPALM for awhile but there was too much going on with NAPALM, I couldn’t cope with the two bands. I’m not one of these guys who can do a band and have umpteen projects going on. I have got a project going at the moment, or about to start, but that’s enough for me. It’s been a long time since I wanted to do another project because of the work involved.

How did you get the opportunity to join NAPALM DEATH? What happened with Lee Dorrian?
They went off to Japan, the Lee and Bill lineup, and there were some disagreements there. I’d rather if you talked to Shane [Embury] about that because that’s their personal stuff. They came back and very soon after Lee and Bill put their heads together and decided they wanted to leave. I’d been working with NAPALM in terms of roadying, which basically translates into lifting a few cabs and then getting totally fucking drunk! I’d fall over and watch the gig. I used to hang with them and all the rest of it. They knew what I could do because they’ve heard my BENEDICTION thing and Mickey produced the first BENEDICTION album. They knew what I was capable of. Straight away, they asked me to join. I was riding around, the only mode of transport I had at the time was a BMX bike, I pedaled down the road, I remember this quite specifically, totally euphoric and crashed into a postbox! Totally wiped out. It was kind of funny at the time. Also kind of painful.

It just seems that from going back and getting the albums that suddenly the singer’s gone, the guitar player’s gone, and here’s a new vocalist and two guitar players.
In America, I think most of the American kids that liked us, their first introduction was the Harmony Corruption lineup. That made things easier for us in America.

The Death By Manipulation CD was just a compilation of EPs, but when was that whole thing actually released?
91. Death By Manipulation is an old NAPALM track from the demo days.

I know this wasn’t a song that you wrote, but when I say I like NAPALM DEATH, and when I wear my NAPALM DEATH shirt out, people look at the words NAPALM DEATH and it puts these images in their head that it can’t be anything good and it can’t be anything intelligent. I try to show to show them the lyrics to show them what you’re about, and they skim through the booklets and the one thing they always do is stop in the Death By Manipulation booklet on the song Unchallenged Hate, they always see the word nigger. Have you ever gotten flak as a band…?
Absolutely not. If you look at the way it’s used, in quotes, “in a life of unchallenged hate, it’s you who’s the nigger.” In other words, it’s saying to a bigot, using the word nigger as meaning outcast. By you being a bigot, it’s making yourself the outcast. You know that and I know that…

People into the band will know that, but it will be people on the outside that don’t have a clue.
It’s up to us to explain ourselves then. I never have a problem justifying the lyrics. I’m just happy that people are intrigued enough, or questioning them enough to want to know. As far as the name NAPALM DEATH, we were supposed to go to Vietnam at one point. We didn’t go, I’m sure we will at one point. Imagine what that would be like taking that to Vietnam. NAPALM DEATH was and is an anti war statement. That’s what it’s accentuating. The absolute depths that man will sink to.

So many of the really extreme bands these days come up with these shocking images that are just there to be shocking. NAPALM DEATH, there’s something behind all of it.
That’s the thing. We get shit for it. There’s the thread on the Metal Maniacs board about an interview I did talking about Kerry King wearing the [Resistance Records] T-shirt. It’s become quite the infamous statement I made. People saying “Yeah, you’ve got a point” and people on the opposite side of the coin to total personal abuse. At least it’s provoking thought. Some of the things I’ve read from people, sometimes in the extreme music scene you’re not allowed to be compassionate. As if you have to resort to the bad things in life because it goes hand in hand with extreme music. My reaction to that is “I’m sorry.” That’s all, you know?

I think that goes back to black metal. In death metal, in the early days they’d do interviews talking about playing shows, then kicking back and doing whatever. And black metal, your music has to sound this way and then your personality had to be hard as nails. All that crap.
Don’t get me wrong, I like some black metal. I certainly wouldn’t give money to a band that’s openly fascist for sure, that’s a principal thing. I like some black metal. But I treat it like I would death metal. It’s entertainment. Like Hammer horror. I like horror entertainment. One of the classic bands, DEATH, look at the imagery they used to use. OBITUARY as well. Classic bands, and yeah, lyrics that don’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but very, very entertaining.

How many times are the Peel Sessions going to be re-released?
Oh I don’t know. They just put the one out where they had all the radio sessions so it’s a little bit different.

I’ve got the CD that was released in 1993 that has three different sessions on it including the one from 1990, and I see they just released one that has Greed Killing on it.
On the end of it there’s some other radio stuff that was never released.

But if I buy that one now, in four years is there going to be even more released?
It’s Strange Fruit, who can tell?

Harmony Corruption was the big breakthrough. Listening back, everyone says that Scott Burns was a great producer. But there are so many albums, including Harmony Corruption, that don’t sound the greatest.
You’re absolutely right.

What happened to going all the way to Florida to record the album?
I’m certainly not going to point the finger at Scott for it. When we went to Morrisound originally, we had an idea in our heads. There was a breakdown in communication before we went there. When we went to Florida, we liked the sound that was coming out of the studio. But we still wanted to retain the Napalm sound from the previous records, just have it in a better studio. And just build on it a little. What happened was, the thing that we hadn’t taken into account, if you’re not careful you can come out of there with a really compressed sound. That’s exactly what happened. We didn’t communicate with Scott properly what we wanted, so he started laying down the sounds that Scott will do, like any producer will do if he’s not briefed. What came out, came out. It was very thin, very muddy sounding. I like muddy, but it wasn’t powerful muddy, it was slopped back there in the mix. I knew straight away that the sound wasn’t too good. The album itself, it’s great! I like it more over time than initially.

It had the all time classic NAPALM DEATH song, Suffer the Children.
We still play that song live, that’s one song that’s never been off the setlist. It’s one the kids always want to hear.

How much did you have to record in Morrisound?
Quite a bit of time, about a month. That was back when Earache was bothering to do anything for us. Maybe it was three weeks?

Why was the Harmony Corruption song not on Harmony Corruption?
I don’t know why. We might have specifically recorded it for the Suffer the Children EP. Harmony Corruption was on the b-side.

So the song Unfit Earth. I understand some members of the band aren’t too fond of that song.
No. There’s quite a funny story behind that actually. Glen Benton came in to do some of the lyrics. Back then Glen was pretty cool. He hadn’t said some of the fucking things that he has said. He’s ragged on us in the past, but this isn’t about that, this isn’t a tit for tat type of thing. I gave Glen the lyrics and he did a doubletake. I asked if something was wrong and he said “I can’t sing these lyrics. They’re not evil enough!” or something like that. They are very environmental. He didn’t think he was going to get something like that. He did it, so fair play to him, but it was kind of funny. Going back to the question you’re asking, Mickey wrote that song, and none of us could get on with it. The start riff just doesn’t go anywhere for the first minute and a half and it just drags.

I can’t think of a single other metal song with the word dioxin in it.
I’m sure you will with the punk or hardcore bands.

For that late 80s, early 90s period, the whole connection with Earache and NAPALM DEATH, when you thought of one you thought of the other at that time. The whole thing, NOCTURNUS, ENTOMBED, CARCASS, MORBID ANGEL, all of that. That was the ‘it’ thing in the underground. And you were spearheading everything. Most of what I listen to isn’t real upfront in the underground. What was it like being the thing in underground metal?
You know what, man? We had the same attitude then as what we do now. We knew things were really starting to happen in America. We knew that. The important thing for us, which in a sense is what’s kept us alive, we never let it go to our heads. We never put ourselves on a pedestal. We just got on with what we got to do. Coming to America, doing the tours, making powerful music, making powerful lyrics, powerful statements, and having the audience there to listen. We try to do it with integrity. We treat it exactly the same.

You had an insane touring schedule during that time. How do you survive on the road with the grind of waking up in a different city every day?
We’ve learned a lot as people over the years. You learn to live with each other and each other’s habits. We’re not the most extravagant band in the world. We’re still down there scrapping around in vans, sometimes in America on a bus. But we’d have another band with us and it’s kind of crowded. You learn to live with each other’s habits. The other guys in the band are my friends. We all have our down days and our disagreements but I love the guys. You try to keep yourself occupied and try to keep yourself stimulated. The way I do it, I gave up the drink years and years ago, I’m totally straight now, I try to keep my mind stimulated by reading books, playing video games a little too much, just keep generally stimulated and educated.

Was Harmony Corruption and Utopia Banished the sales peak for the band?
I believe so. Harmony Corruption was the biggest selling NAPALM DEATH album to date. It did about, all told, 130000.

Certainly not bad at all!
No, not bad, even though we never saw the fucking royalties, or at least most of it.

I remember seeing a press release where the band’s sold over a million copies of everything, all told?
Maybe not quite that much but close to it. But as I said, we certainly haven’t seen the royalties. But that’s an ongoing issue!

Between Harmony Corruption and Utopia Banished is when you lost Mick Harris. People thought of him as the last original member, even though he wasn’t an original member. Did that create any problems?
It was less of a problem than the Lee and Bill switch. Mickey was a colorful character, not that he just was an old member, but he was a colorful character. He could be funny as hell, but he could on the reverse side, he was completely schizophrenic, he could be the biggest asshole. Not just to us, but to the kids who would come to the shows, and that was out of order. Danny [Herrera] just stepped into the breach, he could do the shit, you know? He can thrash that kit like crazy just like Mick did. It was a natural transition for us.

Where did Danny come from? For the past lineup changes since NAPALM DEATH became a recording band, all the replacements came from bands that already had albums out like TERRORIZER and RIGHTEOUS PIGS. Where did Danny come from?
Like we got Jesse [Pintado] and Mitch [Harris, no relation], it was just a phone call away. We were thinking about people and Jesse said “I’ve got this friend in LA.” A lot of bands will think “Oh, we need to get a guy that’s got pedigree, oh yeah we need someone in the band to give it a boost a little bit.” We’re more interested in getting someone that was up to the task and Jesse said “I’ve got this friend in LA who isn’t doing anything, he’s not working but he can blast on the drums like crazy” and we just said “Get him in!” He came over, no auditions, we just said “You’re in!” And that was it right there!

If Lee Dorrian, Bill Steer, Mick Harris, and Shane Embury made an album now, what the hell would it sound like?
Ahhh, I don’t know! That’s a real difficult question to answer. If they’d have stayed together, they would have been in agreement. Lee and Bill got a little bit bored with the musical format and wanted to go do something else. Bearing that in mind, I don’t know what it would have sounded like because all those guys have moved in different directions.

That’s what made me wonder. A 70s grinding electronic groove? To the album that got me into metal. Utopia Banished. How powerful an effect that album had on me, there’s no way I could ever exaggerate that. I got Utopia Banished, Seasons in the Abyss, and Peace Sells that same day and Utopia Banished had the way more developed lyrics. That’s what got it. That something can be so raging and yet so intelligent…
Yeah, yeah! You’ve just hit the nail on the head there. You can still be completely extreme and totally harsh on the ears and have a brain and sense between your ears.

How was the writing for the album done considering you just lost a powerful songwriting force in the band?
We were actually on the up. I equate it to this. Say losing a soccer team’s manager, if you’ve been going through a tense period, the aftermath of that is the guys on the team get hyped because it’s a fresh start and they want to get on and improve if they’ve been going through a bad patch. So that’s exactly what it was on Utopia Banished. We’re all hyped up working with the new guy. Danny was obviously hyped to be in the band and as a result Utopia came out the way it did.

I don’t know if this is off to the side, but one of the things I loved about Utopia Banished, I first became aware of the band from MTV of all places, The World Keeps Turning video. The middle of the Triple Thrash Threat!
Oh god…

It was a performance type video, very grainy, you couldn’t see the band members at all. I bought the tape and there’s no band photo on that version at all. It was a force of nature more than a band! Is there any sort of image that really could have fit the band at that time?
I don’t know! The video we did on the hand cam, we did it ourselves. As we do now, we started doing our own videos. We’re not paying a fucking production company 20 grand to do nothing but sit around, take the money and run. We did it ourselves. I guess we were the same as any other time, striving to do some creative work.

Now looking back, “Oh yeah, there’s the picture of the band,” but at the time I was thinking there was no way human beings can be doing this!
We worked so well together as a unit, and we bring out the best in each other. Again, we all have our disagreements at times, but when we work together as a musical unit we just feed off of each other. We’re able to come out with what we come out with. It’s not being as calculated, not having a master plan, and just letting it flow.

I guess it was a little bit after that that the Nazi Punks Fuck Off cover was done?
A little bit after that, yeah.

What are your thoughts on the lawsuit with Alternative Tentacles and DEAD KENNEDYS?
Obviously I don’t know the guys personally, I’m not aware of the full facts. But for the ex-guys to want to take Biafra to court in order to use DEAD KENNEDYS music in a Levi’s ad, it’s like hello? What exactly was DEAD KENNEDYS about back in the day? A lot of stuff has been said about Jello Biafra in the past, and various criticisms leveled at him. Like the guy acts like a rock star, flying to his own gigs while the rest of the band traveled in a van. I can’t really comment on that, but I do know the guy used most of the money from his label to fund a lawsuit, which he didn’t have to do, and he took the censorship people to court over the Penis Landscape. He fought the case with his own money. If it wasn’t for him there’d be a lot more constraints on what we can and can’t do with album artwork. People should think about that. I have total respect, I absolutely love the DEAD KENNEDYS.

It was around this time that Columbia Records stepped into the picture with Earache?
Oh yeah. It was a great period.

How did that get started and when did you first become aware of it?
I wasn’t aware of what was happening until too late. Digby [Pearson], in England, the guy who basically formed Earache thought it would be a good idea to sell us to a major for distribution. I was totally against it obviously, and I guess a couple of other guys in the band were as well. This goes against everything the band was about! Consequently things broke down. I will say that the press girl that worked there, Jocelyn, was fantastic. She was brilliant and she cared about the band rather than the label. That was the only positive thing that came out of it. That and I got to meet Steve Perry from JOURNEY as well! It was just a crazy time. I think that was the turning point because it didn’t do us any good and it lasted six months and we were back on regular Earache.

It was weird at that point, because when the Columbia logo started appearing on the Earache CDs, all of the bands were in this process of growth so everyone was like “Oh, see what the major labels are doing to them!”
Yeah! Exactly! I fretted a lot throughout that time.

Would you agree with me if I said Fear, Emptiness, Despair is the best NAPALM DEATH album just in terms of having a clear difference between the songs on the album?
I would say from a personal perspective, absolutely not! That album was a nightmare to make, honestly. It took forever. The recording was all messed up. It was the only time since I’ve been involved in bands that I had to struggle recording the vocals. We went to a studio in Liverpool and the room I was singing the vocals in was completely arid and it just dried up my throat. I had little bowls of water around the room trying to put more water back into the air. My throat just completely seized and I was going completely crazy in my mind. Consequently we ran out of time in the studio and I had to book another session in another studio elsewhere. It was just dragging on forever and ever. And there were obviously stylistic differences which split the band a little bit. The other guys hadn’t consulted me on the direction they wanted to go in at that time and I just heard it when we went into the rehearsal room. It took me aback. I’m quite a traditional guy. I like my NAPALM to be fast, progressive, but fast and furious. Some of the thing on the album I was like “God, I joined the band for this?” I hate to be negative now because it’s water under the bridge and I don’t want to piss the other guys off. That was where it started to cause friction between us which came to a head a few years later. I can’t say it’s my favorite. It’s some people’s favorite.

It’s not my favorite but I like the variety of the songs on that album.
We lost our edge a little bit. One thing with NAPALM, it should have that certain degree of impact and we lost it a little bit.

Didn’t you get the gold record then for being on the Mortal Kombat soundtrack?
Well, yeah, but whether it was anything to do with that record or not… We just kind of got picked for it and it kind of happened. It’s neither bye nor bye to me.

One thing about Columbia at that time, I saw a lot of reviews and press for the album in places you wouldn’t expect like the newspaper. This must have been on the press sheet, because these people for Fear Emptiness Despair was calling NAPALM DEATH the ‘fastest band in the world.’ At that late date, that definitely wasn’t true. Where did that tag come from, anyway?
You’re aware of the NME newspaper, in England? NAPALM got the cover there at the time which was a big coup. The headline was ‘Is this the fastest band in the world?’ Although somebody would have come up with that sooner or later. Obviously NAPALM at some points was the fastest band in the world. I think there was such a buzz on the band that even without Columbia, we would have gotten press in the newspapers and other places anyway. We still do get reviews in major newspapers. People are still intrigued by the band.

After that, we move into what I consider a down period for the band, the Greed Killing EP. The song Greed Killing itself, I think it’s a killer song but it’s not what I think of when I think of NAPALM DEATH.
I just want to make one point before I get to the main body of the answer. Greed Killing is still in the set. Like Suffer the Children, it still gets a lot of requests. That’s from oldschool kids as well as newschool kids. But yeah, internally within the band, the rot was really starting to set in. Not only was support from the label now that we were back on Earache diminishing, because the state of mind had come in where Digby was thinking “Oh, it’s another NAPALM DEATH record, we don’t need to promote it, we’ll just throw it out and see where it sticks.” Internally within the band, it just got to the point where I was personally unhappy. I didn’t have a problem with everything the band was doing, but there were some things, looking back to be quite honest I was disgusted by. I was! I genuinely felt that way. I felt a little bit betrayed, it had become a bit undemocratic as well. NAPALM was always supposed to be a band! My mood just went down and down and down. It came to the point on the Japanese tour, we did a lot of press in Japan. Shane and me were actually sitting together at a table for the first time in a long time, doing interviews. They journalist would ask me my opinion of a certain track and I’d say “You’d better ask Shane because I really don’t like that track.” Being as we just released the album, that obviously didn’t go down too well. But I’d said it all along! I did put that point across. I certainly didn’t change my mind because my opinion certainly didn’t change. After the Japanese tour we didn’t communicate for awhile and the guys just decided amongst themselves they would go on with another vocalist.

I’d heard that the band lived in one place, except for you?
They still do! It’s the same setup.

Did that have anything-
No, that has nothing to do with it. It hasn’t affected us any other time. The guys do it for practical means. I love the guys to death, but I don’t want to live with them when I come off tour. It’s not a personal thing. If it was with them or four completely different guys. Everyone needs their own degree of space. I need to be alone to collect my thoughts. I do live with someone else, because I don’t like my own company 24/7. I do like to be with other people but when I come off tour I need to be with different people.

To me, Diatribes is the least NAPALM DEATH NAPALM DEATH.
I think it’s still raw and a little crazy. But it’s not got the vibe I don’t think.

Which is weird. Didn’t everyone have other side projects at the time that would have been draining off the non-NAPALM influences?
Yeah, you’d figure that but it didn’t quite work out that way. I could never and would never stop any of the guys in the band from doing their own shit because you shouldn’t prevent musicians from coming up with music. They had their minds set on bringing these other influences in and that was that right there, really.

What do you think of a band’s right to experiment and grow versus a fan’s perspective of wanting to be able to trust a band’s legacy?
A band has a right to do what it wants depending on the opinions of the members in the band. They can experiment as long as it retains the core elements and vibe of the band. You don’t lose your edge! Once you lose your edge, your impact, whether you are the most melodic band in the world, whether you are the craziest band in the world, once you lose your impact and your soul, then you’re in trouble. I don’t think we ever lost our soul, drive, and motivation, but we were a little distorted on the impact.

You could always tell it was NAPALM DEATH, but it wasn’t sounding like NAPALM DEATH!
Just from the vocals!

It’s cool because you still have one of the most distinctive vocals out there…
I get my influences from other places. I’d never deny that. I got my influences from Kam [Lee] from MASSACRE, Chuck [Schuldiner] from DEATH, to more punk things like Cal from DISCHARGE, SIEGE from Boston, early hardcore bands. Japanese punk and Japanese hardcore. But people think I have quite a distinctive voice. I know I like doing the things I do well and what does it for me.

How did you end up doing the EXTREME NOISE TERROR album?
Dean [Jones] asked me outright if I wanted to join the band. To be honest man, I’d just stepped out of a situation that had been going beyond a democratic sort of practice. I knew Dean and Ali [Firouzbakht], who was the guitarist had a real controlling influence and I didn’t want to step into that situation again. I’m sorry, but no. So they asked if I’d do the album. Yeah, I’ll do the album! I was a hired hand, really. I had fun, it was good fun, but looking back, if I could have had some influence, I would have done it differently. I’m a big fan of early EXTREME NOISE TERROR, the real chaotic stuff. I don’t know if you’ve heard that…

I’ve got Retrobution, that’s about it for early stuff.
I’m talking about the Radioactive split they did with CHAOS UK and that sort of stuff. I’m a big fan of that stuff. I went in to do the album, and it kind of sounded like NAPALM. It was tight, but almost too tight, and it was a little bit sterile. Dean wanted every vocal pattern on the nail. I was going “This is how I do it with NAPALM, I do my lines, if it comes out with a vibe and it’s organic, then we keep it.” Even if it slips off-time. He said “No, I want everything right on.” I said “Right, it’s your band, your album, I’ll do it your way no problem at all.” That was it.

They didn’t last too long on Earache.
They fell to the usual Earache sort…

Part of the problem you had with NAPALM is that you didn’t have your say. But walking back into NAPALM for Inside the Torn Apart, wasn’t that album completely written?
True. I was quite happy to go along with it because it was completely written. My thinking at the time was I had a week before going into the studio. I can’t write ten, eleven tracks worth of lyrics! No thanks! I kind of went with the lyrics that were there. They weren’t bad. We couldn’t change the music because it was already on tape and we didn’t have the budget. We haven’t gotten these astronomical budgets that some bands have had. We had to make do within the constraints. I just went in and did it and that was that. I was back in the band.

Looking objectively, and I’ve been doing a big crash course in NAPALM DEATH again the past few days, I hadn’t listened to Inside the Torn Apart and Diatribes for a few years. Objectively, the band gets tighter and tighter, they’re expanding the sound, not doing anything to suggest a sellout, basically everything you’re supposed to do with a band, and yet I’m liking it not as much as the early stuff.
The obvious thing to point to would be the production. It’s still raw, but it’s a very clean production. Colin’s production had become very clean by that point. Again, I’m not going to point the finger at Colin because Colin is a very good producer. But as we were talking about musicians experimenting and moving on, Colin had also progressed as a producer. He was looking for the premium sound on record, a real high grade sound. Which isn’t necessarily is right for NAPALM. Thus the production values on those are a little too polished, that might have something to do with it. At least that’s my theory.

What was so bad about the Breed to Breathe video that it had to be banned on seven continents?
A guy jumped out the window like a suicide. Nothing you don’t see on the news but you know how freaked people get.

I was wondering how tough those Antarctic broadcast standards were.
I think we actually re-released it with the scenes still in.

The other thing on the Breed to Breathe EP was the covers competition winner. How fun was it going through those entries there?
It was Earache that chose the tape at the end. We weren’t told about the number of entries until the end and at that point it was too late. The concept was great. To say to an underground band, “Here you go, do what you will.” It’s a fun thing.

What confuses me, some of those bands that sent songs in must have gone on to be signed, and must have gone on to do something. I’m surprised the NAPALM DEATH Tribute Album hasn’t shown up using the entries from this covers compilation.
Right, I guess. I don’t think even Earache would be so crass about it! Or maybe not. Don’t give them ideas! NAPALM’s on another label so here’s a bonus album for you of all the cover tracks you never fucking heard on one CD!

They’ve done that with every other band that’s left the label.
They’ll do it with us as well. Digby is sore because we left the label. There’s a Best Of NAPALM DEATH coming out, I know that for a fact.

I was hoping if they were going to do that, they’d remaster the first four or five albums.
No, they’re going to put out a best of.

Crap. I’ve already got everything. Next, Words From the Exit Wound. I don’t know. How do I put this? It didn’t seem like it contributed anything to the scene.
That’s got more to do, if I’m going to singularly blame Earache, then I would on that album. They didn’t do jack shit for that album. Let me tell you about the promotion budget for that album. Me and Shane were at the Earache office just before the album was about to get mastered and pressed up. Digby says to us “Right, you’ve got a choice, we can press up 1000 sampler tapes and you can hand them out yourselves, or you can do a video. Which do you want to do?” What about promo tour to get all the kids together and hang out and he says “No, we can’t do that.” We ended up playing a gig in our hometown where I had to build the stage myself. I have no problem doing that, but to think that represented the promotional activities for that album.

You guys built that label! Shit!
They did for us in the early days, but that doesn’t make up for the times they were relying on us for a crutch alone.

What the hell keep bands like CATHEDRAL and MORBID ANGEL on the label?
It’s a psychology. CATHEDRAL are off the label now.

I did not know that.
That’s official. I don’t know what the deal is. Earache has MORBID ANGEL on the label, but Digby will actually look after MORBID ANGEL because he knows if he loses them then he’s pretty fucked. So he can’t afford to mess with them.

Here MORBID ANGEL has the tours with SLAYER and PANTERA in the big arenas.
I like MORBID, I’ve always liked that band. David Vincent, I knew him before, he never was like this, but he’s turned into a raving, crazy bigoted fucking Nazi! But I like that band. It is a great band.

I’d read in Terrorizer not too far before you left the label that you’d signed an extension with them.
Yeah. Stupidly, we signed a two album contract extension.

How did you sign that and then leave right away?
We covered the extension.

Is that where Bootlegged in Japan comes in?
I think so, yeah. It wouldn’t be right for a band like NAPALM, even to get out of a contract, to stick something out even if it was complete crap. We wanted a live album, and Bootlegged fit the bill.

Now you’re on Dream Catcher in Europe and Spitfire in the US. I had originally set up this next question as a joke, but the more I think about it, it’s not a joke. How does it feel now to be a real English classic rock band?
Oh God! You mean being with the rosters on those labels?

Not only the rosters, but just the fact that you’ve been around forever. You are a classic band.
Uh, yeah, I guess. I can’t say “Yeah, I agree” because that would be very arrogant. You know what, man? What separates us from a ‘classic rock band’? We still challenge convention, we don’t rest on our laurels. It separates us a little from the perceptions of what people think of as a classic rock band. That’s where we differ. As for the label rosters, yeah, OK! I don’t care, I’m a fan of classic rock. But the main point of being on those labels is that they’re independent.

I like a lot of those bands. You’re labelmates with YNGWIE and IMPELLITERI! That’s a lot of good shit! You’re in good company, just a little weird for the rest of the roster.
It’s cool man. I have no problem with that at all.

You guys have done a lot of tours, seen a lot of trends come and go. What are your thoughts on being on the top of the heap at one point and now opening up for a lot of these bands like MACHINE HEAD and CRADLE OF FILTH?
Maybe slightly, we’d wondered how things have come around, but at the end of the day it doesn’t pay to get down about it. You just get your head down and get on with it and let the band stand on its own merit. A lot of bands would have given up the ghost a long time ago given what happened to us as a band. We were really on shit’s row! At one point we were so poor we couldn’t afford to take another tour. I’ve mentioned this in a few interviews, the tax authorities were thinking of hijacking the name from us so we couldn’t use it because we owed the money we owed.

Holy shit!
We just kept our heads down and did what we had to do, said what we had to say, and consequently we’ve come around a bit now.

How closely do you follow the underground scene nowadays?
I still do. I love hearing new bands. But sorry to say, the underground isn’t as vibrant as it was in the mid to late 80s and early 90s. That’s a fact. In terms of the extreme side of things, it isn’t as vibrant. I’m still into my extreme hardcore, the crazy and fast stuff. There’s stuff like that still around, but you really have to dig deep for it. That’s kind of what interests me.

Not even counting the actual music, how has the vibe changed?
The tape trading days in the 80s was so, you used to look forward everyday to having a new tape on the doorstep, a new REPULSION rehearsal demo. A fucking DEATH demo recorded in Chuck’s bedroom. There were so many bands, but most of them had quality and it was so exciting. The underground just isn’t like that anymore.

There’s so many small labels now, all the bands want to get signed and act like a big band.
To be fair though, there is a merit to that. Whenever someone has a small label, it makes people realize you can do things on your own. You can put an album out which takes the onus off of signing to a major, or even a major indie that’s going to cause you some problems.

