Decibel #213 - July 2022

GWAR

SOUTH POLE DISPATCH

DAZZLING

FACE OF COLLAPSE

KILLMEN HALL OF FAME

REFUSE/RESIST

GABE

SERBIAN 1977 - 2 0 22

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Mouth Against War SEPTICFLESH MISERY INDEX HAUNT NIGHT DEMON MIZMOR & THOU COME TO GRIEF ARTIFICIAL BRAIN

JULY 2022 // No. 213

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upfront 8

obituary: gabe serbian A cold day in Southern California

10 metal muthas Wise blood of my wise blood 12 low culture Once more unto the breach

16 cavernlight Better apart 18 mutilatred Toledo Rot City 20 mizmor and thou Anything but short-sighted 22 ufomammut Ready for liftoff

13 no corporate beer Sonic excess

24 knoll School’s out

14 in the studio:

26 spiral skies They see dead people

night demon

An outside look

28 come to grief Stay for the riffs 30 evergrey They don’t want to live on this planet anymore 32 artificial brain Soul of a new-ish machine

features

reviews

34 haunt Heavy metal lifers

69 lead review Candy forego any saccharine inclinations to administer purely caustic industrialized hardcore on their Relapse debut Heaven is Here

36 septicflesh Requiem for a dream 38 misery index For inquiries, please send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to 1991 40 q&a: gwar Human Mike Bishop might feel good in a nice pair of jeans, but Blothar the Berserker isn't ready to give up his codpiece

70 album reviews Records from bands that can’t wait to see what hot, edgy shitposts are worth $44 billion, including Anvil, Origin and Suppression 88 damage ink Virginia is for... someone

44 the decibel

Hatred Purge COVER STORY COVER AND CONTENTS PHOTOS BY ESTER SEGARRA

hall of fame Beautiful, heavy and all-around weird, Dazzling Killmen craft a sadly prophetic final album with 1994’s Face of Collapse

Decibel (ISSN 1557-2137) is published monthly by Red Flag Media, Inc., P.O. Box 36818, Philadelphia, PA 19107. Annual subscription price is $29.95. Periodical postage, paid at Philadelphia, PA, and other mailing offices. Submission of manuscripts, illustrations and/or photographs must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materials. Postmaster send changes of address for Decibel to Red Flag Media, P.O. Box 36818, Philadelphia, PA 19107. © 2022 by Red Flag Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

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REFUSE/RESIST

July 2022 [T213]

Beyond the obvious monthly reward

of producing this magazine that you’re holding in your leathery hands, one of the most fulfilling aspects of running Decibel for the past 18 years has been learning how to do all the nonmagazine things I never imagined we’d attempt. Like publishing books; reviving the dormant flexi disc format; launching an annual national tour; starting a festival; starting a second one on the other side of the country.

Record label was not on any previous “to-do” list, however. But as our Metal & Beer Fests began to regularly land special, exclusive sets— many of which are likely to never be replicated—the idea of properly commemorating these moments became more important. Sure, your shitty iPhone videos shot directly in front of the bass monitor have their unlistenable charm, but wouldn’t you like an official document?

And so, into a world of vinyl plants already burdened by gratuitous color variants and pointless reissues of inessential back catalogs, Decibel Records is born! Our mission isn’t to add to that mess, but to create something unique that benefits the artists and is something you might actually want—like the first new Deadguy full-length recording of any kind in over two decades.

Decibel Records’ inaugural slab of wax is Deadguy’s Buyer’s Remorse: Live From the Decibel Magazine Metal & Beer Fest, the legendary Fixation on a Coworker lineup’s first live performance in 25 years, recorded in front of a sold-out crowd at Metal & Beer Fest: Philly on September 25, 2021.

It sounds monstrous and looks gorgeous, courtesy of Deadguy frontman Tim Singer’s trademark design. And that’s as close to a review of a Decibel Records release that you will ever read in this magazine.

That’s one of the few things we can say for certain about the label.

That and there will be more releases; some are already recorded, while others will be shortly. Readers can expect more exclusive partnerships like this with the artists who have graced our pages and dominated our stages for decades. Or whatever I said in the press release.

Look, we know the world needs a lot of things right now and another record label isn’t very high on that list, but hey, at least we didn’t start another fucking podcast. albert mudrian, Editor-in-Chief

PUBLISHER

Alex Mulcahy

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

alex@redflagmedia.com EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Albert Mudrian albert@decibelmagazine.com

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James Lewis james@decibelmagazine.com

DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND SALES ART DIRECTOR

Aaron Salsbury aaron@decibelmagazine.com

Michael Wohlberg michael@decibelmagazine.com

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Patty Moran

COPY EDITOR

Andrew Bonazelli

BOOKCREEPER

Tim Mulcahy

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tim@redflagmedia.com CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

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Online DECIBEL WEB EDITOR

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DECIBEL WEB AD SALES

James Lewis

albert@decibelmagazine.com james@decibelmagazine.com

Vince Bellino Adrien Begrand J. Bennett Dean Brown Louise Brown Chris Chantler Richard Christy Liz Ciavarella-Brenner Cody F. Davis Chris Dick Sean Frasier Nick Green Raoul Hernandez Addison Herron-Wheeler Jonathan Horsley Courtney Iseman Neill Jameson Sarah Kitteringham Daniel Lake Shawn Macomber Shane Mehling Justin M. Norton Dutch Pearce Forrest Pitts Greg Pratt Jon Rosenthal Brad Sanders Joseph Schafer Matt Solis Kevin Stewart-Panko Eugene S. Robinson Adem Tepedelen Jeff Treppel J Andrew Zalucky CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

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To order by phone: 1.215.625.9850 (10 a.m. – 5 p.m. EST) To order by fax: 1.215.625.9967 To order online: www.decibelmagazine.com Decibel (ISSN 1557-2137) is published monthly by Red Flag Media, Inc., P.O. Box 36818, Philadelphia, PA 19107. Annual subscription price is $29.95.

Periodical postage, paid at Philadelphia, PA, and other mailing offices. Submission of manuscripts, illustrations and/or photographs must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materials.

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READER OF THE

MONTH For my money, no American music publication—at least since the heyday of Creem in the 1970s—has been as consistently irreverent and erudite as Decibel.

You teach English at the University of Windsor in Canada and regularly work with international students. Do you encounter any metalhead students, and can music be a tool in learning a new language?

David Owen

Windsor, Ontario

You've been a reader since issue No. 1, but only became a subscriber a couple years ago.

What made you finally decide to make the monthly commitment?

As a matter of convenience, I used to purchase my copy at the Indigo bookstore in the local mall, but then of course COVID lockdowns meant that most magazines were unavailable due to distribution problems. I didn’t want to run the risk of back issues being sold out, so a subscription was the obvious solution.

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After 20 years of teaching international students, I continue to be astounded by how little they know about rock music in general, and metal in particular. Out of a class of, say, 20, probably half have pop Muppets like Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift downloaded to their iPhones; perhaps half a dozen will know who Elvis and the Beatles are; and at best, maybe two or three will have heard of Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath. The likelihood of anyone being familiar with the works of Cephalic Carnage would be about one in 50,000. As far as music in the classroom, I will sometimes use songs for listening proficiency/vocabulary-building,

i.e., Listen to the song and then fill in the blanks with the missing word. After playing “Hells Bells” by AC/DC, one of my students went out and bought an electric guitar. Result!

Kreator are on the cover of this issue of Decibel. The band has numerous essential LPs from its early days through the modern era.

What's your favorite?

Probably Enemy of God. It combines the feral intensity of their formative works with a gleaming, machine-tooled Andy Sneap production. Truth be told, if we’re talking Teutonic thrash, I’m a bit partial to their Swiss compatriots Coroner and Celtic Frost.

The baroque complexity of the former and the genre-shattering originality of the latter still take some beating.

We recently launched Decibel Records, which will release limited vinyl runs of new recordings. Are you a vinyl fan or are you just listening to Kreator right now on YouTube?

Neither, actually. When I started listening to rock music in the late ’70s, records were already on the way out and cassettes were considered the way to go; around 1990, I switched to CDs, and I’ll be damned if I’m changing formats again. Would you believe I recently picked up a Gorgoroth CD for two bucks in a thrift shop? Believe me, five years from now, CDs will be the new vinyl.

Chuck BB is the illustrator of the graphic novels Black Metal, Vol. 1, 2 and 3 . For more info and art, head over to chuckbb.com

MIC H

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PHOTOS: Chad Lee (King), Dirk Behlau (Amott), Stephanie Cabral (Peterson), Dylan Duncan (Barrett), Martin Wicker (Vincent)

OBITUARIES

GABE

SERBIAN 1977 - 2 0 22

ON

the day before what would have been his 45th birthday, Gabe Serbian passed away. While best known for backstopping San Diego quick-change plaguewielders the Locust since 2001, those who followed Serbian beyond his densely academic and frazzling free-form approach to battery were aware of talents beyond his mathematically beating the tar out of drums and cymbals while wearing a space-age insect uniform. ¶ In addition to drumming in oddball jazzbos Zu, for IDM/breakcore artist Otto von Schirach’s live band, and hardcore supergroups Retox and Head Wound City, Serbian was a proficient guitarist, the instrument on which he initially joined the Locust. He also slung strings for Holy Molar (where deranged dentist costumes replaced space-age insect uniforms) and as an original member of Cattle Decapitation.

Additionally, he was known to grab the mic— fronting hardcore/punk filthmongers Rat’s Eyes and preceding Mike Patton as vocalist in Dave Lombardo’s Dead Cross project. And if that weren’t indicative of how music was Serbian’s obsessive calling, in 2014, alongside longtime friend and bandmate Justin Pearson, he composed and recorded material for Incompresa (Misunderstood), an Asia Argento-directed drama.

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Tributes have been pouring in as one might imagine when the underground extreme music community unexpectedly loses one of its creative pillars way, way, way before their time. “This world will miss Gabe as a friend, family member, musician and artist,” read a statement from the Locust. “He will continue to live on in so many ways and through everyone he has connected with during his time

with us. We hope that you can find a way to celebrate his life.”

As I write this, clad in a slowly disintegrating Locust hoodie purchased after they simultaneously decimated and offended the entirety of 2003’s Milwaukee Metalfest, I’m reminded of an interview I conducted with Serbian promoting the release of the Locust’s 2007 album, New Erections. Partway through our chat, he piped in with, “Hey, can I call you right back? I have to go track down a gun.” Say what?! Turns out he was on the clock at his then-gig as movie set prop master, and a firearm was required for an upcoming scene. When he rang back, he succinctly encapsulated his dedication: “Yeah, I found it; some sort of rifle. This job is a bunch of go here, go there, get this, get that… man, I put up with a lot of shit so I can play music and tour.”

Serbian is survived by his wife and two children. The Locust have set up a memorial fund through GoFundMe. All donations will go to Serbian’s family. R.I.P. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

NOW SLAYING Wonder what Decibel world HQ has been rocking for the past month?

Well, here are the records that we spun most when we probably should have just been listening to Dio instead.

Because not all of us were spawned in the darkest recesses of hell

This Month's Mutha: Barbara Frasier Mutha of Sean Frasier of Wise Blood Records

Tell us a little about yourself.

I am the proud mother of Sean Frasier and a Baby Boomer from central New York. I have been married for 44 years to my husband Truman, who I met while pursuing my master’s degree at SUNY Cortland (go Red Dragons!). We also have a younger son, Shane. The local YMCA and summer camps were my home away from home, and I was always swimming. I swam across Owasco Lake, one of the Finger Lakes, when I was 11.

In addition to running the label, Sean has written innumerable pieces for Decibel, including multiple cover stories. Do you keep up with his writing?

Maybe it’s the proud mother talking, but I love Sean’s writing style and his ability to relate to the bands that he covers. I remember when Sean started writing for Decibel. He already loved the magazine and reached out to join the staff. Years later, he is doing what he loves: writing. We pick up copies whenever we can!

Did you have any influence on Sean’s affection for heavy music?

Which of Sean’s accomplishments are you most proud of?

Although I don’t believe I directly influenced Sean’s affection for heavy metal, I do think my husband and I instilled a love for music, especially for groups heavily driven by strong guitar. We listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin, Queen, the Beatles and Rolling Stones. Sean taught himself how to play drums so he could be part of a hardcore band called Inutility. My husband and I were his proud “roadies” for years. One thing that may shock you is that I survived a mosh pit twice.

This is a tough question. I guess I would have to look at how he has persevered through the pandemic. Having lost a job that he had for over 13 years, Sean did not give up. He found another job as a bartender, started up his record label and still writes for Decibel.

What’s something that most people would be surprised to learn about your son?

Sean founded Wise Blood Records in 2020 and already has a diverse roster of artists.

Did you ever imagine label owner as a career path for him?

You may be surprised to hear that Sean wrote two songs for me: one for Mother’s Day, performed with his brother and some friends, and another called “Black Bears.” Black bears are one of my favorite animals, and that song actually made me cry. It’s about love of family and supporting each other’s dreams. One verse goes:

“Label owner” was not a career that I saw for Sean, but I am not surprised at all. With his musical knowledge, writing skills, willingness to help others get ahead and amiability, it is a perfect fit.

In the coldest days of winter In the caverns tucked away Black bear mama keeps her cubs warm As the night replaces day —ANDREW BONAZELLI

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Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Wake, Thought Form Descent  Mournful Congregation, The Exuviae of Gods - Part 1  Deathevokation, The Chalice of Ages  Kreator, Violent Revolution  Suppresion, The Sorrow of Soul Through Flesh ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  Fugazi, 13 Songs  Malignant Altar, Realms of Exquisite Morbidity  Flipper, Generic Flipper  Unsane, Scattered, Smothered & Covered  Shellac, 1000 Hurts ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  Kreator, Hate Über Alles  Unto Others, Mana  God Forbid, Gone Forever  Cryptopsy, Whisper Supremacy  Judas Priest, Firepower ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  Mizmor & Thou, Myopia  Wolves in the Throne Room, Primordial Arcana  Fawn Limbs, Oleum Decibel Flexi  Kreator, Hate Über Alles  Undeath, It’s Time... To Rise From the Grave ---------------------------------Aaron Salsbury : m a r k e t i n g a n d s a l e s  Deadguy, Buyer’s Remorse: Live From the Decibel Magazine Metal & Beer Fest  Salvaje Punk, Demo 2020  80HD, Demo 2021  Nisemono 偽者, Demo 2021  Venomous Concept, Kick Me Silly VCIII

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------Götz Vogelsang : d e at h e v o k at i o n  Venefixion, A Sigh From Below  Chthe'ilist, Le Dernier Crépuscule  Furbowl, The Autumn Years  Vader, Dark Age  Lord Vicar, The Black Powder

Y ISEMAN

TNE

BY COUR

But Where Will People See You? ecently, Maryland Deathfest

announced that this is (potentially) the last year of the festival—maybe temporarily, maybe permanently— and the reactions, at least those I saw, were predictably worth a few hundred words in here.

There were a lot of people talking about how they wouldn’t be able to see friends, or the memories they had of getting shithoused, or “Where will Chicken Man go?” ad fucking nauseum.

Scant few mentions of the bands they saw and even less appreciation for MDF for putting in the work to pull this yearly shindig together. Yep, mostly just drinking and taking pictures with people from the Internet.

I had planned a tirade about people being more upset at the loss of a social setting to get hammered and show off whatever cool shirt they spent too much money on from a seller on Etsy. There would have been jokes and chuckles about fests being fucking fashion shows—probably the same jokes I’ve told when I’ve written about this subject on a near-yearly basis. Not today, though. Why? I’m sure everyone is on the edge of their seats.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been careening through a downspell, the choking depression that settles in with me for a bit every few months/years. The kind that really fucks up relationships, deadlines and just life in general. I’ve done pretty well at holding on, truth be told. I’m still present for my child and I’ve only mildly fucked up at work (beyond my norm, anyway).

But it’s been fucking miserable, and I’m sure it’s been about as fun as stepping in dogshit to be around me. I keep telling myself it’s time to get help, but my insurance requires referrals to see shrinks and I just made an appointment with a new primary care physician in January. When’s he able to see me? July. So, it’s been all about trying to hold on until then. Who knows how 1 2 : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

fucking long it’ll take to see the psychiatrist I’m referred to, but I’ll bitch about that bridge when I get to it.

I think I’m approaching the other end of this thing, with somewhat minimal damage—that I know of—and I suppose that’s a bit of a relief.

Except that I’m almost 44 and I have to start all over again with meds and a therapist. My last therapist could only see me every eight or nine weeks, so half of my session would be “on the last episode of…” type shit. I gave it very little credence. And yet I’m willing to give it another go. Same with meds. I’ve been on like a dozen of them since ’01, the last time being in ’17. I also give that very little credence. And yet I’m willing to give it another go.

There’s always going to be those assholes who tell you to go outside, hunt elk, listen to Joe Rogan and don’t listen to a doctor. Or some “influencer” on Instagram who’ll tell you that you’re not eating enough cauliflower and that’s the cure for depression. Both are the types to use the same condom twice, so I’m not particularly interested in what they have to say. Moreover, they’re just trying to get you to believe in what they’re shilling so they get likes, follows and retweets.

Mental health has always been a problem in this country, and I have no doubt that it will continue to be. Do I trust the pharma companies? Not to cure me, no. The money’s never in the cure for fucking anything. But I also don’t think that means I—or you, the royal we, etc.—need to grit our teeth and run through it without exploring our options and asking for help. And it’s OK to try everything—even the fucking elk hunting—in the journey to get better. Because, as stupid as most shit in the world is, the stupidest thing is not acting to help ourselves.

Even if MDF would never book your (my) band. Try to take care of yourselves.

Under the Influence: Drinking Beer While Listening to Metal

N

ame a better pairing than

metal and beer—Decibel has a whole festival honoring the duo. Two things we love together. Simple, right? But scientists are gonna science. In 2016, Dr. Felipe Carvalho of Vrije Universiteit Brussel conducted an experiment in which participants tasted three different beers. For each, they were exposed to three different kinds of music and not told they were still drinking the same beer.

According to sites like Eater and VinePair, light, poppy, “Disney-style” tracks had people rating beers as sweeter-tasting. Deep, bassheavy music made beer seem more bitter.

Volume counted—the louder the music, the more negative the ratings.

The third factor observed, however, could explain why metalheads aren’t suddenly spitting out their favorites. Genre predilections impacted flavor perceptions. Someone “overwhelmed” by punk could find a beer overwhelming, too. So, despite how un-Disney metal is, you might still reach for and enjoy your regulars because you love what you’re listening to. To decide if that’s the case, or if maybe metal gets some of us craving, say, more crushable beers than others, we talked to some folks in the beer-meets-metal fold.

PHOTO BY SHANE GARDNER

Goatwhore drummer Zack Simmons:

“If we’re getting serious about living after midnight in a show environment, endurance is key. I’m going the High Life/Modelo/ Heineken route. I'll save the more adventurous beer for a night at home listening to tunes.”

Pig Destroyer keyboardist Blake Harrison:

“I love Guinness and it’s my go-to. I’ll have any lager or pilsner other than that, but I sometimes enjoy them less if I don’t get my Guinness… I like [those] beers in any situation.”

Jester King Brewery co-founder Jeffrey Stuffings: “If I’m at a show, I find

myself reaching for something easy-drinking and light. Austin is a great lager town, so typically there are good selections at local shows.

If I’m home and in a ponderous mood, I’ll listen to some stoner doom and drink something… not heavier per se, but more complex and thoughtful.”

TRVE Brewing Co. founder and CEO Nick Nunns: “When I’m at a show, I’m typi-

cally not looking to crush massively flavorful beer; it’s just not the right set and setting for those kinds of beers. Instead of the typical nuanced lagers or big IPAs I might drink at a bar or taproom, I’m more often just looking for some kind of light lager I can crush like a Coors Banquet. If I’m lucky enough to be at a venue where there’s a craft pils on tap, I’ll always support small and local and go for that.”

Beer writer and Queer Brewing founder Lily Waite: “I do think beer and heavy music

have a fascinating relationship, but whether I’m listening to blackened doom or folk, my choices tend to remain the same: I’m a fan of lower-ABV beers and lean more towards Belgian and German-influenced beers like pilsners, pale lagers and witbiers with some hoppy pales; and IPAs in there, too, though perhaps more occasionally.”

Crowbar and Down guitarist Kirk Windstein:

“Coors Light tastes great with any music!”

Mantar guitarist Hanno Klänhard:

“Coming from Germany, it is interesting to see how the rest of the world seems to make rocket science out of beers. We have it figured out for the last 1000+ years. The magic was and is: Don’t change a damn thing. Bottom line? ANY beer is better than NO beer when listening to metal.”

Advanced Cicerone and The Six Most Metal Breweries “Beer Slayer” Adam Zuniga:

“I love craft lagers for a show, or West Coast IPA listening to music at home. What's most important is the beer is clear like the sound quality, as well as the size of the serving vessel if you’re a DOOM fan. Seriously!

