Decibel Magazine #194 - December 2020

SWANS

CHILDREN OF GOD HALL OF FAME

INCANTATION SECTS & VIOLENCE

MACABRE FULL-TIME KILLERS

TOMBS WEATHERING THE STORM

REFUSE/RESIST

ARMORED

SAINT

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DECEMBER 2020 // No. 194

ALSO

E Y E S T O T H E S K Y SÓLSTAFIR UNANIMATED BLOOD INCANTATION ETERNAL CHAMPION BOTANIST THE OCEAN PORTRAYAL OF GUILT OF FEATHER AND BONE

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EXTREMELY EXTREME

December 2020 [R 194] decibelmagazine.com

upfront

features

12 metal muthas Our first proper plural

18 eternal champion Getting into knives

30 macabre Murder junkies

14 low culture Daddy’s girl

20 of feather and bone You smell that?

32 incantation The cult never dies

15 no corporate beer Did you ever take the time to listen to your beer?

22 botanist Cleansing plague

34 sólstafir Shine a little love

24 the ocean Closing the book on pre-history

36 q&a: tombs Regrets, Mike Hill has a few, but they can’t stop him now

16 in the studio:

unanimated Paid in blood

26 celestial season Doomed to repeat

reviews 40 the decibel

hall of fame Swans’ interpretation of the American gospel leads them past the Iron Curtain with avant-garde masterpiece Children of God

28 portrayal of guilt Alone together

50

61 lead review Eternal Champion vanquish any notion of a sophomore slump, armed with the razor-sharp Ravening Iron 62 album reviews Releases from bands that feel better now than they did 20 years ago in March of 2020, including Idle Hands, Nothing and Pallbearer 80 damage ink Didn’t mean to make you cry

ARMORED

SAINT Salvation of the Nation COVER STORY COVER AND CONTENTS PHOTOS BY HRISTO SHINDOV

Decibel (ISSN 1557-2137) is published monthly by Red Flag Media, Inc., 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor, 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, 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor, Philadelphia PA 19107. © 2020 by Red Flag Media, Inc. ISSN 1557-2137 | USPS 023142 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher is strictly prohibited.

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• H EAV Y W EIG H T 1 8 0 g T R I P L E B L AC K V I N Y L • L I M I T E D E D IT IO N M E X ICAN F L AG T R I P L E C O L O U R E D V I NYL • DELUXE 2 CD BOOK FORMAT • 2 C D D I G I PA K OUT NOVEMBER 20, 2020 Facebook.com/ironmaiden

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REFUSE/RESIST

December 2020 [T194]

Some of you may have noticed that

the last of issue of Decibel was a return to our “normal” monthly page count, a hefty step up from the pandemicinduced “Virginia Slims edition” (as one astute reader called it) we’ve been forced to publish for the previous five months. This month, we’ve maintained that satisfying bulk, thanks in large part to our ad sales director James Lewis, who has worked tirelessly in a climate where many labels were reluctant to release new albums (and when they did, they were often understandably hesitant to spend on them).

Decibel’s long-suffering art director Mike Wohlberg hasn’t had to polish any sales pitches, but in scant moments that no reasonable person would describe as “downtime” between our monthly issues since May, he’s had to design not one, but two books. The latest of which is a 540-page fucking behemoth, which we’ve been hammering away at for the past three years (more on that next month).

When the U.S. went into lockdown back in mid-March, our intrepid customer service guru Patty Moran still managed to safely get to our abandoned office twice a week to process the orders in the Decibel webstore. If you’ve ordered anything from us since the start of the pandemic, it was Patty who made sure that, even if you ran out of toilet paper, your bathroom was stocked with essential Decibel items.

I’ve not seen James since he left my home office in March. I’ve not seen Mike since last December at LAX when we departed victoriously from Metal & Beer Fest: Los Angeles. I don’t think I’ve seen Patty since I was at the home office the day before last year’s Philly edition of Metal & Beer Fest. I will, of course, meet up with each of them again at some point, and that is largely thanks to both the remarkable asskicking they’ve done since March, and the continued support from our advertisers—and from you, dear reader, at a time when very little was certain. It won’t be forgotten. albert mudrian, Editor-in-Chief

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Albert Mudrian

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Aaron Salsbury aaron@decibelmagazine.com

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READER OF THE

MONTH they love.

You can’t get more genuine than that. Since the beginning of the pandemic, clearly people have more time on their hands, and so I think we are starting to see a lot of additional metal podcasters throwing George Washburn their hats in the ring.

Adamstown, MD I know a lot of artists, unable to tour, are also turning to podcasting You and a number of other like-minded metal as a way of reaching their fans. And as far as fans—including former reader of the month I’m concerned, the more the merrier. Metalheads Will Cook—host a long-running show called Podcast is all about celebrating the metal commuMetalheads Podcast. How have you seen the nity, and we think of it as one big metal family. metal podcast landscape change since the start of the pandemic?

I started the Metalheads Podcast a little over six years ago as just two people, and over the years we have expanded to a crew of six: Jay Dickinson, Will Cook, John Comisky, Matt Stewart and Markisan Naso. I feel the chemistry that everyone brings to the team is what makes us special. It’s not just a dry podcast where we throw facts and opinions at you; this is a group of friends together for an evening to drink beer and talk about the music

10 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

MHP is infamous for exhaustive episodes several hours in length. What’s the longest you’ve ever had a guest sit through an episode?

So, as luck would have it, our longest episode ever was just a few months ago, and the guest was none other than Decibel’s James Lewis.

We asked him to come on for our 2020 midyear episode where we drank a lot of beer and counted down our top 25 albums from the first half of 2020. Poor James was reluctant to come

on in the first place, and then when he came on, the episode ended up running over seven hours long. Normally, our episodes run three to four hours. We are definitely a longform podcast, but this one was monstrous. James was a great sport, and we look forward to having him on again.

Like your co-hosts, you’re a huge craft beer enthusiast. What are the top three beers you’ve had in 2020?

While all of the Metalheads Podcast crew are craft beer enthusiasts, I’m definitely the low man on that totem pole. The other guys are way more active with hunting down beers.

However, I still pick up my fair share. In podcast fashion, I’ll count down my top three from this year so far. In the No. 3 spot is Black Death from Mad Science Brewing, just a few miles from my house. It’s a Black IPA and looks very metal. For my No. 2, I will go with Baltimore’s Nepenthe Brewing and their Alpaca Fracas! Double IPA. My No. 1 is Adroit Theory and their Evangelion XIII Bardiel.

I’m going to get stabbed by Will, but this is a hazy (a no-no word on the pod) triple IPA. I live about a half-hour from Adroit Theory, and Mark Osborne, the owner, makes a ton of great-tasting beer with wickedly metallooking artwork. One of their artists did our podcast artwork. I would recommend trying anything from this brewery.

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

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

Well, here are the records that we spun most in between logging first and third graders in and out of Google Classroom all day.

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

This Month’s Mutha: Margo Pedrick (left) This Month’s Step-Mutha: Kittye Bright (right) Mutha and Step-Mutha of Isaac Faulk of Blood Incantation/Wayfarer

Tell us a little about yourselves.

Active participation in music runs through our extended family. I also teach Tai Chi and ride horses. Love of family, friends and the ongoing exploration of what it is to be a creative human being keep me engaged in life.

A highlight of 2019 was going to the Fire in the Mountains festival!

KITTYE BRIGHT: I’ve always loved singing harmonies, from choirs to folksy duos and groups. For my day job, I work with families, lawyers and judges as a child custody evaluator.

MARGO PEDRICK:

Did either of you have any kind of influence on Isaac’s musical evolution?

When I was nine months pregnant with Isaac, his dad and I joined others on the Boulder Pearl Street Mall to play a benefit concert for the rainforest. I stood right in front of the drummer and bassist, enjoying Isaac’s rhythmic in utero movements! I ponder that perhaps Isaac’s drive to explore way beyond feel-good music is his way of forging a trail toward wholeness. Light needs dark, yin needs yang.

KB: I encouraged Suzuki piano lessons, saxophone in the fifth grade, and bass guitar and drum lessons in high school. His dad and I, along with Margo and her two cousins, performed together for a few years as the Little Snake River Band. Whether that was a positive or negative influence on Isaac is still up for debate.

MP:

To the best of our knowledge, Margo, you’re the only Mutha we’ve interviewed so far with a “Metal Mom” T-shirt. What are the origins of that?

MP:

After attending various gigs over many

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years, the idea came a couple of years ago to take a Wayfarer T-shirt to a shop and have them put METAL MOM in two-inch white letters across the back. Now 71, I’m usually the oldest person at a venue, and enjoy it when people let me know they like it: a pat on the shoulder, or a thumbs-up when it’s impossible to hear over the music. It also saves me if I stand too close to the stage!

Kittye, we understand you let Isaac’s first band practice in your basement his senior year of high school. Any horror stories, or was fun had by all?

KB: Surprisingly, the bandmates were always respectful, no matter how rough they looked with their spikes, all-black clothes and demonic tattoos. I got so used to the noise that when a friend dropped by once and incredulously asked, “How do you stand it?” I frankly replied, “Stand what?” We had a signal of me flashing the light on and off at the top of the stairs that meant, “Time to stop!” Never once did any of the guys beg, “Aw, come on! Just a little while longer?”

Isaac has eight credited bands on Encyclopaedia Metallum. Other than music, what else is he obsessive about?

MP: Isaac’s pretty chill, so not very obsessive, but values: friends and family, honest interactions, world history, mythology, ethics and environment.

KB: Definitely veganism and animals. He loves dogs and cats. Before metal, he was obsessed with all things Japanese: anime, Pokémon and [Hayao] Miyazaki movies. —ANDREW BONAZELLI

Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Tombs, Under Sullen Skies  Black Anvil, As Was  Bad Religion, Against the Grain  Necrophobic, Dawn of the Damned  GWAR, Scumdogs of the Universe ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  The Limiñanas, Shadow People  Th' Faith Healers, Imaginary Friend  Idles, Ultra Mono  Can, Tago Mago  The Black Angels, Death Song ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  Enslaved, Utgard  Carcass, Despicable  Undeath, Lesions of a Different Kind  Vital Spirit, In the Faith That Looks Through Death  Clutch, Slow Hole to China: Rare & Re-Released ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  Eternal Champion, Ravening Iron  Jesus Wept, Apartheid Redux  Tombs, Under Sullen Skies  Bergeton, Miami Murder  Ruins of Beverast/Mourning Beloveth, Don't Walk on the Mass Graves ---------------------------------Aaron Salsbury : m a r k e t i n g a n d s a l e s  Necrot, Blood Offerings  Tørsö, Community Psychosis  Holy Molar, Live at The San Diego Metropolitan Correctional Center  Question, Reflections of the Void  Various Artists, Nativity in Black

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------Gina Gleason : b a r o n e s s  Honey, Nightmare Come to Life  The Jesus and Mary Chain, Automatic  Nirvana, Almost Everything: The BBC Sessions (bootleg)  Control Denied, The Fragile Art of Existence  Tsjuder, Desert Northern Hell

PHOTO BY JASON BLAKE

TRAPPIST FRONTMAN

The Arrival ince I’m stuck here in the past

as you read this, I’m blissfully unaware of how the election turned out and what stupid shit the country is coughing through this fine November, but I’m sure it’s a mess and there’s a bunch of really shitty bands trying to capitalize on the subject matter to bring undeserved attention to their mediocrity. Probably a gimmick or two baked in there, just in time for Thanksgiving.