Now, more happier stuff. Leaders Not Followers. Just that name, coming from NAPALM DEATH, when I heard it was coming out gave me goosebumps just for the concept of what it would be. When I got it, it was insane NAPALM DEATH shit coming out of my speakers! I was like “Ooooh, glory!”
Yeah! I had that feeling of relief as well! The Leaders Not Followers thing has two meanings. It’s a take on the KORN album Follow the Leader. It was a parody of that. But more pertinently. It wasn’t a statement of arrogance from NAPALM DEATH saying we’re the leaders and not the followers. What it was saying was that bands that we covered on that EP were leaders. They weren’t the only leaders, but they were amongst the bands that were really doing something great, stretching back to 1983. RAW POWER was 1983. That was what it said. A lot of bands are happy to act like sheep and jump on a bandwagon, these guys were true pioneers within their field, and they did it on a shoestring. It can be done. I wanted to make it clear that you can make great music on a shoestring budget in the underground.

I loved the double meaning. The bands you covered were pioneers for a lot of the extreme music, but the there was also the meaning of “God damn it, we’re NAPALM DEATH, we’re not going to sit in the back anymore, we’re putting our foot down!”
I can honestly say that we didn’t intend it to be that way. If that’s people’s perceptions outside the band then obviously fine, but we really didn’t intend to make a statement like that. It would be arrogant, and we’ve never gone about our business being arrogant and I wouldn’t want to start now.

How is it working with Simon Efemy?
He’s a colorful character to say the least! This is the contrast with Colin. Simon’s attitude is ‘Go into that studio, go bang it down, if it’s right in one take and it’s good then we’ll keep it.” I’ll tell you what, that was music to my ears! If you do it and it’s in and it’s done and it sounds good, we’ll keep it!

He’s worked on a lot of different things lately like AMORPHIS and DECEASED lately.
That’s the thing with Simon. Where Colin has one certain way of doing things, Simon will adapt. He knows if he goes and works with AMORPHIS, he knows that band expects more premium sounds and production. More separation and definition. And then he’ll work with NAPALM and put his organic hat on again and he knows we need one take, distorted bass, all that sort of stuff. Bulldozer bass!

Moving on to the masterpiece that has just been released in the US, Enemy of the Music Business. Why didn’t you just call it Gods Again?
God! Honest, we wanted to accentuate the bad times that we’d had. When bands talk about their bad times, I know bands have the capacity to fucking cry when they’re sitting there counting their millions. But we really were on shit street. We really were on shit street. We just wanted to accentuate that whole vibe and the time we went through. But to be productive and tell younger bands “Look, when the sharks are circling you have to know who the sharks are and how to avoid them.” I’m very very proud of it, I’m very happy about the album. I can tell you in advance that the album is going to be even crazier. I’m hyped again, I’m loving the album!

So from your perspective, what’s the difference between the last album, and Spitfire working you in the US now?
We’ve come to a new team of people. The guy doing the press at Spitfire, Jon [Paris], it’s good that we’ve got him because he knows us and he was one of the guys in the final days of Earache that was one of the people trying to help us on a limited fucking budget! Trying to doing things for us. It’s good that he’s there, he’s spreading the word and trying to get people talking about us. We can only sort of gauge what happens here on in. The proof is in the pudding!

You guys are in your early 30s?
Yeah, we are.

Where do you get the fire to make the music this intense?
I do not believe with age that you calm down and become less angry or less concerned. That to me is a fucking load of bull! I still feel the way I did when I was 19. I’ve still got the impetus, I’ve still got the drive, I’ve still got the verve. I don’t listen to an album I listened to 10, 15 years ago and go “Oh shit, that’s a bit too painful on the ears!” Fuck no, man! It’s still the same for me!

Usually bands, even when they have angry ideas, become moodier instead of becoming all out violent. And this is the most violent thing you’ve done in a decade! Another thing, you often refer to your fans as ‘the kids.’ And yeah, that’s the reality so it can’t be criticized, but does it feel weird that you’re writing music for what can be considered children?
Well, when I say the ‘kids’, I mean we’re very ordinary people. Working class kids. We’re basically kids that sprang out of the scene together. But essentially we’re five kids doing our thing. We’re very much the same as the kids that will come and pay for the gigs and buy the records, etcetera etcetera. Yeah, that’s it there. It’s on a level playing field, the same as us. We play to people of all different ages.

One recent interview I saw with you, you said rock, metal, and hardcore was supposed to be “alternative and liberal.” I was disappointed, I understand what you meant but I don’t think of creativity and politics together. It’s one thing to have political lyrics…
What I meant from that, I meant the whole ethos behind it, as a scene, that we should be compassionate, we should try to erase bigotry and prejudice. Music is supposed to break down barriers. It really is. Let’s be quite frank about this. The whole point of music is to be accessible for everyone. There was a big Nazi come-together in Birmingham once. Obviously we were a bit vigilant about that and this Nazi skin came up to me on the street and said “Man, I’ve read some of your statements. You’re a nigger lover! Why don’t you let niggers have reggae and hardcore is white man’s music!” And that sums it up for me right there. The stupidity of all.

I admit, I end up doing it once in awhile because it’s become so ingrained in the way things are said, but when people in metal don’t like something, it’s ‘gay.’ That word there has become the go-to word. Instead of saying it sucks, you say it’s gay.
People confuse being politically correct with being compassionate. “Oh, you’re offended by me using the word gay, you must be PC.” It’s not the fact that you use the word gay, it’s the fact that you’re using it to say something’s fucking bullshit. You’re equating it with totally derogatory things. Like they’re dirty fucking entities or amoebas. Why don’t you just say it’s fucking crap? I do want to say that a band does not have to be political. I’m not saying that at all. But when you are a scene, if you’re challenging a mainstream as I want it to, then surely you have to oppose conservative values which form the census of the rest of it. Surely you have to oppose that. And it doesn’t help by putting up barriers where you don’t have to. I saw on a website “Do blacks belong in metal?”

Hmmm, a lot of things on the internet are people trying to cause shit more than actually trying to say something.
I’ve been to America enough times. A lot of the kids are hardcore about this stuff. We’ve had a lot of aggravation at gigs. Fights where we’ve had to jump in. Riots. All kinds of stuff. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear bigotry at gigs. I don’t want some guy coming in, whether he be Chinese, or mixed race, I don’t want this guy coming in and being intimidated by these meatheads!

You say values in the music have to be fighting against the status quo as a reason to be underground. How do I say this right? I think that would prevent creativity when more of the sheep minded musicians that want to be cool and impress their friends are better regarded than some guy doing his own thing that hears something from say, pop, and wants to pull that in and use it.
Yeah, I get what you’re saying. I certainly wouldn’t put a curb on creativity. I look at it like this. If something’s got soul like I was talking about earlier. If it’s the mellowest, or the craziest, music, as long as the general motive is to make music first and commercial considerations later. I like JOURNEY, man! They were the biggest band in America! But if you cut all that away from them and just have the band in the center, as a band of musicians and the ability of that band to put emotions on the listener, they were so fucking talented!

I’m listening to a lot of lighter, proggier stuff these days too.
I like some of that. Not all of it, some of it bores me. I like a lot of that stuff.

Didn’t you write the review for Change of Seasons in Metal Maniacs? Isn’t that a bit cheating considering you performed at the gig, even if you weren’t on the CD itself?
No, I didn’t do Change of Seasons. I did Images and Words and I did something else as well. I definitely didn’t do Change of Seasons. [Not to be an asshole but I have the Feb 96 issue, and, uh, yeah you did.] When I write, I’ve got a certain code. I won’t write about anything that’s on my own label, or I won’t write about what I’m on obviously, or what any of the other band members are involved in obviously.

The one METALLICA song you did with DREAM THEATER is a perennial favorite on the local metal show here.
That was so funny! It was a lot of fun doing that, you should have seen the other guys’ faces. You should have seen John Petrucci’s face when I kicked in with the vocals. We didn’t rehearse it, we just did it straight. John Petrucci’s face was a fucking picture! He was laughing! He was taken aback by these crazy vocals coming out of his monitor! He’s always worked with James [LaBrie] who has always been more, shall we say, restrained.

I know it made it onto the live video, but I haven’t seen it. What was the crowd doing when you were on stage?
The same as John Petrucci’s face actually! There were a lot of old prog lovers there.

Hearing that finally made me not like METALLICA. What had happened, when METALLICA does the song, it’s a completely raging song. When DREAM THEATER does it, it’s still completely raging but you can just tell everyone’s just holding back so much to do the song the way it’s written.
Oh, happy days, the memories of that song and that period. Certainly beyond anything they’ve done since, apart from And Justice and bits of the Black album, not all of it. Load and Reload you can sort of take them and throw them in the bin for me.

How long do you think your throat can take the NAPALM style?
For me, the throat will be the last thing to go. If they can take my throat in a little cryogenic chamber and hook it up to the electrics or something, it’ll be OK. But it’s the rest of my body that’s falling apart! But my throat is absolutely fine. No problems whatsoever. The thing that gets me on tour is the fatigue. When we play, we give 110% every gig no doubt about it. To play that fast for that amount of time, you get just a little tired.

You canceled appearing at the New Jersey festival this year. I don’t know how much of a straight answer I can get from this, but was it really because band members were sick?
Danny was ill, yeah. But I kind of added something to that which is how I felt, on the NAPALM website. I wouldn’t lose any sleep by doing it. I do not like Jack Koshick and the way he goes about it. I think he’s a fucking scumbag. I really do. I don’t think he’s good for the scene. If he thinks he’s helping the scene then he’s got some crazy ideas. You know about the play to pay thing? Charging even the bands that get 10 minutes $1000 a pop to play. He got his comeuppance this year because I heard this year he barely drew 1000 people. Maybe not even half that.

Last year at that fest he had the two stages in one room separated by a curtain.
Now that is a good idea. Really good for acoustics!

I would guess you’re familiar with the band AYREON?
Yeah, I know that guy. He sent me the CDs. I like that.

I was wondering, he’s used growlers before, ever thought of asking him for a part on his next album?
Funny you should mention that, I read in one of your magazines where you asked him the same question about me! [Oh I am so BUSTED!] There you go, I do pay attention! I’d do it if he asked me to do it.

Have you been checking out any of the extreme progressive metal bands coming out of the woodwork lately?
As in?

OPETH is the big one now…
Oh yeah, great album. I like it, yeah. And it’s a matter of taste again, but I got that one week and thought that was fucking brilliant, but then I got the KATATONIA album and I didn’t like that at all. It just bored me. I think the songwriting was far better on the OPETH album. Have you heard that band ARK? It’s not really extreme but it’s fucking great!

I have the debut, it’s not my favorite, but I can tell there’s some serious shit going on. I’m waiting for the new one, I know on the first one the vocals were thrown on at the last minute. So as someone into the prog stuff, how do you keep that out of your own music?
This is where I make the separation. What drives me, what influences me, and what I like to listen to are two totally separate things. I am physically driven by getting up on stage and screaming, you know? Screaming in someone’s face. But I wouldn’t necessary be driven by playing melodic rock on stage. I appreciate the talent of the people, but I don’t have any desire to do it myself.

Looking back, what is your absolute favorite NAPALM DEATH song?
I couldn’t give you one song. I could give you a collection, but I couldn’t give you one single song.

Could you give me top five?
In no particular order, I would say Lucid Fairytales from FETO. Can I scrub that and put Practice What Your Preach.

Sure.
Inner Incineration from Harmony Corruption. I Abstain from Utopia. And two from the new album because I’m so happy with it, Next on the List and… let me grab the album real quick to jog my memory. [It was well after midnight by this time in the UK…] Oh, god. Probably Constitutional Hell.

My favorite is Can’t Pay, Won’t Play. Aside from the new one, what is your favorite NAPALM DEATH album?
I would probably say Utopia Banished. You mean what I’ve been on? I would say FETO and Utopia.

What is your favorite band from an ex-member of NAPALM DEATH?
I’d probably say UNSEEN TERROR but Shane’s still in NAPALM so I’ll say CARCASS.

As a whole I’d say CARCASS but those early CATHEDRAL albums are the ultimate.
Have you heard the new one? I liked that a lot.

I didn’t like that as much. I thought they were going too far into the sludgy stuff. I don’t like Billy Anderson’s production style.
That’s fair enough.

So I notice in the photos for the new album you’re wearing a NASUM shirt. Is that a fucking incredible band or what?
Absolutely! I love that band! That band just reconfirms for me how vital this kind of music can be. We took them out on tour in Europe because me and Shane said “That band has got to come out on tour with us.” It was cool, they were great, great guys, great band. If you let me carry on praising them I’ll praise them forever.

When their debut album came out, just the idea that it was that good and that fresh…
That well played!

Hope for the world again!
I fucking freaked when I heard that album! Shane played it to me. He winked at me and said “I think you just might like this album.” Stuck it in and I was like “Fuck!” and running around and screaming.

Any other lesser known bands that you’d recommend to people into NAPALM?
There’s an English band called SCALPLOCK. DROP DEAD, a Canadian band. Three bands I suggest you should listen to even if you have to kill yourself to get a hold of them, historic bands, REPULSION’s Horrified album, SIEGE Drop Dead which I think you can get on CD, a band called INFEST from California, the Slave 12”. Beyond essential.

So where can people get NAPALM DEATH or CIVIL DEFENSE demos?
I don’t know. I don’t have any demos from back then. I got the NAPALM demo, before they did Scum.

Well I have finally gotten to the end of questions I have. I hope I didn’t bore you too much. Any final remarks you have for the reading public?
Thanks a lot for supporting us. I know every band says that but it’s very applicable in our case because we’ve been around. The band’s in its 20th year. I’ve been in the band for 11 years. I want to thank everyone for supporting us even when times were down there were always people there to give us a kick in the ass if we needed a kick up the ass. It helped us. Obviously we’re indebted to those people.

Legacy

2009-02-05T14:55:00.000+02:00

by James Edward Raggi IV
(written in late 2007, and presented now as Di'Anno is returning to Finland this month)

Paul Di’Anno came through Vaasa on October 19, 2007, as part of his Finnish tour. I’m sure that I wasn’t alone in going because I wanted to hear Iron Maiden songs.

I thought a lot about Di’Anno’s career before the show. He has a reputation for making a career of recording songs from the first two Iron Maiden albums again and again. His live set was half Maiden songs despite having at least eight non-Maiden studio albums to his credit. The usual feeling expressed is that it’s pretty sad that Di’Anno continues to milk the success of two albums released almost thirty years ago instead of getting on with having a “real” band. The guy doesn’t even have a regular touring band; he uses a local band when touring. On the Finnish tour, that band was Jani Hurula, Jonas Kuhlberg, Joni Lahdenkauppi, and Jani Liimatainen.

I don’t see it as a problem. In fact, I think it’s really awesome.

The truth is the guy could walk in, unannounced, to the rehearsal space of most any heavy metal band in the industrialized world and they’d be able to perform half his set on the spot. They play those damn songs anyway! That has to be one of the most powerful feelings on Earth, knowing songs that you helped write are so highly regarded, so often played, and are still so ubiquitous in a world so often driven by market trends. He has every right to be proud of this, and I hope he sees it this way. We’re so obsessed with new-and-improved and what-have-you-done-for-me-lately that we devalue those who do great things just because they don’t continue to do great things forever more. What a bunch of shit. For one, the non-Maiden songs that were performed were, for the most part, very good. He’s got nothing to be ashamed of in his post-Maiden career. Second, how many times have we all gone to see formerly-favorite bands and have been disappointed that they concentrated on their newer, not as loved, material? We wanted to hear the great stuff, written when the band was hungry and full of fire. Di’Anno plays that kind of set.

The point was proven with his performance. This wasn’t some old fart living off of past glories. This was a vibrant heavy metal performance by a man still possessed by demons and still capable of delivering top-notch singing. Paul Di’Anno sings the Iron Maiden and Killers material better than Bruce Dickinson does. Period. The performance wasn’t flawless, but it was intense. Between his castigating the sound man for the monitor problems he was having, his anti-American rhetoric (very telling for the US’ reputation that a British man would take time in his performance to address a Finnish crowd about this), and that one idiot in the crowd that tried to start a fight with him (I don’t care if he is right around fifty years old, Paul Di’Anno is one man I would never fuck with), there was the atmosphere of danger, that threat that things could get out of control. It brought to my mind speculation about all of the violence at 80s heavy metal shows that I’d always read about. It would really suck to be in that situation, but the perspective that being there would have brought… This show was luckily filled with the dangerous atmosphere, but no actual danger.

I’ve never seen Iron Maiden in concert, and honestly I really don’t want to. High ticket prices, giant arenas, huge stage show… while seeing Dickinson and Harris and the rest perform the songs that have become iconic wouldn’t hurt, I just don’t want to suffer the environment that such performances take place in. Someday, maybe.

But I don’t need to. Not now. Not for the Iron Maiden material that truly inspired generations of metalheads.

Interview with Portal

2009-02-04T15:00:00.000+02:00

Sometimes, it’s clear that there are going to be problems. After having my interest in Portal piqued by some posts on the LotFP message board, I investigated. I was pleased with the ensuing purchases, finding a band that was just exploding with creativity, having albums that (charitably) sound like a leaf blower if one isn’t paying close attention, and they are just the antidote for all of the really boring “extreme metal” that I desperately want to love (my heavy metal roots are in the early 90s death metal scene, for fuck’s sake) but that always lets me down hard. I knew I had to do something with the band, but there were problems. Their image is very… odd, with their using all sorts of bizarre stage names and obscuring their identities. I have an allergy to talking to facades, so I contacted Chris Bruni at their label (which manages to have the absolute worst-written band bios in the history of promotion for all of their bands… Bruni also does Unrestrained! mag and writes for a bunch of other mags… what gives?) and asked, “Is there any way in hell... I mean IN HELL... of getting someone from the band with a real name, on Skype (no phone here that I can hook a recorder to), to talk to me?” Well, I didn’t get either request (although I did end up emailing with “Chris Illogium” instead of “Horror Illogium” in trying to arrange things), so it was going to be an email interview. How I hate those. So instead of having a chat, I took over two months in coming up with a series of questions that I think would both not insult the band, and get me what I wanted in print. Illogium decided to pick and choose how he answered (the whole reason I don’t like email interviews in the first place!), but I think he still gives a good overview of what the band is all about. And really, with all of the mystery surrounding this band, should I have expected anything else? You are on notice: If you are at all interesting in cutting-edge, serious metal that blows through any expected sonic standards, you will listen to Portal.

(interview by James Edward Raggi IV with Roman Temin)
First, the boring stuff. Can you introduce the band to the readers?
Conceived in 1994 by Horror Illogium (guitar) and The Curator (voice) in Brisbane, eventually the Self titled demo tape was recorded in 1998 inspired by Lovecraft and Sumerian Occult themes. Some years were spent on crafting our very own dimensions of horror, delving into the antiquated. Members abducted Mephitic (drums) and Werm (bass) in 2001, The End Mills EP was released in 2002 and the debut album Seepia CD/LP 2003. A second guitarist Aphotic Mote was found in 2004, his sound added another spectrum of ghastly horror. The Sweyy EP completed in 2004 and released as a split with Rites of thy Degringolade (Canada) in 2005. Seepia became re-released via Profound Lore Records in 2005 for North America. The Telepathic chord with Mephitic and Werm is cut thereafter... The Lurker at the Threshold demo in 2006 with enlisted masters Monocular (drums) & Elsewhere (bass). A sophomore full length Outre' released by Profound Lore in 2007. Due to the distance in making frequent rehearsals difficult, closer geographical entities have been summoned and trained to usher in the next chapter of Portal.

What was the basic appeal of this music to you that more popular and accepted music couldn’t satisfy?
In 1986 I became obsessed with guitar when Iron Maiden blew my young mind.

The extra-musical elements of Portal are obviously very important. Can you tell us more about this?
The visual element was an unconscious development, The Curator and I have an affinity for the same horror feeling, these things made themselves present in the sphere of Portal. The two of us have been the central figures from day one, any of our members have agreed with our ways and expressed interest in the artform. Aphotic Mote has been with us the longest and he has an instinct for the horrific as we do. The costumes are significant to the visual element of the feeling we inject into our sound, it is the animation of such. If we had cinematic production at our fingertips we definitely would grasp the means to an end. Unlimited resources would produce some unearthly reflections of the scapes we have brought to life via audial essence.

Why do you use pseudonyms?
It is all about creating a feeling for ourselves, we become animated Outre' figures come to life, much the same purpose as the visual element, pseudonyms create unreality for the purpose to delve into our own scapes, inducing a feeling upon ourselves and the audience through this alter reality. If we did not use pseudonyms to present ourselves as artists we simply would not state any names. All members are in their third decade.

Everything about the band would seem to be an obstacle for more casual listeners to get into the band - even ones that would like the sound. How do you perceive would-be listeners?
The Portal art is used for our own device, only we fully understand the totality, most would-be listeners are interested in torment, the mental sadist who love to walk the corridors of our labyrinth. The works of Portal develop from our own feelings until we deem a composition complete, there are no intensions toward anything outwardly, the purpose of the device is inward. Portal is truly self-involved, the goings on of a scene is not of great importance to us. The website is for documentation and inciteful purposes, we se no inconsistencies when the art itself does not mold to whatever tool. Families understand the personalities involved and see nothing more than artistic embellishment.

Australian bands tend to be, I don't know, "amplified" in their images and attitudes compared to similar bands elsewhere. What is it about the Australian heavy metal environment that causes this?
The few bands that do this are made up of very 'amplified' personalities, I'm not sure that the environment has anything to do with it to be honest.

I often see you described – including by your label – as death metal. But with the chaotic nature of the sound, the extreme visual element, and just the feel of the thing, I’d say you’re closer to black metal. Are such distinctions important to you? What do you think separates these two subgenres?
Morbid Angel was the biggest influence on our sound, therefore we called it death metal, to what it has warped into now, I’m not sure if the term death metal still fits. I would suggest that our sound is much closer than what is representative of the genre in this day and age, however such distinctions are not important, when we have created our own identifiable sound. The best elements of death metal can be very dark, black metal took that sinister feeling and tapped into the inner psyche. There is a lot of boring crap in both genres unfortunately.

When listening to Portal, suddenly I feel like it's 1992, I'm seventeen and don't know shit about shit, I'm just getting into death metal and bands like Entombed and Morbid Angel are destroying my mind and how I think music is supposed to sound. How do you put this together?
Possibly Portal has unraveled feelings you have not experienced in extreme sound. Most of the time I myself have composed the music but of late Aphotic has offered up some truly horrifying music or we co-create as a band. Usually some guitar parts are created from some inspiration and built upon for months, we know when we have a Portal sound when we feel revolting or just from instinct. There is a lot of unused music that just didn’t touch that horror gland, or too many unnecessary notes in riffs without touching on the core element of feeling. The absurd confounding is just an effect taken by the listener, we only construct songs for our own journey and interest. The Curator's asphyxiating old man voice we find very appealing as the heirs master's voice. Regarding the 'next step,' I would say we have something unique, metal is moving with technology a lot, and if anything Portal is going backwards as we really despise an over digital, over clean sound with triggers and such. Our kind of production accentuates what we convey musically, we are about making extreme heaviness! Outre' is different to Seepia in the way that it really captures the olde vibe we were aiming for, and in an even more dreadful way we had envisioned, Seepia still holds a lot of our early influences in it's sound, that album has our first demo songs from 1998, so the soundform was still very much beginning, also the production is heavier on Outre' while sounding more defined and in your face. We have already started on the next opus with direction even more dreadful but utilizing methods as olde as the 16th century.

Lyrically, the band is fascinating. Tell us about that.
Much inspiration was derived and we pay tribute to entities mentioned in Lovecraft Mythos, Omnipotent Crawling Chaos is Nyarlathotep, 13 Globes - Yog Sothoth, Sunken for Cthulhu and Transcending a Mere Multiverse are for Azathoth/Cthulhu. All other lyrics are invented from our own minds over the course of several years. It is up to the observer of our art to make up their own judgement upon reading our lyrics, we only care to complete our creation and feel it has been described musically in full.

Outre´ has an amazing visual presentation. Tell us about that.
As artists we are of the self satisfaction thinking, we invent Portal to fill a void that is missing for our own observation. To lose ourselves in the art is pure indulgence. We're not concerned for how people wish to obtain their music, most people want the form in it's entirety from what's been witnessed. The artwork ideas were conjured between Horror Illogium and The Curator, with specific instructions with artist Jeff Lowe in the construction of the Clock Father in detail. A lot of the artwork was gathered and manipulated by ourselves over years, some other pieces were hand drawn for us by Perversor.

Tell us about your relationship with the record labels you have dealt with.
We have a good working relationship with all our labels over the years. Black Talon Media (RIP) served as nothing more than a promo machine to spread our horror into the underground, they were issued in limited editions as they were most likely to be released on a larger scale down the line, and thus Seepia - Profound Lore and The Sweyy - Ancient Darkness Productions as a split with Canada's Rites of thy Degringolade. Profound Lore approached Portal as they had heard a CDr of Seepia, we knew they were right for releasing Seepia because they really understood the aesthetic and there was a special emphasis on packaging. There are completely different layouts between the two releases of Seepia, the Black Talon one being a jewel case. Never had any disagreements with our labels. Profound Lore have ensured horror aesthetic when promoing Outre', and have enabled Portal to appear in large print magazines. We adore The Angelic Process, WOLD but all of the bands are unique and great.

To wrap this up… what five albums are you enjoying lately?
Negative Plane - et in saecula saeculorum, Nocturnus - The Key, Mortem - Demon Tales, Siouxsie and the Banshees - JUJU, The Cure - Pornography.

Any final words for the readers?
The worst advancements are afoot!

Interview with XHOHX

2009-02-03T15:00:00.003+02:00

(interview from early 2008)
The other day, I received an email from French XHOHX asking me whether I would like to review their latest self-released album KARYOTYPEXPLOSION. As everything about their uncomfortable record is DIY, the band deserves any exposure it can get, especially with respect to the music, which makes you run out of the usual comparisons and be stunned by both the instrumental and conceptual prowess it displays with every note. It’s heavy an maybe even more heady an experience for sure, but no fist-in-the-air metal. Actually, talking to the two eloquent Frenchmen behind the project corresponded to the feelings I got from listening: highly interesting, but afterwards, it’s time to revisit some music for enjoyment’s sake, something that is graspable emotionally without a doctorate in whatever science. Never has an Iron Maiden record sounded better than after KARYOTYPEXPLOSION. I can tell… Anyway, all good things in all good time, no pain, no gain and all that. Have more than a glimpse at XHOHX, maybe beginning with this interview…

(interview by Andreas Schiffmann)
What was your musical socialization like, and what inspired you guys to eventually pick up instruments? Also, what education did you receive musically?
Ramon Ribas Coca: We learned music and to play instruments on the job, but with the help of quite a few books too. We have a passion for music since our teen years, and a distinctive feature of the two of us is the fact that we have been trying to work out a music of our own in a way. Before forming XHOHX, we experienced almost every form of rock style in several bands going from punk and new wave to pop and prog rock. In fact, for the most part, it was easier to get rid of our musical education, it was a long term work. So our music proceeds from this long development. As we have always been rather political, we get ourselves involved by showing through our material the ensuing social discontent… at least we hope so. That's why the Rock In Opposition tag suits us and we agree to such world views.

So as you mentioned politics, what exactly is it you address on a political scale? - Do you refer to global issues, or are do you also criticize political events in your own country? By the way: How much Hollywood does it get with the recent media craze about monsieur Sarkozy and his life and love?
“Oregolakatzor”: Every action is politics. To my mind, everyone manages with what they can give: it's more about individual will which follows from a mass change, an inner revolution which leads each of us to this consideration: Do we really wish to be the legitimate holders of direct democracy? As things look at the moment, I'm sure it has been taken by elites without any power over ordinary people's concerns since the beginning, and we suffer the consequences for the world as well as on a local scale. To get back to our main subject, it results in kind of a brainstorming mentality, a confused situation organized by the high Treasury which surfs across the counterculture or at least what is left of it! Art is not spared anymore by those who make money with anything, like an ordinary soap powder: We are knocked off our feet in the "institutionalizing" of protesting. The new conventionality is the anti-conventionality. In plain language, to be cool, one has to look like a rebel, and too bad if underneath, the hidden ideas are whisked away... Now, this has not been so all the time. Until the early eighties and a few rare events in the nineties, rock was rebellious, it upset the "bourgeois" and clerical morality, imposed some changes. Since then, it has gone over to the other side, emptying the concept of its substance to only keep its "packaging" for appearances' sake. Early people who have lifted the curtain on this deception are the Crass, No Wave and Rock In Opposition collectives. That's why the music of XHOHX is in unison with this spirit. Concerning the last part of the question, leave its answer to the French journalists , that's the only thing they should know... On the whole, they delight in some communication made up by the Elysée Palace to play to the gallery instead of asking the real disturbing questions. This is the collapse of democracy too, the media attitude that doesn't fulfill their job being an counterforce, because, you know, that's the matter here: "Shhh... Quiet please, we're asleep!"