I’m drinking a 19.2 oz. can of Sierra Nevada Atomic Torpedo right now.”

The verdict: Metal’s not some magic go-to beer deterrent, but it’s common to favor lighter, less complex beers for crushing at shows and letting the music pull focus. Save those contemplative mixed-fermentation ales and get something you don’t mind spilling when you headbang.

D E C I B E L : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : 1 3

NIGHT DEMON

STUDIO REPORT

NIGHT DEMON

P

ALBUM TITLE

Outsider

rogress’ would be the best way to describe it,” says Jarvis Leatherby beginning of the band when STUDIO when asked to describe Night Demon’s new album. “Every band claims we quit our jobs to endlessly their latest album is their best. I’m proud of our existing catalog, but the be on tour,” says Leatherby. “It The Captain’s Quarters, Ventura, CA last thing we will ever do is repeat it. What we have brewing is definitely was during those uncertain, ENGINEER branching out from what you would expect, but it’s still very Night Demon.” but necessary times for us that Armand John Anthony Slated for early-2023 release, Outsider is certain to be the Los Angeles band’s most we were fortified in our DIY RECORDING DATES ambitious record yet. “It’s quite a departure in its experimentation, and not every ethic. Being homeless during song being at a breakneck pace,” says the singer/bassist. “It takes the listener on the lean years definitely softApril 2020, October 2021, quite a journey throughout.” ened the blow of the pandemic April 2022 A band that has built a reputation for scorching, catchy, NWOBHM-informed for us. Also, I feel that every LABEL heavy metal, Night Demon are seeking to do something a lot bigger than 2015’s Curse band, musician and business Century Media of the Damned and 2017’s Darkness Remains. “The entire album is a concept record from was dealing with the same RELEASE DATE start to finish,” Leatherby explains. “So, I honestly look at each track equally as it situation the last couple years, Early 2023 tells the story. Truth be told, I actually wrote a screenplay first, then adapted it to so we all had each other’s lyrics for this record. It’s always been a dream of mine to write and produce a film, backs. I’m very happy to be but the first step for me is always the band, so this comes naturally. We are planning an audio drama on the tail end of this thing, and very much looking forward to the future. More than anyof the script next, then hopefully a feature-length film to follow at some point.” thing, I think it taught us all what things really After spending two years of the pandemic doing a good job keeping busy and staying engaged matter in life.” —ADRIEN BEGRAND with fans, the band is eager to head back out on the road. “Our self-sufficiency goes back to the 1 4 : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

CAVERNLIGHT

C

avernlight [have] historically been about giving really negative feelings a place to exist outside of ourselves, and having a place to put them where they can live on their own and be their own thing.” ¶ Drummer, vocalist and lyricist Adam Bartlett—stylized as A // B—is referring to his work on Cavernlight’s second studio album. Dense and nihilistic, As I Cast Ruin Upon the Lens That Reveals My Every Flaw sees the Wisconsin-based outfit merge sludge, noise, drone and post-metal to suffocating impact. ¶ “This country is designed to keep lower middle-class people like us working and in debt and at the ends of our rope so that it’s difficult to improve,” Bartlett observes. “It’s difficult to get out. Even with all the advantages that people like Scott [Burns, stylized as S // B; guitar, vocals, electronics] and I had growing up relatively poor in the Midwest, it’s hard to get anywhere. It’s hard to do anything. That’s this existence that you have to choose between— 1 6 : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

killing yourself to get ahead or forever struggling, trying to be more in touch with the things you’re passionate about.”

The subject matter strongly befits the downtrodden and autobiographical band, which is increasingly defined by noise. That’s courtesy of Burns, who spent a long period after recording was complete diving deeper into electronics as the pandemic raged.

“There’s a company called Spitfire Audio, and one of the lead guys at the company started a project called Pianobook where people from around the world are sampling different pianos and sharing those with one another,” Burns reveals. “I really wanted to take advantage of that and get more sounds. I played violin on the album. I have no clue how to play violin, but [I ran it] through some distortion and delay … I also

played my grandfather’s accordion on the last track of the album. I just wanted to be able to feature that somewhere where I thought was meaningful and purposeful.”

The album was further delayed by “interpersonal issues,” leaving the future of Cavernlight (a band that “never intended to tour a bunch or have a bunch of records out or have a super active social media”) somewhat unknown.

“I actually did leave the band about a year and a half ago,” explains Bartlett. “We’ve known each other since we were 16 years old.

We’ve worked together on a bunch of stuff: at jobs, in the band and other things. Our personalities conflict… it’s not worth it for either of us to be in a working relationship with each other. It just ends up having a negative impact on our personal friendship.” —SARAH KITTERINGHAM

PHOTO BY SCOTT BURNS

CAVERNLIGHT

Wisconsin doom crew turns its weakness into strengths

MUTILATRED

MUTILATRED

Ohio morticians slather old-school death with fresh blood

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the cusp of 2014, vocalist/guitarist Patrick McDonagh and drummer Clay Lowe drove back to Ohio after playing a Christmas jazz show in Ann Arbor, MI. That sounds like the start of a holiday Hallmark film, not the genesis of a death metal band. But during that ride, the two friends bemoaned the difficulties of finding reliable collaborators. ¶ “Pat and I have played music together [since 2006], but there were always member issues,” Lowe confirms. “People not making time to jam. Hard drugs and crazy shit. We were in all these bands and barely jamming, so we said let’s start Mutilatred and we can play anytime we want, the two of us.” ¶ While they can still play as a duo in a pinch, Mutilatred have since recruited some of the top extreme metal talent in Ohio. Drew Arnold of Sanguisugabogg joined on guitar, while Eli Fakes of Meka assumed bass duties. Seven years after their debut, the Toledo-based casket-crushers have now unearthed their sophomore LP from Redefining Darkness Records.

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Determined to Rot is a viciously heavy and chaotic successor to 2015’s Dissecting Your Future. Like their debut, the album is infected with harrowing ambient noise— inspired by their original guitar player Patrick Meyers and his Premonitions of War project.

They’re powered by the same chainsaw motor as Mortician, minus the grindhouse horror.

Instead of Video Nasty gore, Mutilatred’s lyrical focus is on a different type of anguish.

“A lot of bands talk about evil stuff and government corruption,” McDonagh considers. “We decided to write about the horrible struggle of people we know with hard drugs and how heroin specifically has ruined lives. It’s such a nasty topic, and that’s what we have always focused on.

The artwork might not directly depict that, but it’s supposed to capture the feeling.”

McDonagh uses master paintings from the Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical movements as reference materials. He employs traditional methods to prepare the canvas for his oil paintings, then drenches the piece in his own style of dread. To further embody their collaborative bond, McDonagh asked Lowe to paint a few splatters of blood on Determined to Rot’s cover. That’s Mutilatred in a microcosm: a core of friendship, and a fresh coat of blood on old-school death. And there’s even more on the way for a band that writes faster than their discography implies.

“We’re playing with Mortician soon—no pressure, right?” McDonagh quips. “I’ve been listening to [Mortician] since the ’90s when the internet was super fucking slow and it would take a couple hours to download that shit. We’re going to write multiple new songs for that occasion, because that show is such an honor for us.” —SEAN FRASIER

MIZMOR AND THOU

MIZMOR AND THOU

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izmor and thou’s collaborative set was a surprise addition to Roadburn 2022, and Myopia was equally wellreceived in the public sphere. Crafted in secrecy over six months (and many trips from Portland to New Orleans), Mizmor and Thou’s joint effort (heretofore and popularly known as “Thizmor”) paired a prolific band with a secretive solo artist. Featuring atmospheric black metal as a backdrop for both bands’ equally oppressive doomed sounds, Myopia brought together two formidable artists. ¶ “[The press process] is very boring and uninteresting for me,” Thou frontman Bryan Funck explains concerning the album’s secretive nature. “If we can [release the album] at Roadburn, that’s the way to do it. This is our grand announcement: Just show up and do it. And let’s try to have records at the fest, too. A lot had to come together to make this happen. ¶ “Thou had been talking about doing a black metal band for years, since at least 2008 or something, and we just never really got around to it,” Funck continues, 2 0 : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

explaining the album’s range of influence. “We’ll talk about doing a record in a certain way, and then something comes up and it goes in a different direction. We never got around to it. At some point during COVID, I had approached Liam [Neighbors] about doing something.

Send stuff back and forth and demo it and bring it to the band as a possible thing to do. At that point, I envisioned it as this very raw black metal thing, but it sort of snowballed into this other thing. “[The black metal] element came very easily for us actually, because, from the outset, one of Thou’s goals was to write a more black metal record. We both leaned into that part of the record together. I think Mizmor was a good choice as an artist to collaborate with, if that’s your goal. It’s, of course, still all rooted in doom, funeral doom, sludge and

pretty clean parts, which are all common sounds in our respective projects, but having the goal of a despondent, black metal-forward album was a helpful and natural blueprint. It was refreshing for me too because my last couple releases have been all doom and/or ambient.”

“Collaborating with a full band was amazing,” adds Mizmor’s Liam “A.L.N.” Neighbors. “I hadn’t played live music in a room with others in close to two years, so getting into their space and hearing one of the heaviest bands ever play songs I wrote with me was so powerful and fun. To hear my ideas played by one of my favorite bands with their oppressively heavy tone was surreal. Spending time with them and playing music together was a very life-giving experience for me.” —JON ROSENTHAL

PHOTO BY TEDDIE TAYLOR

Doom dealers get some-more-black on covert collaboration

UFOMAMMUT

Space doom lords continue to spread their wings

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ateline 2020: As the globe grinds to a halt, the boot of the Roman Empire catches COVID first. Italian psychmetal mothership Ufomammut: grounded. ¶ “We had no idea what to do,” emails bandleader Poia Malleus. “Suddenly we were in this totally new, unreal, scary situation. We weren’t ready for the quick and increasing cases of people with severe symptoms and deaths.” ¶ “A terrible time,” affirms coboss and bassist Giovanni Rossi (a.k.a. Urlo). “Day after day the virus [spread] and, in no time at all, we entered lockdown.

Just before this happened, after a long hiatus, we asked Levre to be our new drummer, then had to wait months before we could see each other.” ¶ “As Urlo and Poia said, those times were a very breaking point for us all as human beings, and as musicians, too,” writes said stickman, Alessandro Levrero.

“I lost my job as a sound engineer, and in this new reality we started working as a band, trying to have perseverance and regularity without being able to program almost anything, 2 2 : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

both in terms of rehearsals and composing new tracks. Step by step we succeeded, and Fenice is the result of this long and tortuous journey.”

“Phoenix” in Italian, Ufomammut’s 10th studio LP divides an albumlength track into six cuts. Initially tolling an industrial transmission from deep space, “Duat” ignites Fenice like a quasar, the 10-minute opener clattering to life the sound of musicians all in one room together jamming astral ascension.

Business as usual, more or less.

And yet, the Neurot recording pulses more inner space than previously. Centerpieces “Psychostasia” and “Metamorphoenix” lope from alien landscape ambiance (courtesy of “sound lord” Andrea “Ciccio” Aimone) to throbbing doom, the latter bleeding a prickly noir straight out of Mother Love Bone. Equally seven minutes, “Pyramid” towers like Giza, then “Empyros” burns pure, clean, dirty Ufomammut.

“Fenice represents rebirth from the ashes, the infinite life, the return from the dead,” ventures Urlo. “It is such an important record for us, because we have gone through so many bad moments, as a band and as people, and we have tried to heal our wounds with music, the magical essence that has always kept us alive.”

“It’s a real milestone for us,” agrees Poia, “being the first work with Levre after more than 20 years with Vita [Gianni Vitarelli], composed and played in a different world and with a different perspective.”

“We have made an album that sounds similar to the old Ufomammut albums, but I feel a change in compositional point of view that differs from the past,” concludes Levre. “The situation of this last period—and particularly the last two years—has given us a new and different vision.”

—RAOUL HERNANDEZ

PHOTO BY FRANCESCA DE FRANCESCHI MANZONI

UFOMAMMUT

KNOLL

For young Nashville DIY grinders, life is theirs, they live it their way

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he first couple tours for young bands usually means stupid mistakes, unnecessary risks and a complete abdication of responsibility. Nashville’s Knoll bring a microwave. ¶ “We don’t get fast food, like, at all,” says vocalist/power electronicist James Eubanks. “We have a portable gas grill we bust out on the side of the road. We microwave stuff at venues. We eat really healthy.” ¶ That’s not just shocking for a band whose median age is 20; this kind of forethought is way beyond your average deathgrinders. But as their sophomore LP, Metempiric, is set to drop, this Nashville sextet is far from average. ¶ “Most of us were still in high school,” Eubanks says about the beginning of COVID. “When the pandemic hit, we had never toured because we were kids. So, when the expectation of shows dropped, we had more time to focus on our music.” ¶ That resulted in the band’s incredible selfreleased debut, Interstice, a tormented and intricate album of 2 4 : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

blasts, bizarre riffs, sludge and repulsive noise. That was followed by the band’s first two tours, and then a trip back to the studio to keep building on their sound.

“We were already writing the second record when the first one came out,” Eubanks explains. “But being out touring and seeing how the songs affected people definitely had me growing an appreciation for certain aspects of our music and made me want to show those off more. It was super inspiring, and coming home we were in the zone.

It made me want to write something even more extreme.”

And that’s what the band has done, sharpening its skills to create an absolute monster and AOTY contender that many labels would be thrilled to put out. But once again, Knoll are going DIY. “For the first album, I’d saved a bunch of money from teaching

swim lessons,” Eubanks says, which you probably didn’t see coming. “I decided to put it into the band and press a shit-ton of records. And, thankfully, we recouped that and reinvested it into the next one. We had so much fun we just said fuck it and pressed twice the amount of records this time. I don’t have anything against labels. It’s just being able to ship out your shirts and records and talk directly to the people buying them is something I don’t really want to give up.”

All in all, Eubanks and the rest of Knoll are stoked. They are stoked to tour, they are stoked to write music, and they are stoked to put out records as exciting and intense as Metempiric. And time is on their side.

“This is a lifer situation,” Eubanks concludes. “None of us really care about doing anything else.” —SHANE MEHLING

PHOTO BY JAKE MURNANE

KNOLL

SPIRAL SKIES

SPIRAL SKIES Swedish psych doomsters write about what they know—death

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hen we saw where all the songs were going when we went to the studio, and we saw the lyrics, [we realized] there’s just darkness and death. Everywhere. So, we said, ‘Can we do something about it? No, we can’t.’

That’s where we find inspiration.” ¶ Vocalist Frida Eurenius of Swedish occult doom rock outfit Spiral Skies does not offer any flowery or grand explanations about the band she joined in 2014. Channeling the opulent and mystical dance-inducing style of Uriah Heep and Blood Ceremony, Spiral Skies just released the follow-up to their dramatic and opulent debut, Blues for a Dying Planet (2018), via Art of Propaganda Records. Written, rehearsed and recorded in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, while multiple members of the band became parents (and a founding member departed), Death Is but a Door demonstrates a sadder, slightly slower version of the grandiose outfit.

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“A lot of the songs were already written when I joined,” explains Eurenius, who took on a more prevalent writing role for Death Is but a Door. “So, I think it was kind of natural for me to step in, because Daniel [Bäckman, drummer] is such a good writer, but he takes a lot of time doing stuff. I just started to write my own melodies and the harmonies. Since we had written it all together this album, it felt more natural for me.”

In addition to Eurenius and Bäckman, Spiral Skies are rounded out by guitarist, organist, pianist and didgeridoo player Dan Svanljung, bassist Eric Sandberg and new guitarist Sonny Blom.

Svanljung’s unique instrumental flourishes are found in unexpected and enhancing ways—just take the

ending of album highlight “Nattmaran” to hear the faint droning of the indigenous Australian wood instrument.

Eurenius continues: “I listen to a lot of black metal and folk metal, and I’m seeing a lot of those kinds of bands. So, I think when we start to write together, I think I just pull it in this little more depressive way…

When we rehearsed last week, [Sandberg] said, ‘Why can’t we make a happy album next time?’”

Eurenius laughs at the absurdity of the thought.

“I was like, ‘What is the happy album?’ I think we have a lot of happy songs on this album. I get your point that maybe it does seem a bit darker, but [it] has also been quite tough for us these last couple of years.” —SARAH KITTERINGHAM

COME TO GRIEF

COME TO GRIEF Sludge masters kick things up a notch as the apocalypse nears

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totally snap if it wasn’t for playing music.” ¶ This is our man Terry Savastano talking. You may know him from Hall of Fame-inducted sludge legends Grief, but these days he’s laying down sludge of an equally miserable measure in Come to Grief, and the band is about as happy as a bunch of guys who play miserable sludge can be with their debut full-length, When the World Dies. ¶ The record makes this sludge lifer happy as well, even if, as I explain to the guitarist, I was taken aback by the slick cover art; the massive (and raging, and awesome) Kurt Ballou production (“We’re totally blown away by the results,” enthuses Savastano); guest vocals from Converge’s Jacob Bannon on two tracks (“He definitely added a lot of emotion and anguish to the songs,” offers Savastano); and the fact that this LP is on Translation Loss, a slightly larger label. Yeah, none of this seems to fit with the Come to Grief aesthetic, but it all ultimately makes sense.

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“I certainly think we’re going in a slightly different direction instead of it being just purely all sludge or all doom,” Savastano posits. “We’re older guys. We listen to all kinds of music. We feel we can branch out slightly, but still stay close to where we come from.

We want to be good. We want to be professional and be taken seriously. This is no joke. We’ve each sacrificed so much for this band.

We want the best producer and the best sound quality and cover art we can get. I’m gonna be 53 this year.

Been at it for decades. I’ve fucked off enough in life; I want nothing but the best and to succeed doing something I/we love.”

Indeed, the songs on When the World Dies feel complete, cohesive and accomplished, rather than just a bunch of killer sludge riffs thrown together. “We worked so incredibly hard on this record,

particularly the songwriting, atmosphere and dynamics,” confirms Savastano. “We spent a lot of time rehearsing and working out small details; that’s the one positive thing COVID did for us: We couldn’t tour, so we stayed home and perfected our music and our approach.”

Not to mention perfected the misery, to the point where maybe— just maybe—Come to Grief are using their music to find a way out of it. After all, the incredible ending riff on “Bludgeon the Soul / Returning to the Void” is almost triumphant-sounding.

“You would like to think that descending back into the black void after a lifetime of pain would be tranquil and a huge relief,” offers Savastano, “but what if it was worse and more horrific than the life you just left? You hope you are triumphant, but will we ever know?” —GREG PRATT

EVERGREY

EVERGREY

Nothing is permanent, except these Swedish prog metal heroes’ continued rule

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wedish dark progressive metallers Evergrey eclipse the 25-year mark with their 13th album, A Heartless Portrait: The Orphean Testament, their first for Napalm Records. The group’s new long-player comes hot on the heels of last year’s celebrated Escape of the Phoenix. When asked what keeps frontman/songwriter Tom S. Englund going, he says plainly, “I think it comes down to feeling alive. We’re not getting any younger. We’re closer to death now. So, I’m afraid of not being able to write what I’ve always wanted to write. It drives me to create and write better songs. I love it now just as much as I did when I was 21.” ¶ Englund’s passion for not only Evergrey, but also his other music projects (Silent Skies and Redemption) is evident. Since entering metaldom with The Dark Discovery in 1998, he’s positioned Evergrey as a “like it or not” prospect. Indeed, the Swedes didn’t always land squarely with kids fist-pumping for HammerFall or dreaming of Neverland with Nightwish. The Gothenburgers were too dark, often moody, and always heavier than the pre/post-millennium brightness rising to the top.

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A Heartless Portrait preserves Evergrey’s tradition of shadowy, from-the-heart metal. Now they have a near-zealous audience in tow.

“Inevitably, it’s a continuation [of Escape],” says Englund. “The day after Escape came out, we sat down, had a meeting and discussed not being able to tour [due to the pandemic] for at least a year, or maybe two. We went back to our writing dens, inspired by what we had just created. Writing A Heartless Portrait was so easy. We all contributed to the songwriting. I think, in total, we had like 50 new ideas. I’ll say [this]: There’s still a lot of music left in us.”

Moored by a trio of powerful singles—“Save Us,” “Midwinter Calls” and “Blindfolded”—Evergrey’s newest tackles topics that are obviously personal to Englund. “Ominous,” for example, deals with the bullies of our man’s youth, and how he’s gone from a position of desperation to one of strength. The state of the

world is speared in “Midwinter Calls.” A Heartless Portrait’s lead single, “Save Us,” deals with humanity’s evitable and fast-approaching decline. Of course, all of Evergrey’s albums have been red letter days for Englund, but this one, in particular, is conspicuously pointed to an observed downward spiral.

“This album is—even more than Escape—more about me feeling more and more outside of this world,” Englund says. “Escape had ‘Forever Outsider,’ so that’s telling. My position with the world is that I’m distancing myself more and more from it. I find the world to be more relentless, ruthless and evil. That’s not something I want to take part in. I got proof when we released the song ‘Save Us,’ and Russia invaded Ukraine. I don’t understand how the EU and NATO have allowed Russia to do what they’re doing in Ukraine.