But since I’m still here sometime in September writing this, I’ll be more selfish this month and talk about myself. A year ago, I was sitting bedside in a hospital writing this column while my girlfriend prepared to undergo surgery for brain cancer. It was one of the few times I took this platform and used it entirely as an outlet for genuine emotional release and not as some place to hide a few jism gags. Fast forward a year and we’ve been going to the same hospital a lot recently—not because of her cancer, but because of another growth: our daughter.

Fucking weird what can happen in a year, right?

When she started vomiting like a fucking firehose every morning a few weeks back, it could have been her cancer returning. I took the bet that it was a kid and purchased some sticks for her to piss on. Unlike every lottery ticket I’ve ever sworn was going to take me away from a satisfying life in retail, I was on the money. We had tried most of last year before everything went sideways with her health and just figured that it wasn’t in the cards, so this wasn’t at all a bad surprise. Just surprising is all.

We kept it pretty quiet because it’s a very high-risk pregnancy because of her health and age, but we just made it through the most dicey part of the process, so it’s time to breathe a 14 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

little easier until the panic of becoming a father makes me look longingly at the cigarettes behind the counter when I buy my coffee.

Longtime readers of this column have likely noticed that I’m a colossal fuck-up, and if you haven’t, there’s some washed up ex-publicist doing his best to inform everyone on social media (plus at least a few exes who’d agree). I also come from a family where my father was the emotional equivalent of falling off a horse, but being stuck on the saddle and dragged until the horse slowed down enough to take a shit right on you. So, I worry about that. I worry about my mental health issues or if I’ll be able to provide a secure childhood for her. Mostly I worry that I don’t know shit about kids—and daughters in particular.

Over the last year, I got the IRS off my back, built up a decent credit score for the first time in my life, celebrated a few years at the same awful job and quit smoking. I figured that clearing these hurdles entailed building towards something approaching a normal, functional adult life. Turns out, they kind of were.

So, sometime in March of 2021 we’ll be welcoming a baby girl into the world, which means I have a few months’ head start on making sure I give her everything I can that she’ll need in order to become whatever she wants to be. It’s strange to me how comfortable I am with the idea of fatherhood, regardless of any of the shit I’m worried about, and how natural of a progression this feels like to someone who’s spent most of his life being self-absorbed. Now I have to move all of my nonsense to make room for someone more important, and I’m very much at peace with that.

Until the first night she wakes me up at 3.a.m., spraying liquid shit and shrieking. Then she’s her mother’s girl.

crafts a monthly journey through

MORBID ALES

BY CHRIS DODGE

Against the Gain: Metal & Beer Podcasts

P

odcasting is a DIY godsend.

Anyone can throw their stained trucker snapback into the ring and upload a show. Hell, even I have a sloppy, drunken podcast with my Trappist cohorts called Hour of the Barbarian.

However, easy accessibility doesn’t equate to high quality, so here’s a quick rundown of the top dogs running the best metal and beer shows in podland.

When not abusing tonal frequencies as frontman for Cryptopsy, Matt McGachy satiates his unquenchable thirst for quality microbrews with the Vox&Hops podcast. “Back in 2014, I dove deep into the local Quebec craft beer world,” McGachy reflects. “I felt such a correlation between my primary love of music and this new obsession that I had to find a way to bring them together.” He launched the show two years ago, producing episodes at a fever pitch, clocking in at over 180 to date.

McGachy’s enthusiasm is infectious on each installment; he conveys a mix of expertise and unpretentious passion for the craft.

“Whether it’s to create a sick album, a dope brew or simply interesting podcast content, we are all in it for the same reason,” he gushes. “It’s always a pleasure to finish an

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 Invasion of the pod people

(clockwise from top) Torres, McGachy and Mendiola are here to give you an earful

interview with a sense that I have just made a new friend… I just want to spread that positivity with the rest of the world.”

Experienced in both the indie beer biz and the metal scene, Eddy Torres says the idea for his show came about while working at Cigar City Brewing in 2016. “My buddy Gaspar suggested, ‘You should start a podcast! Call it Rocknroll Beer Guy.’ It was just cheesy enough to work.” With one listen, it’s apparent that RRBG is devoid of cheese. Torres helms the series exuding the vibe of a seasoned pro. He has served as former vocalist and keyboardist for South Florida prog metal heroes Dissever; now, after SoCal relocation, he serves up bass riffage and screams for Vultures Are Wolves, along the way clocking in at breweries like Iron Triangle and Modern Times. Torres diligently cranks out episodes with eclectic A-list interviewees from Testament’s Chuck Billy to MMA legend Josh Barnett.

“While the podcast really started as a metal and beer concept, it has definitely grown out of that into something bigger, featuring comedians, actors and artists,” the motivated Torres expounds. “The biggest surprise is the caliber of guests I’ve been honored to have on, simply by asking. It really taught me… it’s all about having the drive and self-confidence

to ask for what you want. Things are not just going to be handed to you.”

San Antonio-based Aaron Mendiola delivers his Beer Metal Show Podcast on a more underground gut level. In 2013, Mendiola blogged about craft beer and metal on his beermetal. net site, but ignored podcasts until 2017.

“My wife at the time turned me on to horror [and] true crime podcasts, [so] I searched for craft beer or metal podcasts, found some and thought, ‘Fuck yeah, I can do this!’”

The show focuses on promoting local Texas beers without getting sidelined by hipster culture. “I am not really a beer chaser, nor do I really follow the new hyped-up trends in craft beer,” Mendiola proudly proclaims. “I hate hazy IPAs, milkshake IPAs, pastry stouts and all that dumb bullshit slushy FroYo, whatever crap that is.” As a brew junkie and grindcore vet from bands like Maleficent, Putrilage and Exulcerate, the man knows his subject. “I feature a band and dive into [its] history, the members, and each album or song as I play them,” he says. “I drink and dissect four beers per episode, and pair each beer with a metal song similar by name or origin.”

Mendiola’s show is gritty and real with a relatable manta: “Horns up, pints up! Cheers, motherfuckers!”

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UNANIMATED

STUDIO REPORT

UNANIMATED

C

elebrated Swedish death metallers Unanimated will

have finished recording their fourth full-length, Victory in Blood, just as this issue of Decibel goes to print. Though it’s ALBUM TITLE taken the Swedes 11 years to follow-up 2009’s excellent In Victory in Blood the Light of Darkness, at the very least they’re not engaged in full(working) on fisticuffs on the way to the studio. In the ’90s, the members PRODUCER/MIXER of Unanimated were infamous for violent pre-studio dust-ups.

Fredrik Folkare “It’s fun to talk about that now,” laughs bassist Richard Cabeza.

STUDIO(S) “But back then, it was, ‘Pull the fucking van over!’ We’d pour out Chrome Studio, of the van swinging and hitting each other. It was no joke back Stockholm, Sweden then. We’d duke it out, get all bloody and then get back in the and Dallas, TX van as if nothing happened. It’s like, ‘What is happening?!’”

RELEASE DATE The fact that the rest of Unanimated are in Sweden while Early 2021 Cabeza’s rooted in Texas probably makes the Fight Club deal LABEL harder to realize now. Still, the distance isn’t stopping the Century Media group from laying down 13 of 15 songs with producer Fredrik Folkare. Nestled for weeks at a clip at Folkare’s Chrome Studio (Unanimated recorded 2018’s Annihilation EP there) south of central Stockholm, the band has had ample time to review, change and re-record their first full-length in 11 years. While Cabeza will track the bass in Texas due to COVID-19, he describes the Chrome Studio sessions as “awesome, but a bit weird when I’m on a cell phone in Texas and they’re in the studio in Sweden.

“We didn’t book the studio in the traditional way,” he continues. “We booked Fredrik for like two weeks, recorded and then checked everything out. After that, we booked another two weeks to see where we’d end up. It was a flexible way to record.”

Musically, Cabeza informs Decibel that the new material is a mix of In the Light of Darkness and the Annihilation EP. And the surprises the Swedes have in store are nothing short of mega-awesome.

To wit, they’re recording a cover of Sarcófago’s “Satanic Lust,” a live track and old Cabeza favorite.

“I will say it’s not the next Ancient God of Evil,” says Cabeza. “That will never happen again. The new music is more intense. Very aggressive. Very raw. And very fast. It’s a different Unanimated album for sure, but you can hear it’s us at the same time. The melodies are there. The way we use them, however, is different. It was important to maintain the Unanimated feel without repeating ourselves too much.” —CHRIS DICK

STUDIO SHORT SHOTS

NADER SADEK DELIVERS IMPENDING DEATH FROM THE TOMBS OF THE DARKENED PAST Egyptian death metal vocalist and visual artist Nader Sadek is currently preparing his latest effort for imminent release, an EP titled The Serapeum. Recorded in Cairo, the new EP came about, according to Sadek, after he “was approached by CairoMetal.net with the idea of collaborating with Karl Sanders.”

Sadek says that “for obvious reasons,” he “loved the idea, but … felt [they] could go one step further and make it more interesting for [Sanders].” He continues: “Having spoken

16 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

to Karl through the years, seeing him live with Nile, I was pretty sure he said he had never actually gotten the opportunity to go to Egypt.” Arrangements were made and Sanders was flown to Egypt, where he was joined by drummer Derek Roddy and rhythm guitarist Mahmud Gecukusu (Perversion [United Arab Emirates]).

Sadek also reveals that he recorded his vocals for The Serapeum guerrilla-style at the Red Pyramid. “It was definitely surreal,” he reflects. “I was so pumped and nervous; literally anything could go wrong, including other tourists coming to check out the chamber.”

Hear the results of these collaborations and daring techniques that composed The Serapeum on November 20. —DUTCH PEARCE

ETERNAL CHAMPION

ETERNAL CHAMPION

Epic heavy metal champs embrace crossover roots on sophomore game-changer

W

ith the release of their hugely anticipated second album, Ravening Iron, epic heavy metal Texans Eternal Champion embark on a future brighter than the glare of 100,000 swords on some harsh desert planet scorched by two suns. But to reach this point of despotic dominion over all things epic, heavy and metal in the modern era, Eternal Champion’s frontman first had to seize dominion over himself. ¶ “I needed a career,” Jason Tarpey says he remembers thinking some years ago. “At that point, I had like 35 jobs or something, you know, ’cause I’d take jobs in between tours.” He says he realized he couldn’t do that anymore. “I’m not really into having a boss [but] I really love swords.” That’s when he realized, “I can make a sword.” ¶ After a fateful encounter with a metalsmithing professor at Austin Community College, Tarpey was on a path to achieving his dream. “My aspiration was to have my own forge,” he says. We find him taking a break from working in that very forge to talk with us.

18 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

Now he hammers out swords and other implements of steel for work.

“I love swinging the hammer,” he enthuses. “Once I found it, I knew that I found my thing.” Plus, he says, it helps him maintain creativity between records.

Tarpey looks at heavy metal the same way—as something he found that felt immediately natural. “It would shock some heavy metal people who don’t even know where we come from to hear that we have this past in crossover or hardcore,” he notes.

Tarpey fronted crossover titans Iron Age; his best friend and current bandmate Arthur Rizk also briefly played in Iron Age (hear: Saga Demos). One of Rizk’s first successful bands was War Hungry, a metallic hardcore outfit from the hotbed of Wilkes-Barre, PA. “I spent my teenage years learning Scorpions, Malmsteen, Megadeth, etc.,” Rizk recalls.