In terms of infiltration of allegedly genuine rock music: isn't RIO or whatever you may call it in a similarly dangerous situation now that it is catered to relatively blinkered crowds such as the metal ones or lovers of classical prog? Do you feel that your brand of music and its philosophy could be diluted in the process of sinking into such conservative music cultures? Bands like Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Unexpect from Canada have gathered some fame for being "freaky" and "odd", but listeners seem to be unaware of the additional contexts behind these bands. After all: is it more important to enjoy the music, or do you feel that ideology weighs equally heavy, if not heavier?
Ramon: Yes, you've put your finger on a key issue. Rock music has undergone a revival which still goes on. Taking the easy way out, it's a good choice to entertain some people who want to amuse themselves, and it's true this is the basis of rock and roll, all things considered, and quite a lot of other stuff we're in dire need of as well. Those bands know how to handle the media, and business happens on a mutual basis - Who is going to earn the most? Try to guess; your guess is as good as mine... It's this famous story of the people in power who reassure themselves that people will spend their not thinking of any other thing than themselves. When you think that RIO used to fight against it! The spirit of the present RIO bands is the quite the same as in those days; we are lost in the majority crowd although we're respected, and many people are very fond of our music and perhaps even our philosophy. We are in agreement about the idea that art marked by politics can change the way people think. As I said, the media are not a great help, but the situation is not hopeless...

Oregolakatzor: It's a blessing, even a miracle, that something like Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Unexpect get such an aura, but it's certainly not the fruit of chance - Those are lovers who fight for their artistic continuance as sounds artisans and serve a conscious public which knows what it wants and what it does not. I think, perhaps naively, that a large part of this public is sensitive to the philosophy of these bands. Otherwise, cutting this Gordian knot where music and political views are intermingled would be nonsense, because the former revels in the latter and both make up a whole. It's as if you'd asked Jaz Coleman to shut up - Impossible! It's the same with us. Planning our music in order to make it smooth amounts to censoring our personality. In KARYOTYPEXPLOSION, an explicit message exists...

Which is? - And going back to the very beginnings: I guess it was not the ambition to vent your political anger when you first decided to pick up an instrument. I guess it must have been every artist's aim to get recognized for his or her ideas which they convey through their respective forms of art. So in a way, the initial purpose is self serving, almost narcissistic and not as noble as the will to trigger societal changes, right?
Oregolakatzor: Okay. First, let's place the background about when the album and its musical content were realized. Except for the mastering assigned to Ugo Sanna at 3X8 Studio (also Goryptic's guitarist, a brutal death metal band), it's been created from a to z by ourselves, artwork included, at our humble Telluric Studio. So, it's do it yourself through and through. For KARYOTYPEXPLOSION - and I do insist on this point for this first opus - we used a virtual drummer in the person of a computer whose first function is to endlessly repeat the military pounding of the sound of jackboots on the pavement. It's a celebration of the eternal conflict of man against machine in which the organic matter tries to overcome the robotic beat from crushing bone factories and achieves its aim, destroying the metronomic system with some non-rhythms. With polyrhythmic structures, things played backwards, fortuitous tempos and so on, this framework carries some tortuous rhythms along unitonal roads. voluntary abstractions of intervals introducing their own climate, colors and atmosphere. Voices are these of a contemporary regression, a dizzy fall towards the early time to snatch away from the archaic cerebellum... The primal scream of a misshapen person shouting: Our captivity in the realm of conventions is over!

Ramon: "Conventions" in place of "empan" in French is a term from the field of physiology, for example, it stands for beating a 4/4 time naturally, unconsciously. The topic of KARYOTYPEXPLOSION, as its name indicates, is the drastic change of the structure of all chromosomes within our cells, perhaps in order to cure humanity from its inborn stupidity, which will be the ruin of all of us as well as our environment. In any case, that misshapen person may represent what is wrong with us: the irremediable aspect of our condition expressed in a manner of speaking. In fact, it's an act of provocation that prompts us to call ourselves into question. It's the problem of this modern society - we think we have gained control over everything which surrounds us, although we ourselves are our own worst enemies…

Oregolakatzor: As it is the case with most people, it's the passion of music which drove us to make the transition from an ordinary enlightened listener to a protagonist, but at the same time, we can't deny the fact it is the cultural and social setting which naturally influenced us. There's nothing new telling you music is a great medium to pass on your thoughts... it's one of the very few modes of expression where we can have a crash and find ourselves back unhurt. Life is too hazardous... If we want to explore new areas and venture in forbidden territory, we should also wonder what our relation with the universe is.

Ramon: ...after we have felt the uneasy mind of the society.

Speaking of the purpotedly "natural" 4/4 metre: given that other cultures deem different metres, even odd ones, to be more natural, does it eventually depend on culture and coinage what people consider to be genuine. Is the unconscious and intuitive, after all, a product as well, maybe shaped already before a person's birth? In this context, would you consider expanding your tonal system with respect to, for example, 12 tone philosophy or even Eastern half and quarter tone systems? Are we Westerners actually able to distinguish between these subtle nuances?
Ramon: You're quite right - we really try to be out of the usual scales. We do certainly have a dodecaphonic side where each note stands for itself and has its own life too. Rhythm is its blood, and this makes up a whole to live up to our music and set it against cruel reality. Besides, that enables us to write more freely and with real tonal exploration - without going to that kind of serialism which requires effective and combinative notes to be meaningful... Mind you: For the moment, we avoid this process, but who knows... Within our musical minds as Northerners, odd times and intricate rhythms most probably call for a great deal of effort; musicians with an Asian cultural background, remarkable rhythmists, get the same results much more easily. It shows that culture is an important part of music, and as I said, the mnemonic musical span ("empan" in French), has not the same value in different musical and cultural circles. Musical education has been formalized in the West, and somehow, our ears have accommodated to that. Therefore, everything is relative, even though we can play music in all its forms, ours being a part of it. One thing's for sure: We have invented nothing new, but only put forward our world view through our music, and we know there's no accounting for taste, so we just somehow give vent to our own weird ideas - after all, that's the main purpose of art.

Well, there won't be any love songs in XHOHX, I guess...
Oregolakatzor: It goes without saying...

How can you reconcile the back-to-the-primal approach with the fact that you rely on modern technological achievements in the process of creating your music and promoting it?
Oregolakatzor: What a coincidence! It’s explained in these plain terms inside the CD: "We are all organisms thrown into the future. Back from a journey to the archaic sources, with help from technology, we cut flints, echoing resoundingly in the valley of our consciences. Hermits on the human mountain, we belong to this community which provides us aid. Thanks to the crumbs falling off the table, it is an accomplice to our rise..." I think there is nothing further to say...

Ramon: It's also a representation of the conflict between man and machine, a challenge as it happens for us...

As for the language that is used on the album: where does it come from, is it entirely arbitrary or does it follow certain rules? You were apparently influenced by Magma in that respect, were you?
Oregolakatzor: Right then, contrary to what one could think, our language has no contacts at all with Kobaïa, which happens only in a dream, and actually Kobaïa, its sensitivity and Vander’s manner of playing are closely connected in their live performance. The language practically makes sense only within this context. I don't know if you know Nosfell - he's an artist who uses his own language as well and yet he has no connection to Zeuhl as far as I know. However, I won't be so objective about Koenji Hyakkei, for instance, or our friends from Corima... Anyway: Yes, the only common point lies in the fact that it is organic - no, in fact, it's a musical language we can easily compare to onomatopoeia, to an unhealthy inner search similar to a trying trance, the purpose of which being purpose to fetch the idea I get about primitive sounds uttered by early man. Most reviews are focused on "growls" like "death metal" but in fact these are simply the expressions of feelings like doubt and anger. Moreover, other vocals styles permeate KARYOTYPEXPLOSION - like whispering, rattles, semblances of melodies, starts, aspirations and so on.

Not that it actually musically relevant, but it came across my mind that in countries like France, you can get the people to start riots more quickly than in Germany or the US. I was thinking about these incidents two years ago, when the suburbs of Paris kept burning for some nights due to this youth that has been killed by the police. As I don't see bands of the RIO-type or something similar here in Germany, I wonder if it is a national phenomenon or at least dependant from your respective locale and how you have been raised politically. After all, American RIO bands are largely to be found in California, which has always been more of a liberal place...Is it maybe even a genetic predisposition with, for example Southerners being more hot-blooded and easier to stir by injustice?
Ramon: Genetic… Certainly not - it's rather the historical context which makes the difference. Assuming that neither politicians nor economists will resolve anything, it's the reaction of the people that matters and moves things - otherwise nothing comes about; social history has proven that... I don't know Germany’s home policy or the German social angles that well, but over here, we attach importance to social injustice. Injustice to people's living conditions is to appeal to the emotions; they say we are grumblers, the people… We are unfortunately not often enough... Seeing that injustice of all sorts always triumphs in the end, and that we're still being on the wrong road... Both the past and future know! Is it not our duty to let the powerful breathe? - A band like Sleepytime Gorilla Museum from the US west coast clearly illustrates this point by assuming a tough stance towards the world's condition, but I don't think it's the consequence of a certain freedom of thought because over there, you can find both the best and the worst things - like everywhere else.

Oregolakatzor: Well, I'm not going to simplify this debate by deliberately avoiding historical and socio-economical points of view within this sinister business, which makes me step beside myself with rage: These events from two years ago - and it's not over - are the consequence of the carelessness of the administration. Its inoperative actions to solve problems of ghettoization and pauperization as well as the lack of mixed social community leads to this end result: It's breaking while others wave the spectre of insecurity... It's a global complication; the Black Block got famous by the definite positions of these countries against all kinds of injustice. The words "genetic predisposition" gave me a shock and threw me back to the gloomiest days of our history! In France, "the country of human rights", the police have been taking DNA systematically from people in custody since 2003. This file, created in 1998 by the socialist government to go against paedophiles, has spread to the whole population because they say our citizens would be more secure if their DNA data was collected. Like all state files, they count on the presumption of guilt. All in all, it's the very principle of individuals observed by the state, which disgusts me as well as the driftings which will ensue from it today and tomorrow, given what history taught us...

With the trivialization of extreme metal and its singing style in particular (vocalists screaming and growling because they want to fit conventions rather than because they have the urgent need to), do you think that a brand of extreme music like yours could be the "new" black or death metal with respect to its relevance concerning the general development of modern music - in short: As common ears have gradually become used to hear elements of these genres in middle-of-the-road music released by (disguised) major labels, can your stuff assume this role in an unspecified future?
Ramon: It's not our ambition; we'd really like to, but our album is a drastic change all the way through. The few people that told us, they find it difficult to listen to. We surely skip some steps in the process.... It's not easy for us to get appreciation for our music as such, and I'm only talking about a limited musical environment and not even about major labels. Anyway, the question is: Will an evolution really be necessary? We are optimistic and fighting our way through conventional styles for our own definition of music.

Oregolakatzor: I quite agree with Ramon - it would be pretentious on our part to try to embody anything within these musical styles. They have their own brand names and are split up into a multitude of gradual emotions, even if apparently for the neophytes, some aspects remain conventional within the same circle. That's why there are different breeds in the metal family... Concerning XHOHX, I know it's appreciated in a certain grind and death as well as blast or crust environment… Curious, isn't it? At the moment, we receive some new reviews almost every week, and the least we can say is that there have been names galore which try to define it: Punk-jazz, brutal progressive, noise math-rock, metal artbear zeuhl and so on. I think it's difficult to cling to certitudes, XHOHX is a living musical proof. I don't know what to say… We are very grateful to you, since you are one of few people in Europe to support us alongside some others in Scandinavia. From the US, we get a lot of support; other interviews from these people will come to complete yours, say on Aural Innovation by Jerry Kranitz and more...

So in the end, what will the future bring to your project? Any live activities planned, and do you actually see any potential to establish yourselves as a long-running capacity and institution of your respective genre, however one may call it? Would you like to be seen as a seminal band in the future?
Oregolakatzor: We are indeed setting up to tour France in early May and the rest of Europe in October - first the Northern part: Germany, Benelux, Poland and Scandinavia. After that, we’ll go to the Southern part with Switzerland, Czech Republik, Slovakia, Italy, Southern France, Spain and Portugal. We are keen on doing a maximum of gigs this year to promote KARYOTYPEXPLOSION in the independent international network. It's too early to take stock of the situation, because it's only the beginning... We keep going and focus all our energy to get our music appreciated - making connections with those who wish to support us, playing with bands whose music suits us, strengthening the connections to those who hearten us today. In that respect, we are very honoured to appear in Lamentations of the Flame Princess because without your passionate mission of discovery, nothing would happen.

Ramon: We keep honing our art and transmitting what is dear to our hearts... Everything is said.

Interview with Atlantean Kodex

2009-02-02T14:37:00.002+02:00

German metal is strangely famous for its hamfistedness - chunky riffs devoid of finesse, singers that make a career out of actually being no singers at all (yes you pig-squealing Dirkschneiders and Boltendahls...) and a general awkwardness that is manifest in the lyrics and rhythmic infleibility. Whether you positively call this "rock solid" or not: be aware that there is more to come from Sauerkraut-country. Enter Atlantean Kodex whose drummer Manuel took some time to answer the questions Jim and myself put together with respect to his grandiose band, which taps into a fresh way of Solstice- and Bathory-worship - but what's most important is that Atlantean Kodex enable the listener's individual approach to their music, meaning that they can deeply affect you in your present state of mind...despite the age-old lyrical themes. Manuel has some debatable views, but he definitely knows what he is speaking about - so sit back and listen up a bit.

(interview by Andreas Schiffmann with James Edward Raggi IV, conducted late 2007)
You call this The Pnakotic Demos. Define "demo" as you use the term here. Are these songs going to be re-recorded in a "final" (and presumably better) form later? If so, really, why should a listener care to buy this?
To me, a demo is a means of presentation for a band without record or distribution deal. People that buy a demo are able to get a first impression of a band. Even though two of the songs from The Pnakotic Demos are likely to be re-recorded for a full-length album (Marching Homewards, From Shores Forsaken), this is the raw and original sound of the band. Many metalheads I know are most excited about the very first demos of a band, because what you get here is the undiluted and probably most energetic performance. You are closer to the essence of the music than it is the case with a professional studio production, where an external sound engineer maybe manipulates the sound.

The insert jokes that The Pnakotik Demos are "underproduced." Explain this, please.
As you have said, it is actually a joke. If we had not been fully convinced by the sound, we would not have put the CD out. Nothing more to say about that – I am sure our fans have enough brains to get the irony here. With unlimited resources, we would have improved a little more on the drum sound and mastering, but in general, the result is very, very close to what we wanted. That is also the reason why we did not wait with the release. Firstly, we were satisfied with the outcome ourselves, and then, we got a dozen requests a day as to when we were going to release something at last. Thirdly, you can of course work on a CD without end and improve things, but then it would probably never come out. At a certain point, you have to put an end to it. We reached this point when we all thought that we had indeed created something great…and had run out of money…

Both traditional metal and heathen circles like to blather about roots. Is it actually possible nowadays to trace back your existence to one distinct origin, considering how much everything got mixed up through the ages – from “races” to musical crossover, the roots of which only few listeners seem to be aware of?
First of all, the concept of “race“ is, from a biological point of view, bollocks. It is surely impossible to draw direct lines of continuity back to the Germanic tribes or the early Stone Age, as the Wicca movement does. You just have to be aware of the migration that has occurred throughout the last six thousand years even in relatively small areas. Even if you restrict your investigations to a secluded area like the Upper Palatinate, for example, you cannot find your individual roots. This is because the moving Germanic Tribes, Slavs or Francs have all left their marks, starting from the Mid Stone Age across the Celtic and Roman period along the Limes Wall.

So whenever today especially right wing and esoteric groups are searching for “Germanic roots”, they are lying to themselves, as they completely neglect the results of all the research that has been done within the last fifty-two years. It’s simply a fact now that the origins of Halloween are not found among the Celts, but for the first time in a French Benedictine monastery in the early Middle Ages. Similarly, Easter does not refer to the goddess Ostara, which has never existed; it simply alludes to the Old High German word for the red in the sky at dawn, as this has been the time of day for the Christian Easter Mass since the early Middle Ages. The Advent Wreath is no Old Germanic symbol of fertility, but an invention by a protestant scholar from the late 19th century.

Eventually, these fabricated lines of continuity are based on ideology anyway. People that claim such things have no interest in the truth, because it does not fit into their world. All the bands that keep posing with drinking horns, deem themselves Vikings or descendants of the old Germanic people due to their swilling mead and praying to Odin therefore are nothing but a huge carnival scene – just like the majority of “new heathen religions.” They have a good show going on with costumes and stuff – but in the end, they are as heathen as the Pope.

You cannot transfer all that to heavy metal, though. We are still close to the origins of the music, and thanks to modern media these are perfectly preserved and well documented, which is not the case with so-called “heathendom”. Reconstruction in that case happens through assumption, interpretation and fallacy that is owing to ideology. In terms of speaking about the roots of heavy metal, we might be guided by ideology as well, yet we can refer to the actual sources and have real proof at hand to support our argument. In this way, we can look at the roots and reconstruct the original stylistic devices, values and attitudes. We are able to recognize the roots and tell what innovation, change and continuity are – granted, though, that we treat the sources seriously and thoroughly examine tradition as well as the origins. Also, it helps to know about heavy metal history – and that is exactly where I see a crucial lack nowadays. It gets tricky as soon as people without a clue spread their ignorance through internet fanzines and forums. Suddenly, bands like Sunno))), My Dying Bride or The Sword become doom metal, and the boundaries and lines of orientation within heavy metal culture start to blur. It gets arbitrary and disappears at a certain point. This is the reason why we need the knowledge and must be aware of the origins and tradition. If anything becomes metal, then soon nothing will be metal anymore.

How far can you develop your own style to not become boring, yet still remain true to the origins?
Why develop? This is the music we like to play and hear, and there is nothing to change about it or “develop” for the sake of “novelty.” Bands that behaved this way were the ones that lost it for me because they changed until I could not connect anymore to their music. Why change anything that you want to be exactly as it already is?

Why do you call yourselves "Regressive Metal"?
We used that tag consciously to stress that we do not expand the boundaries of metal. We are not progressive, but go back to the roots. A large part of metal culture today has been alienated from the canon of heavy metal tradition through various crossover movements. We try to overcome this alienation by applying stylistic devices from the time before the great arbitrariness, which is mostly the ‘80s.

Unfortunately, I am no contemporary, as I got into metal only around 1988 or ’89. If I wanted to specify the break between “metal then” and “metal now,” it would lie in the first half of the ‘90s. This is when the metal industry as we know it – the tastemakers of the mainstream – started to come about. Sure, majors have existed before, but they were clearly to be distinguished; you knew they stood outside the scene. The perfidy of this new metal industry that emerged in the early ‘90s lies in the labels, which indeed used to belong to the scene. Consumers therefore would be less critical with Nuclear Blast, Century Media and so on than with, say, Atlantic or Sony right from the start – even though in both cases, the principles and measures are the same. These labels were able to gradually model their audience after their wants by intentionally breaking down stylistic barriers and counting on mass appeal – all under the guise of ones own former scene credibility and by abusing equally credible bands from the old underground for their causes. The best example are all the death and black metal bands that jumped onto the gothic bandwagon to reach a larger audience – Cradle Of Filth, Tiamat, Sentenced, Samael… And people did swallow it and still do! Instead of looking for information on their own, they are force-fed on a monthly basis by the mainstream press and industry.

“Regressive metal” for us is not about “aping” or imitation. Highlighting traditional elements is indeed what we are keen on, but there is still no other band at the moment that sounds like us. This is also why we are successful, as we have obviously tapped into a way that had been untrodden for some time. Although we combine traditional elements in a new way, we are still not modern. The term “modern” always implies an assessment with respect to zeitgeist and late fashion and whether something corresponds to these. An anachronism like Atlantean Kodex surely does not.

Why does authenticity in contemporary metal always seem to equal intentional primitivism and the semblance that something is old? In return, there is the question as to whether a “modern” band – let us take Soilwork or Fear Factory – can be authentic as well in case you say that authenticity entails timelessness…
I cannot comment on these bands, since I do not know them, but of course, bands these days can be authentic, even when they are “modern” – yet only in case they do not cater to fashion, but happen to be a part of it without selling themselves. As far as the “semblance of the old” is concerned, I would differentiate a little more. It holds true, for example, in black metal. Mostly because this is a relatively young scene, there is the pressure of self-legitimisation, and this works best when you are clad in tradition. Labels naturally also work this way by putting nu metal bands with nice haircuts into vintage Maiden shirts. It is all about legitimisation through tradition – and if there is no tradition, then it is made up, quite the same as with neo-heathendom, in fact. As opposed to this, in the traditional metal scene, there is no need to make things seem as if they were old; the music is old by itself, and that is fine. The fans do not listen to it to appear “authentic”, but because they like it.

Your lyrics convey feelings of home as well as alienation. Alongside the imagery of battle and values such as honor, how easy is it to make Atlantean Kodex the soundtrack for your next local Nazi disco?
I think there is one crucial element missing in our lyrics in order to allow a political interpretation: the idea of nation. All our texts prevent mentioning distinct time and place. Our feelings of alienation remain within the myth and describe distances that are not to be measured in years or miles, so it becomes hard to interpret the lyrics in such a way. You cannot help complete idiots, of course, but I do think that we are relatively safe from misinterpretation.

How can contemporary man identify with your mythical lyrics? If authenticity means that you can attach to the contents of music on a personal basis, then how can your band be authentic, as it only provides the listener with a background sound to raise his mead horn?
First of all, authenticity of both music and lyrics depends on the artist and not the recipient. He has to find himself within his own lyrics, not the listener. Secondly: Is it not rather the case that mythical lyrics are far more open to subjective interpretation than lyrics that tackle concrete, contemporary phenomena? Especially when such fictional texts are withdrawn from certain times, places and people and refer instead to general topics, archetypes and the myth as such, to which every human being on earth is connected, notwithstanding social standing or ethnicity.

To answer the first part of your question: I believe that it is particular to “contemporary man” that he can identify with our lyrics. Memory is always a present thing as well. The subject of alienation and the craving for an idealised past, which both permeate our music, are fascinating in a time where traditional family structures, religious beliefs and class belonging are gradually dissolved or constantly altered. We offer people the possibility, at least temporarily, to look back and glimpse at a golden age that offered straight lines of orientation and clear-cut values. Of course, we are aware of the fact that this golden age has never existed as the allegorical myth of Atlantis in which we present it. However, that is not the point. It is more important to open new horizons for people. Whether our lyrics are purely a means to escapism for some or personally helpful to others is secondary in this context. In any case, they are more than a backdrop for a drinking spree.

So is a differentiated reception of your music important to you, or do you not care at all about superficial listeners that just like what they hear?
It is surely more satisfying to me when people get deeper into what I have created, but I would not mind either if Marching Homeward was running at a metal party while having a beer. After all, it is about metal and not some poetry circle or discussion group. Metal these days has become far too intellectual anyway.

New Iron Age Records is run by a couple of members of Atlantean Kodex, but the label also handles other bands. How do you handle the conflict of interest in having limited resources to promote several bands when one of the bands is your own?
Atlantean Kodex is treated exactly like the other bands on the label. Two of us are involved in both the band and the label, but that has no effect at all.

The songs on The Pnakotic Demos sound heavily influenced by Solstice's New Dark Age, from the vocal style and melodies to the "special effects" noises. Take as much time as you need to tell us all about your personal listening relationship with New Dark Age.
I am not sure how to describe my experience with New Dark Age. Good music at least is highly evocative and inspires my imagination. Hardly any other record has ever brought such strong images onto my mind and impressed me that much. In fact, I was already taken into another world when I listened to it for the first time and the sound of the waves set in. The album is incredibly sublime and majestic, being ancient and archaic at the same time. You can literally grasp the atmosphere on it with your own hands. I see grey mountainscapes and deep, dark woods – eventually pictures of a past that seems long gone. The same effect I actually experienced only with the first Manowar albums, Bathory’s Twilight Of The Gods and Crystal Logic by Manilla Road.

Ross the Boss guests on the recording. The other guests (Swanson, Tuozolli, Weinsheimer) make more sense as they are your contemporaries and co-conspirators in some ways... but how did Ross get involved? Do you think he offered something musically relevant, or is it just a "OMG Ross the Boss COOL!" moment?
Of course, his contribution is relevant! His solo fits perfectly. From Shores Forsaken is taken onto a new level just because of it. It is totally like Into Glory Ride and does not get any better than this. But yeah, OMG Ross The Boss COOL!

Beyond the Sixth Seal – The Resurrection of Everything Tough

2009-01-30T21:37:00.001+02:00

(Metal Blade Records, 2007, 13 tracks, 55 minutes, 55 seconds, by Adam McAuley)

Impressively crushing sounding metal that has a distinctly heavy feel to it is what Beyond the Sixth Seal deliver effectively. They deliver a heavy metal platter that has an emphasis on bringing the modern heaviness aspect to the forefront, with even a hardcore vibe present. A somewhat melodic slant is added to the proceedings as well to give it a catchiness, but the album attempts to crush with its heaviness at most points.

The band are somewhat difficult to classify as they just crush along, but they bring enough hooks to catch your attention. A rather booming sound is emphasized greatly throughout which manages to hold you in thrall. Beyond the Sixth Seal comes across as a band that wants to throw massive riffs at you to enrapture you with their hugeness.

As such we’re left with an album that is difficult to characterize because it has a hardcore element, but it also has strong shades of straightforward heavy metal as well as melodic death metal. This un-classifiability makes you want to appreciate the band on many levels as they never fail to excite greatly.

The ability to entertain is a key to maintaining the fun pacing Beyond the Sixth Seal are able to convey throughout. They chug along quickly and vehemently to create a wave of emotion that captures you. This characteristic is quite a way of capturing your interest in the band despite the initial unfamiliarity.

The performances on the disc are tight and crushing sounding enough, with a penchant for adding a melodic standpoint to the proceedings. The guitars sound sort of hardcore in nature, though there’s nods to traditional metal and even melodic death like metal to be found throughout. The performances perk your interest in the band further.

Otherwise, the band have enough to distinguish them from bands within the genres they try operate under and the groovy nature would be suitable for many types of music, though they are able to craft their own distinctive style around it so that Beyond the Sixth Seal have a singularity to their performances.

Lyrically, we can see the band pushing themselves in a direction convenient to them. The fifth track, “Stricken”, tells of how people might fear them and this goes towards a similar tone of them wanting to find their own space within the metal realm quite effectively.

Overall, The Resurrection of Everything Tough is a strong album that brings massive waves of riff energy to the table. They clearly have some hardcore tendencies as well as those of the melodic death metal and traditional genres, but the exact frequency of the band seems to be to want to be as fun as possible. Recommended to any metal fan with an open mind.

Carcass – Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious

2009-01-20T20:52:00.002+02:00

(Earache Records, 1991, 8 tracks, 48 minutes, 3 seconds, by Adam McAuley)

Prime death metal that was always a cut above the rest is what Carcass offered and their style easily peaked with this masterful work that put them right at a creative high overall. It was a masterpiece that combined veracity with complexity making for one of death metal’s finest moments and an easy premium within their discopgraphy. Necroticism will always be remembered for the ways it smoothly spliced together killer hooks with textbook type lyrics that had a nice knowledge of medical terminology.

The first thing one will notice when comparing this work to other premiums of the death metal genre is Necroticism’s jagged complexity which has a manner of working itself into your skin well. Songs like “Carneous Cacoffiny” have a manner of implementing obtuse beats into the mix nicely and constantly keeping one interested.