We’re watching a big guy bully the small guy—we just let it all happen.

Blood is on our hands.” —CHRIS DICK

ARTIFICIAL BRAIN

ARTIFICIAL BRAIN The end of an era arrives for tech wizards, but they’re far from considered dead

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hether death metal luminaries Artificial Brain are warping minds with insane discordant musicality or melding atypical melody lines in counterpoint (or wielding both in unison), there’s always a sense of cohesion and purpose to the chops on display. This focus continues to the final part of a trilogy that began with 2014’s Labyrinth Constellation and ends with an eponymously titled LP, as these supremo musicians always keep the songs (and album in general) central rather than using their position as a masturbatory showcase for musical prowess—something that can sadly still exist in contemporary death metal. ¶ “Yeah, we’re not at all interested in writing or playing anything ‘impressive’ in that sense,” confirms bassist Samuel Smith (also of Aeviterne, Luminous Vault and Fawn Limbs). “If any of our music is physically demanding or technically difficult, it’s only because we’re trying to create certain musical effects that require that. Our primary concerns are the harmonic and melodic integrity of the songs, and prioritizing these elements of the music makes it easy to not get caught in tech-traps.”

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Artificial Brain is the last record from these New York brain-manglers to feature vocalist Will Smith. Unlike recent controversies surrounding his namesake, we can only assume that no limp-wristed slaps were involved in this split, with the band instead confirming the dreaded “personal differences” as the reason.

The band’s nimble-fingered lowender of the same surname is eager to confirm, however, that this sci-fiindebted DM entity will mutate onwards: “We are currently working on new music, and we’re eager to explore the different possibilities of what Artificial Brain might become.

The idea of continuing to make the same kinds of records over and over again has never interested us, and we feel that this [self-titled] LP is a really good representation of what we’ve been trying to achieve. So, it’s time to try something new.”

Before that, Smith believes his band’s trilogy-closer—which features guest appearances by peers Colin Marston and Paulo Paguntalan, and legendary DM figureheads/

direct influences Mike Browning and Luc Lemay—stands as “a culmination of some of the sounds and musical ideas we’ve been working with for the first decade of our career.” And it’s hard to disagree with that summation, as Artificial Brain are in peak control of their identity here—musically, thematically and aesthetically (thanks to Adam Burke’s artwork, inspired, in part, by a scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, showing “a military tank that’s grown into a verdant landscape in this mysterious and long-neglected ‘zone,’ the site of some unknown occurrence which has disrupted the laws of nature”).

“What I think distinguishes us from other bands in this growing subgenre is that we’ve tried to cultivate a melodic sense that is often consonant, melancholic, even pretty,” offers Smith. “The use of dissonance is often to complicate, deepen or trouble these moments.

Or, as Dan [Garguilo, guitars] sometimes likes to say, we’re just trying to be ‘fast and sad.’” —DEAN BROWN

JORD

WINDOWS of OPPORTUNITY When life gives

HAUNT mastermind Trevor Church lemons, he makes metal story by JEFF TREPPEL

revor Church’s enthusiasm makes him an easy interview. In fact, over

the course of our hour-long conversation (more monologue, really), I don’t believe I asked a single question. He just naturally covered everything from post-pandemic touring and fostering a New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal community to fatherhood, the D.I.Y. grind and his fantastic new album as Haunt, Windows of Your Heart. ¶ Part of his excitement stems from the fact that, after two long years (half his band’s existence!), he’s back on the road with a hand-picked roster of some of the best New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal upstarts out there: Screamer, Traveler and Saber. “This is the first tour since 2019, and I also have a new live band,” Church tells us. “COVID really fucked me as far as my band situation. People had a change of plans. So, this is kind of the first real tour, and it feels good to be out here playing music, seeing venues again and trying to get a groove back. I’m sure you know that, after sitting around for two years not doing your typical thing, you all of a sudden get to get back to what you were doing and you’re like, ‘Wow, I didn’t even know I missed it.’”

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Not that he was just sitting around doing nothing. Besides spending time with his son, Church released two new full-lengths and an unplugged album during quarantine. He also found an unexpected way to connect with his fans: Facebook.

“This dude in the Czech Republic made a Facebook fan club page and he asked me, ‘If I start this and do all the moderation and stuff, would you interact on there?’” Church explains. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, absolutely!’ And I have like 1,500 people on there now. And it’s crazy! I did not know that that kind of thing would happen. It’s really cool because it’s not just Haunt shit. I’ve become friends with a lot of them. It’s crazy because Facebook fucking sucks. But out of nowhere during this COVID shit, I got so much closer to my fans and I didn’t even know it was a possibility.”

The metal community comes up as a constant theme across our conversation. Church laments the lack of a tight-knit New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal scene similar to the ’80s Bay Area thrash scene, but sees himself as an ambassador of the style. He considers 2018’s Burst Into Flame one of the cornerstones of the genre (and he’s not wrong) and wants to use whatever success he’s achieved to convince promoters that booking NWOTHM acts will bring bodies through the doors. To Church, it helps that Haunt aren’t a typical heavy metal band.

“Jarvis [Leatherby, Night Demon singer/ bassist] was like, ‘Haunt is an interesting band because you got heavy metal on one hill and you got heavy, hard rock on the other, and Haunt kind of sits on a hill by itself. You kind of have your own little thing that you do where nobody really sounds like you, but it’s familiar enough for people to relate to.’ My other friend, Francis Roberts [Old Man Wizard], once told me, ‘My friends that don’t like heavy metal, I show them Haunt. Here’s heavy metal that you can like that’s not like too heavy; it’s just like borderline.’”

And that’s all very much according to plan.

The son of Montrose bassist Bill “Electric” Church, Trevor grew up in a very classic rock frame of mind. He believes in eight-song albums, pop melodies, catchy choruses and consistent quality. Even though every song is its own beast, he doesn’t believe in throwing curveballs at the audience. His philosophy is, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” According to him, each of the

20 records he plans to record over Haunt’s lifespan will have the thrashing anthems, “the disco beat/Ozzy stuff,” the NWOBHM gallop. The main element that he feels makes the music distinctly his own are the lyrics. They avoid heavy metal clichés and come from a very personal place.

“I had written a song called ‘Father Time,’ and that is very easy to pinpoint what it’s about,” Church says. “You can never run from fuckin’ Time. Time is always going to catch up to you, and you’re just racing the clock, and you’re never going to get ahead. Probably a lot of it is just what was going on during COVID. I had a lot of stuff go down—fucking audited by the IRS, had my identity stolen. Like, holy shit, when it rains it fucking pours. You think you’re ahead, but it catches up with you.”

Thanks to his D.I.Y. mentality (Church runs his own label and puts everything out himself, primarily through Bandcamp), he’s been able to make the most of his time and do what he wants.

Still, that comes with its cost as well, as chronicled in the title track of Windows of Your Heart.

“I wrote the song ‘Windows of Your Heart’ for my son,” Church says. “Right when he was born, I had to go to Europe. And then three months later, I was back in Europe again. I was trying to build this band, keeping the family traditions alive. My dad’s a fantastic musician, had a career as a musician, and it’s been my lifelong dream just to play music and do what I do. And by doing what I do, I’ve been able to say it’s my job.”

FACEBOOK FUCKING SUCKS. But out of nowhere during this COVID shit, I got so much closer to my fans and I didn’t even know it was a possibility.

TREVOR CHURCH

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The future of symphonic death dealers

SEPTICFLESH is anything but primitive story by C H R I S D I C K photo by S T E L L A M O U Z I

FOR

new album Modern Primitive, it stands to reason that

Septicflesh would’ve taken note of the methodologies employed by the Symphonic Experience Orchestra when they backed the Greek symphonic death metallers for their groundbreaking Infernus Sinfonica MMXIX performance in 2019. Over 100 classically trained musicians buttressed the Athens-based outfit as they blew the top off Mexico City’s Metropolitan Theater with “The Vampire From Nazareth,” “Anubis,” “Pyramid God” and “Portrait of a Headless Man.” Turns out guitarist/songwriter Christos Antoniou already holds compositional fort with his master’s degree in Concert Music from the London College of Music. ¶ “We’ve always known how we’ve wanted to sound,” says Antoniou, who shares songwriting responsibilities with his brother Seth Siro Anton and longtime collaborator Sotiris Vayenas. “We learned a lot from performing with the orchestra, but they weren’t involved in the making of Modern Primitive.

We’ve been fans of movie scores and soundtracks for a long time. You can hear composers like [Hans] Zimmer [Elliot] Goldenthal and [Basil] Poledouris in our music.

There’s also a lot of classical music—like [Igor] Stravinsky—in our sound. In Septicflesh, I try to make all that not-so-obvious. I want my own fingerprints on our music. Modern Primitive balances the orchestra—my child, so to speak—with metal.”

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Antoniou’s right about balance on Modern Primitive, Septicflesh’s 11th full-length since debut Mystic Places of Dawn stunned the underground 28 years ago. Unlike predecessors Codex Omega (2017) and Titan (2014), Septicflesh’s new album benefits from the quarrels of age. To wit, the three songwriters—plus drummer Kerim “Krimh” Lechner and Dinos “Psychon” Prassas—have historically drawn battle lines over the prominence of the orchestra and the dominance of metal in the group’s sonic milieu. With Modern Primitive, all the arguments, discussions and ruminations finally coalesced into a stately beast.

“We share some of the same music taste,” Antoniou continues. “We like to create a filmic atmosphere, but the challenge is how we do that.

Now that we have Dino—an excellent songwriter and sound engineer—with us officially, there’s one more person in the mix. So, our band symbiosis is not always easy. Even with brothers, there are always problems. Seth and I have thousands

of arguments, but we’re brothers. We eventually Jens Bogren (who worked from his Fascination get along and see each other. We know our limits. Street Studios) off a proverbial cliff.

“He had to deal with our battle of frequenThe tension and understanding between artists cies,” Antoniou laughs. “We wanted to expand [in the band] creates the Septicflesh sound.”

The conceptual center on Modern Primitive isn’t on our Middle Eastern sound. So, we had female too far from the title itself. No matter how much vocals and the mandolin-like guitar sound to highlight that element. Then, we had the chilmankind progresses, there’s a destructive trait dren’s choir, an orchestra—which we recorded buried deep down. Songs like “Coming Storm,” in Prague—and, of course, our own instruments “Self-Eater,” “Psychohistory” and “A Dreadful as part of the sound picture. By now, Jens obviMuse” detail a world in peril, brought on by ously knows exactly those who see order what we want, but he as failure and chaos had headaches trying as destiny. The cover to blend it together. art—again by the There’s a lot of colors able-handed Seth Siro and heaviness to conAnton—shows the sider. We are, after all, problem profoundly. a metal band, so it had The profile of a human to be heavy, but also head with perverse not. It was madness.” mutations isn’t superComparing Modern ficial, as it is a zoomPrimitive to its foreout of our very fiber, bears—starting lustful for pandemowith Communion—is nium and needful for relatively easy. The its continuance. same constituent “We have thousands parts that comprise of years of evolution,” Septicflesh’s whole are posits Antoniou. “Yet, in place and at play. we carry a strong primYet, it’s how they’re itive and destructive employed this time element deep inside. around that differs.

It can’t be tamed.

Singles “Hierophant,” It won’t be tamed.

“Neuromancer” and “A This element may Desert Throne” offer be our downfall. widely divergent expeSure, humans can riences. “Hierophant,” create miracles, with its striking oldbut we’re also world video, is like a capable of destroybig cinematic opening. ing ourselves. You can CH R I S TOS A N TON IOU On the other hand, see this today. The “Neuromancer” is reaction to the pandefiantly economical, demic shows us this.

The current state of war in Europe also shows us conceptually owing more to Black Sabbath than Emerson, Lake & Palmer. “A Desert Throne” is this. We can’t really imagine these things, but the riskiest of the lot, its syncopated burl and we’re near total destruction. The world is crazy. triumphant bursts hitting like the weight of the The title says it all. We’re modern primitives.”

Achaemenid Empire coming to bear.

Sonically, Septicflesh had more time to dial “As artists, the most important thing we can in what they wanted with Modern Primitive. For do is not repeat ourselves,” stresses Antoniou. “We Antoniou, working with Petr Pycha and the have to evolve, develop, seek and search. The path FILMharmonic Orchestra of Prague was a noforward is to move on from the previous album. brainer. He’s embedded Septicflesh with the We have a big discography, so, understandably, we renowned orchestra since Communion (2008). aren’t going to stray too far from what we’ve been However, the songmaster didn’t plan on having doing. We’re not going to play jazz, for example. the children’s choir—dubbed the Libro Coro— We can’t change radically to create something participate. The choir gave color and innocence new. We’re following our trademark, but we also to the metallic and symphonic cacophony. In want to have albums that have an identity. Modern fact, the group had so many production layers Primitive has an identity. It’s not Codex Omega II.” that they nearly drove co-producer/studio ace

We have thousands of years of evolution.

Yet, we carry a strong primitive and destructive element deep inside.

It can’t be tamed.

It won’t be tamed.

THIS ELEMENT MAY BE OUR DOWNFALL.

DD EE CC I BI B EE L L: :A JPURLY IL 2022 1 : 37

STORY BY

KEVIN STEWART-PANKO PHOTO BY

RYAN PHILLIPS

Deathgrind heroes

MiSERY INDeX

are willing to play the modern promotional game, but that doesn’t mean they like it

SO,

you want to be in a band, eh? A long time ago (1975) in a galaxy

far, far away (Australia), a bunch of scraggly, malnourished fellas with shitty dental plans used three chords and a set of bagpipes to convey that it is indeed a long way to the top if you want to rock ‘n’ roll. And AC/DC didn’t have to contend with everything that comes with the internet, constantly shifting business models, and the entitlement of access that newer generations of music fans feel is their birthright because mom sewed that band’s patch on their battle jacket. These days, for artists to keep the machine rolling in their favor, there’s a lot more expected than just the ability to make pleasing noises. ¶ Misery Index bassist/co-vocalist Jason Netherton remembers the days when his PR responsibilities in support of an album were limited to a handful of interviews preceding multiple touring runs that often totaled over 200 shows a year. Heck, in his pre-Misery Index days as a founding member of Dying Fetus in 1991, Netherton recalls when “doing press” was mostly handwritten interviews via snail mail and the occasional phoner. Today, even though Misery Index have dramatically scaled back on touring—“This is a part-time thing that we still love doing because we feel we have a contribution to make and a passion for it”— the time spent promoting and making people aware of all their doings and transpirings consumes as much time as six months on the road. Or at least it feels that way.

38 : J AU P LY R I L2 0 22 0 2 1: :DD EE CC I BI B EE LL

“It’s not ideal,” he laughs via Zoom from the Helsinki record store he runs, “but we do what we have to do to make it work. What’s demanded of the artist in this day and age is much more.

There’s this whole other pallet of duties and expectations that are part of the process of promoting and supporting your record. For example, last September we managed to carve out a weekend where we all convened in St. Louis, filmed two videos, did promo photos for the new album and kind of practiced.”

Having recently made the move to Century Media for Complete Control, their seventh and latest full-length, the band has seen an uptick in their non-musical duties. These newfound responsibilities get heaped onto the fact that, for a solid decade, MI’s personnel has been spread out across the East Coast (guitarist Darin Morris and drummer Adam Jarvis), the Midwest (guitarist/co-vocalist Mark Kloeppel) and, in the case of Netherton himself, the Finnish capital for the last six years, and four years before that in southwestern Ontario’s snow belt region.

If anything,

I THINK COVID HELPED AcCELERATE THINGS. This album is coming three years after the last one, which is the fastest we’ve gotten an album out

SINCE 2010.

JASON NETHERTON

“We’ve had to do a lot of these promo clips for different platforms—Spotify, for placement on Facebook streaming, blurbs for this and that,” Netherton continues. “Basically, the way our deal with Century Media works is that they have a lean model where a lot of the marketing and promotional stuff is outsourced and the label is just the people who organize it all.

It’s like the traditional A&R person is also now organizing relations between the artists and other intermediaries. Because of that, the artist takes on more of a burden to get out there and promote. There’s a generational expectation that there’s going to be a more intimate relationship and more connectivity with the artist, so you have to fulfill these kinds of roles that were previously off-limits in the old models.

Whatever the case, it would be a lot easier if we were all in the same place.”

Despite all the roadblocks and time constraints placed on this quartet of gentlemen who now have businesses, families, mortgages, other bands and grown-up responsibilities to tend to, Misery Index have clung to their lifer status in the delivery of Complete Control.

The simple act of getting together may have been thrown into disarray by COVID-19—“I couldn’t even leave Finland for that first year,” Netherton sighs, “and then getting a flight was hard because every airline, country and state

had different regulations”—but the result is the band at their fiery best.

“One thing about us is that we all contribute, so there’s no one songwriter carrying everything,” the bassist explains. “Every album is good for Mark to have four or five songs, me to have three and Darin to have two or three, and at this stage we’re set with a Misery Index sound. What we’re writing now is a continued refinement of this path we set ourselves on in the 2000s: to be a death metal band that takes liberal influence from hardcore, grindcore and punk. Our sound is well-established and we’re always pushing ourselves in little bits here and there to incorporate new ideas and build on them.

“If anything, I think COVID helped accelerate things. This album is coming three years after the last one, which is the fastest we’ve gotten an album out since 2010. We’ve been apart, writing and recording separately for 12 years now; this is the third album we’ve done that way, and when the pandemic happened, we just went back into that mode. Under normal circumstances, we would see each other every few months, whether it was to rehearse before a tour or if I was back in Maryland visiting family or whatever. When we finally did meet up, we just jumped right into it and made a record that is very much a Misery Index record.”

DD EE CC I BI B EE L L: :A JPURLY IL 2022 1 : 39

interview by

QA j. bennett

WIT H

Mike Bishop, the man behind GWAR’s Blothar the Berserker, holds forth on bobbleheads, graphic novels and the band’s new album

4 0 : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

I

always say, ‘Never waste a good pandemic.’” Wise words from Blothar

the Berserker, vocalist and bassist for GWAR. Clearly, he and his hideous posse of intergalactic metal fiends took this advice to their blackened, crack-addled hearts. In the two years of plague downtime, the band managed to co-create a GWAR graphic novel, become the subjects of a GWAR documentary and shove their grubby claws into the NFT business. Oh, and they wrote and recorded a new album. It’s called The New Dark Ages, and not only does it tie in with the aforementioned graphic novel—GWAR in the Duoverse of Absurdity—there’s also a deluxe version that comes with a Blothar bobblehead. It’s hard to see how GWAR’s dearly departed leader, Oderus Urungus (R.I.P), wouldn’t be cackling with glee. With all that swirling around our feeble lizard brain, we spoke with the artist occasionally known as Mike Bishop about all things GWAR. How are things at GWAR HQ?

Things are good. It’s a busy time, coming out of COVID. Everyone’s working and doing what they have to do. We have this little spring run that’s coming up, but we’re really gearing up for building a new show around the album. It’s sort of that time when GWAR exists like no other band.

It’s not just rehearsing for tour—it’s coming up with the stage show, the choreography, and all the props and costumes. It’s go time.

Years ago, I had the pleasure of visiting the GWAR workshop in Richmond and hanging out with Oderus and a couple of the other members.

I saw firsthand how much more work you guys do than your average band.

Yeah, definitely. GWAR is not an easy gig.

Don’t you ever wish you could just go out there in jeans and do the show?

[Laughs] Well, of course! But then again, that would be boring. And we don’t wanna be boring.

How has GWAR weathered the pandemic?

We got to spend some time apart, which is exactly what we needed. I mean, let’s face it: GWAR is not the most pleasant bunch to be around. We’re all murderous aliens. But we used the time to work on the business of the band and to develop some alternative income streams and other things we needed to survive. Like a lot of bands, we were trying to make it through without doing live shows. And now, when live shows are picking back up, we have all that world-domination infrastructure that we developed in that time. It actually turned out to be a good thing.

Speaking of alternative income streams, GWAR are now in the NFT business. What’s your take on that phenomenon?

Well, I like that it pisses off certain segments of P H O T O B Y S H A W N S TA N L E Y

the population. It’s almost worth doing just for that. It’s a product that some people understand and that other people just get angry about. But NFTs are just another example of humanity’s boundless stupidity. I like them because they’re almost an avant-garde critique of capitalism.

What has value? Whatever you ascribe value to.

How much value does it have? Whatever someone is willing to pay. It’s no different than the power of any currency, but the ridiculousness of it is laid bare. So, it seemed like fertile ground.

Being the world’s stupidest unit of exchange, of course GWAR is going to get involved.

Well played, sir.

At the same time, NFTs also represent a ticket into the world of imagination. What we’d like to do with them is to help construct the multiverse, to help build this alternative reality where things look the way you want them to look.