“However, I can’t imagine I would be any sort of rounded songwriter without the genius of albums [like] Cro-Mags Best Wishes and Leeway Desperate Measures. They bridged the gap between metal and hardcore for me and taught me to not overload songs with complexity, but to make complex moments instead.

We love to include those types of moments under the guise of epic heavy metal.”

Rizk goes on to say how he hopes Eternal Champion can “bridge” the gap between the two worlds of metal and hardcore. “I think it is important to maybe leave that bridge open for hardcore fans looking for a break from reality,” he adds, noting that hardcore fans “can sure mosh to ‘Skullseeker’ or ‘Coward’s Keep.’

Or maybe vice versa ... metal fans looking to understand the hardcore aggression and where we come from can discover the crossover age of hardcore.” —DUTCH PEARCE

OF FEATHER AND BONE

OF FEATHER AND BONE

Denver trio embraces the incessant call of death

S

ulfuric disintegration, the third full-length faceripper from Denver death metal trio Of Feather and Bone, is a riotous tornado from front to back, a head-down pummeling coordinated by guitarist/vocalist Dave Grant and drummer Preston Weippert. Periodically, they’ll throw us for a loop with an unsignposted tempo change, but it’s riff after riff, blast after blast. Bassist/vocalist Alvino Salcedo chuckles just thinking about it. ¶ “It’s like we don’t want anybody to breathe,” laughs Salcedo. “We want you to be suffocated the whole time while listening to the band. We don’t ever want to let up. That overwhelming feeling of being suffocated, where you can’t catch a breath? ‘Am I going to die during this?’ Yeah, we want you to feel that way—the whole time!” ¶ Salcedo has the gift of maintaining bonhomie when discussing theatrically violent songwriting and the bleakest frontiers of the human condition.

“Some people are okay with listening to pop, country, talkin’ about trucks and women,” he says. “I like songs that are depressing. I like songs about death. These are the things that I enjoy.”

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For a trio, Of Feather and Bone excel in dominating all the frequencies in the mix. This isn’t old-school revivalism; it’s the next phase in death metal’s evolution. Out with quantized precision, in with analog hellscaping. “I think we have always been the oddball, the odd duck,” muses Salcedo. “People lumped us in with the old-school revival of death metal, and yeah, the last record has that for sure, but at the same time, I remember people told us, ‘Oh, there’s too much blasting!’ Yeah! That’s what we do! [Laughs]” What is old-school is the grossout song titles and extremity in verse. “Sulfuric Sodomy (Disintegration of Christ)” and “Baptized in Boiling Phlegm” have the air of Alex Webster’s carnivorous poetry.

Salcedo is ever-animated by antiChristian invective, but here the underlying theme is suicide: the method and the psychology. “Is it

religious fanaticism? Is it straightup oppression?” he ponders. “I think that’s something that haunts everybody—or most people have some degree of depression, anxiety or just the overall wonder of, ‘Maybe this isn’t all there is.’”

Salcedo looked outside of metal for inspiration. The Cure and Wu-Tang side project Gravediggaz— particularly the morbid rhymes on “1-800 Suicide”—afforded him the headspace to explore the darkness. As Salcedo reminds us, death metal is most potent when it appeals to our humanity... or lack thereof.

“It has to have some sort of human connection,” he says. “Death is always present—in every art form, from painters and sculptors to poets. It’s called death metal for a reason; not because it’s spooky, or it has a somber tone, but this is what humans have always been curious about.” —JONATHAN HORSLEY

BOTANIST

BOTANIST

USBM duo continues rapid growth despite environment’s rapid decline

T

he wildfires have had little effect on me, frankly. It’s selfish, but the smell of fire in the air has always inspired me. It smells of renewal, of upheaval. It motivates me to create.” ¶ So writes Roberto Martinelli from California.

Over the last decade and some dozen threats as the Botanist, an eco-isolationist counting down mankind’s extinction so plants can repopulate, our percussionist by trade (a.k.a. Otrebor) screams biological bile with black metal belief while taking it out on a hammered dulcimer, keyboards and (since 2017) drummer Daturus (Ron Bertrand). Latest prog-bender Photosynthesis adds bassist Tony Thomas, though you wouldn’t know it from “Chlorophyll,” a Scando hammer leavened by classical piano and a dulcet ringing. ¶ “Yep. Fooled you. No guitars,” gloats Martinelli. ¶ They’re not missed. “Light” opens vocally clean over a drum regimen ejecting Neil Peart from the grave. In fact, a topical uplift derived from the organic subject matter lends the LP a rise hastened by Piper at the Gates of Dawn harmonies on “Water.”

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At one point, “Dehydration” literally feels like it’s drying up. “‘Dehydration’ works great as the creepy song on Photosynthesis, with the chromatic declination that descends through the first third, takes a break in the middle, then picks up where it left off,” agrees Martinelli, who calls the new work a sister album to 2017’s Ecosystem, both cut through spring/summer 2018. “Having the song in the middle is an intentional mirror to ‘Disturbance’ on Ecosystem. Chelsea Murphy’s death vox also makes the track special, and I love [producer] Dan Swanö’s input on making my (too) adventurous clean vocals act as ghosts on that song.”

Seeing as the Earth stopped on its axis back in March, everything the Botanist predicted is coming to pass, no?

“The Botanist is a human avatar for Nature’s anger, hurt and vengeance,” Martinelli explains.

“That vengeance is about watching humanity eradicate itself through bumbling and self-centeredness.

As far as that’s going, the Botanist feels things are moving along nicely, and the reward for his work—dying in the apocalypse, but then being assimilated and reborn as a plant in a floral universal consciousness—seems closer than ever of late.

“I take solace and inspiration by the adage that ‘all things rise and pass away,’ so one day, this will stop. That drives me to finish the art I absolutely need to finish.

I believe COVID-19 is a real thing to be respected, but I’m also not so sure it’s the thing we’re being led to believe.

“Maybe it’s because I and others I know had it and made a full recovery within two weeks that I’m emboldened. Maybe it’s how fear of death is worse than death itself.”

—RAOUL HERNANDEZ

THE OCEAN

THE OCEAN

T

hinking big is standard procedure for Robin Staps.

Since forming the Ocean Collective (originally the Ocean) in 2000, the visionary German composer and guitarist has piloted his renowned post-metal vessel through expanses of the space-time continuum more vast than most of his alleged peers are capable of conceiving—all without ever leaving the planet. He’s not prone to dishing out empty entertainment, either; Staps excels at suturing philosophically rich lyrics to nuanced, heavy AF musical expeditions inspired by scientific fact. ¶ Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic marks the final chapter in the Ocean Collective’s most ambitious undertaking to date: the sweeping historical survey of life on Earth launched with 2007’s Precambrian. As always, the release—which picks up where 2018’s Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic leaves off—offers more than just abstract paleontology. ¶ “Both Phanerozoic albums are dealing with concepts of time,” Staps explains via email. “Is time to be conceived of as a linear progression of events, a line that connects the dots… or is time cyclical; 24 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

are we living in a universe of eternal recurrence, where things happen over and over again, in infinite time and space? This is the main question, the red thread that goes through both albums, and it really is an intriguing one, no matter whether you look at it from the angle of large geological time spans or from the much shorter angle of your personal life span and certain (déja vu) experiences you may recall.

There is a lot of writing and processing of sex on the records, too.”

For better or worse (but almost surely better), the processing Staps mentions never situates vocalist Loïc Rossetti or guest vocalists Jonas Renkse (Katatonia) and Tomas Liljedahl (Breach) as, say, a horny pterodactyl dropping lines like, “Hey baby, you’re a real humdinger / You make me feel just like Kip Winger.” As with their other noninstrumental releases, the Ocean

Collective’s eighth studio album hews to a marriage of casual language and elevated tone bound to leave attentive souls thinking hard.

The album’s musical component evinces comparable values—always elevated, never pompous or overblown. But it does come off a helluva lot more intense than the lyrics.

Given the project’s scope, it’s hard not to wonder what’s next (apart from a mighty fuckload of longpostponed touring) for the band.

“I haven’t even started thinking about it,” Staps writes, “but I’m kind of tempted to make a record in a more intuitive way. I would like to just rent one place for the whole band and lock ourselves in there for a month to write and record simultaneously. There is a studio in Norway right on the ocean shore called Ocean Sound Recordings, which would be the perfect place for such an endeavor.” —ROD SMITH

PHOTO BY ANDREW FAULK

German post-metal exemplars drop opulent 550,000,000-year snack

CELESTIAL SEASON

CELESTIAL SEASON Dutch heroes bury the hatchet and return to their death/doom roots 25 years later

D

oom masters-turned-stoner rock neophytes Celestial Season probably haven’t had a “moment” since 1995 gem Solar Lovers. Well, that’s about to change on the 25th anniversary of the Dutch outfit’s celebrated sophomore effort.

See, the groove masters officially split sometime in 2001 to little fanfare. Then, a decade later, spearheaded by drummer Jason Köhnen, the “doom era” members reconciled 20-year-old grievances and paths untimely broken, agreeing to pick up where Solar Lovers left off by performing a one-off show where they played the album in its entirety. Almost another lifetime later, Celestial Season’s spiritual successor to Solar Lovers is here in the form of The Secret Teachings. ¶ “I hadn’t seen or spoken to Stefan [Ruiters, vocals] in 20 years,” says Köhnen, who also captains weirdo ship Servants of the Apocalyptic Goat Rave. “Before we really got going again, I talked to the other guys, and said, ‘Let me talk to Stefan first.’ So, Stefan and I sat down, had a coffee, and he was great with it all. He said, ‘Shit like this happens. Look, we were young.’ After that, he agreed to return to the band.”

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Indeed, the transition from doom metal to stoner rock was internally rocky all those years ago. The band’s budding fandom was also startled by the stylistic switch first heard on Solar Lovers’ follow-up EP, Sonic Orb. What had started as music influenced by the “Peaceville Three,” Cathedral and select artists from the Hellhound Records roster had vanished into the heady smoke of the then-burgeoning stoner rock/doom scene. Celestial Season not only return to form on The Secret Teachings, but also have authorized a plethora of reissues/ remasters from Burning World and Vic, respectively. The timing of it all couldn’t have aligned better.

“At the time, the then-members of Celestial Season should’ve formed a new band,” Köhnen says.

“Back then, when we changed, it should’ve been two bands. I’m partly to blame for that. When Stefan and Robert [Ruiters, guitars] were sacked, I was pretty young. The way I handled that wasn’t good.”

Fortunately, the signature Dutch-style death vocals of Stefan and the morose violin work of Jiska ter Bals find their way on “The Secret Teachings of All Ages,” “The Ourobouros” and “Salt of the Earth.” Similarly, groove-wah guitar work also continues unabated on the rhythmically active “They Saw It Come From the Sky,” while the album’s three instrumentals clearly recall Solar Lovers’ atmospheric song breaks.

“We wanted this album to be pure and honest to the Solar Lovers era,” says Köhnen. “We’re older now. We have kids. We have no intentions of becoming rock stars, so we wanted to prove to ourselves and to the people who loved Solar Lovers that we could restart the timeline in a respectful way. The lessons of life that come with it are why we called this album The Secret Teachings.