We can sense an aggressive tone to their proceedings here, but there is also a melodious edge to be the most balanced overall portion of their discography. The nature of the album takes variety as a key trait as well to deliver an experience that never gets tiring, but remains constantly vigorating throughout its length.

Again, when directly comparing this album to other works of the same band, we see this one coming out on top because of a focus upon making an album that works greater as a whole as earlier efforts were concentrated too much upon aggression and later ones upon melody and this comes up as a positive point.

And again the interest one has with the band is concentrated upon their Necroticism album and the combination of their great ideas making an overall masterpiece that affects you. This is shown to culminate in one of the finer ending songs “Forensic Clinicism” that brings all the hooks together towards a satisfying finale.

Lyrically, a medical like dictionary approach is used to deliver lyrics that interestingly convey to you the ideals of body parts, for example, towards the furthering of a scientific knowledge. This is one of the slants of Necroticism that I found added to the complexity they were trying to convey.

On the whole, Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious is indeed the finest moment in Carcass’ discography and demonstrates them to be the finest of the death metal genre for a short time with a varied approach that brings out the best of the band. We can see their thoughtfulness blossom into one of the greatest albums of the nineteen nineties as well and a work that could be considered one of the all time greats.

Iron Saviour – Megatropolis

2009-01-13T21:30:00.010+02:00

(Dockyard 1 Records, 2007, 45 minutes, 34 seconds, Reviewed by Adam McAuley

We have here a power metal band that tries to stand within the constrictions of the type of music they're performing and thus remains very standard sounding and unable to distance themselves from the pack. One might want to compare them with a more pompous band within the genre such as Rhapsody and then we could see that perhaps Megatropolis deserves a bit of an adrenaline upgrade to reach the types of registers seen by that band, for example.

Iron Saviour perform a relatively straightforward power metal affair with the usual driving verses and catchy choruses seen by the genre, but they don’t have an interesting enough slant to be a necessary listen to fans of power metal because of their restricted sounds which are inviting, but not overly breathtaking enough.

Rapid fire riffing that tends to wants to imitate the likes of Helloween and Painkiller-era Judas Priest rapidly abounds on the album and they don’t hold quite the excitement and memorability those two bands do in particular making Iron Saviour just another power metal act rather than one that is to be followed and imitated upon.

The musical performances on Megatropolis follow the same outcome as much of the rest here. Everything is hectic enough to gain the listener’s interest to a certain extent, but they don’t carry enough weight to really excite on a higher plain. The guitar playing is decent as is the singing and drumming performances, but nothing is of very high caliber.

Lyrically, we can see Iron Saviour drawing on themes of the power of man overwhelming the scene and this causes for a comic book like view which, though appropriate, is not overly noteworthy and just makes for an enchanting way to enhance the overall thoughts on the album.

Standout tracks on the album include the final one "Farewell and Goodbye", which manages to brings things to a close with relative style and on an exciting enough note, but altogether Iron Saviour isn’t capable of stringing together a number of stellar tracks like some of the other bands mentioned which makes them lose interest at times.

Overall, Iron Saviour bring an album together that doesn’t hold enough of a special appeal to interest fans of the power metal genre as they go through similarly slightly cheesy sounding standard riffing without adding anything new to the genre or standing out in a way that’s spectacular enough to be particularly above mediocre.

Militia - Released

2009-01-08T23:18:00.003+02:00

(2008, 12 tracks, 54:28)

Hard as it is to imagine now, Texas was once a hotbed of metal talent; Watchtower and Helstar were the big names, of course, but Juggernaut, S.A. Slayer, and other such underground bands sustained a scene lively enough that it made sense for Mark Reale to rebuild Riot with lone star recruits in the late 80s. Nowadays, well, Ron Jarzombek is still kicking around down there, and Helstar is back together, and that first Power of Omens disc was pretty good, right? But really, no one playing the word association game today is going to answer “Texas,”with “Metal!” That’s too bad, because this finally released Militia retrospective shows that the metal of this cast-off, never-was band kicks the shit out of a lot of bands that, you know, made an album at some point.

To the extent that anyone is familiar with Militia, it’s usually by a trivial awareness that the guy who sang on Watchtower’s track on the Doomsday News II compilation, Mike Soliz, was stolen from Militia. He sang that one track with the band and was shortly replaced by Alan Tecchio, who sang on the Watchtower’s sophomore LP. Militia themselves only released one piece of vinyl, a vanishingly rare EP called The Sybling, pressed in a quantity of 300 or thereabouts, plus a couple low-rent demos. They did the usual live work and stuck it out for four or five years and were gone. Released collects The Sybling, some of those demos (or maybe all of them- it’s not exactly clear) and packages them with nice historical liner notes from bassist Robert Willingham. The booklet is really sharp, with lots of pictures and reproductions of old show flyers (those are always fun: Exciter, Megadeth, and Militia? King Diamond, Watchtower, and Milita? Oh to be a denimed Hessian in 80s Texas!) Sadly, the sound quality of these 12 tracks doesn’t live up to the visual standards of the package. I would be shocked to learn that any of these tracks were taken from master tapes: The Sybling is probably sourced from an old vinyl copy and the demos from ancient, low-bias cassettes copied at high speed. The 1984 Regiments of Death demo sounds about as good as you could hope, given the provenance of the material, but the No Submission demo is in such a poor state that the right channel frequently just isn’t there. The Sybling sounds fine, I guess, but the less said about the live and rehearsal tracks, the better. It’s a real pity, because the music is just smoking. It’s semi-technical thrash that vaguely recalls Savage Grace, or early Watchtower minus the virtuosity, but topped with some truly serious ballsqueezer vocals. Soliz doesn’t have the presence or command of Eric AK or Marc Antoni, but he’s got the range, at least, and he’s not scared to use it. Check out the scream in the middle of “Objective Termination”: it’s probably two or thee whole steps higher than Midnight’s highest note. Badass. His melodies are not the most graceful, it should be said, and his lyrics (as far as I can tell, as they’re not printed in this otherwise excellent booklet) are nothing special, but his singing is dripping in the pure metal insanity that only these high-register thrash guys can muster.

Released is not some kind of Holy Grail reissue, and Militia aren’t anyone’s idea of the best band ever, but thrash enthusiasts looking for a shot of that old tyme goodness could do worse than this collection. The sound issues are not insignificant, so if you have a low tolerance for bootleg-quality reproduction, this is not the CD for you. But, if you’re so hardcore, really, that you’d even consider buying the demo collection of a thrash band that existed for about 10 minutes in the whirlwind 80s, you probably have boxes full of 7th generation cassette dubs a hundred times worse than this, in every regard, and you probably love that shit, so why not throw a few bucks in Militia’s direction. They’re back together, unbelievably, so who knows, maybe your support will encourage them to put these tracks down properly (assuming Soliz can still sing like this, 20 years on.) Stranger things have happened. After all, that new Helstar album is not too bad, either! Thrash out with yer gash out!

Burst – Origo

2009-01-07T23:08:00.004+02:00

(Relapse Records, 9 tracks, 46 minutes, 51 seconds, Reviewed by Adam McAuley)

Very energetic molten hardcore is what is crafted by the band Burst. They are able to breath fresh air into a genre that at times could seem one dimensional, but is here given the passion needed to work within multiple dimensions. They bring an emotionally charged type of musical tempo to the metal landscape and are thus able to raise themselves into a niche of their own.

One of the primary things you’ll notice when listening to Origo is how it’s a more varied and dynamic work than Prey on Life was and the improvements in terms of deep song-writing tendencies illuminate the work well. There is a greater tendency to verge towards softer, acoustic like moments here and there is also an abundance of memorable stand out sections.

Origo shows a great progression in terms of incorporating nuances that stick out within the listener’s mind. See the introductory portions of track 6, “Homebound”, for example, regarding when a change of pace nicely complements the style of the work. The earliest moments of the album show a similar ability to build up from sparse moments , winto more momentous sections quite splendidly.

Further stellar moments on the album include the song “The Immateria” which features cascading riffing atop perfectly complementing abrasive singing. It has a passionate approach that is largely one of the better moments of the album as it builds up into exciting moments from the start quite effectively.

Lyrically, we can see Origo taking a sort of hopeless vibe with their views often shifting towards pastures of nothingness in a bleak, but entertaining fashion. This can be related to the manners their music shifts to different types of pastures quite effectively and approaches a state of bleakness similarly as well.

So, is our relationship to the band elevated by this work. I would say it is to some extent because Origo is a step up from Prey on Life and bodes well for the their upcoming work Lazarus Bird. It shows the manners that hardcore can improve in interesting new directions to add layers of depth to their repertoire.

And thus Burst put out a great new album in the form of Origo. It has all of the variety necessary to hold one’s interest quite effectively throughout. If there are any problems with the album, it’s that the band hasn’t completely opened up their new sounds for an entirely masterful effect yet, which might come to full fruition when listening to their upcoming release Lazarus Bird.

Harms Way - Oxytocine

2009-01-05T03:36:00.003+02:00

(Black Lodge, 9 tracks, 43 minutes, 85 seconds, reviewed by Adam McAuley)

Very high octane stoner metal that brings strong grooves and reminds highly of Kyuss is what is on offer from Harms Way and they deliver on their promises to become a highly undervalued part of the genre. They show enough of a potential to be considered a band that could be on a similar level to Kyuss and this makes them a significant entry into the metal world on that note alone.

From the outset, we can sense an emphasis on creating huge riffs, which is an aspect that makes them immediately appealing because it offers a way of absorbing sounds unlike many other bands and wants one to become interested on a higher level. The riffs gel together nicely to create a massive sound overall that has a manner of enrapturing you within its boundaries.

Strong stoner grooves round out this entire experience to create a package that has the potential to enamour you with its enormousness. The sound is something that sounds drug induced and this is interesting when looking into the performance enhancing potential of these drugs specifically when applied to an album that uses so many references to them.

The musical performances are top notch with musicians that play the style as though it was their last breath of fresh air in as honest a manner as possible. The guitarists have a suitably hugely distorted style that matches the groove-laden nature of the music and could be considered a pinnacle for the entire stoner genre as a whole while the drumming is solid and the vocals remind of Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age and Kyuss.

The lyrical content of the album matches the esoteric nature of the background music to create an overall experience that attempts to reach an esoteric plane, but with a focus upon the way we feel about the various songs making us further immersed in them. This has a manner of making us become more greatly attached to the stoner type image they try to portray so clearly through Oxytocine.

Some of the ways our relationship with the band would be at an interesting high include the way we scope out their emotional highs which form a background to how stoner songwriting should be performed and are backed up by interestingly massive riffs in terms of density. All of these euphoric elements form a nice relation to bands like Kyuss that we already have a great knowledge of as well.

In conclusion, a near perfect offering within the stoner genre is created that enscapulates all of the elements that would clearly make a highly drug influenced type of work interesting to the listener. We can see them having a need to create big riffs that are backed up by an incredibly fun slant that has a manner of affecting the listener greatly. Oxytocine comes as recommended for any fans of the Kyuss style of music.

Textures - Silouhettes

2008-12-30T03:18:00.003+02:00

Textures – Silhouettes

(Listenable Records, 9 tracks, 47 minutes, 28 seconds, reviewed by Adam McAuley)

Another work from a promising band is on display here though it doesn’t quite measure up to the stylistic virtues implied by the title, which implies an artistic powerhouse. Instead we’re left with a progressively slanted metal album that heavily recalls the likes of Meshuggah at many times. However, they have their own views which makes one want to be interested in their sounds towards a different slant.

We can see a rhythmically dense structure attempting to be created by the band which makes them wanting to skewered their thoughts into similar realms as the aforementioned Meshuggah. Textures have a way of pounding out a dense sound that they want to ingrain with the listener steadily, though its positive effect is sometimes questionable.

The sort of punishing vibe they demonstrate is shown nicely in "Laments of an Icarus" which starts off pummelling the listener in fine fashion and shows one of the more standout parts of the album, though there are fewer of them throughout than I found upon their last album Drawing Circles.

The lyrics that Textures utilize outline someone always wanting to find more interesting pastures in life which can be paralleled with the idea of Textures wanting to find a more solid grounding within the metal genre. The album thus brings together an interesting way at looking towards future circumstances that is key to their forward thinking nature.

How is my personal relationship to Textures elevated by Silouhettes? We can see them trying to satisfy an interest queued by their release Drawing Circles and they fail in this to some degree because it doesn’t supply as ingenious of a listen as its predecessor. Thus Textures are lumped into a slightly less than stellar status here though they remain solid.

Altogether, we can see that Silouhettes provides an enjoyable progressive listening experience on the whole, but doesn’t quite have the splendorous approach that can be seen from Drawing Circles, for example, and should have a slightly lessened fanbase to react to their undaring nature on this work. It is still worthy of a good listen though as we can see Textures delving into a slightly more tangible mindset.

Hollenthon - Opus Magnum

2008-12-26T00:03:00.004+02:00

(Napalm Records, 8 tracks, 50 minutes, 44 seconds, Reviewed by Adam McAuley)

Egotistical symphonic metal with a flair for wanting to master techniques of epicness is present and brings a characteristically exciting sonic vibe that is interesting in how it grips the listener’s attention. It strengthens your relationship to an already great band, but makes you question whether they honestly could have done better when comparing the album directly to With Vilest of Worms to Dwell, for example.

Their specific approach on the album makes you wonder if they’re imposing any boundaries of maintaining a certain level of quality upon themselves as the Opus Magnus might suggest certain standards wanting to be upheld, but not a revolution in their sound by any means, which is something that strongly catches your attention here.

The ability to incorporate a keen classical flair is an aspect of the band that makes you want to strongly become attached to them in an ingenious manner. They have a method of incorporating horns and other instruments into the background in a way that makes them particularly appealing to people.

Along with this operatic vocals weave a bombastic flavour into the songs and make them stand out in a manner that makes them appealing. The melding of classical elements realistically with normal metal moments makes Hollenthon a strong out-being within the metal genre and one can see growth in these elements making us interested in the work.

In terms of incorporating a lyric aspect into their work we can see a sort of poetic style taken within epic stances and some mentions of dying to raise the overall standpoint of Hollenthon into a different level. This makes them feel like an elevated band in terms of using a strong style to go along with their already substantial music abilities and make them feel bloated because of it.

What are some of the standout elements that make one want to listen to this album with extreme interest. We can sense that “Dying Embers” brings your attention up with its acrobatic approach and makes you want to really listen to the band keenly much like songs like “Fire Upon the Blade” did in the past. Having standout tracks is a method of gaining the listener’s interest effectively.

Altogether, this album represents another splendid work for the band Hollenthon with songs that are about bringing together an extremely epic classical flavour towards their work, which makes them a particularly different band for the listener to fans of the metal genre. Fans of both the metal genre and the classical music genre should be able to relate to Opus Magnum from a stylistic standpoint and enjoy it equally although it takes a very small step down from the magnificent With Vilest of Worms to Dwell.

Thesyre- Exist!

2008-12-23T15:00:00.002+02:00

Thesyre
Exist!
1 – 32:44

(review by James Edward Raggi IV, from the LotFP issue The Shameless, 2007)
It is amazing how often I am bombarded by messages telling me to ignore things I had no intention of thinking about in the first place. On the splash page of Thesyre’s site: “Thesyre is an ideologically independent band. We like to think that our visitors are intelligent people able to make up their minds based on what they can observe, hear and read and not upon all the lies, rumors and gossip circulating around.” The Schuldiner approach to deflecting criticism. Awesome. But when Exist! was released a few months back, funny things started popping up in sales catalog blurbs: “This Canadian outfit (with The Black Dahlia Murder drummer in its line-up) has a quite militant presentation when it comes to logo, layout and musicianship, yet they are not politically linked to any organization, and their releases should be reviewed on the music and intensity only.” Definitely interesting that those things were considered most important to tell potential buyers, eh?

As if that doesn’t set of alarm bells (the more effort someone puts into telling you something is not true, the more likely it is that it is true), there’s more! Call me naïve and easily influenced, but when a quick internet search finds band leader Eric Masicotte making it a point to say “I’ve read lots on and from Adolph [sic] Hitler,” when asked “What thinkers have influenced your philosophical and political worldview?” in an interview with ANUS, I’m not thinking nice and happy thoughts. And the topics of nationalism seem to come up in every interview I see with the guy. It’s certainly possible that the guy is not a racist or a Nazi in any way and is simply a provocateur, but it’s just as possible that the guy is indeed a fascist who is annoyed that people judge his work based on that understanding. Fact is that one way or the other he does care, because this sort of shadow does not follow the uninterested. Interesting quote from an interview with Vampire Magazine: “I might take the opportunity to mention that Thesyre is not a NSBM band either, hehe. I think that any form of culture deserves to be protected and cherished. This is what defines you as a part of a nation, this is collective identity! I can't understand why any minority organizing a cultural celebration gets a thumb up from the public opinion but when Europeans gather to celebrate their pagan past everyone sees hateful demonstrations of racism. I think we must thank a lot of right-wings organizations for that. People mixing racial hatred with nationalism gets it all wrong and only helps spreading stereotypes.” The truth behind Eric Masicotte requires a bit of digging.

The truth is entirely relevant to this album as Exist! is a call to self-awareness and individuality. The fucked thing is I thought the message was awesome before I started trying to learn more about the artist behind the art. Now? It bears a closer examination.

The crux of the album’s message is carried in the following lyrics: “Exist! / Manifest yourself / Don’t rely on someone else / Before you die / Experience life!” which is pretty much the entire message behind The Shameless (and why I didn’t bother caring whether Thesyre’s label is “too big” to fit into this issue’s concept). It’s a half hour of pure metal ideology of the sort that’s been repeated by lefties and righties forever, referencing everyone from Nietzsche (“The will of iron, the will to power”) to JFK (“Ask yourself what you can do / Not what the others could do for you”).

It’s easy to get behind this sort of message, isn’t it? “Exist! / Manifest yourself / Don’t rely on someone else / Before you die / Experience life!”

How about “For all these years humanity tried / To move away from its racial pride / We mixed our blood and generated a mess”? That’s from this same band, different release mind you, in a song called The Cleansing. Songs such as Elitism and Propagandart are little ditties you might find interesting. Yeah, that self-titled debut album certainly is quite revealing. The funny thing is, since I’m not plugged into this corner of the scene, I would have never thought to look for it if both the band and CD vendors didn’t bring attention to it. That the band did it is understandable, that a sales catalog did it is hilarious.

So that’s settled, but the reason I’m going into all of this is not to just point and throw “Fascist!” accusations around. Plenty of easier targets have just gotten thrown in the trash without comment here at LotFP headquarters. This is one of the few (I hope) that’s actually fooled me on first look.

It is an easy mark, I think, telling people that they need to take control of their lives. Telling them they should be somebody! “You are a beautiful, unique snowflake!” Yeah, man! Fuckin’ A! But it’s pretty easy to slip other messages in between the words that are easily agreed with.

Looking closer, even forgetting any connections in the wording between Exist! and past lyrics, it’s not all piss and vinegar for the waking of individuality in the listener. The use of “us” and “we” versus “you” or in this piece becomes pretty interesting when looked at with skepticism. Exist! opens up with the “us” and “we” being humanity at large, clueless and ignorant and destructive. Then they change the focus to “you”. Asking questions. Poking you. You’re not one of those people talked about in the first couple of verses, are you? Then it switches to talking about what “we” should do. Then it’s back to “you”, telling you that you are empowered and it’s your choice to be part of the problem or… something else. (You don’t want to be part of the problem, do you? Of course not.) Suddenly it’s a bit of talk about what “we” must do, and this is where “will to power” comes in. Suddenly the “we” isn’t some hopeless mass of humanity, but some group that can perhaps make things better. Then, this key bit of wording:

First prove your worth
Before you claim back what is yours
First you will serve then join the ranks that you deserve
Will you lead or will you follow
You take the path where you want to go
Ask yourself what you can do
Not what the others could do for you
…Meritocracy…

(“Meritocracy” gets repeated several times). This changes everything and is what I missed in my first glances at the lyrics. “Prove your worth” to who? For what purpose? To prove you’re taking control of your own life and shrugging off the shackles of a mentally comatose existence? Doesn’t that mean you don’t have to prove anything to anybody? “Claim back what is yours”? Are a few stanzas edited out or has the topic shifted to something completely unrelated to the rest of the song? “First you will serve”… what? Serve who? “Join the ranks that you deserve”? What ranks? Who’s deciding what I deserve?

What is the fucking point of such a statement as “Everything is possible if you can break your chains / There’s no one to be blamed… / You live enslaved or you make a change” (as appears earlier in the song), not to mention the “Don’t rely on someone else” sentiment I quoted earlier, if the end result of all of that is still serving, joining ranks, and having someone judge what it is you deserve?

I wonder what kind of civil service the “Ask yourself what you can do / Not what the others could do for you” line is supposed to inspire in this context.

Meritocracy is a brilliant concept, isn’t it? Everyone assigned a position based on their abilities. The word Meritocracy was coined by an author named Michael Young in the 50s, and his book The Rise of the Meritocracy portrayed the idea as a negative thing. As the writers of Is It Me Or Is Everything Shit? point out about the book, “…it would not necessarily be the ‘best’ who came out on top, just those who are most enthusiastic about standing on the faces of everyone else.” I’d hate to see how such a system really would deal with individuals who spent time and energy on listening to, performing, or worse yet writing about heavy metal. That’ll rate highly on the merit scale, I’m sure. The entire point of my philosophy is to escape these ridiculous systems to where I am not forced to contribute into them, and am not responsible for what happens within systems I do not support. It’s how I fell out of college, of office jobs and a “career path”, and any sort of future in the music industry. The constructs are crap and “getting ahead” would have meant participating in something that I thought was crap. Not interested. I could have been anything I wanted, really. I could have been a doctor or a lawyer if I’d have been really motivated, or more to my interests fifteen years ago, a computer programmer. One of these “network engineers” that listens to progressive metal, for sure. But all I really wanted to be was left alone. Give me the means to pay my rent, buy some books and albums, and publish my ranting to a couple hundred people every few months and I’ve got all the life I need. It’s not a formula for a great life, but that’s the point of freedom and individuality. I don’t have to care about any sort of life but what makes me happy.

I think Exist! is saying the exact opposite. The entire purpose of becoming aware and empowered in the world this album attempts to build is very ordered, and very smothering. But it is very different to the current way of the world and it is in that difference that I first found excitement in the concept of this album.

But it doesn’t end there. “Meritocracy” may be a key point in the lyrics of the album, but it serves merely as a change in the focus of the ongoing concept. It shifts back to “we” again, at first questioning in terms of “we, all of humanity” much as the beginning of the album, but changes almost imperceptibly to a “we, that are aware,” and finally quite obviously taking this last stance to mean “we, that are above the rest of humanity.”

I do not believe this language is arbitrary or a result of laziness or incompetence. I believe this language is very deliberate. And I believe it is very dangerous for people who do not fit into specific ideas of merit and worth.

Why is there so much hypocrisy concerning empowerment and individuality? Thesyre talks about freedom and empowerment but actually means trading one set of shackles (consumerism?) for another (fascism). The agents of consumerism tell you out of one side of their mouths that their products are for the beautiful and unique snowflakes of discriminating taste, while out of the other side they have you firmly mapped into demographic categories that obscure the fact that you’re a living, breathing thing at all. An organization can not promote the individual. The larger the organization, the flatter the individual is squashed, always, without exception. Remember that the next time you cast a ballot at the polls, the next time you punch in at work, the next time you get excited that your band has just been offered a contract from a larger record label. First you will serve, then you will join the ranks, but you will never have any claim to anything that is yours. Don’t believe me? The next time you have more than the most casual of conversations with your wife/boss/record label, see if you can make it through the conversation without showing support for something when you really don’t want to support it. See what happens when you have an idea that’s outside of the established procedures. Make a conscious effort to alter your daily routine for the next week and see what happens. See if you can simply tell the truth. You’re fucked, and so am I. I can accept that life is just like that*, but what you need to ask is, where is the line drawn and who drew it?

So today’s lesson is question everything. Every single fucking thing you ever come across. Even, or maybe even especially, the things that are appealing and agreeable.

We can’t forget the fact that there is music associated with Exist!, as it is presented as a music album. (Not that winning and satisfying people are options. If you talk too much about the music then you’re accused of the old “dancing about architecture” nonsense, and if you don’t talk about it then you’re guilty of not realizing that “only the music is important.” Yet in an interview with The Darkest Hours, Masicotte states, “We make music to please ourselves first and then to carry a message to the audience,” so I’ll lose no sleep in discussing the very thing the band says is their first priority towards listeners.) It’s all a very rhythm-focused piece based of various pieces of repetition, and in this way it feels more like a Ministry album than anything else. Everything stays very basic, and the vocals, even if raspy, are loud and clear the entire way through. There is a five minute “break” of looser material (clean and acoustic guitars with an absence of drums, really) around the middle of the album where Exist! shows signs of life, but that’s really all there is. You’ll see descriptions like “old school black/thrash metal” but this thing is so clinical/sterile that I can’t agree. I don’t expect to be listening to any more of this, for many reasons, after I finish typing this sentence.

* Life is not just like that. I read How to Be Free by Tom Hodgkinson at the very end of the production process for this issue. It’s an amazing book and I find that much of my lifestyle (if not his reasoning for it) already parallels his advice, and the book was most inspirational. You don’t have to work. You don’t have to do anything. The book is available through Amazon UK (and he even talks about why he didn’t self-publish within the book itself!) and more info on Hodgkinson’s work can be found at www.idler.co.uk. Highest recommendation.

In Praise of Levykauppa Äx

2008-12-23T10:20:00.002+02:00

This store RULES beyond all concepts of rulership.

The timeline:

Maria and I were sitting around Sunday trying to figure out what Christmas presents we should get each other. We had a couple of ideas. She needed a new quilting ruler, and I still hadn't gotten the new double album from my favorite band, Hammers of Misfortune. We looked online at the usual Finnish distributors. Only one had it - Levykauppa Äx. There is a physical store in Helsinki, so...

Monday we go off shopping. We stop by that store during our trip. It's not on the shelf. Asking the helpful people at the counter (and they have always been helpful to me), they check and they only have a copy in their Kuopio location... I ask Maria but doing a 5 hour each-way train ride for a CD is out of the question.

Shit.

So we return home. At 3:13pm Monday afternoon we complete our online order for Hammers' Fields/Church of Broken Glass double CD.

At 10:15am Tuesday morning, just a few minutes ago... IT ARRIVED IN THE MAIL.

HOLY SHIT.

HOLY SHIT.

I guess this post is in praise of both Levykauppa Äx and the Finnish postal service.

Job well done!

Thank you Maria!

Now I don't have to feel like such a lame-ass because I don't have my favorite band's latest album(s)!

Formicide- Formicide

2008-12-22T15:00:00.002+02:00

Formicide
Formicide
15 – 58:19

(review by James Edward Raggi IV, from the LotFP issue The Shameless, 2007)
People are such weak-willed fucking pussies these days. It’s not enough that everyone expects to not be offended, but it’s to the point that people expect to be praised for the insignificant nothing that they do. It doesn’t give the immediate gratification of manipulating some pixels on the ol’ X-Box, so it’s obviously not worth it.

Let me tell you a little story about what it means to do something for the sake of doing it, and not because you want your ass kissed. In the introduction of this issue, I mentioned that I, the publisher, don’t need you, the paid customer. This is true. I do this because I am driven to do it, by forces 100% known and accounted for. I’ve wanted to be a writer all my life. I was reading novels, real ones, at six years of age and scribbling stupid shit immediately after. It was all garbage, from the attempt to sell hand-made comic books to the neighborhood kids for twenty-five cents a pop, to passing around sub-quality sci-fi/fantasy adventure stories to co-workers in the 90s looking for critiques. Isn’t that the sorriest shit you’ve ever heard? Add heavy metal to the ears, and then add exposure to the independent press. Instant inspiration, instant output. The energy that heavy metal gives to me is indescribable, and it certainly is not containable.