When people talk about selling the Brooklyn Bridge, we’d like to be selling them a little bungalow in Antarctica that’s over in Berserker Blothar’s neighborhood.

The new GWAR documentary, This Is GWAR, has been screening at festivals. What can you tell us about it?

It’s not actually out, but yeah, a cut of it has been circulated to festivals. Its actual release will come later this year—September, I think.

And it’s good. I think people who aren’t even GWAR fans will enjoy this documentary. It’s an emotional ride, and you learn a lot about what makes GWAR unique. That’s the most important thing about it, I think, because the story of the human slaves of GWAR has always been the most interesting part about what GWAR does, and this introduces that for the first time. I think it’s very impactful. It’ll be streaming, and there will be a theatrical component.

What’s the concept behind your new album, The New Dark Ages?

Essentially, it’s about the dawn of another pivotal point in human history, where the fate of the human race and the Earth hangs in the balance. GWAR has really been present for all of those, but the plagues have changed. They’re both viral and plagues of information and technology. We find ourselves haunted by an ancient evil from our past that has made it to modernity through technology. It’s polarizing mankind, and the universe splits in two so you have a duoverse. That’s what we’re calling it.

What happens in this duoverse?

It’s like when Superman battles the antiSuperman. Only in this case, it’s GWAR battling an anti-GWAR. It’s fun because they’re a country band. But that part shows up in the graphic novel, not the album. But the album has songs that reflect that narrative. It has new characters, new concepts, and all the statues on Richmond’s Monument Avenue come back to life.

GWAR retells some fairy tales, and even some Shakespeare. I think it’s the creative apotheosis of GWAR in this new era.

It seems to be the story of humanity’s undoing.

It is. And it’s always that with GWAR, but this time it feels somehow different. The other day I was on YouTube, and I found that Minutemen song that goes, “I try to go work, [and] I just keep thinking about World War III!” [Laughs] It’s like that. Part of bringing back the ’80s seems to be that we’ve brought back the imminent destruction of humanity. That’s one of the comeback trends that I think people didn’t wanna see. But, of course, GWAR relishes that.

As you mentioned, there’s a graphic novel tie-in called GWAR in the Duoverse of Absurdity. Why did you want to include that as part of the story?

I think we wanted an opportunity to have a narrative that could extend beyond the album itself. Certainly, GWAR has done concept records before. Beyond Hell was modeled on Dante’s Inferno, but it wasn’t a story of our own invention—and not one that you could hold in a comic book and look at. Basically, we just wanted to make a graphic novel that has a deliberate synergy with the new album.

How did you approach this album differently than your last one, The Blood of Gods?

I think The Blood of Gods was a record that was about the survival of the band. This comes out in the documentary, but the things we do onstage dramatize the things that we’re doing in our lives, just trying to survive. And D E C I B E L : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : 41

certainly, The Blood of Gods was this moment where there was a question if the band would continue. We were faced with making a GWAR record without Oderus singing, and to say that was an anxious moment would be a great understatement. It was a question of: Is this something we can and should be doing? I think that album answered that question very affirmatively, because we made a GWAR record—and it worked. With this record, we’re not really struggling to answer that question. We had some freedom to get back to the process of creating the narrative of GWAR. You must feel like you’re on much more solid footing without Oderus at this point.

Yeah. But you’re never gonna please all your fans, so we decided to please none of them. I do feel like this record stretches back to some of the older works of GWAR, though—like America Must Be Destroyed. It feels a bit like that.

And Casey Orr is coming back on bass.

Yes, the human thrall of Beefcake the Mighty is back. He’s not playing bass on the record— that’s the human thrall of Blothar—but that’s another aspect that makes it more like some of the older works of the band. We’re very fortunate to have Casey back, and he’s one of the only bass players I can imagine handing the instrument to and saying, “Go forth and rock ‘n’ roll.” I expect he’ll become more integrated into things as we move forward.

The title track has a line that goes, “These are the new dark ages, lies have become contagious,” and then it goes into an Auto-Tune

part. Which fits perfectly with the commentary you’re making about our times.

[Laughs] Yeah, definitely. Auto-Tune is completely burnt now—it’s beyond cliché. But, of course, GWAR is just getting around to using it.

The song is saying: Here’s the state of things, but GWAR doesn’t give a shit. That whole AutoTune section is just GWAR having a party in the last days of the world.

There’s a song called “Blood Libel.” And blood libel itself is a really old and fucked-up concept, so it seems ripe for a GWAR song.

It is! And while it’s an old and fucked-up concept, it’s an extremely present concept. But it wasn’t even two years ago. Well, it was, but it was marginalized. And now it’s almost mainstream. People who aren’t Jewish haven’t had a reason to think about it, but it’s not difficult to recognize. It’s a conspiracy theory that’s been around since the Dark Ages, which is one of the reasons it feels like we’re living in a new dark age. It has the kind of visibility now that it did during that time.

postmodern loss of truth. But at the same time, it could also be about this Midwestern guy whose girlfriend cheated on him.

The song “Rat Catcher” is a modernized version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. There are obviously a few people who could fill the Pied Piper’s role in your version, but why did you want to revisit that fairy tale?

The first thing is that the story comes from the Dark Ages—and it’s such a weird story. All the theories about it are pretty compelling, too.

There’s no doubt that some moment of intense emotional trauma affected an entire town in medieval Germany, so what happened to produce this story? I love the idea of some horrible incident becoming a fairy tale, but the truth of the matter is, the further away you get from history, the more likely it is to be fictionalized. You almost wonder if 500 years from now, someone as horrible as Adolf Hitler becomes a demonic character in a children’s book. And there’s a danger in that, because he was real. But mostly we liked the story because of the pleasure of stealing and killing children. [Laughs]

What’s next, vampires?

[Laughs] But that’s part of the narrative, right?

That Jews depend on the blood of humanity to survive. What a horrible concept. For that to come back in this sort of sleek fashion with adrenochrome harvesting and all this Q-Anon stuff, we had to deal with it.

Is the song “Motherfucking Liar” directed at anyone in particular?

[Laughs] Well… no, I think it’s more like something that needed to be said. Everybody feels this

There’s a deluxe version of the album that comes with a Blothar bobblehead. You must be so proud.

[Laughs] Oh, I am. And it’s a particularly hideous bobblehead. The reason we picked it is that the Oderus bobblehead we came out with was so terrible that it actually spawned a Facebook group called GWAR Fans Against the Oderus Bobblehead. So, we figured we should do something that enrages the fans more. Blothar already sort of enrages them, so why not?

PHOTO BY SHAWN STANLEY

Part of bringing back the ’80s seems to be that we’ve brought back the imminent destruction of humanity.

That’s one of the comeback trends that I think people didn’t wanna see.

But, of course, GWAR relishes that.

 Bringing back the plague Mr. the Berserker (center) and his fellow intergalactic murder junkies in GWAR are looking to corner the Antarctic housing market

4 2 : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

the

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

definitive albums

by

nick green

Focused Hammer the making of Dazzling Killmen’s Face of Collapse

AS

an album title, Face of Collapse proved to be eerily prophetic: Less than a year after its release, and just two weeks before the band was scheduled to embark on a Japanese tour with Zeni Geva, Dazzling Killmen broke up forever. The legacy of this trailblazing St. Louis quartet (originally a trio) lives on in a small, but concentrated body of recorded work, headlined by the band’s second and final full-length. Face of Collapse offers a bridge between hardcore and math rock, with the cinematic sweep of a Bernard Herrmann score. It is simultaneously genre-defining and genre-defying.

Of course, at its heart, Face of Collapse is all about oppositions. Bassist Darin Gray, drummer Blake Fleming and guitarist Tim Garrigan all had classical training, and met as students in the jazz program at Southern Illinois University, while guitarist/vocalist Nick Sakes was largely self-taught. Fleming and Garrigan were younger; Gray and Sakes were already veterans of the St. Louis punk scene. The band’s first album, 1992’s Dig Out the Switch, hewed closer to the angular, rhythm-driven hardcore of Black Flag and other SST acts the group admired. But Face of Collapse was very different—the addition of Garrigan, coupled with renewed focus from the rest of the group, added harmonic layers and intensity to the band’s sound.

There are no false notes on Face of Collapse; the album was painstakingly arranged by Gray and Garrigan, and rehearsed in marathon sessions to achieve mastery—then rehearsed even more. Aside from an accident on Steve Albini’s couch, every song on the recorded version of Face of Collapse was executed as the band intended. Everyone is in particularly fine form here, but the album’s unquestionable centerpiece is the 14-minute quasi-title track “In the Face of Collapse.” With its herky-jerky rhythms and weird time signatures, it’s probably the closest the band got to drawing in a jazz element, offering a nod to the violent, uncomfortable sound of the New York improv scene.

DBHOF211 It’s worth noting that the band was the foundational brick for Rob Syers and Mark Fischer’s burgeoning Skin Graft Records, which also had its roots in St. Louis. Face of Collapse was the label’s first full-length, and has remained in print constantly, with a 2016 remaster—spearheaded by Fleming—leading to a lavish reissue with handsome packaging, extensive liner notes and a handful of bonus Face of Collapse tracks. Dazzling Killmen’s influence is definitely discernible in later metalS KIN GRAFT lic hardcore touchstones like the Dillinger Escape Plan’s Calculating Infinity and MARCH 14, 1994 Botch’s We Are the Romans, not to mention the prolific output that followed from all of the band’s members on Skin Graft and elsewhere.

Staring is caring Face of Collapse remains completely out of step with rock music then or now; much like the Victorian cabinet of curiosities depicted on the album cover, each of its component parts is an object of wonder.

DAZZLING KILLMEN

D E C I B E L : 4 5 : J U LY 2 0 2 2

DBHOF211

DAZZLING KILLMEN face of collapse

One of the key differences between the two Dazzling Killmen full-lengths is guitarist Tim Garrigan, who joined after Dig Out the Switch.

How did this impact the band’s dynamic?

The band started as a result of Nick Sakes learning how to play guitar—that’s how he and Darin first got together to write the rudimentary riffs that became the first Dazzling Killmen songs. Tim liberated us in terms of what we could do musically. Having him in the band meant that Nick didn’t have to be the sole guitar player anymore. Tim added a harmonic complexity to the songs. Dazzling Killmen started as a progressive punk rock band, in the vein of Black Flag or the Minutemen. When Tim came into the picture, we were able to start to realize a more avant-garde approach.

TIM GARRIGAN: I met Blake during the summer of ’89, when we were both students at a summer jazz camp. I think we sort of stayed in touch and ended up as freshmen in the same jazz program at Southern Illinois University and became friends. It was through Blake that I learned of the Killmen. During sophomore year, Darin came into the jazz program. Not long after that, we started playing together as a combo. Darin and Blake introduced me to a lot of music, and we talked about music a lot. Eventually they invited me to come to a Dazzling Killmen practice, and that’s where I met Nick. I think the first time we jammed, we just improvised together. This led to them inviting me to guest on the recording of “Medicine Me” and the Public Image Ltd cover “Poptones.” I’d played songs in odd time signatures before, but Dazzling Killmen was almost like a different language.

DARIN GRAY: Tim, Blake and I all went to school together. I went to university late. We had a practice room at school, and we played all of the time. Hours and hours and hours, even outside of Dazzling Killmen. Tim and I were roommates during the making of Face of Collapse, too. Tim and I were able to go over those songs and hone them outside of the practice room.

He brought a completely different sensibility to the band. His chord voicings, in particular, fit so well. Tim came to one practice and we were like, “Yeah, that’s it.” We did the “Medicine Me” 7-inch with Steve Albini prior to making the album. Tim played on it, but we hadn’t told him he was in the band yet. Interpersonal relationships in a band are important, so I guess we were feeling that out. After that, we knew that he was all the way in.

NICK SAKES: The dynamic before felt like the three of us—me, Blake and Darin—were kind of hunting in the dark. The other guys in the band all went to school together, and I was kind of the outsider. They practiced day and night and... I didn’t. Things changed when Darin BLAKE FLEMING:

and Tim moved in together, and also as the three of them progressed in school. The roles changed. I became more of a frontman. Those guys would come to practice with songs or riffs, and they would already have parts written for me. It was kind of freeing for me. I wondered at times if I should start taking guitar playing more seriously, but they were always like, “No, don’t do that.” There was also some new enthusiasm because we had been playing out and the response was really good. It felt like a real band; before that, it felt like dabbling. So, there was a big growth phase between the two albums.

What do you remember about the writing process for Face of Collapse? How quickly did the material come together?

Most of the material on Face of Collapse was written with Tim Garrigan in the band. I think we spent about a year and a half working on Face of Collapse. Like anything the Dazzling Killmen did, nothing came easily and everything we did,

GRAY:

“We took three days to make Face of Collapse, and that felt pretty extravagant for the punk rock scene, like we were Aerosmith.”

BLA KE F LE MING we did over and over again. We spent massive amounts of time honing and chipping away at that material. Those practices were super brutal, typically six-to-eight hours, multiple times per week. We did stuff like that even when Tim wasn’t in the band—we rehearsed for a year before we ever played a show! The cohesive sound of Dazzling Killmen was not an accident.

We were all on the same page in terms of commitment to the band.

FLEMING: We were a band that rehearsed often and consistently. I was still living at my parents’ house. Darin and Tim had moved in together in a little apartment in South Roxana, IL. It was a dark, dirty, industrial environment—a small town positioned near two oil refineries. Darin and Tim were starting to write music and work out ideas together in their apartment. That grim backdrop was where Face of Collapse really began to take shape. They’d bring pieces to band rehearsal and we’d improvise to find our parts.

I wrote my own drum parts, but I did not J U LY 2 0 2 2 : 4 6 : D E C I B E L

participate in composing any of the songs from a harmonic or melodic point of view.

SAKES: Tim, Darin and Blake practiced on their own at school, after their classes at night. They sort of woodshedded the whole thing, or at least most of the songs. Then we just practiced a lot.

Hours and days of repetition. We rehearsed in a loft in downtown Alton, IL for a long time, near where we all lived. Later, we rehearsed in the basement of a woodshop in St. Louis that our friend had converted to a practice room. It wasn’t a really collaborative kind of thing— those guys composed the music and I would play mirroring parts. I was definitely not what I would call a guitar player on that album.

GARRIGAN: Darin liked the stuff I was coming up with, so we tried to work through some things together. “In the Face of Collapse” and “Bone Fragments” started with riffs I came up with.

Those represented most of the contributions I made to the record. “Blown (Face Down)” is a song they were playing live before I joined the band. By the time of Face of Collapse, that song and “My Lacerations” were both well-oiled. “Bone Fragments” and “In the Face of Collapse” were written at the end of 1992, and the other songs followed. Nick and Darin came up with “Staring Contest,” and “Windshear” was a later one. I think “Agitator” was the last song we worked on. That was Darin’s thing—our work was just dressing the song up a bit. Face of Collapse features a lot of diminished and modal scales, as well as dense extended chords, which is where the jazz element comes in a little bit.

Face of Collapse was recorded in Steve Albini’s basement in September 1993. What do you recall about that process?

SAKES: Steve originally had us scheduled for December 1992, but had to move the session because PJ Harvey was coming in to record Rid of Me. We had been ready to go for months, except I didn’t have my shit together with vocals. I really procrastinated. I had some stuff in a notebook, but I wasn’t really a notebook guy. We did the tracking on the first day and Steve announced we were going to do the vocals the next day. It was like one of those dreams where you show up to a final exam and you realize that you hadn’t been to class all semester. There were a few songs that we had practiced and played with vocals, but a lot of that stuff I pulled together on the day we recorded. I don’t know where it came from, but I’m proud that it turned out like it did. Steve also gave us a break on the studio time in exchange for helping to put together Shellac 7-inch records. He had some rubber stamps made and the idea was to sit on his living room floor with big piles of covers, stamp each, and then brush them with root beer-scented paint. I think he only charged us like $200 per day. The whole album was done for right around $1,000, tape and all. It was a different time.

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DBHOF211

DAZZLING KILLMEN face of collapse

When I first went with the guys to record the “Medicine Me” 7-inch, I was still getting schooled on underground music of the ’80s and early ’90s. There was something really aweinspiring about being around Steve Albini. He was a super intelligent, cool guy. He had a certain authority about him, but he was also very laidback and disarming. We’d rehearsed everything pretty hardcore. I don’t remember if we recorded any of those songs more than once. We did the take and that was it. I did a guitar overdub on the bridge to “Bone Fragments.” I think that riff was the only guitar overdub. Working with Steve was easy. He was a total professional. The drum area was sequestered, so Blake was over in one spot and Darin, Nick and I played in a line in a narrow room. That part was a little nerve-wracking. Steve was good at putting people at ease, though.

GRAY: I think we spent three days there. It’s possible that we tracked the entire record in a day, and then spent two days mixing it. Or maybe we spent a day tracking, a day doing vocals, and then spent parts of two days mixing it. But it was pretty quick—even though it seemed like a luxurious amount of time then. Most, if not all, of those takes were first takes. All of them were played as-is. There might be a few guitar or sound overdubs here or there—maybe. There isn’t any splicing, though. We played all of the songs as full takes, which wasn’t that uncommon then. You honed the material so you didn’t waste anyone’s time when you went to the studio, and you nailed it. The record was basically done in our practice space before we got to the studio. We even recorded the songs in order.

Steve was always wonderful to us. He was a great supporter of the band.

FLEMING: We basically set up and played our songs, the same way we’d do a live show. We took three days to make Face of Collapse, and that felt pretty extravagant for the punk rock scene, like we were Aerosmith. That created a certain intensity. We didn’t have time to mess around with a bunch of takes. Everything instrumental was done as a live performance, and we’d go back and overdub a little guitar here and there, then we did the vocals. The recording of Face of Collapse was really fun, in general. I had just turned 21 and Nick introduced me to Jose Cuervo.

After going to a bar to celebrate my birthday, I collapsed in Steve’s foyer. I was completely shitfaced. I woke up on Steve’s futon in the control room and realized that I had pissed all over it.

So, I went down to the basement, where we were recording, and slept it off in an isolation booth. I had alcohol poisoning and was ill for about three days. I remember that Steve was so kind and understanding about the whole situation. He was like, “Don’t worry about it, but this is exactly why I quit drinking.”

GARRIGAN:

“I remember that the drummer of Fugazi came up to us after our set and was like, ‘You guys are weird.’”

T IM GA RRIGA N

Did the recorded versions of the songs on Face of Collapse differ in any way from what you had planned going into the studio?

Not at all, not even a little. If you heard a demo tape from that era, it would’ve been basically the same thing.

FLEMING: Nope. The music was so complex that it didn’t leave much room for variation. Once you established what your part was, it wasn’t something that you really strayed from. There would be little pockets here and there where we might be able to improvise a little bit. But for the most part, everything on Face of Collapse was very through-composed. Live, the only way these songs would change was through adrenaline. The tempos might get faster. But we were pretty polished and tight as a live band, so the songs didn’t really change there, either.

GARRIGAN: We really had things worked out. We were all pretty scientific in our approaches to the music. I don’t think we changed a single thing, arrangement-wise. Every time we played, even in practice, it was always intense. We were never nonchalant about playing. It’s not like we had that much time to spare—Blake and I were still going to college, Darin had a kid and Nick had a full-time job. We all had busy lives.

When we would get together, it was totally sober and serious.

SAKES: I remember that the day we finished it, we went over to play it for the Skin Graft guys at Mark Fischer’s house. It was a rainy afternoon and he had some friends over already, so we popped the cassette in and sat around the stereo, listening to Face of Collapse with everyone. It hit

me then that we had done something really cool. That was one of the most deeply satisfying moments of my life.

GRAY:

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As with its predecessor, Face of Collapse features one song (“In the Face of Collapse”) that is significantly longer than the rest.

Songwriting-wise, was the process of assembling this substantially different than putting together the shorter songs?

That’s a good question, but the answer is emphatically “no.” It’s the same process, but the longer songs take a lot more time, that’s it. The actual process is the same. You’re basically sitting there with a marble cube and chipping away at it until it resembles the thing in your mind.

Over and over, until you get it right.

GARRIGAN: When Darin and I pieced together “In the Face of Collapse,” the links were inherent in the parts we came up with. It was a linear process at a certain point. The ideas came intuitively. At any point, Darin could’ve vetoed those parts, but I felt comfortable in sharing those ideas. I think things flowed because we were all listening to music constantly. I learned a lot from studying everything from Stravinsky and Brahms to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Also playing in the pit orchestra for West Side Story—there are some cool guitar parts in that! I had “orchestrated” the parts for both guitars on “In the Face of Collapse” for Nick and I to play; similarly on “Bone Fragments,” and parts of “Agitator.”

Whereas, on some of the other songs, I might just double what Nick was already doing, adding some variations for texture/dynamics.

GRAY:

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DAZZLING KILLMEN face of collapse

 You were not at this show A poster for one of Dazzling Killmen’s shows with Neurosis and Sleep during their 1994 tour

SAKES: We had to break up that song while rehearsing it. It was kind of a painstaking and painful process. It took a lot of time to get that one down. But I think it was the most representative of everyone’s moods at the time. Maybe our age had a factor in it. We were dealing with grief. Darin went through a divorce. It was a grown-up record. All of that seemed dramatic.