Life is informing our way forward, and this is a special moment in time for us.” —CHRIS DICK

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PORTRAYAL OF GUILT

PORTRAYAL OF GUILT

Hardcore Austin trio are DIY (depressed, isolated, yearning) as fuck

2020

has really been trying to kneecap musicians, especially the hard workers. Portrayal of Guilt are without question hardworking, balancing a consistent stream of releases with an arduous touring schedule. Guitarist/vocalist Matt King admits that the Austin trio tours so much in part because they simply love to travel and experience everything they can. So, what happens when that gets taken away for the foreseeable future? A lot of shitty stuff. But one blindingly bright spot is the band’s new full-length We Are Always Alone. ¶ A logical, yet massive leap from their debut LP, describing this album as blackened screamo misses out on how much the band packs in under a half hour—its pervasive noise elements and bleak melodies are reinforced by a seismic rhythm section and King’s raw, devastating lyrics. ¶ “It comes from how depressed I am as a person or how nihilistic I feel in my head,” he explains. “Things are just so fucked up it’s hard not to feel exhausted and sad.

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Now more than ever. There are multiple songs about suicide, depression, dying and going to hell.

The title of the album is sort of like how I feel in general. At the end of the day, it’s just me. And [the pandemic] has definitely brought out the darkest feelings as far as music goes, that’s for sure.”

But these thoughts have not paralyzed King or the band. In fact, now that We Are Always Alone is done and there’s a big question mark about when things will get back to any kind of normal, the band is trying to figure out what they can do instead.

“We’re kind of bored,” King says.

“We live five minutes away from our practice space, and I’m just sitting here working on music basically all the time. We already have another album coming together, and maybe we’ll record multiple albums this time. We’re thinking, should

we just hold onto them so we don’t have to record anything later?”

And he’s looking at other projects as well.

“I started a label for our band, and I’ve put out cassettes and some stuff for us,” King adds. “I was thinking about trying to get that going and turn it into something. I’ve definitely been thinking about ways to be creative. Even though I’m just here at home, I’m thinking of ways we can survive and keep going as a band without touring.”

King is one of those people who is depressed and nihilistic and relentlessly determined. Determined to keep writing, keep promoting Portrayal of Guilt and just, well, keep going.

“I don’t really have a Plan B,” he admits. “I just have to try and figure out how to make my own career using what I have.”

—SHANE MEHLING

reinvigorated cult death metal heroes MACABRE move back in for the kill

A

B Y K E V IN S T E W AR T - P ANKO

/ PHOT O

B Y R ODNEY PAW LAK

s you get older, life gets tougher,” Macabre guitarist/vocalist vocals, he was like, ‘You do them.’ So, I did, and

Lance “Corporate Death” Lencioni sighs as he gives a loose overview why the band’s new album, Carnival of Killers, has come so slowly on the heels of 2011’s Grim Scary Tales. “When I’m not playing and touring, I’m working a full-time job. A lot of these songs have been written for a couple of years and we had offers from other labels, but they weren’t right for us. We didn’t want to jump into putting an album out for the sake of it.” ¶ Despite a near-decade between full-lengths—or maybe because of it—Lencioni insists that new life has been breathed into Macabre. The original purveyors of “murder metal” returned to Nuclear Blast 27 years after the release of Sinister Slaughter, realizing that inking a contract in blood with Nuclear Blast in 1993 versus shacking up with the label today is an entirely different proposition. Now they’re part of the world’s biggest metal record company and labelmates with Exodus, Sepultura, Testament, Hatebreed, Carcass, Slayer and many more from extreme music’s upper echelons. Lencioni is cognizant of Nuclear Blast’s growth, and hopes to parlay the power behind the powerhouse to ramp up Macabre’s details and business side as he, bassist/vocalist Charles “Nefarious” Lescewicz and drummer Dennis “Dennis the Menace” Ritchie dive deeper than ever into the project they’ve nursed since 1981.

“With Nuclear Blast behind us, I want to start doing more stuff and try and get an album out every two years,” Lencioni asserts. “I’m into this more now than ever. Working a regular job isn’t so appealing, and life and time are passing us all by. Doing music full-time is our goal.

“The music on this album is from all over the place,” he continues. “A lot of it was written around the time of Grim Scary Tales, half of it was written over the past couple of years, but we actually went back to songs that we played before Macabre. Me and Charles have been playing together since 1979, and we got Dennis in 1981.

We used to play with a singer back then, but we kicked him out and started Macabre. So, we actually got a couple of those old songs and changed the lyrics and vocals. This album kind of shows Macabre over the entire period of time.”

Lencioni points out that Macabre have always been a grassroots, DIY band, but just as he continually mines the atrocities committed by notorious murderers like Gacy, Bundy, Speck 30 : D MEAY C E2M 0 19 BER : D2E0C2I0B:ED LEC I B E L

and Gein for lyrical and topical fodder, Carnival of Killers sees the frontman becoming even more hands-on. Album number six will be available in a variety of formats, vinyl collectors will salivate at the myriad of splatter designs, and bundle options include the “Unhappy Meal,” complete with a children’s burger box and activity sheet, all of which the band had a creative hand in.

“We’ve always tried to do stuff like that— special releases with special goodies—as we’ve gone along,” Lencioni says. “Nuclear Blast are total pros and they do stuff right, so we planned from the beginning to put a bunch of different things in there. I was involved with the artist for the cover, design and inside layout, which was a couple months-long process. This has been a total hands-on project and a lot of work, but I really enjoy doing it.

“Dennis lives out of state,” he continues, outlining their use of resources available to them via Nuclear Blast, “so he had to learn the songs pretty quickly, and when it came to the

did a lot of layering with three or four parts on top of each other, and tried to be really diverse with them. For the recording process, we went to Kiwi Audio, which is the best drum studio in the Midwest, and did the rest at a studio [Tomek Spirala’s Studio 1134] with tons of pro gear. I was really hands-on with the mixing, going back and forth a lot via Dropbox. With all the technology, what we used to pay a lot more for, we got totally pro quality and production.”

Macabre’s reliability hasn’t been dulled by the decade between releases either. Lencioni laments how COVID-19 may have eviscerated the band’s summer festival schedule, as well as their annual hometown Christmas holiday show in Chicago, and delayed the new album’s original release date; he is, however, tickled that “it’s coming out on Friday the 13th in November, which is a good day for us!” But the band has remained busy regularly offering exclusive merch online, making their back catalogue available on Bandcamp and posting scads of old live videos transferred from the VHS/DVD/Hi8 originals.

Musically, Carnival of Killers remains locked in with the murder metal ethos of serial killers examined under the light of thrashing death metal with calliope, nursery rhyme and children’s music melodies. The new album alters the sound and sensibility of the Slinky novelty toy jingle on “Stinky,” salutes German butcher/ human meat vendor Fritz Haarmann via a cover of Hawe Schneider’s 1961 hot jazz hit “Warte, Warte Nur Ein Weilchen,” and warps circle time favorites “The Wheels on the Bus” and “Dem Dry Bones” in the name of those who would “kill those kids and cook them in a stew,” he laughs.

“All that stuff is just melodies I remember from children’s albums my mom used to buy for me as a kid,” Lencioni says. “Using it in Macabre was nothing I really ever planned; it just kind of came out. It was like singing about serial killers with sick music and using those happy-sounding parts just made it sound more sick and demented.”

w than ever.

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Look beneath the stone curtain of U.S. death-doom titans

Incantation’s ongoing legacy of utter domination

by D U T C H P E A R C E

T

photo by D E R E K S O T O

here is no big secret to our longevity and quality,” claims John McEntee

of Incantation. “It’s pretty simple: We really enjoy what we do.” ¶ Once again, the relentlessly consistent Pennsylvanian death-doom legends defy the laws of nature to release another opus of genre-defining potency. After more than 30 years of subterranean death praise through graveward chugging, infernal auracidal blasting, demon-toad vokills, and standing in as the veritable GOAT of countless young copycats for generations yet to come, still, somehow, Incantation remain the most influential presence in their genre, towering above all others. But as their recent output shows, with astonishing and undeniable proof, even monuments can grow. ¶ Together, guitarist/vocalist McEntee, drummer Kyle Severn, bassist Chuck Sherwood and a legion of deadly, capable and eager friends ever at the ready constitute what has become the most reliable operation in underground extreme metal. Whatever the trends, Incantation loom, unflinching and impervious. For McEntee, this all comes as the result of something quite simple.

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“It’s very important to us to express ourselves with music,” he affirms. “Doing music is a lifelong passion. So, if it’s live or on recording, I always try to do my best. I don’t take playing and performing music lightly. The most important thing is I always remember why I decided to do music in the first place. If you have a strong root, you can properly grow.”

Kyle Severn took over drums for Incantation in 1996. His first appearance was an untitled three-song promo tape sent out to labels only, also featuring Will Rahmer of Mortician on vocals. After a quarter-century of killing it behind the kit for Incantation (not to mention Shed the Skin), Severn agrees with McEntee.

“There’s no real formula,” he says. “It’s the music, the riffs that push me. I am fortunate

that, for most of my musical metal career, I have been jamming with great players that create amazing metal riffs and arrangements.” “[These have] been very inspiring times,” McEntee enthuses. “The band has been going full steam since Chuck and Alex [Bouks, who played in Incantation from 2007 to 2014] joined the band, then when Kyle rejoined around 2009.

Things have just been nonstop. There is so much inspiration in the band, it’s been overwhelming to an extent. We all fill in gaps that the other members might not excel in. The amount of productivity is just awesome. And now, with the addition of Luke [Shively, guitars], we really feel great as a band and look forward to getting out on the road and kicking some metal asses.”

It was only back in November and December of 2019 that Incantation toured the U.S. opening for fellow inveterate death metallers Morbid Angel and Swedish black metal warlords Watain.

For a month straight, Incantation looped around the country, leaving audiences in a state of awe with their ungodly storm of jarring tempo shifts and sudden attacks of evil hypnotic doom.

“The tour with Morbid Angel and Watain was a total blast,” McEntee remembers. “The whole band has been killing it live. We have a great bunch of musicians that help us when one of our members can’t tour.” As was the case last winter, with ballistics mercenary Charlie Koryn filling in on drums for Kyle Severn.

“It’s very easy to keep up the momentum,” McEntee continues. “We all really enjoy what we do. We record, write and perform music because we enjoy it—not as a job or obligation.”

Now, three years after Profane Nexus, their last ground-shattering addition to an ever-relevant and unapproachable discography, Incantation have released their 12th album, Sect of Vile Divinities. Turns out the process remains the same, despite the fact that the band’s powers appear to be growing stronger with each new album.

According to McEntee, “We have always had way more songs for each album than needed.

Pretty much up to 20 songs to choose from each time. We don’t cherry-pick songs that are the best for each album, but we look at it more as a full piece of art and use the songs that work together to make a complete journey.

“Each album is its own journey; we just go with what flows. In a way, the pieces are all in front of us; we just need to follow its lead.” Sometimes, he notes, “it’s good to rage with speed; it’s also good to indulge in the somber agony of total doom.”

Bassist and lyricist Sherwood, the mind behind such titles as “Entrails of the Hag Queen” and “Black Fathom’s Fire,” adds, “What we create musically translates into research interests and exploring my subconscious with death metal as a catalyst.” He says he believes “[everyone] into metal, regardless of its subgenre, can relate in some way to the draw of the dark and evil.”