My outlet is the written word, and it is my art and is my creation. This is the reason why I laugh when I’m hit with that great canard from some shit-ass priss musician, “Well where’s your album on this great big label, huh?” Such wisdom. First, if you’re confident in your creation, you listen to and reflect upon criticism, but you don’t get defensive and you don’t bitch like a four year old. The type of person who responds in this manner knows their career is built on publicity and playing financial grab-ass, and not on the principles of inspiration and creation. Judging your success (and apparent immunity to criticism) by what business entity you decided to sign the rights to your creation over to is pretty weak. (I’ve also released fewer bad albums than these whiners, so maybe I win the music race.) My ability to write about music has nothing to do with my ability to create it. If I was a creator of music, my opinion would mean even less, because it is a musician’s job to connect with a listener, not a peer, and a musician who doesn’t like what they hear should demonstrate, not illustrate, the deficiencies by creating music with these problems solved.

Let me tell you about criticism and under-appreciation. My [now ex-] wife refuses to read LotFP. The people I hang out with, if they’ve read it, haven’t been moved enough to say a single word about it. I’ll have to assume they hate it. Yet there is, scattered around this globe, a small group of people who appreciate it. Pay to receive it. Every so often I hear from someone that used to read in the better-distributed days and they tell me what bands they discovered because of LotFP. Once I even got a “star” reaction with a reader freaking out about meeting me when I went to DragonCon one year. There isn’t a country in the Western world where I don’t know somebody that will meet me and help me out getting around their city, or even halfway across the nation, if I need it. And my home is open to them if for some reason they need to stay in Vaasa for a day or two (house rules: No smoking, no drinking). Shit, I’m planning on putting my own mother up in a hotel when she comes, you know? A couple people have actually been inspired enough by LotFP to join the effort, and these guys pay into the costs of the mag to help produce it. No shit. This is why I think it’s funny when this past year people were saying that LotFP was “jealous” of Decibel and other mags when launching our assaults. Yeah, so jealous. When I hear the staff at Decibel are offering to buy a couple dozen extra copies and pass along a few extra dollars to help get the thing made, then maybe I’ll further consider the whole envy thing. And coming back to the readers, saying “I don’t need you” does not mean that I don’t appreciate you. Your comments are appreciated (especially relevant criticism), your subscription money a sign that I’m actually reaching people. But don’t you feel better knowing that LotFP will be LotFP whether or not you’re reading it?

There is a point to all of this, directly relating to Formicide no less, so stay with me. Andrew Westerhouse does the Aversionline and Blodårstid webzines/blogs. He’s passionate about music and has been writing for over half a decade. He decided to take this band, Formicide, that had never released an album, gathered up all their demo tapes, and released it as a CD. Didn’t even have access to the master tapes, it’s taken from the released cassettes (this is a good thing… no temptation to fuck with the sound, so it gets released sounding like it did when it was impressing him in the first place). The money and business part of the equation was so well-thought out that after the finished CDs arrived, he was talking about how he was going to get around to contacting distros about carrying it one of these days. The damn thing doesn’t even have a barcode on it. So the question is… why?

Because he’s a goddamn fan of the music and he thought it would be really cool to have this band out there, in a modern and convenient format, for the people who might be interested in it. He’s not concerned about business and finance, and the success or failure of this venture is completely irrelevant to his doing it. Even if this one doesn’t sell, there are still some other old bands he’s thinking about doing releases for, business be damned. (It’s in print now Andrew, so if you puss out on us I’m coming to rip your nuts off.) His criteria for what is worth doing are not determined by money, marketing potential, trends, or any insignificant bullshit like that. The truth is that a label with any sort of success can not be trusted, because the instant something becomes a success and the label owner sees money in his own pocket, the label changes. It does. New signings and all activity become all about sustaining success and worrying about money and what is good for business instead of letting the music and inspiration determine what is good and what is not. Fuck that. Commerce kills art dead. Financially unsound record labels are the only record labels that music listeners can trust.

Thing is, it’s bad enough when “industry professionals” (read: fuck-asses who are making money they don’t deserve while ripping off the people who actually produce what they manipulate other people into buying) and musicians who have had a taste of a bit of fame and monetary success fall into thinking that any of that matters. It’s fucking pathetic when fans act all concerned about the business moves of labels and bands like “good business” and “good music” have any relationship whatsoever. It gets even worse when fans pretend they are junior members of the industry who are helping promote the bands. Slave labor, right? Fool the consumer into thinking they are a provider. People… it’s this simple:

STOP GIVING YOUR MONEY TO BUSINESSMEN. THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU. THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT THE MUSIC. THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU. THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT THE MUSICIANS. THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU.

That’s all that “professionalism” is worth. Nothing. The ability to fuck you over with no sense of shame or responsibility. “It’s just business. Just doing my job. I didn’t make the rules.” Go fuck yourself and your soulless shell.

Of course, for the purpose of this review anyway, all of this is only relevant because Formicide is pretty good and will also appeal to people not named Andrew Westerhouse. It’s 80s American thrash, no doubt about it, with a sense of aggression and relentless riffing the likes of which seemed to stall in this time period as bands became more aware of MTV, money, and thinking Slayer and Metallica levels of success were really possible and desirable. That this album covers material originally recorded between 1987 and 1989, it’s impressive how the band ignores South of Heaven and And Justice For All’s slowed-down success and gets even more raw later on. It doesn’t stop, it doesn’t let up – it’s an album by metal for metal and nothing else. This doesn’t get in the way of the songs from being distinct and at times catchy. The singer (as opposed to shrieker or shouter) is quite articulate with real understandable words of apocalypse and being bellowed out with controlled anger. And if you don’t agree, the lyrics are all there in the insert in plain black and white. The sound is pretty damn effective for the material taken from the first two tapes. The third demo sounds like ass and there isn’t much saving it. A re-recording of some of those 1989 songs (done later that same year) get released on this album for the first time ever, and they do show a better sound quality, and highlight the longer and far more articulate (and important) lyrics the band was attempting. Formicide is everything good about what the American metal scene was capable of in the 80s. And they did it themselves.

Formicide only existed for two years. Why they didn’t last very long is unknown, but largely irrelevant. They did what they wanted to do, for as long as they wanted to, and the progression of the music shows absolutely no taint of outside influence in attempting to attract attention and get signed. Formicide serves two purposes – one, their music is worthy of listening on its own. Two, bands should treat their work seriously, for its own sake. You never know who is listening to that “promo” you are putting together, what effect it will have on them… or when. Formicide got what you just know they wanted back then – they got signed. Somebody put their record out. Should we feel it’s somehow irrelevant or “doesn’t count” because it was seventeen years later? Or should we just remember the real lesson: Make it good and shut the fuck up when the world isn’t beating down a path to your door. The point is to make something meaningful that connects with people, and the second you forget that in hopes of being an impressive line on some business’ accounting sheet, you’ve lost all relevance. Andrew Westerhouse is a thrash freak and he was moved enough to finance a proper album release of this material. Effectively, he liked it so much he bought a thousand copies. I’m not so much a thrash freak and I’m enjoying the hell out of it for its quality on a more general metal scale. How much more convincing do you need to be moved to investigate for yourself whether or not you should invest in Formicide?

Ascension Theory - Answers

2008-12-21T13:25:00.001+02:00

Ascension Theory
Answers
10 – 46:04

(review by James Edward Raggi IV, from the LotFP issue The Shameless, 2007)
It takes a special kind of self-loathing to play, or enjoy, music that is nothing but a series of contradictions. Complex, yet song-oriented. Heavy, yet melodic. Aggressive, yet accessible. Metal, yet good-natured. It’s an impossible balancing act that even the best can never pull off for more than an album, maybe two.

The problem is that the people who play this kind of music, and those that listen to it as their music of choice, hate heavy metal for what it is and think this “progressive metal” style uses what is “good” about metal and discards what is “bad” about it. The result is a bunch of pencil pushers, data jockeys, and other corporate office professionals being “creative” and making “progressive” “metal” about “important issues” with a sound that contains no real anger (that would be immature) or frustration (imagine what the wife or boss would think… they’re suspicious enough as it is since a *gasp* electric guitar is involved!), and no real progression either. Because “progressive” is a genre with a set of rules, you see, not an adjective that means anything resembling progress or real creativity. And the people listening to it are a bunch of pencil pushers, data jockeys, and other corporate office professionals expressing their appreciation for fine, intelligent, upstanding music.

Basically, it’s a bunch of unhappy, repressed people involved in music that intentionally puts barriers between sound and emotion under the banners of intellect and maturity. It’s passive aggressive bullshit, all of it, and like most manifestations of passive-aggressive behavior, the best ways to deal with it are to just flash a bird and walk away, or beat the offending party to death with a nail-spiked bat.

Dream Theater has much to answer for.

And this brings us to Ascension Theory, a band that practices all of these contradictions and worships them by recording song after song with all of these problems on display. There isn’t a cliché left untapped by the three guys in the band, and every promise of heaviness is emasculated by some sort of floofery, puffery, or other some such faeriekin handicraft. They even have a song called The Way of Death, with an actual riff, and it seems like it’s going to be an actual metal song, but then some cooing woman starts singing about overpopulation.

The tragedy is that some of these songs are so filled with hooks and good choruses (Saturn’s Reign, for one) that if the band would just go for it, in whatever direction (just pick one!), they’d be successful (and I’m not using money or record sales as a definition of “success” here). They have riffs. They have sugary sweet melodies. They have instrumental prowess. What they don’t have is a cohesive vision, their own sound, or any real emotion in their music. It’s fatal to all their efforts, and this album is a few scraps of good ideas and a giant example of all of the problems inherent in a “progressive” “metal” band.

Judas Priest - Nostradamus

2008-12-21T06:47:00.005+02:00

(Columbia Records/Epic Records, 23 tracks, 102 minutes, 42 seconds, reviewed by Adam McAuley)

Nostradamus represents an interesting change in pace for this band who had been throwing out albums of pure metal delight for years and to almost no equal. Here we see them changing their direction towards a concept album stance and this bodes for pompous results. As such we can see that Nostradamus is a slightly more uneven album because of its ambitions, however, and manages to throw in a lot of filler in between tracks to make it so. And thus the album fails to live up to their better comeback Angel of Retribution although it isn’t really a complete downfall by any means.

So, to start off, the structure of the album is a huge changing point over past works in its double album nature and its presence of many shorter intermission kind of tracks. This displays a different direction they want to take attempting to build excitement over lengths of time rather than hitting you on the head with one classic track after another. Nostradamus’ nature makes for moments of boredom throughout the work as the filler tacks fail to raise a pulse. They serve as just a minute of stationary waiting for the next exciting track, which comes by at reasonable frequency.

The standout tracks aren’t frequent, but “Revelations” and “Visions” were amongst their names. They have a slight feel of older Priest overwhelming them which raises them above some of the greater filler type tracks on the album. A sort of virtuoso flavour overwhelms the songs as well, which is a promising characteristic.

In terms of musical performances, we can see a fairly solid outing by the band, although one yearns for the classic feel of albums like Sad Wings of Destiny and Screaming for Vengeance slightly more than the slightly modernized tone presented here. Halford’s voice is starting to show a slight down-point compared to his early youthful vigour, but this was also demonstrated on the Angel of Retribution album and solo works as well, though his voice is still solid.

The concept album stance of Nostradamus tends to want to make it seem majestic at times, but here we’re left with a product that seems slightly more bloated in the long run because of filler tracks. In the stages of the band’s progression, an album of this type of a nature would be a reasonable idea for a change although we can see that it isn’t necessarily an altogether positive one at this point.

On the whole, Nostradamus is a step down Angel of Retribution or such classics as Sad Wings of Destiny, Stained Class, Screaming for Vengeance and Painkiller. However, it is a reasonably solid concept album taken from a purely musical standpoint despite the filler. This work is thus slanted towards people welcoming a change in Priest’s habits although they may not be entirely wanted, show even expansions of the band that could be helpful.

Primordial – To the Nameless Dead

2008-12-21T02:50:00.002+02:00

(Metal Blade Records - 2007, 8 tracks, 64 minutes 42 seconds, reviewed by Adam McAuley)

This album, To the Nameless Dead, displays the great talent that Primordial bring to the heavy metal environment via their majestic approach to song-writing. We can sense a very honourable manner of approach that this band can display and it makes them to be a distinctive unit in the genre because of the passion their awe-inspiring constructs manage to obtain from you. One can sense a sort of empowerment to be derived by their dense techniques overall.

The first thing one notices is that when trying to compare the band, it is very difficult to make in appropriate comparison because their sound is so unique, but I could see them being slanted towards Agalloch by some. This comes from their very nature-like sound that makes them seem enchanting in a similar manner to that band. Otherwise, they occupy a triumphant realm that should be emulated from rather than compared to.

What are some of the shades that best describe Primordial’s style? We can sense them utilizing a very rapturously rhythmic guitar which has highs and lows to suit the variously moody textures the band wish to portray. There is a decidedly hopeful tune to the songs, which is echoed by their up-swinging mood at times to create a characteristic sound.

The band are successful at crafting their epic approaches to a reasonable extent altogether. The rising tensions in the song-writing display this as seen from “Traitor’s Gate”, for example, which features the greatest epic build-ups on To The Nameless Dead. Other songs follow a similar suit.

In terms of musical performances, we can see a charismatic vocalist that carries himself properly over the momentous soundscapes. The support of the backup band is equally astonishingly solid, providing abrasive guitars, over a nicely constructed wonderfully laden guitar passage scene. This all goes together to form an outfit that shows strong promise in their song-writing skills with only the hope to improve in the future.

Overall, To the Nameless Dead is a splendid entry into an already stellar line-up of albums that is consistently proving Primordial to be one of metal’s better bands. They generate sonicscapes that will wow you, but just fall short of reaching an altogether phenomenal status. Still, To the Nameless Dead is a splendid album.

Metallica - Death Magnetic

2008-12-19T06:04:00.013+02:00

(Warner Bros. Records, 10 tracks, Total playing time 74 minutes 42 seconds, Reviewed by Adam McAuley)

This album was quite a astounding in that it made up for the rather bitter efforts of recent material from St. Anger and others which didn't stir up attention as well as the new work. I found it to be excellent in its crunchy new riff-laden approach. It may not measure up to efforts like …And Justice for All in its metallic character and thrashy stylings, even though it has a brash enough standpoint on its own. Death Magnetic features the usual array of slightly more aggressive songs surrounded by a couple of ballads, though there are less distinctive qualities of heaviness to be found here.

The playing on this album is restrained enough for great clarity, but at the same time heavy enough to make one headbang like during the early days did. Instead of featuring a lazy radio-driven type of standpoint as was seen on the Loads to St. Anger, we can see the album take on a decidedly more heavy metal standpoint overall. This facet of the album is a bright spot for the band as we want want to welcome them back into the world of metal steadily again.

Standout cuts on the album include track 4 and 5. The latter, "All Nightmare Long" contains a rousing chorus with some of the better singing we’ve seen from Hetfield altogether and manages to set your mind on fire to some extent. "The Day That Never Comes", the earlier track, is a winding ballad that enraptures you to almost as great an extent as songs like "Fade to Black" did in the past. These songs are memorable and carry enough momentum to win you over.

How does this album compare to recent works by the likes of Testament for example? We can see a greater presence here as compared to recent works by Metallica, but the album still lacks the licks newer material by bands like Testament can provide as this is no The Gathering, for example. As thus it makes itself out to be more like a quality heavy metal album rather than a thrash album at times.

Thus, on the whole, Death Magnetic shows huge improvement from their last couple of efforts and most importantly displays that the spirit of metal is wanting to find itself re-injected into its core. Death Magnetic manages to be the perfect blend of abrasive songs with more infecting ballad-types into a nice blend of addictiveness and asserts itself to be the band’s best work since the classic …And Justice From All from their early stages.

Cynic and The Ocean, December 15 Concert Review

2008-12-18T14:30:00.000+02:00

Cynic is a very important band to me. They were one of the first, if not the first, band to make me realize that full-on death metal wasn't the be-all and end-all of music.

It's summer, 1994. I know who Cynic is, vaguely. They had a cool song on the Roadrunner compilation At Death's Door II. Two of their members played on Death's Human. And they're playing with Cannibal Corpse and Sinister in the town where I live!

I was there to see Cannibal Corpse, of corpse.

:P

So there I am, right up front. "Where did they get these kids to be roadies for them?" I thought as Cynic's stuff was being set up. Then they start. They weren't roadies, it was the band... so there they go, playing newagejazzydeathy metal, with a slideshow and all sorts of fun stuff going on. As the opening band, they didn't get the full stage, so fans got to see Sean Reinert right up front, facing to the side, as he drummed away. We got to see Dana Cosley handling keyboards and the growling vocals (and check out Youtube videos from that tour - it seems when people realized it was the girl doing those... the crowd pops. Not so big a deal now, but 14 years ago?). I saw a Chapman stick played live for the first (and only) time in my life. (I read that Sean Malone wasn't on that tour, but

I was mesmerized. You can bet I went out and bought Focus immediately afterwards, and kept up on all things Cynic thereafter.

The rest of the crowd? "Play faster!" "Turn your guitars up!" uugghh. Not unanimous hatred of course, but it wasn't a very respectful crowd. Yet who should Cynic have realistically toured with in order to reach an audience? (didn't similar problems plague Anacrusis, Atheist, and Believer? Maybe they could have all toured with each other and drew 25 people a night...)

It changed the way I looked at music (expanding my horizons) and was a major source of my feeling disconnected from my fellow metal fans. For years, a person's opinion of Cynic's Focus was the sole qualifier for whether or not I would discuss music with them in any serious manner. These days, I'll discuss music with nonbelievers but if you don't rate Focus highly, then I don't rate you highly. People who don't like that album really have to be deaf or stupid.

(And if you find such statements absurd... eat shit, fuck off, die, or do whatever it is you do when you're not around me. I really don't care. There are things important to me, and things that are not. Music that moves me is important. People having a problem with music that moves me are not. Cynic is that good. Are you?)

Fast forward a few years. I'm online in 1997, on some internet chat room, looking for new music to investigate. I'm in some random place talking to some random people. "Well what do you like?" someone asks. Cynic is on the list, of course. "Then you should check out Opeth!" That was good enough for me. What can I say? I was easy then... So I buy Orchid and Morningrise, which had been recently released in the US by Century Media.

2008. Opeth and Cynic are touring. Together! In Europe... wait a minute... I'm in Europe!

They're going to play in Helsinki... wait a minute... I'm in Helsinki!

They're playing at the Kaapelitehdas... wait a second... my girlfriend lives in that same plaza! The venue is right outside the window!

Holy crap!

Money problems prevent me from buying tickets (40€ each!) until early November. Over a month before the show. Guess what? SOLD OUT!

Crap.

CRAP.

What to do? What are my options? I'm not contacting Roadrunner to get on the guest list. Dare I contact Season of Mist? LotFP has rather fallen into a state of... uh... cobwebs as of late. And I was never close with that label. Dare I risk finding out that something I did as the prime focus of my life for just about ten years isn't worth a couple of free concert passes anymore?

No, not going to do that. I know! I used to know Mikael Åkerfeldt fairly well. Interviewed him a few times. Even went down to the studio in Örebro for a couple hours while he was recording during the Ghost Reveries sessions. Had his private number for awhile (long since lost...). I can email him and blah blah blah. But he's on tour. Does he read email on tour? And I haven't talked to him in a long time since, honestly, my interest in the band's post-Still Life stuff (and these days, post-MAYH stuff) isn't as strong as it used to be. ay ay ay.

And I'm doing all this because I want to see Cynic.

Day of show. The girlfriend and I walk the dog, passing Kaapelitehdas as we often do. Wait... there's a tour bus? At 10:30am? And who's that stepping out... is that... couldn't be... I'm not wearing my glasses so I walk up... it's Mikael! Is the day saved? No. He stops, I don't even know if he recognized me, but he explains he's sick as a dog and on his way to see a doctor. No problem. That is all.

And that's that, until about 7pm, when Chrissy calls me. (By the way, she moved to Finland based on my example, and met her now-husband while here. I change lives. :P) Opeth canceled! Cynic and The Ocean are now playing some other club (Dante's Highlights). Doors open in two hours! The day is saved!

So the girlfriend and I head down and arrive about 8:50. There is already a line formed around the block. Oops. Chrissy and Ossi arrive soon, and inform us that the club is small; we may not get in. So I panic and come up with a series of improbable and comical plans to clear out the line in front of us (including running down the line farting, or walking the other way around the block, then up the line bitching that the show is sold out and nobody else is being let in) when a person in front of us assures us that the club can hold a decent amount of people and not to worry. She really did seem nice so I don't think there was an unspoken "So shut up, OK?" attached there. She did say she was there to see The Ocean. I haven't heard that band, ever. "They're like a mix of Isis and Opeth!" Isis? Ah, shit. Shit.

We get in. Walk right up to the stage. Close. Not close to full yet. Argh, Chrissy!

Maria, the girlfriend unit, aka my non-penised companion, at age 34, has never been to a concert before. She's not a metalhead. She doesn't even listen to music on her own. (and now she has 700 CDs in her living room... hahahaha!) So she's enjoying the people-watching opportunities this show is providing. But this is a well-behaved crowd, all things considered, so I need to take her to see some rancidly tr00 black metal show or something soon.

The Ocean are up. Some bad signs: They have a computer running at the side of the stage. None of the band members have long hair, and a couple even have trendy haircuts. They start playing. It's shit. The singer has a very generic "core" voice, the band is for the most part playing very simple heavy rhythms, no riffs here, and there are backing tracks providing violins and keyboards.

It's shit. Shit. SHIT. Actually, if you take out the backing tracks, it's nu-metal. The band sucked. Sucked hard.

I can deal with that. I've watched a lot of shit bands and not gone into convulsions. But then the fetuses they call fans start moshing. To this? And it's not a proper mosh. Or even anything resembling... I dunno... anything. It's a bunch of smiling kids jumping around like retards (seriously... they had that crooked arm movement and everything) and bumping into each other and spinning arm and arm and shit. Uh, guys? The band's over there. Stop that! I don't want to lose my good spot for Cynic, but I really don't want to deal with these turds ramming into me every three seconds either. I consider taking a cheap shot at the next one to do so... I consider it for the rest of the set, really... but getting into a fight would mean missing Cynic and probably not impressing the girlfriend very much. So I suffer.

Then The Ocean's computer breaks, and that's when they change from a shit band to a fake, poor excuse for a quasi-pseudo-poser-ass metal band. I mean, up to that point, they had all the moves down. The violent GRRRRR faces while playing guitar, the oh-so-emotionally-wistful look during the quieter parts... you know, that fake and infuriating "stage presence" that metal bands insult their fans with.

But their computer breaks... and they can't go on. Not only would we miss the pre-recorded violins and keyboards, but they're drummer's playing to a click track. Run by this very computer.

Apparently, their drummer can't keep a beat. Which is the entire point of a drummer. Dumb fuckers.

So the singer, ever the pro, kills time by addressing the crowd. "This is the best reception we've had on this tour... give yourselves a hand!" "It sucks that Opeth couldn't play..." blah blah blah. I hate that shit. He couldn't just talk to us... he has to do the Rock Star Stage Pose conversation.

His speech was just as fake as the metal his band plays.

Then... the greatest thing I've ever heard. He leads the chant of "Fuck you!" directed at their computer (not at themselves... you know, the band that couldn't play dead-simple tunes without help... hey guys... it's called... rehearsing... you're opening for Cynic and Opeth... it's something you should have looked into). At their computer!

They finally decide to "play old-school... without the click!" He said that!

After the set, I catch up with Chrissy. I start voicing my complaints. Chrissy, lover of many things False Metal (only a problem because she says she's all about metal), starts listing excuses. "Do you think they have the budget as openers of this tour to bring a keyboard player and a violin player and..." blah blah blah. Like I, as a listener, should care about the artist's budget issues? It sucks, or it doesn't. And the problem with this band wasn't their budget.

I suggested that if they brought the keyboard player and violin player and whoever else, and left home the losers who showed up, that I might have actually enjoyed listening to it. "I don't even know why I bother to discuss music with you," Chrissy says, and runs off. Haven't talked to her since. heehee!

After a short wait, here's Cynic. I waited 14 years to see this. Some of these people have been waiting their entire conscious lives to see this. It's a much different atmosphere than the Cannibal Corpse show in 94. I know the band. The crowd knows the band. And the band is actually liked by the people there.

The stage attitude is much different between Cynic and The Ocean. Cynic is much more laid-back. There is no intensity or aggression or attitude on the stage. Hell, the two Exivious guys they have on bass and guitar/growls pretty much just stand there and play. That's not very engaging, but neither is it fake poser shit. I can't see Sean Reinert from my position, so it's all about Paul Masvidal.

Masvidal is leading Cynic these days, with the sole writing credits on the new Traced in Air album. In some ways, Cynic is no more a "real" metal band than The Ocean, with all the heavy new age and jazz and what-have-you influences. But it so happens that many of those outside influences are things I listen to on my own anyway (Cynic started that in the first place... :P). And Cynic started in the 80s Florida death metal scene. In Miami rather than Tampa, but still. Masvidal has performed with, and recorded albums with, both Chuck Schuldiner and Paul Speckman. He knows his stuff, and any deviation from the norm is through choice and calculation, not because he's a young clueless rebel that doesn't know his ass from his elbow.

Cynic was a joy. Masvidal was an engaging frontman... never condescending by posing with fake attitude. He smiled, spoke softly, sat down at one point while playing, and had some real interaction with the crowd between songs. These were "just" a bunch of really talented musicians playing some awesome music for us... not TOUGH AND MEAN GUYS WHO WERE EXPRESSING THEIR ANGER AND... you get what I mean. There was a cool moment when Paul dropped his plectrum while finger-picking... it was snatched up by a fan... and when Paul was done and looked for it... the fan gave it back. The fan got it back himself after the song, but it was a cool little moment of mutual respect between musician and listener. At the end, there was no encore. They announced the last song, left the stage for a minute (to breath, take a piss, get a drink... whatever), then returned to break down their equipment. Again, no posing.

This isn't to say that the performance itself was listless or robotic or just going through the motions. Cynic's music is intense, and probably tough as hell to properly perform on stage. The intensity was there in the performance, it was just the kind of concentration that reminded me more of the musicians of a symphony orchestra performing more than the posturing of 99% of metal bands on stage.

And by playing for about an hour, they were able to cover a good deal of both Focus and Traced in Air, since both albums are right around 35 minutes each. They were able to present a good deal of their newest creation without disappointing anyone that wanted to hear old stuff. Veil of Maya, How Could I, Textures, Uroboric Forms, Celestial Voyage... I was a happy camper.

Yet I'm not sure what to think overall about Cynic in 2008. Their reunion seems convenient to take advantage of better economic times now than when they broke up (the overall economy may be in the toilet, but metal is more popular than it's been in almost 20 years). Of course the new album doesn't have the impact the first one did. Focus was a genre-breaking, breathtaking work of creativity. Traced in Air is three of the five musicians from the first album (plus another guy) revisiting that same creative space fifteen years later. It can't compare as far as impact.

But it is a good album, well crafted, and not at all an embarassment to the Cynic name. That they did get Sean Malone back on bass, that they got the same cover artist to embellish the new album, I think that stuff counts. This is a Cynic album in substance as well as in name, and I'm happy to have spent the 19€ to buy it. If it grows on me in the next fourteen years even a tenth as much as Focus did over the previous fourteen, it'll become one of my favorite albums ever. Time will tell, and a couple weeks with it is far too early to say anything other than "good album."

I had the privilege to talk to Masvidal for a minute after the show, and said to him many of the things that I wrote at the top of this post. He's created art that has, without any exaggeration, changed the entire course of my life (would I be sitting here on a keyboard in Helsinki if Cynic hadn't changed my attitudes so much in 1994?), and I had to express my appreciation.

I had a great time.

Sculptured - Embodiment

2008-12-14T04:55:00.009+02:00

(The End Records, 5 Tracks, Total Playing Time 39:19 - Reviewed by Adam McAuley)

Embodiment shows that this outfit is finely tuning their style into a progressive powerhouse of shifting metal effectively going through its various tempos. There is a rigidness to their sounds that nicely coincides with a jazzy sense to create a unique overall progressive flavour. The ideal of a heavy metal type of jazz structure can be taken from this album and it makes the band well suited for fans of that particular genre because it has a stop and start nature that can be relegated towards the styles of the genre.