That’s kind of what the album’s title was about: How do you function when someone you love dies, or something tragic happens? You still have to get up in the morning, you still have to go to your job, you still have to do dishes. Despite everything, the show has to go on. That song was the big outpouring of that mood, a sort of exorcism.

FLEMING: Not a whole lot. Even the shorter songs comprised a lot of parts and changes, which required rehearsing them in chunks, then working on the transitions between those chunks.

The process for the longer songs was pretty similar. Someone would come in with an initial idea, then we’d improvise and jam on it to generate

more ideas, then we’d rehearse to form muscle memory for all the parts, then we’d put things together. The longer songs just presented a bigger arc to work with. I don’t think those songs were long for the sake of being long. In a way, they just wrote themselves. One difference is that the longer pieces allowed us to be more dynamic, which we started to do on “Code Blue” on Dig Out the Switch. Those longer pieces allowed us to explore tension and release a little more.

Do you have a favorite song on Face of Collapse, and why?

The most-played song on Spotify is “Staring Contest,” the first song on the album.

It’s a nice, concise song. It was a Nick/Darin song. It’s hard for me to pick a favorite. With my own ego involved, maybe I’ll revisit the ones I had more to do with. I love “Blown (Face Down).” I love the intensity and the space in it, and Darin’s bassline. I like “Agitator” because it has some cool, atypical chords in it, but it’s very much driven by the bass and drums. I mean,

GARRIGAN:

J U LY 2 0 2 2 : 5 0 : D E C I B E L

I love “In the Face of Collapse,” too—there’s a velocity in the progression of the parts. It doesn’t feel too math-y. It conveys this feeling of utter dread. I love the rhythmic hits on “Painless One” and long, sustained chords on the second half of “Windshear.” I guess I like them all!

GRAY: I haven’t listened to the record since we made it, but I have heard songs here and there.

Everybody pretty much nailed it on “In the Face of Collapse.” That song represented the best of what we could be. That particular song has haunting guitar parts from Tim, incredible drumming from Blake, and Nick nailed it with the vocals. I also like “Agitator” a lot, too. If someone asked me what Dazzling Killmen was all about, I would probably play them those two songs.

FLEMING: I think probably the title track, “In the Face of Collapse.” It is probably one of my favorites because it pointed to a direction that the band could’ve kept going in. The band could’ve turned into something more like Last Exit, the jazz/improv group with Bill Laswell, Sonny Sharrock, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Peter Brötzmann. That was definitely a big influence on Dazzling Killmen, at least instrumentally. We were never a jazz band, but people often attached that label to what we were doing because we had some technical ability. “In the Face of Collapse” shows the evolution of the band and also makes the case for the difference that Tim Garrigan made. A lot of that song came from Tim’s mind. The collision of three schooled players with Nick, who was self-taught, added really interesting dimensions. That song is a real journey and a pretty unique statement for the time.

SAKES: “Agitator” might be my sentimental favorite. The lyrics are pretty much about my troubled relationship with my father. It’s comical. At the time, I didn’t think of it that way.

Now, with some time and space, I think it’s kind of funny. I lived in my dad’s basement for a long time after high school, but I had been leading a very secret life, especially when it came to the band. The only comment he ever made about it was, “I heard your record the other day. The whole thing was like, ‘Raaaaar, I hate my dad!’”

That was his review of Face of Collapse. I guess it’s low-hanging fruit to write about daddy issues, but hey, that’s what we had to work with.

Blake, Darin and Tim were all jazz music students at Southern Illinois University, and played together in an electric jazz trio. What kind of reactions did Dazzling Killmen inspire from jazz enthusiasts?

SAKES: I didn’t really sense that there were a lot of jazz aficionados coming to our shows. I never played jazz and I didn’t know much about it.

The other guys would go on massive record store hunts and come out with armfuls of jazz records.

I’d sit in the van or just look at the punk rock/ hardcore section for 30 minutes while they’d

DBHOF211

DAZZLING KILLMEN face of collapse Dazzling Killmen were known for being a searing live act. Did you have many opportunities to play the material from Face of Collapse live?

be there for three hours. I didn’t really talk the talk or walk the walk with that. I never ran into the jazz people. But if they came to the shows, I’d be like, “Uh, maybe you should talk to Darin.”

I listened to stuff like Last Exit, Massacre and Naked City—the fringe-y New York stuff. I never listened to John Coltrane or Miles Davis. I was more into metal and noise rock.

GRAY: I think that has been played up a little more over the years than it needs to be. One big thing is that we didn’t know how other bands worked and made music. That’s probably why Dazzling Killmen sounded like it did. We had a lot of rules for what we couldn’t do, so what was not there became just as important as what was there. Tim is an incredible guitarist, but there are no guitar solos. There are guitar features, just no solos. By that very nature, it was going to sound very different. And that was a conscious choice. If you listen to a band like Helmet, there were a lot of solos. We didn’t have any, and we had two guitar players. Another thing that I think is interesting is that Nick started playing guitar when we started this band. Blake and I had played our whole lives. Between Nick starting to play guitar to Face of Collapse was four years—that’s mind-blowing.

FLEMING: I remember seeing a lecture with Leonard Bernstein, and hearing him talk about the Velvet Underground with the same intensity that he talked about Bach. That’s the way we looked at music. Of course, there were punk rock people in the scene that thought we weren’t punk rock enough; they’d be turned off by the progressive rock elements. If you were coming from a more purely ideological sensibility about what music would be, you’d hate the band. We didn’t want those people around anyway. We were open-minded people, in general, and very accepting of things. Dazzling Killmen made music that related to how we felt in the world. It wasn’t us trying to join some other crowd.

We were going to form our own crowd. If everyone else was making a right turn, we were going to make a left turn.

GARRIGAN: There are some jazz-influenced parts on Face of Collapse. I think we all brought our own musical tastes into it. Darin probably had the most eclectic tastes, but we were all in the mode of listening to everything that was out there. I don’t know if the band would’ve appealed to jazz players in any specific way. The music was heavy, loud rock music. There were people we went to school with that were into jazz, but rejected Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman and the more out-there Coltrane stuff. Dazzling Killmen was never going to appeal to them. I would think that anyone who had eclectic tastes could appreciate the band.

FLEMING: The West Coast tour with Sleep and Neurosis was so much fun—we loved those bands and they loved us. Matt [Pike] and Al [Cisneros] from Sleep looked like they’d been around the block, but they were not a lot older than I was. They were really road-hard veterans by that point, though. Their description of Dazzling Killmen was “total wall.” They saw the band as a wall of music that would bludgeon the listener. The way we expressed ourselves was different than Sleep, but the intent and the intensity was the same.

SAKES: We pretty much played the album when we played live. All of it, even “In the Face of Collapse.” That was kind of a joke. We used to announce that we’d have “one more” and play that incredibly long song. That used to really piss people off. Neurosis liked us. I’m not sure Sleep had any idea where they even were at the time because they were smoking a lot of weed.

We never really got to know them. Those shows with Neurosis and Sleep... fans couldn’t care less. We didn’t really look like “rock dudes.” We just looked like regular Midwestern guys. I was quite a drinker back then, but we never drank or got fucked up before we played. Nobody drank before we played—that was kind of an unspoken rule. The music required a lot of concentration.

GARRIGAN: We played “Bone Fragments” infrequently live. “In the Face of Collapse” was something we played fairly often. When I first started playing live with them, “Code Blue” was

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J U LY 2 0 2 2 : 5 2 : D E C I B E L

the epic piece. We’d never play that and “In the Face of Collapse” in the same set, because they’re kind of up the same alley. “Blown (Face Down)” and “Painless One” were always in the sets. We’d typically do a mix of material from both albums.

I remember that the drummer of Fugazi came up to us after our set and was like, “You guys are weird.” I think we always performed with intensity. I was more introverted in the way I presented myself onstage, but Nick and Darin were very performative. I wasn’t much for putting on a show.

GRAY: The bands we played with were all-in.

They loved us. But when we looked out in the crowd, there were a lot of blank faces. We didn’t give audiences any time to breathe. When we played, there wouldn’t be any breaks between songs. We didn’t stop to take a drink of water or to wipe the sweat from our brows. We wouldn’t even tune in between songs. During that whole time, we refused interviews and stopped doing guest lists. I don’t know why we did that, but I think we wanted everything to just be about the music, not all of the stuff in between.

How was Face of Collapse received when it came out? How has perception of the album changed in the intervening years?

I think the album was well-received.

I think there were a couple of reviews—well, I actually only remember one. I wasn’t really in that world. I didn’t go to punk shows as a teen.

I was a geeky, studious guitar player, practicing scales. The thing that is nice is that the music stands the test of time. When I listen to it,

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DBHOF211

DAZZLING KILLMEN face of collapse

“There were so many fuckin’ bands in 1994, and they all thought they were going to make a million dollars and sign with Interscope.

It seemed really competitive. We kind of felt like we were lost in the shuffle.”

NICK SA KE S it still sounds fresh. I mean, my initial reaction in revisiting this album was, “Wow, there are a lot of chords in here.” There’s a lot of information to process. It’s dense. But it also has a sort of symphonic quality to it, if I may say.

The anguish in Nick’s voice is really dramatic on this album, and his dystopian lyrics/storytelling are still compelling. Darin’s amazing compositional command of the bass and Blake’s incredible dynamic range and facility on the drums stand out to me. I’m proud to have been a part of it. It was definitely an honor to play with those guys, and to have a chance to be creative with them.

SAKES: I’ve listened to it many, many times over the years, and there isn’t a song where I feel like I have to hit fast-forward. That’s not true of my other bands. Face of Collapse came out at a really shitty time, in hindsight. There were so many fuckin’ bands in 1994, and they all thought they were going to make a million dollars and sign with Interscope. It seemed really competitive.

We kind of felt like we were lost in the shuffle.

Every review we would read—not that there

were that many—kind of missed the point.

College radio was a huge competition back then, so we never got played on college radio. We felt a little disappointed that we put so much work into it and it didn’t get much attention. Of course, as the years roll on, it seems to be holding up. That’s kind of the last laugh. That’s way better than having a big, flashy release that just fizzles away.

FLEMING: We were screaming and shouting to an empty room at that time. Harder music—especially Helmet, the Jesus Lizard and Fugazi—was popular at the time. But all of those bands were very poppy compared to Dazzling Killmen. I always thought the mix left a little something to be desired, even though a lot of people really liked how it sounded. Steve’s sonic blueprint is very influential and we loved him, but everything was done really quickly. I was happy to have the opportunity to remix it from the original files, taken directly from the master, when Skin Graft reissued Face of Collapse in 2016. The reissue looks incredible. It stands as a good tribute. A lot of bands kind of go the Van Gogh route: J U LY 2 0 2 2 : 5 4 : D E C I B E L

Everyone wants your paintings after you’re dead.

All of us are proud of the legacy we left behind, and we’re enjoying getting a little bit of recognition. Time helps a lot in seeing the positive aspects of any situation.

GRAY: It’s strange to talk about something that I did so many years ago. Every time something like this comes up, I’m always shocked. But I’m humbled by it, too. It’s incredible that people still care. I wouldn’t change anything about that record. Face of Collapse is the record we wanted to make. I do think that all of us knew we had a better record in us than Face of Collapse. I would’ve liked to have had a crack at that, because I think it would’ve been more representative of what we wanted to do. I don’t remember the material we were working on; I just remember feeling like we were on to the next thing, that we had opened up a new door.

I’m sure there are imperfections in the mix, but we made that record in three days. Honestly, I wouldn’t change any of it. I’m glad we put that work in. We paid the price for that, for sure. But I’m very glad we did it.

D E C I B E L : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : 5 5

56 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL

Thrash legends

and timeless frontman MILLE PETROZZA return with the brilliant Hate Über Alles — STORY BY —

Justin M. Norton

J U LY 2 02 2 •

— PHOTOS BY —

Christoph Voy

57

• DECIBEL

DECIBEL : NOVEMBER 2021 : 57

IN 2019,

Kreator

founder

and

frontman

Mille Petrozza decided to get off the road for a year. Who could blame him? Even in the best, most comfortable situations, touring is a grind. Load in. Find decent food (a hurdle for Petrozza, a committed vegan). Soundcheck. Play a show. Get back to the hotel at 1 a.m. Depending on the itinerary, wake up at 6 a.m. to head elsewhere. Rinse and repeat for weeks until location and even identity become nebulous. Even for a fit 54-year-old frontman who performs thrash metal concerts that double as HIIT training sessions, it can be a little much after roughly four decades. ¶ “After three years on the road for [2017’s] Gods of Violence, it started to feel like work, and that’s not why I do this,” Petrozza says this spring from his home in Germany. “I had to put the passion back into music. Don’t get me wrong: I was still enjoying playing, but traveling was getting on my nerves after two world tours. So, I just decided to take a year, write songs and just be me again without the need to travel. You can get to a point where you feel like you aren’t performing, but just going out and doing the same thing. There has never been a plan to quit the band or anything like that. I’m not thinking about slowing down. Then the pandemic hit.”

58

0 2220•2DE LE L 5 8 : N •O JVU EL MYB E2 R 1 : CDIEBCEI B

That’s right, the pandemic—the elephant in the room everyone is tired of hearing about, but that’s still making life for working musicians a balancing act, if not a living hell. In retrospect, 2019 might have been the worst year ever for a working musician to take off. Petrozza expected Kreator to return to the road sometime in 2020, even after the departure of quarter-century Kreator bassist Christian “Speesy” Giesler. But shortly before a scheduled European run with Lamb of God, the world shut down. As of spring 2022, the rejiggered Kreator—with former DragonForce bassist Frédéric Leclercq joining guitarist Sami Yli-Sirniö and drummer Jürgen “Ventor” Reil—have played maybe a dozen shows with their new lineup.

The long hiatus and lack of in-person practices didn’t stop Kreator from recording one of the best albums in a string of stellar 21st century releases. Hate Über Alles, written before COVID, but assembled around lockdowns and surges, is perhaps Kreator’s fastest, angriest and most visceral album since 2005’s Enemy of God. That’s saying a lot when every 21st century Kreator album has been fast, angry and visceral. Petrozza says Kreator’s consistency results from loving the art known as metal. “I’m a metal fan as

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much as a musician,” he says. “There will always be people who say we sold out after Pleasure to Kill. [Laughs] I just want to do my part to keep putting out killer music.”

Hate Über Alles, Kreator’s 15th studio album, is a critique of something we’ve all had too much of in the past two years: social media. The problem, in short, is that people no longer communicate; they yell at each other from behind an anonymity bubble. Petrozza says a perfect example was when he was attacked for an Instagram post saying he’d received the COVID-19 vaccine. Some commenters even said they planned to burn their Kreator albums.

“If you think you need to burn my records because I got vaccinated, I don’t need you,” Petrozza says. “I try not to read every comment, but I see one bad comment, and it gets to me.”

Petrozza says trolls even attacked a pro-peace message about Ukraine. “It’s getting ridiculous if you think about it,” he continues. “People need to realize that we won’t even have concerts if we don’t have peace. There is no fucking way I’d ever support a war. If people think I’m not metal because I support peace, then fuck them.”

The title track—and to an extent the album—is a broadside on incivility via technology. While social media seems to lack the requi-

site brutality for thrash metal, there’s nothing more disquieting than the death of rational discourse. “In the past, when someone had a different opinion, it would attract me,” Petrozza says.

“Now, people go right to, ‘I’m going to kill you if you don’t have the same opinion.’ Everything has become a lot rougher and a lot less communicative. There isn’t any intelligent debate or conversation—people trying to work things out.

I miss that. Hate Über Alles is ultimately about hate speech and people screaming at each other rather than talking.

“Back in the day, people [who disagreed] would try to talk,” Petrozza adds. “Now you can go right on the internet and spit out your hate and poison.

Sometimes it’s just too much information. How we communicate now is a blessing and a curse.

Technology has advanced, but people haven’t. We need to find some ways to respect each other.”

Petrozza’s rapier pen targets other issues, including organized religion, climate change and even personal history. “Become Immortal” recounts Petrozza’s earliest days playing metal in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. “Killer of Jesus” is about the need to question idols and dogmas and examine how idols are appropriated.

To wit: Jesus was an innovator and preached peace; some might even say he was the original social justice warrior. In the hands of modern evangelicals, he’s become a sign of consumerism and blind obedience. “We need to get away from all of these mostly fiction religions,” Petrozza says. “The song is about questioning your ideas

LEGEND LEGEND

TOM GABRIEL FISCHER on Mille Petrozza and Kreator

I saw the first Kreator album, Endless Pain, at

the West Berlin offices of Noise Records, the record company both of our bands were signed to. We were in West Berlin to record our To Mega Therion album during the second half of September 1985, and Kreator’s debut was about to be released.

I remember thinking that I quite liked their logo, and I also realized that we shared the same producer, Horst Müller, who had also worked on Hellhammer’s Apocalyptic Raids and Celtic Frost’s Morbid Tales and To Mega Therion. This of course made me curious about this German band.

I first met Mille on March 16, 1986, when Celtic Frost played the legendary Zeche venue in Bochum, Germany, and Kreator was the special

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guest. I remember having a long and interesting talk with Mille at a table on the upper level of the venue. I felt impressed by his intelligence and opinions, and this marked the beginning of our friendship.

Well, Celtic Frost played two tours with Kreator, and Triptykon also played a number of festivals where Kreator was also on the bill.

We played together on Celtic Frost’s first U.K. headliner tour in October of 1987, where Kreator were the special guests. I think both bands (and the audiences) loved this combination. Kreator was at a difficult juncture in their career, however, since they had encountered problems with Noise Records, as had many others, Celtic Frost included.

and freeing your mind from set beliefs. The main theme of this record is thinking for yourself.”

“Dying Planet” is a stark look at the reality of climate change at a time when many scientists say it might be too late to fix enough to avert disaster. “The protagonist talks to Mother Earth and watches Mother Earth’s funeral,” Petrozza says. “There is no way we can turn it back. It’s a very pessimistic song. I think we’re too late, and things will get out of hand in the next 50 years.

It’s just the facts. It’s something that happened on the planet before and will happen again. We have treated the planet like shit forever, and these are the results.”

Petrozza doesn’t consider the album or his lyrics negative so much as a reflection of challenging current events. The pandemic didn’t factor into the songs since Petrozza wrote the lyrics before a note of Hate Über Alles was recorded. “The pandemic is a symptom of what’s already there,” he says. “We’ll have more of them as long as we keep treating animals and the planet like we do now. This is what you get.”

—CHAPTER 1—

Teutonic Tenacity

While innovation is praised in popular music, particularly metal, consistency isn’t praised nearly enough. Consistency, however, is far more important. How many bands in metal’s long history have a catalog of material that is almost universally good? Napalm Death come to mind, as do Killing Joke. But both of those bands

Earlier in 1987, we hired an attorney to represent us against Noise Records and attempt to free us from what we felt were very questionable contracts and constant artistic interference. It was because of these events that Kreator consulted with us repeatedly during this tour and asked us for details of our legal quest and for advice.

There was one particularly emotional moment on our tour bus when it became plainly obvious to all of us what a toll these problems with the record company were taking on the members of Kreator. Of course, we knew the feeling.

The second time we toured together, both Kreator and Celtic Frost were very different entities. This was after Celtic Frost’s reunion, and part of the Monotheist tour was a co-headliner tour with Kreator, covering much of Europe in March and April 2007. Musically, I felt this was a very interesting combination. And of course, the number of concerts Kreator had played by that time had made them a very professional, powerful and impressive entity, in spite of some internal problems they had within their lineup.

But we in Celtic Frost were no strangers to such problems ourselves.

Unfortunately, we haven’t seen each other in quite a while. It goes without saying that I respect Mille highly for his stance on animal rights and against violence, as we share those views.

PHOTO BY ESTER SEGARR A

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have shifted styles and approaches throughout their career. Killing Joke also aren’t a metal band, even though they are universally beloved by metal fans. A better comparison would be AC/ DC. The Aussies have made a career out of an approach so distinct and straightforward that no one else can do it except them. Except for outlier albums like Outcast and Endorama in the late ’90s, Kreator have always had the same perennial dedication to approach and quality.

“Even with Death Angel, there aren’t any huge differences on the four albums I’m on, and I’m OK with that,” says Death Angel drummer and Gimme Metal DJ Will Carroll. “I think Kreator fans are the same. If they put out another Enemy of God, I wouldn’t complain. But the [21st century] records aren’t carbon copies.

I can tell the difference between Gods of Violence and [2012’s] Phantom Antichrist, especially with the production.”

“They just found the divot that works for them. They put out consistent fucking records.