As McEntee reveals, Sect of Vile Divinities halfexisted before he and his bandmates conjured it forth, as if it was only waiting for them to do so: “For Sect of Vile Divinities, we used some of the older songs that we really liked, but never used [...] as the starting point. Then we wrote newer songs to fill in the gaps. It all came together quite easily, really.”

Reflecting on the relatively clean sound of Sect of Vile Divinities, which would be divisive if the album were anything but mercilessly crushing, McEntee says, “In my mind, I was thinking originally guitar-wise [Sect would sound] something closer to [2002’s] Blasphemy album. Really, for the most part, we leave the production to Dan Swanö. He knows the ballpark of what we want; we have been working with him now for over 10 years. And for each album, we kinda just ask for the same things anyway. So, at this point, it’s silly to repeat ourselves each time we do an album; he knows we are creatures of habit. I was not really expecting the album to come out this clean. But when Dan sent the mixes, they were undeniably amazing-sounding. He gave the songs a feeling and vibe that we didn’t see in them originally.”

Over 30 years into destroying everything in their path with their signature death-doom destruction, Incantation still manage to surprise themselves. And level all pretenders to the throne of apocalypse.

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TAKE THESE CHAINS

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Icelandic post-metallers

SÓLSTAFIR continue to radiate light through the darkness story by JOSEPH SCHAFER photo by IRIS DOGG EINARSDOTTIR

W

hen Decibel gets a hold of Sólstafir’s Aðalbjörn “Addi” Tryggvason, it’s at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night—his time. While that’s not very late in terms of “rock star” time—and Tryggvason could call himself one of those in Iceland, where he lives—it’s late as hell for a new father. ¶ “Having a child at 43 was quite a surprise,” the guitarist and vocalist says, sounding understandably exhausted. He’s supporting said daughter, his first, by working as a sound engineer on a film set while COVID-19 prevents Sólstafir from touring behind their new album, Endless Twilight of Codependent Love.

“I can make a living off of the band if I am touring constantly, but I haven’t played a show since October,” he sighs. “I would much rather do Sólstafir as my job, be able to pay bills and be with my daughter instead of always being at some job.” Even if a combination of worldwide social distancing and a vaccine or palliative treatment can make the world safe for live music again, Tryggvason’s status as a father may keep Sólstafir off the road for most of the year. “I’m not going to quit being in a band,” he promises.

“We will do summer festivals.”

Endless Twilight of Codependent Love signifies the beginning of one chapter and the end of another—one in which Sólstafir made a run at international notoriety. In 2014, the band played 200 shows, including their inaugural U.S. appearance at Maryland Deathfest, and a

stateside run with Pallbearer. Tryggvason has fond memories of that year, hanging out in Baltimore with members of At the Gates, and later exploring the pawn shops of the Western states whose history has been a constant inspiration for him—Sólstafir perform in cowboy hats and boots.

That hard push presented new challenges; it was Trygvasson’s first tour while sober.

Rejecting offers of cocaine under a freeway overpass in Baltimore wasn’t a massive test of willpower, but sobriety and mental health remain central issues to him—as well as windows into Sólstafir’s emotional tempest.

“We are always dealing with the darkness we’ve seen or experienced,” he says. That grim weariness keeps the edge sharp on Endless Twilight of Codependent Love. “Sobriety makes you see it from a different perspective,” he continues. “You can step out of the darkness when you become sober. It’s impossible to step out of the darkness when you’re doing drugs.

“Duff McKagan is one of my heroes, because he survived rock ‘n’ roll, became sober, and he’s still cooler than anything that walks this planet,” Trygvasson says, before wistfully listing off other famously sober metal gods, including Rob Halford and James Hetfield. Most Decibel readers probably share his idols, but Trygvasson also shares an interest in classicism with his heroes.

“Timeless music is what we aim for,” he explains. “There’s a ’70s feeling to it sometimes, some of Neil Young’s guitar, but we’re still playing music that did not exist in the ’70s, so it can’t be the ’70s.” To that end, Endless Twilight of Codependent Love unites the various styles of music that Sólstafir have experimented with over the past 15 years—black metal, classic rock, grunge—under a single tonal aesthetic. The cinematic scope of opener “Akkeri” evokes “Achilles Last Stand,” the opening salvo on Led Zeppelin’s Presence, with a dash of Bathory’s Hammerheart hoariness.

With timelessness comes universality, the goal of speaking to every possible listener while also telling a story that only one individual group of songwriters could tell. Hence the lingua franca: Endless Twilight of Codependent Love is Sólstafir’s first English album title in 15 years, with

Addi’s first lyrics in English—“Her Fall From Grace”—in over a decade. In fact, the title could have been even more blunt. “[It] could have been ‘Eternal Darkness of Toxic Relationships,’” Trygvasson laughs, “but that’s not sexy enough.” Sólstafir picked the title because each member of the band could relate to the shadow cast by previous generations, which it implies.

“This is basically the story of our lives—half the band grew up with alcoholism,” he explains. “[A child] comes home to an alcoholic father and the child will very soon learn to read the atmosphere: ‘Why does mommy have a black eye?’

‘Will there be dinner tonight?’ And you carry those mixed signals into adulthood. You don’t want to stir shit up. You say yes when you want to say no. You learn to make yourself invisible.”

We are always dealing with the darkness we’ve seen or experienced.

SOBRIETY MAKES YOU SEE IT FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE. Aðalbjörn “Addi” Tryggvason Trygvasson is quick to say that he did not grow up with an alcoholic parent, but his father’s machismo is its own eternal twilight. “I love my dad, but he was raised in a very old-school way,” he explains. “He was raised with violence, but he never beat me—he broke that chain. He said, ‘I sure as hell ain’t going down that road.’ But there were things he couldn’t talk about. There was silence.”

He pauses, reflecting on the fact that young men as a demographic carry the highest suicide rate—and remembering friends he’s lost to suicide. How many lives could be saved if we all broke the chains of our upbringing?

“Men have been given mixed signals about what it means to be a man,” Trygvasson notes, “but I guarantee when you raise a kid, you’re going to hug them and tell them, ‘Come here, I love you.’ I sure as hell do that with my kid.” He pauses, breathing in the night air while his baby sleeps. “We break the chain. It’s what we have to do. There’s nothing else.” :B D E C I B ED L E: CDI B EC EL EM MEAY R 2 0 219 0 : 35

interview by

j. bennett

QA MIKE

HILL W I T H

TOMBS main man on loving his new lineup, hating his last album and recording during the pandemic

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M

ike Hill is at his new pad in the Jersey suburbs when we get

him on the Decibel hotline. The Tombs founder and frontman escaped his longtime Brooklyn headquarters a few months into the pandemic, trading high-density living for more space and easier social distancing. And that’s not the only recent change in his life. In 2018, he enlisted an all-new Tombs lineup—Justin Spaeth (drums), Drew Murphy (bass) and Matt Medeiros (guitar)—which bore its first black/post-metal fruit with February’s Monarchy of Shadows EP. In late November, the same lineup returns on Under Sullen Skies, a new full-length studded with guest spots from Integrity’s Dwid Hellion, Six Feet Under’s Ray Suhy and Ides of Gemini’s Sera Timms, among others. ¶ For Hill, these two releases are Tombs’ fullest realizations to date. “Recording is usually a mixed bag of success and failure for me,” our man says. “But these last two—the EP and the new album—pretty much followed the way I visualized the songs coming together. For the past 10-plus years or however long I’ve been doing the band, the ideas have been coming closer and closer to manifesting the way I thought of them.” ¶ As a dedicated polymath, Hill is staying busy during the pandemic. In addition to running Tombs, he’s hosting three podcasts—Metal Matters on Gimme Radio, the horrorthemed Necromaniacs and his flagship interview show Everything Went Black—and keeping up his physical training as much as possible.

We’ve talked a few times since lockdown. You seem to be handling the conditions on Planet Virus better than most. Does it seem that way to you?

That’s a good question, because sometimes I wonder if we all died and we’re stuck in a purgatory somewhere. Or that I died, and I’m in hell— because for a long time I couldn’t do anything that I wanted to do. All the things that gave my life meaning were gone, and that to me would be hell. I would lay awake at night and think that maybe I’m dead and this is what hell is actually like, rather than some viral reality that we’re all living in. But I just stick to the routine. I think that’s kinda the thing that’s kept me sane through all this—getting up at the same time every day and having something to do with my time. That’s been very crucial to make it through all this stuff.

I’ve come to the same conclusion: Staying busy is the way to survive this fiasco with some semblance of sanity.

Yeah. Not vegging out and watching movies. That stuff’s fun, but I feel like I do that after I accomplish something—and then it’s cool. Rather than just trying to fill the hours of the day with it.

I’m guessing that playing shows is one of the things you miss most.

Definitely. We had a record come out in February, and we couldn’t really tour to support that. And we’re not going to be able to tour to support this new LP. And who knows when we’ll be able to get PHOTO BY DAN HIGGINS

back out on the road? For me, that’s always been the main part of being in a band. It’s nice to make records and all that stuff, but I really enjoy playing and the adventure of going on tour. We had some really cool opportunities this year that got cancelled, and that sucks.

You were supposed to go out with Napalm Death, right?

That tour was supposed to happen at what became the dawn of the pandemic. Napalm Death is one of my favorite bands of all time, too. For as long as I’ve been playing music, I’ve always wanted to go on tour with Napalm Death.

I finally got the opportunity to do it, and guess what? No one’s going on tour.

Was all of Under Sullen Skies written pre-pandemic?

The songs were all written last year, basically.

There were finishing touches on the lyrics that were done in the early weeks of the pandemic, but the drums were actually recorded early because we were supposed to do that Napalm Death tour. When we got back from that, we were scheduled to go in and finish the record.

Instead, we went into the studio when we probably shouldn’t have been doing that. I think that would’ve been frowned upon by a lot of people.

But we did it anyway. Fuck it. It was a risk that we were willing to take, and it turned out okay.

No one got sick. No one died. Nobody’s loved ones died. So, I feel okay about taking that risk.

But you kept the circle small—just the band and engineer, right? I can’t imagine you throwing a party in the studio or anything.

[Laughs] Right, but some people might get bent out of shape. Some would look at it as risky behavior—and rightly so. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be cautious.

Okay, so you wrote some of the lyrics postpandemic, and I know you came up with the album title during lockdown. How do you think this new reality that we’re all living in affected that input?

Well, you spend a lot of time locked away from the rest of the world and somewhat isolated at that particular time—I was still living in New York at that point, so I had some people around me—and your mind can’t go outward, so it goes inward. You start creating other landscapes to look at besides the blank wall that’s in front of you when you’re locked in a fucking apartment.

I think some of those frustrations found their way into the lyrics.

During that period, I would go on the roof and work out. There was a solid two-week period where it kinda halfway rained every day. It wasn’t full-on raining, but it wasn’t sunny. It was like this shitty, half-assed rain. Sullen days, sullen skies, you know? So, the title of the album came from that.

You got a new lineup prior to the Monarchy of Shadows EP, and those guys carried over into the new album. How did that create a different working environment from that of the previous Tombs record, The Grand Annihilation?

The Grand Annihilation was a totally half-assed effort in my opinion, looking back on it. The recording sounds great—Erik Rutan always does a great job.

But there was hardly any input from any of the band members at all on that record, other than me and the drummer, and the drummer wasn’t really able to play the material the way it needed to be played. So… yeah, it sucked. That record was a total disappointment. If I could have never put that record out, it would’ve been great. I would be cool with having that erased, like some Mandela Effect where that record won’t exist.