Passages verge towards well-placed interludes to create an open-ended approach. They slow down their speedy tempos at times towards a nicely gelled frequency. The approach is further elevated by solid musical performances, especially that of drummer Dave Murray, some strong guitar playing, and an enjoyable singing talent. These form the background for an innovative and stirringly complicated approach.

The track listing is relatively short with only five songs and not a huge differential between them, as the last song is definitely the longest and most intense. It shows a varied approach for the band’s thought waves, as they are able to recapture your attention with each new song. The songs gel together well to form a conceptual type of work. The beginning and end form the more epic structures of the cohesiveness of the album as they feature twists and turns to shape Sculptured views against.

In terms of comparing Sculptured sound, they are similar to the jazzy-laden style of the Still Life era (Opeth) and the complexly-laden structures of Cynic, in particular. Even though Sculptured show a great deal of promise, they are not completely up to the streamlined nature of those bands, but with more refining they might approach them.

In conclusion, Sculptured bring an unique approach to the table with a beating music that brings out the open-ended nature of jazz songwriting and enough hooks to develop an addiction to their sounds. For anyone seeking an interesting stance to the progressive metal genre, Sculptured definitely deserves consideration.

Agent Steel interview with Bruce Hall

2008-12-04T00:00:00.001+02:00

(interview conducted in December 2007 and presented here for the first time)

Has it really been four and a half years since I last interviewed Bruce Hall, vocalist of Agent Steel? Apparently half a decade can fly by before it’s noticed, because there we were in December 2007 picking right up where we left off. It was a real pleasure to speak to Bruce, as he was as straightforward as ever (nothing kills an interview more than a musician trying to be “diplomatic” when the entire point of the exercise is to reveal what he really thinks and feels!), and the latest album, Alienigma, is definitely the best the band has made since they reformed, and for my money it even bests their work from the ‘80s. It’s the sound of a band being creative, moving into new areas, without betraying their previous work. It puts the band in a tough spot from people wanting pure nostalgia, those buying into the “Agent Steel – cult 80s metal” reputation, because that’s just not what the band represents today. What hasn’t changed is that the band is still one hundred percent pure pissed off metal madness of the highest standard. And really, if I were still doing “best-of” lists, Bruce’s performance on Alienigma would get my “vocal performance of 2007” award. Here’s Bruce… enjoy!

(interview by James Edward Raggi IV)
I was reading our last interview before you called, and some of the things we were talking about… Hillary Clinton possibly running for President in 2004, Bill Maher and Michael Savage being fired from their shows for their comments… it strikes me that not a whole lot has changed in the four years…
Nothing, really!

We really did sign on for four more years.
Absolutely. There has been no change in the political climate, really. It’s a subtle change, I guess. Maybe it’s because I tried to keep myself a little bit media-free the last few years, and try to avoid watching political commentary and hearing very much political commentary, but it seems to me that… again, my perception could be really skewed because I live in California, which is not really part of the United States anyway. It’s not. We’re so different here in California and Washington and Oregon, we’re just a completely different country than the rest of the nation. It seems to me out here that there’s a lot of talk about people going out to vote and try and prevent a Republican incumbency from happening. I find it really sad that people are so wrapped up in the same idea again. They’re just playing their part and it just kills me. It kills me to watch rabid Democrats, like they’re really going to do something. It’s just going to be the exact same with a different face on it, and we’re going to continue to get fucked.

What I thought was curious, we did the interview last time in July or early August of 2003, and at that time we still had no clue who would be running in the 2004 election. In this election cycle, people were starting to run two years ahead of time.
For some reason the Democrats are out there in force trying to choose… I would bet money it’s going to be whoever the Democrats choose. I think they have to show some sort of parity within the parties to keep the ruse going. It might disenchant too many people to have the Republicans carry on. I wouldn’t be surprised that you’ll just find one of those middle-of-the-road Democrats who isn’t going to change anything until they can get the next warmonger in there. Or who knows, maybe the next Democrat will be a warmonger as well. You know what I mean?

The Democrats have the personalities with Obama and Clinton. Who the hell do the Republicans have?
The point being is it won’t even matter. They’re going to throw up a strawman, and even if they didn’t I don’t see how it really matters. Man, it’s a really sad indictment if George Bush is the personality President. If it was his charm and good looks that got him into office, we have really low standards here for charm and good looks, don’t you think?

The only thing I could think of after the 2004 election was how much of a nothing did Kerry have to be to lose that one?
He didn’t have to be a nothing at all. He’s playing his part, isn’t he? There are no real elections. There are just fake elections. It’s a nice show for you every four years to make you feel like you’re involved, then you can go back to watching TV, watching Friends re-runs again.

It’s good to see you’ve softened your political pessimism.
I’m the same as I ever was. I have no faith, none whatsoever, in anything. It’s probably worse now than it ever was. I don’t believe. I don’t believe that rulers have their priorities sent to lead people in a decent direction, I think they send them into the direction that their bosses tell them to send them in. I think the masses that are being moved along, they don’t care, don’t mind. I was talking about this the other day with one of my download-lamenting friends, he started whining about the state of affairs and why their record isn’t selling, blah blah blah. The amount of distraction that there is today compared to when I was at that prime album-buying age is so immense. It’s so immense. We had video game arcades that you had to leave the house to go fuck around with if you wanted anything half-decent. We had Atari 2600s and stuff like that, Commodore 64. Those were the computer games at home, which were really pretty shitty compared to what you would get at the arcade. Our TVs, the TV just sucked. Now I have this 57” HD TV out in my front room. Watching TV is fucking bitching, dude. It’s so great, I don’t care about anything! Therein lies the point of it all, doesn’t it? Having TVs in the house was never my decision, it’s not something I’m really into, but I’m telling you man, this new TV, it’s fucking cool! It’s frightening how it can really just take you out of the picture. I think people are perfectly happy being taken right out of the picture. I don’t watch news shows on my new TV because I don’t get shitty HD programming for news shows. I get all these little trashy shows. I get a channel called Mojo and I get HDNet and they play trashy shows about getting drunk and scuba diving in Belize. I’m not kidding. I watch them because they look phenomenal. The water, it looks like you could reach right into the TV and bask in that clear blue Belizean water. It’s a complete non-information center. With my cable system I only have thirty HD channels, and I won’t leave them. The other channels look shitty. It’s either that or watch movies. So they’ve taken me out of the picture and it only cost me $2500 to be taken out of the picture with my 57” DLP TV. Don’t think this is all comedy’s sake, it’s not. It’s the way we are being programmed, and the direction that we are all moving in is to just hang out and let the big boys run us into the ground. As long as we have these TVs and shit hooked up, we’re not going to notice and we’re not going to care. It’s just bigger and bigger what we have at home to satisfy our needs, and the reasons we interact so poorly socially when we’re forced into actually leaving our house to go grocery shopping or some sort of necessities shopping or you have to go to the video store because you’ve got to get something else for your big TV. The level of interaction has changed from little to almost none when you’re passing people in the street. It’s not like I live in a small town when it would be unusual for people to pass each other and don’t say anything, because in a small town everybody knows everyone, everyone has to say something. But here, even just glancing at the other person has become either frightening or a chore, I’m not sure which one it is.

It’s like Finland!
Is it the same vibe?

It’s a cultural thing, apparently it’s nothing new, apparently. You don’t look at them when you pass them, you don’t say, “Hi,” when you pass them.
That sucks, right? I don’t like that. That’s not one of the things that makes me… I’m so cynical too, I get suspicious when I’m in places that are considered really friends, at least to white people, like Texas. Everyone says hello, everyone’s really friendly in Texas, and I often wonder if it’s just because I’m white that they’re nice to me. But James Rivera assures me it’s just the Texas thing. But even there I’ve noticed that it’s slightly changed. It’s not quite as friendly. The friendly is being propagandized out of us.

One of the things I was going to talk to you about was the development of things like Youtube and Myspace and Facebook, I think it ties into what you’re saying right now.
It absolutely is. People get their social interaction when they’re sitting at home behind a keyboard. I interact with people via the computer far more than I interact in the real world. I’m transferring CDs to the computer because I had to clean out my garage. It was turning into a shithole, and I found boxes and boxes of CDs that had no business even being in the house. I figure I’ll put them on the computer and I’ll take them to CD Trader and I heard somebody just dumped an enormous collection, and I’ll trade them in and get something I might want to actually keep in the front room. Doesn’t that play into the whole idea of… here I sit, I download a little bit, not a ton, normally if I find myself in really love with something, I go out of my way to buy it, because I’m in the same boat. I know we’re being ripped off left and right, I don’t know how exactly to stop it, it seems the cat’s out of the bag and there’s no real way back, but… I’ve been part of the problem for a really long time. Long before downloading. I buy used CDs, I sell CDs back to places that sell them as used again and again and again, and the artist doesn’t get any money for that either. It does seem like the end of the music industry. Youtube, I love the Youtube because it pretty much means that every second that you’re on any stage anywhere in the whole world, you’re being taped. It’s true. Anything that happens can be thrown up there and you have very little say over it. So you should be on your best game. That’s kind of a positive thing that’s gone through my head in the last tour particularly. In fact the last couple, you’re bound to be recorded and thrown out into the world instantly. Maybe it’s making live music a little better, but the incentive to go out and see a band is less than it ever was. There are so many ways to not have to go out and participate anymore.

I think it’s interesting that everybody can be creative by putting something up on Youtube.
Of course they can!

Even I was having stupid ideas of doing something just to do it.
You could be Tay Zonday! Do you know who Tay Zonday is?

No.
You’ve never heard the song Chocolate Rain? You’ve got to look it up on the Youtube, man. Find the song Chocolate Rain. It rocks to no end! I’m telling you, man, it’s phenomenal. This guy, someone just sent me a link because they know I’m a fan, it’s Cherry Chocolate Rain, and Dr. Pepper is using it to advertise cherry Dr. Pepper and they’ve got Tay Zonday, this internet creation, who’s this kid who played his original song in a vocal booth and got a recording of himself singing it, he put it out on the internet. He’s from the William Hung school of charm, his popularity, the amount of hits people have put on Chocolate Rain, actually got him a proper video done with cherry Dr. Pepper. I guess the opportunities are out there for the Tay Zondays of the world. And for anybody else. I figure if you’re exceptionally talented or you connect really well with the public, you’re probably in a better position than you’ve ever been in.

How do people find this stuff? When I go around Youtube, I don’t find many quality original…
We use the word quality loosely when we’re talking about Tay Zonday. Because Tay Zonday appeals to me, doesn’t mean he’s going to appeal to everybody. I tend to like wacky, stupid shit. I wandered around all day singing Chocolate Rain. It’s so funny. He does the funniest shit with his mouth when he’s singing. Anyway, he’s got a full-blown video. That came from the Youtube. It’s just a different world. I fear there is no longer any respect at all for intellectual property, you may as well throw that right out the window, majority is going to rule on that. I just don’t see any way to police it, really. Short of sending viruses to people and going around the law. I don’t see how it’s going to stop. It’s sad, but I don’t see how it’s going to end.

I think I’m one of the last people to actually not download stuff.
Dude, it’s so easy. As soon as someone says something, like, “This is good!” you can jump right on and get it, just like that. When our last record came out, I was told that the promos were shipped in an email, and a couple days later I casually checked the name on a Google search, doing Alienigma, because it’s unique, and if you type that in you’re not going to find it associated with anything else, it just is what it is. I typed it in, and I shit you not, there was no less than seven full Google pages with sites that you could get the record on. Some of them keep count of how many times it’s been downloaded. The majority of those ones that I saw that actually kept a count, the counts were well over 800, in some cases 2100 downloads from a single site. This is three days after the record came out. In some ways you look at it and think it’s really nice that there’s maybe twenty-five or thirty thousand people who are curious at the instant of it being leaked. Even then, I’ll bet half of those people don’t even know who we are and they just take everything that someone says is available now. They have these enormous fucking hard drives to fill up and it doesn’t even matter to them. Then they’re out there sharing it with everybody. It’s just endless, it’s just so easy, I don’t know why it would stop.

Did you manage to get to Europe for your last album?
Yeah, we were there in September.

No, not for this one, for the last album, was it with Exodus and Nuclear Assault?
We also went back again a year later and did a tour of our own with After All for three weeks. We did Dynamo and did we do any other European festivals? I don’t think so. We did some one-off shows here and there in the States, like that Chicago Powerfest thing. Just last month we were down in Bogota, Columbia for this thing called Rock Al Parque, which was pretty cool. We get around a little bit, we get to do some stuff.

I get the impression that more and more people are downloading as time goes on. It’s becoming the standard thing that people do…
I never did get to my point… I get spaced out… I download things, and I would expect the same from anybody that would touch my record. If you download it and you listen to it and you don’t like it, I wouldn’t expect you to buy it. I just don’t see the point in expecting someone just because they took the time to listen to a record, in fact I feel kind of thankful that people would take any time to listen to my record, anybody who makes a record should feel happy that anyone would spend the time… Again, in this world where there’s so many things vying for your attention, if someone takes the time to listen to your record, you’ve got to be glad about that. If you download it and you decide it’s not your cup of tea, I don’t see any reason why someone should buy it. It doesn’t bother me at all. It’s when people play it over and over and memorize it and treat it the way I used to treat a record I’d buy, then it becomes a bummer. I don’t think a lot of people who do this realize the ramifications of it. Ultimately, these things you’re really enjoying and taking forever and ever on and never paying back, the bands are ultimately probably going to go out of business. The record companies aren’t going to continue to support them. The bummer about the whole downloading thing too, there was six weeks between the time I first promo of Alienigma on the internet, and when it was actually released and available to buy on a hard copy. In the course of that time, people could end up really enjoying it and six weeks later there’s something more important that takes its place. You end up not getting paid for it, and it becomes a really… To make any money off of music, there needs to be, at the very least, simultaneous availability for people who do have a conscience to pay for things, rather than just getting them for free the day the promo gets leaked from Rock Hard.

So why is there still a traditional publicity arrangements with the magazines and everything? Why are they sending the promos out so early to the magazines?
I don’t think traditional publicity is the way to go at all any longer. If you’re a really gigantic act like Metallica, or even the cash cow for a single label, you could be Dimmu Borgir and do the same kind of thing, if you can set up listening parties for things, like Metallica did for St. Anger, you could probably avert a lot of unwanted downloads initially by just not releasing anything to be downloaded until you’re ready with an actual hard product in a store. I don’t see any reason why that can’t be controlled. That could be controlled. As far as a traditional arrangement with sending promos, I don’t understand why anyone gives two fucking shits what any reviewer says about anything…

Thank you!
Here’s my reasons as to why. Unless you know the person, and I think we probably discussed this before, unless you know a lot about them, then how can you take their opinion seriously regarding anything? You don’t know who they are and what they are. There are scads of webpages and people writing what they think… if you really want to take the time to read people’s thoughts on things, I guess you can start to decipher what something is like, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter on the artist’s end. It doesn’t matter to us that much whether we get reviewed. At least in my opinion. I don’t think it has that much effect on us to have people say things about us. I’m not even that convinced that that many people read, for one. For two, that the opinions that they read have as much credence as their friend next door playing it for them. That carries so much more weight than endless reviews of things that could be very empty and cursory. We seem to escape a lot of opportunities for really scathing reviews. I thought we would get our asses kicked really hard with the last records. I really was anticipating a lot of true metal backlash. It didn’t happen, even from places where I thought there might be a chance there we could really annoy someone. It seems to be going in the opposite direction. That said, it doesn’t mean that we sold a lot more records because we got good reviews. It just doesn’t mean that much. So why go out of your way to service people who are doing album reviews and giving them the opportunity to leak your stuff when ultimately it’s probably not adding up to more album sales, if any. So, you’re right, there’s no real point in doing it. I think it would be better if this came out in every format, CD, mp3, everything, if it came out simultaneously. Juan, he’s still mired in this oldschool record company way of thinking. The truth is, the whole thing, it’s over. It’s not what it was, and it’s never going to be that again. He’s like, “We have to get a promo out to this person…” and viewing it from an old approach. I don’t think bands on our level, who aren’t counting on eating from music, how having mp3s around are really negatively affecting us. It’s definitely much more hurting the people who need the money. And the bigger bands act like it doesn’t really matter but the truth is it kind of does. They’re losing money too. If Korn can have the number one record this last year for even a brief period of time on the Billboard charts and sell only a third as many copies as they did four years ago when they entered the charts at number three, that’s kind of freaky. That’s a big loss of revenue for the record company, if not for the band itself. That’s a staggering loss when it’s supposed to be a gain. You’re talking about one record that entered the charts at number three and one that entered at number one. The disparity in sales is epic in a direction that you wouldn’t think. If you can still keep pulling people to your live shows and you can still keep convincing promoters to pay you a lot of money, then I guess there’s a living to be made doing this. I don’t know how you do that. I don’t know how you can make an actual living. I know how you can live, but not really live. Not live off this alone. Very difficult. My band, we’re so lucky, we get so many more opportunities than most people ever do… I don’t know what it takes anymore to become huge. What did you end up thinking about the record?

I like this new one a lot more than the last one. Some of the songs really hit me and I play it over and over. Honestly the last one just kind of faded away after a little while… Especially “Wash the Planet Clean,” “Liberty Lying Bleeding,” and “Tiamat’s Fall.”
I’m glad. For us, and me more specifically, it was really a time to step far away from the whole trademark of the band. It really wasn’t mine. I was happy when the reactions have been more like yours than not. It’s at least encouraging.

When I listened at first, I was doing something else and it was just on in the background. It seemed a lot heavier, and I was thinking you were just always more aggressive with the vocals. But when I sat down to listen to it, there’s lots and lots of singing, it just doesn’t seem to be way out front. It’s really good.
That was totally on purpose. I’m glad to hear that. Too bad I don’t think we’ll be going to Finland anytime soon. Seems like a hard place to go to. I’d like to go to that Tuska thing.

Traditional bands don’t seem to do that well here, except for Iron Maiden and things like that. It’s all the modern keyboard death metal bands that get popular here.
Is Children of Bodom still a big band?

Oh yeah. It’s freaky. Bands like Children of Bodom or Nightwish, it’s beyond being a big band. It’s part of the culture. You’re seeing these bands on the cover of normal magazines, not music magazines. Like Nightwish’s old singer, it’s like her being on the cover of Redbook in the States. That’s the level some of these bands get here. This Ari Koivunen guy, from Finnish Idol, his album was number one here for like eight weeks? It’s hard to really think of these things as metal bands anymore when you see them like this.
I never viewed Nightwish as being a metal band ever anyway. But Bodom I definitely see as being a metal band. The last tour that we did, when we were there in September, we went with After All again. For a good section of the shows their real singer couldn’t be there, he got a real job. They got a guy to cover all the shows outside of Holland and Belgium. He was the Belgian Idol in 2003. He was a pop idol too. He finished in first place, he had the number one record in Belgium and all that kind of stuff. There was one time we were sitting in Greece, eating food at some place on the street, and we ran into some Belgian people who recognized Peter [Evrard] and came over and said hello to him. It was pretty funny! That show has some power, huh?

We get the Finnish Idol, the Swedish Idol, and the American Idol here. My wife had to watch all of it. The only stuff I like watching are the tryouts where you get to see the freaks.
It’s nice when a freak passes through for a little while. We had Sangia last year. To see him make him, especially with a little bit of help from Howard Stern and the people like me that listen to Howard Stern, it gave me a little bit of fun with American Idol last year. I actually picked up the phone and I did vote for Sangia.

In the tryouts, Melissa Ferlaak from [now ex-]Visions of Atlantis tried out for the Idol. She does the whole opera metal thing and she got put on the freak clips.
*laughs* Too bad you ended up as an Idol freak!

It’s freaky when the Finnish guy wins it all singing Iron Maiden and Deep Purple songs.
That’s the same thing that Peter did, although it wasn’t as retro as that. He was definitely doing more rock things. He has very long hair, he was definitely the rock guy. Out here we had the same thing with Chris Daughtrey. The year of the rock guy. When we were down in Columbia, this festival we played at was huge. It was like Wacken times three. Seriously. Huge. It draws a hundred and something thousand people, and it’s free. So everybody piles into this gigantic park and I never saw so many fucking Maiden shirts in my life. Even back in the day. Even at this show which was primarily not metal, we went over really well, and they didn’t know who the fuck we were. At all. They had no clue. They really liked Maiden and metal there in general. It’s rare that I guess it can ever be a mainstream thing, although I guess Bruce Dickinson could be on the cover of GQ.

He probably could. How did you get booked for that Columbia show?
Juan’s [Garcia] been friends with Alfonso [Pinzón] from Agony for awhile, ever since he worked over at World War Three. Vince Dennis went last year to play with Dia De Los Muertos, which is another one of Alfonso’s projects. He came back and he said it was just crazy. So many people. This year they called us up a couple weeks beforehand and asked if we want to do it. Absolutely! We’ve never been to South America. It’s a state sponsored event. It’s the government who put us up in a really nice hotel, fed us, and allowed us to play on this gigantic stage. We were actually booked to play Saturday night at 8pm on this enormous stage with these crazy lights and this huge Us Festival style PA, and that afternoon at about 1:30, the place got hit with a hailstorm like no other. They ended up having to cancel the festival for the first time in thirteen years. The next day they had devoted to more alternative acts with Coheed and Cambria closing the show, so we knew we weren’t going to get that prime spot anymore. They did give us three o’clock in the afternoon. Even at three o’clock in the afternoon, it was in an article on the front page of the paper on Monday morning, “Rock Al Parque is a bitching festival,” and there’s a sub-headline, “Agent Steel gets most applause.” I swear to god, I’m totally not making it up! We got off the plane in Atlanta, they were sitting away from me, and we get off and they said, “We have a copy of the paper, we’re on the front fucking page!” They mention us three times in the article, talking about how metal at Rock Al Parque is really important. Really trippy. Really, really trippy. In February, Maiden’s going to go there, the same place we played, Simon Bolivar Parque. It’s like Central Park, it’s huge. They’ve already sold the place out to the tune of a hundred and something thousand people, paid, not government sponsored come on in, but paid. A hundred thousand people. Which is really impressive when you consider the income level down there. There are some desperately poor people living in that country. Not all of them of course.

Here Maiden just sold out a tour of stadiums around Scandinavia. They’re not playing until next summer. Tickets went on sale, and I think for six shows there were two hundred and fifty thousand tickets sold.
How great that must be. Can you imagine how great that must be? I can’t even imagine.

How was the tour you just did in September. How did that compare to the tour you did for the last album as far as attendance?
It was a little bit better. It was good. For the most part, the places I knew we were supposed to go in and carry, went off pretty well. The places that I didn’t think we belonged in in the first place, I’d say fifty percent of those I got proven wrong on, the other fifty percent I was dead right about and there was no reason we should have shown up there. All in all, it was good. Truthfully, I saw more people at Rock Al Parque than I have in the entire time that I’ve been on stage with Agent Steel, and that includes playing Wacken and Dynamo and doing four or five tours. We were there for a month and played twenty-something shows, and we probably only saw five thousand people. A lot of work for not very much. For the crowd it’s cool when you come to a small place and you get to see a band like us who is traditional in the sense that we really play our own instruments. It’s kind of a throwback to go see a band that actually does everything you hear coming through the speakers. It’s us, nothing much more than a bit of echo or reverb on the vocals. For the band itself, you kind of look at it and go, “We just really kicked our own asses for a month, and what for really?” We sold some merch and we made some money, it’s not like we came home broke which is different from last time we went out there, I definitely came home broke, it was better in that sense. Would I do anything like that again? Probably not. I wouldn’t want to go out with another band of such a similar level again. I’d really want to be the very clear opener or the very clear headliner. Being with Vicious Rumors was really like being taken back in time to the days of Savatage and fucking weird horseshit that you used to see go on in the ‘80s when you’d play with insecure bands. That was unpleasant. Being with Geoff [Thorpe] and Larry [Howe] for a month was really more than I think most people can fucking stand. That would be the low point. The up part is I went to some new countries that I’d never been to before. We got to spend a little time in Greece which was cool, and see more Eastern Bloc countries that we hadn’t been to before. We visited a handful of places we know we do well in, like in Slovenia, going to Holland is always cool for us. We got to play a show with Candlemass, that was nice to watch them. I hadn’t seen them since the late 90s I guess, out here. Probably more like 96. There were definitely some high points, we played with Destruction in Belgium, that was fun. Being with the After All guys is always cool because they’re totally easy to get along with. It was a nice tour, but at the same time you look back at it, I don’t think I’d go back there for a month again under those circumstances. For me particularly it’s an excruciating amount of work to go out and sing the way that I have to sing for an hour or more. That means I’m preparing for that all day and as soon as I’m done I have to start preparing for it again tomorrow. When everyone else is kicking around and having big fun all the time, I’m constantly in a state of work. The difference between me and Bruce Dickinson, aside from notoriety and talent, is that he’s doing the exact same thing that I have to do, except he’s getting paid about a hundred thousand times more to do it. I’m not saying he’s not worth a hundred thousand times more than me, but I’m just saying the workload is the exact fucking same and why am I putting myself through this? So I would say the next time we go, if we go, we’re going to be the headliner and just do two weeks in the places that are solid. I found a few new places that I didn’t know we would do very well in, like Barcelona and Madrid. I didn’t have very high hopes for going there, and they turned out to be a couple of the best shows that we played. There’s little additions to the realm in which I’d be willing to go tour, but I’d much rather just play festivals. You can kill so many birds with the same stone.

How do you determine what places you should or shouldn’t go?
I determine it from past experience because we’ve done this enough times. I can look at a map of Europe and know where we’re going to do well, and with a relative amount of certainty where we are not going to do well. In France, we’re lucky if we can even step inside France and not be thrown out. For some reason, the bulk of the French don’t really get us. We had a fairly decent show in Paris when we were on the Exodus tour and people responded fairly well to us. I still don’t get the feeling that it’s that great. The very first time we were there back in 1999, we played in Toulouse, and the turnout that night was probably worse than it had ever been for the whole tour. It was the last night of the tour and was just weak. I get this feeling about France. In fact, this time when we passed through there we ended up having a show canceled there. As much as I love France, because I do, and I spend some time trying to learn French because I like the language, like the food, and I like the people, and I know that seems really strange, but I do… It kind of bums me out but France sucks for us. There’s nothing much we can do about it. I know that Italy sucks for us. We’ve never had a good turnout in Italy. We probably never will. It’s nice that the people who do come out seem to like us, they just don’t come out in big numbers. Now I would have said the same thing for Spain before this last pass, but in Madrid and Barcelona the shows were both really kick-ass. They were in smaller venues, two hundred fifty, three hundred people, they got pretty full and they were definitely into it and rabid. I would include them now. I would say in the past playing the Z7 Pratteln in Switzerland is death. It has always been really bad. It’s such a shame too. You talk to enough band guys, I’m sure when they talk about Z7 they’re talking about heaven on Earth. It’s like a monkey paw for us. You get something good from going to the Z7 but you get something equally shitty in return from being there. I don’t know what it is about this place. You go in, it’s a beautiful place, it’s got the nicest PA, and the nicest people work there, they make the best food, they’ve got a washer and a dryer and it’s clean and it’s a nice place to be. You feel, “This is going to be great!” Then you go out on stage and the first time you play there you play to sixty people, and it holds probably six hundred. And then the next time you play there you play to like forty people. And then this last time we played, maybe this is courtesy of Vicious Rumors, maybe this happened to be the night or whatever it was that happened, but this time a hundred and fifty people showed. So big improvement from the last time. But should we go to the Z7? Probably not. Every time I’ve been in that building, somebody has called to tell me that a show in the future was going to be canceled. I’m not kidding. I found out about France at the Z7. The time before I found out that we would not be going to Greece with Riot. There’s just something about the building, I don’t know what it is. They’re always really nice, and they always pay us no matter how many people show up. I love the place, it’s just weird. It comes from experience of having been through places, I’ve been to places that are nearby, or having people come up to you and say, “Will you come play here.” Here’s another place that I completely would not have included in my future plans other than what happened to us this last time. We closed the tour in Vienna. That’s beautiful. We’re going to go through this whole thing and the last night of the tour is going to suck balls and it’s going to be fucking horrible because it’s going to be in Vienna. It’s going to be awful, because Vienna is awful. People don’t come out and it sucks. The first time we were there, not very many people came out and it sucked, the next time we were there, it got canceled, and then we were booked there this last time and we played there were a lot of people there and they were all really into it and we had a great show. It was a really fun way to end the tour. It was especially fun to watch the crowd just leaving in droves when Vicious Rumors was playing. Just watching them walk away from the boring mundanity that is Vicious Rumors. It was just beautifully and sweetly poetic. I had seen it happen at other shows, I watched the audience just turn glassy-eyed and bored and decide it was too late to hang around. Most of the time I would only watch it for a little bit and then I’d need to go and get some sleep or whatever. This time I didn’t have to do that, I could drink and watch people walk away. I had a really fun time watching that. It was a nice end to the tour to watch that happen. And they argued on stage, it was fantastic. Geoff and James were arguing on the mic. It was really good.