More bands should do it,” says Corey Parks, guitarist/vocalist of Indiana-based blackened thrash upstarts GraveRipper. “Find what works for you, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. They have consistency in their songs, know what their fans like and know what they like. You can be a band that puts out the same consistent record year after year, and people will say you aren’t getting out of your comfort zone. If you get out of that zone, they bash that, too. Thrash can be hard to make distinct. But when you are a band like Kreator and have been putting out great records, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Tom Gabriel Fischer of Triptykon and Celtic Frost, who has known Petrozza for nearly four decades, isn’t surprised by Kreator’s longevity.

Like Petrozza, Fischer has navigated career missteps and continues to push boundaries at an age where most musicians are talking about their career in the past tense. “I think what unites us is that we both began around the same time and, at times, followed a similar path,” Fischer says. “When I first heard Pleasure to Kill in 1986, especially songs like ‘Riot of Violence,’ I felt that Kreator was one of the bands that could be the European answer to Bay Area thrash metal. After some experiments in the 1990s, Mille has diligently evaluated what Kreator stands for and what Kreator’s original strengths are. The results are evident, not least when you see the band onstage.”

“Mille doesn’t want to give up and always wants to achieve more than we have before,” offers guitarist Yli-Sirniö, who has played with Petrozza for two-plus decades. “He keeps trying to arouse feelings from our audience. I don’t know if he thinks about making it relevant or if it’s worthwhile. But he can always find a mood and stick to the plan.”

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While much of Hate Über Alles was written prepandemic, Yli-Sirniö says the bulk of the creative work happened when the world was in various forms of lockdown. He says it was a challenge to their traditional songwriting style—Kreator like to shape songs in person—and even to their collective mental health. “There was a long period where we couldn’t rehearse,” he says. “We’re an old-school band, and we need to be in the same room to arrange and play the songs. Sending files only takes us so far. It all happens when we are together. Fortunately, we had the chance to meet up in Germany every few months. And there was loads of time to think about it and discuss what direction we wanted to go.

“When you are stuck inside and have nowhere to go with limited possibilities, there is a lot of bottled-up energy,” Yli-Sirniö adds. “I have to admit when the pandemic started, I started to go a little crazy and went through a small existential crisis. But I quickly realized the only way to do it was to move forward and make the most of the situation. I’m so happy that it seems to be slowly ending and things are starting to happen, and people are allowed to be together. But, of course, now we have this other thing [the war in Ukraine] going on.”

The members take their role as caretakers seriously. At the same time, they don’t want to feel constricted by the idea of legacy. “Thrash is the music we grew up with, and it feels like the natural thing to do,” Yli-Sirniö says. “The new album didn’t feel restricting at all. Legacy is such a big word, and you wonder if you are stuck in a big cage if you have a legacy to respect. Are we relevant? Do we still have something to say? We have a legacy that needs to be respected, which sets the mood for the music we want to make under the name Kreator. We tried to do something a little different with Hate Über Alles, but even a little more vital than the last two records, even if those weren’t exactly easy listening music.”

The other thing that’s consistent about Hate Über Alles is the title track is so infectious that listeners have difficulty getting to other songs.

This was also the case with Pleasure to Kill, Enemy of God and Violent Revolution. Something embedded in the Kreator ethos says the title track must be so good that it is on a playlist until the end of recorded time. The only potential downside to this is there are plenty of other worthy songs on Kreator albums. It’s just a challenge to get to them after the 30th spin of the title track.

“Kreator has always been relevant,” bassist Leclercq says. “Mille still loves the music. The passion is still there. I didn’t know what to expect when I joined. Will they be jaded? And they are still just as passionate to this day.”

—CHAPTER 2—

Strongest of the Strong

Before looking deeper at Hate Über Alles, it would be instructive to examine why a band that formed in 1982 is not only relevant, but vital four decades later. An analogy might help. An

early Kreator album was like a jalopy with a souped-up engine that barreled recklessly down the highway. The passengers feared death in a fiery inferno. Somehow the car made it, leaving the passengers sweaty and exhausted, but elated. That jalopy has since been replaced by a sleek deathmobile enhanced by modern technology; look at the polished albums of the early ’00s like Hordes of Chaos. That doesn’t make the ride any less of a white-knuckle experience because the car can go even faster, and the engine has limitless horsepower.

Kreator would be a legendary band with just a fraction of their output. Pleasure to Kill is one of the foundational thrash albums. Kreator’s output was stellar through the ’80s and culminated in 1990 with Coma of Souls, arguably the high mark of their career and one of the best thrash metal albums ever released. Petrozza then took a left turn in the mid-to-late-’90s. So did many other metal bands trying to survive an era of grunge, nü-metal, the Macarena and Ace of Base.

“In the beginning, we were proud of Kreator because we had something to give to the American tape-traders sending us Metallica, Exodus and Megadeth demos,” says German music journalist Goetz Kuehnemund, who has covered Kreator’s entire career. “We had Sodom, Destruction and Kreator—but Kreator was more talented than the other two. By their third album [Terrible Certainty] , Kreator was looked upon as an international thrash success, and today they are the worldwide leaders of the genre, along with Exodus.”

Kuehnemund says that Petrozza returned to thrash in 2001 because Petrozza realized it was his strength. “He always mixes in a lot of traditional heavy metal, however, and that’s what makes Kreator unique,” Kuehnemund says.

“Listen to a [new] song like ‘Become Immortal.’

When have Judas Priest written a riff as good as that one in the last 20 years?”

It’s little surprise that Kreator have influenced generations of songwriters and musicians.

The big difference: While many listeners stick to a band’s formative albums, Kreator’s fans also cherish their later material. “What I noticed starting on Violent Revolution is some incredible songwriting,” explains Joel Grind of Toxic Holocaust. “They have amazing bridges. Violent Revolution had all these parts that would work well at festivals or would be cool for fans to sing along to. They take you on this journey with cool songs and great riffs.”

Grind first heard the song “Pleasure to Kill” on a mixtape he received as a young skateboarder in Elkton, MD. It was one of the moments all metalheads encounter where music opens up the world and everything seems full of possibility. “Pleasure to Kill stuck out so much because it was so insane-sounding in the best way,” Grind says. “It was so foreign and shocking. I wonder if young people can even have that same experience now because everything is so accessible.

[Kreator’s] early records are a little crazy. You

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could almost call them death-thrash. But then they became players and put out things like Coma of Souls. You could put Coma of Souls with any of the Big Four releases. It’s their Rust in Peace or Reign in Blood. It’s up there with those records.”

Carroll, a lifelong Kreator fan and completist, says Kreator were viewed as “absolute savages” in the Bay Area, the birthplace of thrash. While the Bay Area bands prized precision, great solos and shiny production, early Kreator had more in common with bands like Venom and Hellhammer. “The first three studio albums were way more vicious than Bay Area thrash,” Carroll notes. “Kreator’s early albums were sloppy, but they were very violent and faster than almost any Bay Area band. In my high school, they were too much for almost anyone.

Slayer was the heaviest and fastest anyone would go. I honestly didn’t know too many Kreator fans until [1989’s] Extreme Aggression.”

Carroll says he took a break from Kreator after their late-’90s releases. While on tour in Houston in 2001, someone asked if he’d heard Violent Revolution. “He gave me a burned CD, and I was fucking blown away,” Carroll says. “Ever since then, they’ve been on a hot streak. Enemy of God is one of my favorites, and every album is solid. Ventor plays a big part because his drumming has improved since the ’80s. He’s still doing thrash beats, but mixing them with the kick drum patterns. Everything about the new Kreator albums is inspired. They are keeping it up with the times.”

GraveRipper’s Parks got his first Kreator album, Enemy of God, at the same time as his driver’s license. “What a fucking banger,” he marvels. “It blew me away. I can still hum the whole album. It was so fast, ferocious and mean.

Of course, I loved Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer. But Enemy of God was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s what metal should sound like. It’s so angry and violent. I just did not stop listening to the record.”

Parks says what sets Kreator apart from most American thrash (except for Slayer) is unrelenting speed and aggression. “Kreator seems to want to go faster and meaner,” he reasons. “There is something just so much more aggressive about Kreator. The only American band that captures anything close to that would be Slayer. You can write all the riffs you want, but you must be genuine. Kreator always feels consistent and genuine.”

—CHAPTER 3—

Enter Frédéric Leclercq

Frédéric Leclercq was on his way home from Hellfest in 2019 and got a phone call from Petrozza. Leclercq was still drunk from a birthday celebration the previous night. Petrozza left a message that said, “Can you please call me back?”

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Leclercq called back. Petrozza wanted to know if the bassist could play two shows with Kreator.

Emboldened by the booze, Leclercq said he didn’t want to do shows. He wanted to be in Kreator. “If you want me in the band for good, then yes,” Leclercq replied. Petrozza agreed.

Leclercq has known Petrozza for more than two decades. They first met at an Edguy concert in Germany and shared a few glasses of red wine while singing songs. They kept bumping into each other at festivals. “It wasn’t like we never met before, but getting asked to join Kreator is an honor,” Leclercq says. “They could have asked anyone in the world, and they asked me, this French guy. It was good for my self-esteem to get chosen by this legendary band. I am still adjusting to using the word ‘we’ when referring to Kreator. I was a little scared because they’ve known each other for so long, but they made me feel completely at home. I played the first song, ‘Violent Revolution,’ at practice, and it was like, here we go.”

It was good for my self-esteem to get chosen by this legendary band.

I am still adjusting to using the word ‘we’ when referring to Kreator.

— Frédéric Leclercq —

Adding Leclercq to the lineup before the pandemic was fortuitous. Of all the members of Kreator, Leclercq is the most versed in creating music via technology. “I was also the one with the computer and the one who knows Pro Tools,” he says. “The social distance wasn’t a problem.”

A bigger issue was that Leclercq wanted to play shows to fully assimilate into the band so fans would get accustomed to seeing him onstage.

Instead, the entire band was put on the shelf just as he got up to speed. “I joined the band. We did two shows and recorded the song ‘666 - World Divided,’” he says. “We were supposed to go on tour, and it was like, Oh fuck, we went flat.”

Despite joining the band in an era of isolation, Leclercq has become one of the two new parts that made Hate Über Alles special. His bandmates universally praise his technical ability, as well as the way he brainstorms new and different ideas

for their music. They jokingly refer to Leclercq as “the university of evil’’ because ideas need to go past him to see if they are evil enough to be on a Kreator album. “I don’t want to say anything bad about Speesy, but Fred took the band to a new level,” Yli-Sirniö says. “Believe it or not, a bass player can do that. The intensity, creativity and new outlook on the songs were very refreshing.”

Leclercq says he’s always had a tinkering instinct, and, fortunately, Kreator are open to suggestions. “When you join a band, it’s like joining a new company with new friends,” he says. “I just tried to observe what was going on for a while. I also tried to let them know that I can’t shut up when I’m involved in music. I have strong opinions. When we started working on songs, I had a say, and they didn’t make me feel shy. They made me feel like it was home.”

The suggestions might seem small, but together they made a big difference on Hate Über Alles. Sometimes it was changing a riff to a minor key. Other times it was reworking a melody. “The song ‘Dying Planet’ has a lot of me and a lot of my death metal influence, and I would tweak melodies and parts,” Leclercq says. “The vibe was already there, but I could improve some [parts] with new and fresh blood.”

“He’s a big help,” Petrozza says. “If I write a song and we go into rehearsals, he helps me arrange things and develop the coolest ideas for transitions. On the new record, he co-wrote several songs. He’s one of those musicians who doesn’t have an ego like so many people in bands. It can get stressful sometimes, but Fred is very clearminded and a great person. He’s one of those musicians that adds to a band without adding an ego.”

—CHAPTER 4—

Enter Arthur Rizk

Arthur Rizk looked at his Instagram account one afternoon in 2018 and saw he had a new follower.

The name caught him off guard. “Does that say Mille Petrozza?” Rizk remembers thinking. “This is kind of weird.”

Rizk looked closer. It was, in fact, Mille Petrozza, the frontman of Kreator, not a fake account or a phishing attempt. “I sent a message just letting him know I loved the band,” Rizk recalls.

Petrozza and Rizk later connected for dinner in Philadelphia during a Kreator tour. The Kreator frontman liked what he heard on Rizk’s work for Power Trip (Nightmare Logic) and Cavalera Conspiracy (Psychosis). In particular, Petrozza admired how Rizk employed a Phil Spector “wall of sound” production style in service of extreme metal. He thought Rizk’s approach and a different generational take on heavy music might match with Kreator.

“He enjoyed that my production was threedimensional,” Rizk says. “It wasn’t all in-yourface all the time with everything sounding modern. It’s more like compositions. He also liked that I seemed to bring the best out of Max [Cavalera]. He said I was able to find new sounds and approaches in legacy bands.”

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People need to realize that we won’t even have concerts if we don’t have peace.

There is no fucking way I’d ever support a war.

If people think I’m not metal because I support peace,

then fuck them.

— Mille Petrozza —

Petrozza touched base again and asked if Rizk was interested in producing the new Kreator album. “I was like, ‘OK, whatever you say,’” Rizk recalls. “A few years later, he said, ‘Do you want to come to Germany and record?’” Rizk joined Kreator for the Hate Über Alles sessions in 2021 at the famed Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin, the site of pivotal recordings by bands like Tangerine Dream and U2. It was by far the biggest job in Rizk’s young production career. “It’s a legendary studio,” Rizk says. “I felt like I should be paying them to be there.”

Petrozza says that Rizk encouraged Kreator to own their identity and legacy as thrash pioneers.

Instead of trying to add elements to a formidable sound, it was more about revisiting foundations and fundamentals. “He said this is full-on oldschool thrash metal,” Petrozza explains. “He said we needed to own it and celebrate the old school.

Arthur didn’t change too much—he was trying to create a vibe, which helped the record sound the way it does now.”

“He’s younger and very enthusiastic,” YliSirniö says. “The human touch is a good thing in the music—so it doesn’t sound too polished. I’m not saying Gods of Violence sounded too polished.

But if you try to be too much of a perfectionist, it’s a bad thing. It’s always a risk to hire a new producer, but we decided to take it. I am very happy with the outcome and excited.”

“We wanted to be more direct,” Petrozza says.

“Maybe the next album will be more bombastic again. We felt like we needed to make a statement since we have this new lineup. It’s just been so powerful when we’ve played with Fred so far. We’d been working on the songs for so long. I knew Arthur would do a great job, and I was very happy with the finished product. I was

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just listening to it earlier today, and I am still very excited.”

—EPILOGUE—

Remember Where You Came From

It won’t be long before Mille Petrozza and the 2022 version of Kreator are back on the road. While a festival appearance in Russia was scrapped for obvious reasons, other festival appearances are in the works, and there is talk of a U.S. tour.

Hate Über Alles, however, enters a much different world than Kreator albums did in the 21st century. In 2022 there are too many metal records, too many television shows, too many apps, too many streaming platforms and too many brand names. It’s a struggle even for the best, most established bands to be heard. “You can write a killer record in your living room, so of course there is more choice,” Petrozza says. “It’s getting harder and harder to stand out, and it’s getting harder for me to discover new music. It’s a blessing and a curse. I don’t take music for granted.

I’ve played it since I was 13 years old. I’m still happy, and I still love being creative. Now I’m more ready than ever to get back on the road.”

Petrozza’s bandmates say they don’t see any expiration point for Petrozza’s creativity or ambitions, or any reason why the 21st century album streak can’t continue. “I’d call him an artist. He has a lot to say, and I think that motivates him,” Leclercq says. “It’s not fake. The band could just tour and play Pleasure to Kill, but Mille still has stuff to express.”

Kuehnemund says Petrozza remains motivated and is as passionate as ever about music: “There’s a healthy dose of aggression in Mille up to this day, so he doesn’t have any difficul-

ties finding energy and passion for his music.

Kreator always tries to better themselves and don’t just follow a successful formula. They still want to prove to themselves and to us that they are a lot more than just thrash metal. They are the best German metal band around these days— and that includes everyone from Accept and Blind Guardian to Helloween and the Scorpions.”

“I think the best thing about this kind of music is it doesn’t follow trends,” Grind says.

“You can stay relevant forever because you don’t hop on what’s popular. One-hit wonders or trend-hoppers don’t stay relevant. In some weird way, just being true to what you do makes you relevant. None of the stuff we like is relevant if you think about what most people like. Kreator does this for love, and in a metal fan’s eyes, that is the measure of relevance, especially if you consider the streak they are on.”

Petrozza has never forgotten where he came from, and tries to remember lessons he learned along the way. One of the most important lessons came during a conversation with the late Ronnie James Dio at a festival in Istanbul in 2004. Dio told Petrozza that musicians didn’t take their craft seriously anymore. Whatever one can say about Mille Petrozza, no one can question his dedication and love of music.

“Music touches people’s souls,” he says.

“Literature and movies can have the same effect. But music is so pure and so true. You never forget the music that touches you.

Metalheads still listen to the same records they listened to as teenagers. This is how long it sticks with you. It’s something that never leaves you, never disappoints you or never lets you down. Even in times like pandemics and war, music can keep you sane.”

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INSIDE ≥

68 ANVIL Fabulous disaster 73 I AM THE NIGHT They am also the black wizards

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

76 KREATOR Perpetual renewal 76 THE LORD Sunngeon synth 78 VIOGRESSION Technically, it's active decay

Everlasting Gobstomper

JULY

CANDY buck the sweetness hardcore trend and go through the extreme metal looking glass on sophomore effort

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Thou with The Body

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The Body with Thou

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The Thou Body

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Body The Body

IT

definitely feels as though there’s an Arthur Slugworth creeping certain sectors of hardcore these days.

CANDY Only rather than promising to make the Veruca Salts, Heaven Is Here Augustus Gloops and Mike Teavees of the world “very rich indeed,” RELAPSE in this parallel universe, the arch-nemesis of Willy Wonka—portrayed in the 1971 Gene Wilder film with cold, ostentatious face-scar ferocity by Günter Meisner, a German actor otherwise mostly known his multi-project, multi-genre performances as Hitler—is whispering in bands’ ears about Coachella appearances, Jimmy Kimmel Live hits, Billy Corgan collabs, and the chance to watch newly-minted stans Jesus Christ pose across approximately six billion social media threads over how uncouth it is to criticize anything that might remotely be considered a gateway to more extreme pastures. ¶ It isn’t even that the (lowercase) en vogue albums alluded to above are (necessarily!) bad. Or that, like Hunter S. Thompson and Quicksand, the majority of

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]

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what they inspire will almost certainly be straight garbage—even if it translates better to the NPR Tiny Desk concert studio than Mindforce or Incendiary! No, the trouble is, as any scrupulous dentist not merely seeking to drive up profits would agree, too much sweetness—in mouths and metal-adjacent subgenres—left unattended can cause decay.

So, it is a bit paradoxical to turn to a band dubbed Candy as a bulwark against saccharine overindulgences. And to be fair, the ascendant, diaspora-ized extreme metal-infused hardcore quintet isn’t the only Charlie Bucket refusing to cash in that Everlasting Gobstopper in this scenario. (See, for example, Loose, Knocked.) On Heaven Is Here, Candy do, however, deliver the most visceral, vicious, interesting and powerful counterpoint to the new zeitgeist yet. The band’s sophomore full-length combines hardcore punkgrind and industrial akin to circa–You Will Never Be One of Us Nails wrapped up in a blanket of noise/ industrial accompaniment that is less the sort of the late Code Orange-ish stuff that would’ve got a second-tier industrial rock band a post-Psalm 69 record deal and an opening slot for KMFDM or Skrew than Through Silver in Blood-esque Neurosising. (Outlier “Kinesthesia” could, delightfully, be a lost track from Godflesh’s Slavestate.)

Now, to keep it real, Nails are a catchier, sharper beast than Candy. And Neurosis are… well, fucking Neurosis. Untouchable. Further, in the Olympics of bands with songs called “World of Shit,” Candy take home the silver—ahead of Nailbomb, but behind Morbid Angel.

Yet, there is something exquisite and fresh about the way Candy summon this maelstrom of sonic violence and aim it directly at essentially every prevailing trend. I guess we’re going to see how sturdy all this new What if we made a hardcore record, except like Pet Sounds? construction actually is, ’cause the fucking tornado just showed up. —SHAWN MACOMBER

ANVIL

3

Impact Is Imminent AFM

A Cinderella story in reverse

Anvil! The Story of Anvil is one of the truly great rockumentaries, an unflinching look at the struggles, heartbreak and, occasionally, transcendence of being an artist. It also propelled its Canadian stars back into the spotlight, as the once-forgotten heavy metal icons were given a second chance. But that was 14 years ago, and Anvil are still hanging on with their 19th full-length, Impact Is Imminent.

The record opens with an introduction by Dave Grohl, which itself is 12 years old, and 7 0 : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

then “Take a Lesson,” about how, “When you know you’re right / follow your heart / never let anyone rip it apart.” That caliber of writing shouldn’t be too surprising coming from frontman/guitarist Steve “Lips” Kudlow, who once penned the couplet, “Life can be just like a Game Boy / Filled with frustration and joy,” but the music rarely rises above the lyrics.