You dislike it that much?

I do. I hate that record. We’re never playing anything off that record ever again. But you keep doing what you’re doing and things turn around eventually. Brett Bamberger from Revocation actually turned me on to Justin, my new drummer, and that was the gateway to the other guys I’m playing with. It can all be traced back to Brett, basically. At a time when I was being stabbed in the back by vipers, Brett DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2020 : 37

 Misery loves new company

Hill (center l) and new friends move on from annihilation in search of sullen skies

songwriting, lyrical content and philosophy— things like that. The song he’s on is a not-so-subtle homage to Samhain and early Danzig, which is something he and I had bonded over. I think that track came out great.

You’ve also got our mutual friend Sera Timms on “Secrets of the Black Sun.”

She’s been on a couple of Tombs records—and you have, too. When I wrote that song, I knew we needed a certain atmosphere and I just thought it fit perfectly with her voice and considerable talent. That’s another track that I think sounds great, and having that extra vocal texture in there really makes the song.

was one of the only people who looked out for me during that whole period. He connected me with some good people, and that’s how the new lineup came together.

Who were the vipers in that scenario?

It was basically that lineup that I had, which systematically dried up and blew away. That’s really the best way I can say it. Except for [guitarist] Evan Void—he was the only guy to really hang in there and conduct himself like an adult male. The rest were just, like I said, vipers. But Evan is a legit guy. He was the only one who was honest and truthful about things. He wanted to change his life a little bit, and he was straightforward with me about it, and it was cool. But everyone else had these weird hang-ups, I guess.

[Laughs] The whole thing was very unsavory. But you can’t get me down.

It seems like you landed in a good place, at least.

From what I can gather, the new guys are the most collaborative Tombs lineup you’ve ever had.

Yeah, definitely. And it’s fun. Creatively, everyone has got cool ideas. We’re not exactly on the same page, but it’s all in the same ballpark, and when people bring stuff to the table, it’s a plus.

38 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

I feel really comfortable playing with everybody because they have such great ideas.

You’ve got a ton of guest musicians on this album as well. Tombs have had guests in the past, but not to this extent. Do you think the collaborative nature of the new lineup opened the door to more collaboration in general?

Well, the whole process was more quote-unquote “fun.” People that appear on the record are friends, or they’re people who have helped us out in the past—like Andy Thomas from Black Crown Initiate. He was in Tombs for like a year, just on tours, so we invited him to come back and play on the record a little bit. And it worked out really well. Ray [Suhy] from Six Feet Under is a good friend of Justin’s and the other guys, so we got him to play. Todd [Stern] from Psycroptic actually shares a practice space with us, so we asked him to do something.

Dwid Hellion from Integrity is on “The Hunger,” which is like goth hardcore. Is that why you wanted him on that song?

Dwid and I had been corresponding for the last few years, and creatively I think he’s been on a cool vibe. We share a lot of the same ideas about

The theme of death has always been a meditation for most of our records—and I’m not a young man anymore. I’m getting into that phase of my life where you start seeing the end. You start thinking about how many years you have left. Death becomes more of a real thing. When you’re young, death is this distant concept that you don’t have to think about unless someone in your family passes away. You can get murdered, I guess, or die in an accident, but it’s not part of your natural process. But as the years and decades stack up, you start thinking of death as a reality. It’s eventually gonna come for you.

I write morbid lyrics, anyway, but in the last couple of years it seems like there’s been a lot of obstacles and ordeals on a personal level—with the band and my own life. So, you wonder how many more times you’re gonna go through this.

How many years do I have left to actually wake up and have a day? What’s the number of those days?

I guess a lot of that stuff plays into the record.

Even though most of the lyrics were written before the pandemic, are you starting to see new or different meanings in them now?

Not really. I write almost every day, so what’s in front of me right now is the present. I don’t go back and look at anything I wrote earlier because it doesn’t seem relevant to me in the same way something I wrote today does. And a lot of the lyrics are allegorical. There’re macabre archetypes, like vampires, on this record. But it’s a character you use to express another feeling.

It’s not about drinking blood or whatever. You’re pulling the life essence out of something. You’re immortal and you’re watching everything die around you. That was all written before the lockdown and pandemic, and I had a different point of view. But things I’m writing these days are how I feel about what’s happening now.

PHOTO BY DAN HIGGINS

The Grand Annihilation was a totally half-assed effort in my opinion, looking back on it. That record was a total disappointment. I hate that record.

We’re never playing anything off that record ever again.

Many of the lyrics on the album seem to be about wrestling with one’s own mortality. Is that a fair assessment?

the

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

definitive albums

DECEMBER 2020 : 40 : DECIBEL

story by

kevin stewart panko

The Chosen the making of Swans’ Children of God

I

n the early ’80s, Swans emerged from New York City’s Lower East Side with a sound that mirrored the

gritty harshness of a city that had capitalism’s superstructures and emerging wealth existing alongside a crumbling concrete dystopia and near-apocalyptic poverty. With a bass tone approximating a grizzly bear passing a kidney stone, a factory-floor rhythmic pulse, guitars that screamed like helicopters crashing into the Hudson and icy, brash lyrics delivered in a brutish mantra-like chant, Swans rewrote the landscape of heavy music at the same time as commonly recognized metallic heroes Metallica, Slayer, Hellhammer, Voivod and Venom.

The difference was they were doing it in a completely different world with a completely different sound.

Their 1983 debut, Filth, and its 1984 follow-up, Cop, offered a different kind of pummeling—a caustic resin that straddled metal, no-wave, art-punk, electronic noise terror, experimental music, outsider art and the early days of industrial. Those two crushing masterpieces—along with Time Is Money (Bastard)/A Screw, Greed and Holy Money (all from 1986 and collectively referred to as the “Dollar Sign” records because they all had permutations of that symbol as cover art)—continued to bring the noise. Swans delivered a monolithic enormity of impenetrable sonic pain molded into some of the darkest, heaviest music to never be referred to as heavy metal.

By 1987, however, vocalist/guitarist/bandleader Michael Gira was growing weary of the emotional and physical toll of Swans’ notoriously punishing rehearsal schedule, recording sessions and ear-shredding live shows. He was looking to ease up on the intensity and explore what acoustic guitars and actual singing could bring to the bombast. Drafting the trio of emerging vocal talent and experimental musician/artist Jarboe Devereaux, bulldozer bassist Algis Kizys and drummer Ted Parsons (who would later star in Prong and Godflesh) to join him alongside six-string chameleon Norman Westberg, Gira for the first time had a solid lineup willing and able to push a different set of boundaries, while continuing to push those already being pushed. Children of God married Swans’ colossal early sound with a dynamic, elegiac darkness. Distorted masDBHOF192 siveness was buttressed up against acoustic restraint.

Children of God—which will see a deluxe reissue on Gira’s own Young God label on November 13—shocked and awed Swans’ regular supporters and opened the band to a wider, freakier audience of people who didn’t mind breathers between beatdowns. Recorded in the unique rural environment of Sawmills Studios in Children of God Cornwall, England, the album was a transition from the battering Swans of old CAROL INE/MUT E towards the varied and dynamic Swans that still exist to this day and caught OCTOBER 19, 1987 the ear of everyone from Decibel brethren like Godflesh, Neurosis, Melvins and Napalm Death to musical polymaths the Young Gods, production wizard Kevin Come on down and get saved Martin, avant-garde pianist/chanteuse Diamanda Galás and noise-obsessed jazzbo John Zorn. For these, and many more reasons, we load up the boat and welcome Children of God to ride the tide into our Hall of Fame.

D E C I B E L : 41 : D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 0

PHOTO BY LEE RENALDO

SWANS

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SWANS children of god

Before Children of God, Jarboe, Ted and Al had performed on previous Swans recordings, but weren’t full-time members. Was this the first album in which they were fully in the band?

JARBOE: When I first moved to New York in 1984, I was more like a behind-the-scenes member. I was like a gofer, a flunkie, a takecare-of-this-and-that kind of person. I was a member, but not a performing member. It wasn’t until the summer of 1985 that Al and I were both officially hired as live performing members of the band. It was the Dollar Sign records where he and I became more part of the band. I had done backing vocals, one lead vocal and some stuff on b-sides.

ALGIS KIZYS: Both yes and no. For the Dollar Sign records, I had already joined, but some of that stuff had already been recorded and worked on.

When I came into the band—and I got Teddy in shortly after—we were full members, but it happened that some of the stuff had already been recorded and some of it we worked on in rehearsals as a unit. The stuff that was already recorded got used as it was, so that’s why things might seem fragmented to outside onlookers. We toured those records, extensively, using two drummers, Ted and Ron Gonzalez, and by the time of Children of God, we were down to one, but had gotten tighter as a band.

TED PARSONS: Children of God was the first album I played on as a full member of the lineup. I did play on A Screw and the flipside of Holy Money, but that was more like Michael saying, “Hit the snare and I’ll sample it” and that was it. [Laughs] To be honest with you, I didn’t really like Swans when I joined the band. I was playing in this punk band when Al and I met and became friends at CBGB. A week later, he was asking me if I wanted to join Swans. I was hesitant, but he said, “We’re going on tour in Europe for two months.” I was like, “OK, I’ll join!” [Laughs] I wasn’t really into that whole Sonic Youth scene that was coming out of New York at the time. I was more into hardcore, metal and crossover, but I grew to like Swans.

NORMAN WESTBERG: That’s true. Jarboe was already a member, and by the time we went to Cornwall [to record], Al and Ted were fully members. For a moment, we had two drummers: Ron Gonzalez and Ivan Nahem from Ritual Tension who did the Dollar Sign records. Ivan left, Ted came in and did a little bit on one of those records. Before that [ex-bassist], Harry Crosby kind of faded away and Al came in.

MICHAEL GIRA: I have to offer the caveat that this was 33-plus years ago and I have a terrible memory to begin with, but I think so. [Laughs] I would say that Children of God was a time when it was a solid band, but unfortunately we only lasted through a European tour, then Ted left.

“I had been watching a lot of late-night TV and Jimmy Swaggart. I was struck by the ecstatic fervor of his performances and their relationship to his audience of parishioners. That inspired a lot of the lyrics.”

MICHA E L G IRA Where was the band at heading into Children of God? How did having a full lineup impact the creation of the album?

I’d say things were as usual. Experimenting, finding out what worked and what didn’t.

JARBOE: Michael and I had just done the Blood, Women, Roses album, the first by our side project Skin, and the decision around that was to “explore the singer and the song.” So, this was vocals up front instead of receding in the mix, not having a lot of effects on the voice and just really being about the singer’s emotional experience. So, that colored things because the project was going along at the same time as we were going into the studio for Children of God and introducing the idea of focusing on the singer in the context of the dense bombardment and heaviness of Swans. So, you begin to see these interludes in Swans that are kind of reflecting on the Skin material. There were moments of innocence that were also kind of sinister that would go into something heavier. When you hear the album, it’s like you’re on a ride or a journey. You’d have something beautiful, then something bombastic, and that was the genius of that album; and also the portal, because all the live shows and albums that came after went that way.

PARSONS: The original Swans was completely different. The Children of God Swans was Jarboe with her beautiful vocals, and it was a little mellower than it was intense. I think Michael was trying to do something different with the ambient sounds, which was a big change.

GIRA:

DECEMBER 2020 : 4 2 : DECIBEL

How much of the album was written before you went over to the U.K. to record?