Big Vicious Rumors fan, huh?
I love James, and Thaen, the guitar player for that tour and the one before, but never again, Thaen Rassmussen from Anvil Chorus, Stephen [Goodwin], their bass player, nice guy, really good. Geoff Thorpe, complete fucking cocksucker, Larry fucking dumb cocksucker. If I never see them again, it’s good for them. I can’t say enough nasty shit about either one of them. They impressed me as completely lost in their own past pseudo-fame. They actually imagine themselves and envision themselves to be some sort of rock stars. I heard, and I’m not lying about this, I heard Larry complain about Nirvana ruining everything for them. It’s like a joke. It’s that joke line that you hear. Didn’t Poison say something stupid like that at one point and it became a joke line? The kind of people when they walk onto a bus, not just evacuate someone else’s bunk because they choose that one… Thanks, Larry! Larry evacuated the drummer from After All’s bunk because he decided he wanted to be in that one. If there is such a thing as karma then it went into effect because Larry’s bunk was the only one that leaked on the whole tour. We got into a rainstorm and Larry’s bunk was leaking. That fucking asshole. It’s just stuff like that. Weird rock star attitudes, “We’re the headliners,” all this stupid shit that just doesn’t have any place in the real fucking world. Aside from that, it was a really pleasant tour.

You keep touring with these older bands.
I think it’s terrible, personally. It wasn’t my decision, and it never would have been my decision. In fact, I advised against it. Because Vicious Rumors was signed to our label at the time, they’ve since been dropped by the way, just another ray of sunshine, they don’t have a booking agency anymore either. Ha ha! Oh yeah, and they don’t have a guitar player and James quit and James is suing Geoff. Ha ha! So as you can see, things went real well for them going on this tour. In any event, it was something machinated by Mascot and definitely not something I wanted to sign up for. Vicious Rumors also, knowing they had this future tour with Agent Steel, still managed to book a tour with Beyond Fear back in April. It apparently did really badly and didn’t help matters on this tour either. It’s just a bad move, man. If you want to be seen as something somewhat current or having any sort of relevancy, I think you really do yourself a disservice by anchoring yourself with bands that don’t have very much forward momentum. I don’t mean that in the sense that Vicious Rumors lacked momentum, because if you’re making albums and you’re out there touring, and nothing I would ever say about those guys has anything to do with their level of musicianship, they are good players. It’s not like Vicious Rumors is a slouchy band. They are not progressing in the sense that they are not making any attempts to bring anything different to the table at all anymore. It’s really just an exercise in repetition. Too many bands from the ‘80s are busy just trying to recreate something that already exists. For us, particularly making the steps that we are making to try and distance ourselves from the past, I don’t know why we continually set ourselves up with relics from the past. We are one too, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, even if it doesn’t quack like a duck… If you’re out there roaming the pastures with these guys, why wouldn’t people think you’re exactly like that? I think that does us a pretty big disservice. Oftentimes, my solutions inside this band, while they’re acknowledged, they tend to be not followed through with, because my way of thinking is a little more radical and a little less cautionary. I don’t really care what happens, whether everything breaks. I do have obviously a vested interest in seeing it succeed, but if it broke, if shit just fell apart, it wouldn’t be the end of the world to me. So maybe my solutions are a little bit more, like, “Be able to walk across the Grand Canyon on this 2x4 or you’re going to fall off and die.” I think it’s because of that, because there’s not very much middle ground and room for error in my solutions, they don’t get used.

You guys have been playing tag with labels since the band got back together. What happened with Scarlet Records?
The grass is always greener, man. It wasn’t that Scarlet was doing a horrendous job or anything, but they weren’t doing an outstanding job either. I can’t really say anything bad about Stefano [Longhi] or Filippo [Bersani], they’re nice guys and I think they did do maybe as much as they could for us, but it just didn’t seem like enough. When we had the opportunity to leave, we took the offer from Mascot. It turns out we weren’t really allowed to take the offer from Mascot so we kind of had to pay Scarlet off to let us out of that contract. We thought it would be worth it in the long run to leave there and try someplace else. It’s not like anybody’s lives changed from having Order of the Illuminati out. Again, I’m not saying my life really deserves to be changed for making that record. I think it’s a good record, but does my life deserve to be changed for that? I don’t know, probably not. Why not work at another label, considering we already worked with this one. I definitely don’t have a Candlelight style story regarding Scarlet. They were really kind with us, even when they were looking out for their own interests and extracting some money from us to leave. I have no problem with them, I just wanted to see what Mascot would do. Same thing with Juan, he wanted to see what they would come up with. They had a lot more bands, and they have money. They have money, plain and simple.

I was curious where you say that you’re not wanting to associate yourselves so much with these bands from the past…
There’s a big “unless” there. Unless you’re trying to step forward and move your band in a direction that wasn’t necessarily perceived beforehand, if you can step up out of your skin and try and make something a little bit different, I’m fine with associating with you. If you can play what you’re playing at such a level that it’s outstanding, a la Exodus or something, I’m fine with that. It’s the ones that are treading water… As far as Mascot goes, they have the money and Roadrunner said no. You know what I mean? It would have been nice to be on a very prominent metal style label, but they passed.

One more thing about the tour, how did things go in Greece?
It would have been great, but it turned into shit mainly because we, and I have got to take a lot of the blame for this, although I don’t think I need to take one hundred percent of it, here’s what happened… Are you asking about something specifically? Athens got really messed up, we only ended up playing for only twenty-five minutes when I found out after the fact that we were supposed to be the headliner and it wasn’t written in the book that way. It also started out by not having a place to park, we ended up having to be about a mile away from where the venue was. Because I have a ritual that I adhere to before I play, I virtually one hundred percent of the time I am on the bus, or in a backstage room, singing scales with my head in a steamer. It’s just what I do, it’s gotten to a point now where it’s not just a one-off show, it’s practically a guarantee that I’m going to do it whether I need to or not. It’s just this thing that I do. It’s calming and it keeps my head straight. I had to go back to the bus, because there was no reasonable backstage area, in fact there didn’t end up to be one, this was a place called The Underworld… Before I left, I guess everybody had taken off to go see the Acropolis, which I was unaware of because I stayed with the bus to help unload gear that we had to do. We had to unload gear into a van, and shuttle it over. I stayed with the bus. Then I walk down to the venue with Bernie [Versailles] and Rigo [Amezcua], and we go inside, and there’s no sign up about when anybody’s playing, no anything about anything, just everybody went to the Acropolis. Bernie and I ask if there’s catering, is there any food. There’s no catering, there’s no anything. We’re hungry and we need to eat, so Bernie and I go out to find some food. On the way out, we run into Geoff, and we ask him if he wants to eat with us. He says no, and we can tell he’s starting to drink and he’s really angry, I guess because his band abandoned him and went up to the Acropolis. So Bernie and I eat and go back to the bus, and I start doing my thing. I figure we’re going around ten, so around nine o’clock, maybe even eight forty-five, we leave the bus and go back to the club. As soon as we walk up, Juan is freaking out, “We’re on right now!” I’m like, “Holy shit! I’m ready to go, let’s go!” They march us up on stage, and unfortunately, for everyone who’s ready to go and screaming at me, no one’s fucking ready to go. So we stand there for like ten minutes on this fucked up stage where you can’t even begin to get off because the place is completely beyond packed, the PA sucks balls, everything about this place fucking blows. It’s horrible. It might have a little bit of kitschy ambience, but it fucking sucks for holding a rock show at. We finally start playing, things are going OK, about four songs into it, I get told that we have to cut our set. We end up playing two more songs and that was the end of that. The place almost became riotous. I had to stand out there and answer to everybody for the next few hours why we didn’t continue to play. We listened to people’s stories about how they took boats and then drove and then took busses and then took a fucking mule and finally eighteen hours later with only some granola, they made it to the venue to see Agent Steel and they’re so fucking bummed out. It just fucking sucked. I go on to find out that the whole reason why this goes on is because Geoff Thorpe is being such a cocksucker that he refuses to go on and take our place even though he was there and saw that things were going in a shitty direction and it would have been very easy for them to just go up and play and Geoff refused. There was no reason for it. I could have used the help and the favor and at that point there would be no reason for him to not do me a favor. There was no bad blood, I was just tolerating their stupidity on a daily basis and keeping my mouth shut. When they did that and ended up fucking our time in Athens, I just had it. I kept it to myself until the very last day and that’s when I finally let Geoff and Larry hear what I thought of them for about six fucking hours while they were stuck on the bus. It was brutal, believe you me. It was horrifying. It had to be the worst night of their fucking lives. At least I hope it was. So that’s what happened in Athens. In Thessaloniki, we went up there the next day and it was kind of the complete opposite. A really nice venue, a really well-organized promoter, everything’s fucking great, big PA, things are cool… and only about two hundred people in attendance. Greece was a mixed bag. Awesome promoter there, Elias was the coolest dude in Thessaloniki and really had his shit together. Unfortunately, I doubt he’ll be having us or anybody like us back because he lost money on the show. And then he has to deal with these luddite Greek metalheads outside who think they shouldn’t have to pay. You know the general heavy metal mentality. Gus G is his cousin, so he’s says he’ll do some power metal, but he doesn’t think he can do these quote-unquote true metal shows. Again, all the more reason not to get yourself mired in the true business. Unless you just want to play Keep It True festivals every couple years, I don’t think there’s any future in it for anybody. Not to mention that as a musician, all you’re doing is treading water. Playing music that you’ve known how to play for twenty years is not really showing anybody very much.

It’s interesting that you say that, because everyone I know from Greece is really into the true metal stuff that could have been out in 1982.
In Athens, it’s really like that. It was a very true crowd. I’m not particularly anti-true unless it comes with a retard’s mentality. If it comes with brainlessness and the inability to think, I’m pretty much against you no matter what you like. I guess it doesn’t have anything to do with music, other than it seems true metal attracts a little more than its fair share of empty-headedness. The people were nice in Greece, it was nice to be there, I feel bad and disappointed that we let a lot of people down. I have to take responsibility, at least to a degree, in Athens and say I didn’t find a list and I didn’t know the time I was supposed to play. I got there in time. The truth is the band was ready to walk on stage. I was five minutes later than our scheduled start time. It wasn’t all me. It was really a lot more about Geoff and him trying to exert a little bit of power after he lost out on his trip to the Acropolis.

The plan that was ruined with my divorce is that I was going to go to Keep It True in April.
And who was your target band for Keep It True?

Pharaoh.
Ah, nice. You want to see the new true!

Oh yes. That’s become my favorite stuff over the past couple years.
Jag Panzer’s playing too, right?

Yes.
Always good. One of the best live regular metal bands you’ll ever see. Keep It True is a tough place to be, man.

What you’re saying about a lot of brainlessness, trying to find good lyrics in that kind of music… shit!
I know. It’s brutal. The shame of it is that I think a lot of that kind of music is really pandering, and the reason you don’t get higher quality of it is that there’s a perception that the fan of that kind of music won’t accept something of a higher quality. In fact, the lower the quality, probably the better it is and more true it is. So I don’t think it’s entirely up to the band other than they are pandering to people. They deserve to be chastised for that. If you ever take a stance with something where you’re writing music and you stop writing it because you’re afraid someone might not like it, you’re making a bad decision.

I’ve never seen bands like Omen or Helstar. I know it’s not the same as if I was there in the ‘80s, but just the chance to see those bands…
You’re going to find that the bands are a lot more like I am. Whether they’ll say it or not, they’re a lot more like me than they’d want printed on paper. Again, because they’re afraid they’ll alienate this little audience they have. I think that’s a mistake. You should let people know where you stand. I like metal from the ‘70s until now. There’s not one year you could pick out that I can’t find a record that I love, and it will definitely be a metal record. But I don’t think there’s a period of time when it was any better than any other time in terms of what was produced. I can find levels of similar quality from year to year. You may not find the proliferation of it, there were certain years where there were massive amounts of quote-unquote important stuff came out, but there are still records that can be good and comparable in the same way to their peers in other years. It doesn’t have to be from 1981 or 1983 or 1985 to be great. It doesn’t have to sound like it came from that time either to be great, which is the more important part of the idea. I don’t know how you can live your whole life and feel content doing the exact same fucking thing over and over again.

I wonder if that’s true for a band like Manilla Road. They were never really anything as far as the industry goes, ever, and here they still are and there are bands that still name them as an influence. All these years later, is Mark Shelton just hanging on to the fans he’s got or if it’s what he really loves.
I can’t speak for him, I don’t know him, I’m not super-familiar with Manilla Road, obviously I know who they are and I’ve heard some of their stuff, but it’s not a big concern with me. I’m not Greek! I can’t say that they’ve been making the same record for how many times. Maybe they’re not. It’s hard for me to say what they’re doing. If you are taking things and throwing them out because you don’t think they’re things that your audience would allow you to do, I do think that’s a disservice not just to yourself, but to your audience as well.

What’s beautiful about that is that I completely agree with those words, but so many times I’ll hear a band’s new album and I’ll think, “Well shit, why did they have to do that?”
I know! It’s a really hard line to cross. Sometimes it works out well, and the change is for the better, and sometimes it doesn’t seem to work out as well. I just feel from the musician’s angle, again, if you’re happy doing that and if you’re Angus Young and you feel perfectly happy doing the same thing over and over and it’s getting your rocks off, I’m certainly never going to chastise AC/DC for making records that I like. As I’m putting all these CDs in my computer, it keeps coming back to the A-page whenever one’s done. I’m looking at all the AC/DC records that I have, and I like them all. I love them all. I love all these records that I’m looking at right now and they all fucking sound the same. So I don’t know what I’m saying. Ultimately I think I can only speak for myself. I hope other people are executing their right to be creative and not letting their quote-unquote fans dictate to them what they should be doing. It’s not something I would let happen to me. Look at you, dude! You are so fucking true! I remember going to see Cirith Ungol at the Country Club in like 1982, before you were born.

Hey, I was born in ’74.
Fine, while you were still watching Scooby Doo. While you were watching Scooby Doo, eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes, I was down in the pit at Cirith Ungol at the Country Club. That’s how fucking true I am. Do you get extra license for having been there? There’s a little extra license that those of us who actually lived through it and went through the whole thing when it was initially happening, that we feel extra license to talk smack.

I do that with death metal! “I remember when Machine Head was opening for Napalm Death and Obituary!”
Absolutely. Absolutely! I remember seeing Napalm Death at the fucking Coconut Teaser. I think Fear Factory might have opened for them. That’s a long time ago, it might have been 1992, 1993. That was a really small dump. I guess if you’re that ensconced in whatever it is that you’re doing, it’s really hard to rise above it and become an Iron Maiden. Especially now. There are so many bands out there that can satisfy a broader audience. I’m not saying that we’d ever be a band that can satisfy a very broad audience, I don’t think that’s part of our makeup, just like Napalm Death. It’s not built to cross many boundaries.

They were on Columbia Records for awhile, and were on the Mortal Kombat soundtrack.
That’s true. Probably got them the biggest payday of their lives. It probably did. Still, if you’re coming to Los Angeles, California, and you’re playing a dump like the Coconut Teaser, and that’s right around the time that Earache was distributed by Columbia, you’re not crossing over very hard.

I think we’ve gone a bit off the track here. We haven’t talked a lot about the actual album!
I guess we haven’t. Let’s get into that so we can press on.

You’ve now done more albums with Agent Steel than the old guy.
True that! I have done more albums than him, I am better looking still, and I’ve been in the band twice as long as he was too. I don’t know that that makes all that much difference. It certainly doesn’t make any difference to the people who worship those first two records. Nor should it. Tenure really doesn’t mean shit. All it means is I haven’t found anything better to do. I’ve been here a long time because it’s been a really comfortable place for me. I can’t picture another band where I would get to, particularly lyrically, get to do as much of this kind of stuff. Sometimes you run into people who idealistically are completely different than you, although you might be able to have a reasonable conversation or be able to play music with them, they could be ideologically so diametrically opposed to you that your lyrical ideas might come under some sort of fire. In this band, everything I say is golden for them. They’re perfectly happy with whatever shit I spew. For me, that’s fantastic. I’m really happy about that. As far as musically too, I wanted to make a big change on this record. Nobody complained about it for a second really. There was a little bit of, “Aren’t you going to go for a high scream there?” Once I said enough times, “No, I’m not going to do it, it’s not going to happen on this record,” I just want to see what happens if we make one without it. If you throw in a few, you’re going to throw in twenty, and then the whole idea is going to be blown so I really stuck with that thought. No one argued with me, and there was no telling me what to do. So yeah, I’m perfectly content on that level. Probably like I said the last couple of times I’ve been interviewed by you, I’m lucky to have the opportunity, and I wouldn’t have the opportunity if these guys hadn’t done something that was special to a lot of people a long time ago.

It’s amazing when you think a lot of bands, Agent Steel included, the period of time they were active and releasing albums was really short. An entire career and legend was born, and today people take that much time between albums.
It also fits into a period of time when things like Agent Steel or Anthrax or Overkill or any of these bands that came to popularity and notoriety at the time, it was a really friendly environment for that kind of stuff to occur. Now it’s not so friendly for any of us, really. You’re competing against a lot of other things that just weren’t there in the past. I’m sure over these past couple of years in the pop music world that I’m completely unfamiliar with and can’t even speak to, there are legends being creating right now that will disappear next year and will resurface ten years later and cause a stir with the people who cared at the time. I have to figure it’s going on right now. It has to. Things can’t change that much.

How come it’s taking you guys four years between albums?
Because I’m not paid to do this and neither is anybody else. It takes time to get it together. I could also say that… Bernie moving to Reno didn’t help anything at all. That definitely made things a lot harder. His contributions when writing in terms of translating ideas or taking things and moving them forward, it’s a really good thing to have around. It just slows down the writing process a lot. What you ended up with is a record that doesn’t have a lot of contributions by him, other than his actual playing. In terms of songwriting, most of the stuff wasn’t written with Bernie around. It would be nice to have him more involved, but he doesn’t live here. It’s difficult to get that to go on. He’s lived there now for a good long time. We tried to make things go faster. I hope that they go faster next time. Will they? I don’t know. I’m willing. I’ve got time. I’ve got time and the inclination, but it takes more than just me. I don’t write whole songs sitting at home by myself with the acoustics. I might write a riff here and there, or when we’re actually writing songs I contribute a lot of riffs and ideas if we’re all together. But I need people to bounce things off of and I need people to translate ideas for me. Without everyone participating it becomes difficult. I’m not Arjen Lucassen!

It’s interesting that you’re willing to be talking to me and criticizing other members of the band.
Who did I criticize.

Just talking about you’re willing to do more, but the others cause things to be slower…
You might even get the same answer from everybody. You know that I’m not so diplomatic that I would pull punches from anyone. I’m pretty much a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may kind of person. I don’t think there’s any one person to blame, all I’m saying is that I’m ready and I’ve been sitting here waiting. I will not be ready from December 15th until around the end of January, my time is going to be really short. During that time, you could contact Juan and he could say, “Well I’m ready!” But I let everyone know three weeks ago that I’m available to start writing and we haven’t done anything about it. And I also told everybody that I’m ready until December 15, and then I’m losing some support systems that I have in place so I can split the house. Without them, I really can’t leave. I’ve also put the offer out there that people can come to my house and we can do things on acoustics and at least get skeletons of songs sitting here. Here I sit, alone. I’m not going to blame any one person for this… Again, I have to take some blame too. If I were so highly motivated, I’d probably spend more time playing guitar so I could actually play the ideas that I have. I would have them actually done so I could walk in and show people. I don’t spend my time doing that. I spend my time farting around on the internet. I don’t see any reason for a gigantic rush for Agent Steel other than personal reasons. Our own personal reasons should be enough to rush the next Agent Steel. I think that’s a good reason to hurry up. When you put out a record that is at least enough different from your past records to be noticeable, and you are still getting positive reviews and in some cases even more positive reviews than you’ve ever gotten before in your life, it seems like it would be good for you on a personal level to hurry up and make something else. To the world at large? They don’t give a fuck. There’s going to be a handful of people who really would care if we put a record out next year. It’s not enough to make any sort of dent or any reason to clamor for it other than just for our own sake just to try and move the band forward so we can do something more than what we do, which is just play sometimes. That’s the same thing I say to the guys in the band. For us, I think it’s important that we would hurry up and try and make more stuff and do things in a more timely fashion. There are such concerns as real life and people having outside responsibilities. The band isn’t our job, the band isn’t how we feed our kids or make sure our cars are paid for or any of that kind of stuff. It kind of has to take a backseat. As it stands, without my wife, Juan without his girlfriend, this band wouldn’t even exist. Guaranteed you that much right now. Rigo without his mom to lean on. This band would not be happening right now. If we were the typical forty year olds, there’s no fucking way. There just isn’t. There’s just no way the typical forty year old could carry on like this. It’s a huge amount of sacrifice, even at the level we participate in it. It’s a big sacrifice. And it’s not just a sacrifice on our end, it’s a sacrifice for a lot of the people around us. My kids were not happy while I was gone for a month. There’s just a lot of things that go into it. If there was more money riding on it, I think we’d probably be a lot more motivated to get things done in a more expedient manner. But it just isn’t there. It’s difficult to find the time to put it together. Four years when you’re eighteen seems like an eternity. Four years when you get to be forty, it goes by so fast you can hardly even fathom it.

Once the material is ready, getting the album recorded and put out seems to take awhile. You sent me one of these songs…
I sent you “Hail to the Chief” probably a year and a half ago. Maybe two. I don’t know what to tell you. We recorded the first five songs pretty quickly, and we had other songs to go in with. After having the first five demo’d, I wanted to throw out the next five. I didn’t think that they were really of the same level as the initial five songs. I pushed really hard to write more stuff. A lot of things got thrown out and we started over again. Why not?

That’s a good reason though. To do better. One of the best reasons I’ve ever heard for a delay.
They weren’t bad songs, they just weren’t fitting in to the overall vibe of it. Which I thought was moving in a decidedly more heavy kind of direction. There were some songs that stood out as being not really at the same level. Not necessarily bad songs, just not right for the album.

Every so often someone sends me a demo version of a song, or like you did without vocals. I’m never sure what to say. “They’re sending this to me. I guess they want me to say something, but…” I don’t know. I know I said something to you about a mosh part I didn’t like, but now listening to it, I think it’s the part where you’re singing the “New Rules…” verse. That sounds a lot better with the vocals on it, but I never would have known that…
It’s kind of a weird thing as you start messing around with songs… That’s another thing. That’s why it’s nice to spend a lot of time in pre-production. It’s nice to be able to play some songs live before you record them. You’d be surprised how much stuff starts coming out the more that you play things. For the most part, this record more than the other ones was played a lot in pre-production, and played for people at the studio long before we ever recorded it. Songs like “Hail to the Chief” were probably played more than a hundred times before they were recorded. In that instance, I think the older songs as they translated on the record turned out to be the better songs mainly because they were the ones that were sitting around for the longest amount of time and got played the most. They, surprisingly enough, didn’t end up losing their fire. If anything, I think they sound even more intense because they did live such a long life before they managed to get to record. The songs that were written with the record in mind once we had that kind of focus, they didn’t come off, I don’t think, as strong as I anticipated in the rehearsal room. Even though they got played a lot, they still come off as more… A song like “W.P.D.”, man, I’m telling you, I had such high high high hopes for that song, and it did not end up making the translation to the record in the fashion that I imagined it. I really imagined that being just this song that was going to… When we were writing it, I just went, “Man, that’s just the fucking coolest thing!” I still think it has a lot of really cool elements, I just don’t think we capture the right performance for that song. And again, it’s because it’s a newer one, and… “Lamb to the Slaughter” was written probably three days before we recorded it and sent it out there. I was changing lyrics patterns right up to when I recorded it. I would love for circumstances to convene and us to be able to have a couple months to really devote solely to writing a record. With no outer distractions, much in the way that bands that get paid to do this live their lives. That would be a really nice thing to have happen. I think we could come up with something pretty good if we could do that. We’ve never been able to. We have three hour bursts every couple weeks. Even when you’re trying really hard to get things done, you’re looking at maybe eight hours in a week that would be devoted to it. It’s so not a full-time thing.

So what are your favorite songs on the album?
My favorite songs are different from the ones that I think came out the best. The one that I think came out the best and is my favorite song is “Hail to the Chief.” That’s my favorite, it’s my favorite lyrically, it’s my favorite musically, to me it’s the strongest song on the album. I really like “W.P.D.” as a song. Again, it’s got so many interesting parts in it. If you want to take the time to listen to it over and over, it reveals itself to you more. But I think we could have done something to make the parts sound a little bit more distinct from one another. I don’t know exactly what that would be. The actual ideas of that song are really cool and I love the way that it ends. It’s just a bitchin’ song from start to finish. I really like “Extinct” and “Hybridized” as well. “Hybridized” is really cool, because we did exactly the opposite of what people might expect with it. It just sounds like it’s going to start with one of those *heavy metal scream* and it so doesn’t, you know what I mean? It has the possibility for so many clichés, and they weren’t exercised. That to me… there’s a little bit of special meaning in that for me as well. I look at it and go, “There is a very predictable grid one could have walked on this, and it didn’t get walked on.” It’s a personal little thing about the song that I happen to dig because I know what could have happened to it. Those really are my favorites, although I don’t think there really is a weak link on this record, a song that I have to turn off. If there’s any song that I feel like I have to turn off, it’s probably “W.P.D.” because it just didn’t meet my really high expectations for the song.

The one song that I’m playing over and over more than the rest is “Liberty Lying Bleeding.”
It’s a cool song.

I’m really into the lyrics, it’s great to try to sing along to, you should hear that, it really scares the neighbors.
It’s a demanding vocal line on that song. Not in the sense that it’s extremely high or extremely low or this harsh tonal thing, it’s more in that the notes move very slightly. There’s not big steps, it’s all real subtle. Especially in the chorus. And you have to be spot-on while you’re doing it or it sounds really fucking shitty.

I like the song. The arrangement of the song, it’s not a pop song arrangement. It builds like a real epic of a song even though it’s five minutes. I love that sort of thing. “Tiamat’s Fall,” what really makes that is the end when you start with the “History – Astronomy…” and you pick things up there. It reminds me of “Nice Day for a Funeral” by Overkill.
Oh, yeah, with the big guitar parts? Yeah. That song went right up to the bitter end with me saying every single time I was on the phone with somebody, “Is somebody going to put in those guitar parts at the end of the song? There’s just three fucking chords, can we get somebody to put those parts into the end of the song?” I was really starting to worry that the whole thing was going to leave and go to the land of pressing without those parts on. In my mind it was absolutely mandatory that they got on there. That song is real funny in the lyrical sense, I really like the far-out lyrics on that song.

Once again the lyrics on the album are very political. Why do you never do a straight politically lyrical album. Why is there always science fiction in there?
Because I like doing the sci-fi stuff too. The sci-fi stuff is fun. It’s a break from… I don’t watch all documentaries and I like escapism as well. If I can do my escapism using something that is at least a strange kind of outside possibility sort of thing, then that’s cool for me. I like including it because it’s something interesting and something fun, and an outside chance that there’s some sort of truth to maybe a little bit of it. There’s also the great government conspiracy of hiding all this stuff from us.

For about a year and a half since we last talked, I was an online subscriber to Coast to Coast AM.
Ahh.