Maybe I’m just bitter I couldn’t review their previous effort, Legal at Last (featuring an angel in Heaven smoking from an anvil-shaped bong), but this sounds as vital and interesting as pretty much any band on their 19th album. Was that last Sabbath record good? Some say yes, but this isn’t Black Sabbath.

Kudlow is 66 years old, and many of us would love to think that even past retirement age we’ll still be releasing albums. When it sounds like Impact Is Imminent, though, there isn’t much else to be excited about. Anvil once had a great story to tell, but they’re not doing anything now that’s worthy of a sequel.

—SHANE MEHLING

AXIOMA

6

Sepsis

T R A N S L AT I O N L O S S

Poison unto itself

“Lugubrious” is the word that hovers over this Cleveland band’s sophomore effort. It’s a weirdly subtle sort of sluggishness, though. Rhythms rush and tumble as often as they retreat; a cursory listen to the guitar riffing and drum patterns would certainly give the impression of speed and ferocity. But something buffets against that pace and confuses the ear. It’s almost like the sound of each drum hit lingers a few microseconds too long, dragging at the beat, or the guitar strings are giving up their notes less willingly than fingers are trying to coax them out. This might also be an artifact of the tuning chosen for those notes, which keeps them all safely away from anything resembling a treble clef, or the relative clarity of the mix that rubs all those dark and dingy notes right up against each other.

Add to that brew the monstrous vocals by Aaron Dallison of Keelhaul and Brain Tentacles, which have never really been a precision instrument—his burly bellow has always had the warm tone of a very human throat rather than the icier wraith-timbre that he more frequently targets across these seven songs. The sum of these parts is a hefty record that feels somehow less dexterous, agile and artistically incisive than it should. It’s possible that this texture was intended, that feeling dragged backward into the logy pulse of otherwise

active music is exactly what Sepsis is supposed to offer. It can also make these songs a chore to go back to, though, which is hardly one for the win column. —DANIEL LAKE

BERATOR

8

Elysian Inferno DARK DESCENT

May result in feelings of aggression and violence

Berator’s new EP is what happens when a man comes back from a stint as Profanatica’s live bassist and decides to pick up where he’d left off with his own black/ death band. Hence, Elysian Inferno, a six-headed flail of an EP cruelly and sadistically crafted by guitarist Richard Olsen, who turned in his latex nun’s habit to focus full-time on Berator. Olsen is joined by (now-former) drummer D.F.K., with support from fellow Chicago diehards of the black/death underground, specifically bassist Tim Pearson and guitarist Pat Clancy. The result is a vicious and snarling assault, a radioactive whirlwind of hook-strewn megariffs, absolutely preposterous drumming, and a choir of apocalyptic growls and screams.

Black/death can be a difficult genre to pin down. Sometimes it means chaotic and pitchblack; sometimes it can be bestial and martial, relentlessly grinding. To these and all the other ways for a black/death abomination to sound, Berator say, “yes.” Across its seemingly meager 20 minutes, Olsen takes Berator to epic and even outright discography-defining places, again and again. It’s easy to think of this as Berator’s debut full-length—and to hear why a juggernaut like Dark Descent herded these goats up quick.

So, whether it’s the skin-flaying dire speed of opener “Sultans of Incest,” the transcendent breakneck rhythms of “Onslaught to Absolution,” the Revenge-ful stomp ‘n’ roll of “Dead Rats,” the unabated horror of “War Lust,” the grinding groove of “Final Crucifixion” or the unholy execution of closer “Swine Cult,” Elysian Inferno covers a lot of ground in its brief playing time, and leaves nothing in its path.

—DUTCH PEARCE

BODYSNATCHER

7

Bleed-Abide M N R K H E AV Y

Trigger warning: DJ scratching

So, I’ll admit to having a bit of a Queen Gertrude the-lady-doth-protesttoo-much-methinks moment when I first saw Bodysnatcher vocalist Kyle Medina declaring,

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“Deathcore kicks ass” in the press release accompanying Bleed-Abide. “A lot of bands shy away from labels they don’t deem ‘cool’ enough,” he adds. “But we don’t give a fuck.” I suppose I’m guilty of this as well—without feeling much guilt over it. Call me an aged caboose waiting to be tugged mentally out of another decade when it comes to certain subgenres, but yeah, I get apprehensive when I see “deathcore” and “kicks ass” in the same sentence. Call it the triumph of experience over hope.

Bodysnatcher actually mete out a helluva lesson in this respect. Are there moments in which the band would have benefited from being a bit more “shy” vis-à-vis deathcore?

Absolutely. (I’m pretty sure I hear DJ recordscratching during the opening of “Abide,” for example, which will activate the nü-metal wars PTSD from which many Decibel readers still suffer.) Most of Bleed-Abide, however, sounds like something Roadrunner would’ve put out in ’95… you know, just before groove death/ thrash stumbled off the cliff into the aforementioned nü-abyss. Think less caveman deathcore than early Hatebreed careening into latter day Suffocation or circa-The End Complete and you’ll be in the right metaphorical section of Hot Topic. Primally alluring, riffs big/undeniable enough to force one to check their premises (within reason! Let’s not go overboard here…).

If Bodysnatcher are the future of deathcore, a lot of us may be inclined to give the subgenre another shot. —SHAWN MACOMBER

BRUTALITY

6

Sempiternity I E M A N Z I PAT I O N PRODUCTIONS

Thank you for being the fan

What originally began as a swan song release for this backend bookender from the original late-’80s/early-’90s Tampa death metal scene has turned into a new lease on life. Throughout 35 on-off years, Brutality have consistently come up short: in living up to their moniker; in never catching the right break; in being part of Nuclear Blast before industry behemoth status. Throughout their discography, material was too often inconsistent—energy would fire up and dissipate like an F1 engine. And while Sempiternity may be a mishmash of source material—two new songs, two re-recorded songs from little-heard and selfreleased 7-inches, four tracks from 2019’s Maryland Deathfest—encouraging progression does exist.

This can be traced in the move forward from early tracks “Crushed” and “Cries of the Forsaken” (both originally taken from 1993’s Screams of Anguish debut and both twice as long 7 2 : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

WHERE THE BLOCKCHAIN MEETS THE WALLET CHAIN

ON

Victor Love’s eighth airdrop as MASTER BOOT RECORD, the Italian electronic iconoclast labels all the song titles after an early Intel microchip. His Personal Computer [ META L B L A DE] definitely uses more than 16 bits of processing power in this chaotic chiptune crusade— every instrument is synthesized. Fewer harsh frequencies and classical interludes than on 2020’s Floppy Disk Overdrive and more MIDI metal this time around. That said, it could use a little more variety to break up the software shredding. After all, 65 minutes of this can be a lot for non-cybernetic ears to process. Still, Moore’s Law applies here in a modified capacity: The quality of Love’s work has increased exponentially since he initiated this program in 2016.

Industrial punks HEALTH’s latest collaboration compilation seriously ups the marquee name value: black metal-curious pop singer Poppy, Decibel Hall of Famers Lamb of God, Nine Inch effin’ Nails. DISCO4 :: PART II [ LO MA VISTA ] strikes an impressively consistent dreamlike tone the whole way through—the notable exception being Randy Blythe and company, whose plunge into a scorched-earth nightmare sure acts as a wake-up call. Their carefully constructed atmosphere can get blown up by adding strong flavors like that, but fortunately most of their co-conspirators play well with others. Even the Body don’t spike the punch too badly. This makes a convincing case for bringing partners to the dance floor.

A tribute/cover album contributor list with entries like Enslaved, Ihsahn, the Ocean, Jonas Renkse (Katatonia) and Godflesh might lead you to expect some serious heaviness. Guess what? All those luminaries (and more) have been brought together to celebrate LUSTMORD’s overlooked 2008 ambient piece [Other]—which, to be fair, featured Aaron Turner, Adam Jones and Buzz Osborne, and was even less heavy than this. The Others [Lustmord Deconstructed] [ P EL AG IC ] dips into post-metal sometimes (Mono, the Ocean), but for the most part lets the artists mess around with electronic doodads. At two hours it works best as background music. Highlights like Zola Jesus’ ethereal take on “Prime” and Crown (not the Crown)’s grunge-dustrial “Element” certainly grab your attention, though.

as need be) to the 7-inch rendering of “Artistic Butchery” and new numbers like “Orchestrated Devastation” and “Fluent in Silence.

The former effectively inserts a Paradise Lostlike minor-key moodiness; the latter throws craggy mid-paced black metal into the Morbid Angel-inspired spittoon with absolutely sublime soloing buffering the rough edges. Almost (but not quite) gone are unnecessarily lengthy and abrupt transitions, a longstanding momentumleeching issue with this band. It would appear a lesson in economy has been learned, as Brutality demonstrate there’s still life in them there swamps. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

CYPHONISM

4

Cosmic Voidance MDD

More like sonic avoidance

Picture this: You’re at a club in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony.

It’s 7:45 p.m. A big-name death metal band—Obituary, say, or maybe Immolation—is headlining tonight, but they won’t be on for another three hours. The local first-of-four takes the stage. They play one song, then another, though you can’t be sure when one ended and the next started.

You ask a fellow showgoer, Hey, who are these guys?

Cyphonism, they reply. Another song begins.

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Same key, same tempo, same blandly technical riffage set to the same double-bass drum patterns. You order a beer and wish you’d stayed home playing video games a little bit longer.

Cosmic Voidance, Cyphonism’s second LP and first since 2016, so thoroughly captures the experience of being underwhelmed by a local opener that it might trigger flashbacks. The German band plays technical death metal, broadly speaking, but they lack the originality that sets the best music in that saturated scene apart. They also lack the mind-melting chops that elevate some of the genre’s lesser bands. What they deliver instead is 35 minutes of thoroughly generic tech-death broken into 10 similarly shaped songs, each one content to tread wellworn, conventional paths. If you like the grooveladen technicality of Decapitated and the jagged brutality of Cryptopsy—and you think you might also like a worse version of those things— look no further.

There’s nothing wrong with Cosmic Voidance, not exactly. But bland competence is rarely more interesting than taking a big swing and missing. When a rambling sample of a Trump speech comes in on “Unholy Agenda,” it seems to stand in for the half-assedness of the entire project. If you don’t have a point to make, just be loud. —BRAD SANDERS

THE DARK ALAMORTÉ

6

Lunacrium Thepsis UNIQUE LEADER

The best way to order pie

The Dark Alamorté describe themselves as “ambient death metal,” which is just straight up not a thing—black metal vox can carry a cosmic current because of its ethereal nature. Pig squeals kill just about any vibe immediately, and even current DMVPs Blood Incantation know to keep that stuff separated. Mostly that classification means that they have synthesizers. Which is cool! The synths do add some nice atmosphere to an 80-minute (woof) album that might otherwise feel monochromatic.

Lunacrium Thepsis starts with the main character yeeting himself off a cliff to his death below, and then working back to how he got to that point. I can’t tell you any of the details because, again, pig squeals. If the backing tracks can be relied on for context clues, nothing good happens. They use a lot of music to tell the story, both within the album and within the songs themselves, and I’m sure that there are many subtle differences.

It just all feels the same. Mid-tempo double kicks, breakdowns, purge, repeat. The ambient keyboards help provide some respite, especially on “Vongrimson Burrows” and “Tempest Barren 74 : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

Furor” (delicious word soup). They just don’t help any of the individual tunes pop.

In a sense, the record does come across as ambient because of how much it becomes a dull roar in the background, so maybe that’s what they meant? They clearly put a lot of work into this. It just lacks the dynamics that would help make the trip down the side of the cliff more scenic. —JEFF TREPPEL

DEAD REGISTER

8

Alive

SEEING RED

Draconian rust

The story goes that goth metal masters Paradise Lost had such a rotten time on their first U.S. tour with Morbid Angel that they didn’t return to the country for a decade—and passed up a spot supporting Type O Negative on the October Rust tour (thanks, David Vincent).

Atlanta’s Dead Register ponder, “What if that PL/Type O tour had happened? And kept going?

And never stopped?” Every song on sophomore LP Alive blends gothic pouting, doomy pounding and choruses that would have been considered poppy in 1993. Surprisingly, the band is a power trio, consisting of percussion, six-string bass and an array of synthesizers. Each sound is so nicely saturated in syrupy distortion that most listeners won’t even know the second stringed instrument is absent.

Though Dead Register’s progenitors are obvious (there’s a whole lot of Paradise Lost on “In Between,” and “Let Me In” veers into Crowded House territory), they never seem posturing, nor does their unconventional instrumentation seem like a gimmick. Some of that credit goes to vocalist and bassist M. Chvasta, who sings with enough character to remind you that there’s a live human being underneath the reverb.

But mostly Dead Register just know how to write a concise, focused song. Alive sometimes wants for variety, particularly in the tempo department (I’d love to hear what they do with a D-beat), but it’s got plenty of substance when so many of the band’s peers just have so much black nail polish. —JOSEPH SCHAFER

DEATHWHITE

5

Grey Everlasting SEASON OF MIST

Discouraging ones

Across three full-lengths, the latest being the aptly titled Grey Everlasting, Deathwhite’s music will put years on you. Melodic doom with gothic overtones is the Pennsylvanian trio’s chosen cross to bear,

but while such depressive styles generally impart a substantial wealth of emotion, Deathwhite consistently fail to convey anything more than moodiness and malaise. As a result, they’re simply energy-suckers—and not in the “drains all the life from your body through crushing sonic oppression” kind of way. The band opts for a textural approach to songwriting, yet the instrumentals lack definition in order to leave an enduring impression. The guitar and bass riffs and their interplay are typically featureless even when supported by the odd blast, double-bass eruption or cascade of fills, and when a guitar lead eventually breaks free, it rarely ascends high enough.

Both goth rock and doom metal live or die by riffs, foreboding atmospheres and especially having a vocalist who can carry the mood. And if the soundscapes are taking a more reticent stance (as they are here), to elevate the songs, the singer must have discernible character, an air of drama and the ability to make the listener feel the distress of the lyrics. Sadly, Deathwhite vocalist/ guitarist LM has none of those traits; his range is stunted (aiming for Jonas Renkse, but sounding more like Staind moper Aaron Lewis) and his melodies are often fruitless, forgettable and overly monotonous—a death sentence for the band (and listener) when the music doesn’t have the vital creative spark, either. —DEAN BROWN

DOLDRUM

8

The Knocking, or the Story of the Sound That Preceded Their Disappearance K ATA FA L Q U E

You can break apart my soul anytime, big boy

Black metal’s superficial affair with stylistic conservatism is coming to a close—the bubble will soon pop and we will be left with a sea of Xeroxed posers, leaving only the creative standing tall and carving out their own domain in this new wasteland. Colorado/Massachusetts trio Doldrum follow their own path, one initially forged in the mid-’90s by the select few and left untouched and overgrown in the USBM scene.

On the band’s debut full-length (not to be confused with their 2020 demo of a similar title), Doldrum, boasting members of Erraunt, Gallows and Vpaahsalbrox amongst their membership, revisit the strange world once crafted by “Norweird” musicians like Carl-Michael Eide and Cornelius Jakhelln, but with their own distinct and charismatic swagger. Concentrating more on immediacy and intensity compared to the Norwegian “post-black metal” movement that lasted from the mid-’90s to the

turn of the millennium, The Knocking’s presence is a satisfying, if incensing listen, filled with headbanging, but also thought-provoking riffs and a bizarre atmosphere.

Guitarist and bassist Jimmy Oh-My-Back (the band takes their stage names from old miners) was once recorded saying he wanted Doldrum to be distinctly “American” metal, set aside from USBM’s atmospherics and Euro worship. Using strange chords, drummer The Terrific Don McKinnon’s complex rhythms, and a unique, throaty vocal presence from frontman Rat Deveaux, Doldrum’s topsy-turvy folk horror world is given vivid life on their first album. Go through the door. Follow The Knocking through the corridor to the door beneath the floor. Experience the Doldrum story for yourself. —JON ROSENTHAL

EPITAPHE

8

II

A E S T H E T I C D E AT H

Retombed

Taking the inverted black metal synonymous with their Gallic homeland, the controlled discordance of Immolation and the subterranean death/doom of Incantation, and pairing those imperial styles with the graceful elegance of progressive rock and neofolk, Epitaphe exist in a flame-engulfed world of seismic contrasts. With II, the closest contemporary comparison to what Epitaphe have crafted is Inter Arma, particularly their Sulphur English masterwork. Both bands share common inspirations and can scorch earth at will, while also possessing the adroit ability to rise above their individual trails of destruction with one agile converging movement.

The French four-piece starts II in restrained fashion, with the acoustic refrains of “Sycomore,” before unveiling their elaborate ideas across three near-20-minute compositions—“Celestial,” “Melancholia” and “Insignificant”—that are striking in their sonic density, naturalistic flow, powerful dynamism, and grandiloquent extremity. This hellscape triumvirate expands panoramically upon the strengths of Epitaphe’s 2019 debut, I—an LP that acted as a through-line between the Ruins of Beverast’s multi-genre experimentalism and Portal’s black/death surrealism.

II, as a whole, however, puts greater emphasis on atmosphere, where the shadows elicit the same force as the form, aided by a resounding production courtesy of avant-doom master Greg Chandler of Esoteric and Lychgate. Indeed, the artistic endeavors of Chandler are another significant stylistic influence on the long-form writing of Epitaphe, and the band’s ability to convey beauty in terror is not only a sight to behold, but a main reason why these Frenchmen

hold the listener’s focus rigid across II’s runtime.

This record is made for extreme metal connoisseurs, mes amies. —DEAN BROWN

GRAYWAVE

7

Rebirth

CHURCH ROAD

Pour your misery down

The latest artist to move into Church Road, the U.K.’s most metal zip code, is Birmingham-based busy bee Graywave. The underground label run by husband-and-wife duo Sammy Urwin and Justine Jones (also of new new wave of British metallers Employed to Serve) has been dutifully serving us Svalbard, Palm Reader and Tuskar; and now the newest resident is Jess Webberley, who has been putting out a slew of singles under the Graywave banner since 2019.

Rebirth is not intended to be cryptic; it defiantly sets Webberley’s intention as a forceful reckoning for British music. The EP takes all the grit and grime of the Midlands’ rock past and does it proud. Welding Banshees, Beth Gibbons and Black Sabbath, there is both an ice-cold sparkle and an immense tense heftiness within Rebirth. That somnolent shoegaze is peppered with a late-’90s alt-American clang—a knowing nod to Deftones with its rattle of the chain wallet and scuff of the oversized jeans, but with a very British Shirley Manson/Siouxsie snarl.

But it’s also no pastiche of times gone by; Rebirth is a resurrection of music’s angsty past, and displays it with new scars and new glimmers of triumph. This is the sound of one of the U.K.’s most exciting artists planting their own flag in a scene that is reinventing itself and revealing fresh promise. —LOUISE BROWN

I AM THE NIGHT

8

While the Gods Are Sleeping S VA R T

Thus spake the right spirit

Decibel hinted at the imperial greatness of Finland’s I Am the Night when the pandemic sun was at its zenith last year. The group’s debut single Hear Me O’ Unmaker—featuring a stunningly competent cover of Emperor’s “The Acclamation of Bonds”—blazed our respective northern skies. For those that missed the longboat, I Am the Night is Markus Vanhala’s (Insomnium, Omnium Gatherum) tribute to the halcyon days of Nordic black metal, specifically the edge of the blade where Emperor and Dissection converge. The aforementioned references sufficiently inform what to expect from While the Gods Are Sleeping.

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While there have been others (hello, Stormkeep!) that have donned the shoulder spikes and summoned the (diabolical) full moon with reverence, I Am the Night are the apex. Much of what Vanhala invokes could be heard as simple emulation—it’s actually not. Tracks like “Hear Me O’ Unmaker,” “Ode to the Nightsky” and “Among the Unseen Ones” cast recognizable shadows, but ’neath their frosty, celestial nightglow lies an undeniable work ethic. Vocalist Okko Solanterä (Horizon Ignited) is the business end of I Am the Nightsky’s scythe. He cuts through Vanhala’s soaring motifs, an evil wizard tasked with an unenviable goal of embodying Ihsahn and Pest (Obtained Enslavement). Rhythmically, drummer Waltteri Väyrynen and bassist Janne Markkanen deftly hold the fort on While the Gods Are Sleeping. They’re intense enough—check out “Dawnbearer” and “The Owl”—but not intrusive.

That which was old is new again with I Am the Night, and while there’s not a lot of growth in the expression, While the Gods Are Sleeping is greater than the sum of its “Necrolord blue” parts. —CHRIS DICK

INANIMATE EXISTENCE

7

The Masquerade THE ARTISAN ERA

Mask mandate

Prog-death players Inanimate Existence have been extremely prolific since forming a decade ago—even if their previous five LPs have mostly flown under the radar due to the scene being beyond-stacked. For the unfamiliar, this band likes grandstanding arrangements with a production that is polished, but not compressed. They let fly with jaw-dropping musical crossfire; can frame actual songs out of an array of incisive phrases and dynamic trade-offs; and possess an unnecessary urge to color the background with symphonic decorations intended to make the songs appear grander than they are. The latter stylistic trait has unfortunately survived on The Masquerade, and while the orchestration can be somewhat distracting in its artificiality, it doesn’t ruin album six due to how upfront the rest of the instruments and Cameron Porras’ intestinal bellows are.