A lot of it was written beforehand. I had a lot of it on acoustic guitar and Jarboe had some loops and piano figures, and I’m pretty sure all the lyrics were written. I don’t recall how much we rehearsed for that record, but we spent a lot of time in our Lower East Side practice space, which was known as the Bunker. It was where Jarboe and I lived.

PARSONS: It was pretty much written by Michael, but we all contributed ideas in the studio. Al’s always had that heavy kind of Lemmy-style bass with power chords, so that was in there, but he could also play very softly with his fingers and do harmonic notes. For me, it was totally different from the Filth and Cop albums where [ex-drummer] Roli Mosimann was doing some really intense drumming. It was a juxtaposition of sound, definitely. We were always rehearsing in a studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and we rehearsed quite a bit for that album.

We had the basic ideas and I’d say 50 percent of it was written in New York and the other half was kind of written in the studio. The producer [Rico Conning] had just finished doing a Laibach album, and I think Michael really loved the sound of it, so I think he and Michael were leaning towards something like that.

GIRA:

How did the writing sessions compare to previous Swans albums?

GIRA:

I wanted a lot of dynamics, different

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DBHOF192

SWANS children of god who knows if it would have lasted if he didn’t change things up to that degree.

textures and feels to make it an experience. I think it was the first record where I started looking at the album like a piece of cinema instead of a rock band. I think I might have been growing tired of the monolith of sound, and we started to introduce other atmospheres by the time of Greed and Holy Money, but this was more extreme.

I had unfortunately decided to pick up an acoustic guitar by then [laughs] and started to noodle around on it and became intrigued with the possibilities. It was a learning experience to say the least. I’ve since gotten better at it, but that was the first foray into writing songs and trying to develop things that way. It was necessary to move on to something new, so we did.

JARBOE: I had done some music working with different sampling units, making loops and sonic collages with them even before I moved to New York. So, this kind of sound with keyboard melodies played over noisier stuff was something I’d already done myself, and when we went to record that, it gelled with the chanted lyrics. It all came together in the studio and was very much inspired by the day-to-day because we were there for a long time and away from the world.

PARSONS: I remember one day, Michael came in with an acoustic guitar and Al and I kinda looked at each other and said, “OK, I guess things are going to change here.” And Michael was talking about Bob Dylan and this and that, and I was like, “Really?” And when Jarboe really came on board with her material, we knew things were going to change massively.

KIZYS: We worked on it together as a unit developing material after the Dollar Sign tours, and that hadn’t been the process before and around when I joined and hopped on in mid-flow. For Children of God we worked on material for a while and we had one hell of a rehearsal schedule.

Michael and Jarboe lived in the rehearsal space, Ted and I lived in Brooklyn, Norman lived in Manhattan and we would commute. I remember five-hour rehearsals, five days a week, on top of our day jobs. It was pretty intense, but good because to play that kind of music is pretty difficult, and that’s what it needed to get that tightness. As much as it was strenuous, we were working towards a goal, so it never seemed that bad.

WESTBERG: We would convene at the rehearsal space and play, and we would remember what we played if it was worth remembering. We never recorded ourselves, and since we rehearsed every night, there wasn’t a lot of time to forget what you were doing. In fact, I don’t think there are any Swans rehearsal tapes in existence, anywhere. We’d play the same thing for hours and Michael would sit there and listen, tweak things, latch onto things, and that’s what we would expand on. It’s always been Michael’s band, and

What drove you towards religion as a thematic focus?

The title was just another foray into symbols that represented beliefs in systems or the way we as humans tend to subsume ourselves into beliefs. I had been watching a lot of latenight TV and Jimmy Swaggart. I thought he was the consummate performer, and I was struck by the ecstatic fervor of his performances and their relationship to his audience of parishioners. That inspired a lot of the lyrics and I took it from there. I had no interest in denigrating Christianity; I just wanted to take on the language that was being used because I found it so fervent and compelling, so I just put it in a different context.

JARBOE: Michael was watching all these shows with Jerry Falwell and other televangelists, and they were reflecting what he was seeing. It was a commentary on televangelism, but he didn’t know that the Children of God was actually a cult from the ’70s. These girls would go to malls all over the United States and try to attract or seduce people to come to their meetings or whatever, and they had this leader named David [Berg]. It was a whole cult, but the album isn’t based on it. The title was purely coincidental.

WESTBERG: That’s all Michael, but it’s not like I was repulsed by the themes. I don’t know if you can be in a band where you totally disagree with what’s being projected. I always thought he was a great writer.

GIRA:

Tell us about the studio you recorded at.

It’s called Sawmills Studio because it used to be a sawmill that dates back to the Norman Dynasty and was built in 1066 or something. We just lived there together, and it seemed like there was a lot of easy back-and-forth between the members. Our record company found the place for us. It was going to be our first record for Mute, and I think someone else at the label had worked there and recommended it. It sounded like a good idea, and [it] was romantic to be in this medieval atmosphere. We were supposed to go there for three weeks and we ended up staying six weeks.

JARBOE: A number of British avant-garde and quirky art bands that were quite legendary had recorded there. It was near Cornwall, so it wasn’t far from a number of historic locations. The studio is on an island and it’s actually a compound that you live at while you’re recording.

It was great! We all had cabins and the studio was in the main house. We were right on the water and there were all these swans flying in.

That was actually the first time I realised those things could fly! [Laughs] I frequently remember with fondness this experience and privilege of being able to live there for so long. We were able GIRA:

DECEMBER 2020 : 4 4 : DECIBEL

to walk along the railroad tracks and go into the nearest town, which had shops and pubs. I would hike the hills by myself. I’d go through these dense forests, and suddenly it would clear into these beautiful pastures and I’d be surrounded by sheep. Another day I went exploring and was walking along a path and heard hoofs in the distance. I ducked out of the way and all these people in red coats doing the proper British fox hunting thing came galloping by. We had a woman who would come in and cook our dinners, and she would leave us food to make our own breakfasts and lunches.

PARSONS: You had to take a boat to get there and we had these giant Marshall guitar cabinets and Ampeg bass cabinets on this little fishing boat.

When we got there, it was cool and beautiful and really nice. The place still exists, and if you go to their website you can see they have little apartments for people staying there. But I have to say that when we were there, it was total drunken craziness! Norman and Al were my regular drinking buddies at the bars in Brooklyn, so in Cornwall it was nonstop drinking! The caretaker was this guy named Foxy. He was a really nice guy, but a total drunk, and Al and I could put away the booze, so I’d have to say we were very drunk almost every night. There’s a little inlet to a river that leads to the ocean, and one night those guys took the boat out and they were so drunk they crashed it, put a big hole in the thing and sank half of it. The studio owner wasn’t very happy with that, but it was great fun!

KIZYS: That was Michael’s call. I don’t know how he heard about it or found it, but it was pretty awesome. William the Conqueror had it on his original mapping of England, so it’s been a place for a long time. It was great and a magnificent experience. When we were driving there, the roads were getting smaller and narrower and more winding, and you’re starting to see haystacks on the side of the road. It was like, “Where the hell are we going?” We had to make it to a certain point by a certain time because of the tides on the River Fowey. Fowey is a tidal river and the only access to the studio is by boat.

Our truck pulls up with us and our gear and there are these boats there and everyone there is like, “Hurry up, let’s go!” We load everything on these motorboats and go about a mile down river, and there are these train tracks running over a little bridge; and because it’s tidal, there would either be too much water and not enough room to get under the bridge or not enough water for the boat to run on. You had to time your access to the studio.

WESTBERG: It was me, Al and Ted staying in a cabin, and Jarboe and Michael stayed in the main house. If we weren’t in the studio, a lot of the time we would sit around and drink beer and play cards with Foxy, who was really not a good influence on us. [Laughs] He would take us into town and take us out cruising in the boat.

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Our record label was in England and I think they got us a deal. This was in the pre-internet age, so we didn’t really know anything about it before we got there.

Do you have any memories that stand out about recording at Sawmills?

We did some field recordings where we set off fireworks outside of the studio and recorded the explosions going off. Michael and I went out onto the water in a rowboat and had a microphone suspended and recording us, and you can hear the oars dropping into the water.

I also remember that, because the studio was in the lower level of the main house, when people would walk around upstairs, the microphone would pick it up. When I was doing the vocals for “In My Garden,” Michael wanted it breathier and breathier, and I would have to do it again and again, and I’d be like, “Tell everyone upstairs to stop moving!” I remember we were working on “In My Garden,” which I originally started writing when I was in college on an upright piano, and one day Al was sitting on the floor in front of the TV in the main house practicing his fingering, playing along to whatever was on, and I heard what he was doing and it turned out to be a cool counterpoint to the song.

He went down to the studio and added it. I sat in on the mixing with Rico Conning and Michael and learned a lot, and was able to comment on the way things were being treated and being mixed. Children of God was the beginning of me having a bigger experience, not just coming in there and playing a part and leaving. I was actually there until the bitter end.

KIZYS: The main meat got done pretty quickly. I remember the last weeks were when we started working on some other stuff. You take the kids out of the city and it took us a while to decompress and some of the stuff was developed later on, like recording fireworks thrown over the water and stuff like that. Most of those calls were Michael’s because he was in charge of the recording, so when we needed more material, little experimental and improv-y parts and piano parts were worked on and became pieces. Some of it made it on the record, some didn’t.

WESTBERG: It was a little bit of a shock at first, and kind of strange that we had to bring our own gear because most studios are known for having gear available, but it was fantastic. The guy who was engineering it, Rico Conning, was a really cool guy, and everyone involved in the running of the place was cool and really nice.

JARBOE:

What do you remember about reactions to the album upon its release?

For the people who noticed, I think it was a big surprise. A lot of the heavy music fans who expected us to carry on with that sort of sound

GIRA:

forever were kind of disappointed, and other people who were inclined towards something more nuanced gravitated towards it. I listened to it for the first time in something like 20 years in preparation for this, and realized how much better the songs got as we played them live on the European tour we did for it. I kind of wished we had recorded it after the tour.

JARBOE: Ironically, Alternative Press put it in the top 100 or 200 albums of all time, but another magazine refused to review it because Michael put something like, “Thanks to our lord and savior, Jesus Christ” in the credits, which was a total misunderstanding of the meaning of the album. I think people were divided because they didn’t know if Swans were suddenly becoming born again or something. [Laughs] And then you have people like Steve Von Till from Neurosis saying it was pure, intense evil. In my experience, when you divide people, it’s a good thing.

PARSONS: I remember it got pretty good reviews, particularly from the English papers like Melody Maker and Sounds. It was definitely an escape from the previous albums; there was more diversity and different types of sounds, which was a big break from the pummeling of the early Swans stuff, and the fans seemed to really take to it and followed us through.

What touring did you do in support of the album?

PARSONS: We were on the road about a month after

recording. We went back to New York to regain our composure and make plans, and the first gigs were in London, which were all sold out. Then we went all over Europe. We toured Germany on a tour called the Kings of Independence where we were on a bus with the Fall, Nick Cave and the Butthole Surfers, and it was just crazy, debauchery! We had to make regular stops for Nick Cave to shoot up, we were doing acid, we’d throw bottles of anything out of hotel windows. It was just stupid, dumb stuff. There was a riot at one show that was oversold. We were hauling around this gigantic German sound system. We were bringing it into every venue, even the little ones, and it was so loud that the walls would start coming apart and we’d blow breakers. There was one show we did in Birmingham at the Loft, and the ceiling was actually caving in. But our music had to be loud. I think Melody Maker reviewed a show in Scotland and they said it was so loud that it felt like getting punched in the neck repeatedly, and that people were throwing up.