That will mess you up!
I know! It’s entertainment as far as I can tell. I don’t think that there’s enough truth in it to say with absolute certainty, unless you are a person who has stood in the presence of a UFO or an alien being, and I’m not saying you couldn’t have, but I’m just saying unless you’ve actually faced that, it still lies in the realm of fantasy. There’s also people like William Cooper who have called Art Bell, Art Bullshit Bell forever and they see him as a font of disinformation. Just like they see Alex Jones as some disinformant who works for the government as well. I guess as long as things are being discussed then it’s all good. I do think Art Bell tends to make things that might even be credible seem lacking, it’s again that kind of guilt by association sort of thing.

What would it take for you to not write lyrics about this evil government that deserves a real life V for Vendetta situation?
It would take my trust in them to appear. I would use the word restore, but I never had any. It would have to be that I end up in some way, shape, or form, trusting them, or not caring. I just don’t see either happening. What is my government or any other government done to instill trust in its constituency? I just am not seeing it. I don’t see why I should be so willing to believe what they say to me. Until I find a reason to believe… One thing that would go a long way into making me feel a little bit more empowered as a citizen under this government would be the end of this graft and payoff system that we have now where basically pharmaceutical companies and oil lobbies run our government. If there was something to be done to abolish their sort of control, it’s just so unlikely to happen because money talks. As long as money talks, there is just no reason to trust anybody. So I guess there is never going to be a reason to trust anybody in a position of power. They’re all doing it for the money.

I saw this wonderful news story last week, some government official saying that people are going to have to redefine the word privacy. He was basically explaining that they’re going to have the information and privacy means they don’t release it.
Exactly! To a degree, they do now. Privacy is relative. Private to who, private to my neighbor? I guess. Kinda. The intrepid neighbor could find out everything that happens here. It would be very easy to do. We are entering into the Orwellian world of accessibility to everything about you that’s private. What you need to do is stop being so fucking private. Probably. That’s probably the solution, is to stop doing things that you need to feel private about. Or that government would free up people’s lives so that the things that you do in private wouldn’t make that much of a difference. We have kind of a weird standard, everyone seems to have private peccadilloes and weird shit they like to get all up in, and we love to find out about other people’s dirty laundry, but we hate to have our own exposed. People are just going to have to get used to the idea that everything they do is on display.

We’ve been talking for almost three hours here, we can wrap this up. What five albums have you been listening to lately?
I listened to Fair to Midland lately. I rather like that record, I think it’s pretty cool. I have been listening to and liking part of it anyway, the newer Nightrage. That’s kind of good. I’ve been listening to a lot of old King’s X. And the usual Thin Lizzy, which I can’t seem to go more than a week without listening to, and the new Down. That’s pretty much about it. More than anything, I’ve listened to the Fair to Midland in the last three weeks.

Any final words for the readers then?
Everyone, pay a little extra to Lamentations of the Flame Princess this time so Jim can buy a new Logitech mic that’s desk mounted and he can actually conduct a reasonable interview.

Be'lakor- The Frail Tide

2008-12-03T00:37:00.003+02:00

Be'lakor

The Frail Tide

6 – 42:53

(review by James Edward Raggi IV)
I wonder where metal would have gone if Tales from the Thousand Lakes had the same impact as The Bleeding. I wonder where metal would have gone if Edge of Sanity had struck gold and At the Gates remained the obscure gem. I wonder where metal would have gone if Opeth had the notoriety off of Orchid that Mayhem had off of… non-musical activities. Finding bands that take influence from that sort of melodic death metal really isn’t so easy. And it seems that even with Opeth’s popularity in the past few years, not too many bands are following their lead. While it’s great that these styles aren’t being driven into the ground by copycat bands, there is also a lack of evolutional exploration going on. What would have happened if Opeth went somewhere else after Blackwater Park? Infernal seemed a lazy choice after Crimson.

Enter Be’lakor, an Australian band that sounds like it takes that sound and uses it as the starting point on their first release. The band’s sound is rather laid back and dependent on its ability to interest the listener in the melodies more than grabbing hold of the listener and demanding attention. Plenty of slower and mid-paced passages with lush, dreary melodies, piano accompaniment and plenty of keyboards, a tendency to go off on musical tangents for the sake of it rather than delivering tightly-compressed songs (check out “A Natural Apostasy” with its brief use of a flute) can lead to wandering attention spans, but there’s lots to listen to. The band has managed to have a wide-open, almost ethereal production for their album, which is to the benefit of their overall sound but perhaps this is to the band’s disadvantage in today’s “gimme gimme now!” atmosphere. But this is very much a metal album, and the central instruments are of course the guitars.

One of the songs, “Paths,” is Steven Merry’s six minute piano piece (with some background keyboards appearing later in the composition), with the provided “lyrics” never actually heard on the album. It’s quite interesting that on an album that has distorted guitars and deep growled vocals, a six-minute demonstration by the keyboard player does not seem out of place. It fits. And that should tell everyone what kind of album this is overall.

The name Be’lakor comes from a demon prince from the Warhammer game, and has absolutely no thematic connection to what the band does (it’s “phonetically pleasant” according to the band). It’s really just a random “I guess that sounds cool” kind of name. If there’s a meaning I’m missing, fair enough, but as it is, why choose a name that doesn’t much relate to either the band’s music or the inspiration the band takes from, and I quote, “the grandeur in nature, the ideals of paganism, and the drive to recapture true spirituality and heroism in an age of materialism and religious sterility.”

Lyrically the album largely promotes paganism and launches a barely-veiled assault on Christianity. “A Natural Apostasy” is the most blatant with these words:

A natural apostasy
Tearing down the dogma of weakness
An unnatural mentality
Will be struck from this earth

They never directly name the target of their venom, but it’s obvious that the current state of the world is not to their liking. More from “Sanguinary”:

The puerile form the weakened mind
The pools that linger in our wake
Compelled to act, yet not to think
These are the lambs that will surely fall

It’s not all a covert attack on the world’s dominant religion, as “The Desolation of Aries” (why not Khorne if they’re going to use Be’lakor?) is a more general song of war (yet hardly glorifying it), and “Tre’aste” seems to be about the violent life force of the universe. No fucking relationship songs, hallelujah!

The album’s presentation is excellent, with the artwork being appropriate, and all of the necessary information appears – production notes, lyrics (each song gets its own page in the booklet), it’s all first class. The album’s sound quality is great as well, and everything about the album proves that you don’t need a barcode or a record label logo on the back cover to release complete, quality work.

The album has its share of problems of course, chief among them being so caught up in the atmosphere and the melodies that when the music does charge forward, the band doesn’t have the bite to make a real impact. The faster sections of “Tre’aste,” for example, aren’t invigorating and the song is basically dead until the melodies (at which point, I must admit, is one of the best parts of the album, just great stuff). I think the band realizes this to some degree, because several of the transitions from wandering/melodic to faster/harder have the vocalist accentuating the change with a roar. The band slips into obvious Opeth-isms at times, most notably the last verse of “The Desolation of Ares,” and there’s just a little something about having little bits that echo currently popular bands that gives me pause.

While I am hesitant to call the vocalist a “problem,” George Kosmas is hardly what one would call versatile. He has a low, throaty death growl that doesn’t change much throughout the album. It reminds me a bit of Garden of Shadows (remember them?) where the vocalist is using an exclusively brutal style on top of music which usually features more variety. Not that this guy sucks or takes away from the mood or anything, but there is nothing noteworthy about the performance either.

Although the album is far from perfect, it’s still something I’ve been listening to off and on for the better part of a year. The positives definitely outweigh the negatives, and in all, this is a pretty good album.

Clipping Death- Deaf Magnetic: Mastered by Muppets

2008-11-30T17:31:00.001+02:00

Killl Interview

2008-11-29T23:27:00.003+02:00

Killl is another Norwegian oddity that – apart from lush namedropping – has crude music to offer. What is also interesting is the refusal to put out any music in conserved form other than the dvd format, given the possibility to visually enhance it. Given this, it was refreshing to share Are's views on metal and its neighbors, high-flown aesthetics and a no-frills approach.

What was so attractive about the thought of abandoning your former bands - some like JR Ewing with a strong reputation and probably having been about to break through - for a project that does neither release albums nor follows any interest to find a label? Also, you play a type of music which to describe as "uncommercial" is still put mildly...
Killl was something that happened on the side of our other projects, not instead of. Some of us have moved on to other bands, some still work with their longtime bands. KILLL was formed on request by a promoter who listened to our drummer Martin talking about the idea. We were booked to play a festival in Oslo based on sheer trust, and we all met at first to take a picture for the program. Most of us knew each other, but we were all busy in different projects and saw the concert as a one-off affair. All the tracks were made in some three days.

Since then, most of our concerts and tours have been based on requests, such as the Norwegian tour when we were invited to expand the visual elements of our show, which now is a crucial part of the experience. The composing of tracks follow the same gung-ho approach; anything else would be too time-consuming and make Kill a too demanding project given we are all busy with other bands and activities

Most of us are central in organizing our other bands (a total of some 14 bands), so Killl is very different, much more democratic and fast - no dwelling on complex ideas. Anytime we have tried that, it has lost in favor of simplicity.

When KILLL was started, it was a way for us to leave our musical habits behind and do something else. It is still an experiment as far as Iam concerned. Part of that is the setup: There are no amps on stage, the drummer plays an electronic kit, and we run all the sources through my mixer, opening up for primitive use of effects and – quite often – silence. The music is made to be played live, a studio record would be completely awkward. Which is why we are releasing a dvd, not a record.

What is your conception of Jazz as opposed to conservative notions about the genre (the American songbook, swing and bop). Do you follow the different currents of contemporary jazz or are you, after all, subscribed to the standards and classics?
The jazz parallel is not really relevant given only one of us has ever been playing jazz.

Do you think - also with respect to the meticulous divisions into "sub-scenes" - that rock/metal and jazz have something in common? Isn't it - on the other hand - rather impossible to reconcile jazz and rock/metal because the free-form- and improvisational approaches per se contradict the thorough compositional principles of popular music?
Yes, very much, and it does not stop there, of course. Basically though, I am more interested in attitude and methodology than genre tags. For example, I don´t really like the Naked City version of jazz and metal fusion. To me it´s still oil and water, it is jazz-informed minds introducing metal elements into an essentially open-ended jazz form - which is jazz nevertheless and not a problem in itself; I just do not appreciate the use of humor. It only underlines the “we know what we are doing” attitude, which is so far from the metal attitude. The metal attitude is about doing ridiculous things without any shame, only occasional insight and brutal energy. Metal is escapist music for the working class, theater for the poor, anger with no address.

Equally problematic is the opposite: musicians all of a sudden “dumbing down” and turning true, gentrifying their t-shirt and record collection to a mint condition grimness, as if they never listened to hip hop or pop. I´m interested in music where the fusing or transcending of genres happens as a consequence of following ideas and experimentation - from whatever limited set of tools you have. Maybe that is why I tend to enjoy bands who are moving from metal into other genres more than the other way around. Experimental black metal moving into ambient and electronic through experimentation with duration and noise textures, death metal moving into frantic free-jazz via the fascination of complex drumming and lightning speed riffs, doom metal moving into minimalism and physical sound through adoration of bass, sustained notes and volume... and equally much, musicians where metal references are nothing but a starting point for an ongoing exploration, such as James Plotkin, Mick Barr and Justin Broadrick.

Given that metal and rock are allegedly popular music styles (I mean, fans even complain if bands do not play guitar solos live the same way they can be heard on studio albums), do you want to break out of pop by stressing the jazz in Killl?
What has been a weird experience with Killl is how easy it comes across to people from all over the place. It is strange how we got an audience through not trying. If it is because of the lights and backdrop, the music or the combination, is hard to say. The unusual aesthetic surrounding and the music do force the audience to reconsider the relationship between the two, maybe making it easier for people to approach it. I really don´t know.

Anyone who has heard Fenriz of Darkthrone Deejay - which he actually did for our first gig - knows that there is no contradiction between having an open musical mind and making specialized music. The semiotic juggling of genre tags is very boring. The use of musical tools from all corners of experience is very natural. Killl does not claim to have anything dramatically new to contribute. We have simply said no to a few dominant elements of these genres, such as the inverted catholic aesthetic, and included a tad of electronics. The rest is very basic, bordering on primitive use of compositional ideas.

Why the three "lll", and brash and blunt choice of band name, which evokes images of nothing but violent (metal?) music rather than sophisticated and allegedly "intellectual" avant-garde stuff?
Musically and visually, Killl incorporates a lot of binary and contrasting action: on-off, hi-low, loud-quiet, short-long, clean-distorted, composed-improvised, bright-dark, color-no color. KILLL was the first and most simple word we grabbed that embodied this type of “no”. Visually there are no curves in it, which is a hint at the digital instruments in our music. The third L is a greeting to our Swedish neighbours in Gothenburg as well as a welcoming to our fifth member, Kyrre, the man behind the lights.

What are your aims with Killl, considering the refusal to act within the common realms of music publishing, advertising and so on?
Again, there is no agenda from our part to pitch ourselves as anti anything, but by not subscribing to the noise of a music market in painful transition we can allow Killl to be a rare yet semi-cyclic event where we can do something we do not do elsewhere. We appreciate people coming out for it but we don´t ask pretty please. There is enough hustling in our other jobs.

Does an artist's aesthetic narcissism ("I have something unique to say musically and will do anything to get it out!") have to outweigh his personal narcissism ("oh look, I am a musician with glossy long hair - please love me!") to create something permanently relevant?
As much as I am a sucker for mythology, be it black metal or Egyptian, I have always felt that the most dangerous music does not need theater - it is terrifying in itself. On the other hand, music is ritual and ritual is visual. The combination of the two becomes ritual with relevance, a rare commodity these days. As author and philosopher Joseph Campbell would say, we are in a time where Christianity has monopolized ritual and we are stuck with an aesthetic not representing the times we live in. Not to say that this was a conscious take on that, but when light man Kyrre developed the stage show we are using today together with me, we wanted to explore an aesthetic that cultivated the rgb color logic of led-lighting - very un-metal. We made a 20 x 4 meters backdrop to frame the stage we play at and create a consistent look for all venues. The colors of the patterns on the backdrop are calibrated to be as close to the rgb color temperature as possible. Switching on and off series of quick color changes, the leds animate the patterns of the backdrop by turning “on and off” colors. The result is a simple but effective optical phenomenon of moving patterns causing occasional nausea. Each song of the set has a different color code, and the concert takes you through everything form one color modes to the full spectrum stroboscopic shebang.

Originality: I am sure all artists feels their music is very relevant, and there is definitely a difference between ambition - which is personal - and result, which is for all. Therefore, when one in addition knows how to evaluate work changes over time, it becomes obvious that pinpointing the relevance of music is only possible after time has passed, especially when it comes to ones own music. Personally, I am not bothered by the thought that KilllL is tossed out with the trash in the future music canon. I am having too much fun doing it, and that is my only aim... Less so with other work I do, which I think goes for all of us.

In return, can you imagine that metal and rock with trivial lyrical subjects and "primitive" musical substance can outlast time, also with respect to the relative youth of the genres?
Easily - if not, I would be a snob. I can get moved by anything that deals with the human condition, basically. Most experimental music is polished formalism, which I enjoy, but it is definitely more a spice than food. Experimentation is no endpoint in itself, it´s a constant reminder, reassessing and reestablishing of the dearest things, the basics. Killl is not a negation of the other music we have done; it´s a cleaning up of the tool box, a cold shower followed by a good drink, a celebration of music in crude form.

Interview: Next Life

2008-11-25T02:37:00.008+02:00

Next Life
Interview

Next Life is a duo that touches metal only marginally, or at least: metal how LotFP perceives it. Nevertheless they join the ranks of those recent groups that blend heavy guitars with the odd sounds of old time video game consoles. Interesting enough for me to listen to the short eruptions that form their first recorded effort Electric Violence and contact Hai in Norway, the half of the band with Vietnamese roots.

Is it the short attention span of today's culture that makes for such short songs, or is it the lacking substance of your ideas and ressources?

We have always been very inspired by computer game music and hardcore punkrock. Both of these genres tend to have fast and short compositions. Much computer game music, especially from Japan, has a strongly ongoing drama that keeps progressing until a certain point (about one to two minutes) and then repeats itself. It is possible to recall this in many 2D games where music plays a great role in the narrating of a story, and also it has to keep up with the high tempo of fictional universes built upon simple elements.
In our case as with computer game music, I guess it is a way to keep up a high level of intensity and at the same time not to become monotonous, so that both player and listener become occupied with constant progression untill the next level appears. In a way it should match the tempo of modern consumer culture such as TV and newspapers, but as we try to be untraditional in terms of emotions and drama-building, the songs may - as compared to pop-culture - often remind of "find one/many error(s)"-pictures. There is something wrong that keeps them from becoming TV- or radio-hits, which we find great in terms of being progressive, but also a little bit sad because less people will get into the music.

In terms of longevity, can you think of Next Life as a long-standing outfit that in the future will be revered by a group of fans and spoken of in terms of "classic songs", like bands from the old days of rock?

Hehe, I think that would be the main goal of every artist - to be remembered and to be influental over time. The music scene today has become so big with different artists and styles, and as you said, they most often only succeed for a short time before the next big thing comes up. Even the bands that I am most inspired by such as Zeni Geva, Earth Crisis, Assück and Infest have barely made it to the "history books", so from these observations I cannot see that Next Life will survive any longer than most of today's underground artists. If Next Life or even some of the songs were to to become classics in the future, then we would consider this band project a success.

Is Next Life serious, in that you want to convey anything special beyond the sheer fact that you mix old 8-bit-sounds with elements close to metal?

The mix of 8-bit music and metal has become a style. In Next Life, the goal has always been to mix different genres in order to create an arena to cover our complete musical potential. The style itself is less important other than for maybe describing the music. We actually use anything that we find spine-chilling (again something we have learned from game music), but since me and Trond both grew up and worked a lot with 8-bit sounds plus hard rock music, these genres often surface in our music. The fact that Trond creates many of the sounds we use on Commodore 64, and that many of our base sounds are from Commodore Amiga and various old-school consoles, has certainly put us into the 8-bit metal genre. Actually though, we would more like to call it "electro-violence" as this is a more open and correct expression for us. We are much inspired by digital universes, not only 8-bit, and there has always been a great portion of the hardcore subgenre "power-violence" as we see it.

Would human vocals work well with your music?

We tried that in 2006 after “Electric Violence“ was released, and it did solve some problems live-wise, as it is easier to create high energy on stage the more people are on it. But we did it too fast and without a vision that was clear enough. It resulted in an electro-clash and kitschy musical expression that we simply could not live with, being so proud and happy with developing music purely based on rhythm and melody. Instrumental music is really an abstract expression that will become unique more easily than if you add a person's voice, face and lyrics to it. We want to explore music as an expression itself. Alos, we never stop being fascinated by the fact that there is no real answer to why human beings react how they do to different tone combinations, rhythm progression, the way songs are composed and so on

Do you sample sounds only or do you also actively implement and manipulate them?

We do whatever it takes to fit any of our sounds into the music, both sampled and generated. We never sample tone combinations or a complete rhythm, as we want to compose as much of our music as possible on our own. Manipulation is most often necessary for sampled sounds to fit into our songs, but we do sample voices from movies and computer games. In these cases the samples have not been altered much except for some EQ-stuff.

Where do your musical roots lie, and why do you think that guitar music, the attitude behind it and old video game sounds match one another?

I guess this has partially been answered above, but here is the story concerning myself: I got a Commodore 64 in 1984 and became addicted very fast to the games and sounds. I remember playing Exploding Fist so loud that I blew the speakers on the TV at home. In 1987, I learned to play guitar and got into better and better bands by the years. However, it was hard keeping bands together for a longer time in the small town I came from, either because people needed to do other things, or just because they were too bad musicians. So in 1995, I started using my Amiga as drum machine to play really tight riffs together with my older brother and a friend. In 1999, I visited my home country Vietnam for the first time. Driving by car through the entire country and at the same time listenening a lot to The Last Ninja 1 & 2 and Zeni Geva who used synthesizer in metal music in a way that I found very innovative and inspiring, the vision became more and more clear. What really meant something to me at that time was experimental punkrock and game music. These also had something in common, as game music has many connections to rock and metal, after all. Then I went back to Norway, and voilá.
It was hard to predict if Next Life would succeed in getting any listeners, but I chose to do it simply to cover my own needs to listen to very hard, dynamic and melodic music. It was only when my friends convinced me to do a show that the project became a band.

What is "Kampfkultur"? - It sounds kind of martial.

In order to earn money from art and music in Norway, one must have a registered company. I decided to call mine "Kampkultur" instead of "Next Life", as I also do other things such as theater, gallery, film, and so on. Next Life is a division of the company Kampkultur. I like distinct and straight-to-the-point music and colours, I have also always been inspired by political art, although I mostly work without words or lyrics. It felt natural to name the company after that. The company itself is not supposed to be a war institution, but as war and politics obiously are reasons for people to do anything, the art around it has become very strong as well. It is this art that Kampkultur draws its inspiration from – alongside more positive stuff as the divine, friendship, astrology and technology.

Is it necessary in post modern times to gather elements from various fields to create something that is supposed to be "new", or do you see any possibility for an artist to produce original art just out of him- or herself?

We live in times of much information; you cannot grow up without getting into the many music styles that exist, and that in itself can become a limitation. The culture around you becomes the universe in which you can choose and to which you relate when creating own stuff. But how did the earlier composers come up with new styles? I guess it happened over time (with some exceptions), and we will hopefully see over time that our generation will bring orginality to different fields in one way or another. That aside, I quit watching TV at the same time I founded Next Life to not be too informed. I can say that it has left me with a certain lack of knowledge about society and social development, but hopefully, it also has done or will do something to Next Life that is positive.

In this context, how do you see your band's abilities to progress - are you a flight of fancy as a musical entity, or can we expect a certain development? Have you already said everything you wanted to say, and if not: what is there in addition?

We want to keep the future open for Next Life. In that way, it can perform dramatic changes more easily if desired, and we may become influenced by things left unconsidered so far. However, I also admit we always try to lay out strategic plans in order to forsee problems regarding the music industry and our audience to legitimate the name Next Life, which for us means many things. To be one step ahead of ourselves and the music buisness is one of them, and as we see it, that won't come out of pure improvisation.

Review: Falcon- Die Wontcha

2008-11-23T23:44:00.006+02:00

Falcon
Die Wontcha
Liquid Flames Records – 10 – 53:18

As I am writing this, two years have passed since this album has been recorded. However, Falcon did not release Die Wontcha until a couple of months ago and even now are not going to receive the exposure they deserve – mind you, I am not talking about currying favors with the many potential buyers of all the things currently perceived as “metal”; neither do I expect that the retro craze appreciates the band's second release more than the eponymous debut. Hypothetically though, Falcon could appeal to both audiences, only if some smart label marketed them as cool and authentic – which they are, only that these people won't know without getting it shoved down their throats by some tastemaker. Let us play that part, then.

Live in the backlash of hipper times
When music had much more to say
Not just faceless brutality
A vicious cycle revolves today

No trapdoors. No look beyond any horizon, and not over anybody's shoulder either. This bird perches in backwoods devoid of irony and would rather bite its tongue than put it into the cheek to betray its own cause. The reason for this lies in the respective backgrounds of the band members. Rock.

Trio rock, this is. Singer and guitarist Perry M. Grayson delivered some power metal greatness with Destiny's End before moving on to Artisan and Isen Torr, where he displayed a fond love of more classical forms of the genre. Darin McCloskey is also the skinsman of Pale Divine and now teams up with no other than Greg Lindstrom, former bass player of Cirith Ungol, as the rhythm section of Falcon.

As the band's backbone, Lindstrom and McCloskey do not waste any time with frills and decorations, giving Grayson space to develop his equally heave-ho riffs and especially some delightful solos and leads. This is where one strong influence of Falcon becomes obvious: Thin Lizzy's signature guitar sound, which was both sweet and beefy, thus making for a nowadays rare kind of heaviness - it is refreshing to hear riffs that are actually given a chance to unfold and in return allow bass and drums to be individually discernible... not that Falcon are in any way progressive, but as they do not indulge in redundant staccatos as the conversation-enders and no-brainers of modern metal, their four-on-the-floor beats will do...

...and this already in the energetic opening Jimmy Clark. Why a band of this stripe writes a song about a race car driver (Primus may do that) I don't know; maybe it is because Clark died at the peak of the hippie movement in 1968. Anyhow, Grayson's eulogy sounds familiar immediately to those familiar with the debut. The mention of Tim Baker is almost inevitable with respect to the band's four stringer as well as Grayson's personal preferences, although the two voices are less comparable in stylistic terms than because of their crudeness. Corporate whore shows the frontman as not particularly versatile in his angular approach, but if these melody lines are not catchy, then what is? Actually, the fluent shift between melodic and rhythmic passages is admirable and shows nothing of other bands' frequent ineptness to reconcile both without predictable interruptions. Instead, the breaks in this and the other songs pick up on the lost practice of changing between contrasting (thematically, rhythmically, etc.) motifs without losing the compositional red thread... cool as well how the track returns to its initial motif in the end.

Accordingly and apart from the occasional hint at an harmonic extension especially in Elfland's Daughter, Lindstrom plays in unison with the guitar and locks in tightly with McCloskey, all the time keeping his characteristic plucky tone, which is not as prominent as on the classics of his old band. The song refers to a story of Lord Dunsany; the title says it: fantasy stuff in the old vein, and a love story, too. Cirith Ungol were similarly prone to myth, legend and the more imaginative spheres of storytelling, while Falcon also admit the Grand Funks and Blue Cheers from a better past as influential peers. This branch of hard rock (often tagged “obscure” maybe for the respective groups' lasting status as commercial also-rans) has often procured the kind of frank but brash lyrics that make for a certain embarrassment on the listener's side. Get an impression of it during Corporate Whore, an accusation of former rebels turned conformists, featuring hilarious rhymes of “Hendrix” and “cocaine fix”. However, Grayson's at times clumsily simple truisms ring true in some ears. After all, Finger-pointing to the moneyed usually works from the position of an alleged has-been. Personal hardships read well on the suffering artist's CV, so if you have not encountered any so far, you might dramatize a little – it is all for the sake of good music... did I mention that the bass and cripsy guitar spots here make up for all that?

As an instrumental, The Wreck of the John Deere sidesteps any such issue and pads along bluesy paths in the lead guitar section, adding some keyboard strings for texture: a nice break or alternately the intro of the hypothetic b-side – which starts with a cover version of Leader the opener of Buffalo's 1972 album Dead Forever. The Australians' song passes as one of Falcon's own, being rhythmically simple and lyrically pushing the right buttons once more to blame all the world's wrongs on the movers and shakers. The midsection of the eighth song – named after the band – returns to pushing some synthesizer keys as well as emotional ones, being of a dreamy quality that allows the listeners to drift away for some time; he will be back spot on for the highly memorable Everything There Is To Know with a (fake?) hammond more burning than Grayson's natural organ. The singer stays as distanced from his audience as his lyrics permit, being the straightforward display of basic feelings they are. This text is probably the best on the album, since it is open to at least a bit of individual interpretation.

Finally, we have Show You All, apparently a 1970s tune by Lindstrom for which Robert Garven drew the background image in the CD booklet. Where Cirith Ungol had Michael Whelan, Falcon grabbed an image by sci-fi artist Virgil Finlay for the front cover of Die Wontcha. This rounds up how the band wants us to see them: Falcon carry the torch of the likes mentioned, not to forget Pentagram and Sabbath as the usual suspects. What makes this album so appealing though is of course not its novelty, but the fact that it is a cut above the lasting vintage buzz; Grayson may be in his mid thirties only, but he plays and thinks not like one born too late. The music will seem beyond criticism anyway if you like the references, as it does not force any strained novelty. However, only through Grayson's mouth, the messages turn into truths timelessly valid rather than pushing for mock authenticity and faux nostalgia.

To paraphrase what The Lamp Of Thoth recently sang, doom has nothing to do with laughing, but when I hear sullen reality depicted in such warm colors as on Die Wontcha, I can do with this and any other stereotype. I have been living with this album – this reality – now for some weeks, and I could not prove Falcon wrong so far; rather than belittling what is a dying breed of rock music, I admit it has grown on me.

I'm going through the motions of having a good time
I'm trying to like it, but something just ain't right