Opener “Endless Waves” is neoclassical Decrepit Birth in its near-baroque brutality, while “Buried Beneath Scars” channels prime tech-thrash in its hyper-speed riff surges, standout melodic soloing and procession of impressive tempo changes. Those songs are only bettered by the Obscura-worthy “Into the Underworld,” which strikes a potent balance between ferocity and classiness in its construction. However, similar quality does continue during the record’s 7 6 : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

dying moments, with “Heart of the Inferno” and “Ending the Ritual” both containing more symbiotic, intense interplay. Will all of that be enough to garner Inanimate Existence acclaim when tech/prog bands, old and new, are so abundant and still pushing the boundaries of composition and performance? Time will tell. But The Masquerade certainly brings the band’s name to life.

—DEAN BROWN

KREATOR

9

Hate Über Alles NUCLEAR BLAST

We will rise. They will fall

Over the last six years, it has become frighteningly easy to succumb to hatred. It feels as though the entire world, from the environment to society, is imploding around us. Despair over the state of the world inevitably leads to blind rage, which is what the chaos merchants—from Putin to Trump—want. Kreator’s Mille Petrozza boldly drew a line in the sand this past spring, saying, “Kreator stands for peace, music and a worldwide unity of like-minded individuals, regardless of cultural, religious or material background. Call me a naive hippie or find a new favorite band.”

On Hate Über Alles, Petrozza and his mates have channeled that despair and rage to create a record that explodes with passion, energy and surprising empathy. They’ve been on one helluva roll over the past two decades, and the new LP succeeds in large part thanks to its focus on the world’s current existential crisis. Although Kreator’s forte has always been intense, speedriddled thrash, the dynamics on display lend a remarkable sense of balance to the record.

“Crush the Tyrants” fittingly moves at a stomping pace and “Strongest of the Strong” launches into an irresistible mid-tempo groove, while “Midnight Sun” and the surprisingly wistful “Become Immortal” focus more on melody.

Meanwhile, Petrozza serves up some delicious blasphemy on the delightfully raucous “Killer of Jesus,” his best such tune since “Enemy of God.” COVID has nothing on hatred’s contagiousness, and when Petrozza snarls on the ferocious title track, “Hate is the virus of this world,” he couldn’t be more accurate. —ADRIEN BEGRAND

THE LORD

8

Forest Nocturne S O U T H E R N LO R D

…and the Lord riffeth

Okay, hear me out: Here’s a new album from one of the dudes from Sunn O))), except instead of monolithic droning doom, it’s a guitar-driven, death

metal-influenced original score for a nonexistent vampire flick. Believe me, my own WTF alarm resounds. To be more specific, Greg Anderson, inspired by sojourns through the surviving forests of the American West Coast, has crafted an album of dark ambient/vampiric dungeon guitar that both defies and satisfies your expectations.

With a guitar hook that seems like a lost Entombed intro looped, we are welcomed into the candlelit halls of Forest Nocturne, the Lord’s debut album. Surprises lurk around every corner of this foreboding, Dan Seagrave-rendered old manse. Of course, Anderson can’t help but drone, but beneath and within these plaintive dirges lies the real black magic. With the Lord, Anderson leans into his love for John Carpenter and Bernard Herrmann. The second track, “Church of Herrmann,” not only for its title, but also for all its tension-building organ melodies, is clearly an homage to the latter. The final three tracks—the last of which features Mayhem’s vocalist and frequent Sunn O))) collaborator Atilla Csihar—seem to take place outside the halls of the house of the Lord, out in the dark forest where the night is so thick there is only the oppressive, nearly subsonic rumble of the trees as they collude in their secret subterranean language.

Anderson delivers a darkly unnerving experience with the Lord’s debut album, altogether a surprising affair, and a truly unique approach to both drone and dark ambient. —DUTCH PEARCE

OBSCENE

8

… From Dead Horizon to Dead Horizon B LO O D H A R V E S T

The Pink Album

When Indianapolis death metal quartet Obscene introduced their brand of raw-wound old-school chug to the world by way of 2020’s The Inhabitable Dark, they favored black-and-white with a shock of red on the cover art. This color-coding on this pen-and-ink hellscape operates as neat shorthand in death metal.

Warning: raw primitivism ahead.

Engage fully with the pummeling arrangements on The Inhabitable Dark and one might enter a fugue state from which the only memory is of Dian Fossey kissing your hand. … From Dead Horizon to Dead Horizon is more melodically bold, opening up the canvas. Yeah, still plenty for the rivet-headed silverback and spouse to dance to, but the prospect of more grandiose musical ideas offers Michael Morgan an opportunity to complement his Gavin Ward-style rhythm guitar with Cirque du Soleil-style fretboard stunt work.

The huge, if under-evolved, melodies and pristine mastering job by Dan Swanö stage all this nicely. But Obscene’s ace in the hole—please, do

not Google that—is Kyle Shaw’s sandpaper beastthroat. One day, in his dotage, he’s going to go on one of those reality shows that trace your genealogy to discover that he was related to Martin van Drunen all along. Obscene’s sound sure is aligned with that martial quarter of Euro death metal: mid-paced, relentless kicks; total mosh fodder; music to crush lambic beers to; mayo on fries for ballast. Shaw sounds hungry, like they had to evacuate the mic from his stomach after tracking “Deathless Demigod,” one of many songs to suggest that Obscene have the appetite to make it in this sick, ugly business. —JONATHAN HORSLEY

ORIGIN

7

Chaosmos NUCLEAR BLAST

ADDM: attention deficit death metal

New Line Cinema presents Straight Outta Topeka, erupting Midwestern metal mayhem out of the Sunflower State. Led by Paul “The Quasar” Ryan, his crew Origin evades a quarter-century of speed traps and groove sinkholes in tech-death-defying Technicolor. Carry on, wayward sons; you’re in Kansas evermore.

“I personally tried to combine elements of every era stylistically of each album in this release,” posted Ryan, and indeed, eighth asteroid Chaosmos extracts the best of a band with nothing left to prove but everything on point.

From the blunt force trauma of their millennial full-length bow and early-years ADHD to 2008 catalog peak Antithesis—gleaming 23rd century specimen of speed, precision and density—Origin’s latest big bang compresses and expands simultaneously. Sifting through the quartet’s biogenesis, Chaosmos builds on the bones of its immediate predecessors to recalibrate a more impactful future.

Beginning with 2014’s Omnipresent, third vocal grizzly Jason Keyser ushered in a more homogeneous sound: modulated tempos, streamlined arrangements, polished and locked tones. Unparalleled Universe blurred matters further three years later, but the third time proves the charm for Ryan, Keyser, and ion-thrusting engine room Mike Flores and John Longstreth. Nearly all eight tracks summate Origin in a song: quantum complexities resolved organically.

Opener “Ecophagy” lives up to its meaning as a consumptive ecosystem, shuddering and stampeding through an end event in only 4:08; yet, its micro-opera matches the title cut’s churning, burning emulsion, as Ryan’s hornet tone unleashes a corkscrew riff and OG strut.

“Decolonizer” spurs a grindcore-spiked banger, “Cullscape” decompresses shrieking pummel into proggy grace notes and 11-minute closer “Heat

RUMBLY RU MBLY THROUGH A SPEAKER THROUGH

Into Everlasting Piles

BY DUTCH PEARCE

KATABASILISK

Sunset of Solemn Silhouettes CROWN & THRONE/ MURDER ON PONCE

One of last year’s most captivating demos of synth-stricken raw black metal, Sunset of Solemn Silhouettes, Katabasilisk’s debut, has been mercifully reissued in a large enough quantity of protapes that it’s finally attainable. Black metal this haunted demands to be heard in its intended undead format. At only three tracks, this Philadelphia solo project’s debut may not seem like much, but there’s a reason this release has been reissued across various formats by different labels. A dungeon synth intro reminiscent of the late, beyond-great Secret Stairways; a catchy, sick riff-driven and eponymous black metal paean; and an ethereal outro, like a sustained final gasp— that’s all you get.

SPESIMIN

Rotting on the Vine SELF-RELEASED

Philadelphia-based Demo:listen alumni Spesimin are back with Rotting on the Vine, another fivesong demo of riff-centric, catchy death metal with their patent thrash-punk sensibilities not just thrown in, but honed to a deadly sharp point. The trio was tight on its demo, but this new tape sounds like a lot of time was spent practicing over the last two years.

Seriously, a track like the hook-infested “Nest of Nightmares” sounds at once so natural and yet unlike anything you’ve heard other bands getting up to lately. Track after track, Spesimin check all the death metal boxes with moxie and subtle originality—and also with lots of solos. An absolutely mandatory release!

REPUTDEATH

Dissecting Goryfication T R A N S Y LV A N I A N R E C O R D I N G S

Reputdeath have been around for over 10 years, but Dissecting Goryfication is the first of their releases to make an impact stateside, thanks to Transylvanian Recordings. With guest

vocals on the second track by Takashi Tanaka (Anatomia, Wormridden), Reputdeath’s eighth demo proves that it’s better late than never to get into a sick band. With HM-2 pedals stacked and cranked, the Malaysian trio spends most of this one slowly mowing through four tracks of sopping wet deathdoom punishment. This is buzzsaw death metal, except the saw’s bogged down by the sheer amount of flesh to chew through—plus vocals that’ll dredge up your last meal.

Incredibly foul!

LEFT CROSS

Promo 2022 STYGIAN BLACK HAND

The three songs that compose this Promo 2022 tape represent the latest material from Left Cross, RVA’s hardest-hitting death metal band. Matter of fact, these three tracks hit so hard that Left Cross sound like they’ve got their finger on the big, red button, ready to launch into a full-scale death/war metal hybrid assault. These have to be three of their heaviest songs to date, and so far they’re only available to those who were lucky enough to catch them on their recent East Coast tour.

For now, you’ll have to trust me: If these songs are any indication, Left Cross are on the brink of total domination.

HERSKER

Befængt CALIGARI

Hersker are something like blackened punk with a massive and somber sound. The two black-bag-masked musicians behind Hersker could be any one of the usual suspects from the Copenhagen scene.

Doesn’t matter, though, because before us blares a sound that’s novel and timeless, at times something like TSOL meets Circle the Wagons-era Wagons -era Darkthrone. That’s only the tip of the iceberg, though. Most bands that take up this style do so with a sense of levity or raw sloppiness, but thanks to a perfect post-punk guitar tone, Hersker keep their existential anti-anthems grounded in the despondent.

Not to be missed!

D E C I B E L : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : 7 7

Death” detonates a Maiden-kissed epic. Truly, Chaosmos stretches a 25-year gestation into a half century of deathly extremity. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

SOREPTION

5

Jord

UNIQUE LEADER

An earth crisis

Technical death metal is in an odd position these days. In addition to technical, it’s long been a technological form—one focused on digital preamplification, computer-assisted collaboration, and editing so precise it can only be expressed in the stark black and white of binary code. With that precision has come a parasocial attention economy preying on the anxieties of would-be shredders via YouTube and TikTok. In short, tech-death’s focus on playing and precision has come at the detriment of, y’know… music.

But that’s not the case for everyone. Sweden’s Soreption have delivered some unusually tuneful music in the past. Their 2014 record Engineering the Void had more than its fair share of memorable melodies, and its 2018 follow-up Monument of the End was more of the same (but not in a bad way).

Their latest, Jord, falters, though. It’s precise, relentless and a little pointless. The guitars, bass and drums often blend into an atonal percussive march. For music this focused, you’d think there would be more to capture a listener’s interest, but the songs pulse rather than progress when there isn’t a sample or guest solo laying atop the foundation.

And yes, they’re all guest solos—former guitarist Mikael Almgren has no credit on Jord. In his absence, the band lacks a distinct melodic identity. Metal ought to be more than a drum line composed in a PlayStation. —JOSEPH SCHAFER

SUPPRESSION

8

The Sorrow of Soul Through Flesh UNSPEAKABLE AXE

Soundtrack for the blind

Present humanity has learned sweet FA from the past, despite one of the most popular sayings in the history of sayings being, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Nazi and racist shit-hammers roam amongst us with impunity.

Mother Nature is about to do away with all of us. People still think inflation is the President’s fault. Church types and Republicans will hangwring and ask, “What about the children?” while committing indignities to children.

Cattle Decapitation weren’t wrong to punctuate 7 8 : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

“We Are Horrible People” with the fact we are “idiots” in addition to being horrible. Everything is falling apart, but the metal community can claim awareness of at least one quartet of dudes who have learned from the past for advancement in the present.

The dudes in question are Chile’s Suppression, whose debut full-length is loaded with references to classic Pestilence, Possessed, Death and Timeghoul played in a way that’ll lump them in with the Nucleuses, Desolation Realms and Blood Incantations of the world. The offkilter element provided by Cristopher Zapata’s catastrophically tipsy drumming contrasted with Pablo Cortés’ bass warmth snakes around guitarist Daniel Poblete firing out sidewinding riffing reminiscent of Sadus, Cynic’s demos and fellow countrymen Mental Devastation. Combined, The Sorrow of Soul Through Flesh presents like a poorly-capped pressure chamber ready to erupt skyward or collapse downward. It may not prevent the sociopolitical/environmental apocalypse, but goddammit if “Overfeeding Gaps” and “Lost Eyes” aren’t the perfect accompaniment to our gaily skipping towards and through the end times. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

VIOGRESSION

8

3rd Stage of Decay M O R I B U N D / S ATA N AT H

Vein nectar of the gods

Three decades have passed since the last LP from Wisconsin death-dealers Viogression. Back in 1991, their Expound and Exhort debut was a lost masterpiece before it was eventually reissued. Viogression supported that record by touring with genre legends Death and Pestilence. A year later, their 1992 sophomore record Passage channeled Obituary by way of the Great Lakes. Now the resurrected project kicks off their coffin lid with their comeback record, 3rd Stage of Decay.

Despite the title’s sanguinary excellence, “Nectar of Veins” starts with a clunky synthphonic intro. But once the guitars start slicing a couple minutes in, the blood spillage is relentless. The thick riffs bookending “Under the Riverbed” confirms the band’s Cause of Death influence hasn’t withered with time. But that song also reflects a band that has expanded to slyly welcome splashes of shred. With back-toback rippers like “Death Dive” and “3 Skulls,” the tempos are friskier than the largely lumbering Passage.

Thankfully, Viogression also indulge the atmospheric whims that made their debut so notable.

“From Dust” feels like it escaped Tiamat’s mountains of doom before descending into deaththrash chaos. Later, “Cipher” achieves haunting

Opethian beauty with a guest solo from ex-Cynic guitarist Jason Göbel. Despite their Tampa-fried aggression, “Caliginous Conflagration” and “Murder” hit some mid-album staleness. But the mix from Chris Djuricic and mastering by Dave Otero nail a balance between melody and malice.

Brian DeNeffe’s rasp sounds downright nightmarish on “Blood Stained Path.” Jason Hellman’s bass emerges from the muck with a fantastic fucking tone. This is an album of striking successes minimally bruised by its few missteps.

—SEAN FRASIER

WEREWOLVES

9

From the Cave to the Grave PROSTHETIC

You suffer. Here’s why

Merriam-Webster defines the term “blackened deathgrind” as a completely worthless locution with no rhetorical merit whatsoever. Roget’s Thesaurus catalogs it as the oratorical equivalent of a “condom with a moonroof” and (intriguingly) a “ketchup packet in the ol’ Kenmore.” But wait—is it really so unhelpful to daisy-chain a series of gormless generalities in order to describe an artistic exercise to its potential consumers? My impulse is to passionately argue yes. Those trace minerals deposited by The Somberlain, World Downfall and De Profundis are irrevocably mixed within our groundwater, and we all essentially lap from the same scummy pool.

Blackened deathgrind? Linguistic toilet paper.

Surely, we can do better.

So, Werewolves: a misanthropic Aussie braintrust with direct ties to Psycroptic, the Amenta, Akercocke and Ruins (among scads of others). Sure, it’s reductive to merely wave at the band’s genealogy and say that Werewolves have inherited Ruins dramatic anhedonia, Psycroptic’s explosive violent temper and Akercoke’s winningly erudite chauvinism, but since I’ve painted myself into a corner by taking blackened deathgrind off the table, there you go.

The band plays with Riot-caliber precision and drum articulation (both in performance and on record), and they’re so meticulous that some folks may be tempted to label Werewolves as “tech.” To those so inclined I say, hey, you do you (but you’re doing you way fucking wrong).

The magnificent impatience of the riffs recalls the mighty Dark Angel, and the lyrics read like Bret Easton Ellis ghostwriting for Exhorder. Call it what you like and will, ladies and gentlemen.

Call it blackened Aussie tech-deathgrind if you must, but have yourself a look-see. Werewolves are a volatilized snifter of some seriously topshelf shit, regardless of the nomenclature.

—FORREST PITTS

by

EUGENE S. ROBINSON

YOU HAVE A FRIEND IN

GWAR S

ome crazy stuff you recognize right away. Getting drunk on the New York City subway, going uptown when you wanted to go downtown, then coursecorrecting by jumping on the tracks to crawl under a train to get to the other side? I recognized while I was doing it: insane.

But I still did it.

Jumping into a 1962 Ford Econoline SuperVan and driving across a pre-MTV America to play hardcore in 1983? At the time, not so insane.

Mostly because the year before we had done it in a mini-pick-up truck.

Which means two members had to sit with their knees drawn up under a shell next to bass cabinets while hoping the driver and whoever was in shotgun didn’t crash.

Just for a point of reference, Steve Ballinger, Whipping Boy’s guitarist, was 6’6” and 270 pounds. So, the fit was tight, the drive perilous and, more than that, pre-Internet all tours were set up by letter or telephone calls. So, you had no idea what you were walking into (or, in this case, driving into).

But is there anything that could have ever prepared us for Virginia?

“Is that his sister?” We nodded

8 0 : J U LY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

at who we were told our hosts were going to be. We were just checking.

“That’s his sister.” They looked like any other set of 20-year-olds.

Black T-shirts, dirty blonde hair.

Then they kissed. On the mouth.

Not like sister and brother, but like lovers. And then they laughed. Having never been to Virginia before, we shrugged.

Later, sitting in the club waiting, the band playing with us rolled in. Bang Gang was their name. They gave us their new record. She Ran… But We Ran Faster!!

On the cover was a woman who had either just been raped or was running from being raped.

Virginia? We didn’t know.

The only other conversation I remember having was with a drunken woman who claimed she was the ex of the bass player from Bang Gang. She had apparently bought him all of his bass gear in an effort to win him back. It had failed. She looked at me. I nodded in sympathy and understanding.

In fact, I didn’t have the slightest idea about what was going on.

Outside of this: Virginia.

Years later, I noted the ascent of GWAR. I dug the aesthetic and

cheered on their rise, even if I had had no personal interest in seeing them. I mean, Sid and Marty Krofft had always creeped me out as a kid, and GWAR in their oversized prosthetics reminded me of H.R. Pufnstuf.

But then a call.

“Come to the show, man.” It was Scott Bryant from Ghoul. They were opening for GWAR. “Dave wants to see you. He says you gotta come!”

Of course, there was internet, and when I looked up Dave Brockie, I found out he’s Oderus Urungus.

More than that, it all starts coming back to me. We hung out that night in Virginia. His birthday was two days after mine and a year later.

Our bonding was astrological, and he was both smart and funny as fuck. And now they were playing in Santa Cruz, 20 minutes from me, and I had to go.

The hope, you see, was that he could give me some clarity on the whole Virginia thing, which had now just seemed like a fever dream.

Before that, though, Ghoul had asked if I would run onstage when they played and fight their Frankenstein Uncle Sam monster. I could say no to none of this.

So, I show up, late. Ghoul are about to go on and they brief me on the set-up and it’s Go Time. I rush out to attack Frankenstein Uncle Sam during a song. But see, the thing about those foam prosthetics is that because they were foam, you might expect them to be soft. They, however, were NOT soft, and when the now-eight-foot-tall Sam cracked me on top of my head with his giant foam fist, I saw silver light and realized the possibility of dying up there on that stage was uncomfortably high. And I fight for FUN in my spare time.

I survive the show, but staggering backstage right after the song is done, I find Brockie. We hug. He’s high. I’m brain-boggled. We chat slow, like we’re underwater. Or it seemed that way. We talked about people we knew, their tour, and then finally why I was there.

“So, hey man… um… Virginia?”

He inhaled on whatever he was smoking. “Virginia?” Long pause.

Then, “Yeaaaaah, man. Virginia.”

And he sighed.

He died a few months later. I don’t know if I ever got him, but I missed what I got: the only man I ever met who could explain Virginia to me.

ILLUSTRATION BY ED LUCE

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