GIRA: After the European tour, we had a U.S. tour planned, which we had to cancel because Ted left to play with his other band; we had to reconfigure, which was an unpleasant experience.

JARBOE: I remember being so fucking loud a lot of the time that venues couldn’t handle it.

We would blow a lot of fuses and have a lot of technical problems. For those shows, we would incorporate the softer material and the singing material, and that would lead to the experience DECEMBER 2020 : 4 6 : DECIBEL

of the male audience—which Swans’ audience was mostly at that time—yelling at me to get my tits out and throwing things at me, especially in the U.S. where the shows were harder and more brutal. It was a very difficult and intense tour, and that was scary; so was the fact that we took this album into communist Eastern Europe before the wall came down.

How did you end up touring behind the Iron Curtain?

There was a guy who was a really great underground booking agent who had previously booked Pere Ubu in the Eastern Bloc, illegally as well. Our record company knew of him. We got in contact and he booked us. Yeah, that was very interesting and very much soured me on any romance about communism. People were so unhappy; it was so glum and brutal and awful.

Not to say that corporate capitalism is the best alternative, but there was a grayness to everything, a lack of commodities and some rather unsanitary conditions. The people who booked us in Czechoslovakia risked their lives to put on the show. They may not have been executed if they had been caught, but they certainly would have gone to prison. They were pretty courageous and felt there was something we had that needed to be put forth, so we played clandestinely and it was an eye-opener. I remember when we left the Eastern Bloc from the former Yugoslavia and got to Turin, Italy. We sat down at this seaside restaurant for a meal, and it was like being in Disneyland. Everything was suddenly so bright and colorful; people were sunning themselves and seemed happy.

JARBOE: We played in Yugoslavia and what used to be Czechoslovakia, which was completely illegal. We were smuggled in by people who were dissidents who gave us places to sleep and put on shows that were illegal and unannounced in places like cellars and back rooms. It was extremely interesting to go in there and see the hammer-and-sickle flags flying off buildings and stuff. It was also pretty hardcore for me, personally, going into that part of the world as a vegetarian. At the time, there was literally nothing to eat but sausage, and the drinking water wasn’t safe, so I had nothing but orange soda pop for weeks and got really sick after that tour.

PARSONS: We spent two weeks in Poland before Poland was up and running. Everything was made out of concrete, and we played these festivals that were more like hippie, psychedelic bands playing, and we’d get up there and shock people. We spent a lot of time there, and Al and I ended up with a lot of Polish money that, at that time, you couldn’t just go to a currency place and exchange. We had about the equivalent of what a Polish doctor would have made in a year, but if we brought it out of Poland it would have been worthless. So, we went to a department store to spend it, but there was nothing in GIRA:

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the stores. We had so much money that we played a show at a charity house for teenagers and instead of getting paid, we gave them a bunch of our money.

JARBOE: When we were leaving Poland, we had all this money that was worthless outside of the country, and I remember walking to a Polish department store and there was pretty much nothing to buy. Michael bought a CCCP wristwatch and I bought an amber necklace, but we still had a whole bunch of this money we couldn’t take with us. We were driving and there was this older woman along the side of road, and I remember Al saying, “Stop!” And we had a discussion about giving all this money to this woman and whether that was wrong or right. We ended up not quite giving it to her, but putting it on the ground near her for her to pick up if she wanted it.

KIZYS: We had days off where we hung out with a band who took us to their country house. We went to a Polish wedding where we shoved the groom’s face into the cake and showed everyone how to do the punk rock chicken fight dance.

We played in Warsaw, then Wrocław before we went to Czechoslovakia. We were in some restaurant trying to spend all our Polish money and we were ordering the most expensive stuff we could find, bottles of Russian champagne and everything else, and still the bill came out to something like $12 U.S. We got into an argument about who was going to pay because everyone was trying to get rid of their money.

How did a scruffy-looking rock band from the West with a van full of gear pulling up to an Eastern European border during the Cold War get waved through?

Jarboe: We had Jack Balchin as our live sound engineer and somehow he managed to get us through these borders. I remember this one border we pulled up to very late at night, and he got out and had this way of charming the border guard. He would talk them into letting us through and they would. I have no idea how he did it.

KIZYS: We came in from Malmö, Sweden on a ferry to Swinoujscie and the East-West difference became apparent with what we were offered food-wise on the boat. I’m Lithuanian heritage and was seeing stuff that my parents would eat, like head cheese and pickled herring. We got off the boat and we were definitely on the other side of the Iron Curtain. On the road, our sound guy, Jack Balchin, was really helpful because he toured and worked with other bands like Test Dept. and Henry Cow who had been there, and he knew the routine. I think he was saying that we were just passing through on our way to somewhere else. We strapped the back of the truck

“I can completely disconnect my personal experiences and memories of it, just listen and be wowed by it being one of the greatest and most epic avant-garde albums ever.”

JA RB O E where the gear was and told the officials it was strapped and locked up, and not to worry because we wouldn’t be opening it up. [Laughs] WESTBERG: At the Czech border, they wanted to lock up the back of the truck themselves so we couldn’t get the equipment out to use it, but they couldn’t figure out a way to do it. That’s how we had access to our equipment without doing something really illegal like breaking some government seal. Ironically, the most serious and scariest borders weren’t even the communist ones; it was the one between North and South Ireland.

It was just hay bales and guys standing around with guns. I didn’t like the looks of it, and would rather have had some semblance of official order.

How do you view the significance of Children of God? JARBOE: I don’t know if the others agree with me, but I think it’s an epic masterpiece, a classic. I can completely disconnect my personal experiences and memories of it, just listen and be wowed by it being one of the greatest and most epic avant-garde albums ever. I think that’s because of its extreme dynamic nature and how it maintained that raw quality and incorporated more musicality into it.

PARSONS: To be honest, while I was doing it, it wasn’t really my cup of tea, but I had a hell of a lot of fun with Norman and Al. We really had an impact. The power of what we were doing, the space, the heaviness… I never realized before how important that was to music history. It was really intense stuff we were doing.

DECEMBER 2020 : 4 8 : DECIBEL

After I heard it, I thought it was different, I liked it and it changed my way of thinking about music; and I liked the fact that it wasn’t pummeling like old Swans.

KIZYS: Oftentimes, that’s the first record people who talk to me or about Swans will reference.

So, that says something about that because the Swans are an ongoing thing and that record came out 30-something years ago. It was an obvious transition into a different sound, and to me, that’s the legacy of that record.

WESTBERG: For me, writing the record, getting it together, and playing it with a group of people was fantastic and exciting. That was an entirely new thing, having that level of musicianship around. That made a big difference. The impact the record has had over the years is surprising.

I’m always shocked that a lot of metal bands like Swans when, to me, it’s not very metal and more of an out-noise thing that’s going on.

GIRA: It was a turning point. For me, as an artist and I guess the leader of the group who was engineering how things went, it was a necessary thing to do. We stepped beyond our level of expertise, but I’m glad I did that. I learned how to write songs better and became able to do things in a more diverse way with more confidence. I looked at it as a high point, though now I would have made better mixes and sung it much differently. I’m extremely fortunate that over the course of the years the people interested in the music have changed over the generations; a lot of younger people care about us and they explore the past, and that’s very gratifying.

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50 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

THE

GOES

MARCHING ON 40 YEARS ON,

CONTINUE TO STAND ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS—WHILE PROVING THEIR OWN GARGANTUAN STATURE

W

S T ORY BY

P H O T O S BY

JEFF TREPPEL

HRISTO SHINDOV

e here at Decibel usually give the cover story to newer

Armored Saint represent the very best of what it means to be a career metal band. No trendchasing, no messy public feuds, no questionable statements in interviews. Instead, their legacy to this point has been an incredibly consistent discography, a reputation as class acts and the respect of their peers. They’ve weathered just about everything the world could throw at them and they’re still standing—with the same lineup since 1990 (give or take said hiatus).

Now, as a pandemic ravages the globe, they’re ready to smash through the firmament.

bands, groups that push the genre into the future.

At some point, however, those bands’ moments pass. They go from being the hot new thing to cast as a working band. As metal’s most successful act famously pointed out, time marches on. Often those groups break up or dwindle into irrelevancy. Sometimes, however, after decades in the game, after triumphs and tragedies and setbacks, those working bands not only remain vital, but put out one of the best albums of their career. Such is the case with Armored Saint and their eighth full-length, Punching the Sky. ¶ These stalwarts of the Los Angeles metal scene moved in the same circles TAINTED PAST as bands that would go on to become absolute legends of the genre— Formed in 1982 in Pasadena, CA, Armored Saint hell, they opened a 1985 tour for Metallica and headliners W.A.S.P. They originally consisted of five high school friends: never quite ascended the same heights as their contemporaries, however. vocalist Bush, bassist Joey Vera, guitarist David Prichard, and brothers Phil (guitar) and Gonzo Although well-respected for their powerful live performances and metal (drums) Sandoval. “We’ve known each other for anthems like “Can U Deliver” and “Reign of Fire,” mainstream success more than 40 years—especially Gonzo and John eluded them. The death of one of their founding guitarists and the loss and Joey,” Phil reminisces. “They’ve known each of vocalist John Bush to Anthrax (one of the few times a band traded up other since they were in freaking fourth grade, maybe even third grade. They were like the with a new singer) would defeat a lesser outfit. And they did dissolve Three Stooges, man, throwing eggs at cars—let’s during the ’90s—but it turned out to merely be a hiatus. They reformed not talk about that. [Laughs] But yeah, when I met them, they were these crazy little kids. in 2000 and they’ve been going strong ever since.

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I was a little older—I’m Gonzo’s brother, but when I met John and Joey, it was like instant chemistry. We loved music; we would be, like, walking from school arguing about who’s better: KISS or Queen or Led Zeppelin.”

Growing up in Southern California in the ’70s exposed the boys to a wealth of influences. “We grew up with all kinds of stuff, whether it’s Earth, Wind and Fire or listening to Parliament,” Phil explains. “We were also listening to Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Van Halen, Iron Maiden, all that stuff. Even movies inspired us. The Road Warrior, we took a lot from that movie.” (That last bit is very much apparent if you look at pictures of the makeshift leather armor suits they wore in their early days.)

“The name came from Excalibur,” he continues. “We went to the movie over here at Monterey Park. I think we were a little high—don’t tell anybody—and we come out and Gonzo goes, ‘Hey, how about the name Armored Saint?’ And we all went, ‘That sucks!’ But then a week later, we still couldn’t find a name for our band, and Gonzo said it again and we were like, ‘Whoa, that’s cool, Armored Saint.’”

Armored Saint honed their craft on the same stages as the hair and thrash metal legends that would soon explode.

Their problem? They never quite fit into either category. They weren’t fast enough for thrash or glam enough for hair metal; their bluesy groove made them feel far too American to fit into the New Wave of British Heavy Metal; and the undeniable power of Bush’s raspy howl felt more akin to the ’70s bands they worshipped.

Bush himself has conflicting thoughts on people’s inability to pigeonhole his band: “Believe me, for the most part it’s probably been a bit of an albatross around us. People connect to scenes, whether it was the thrash scene or the hair metal scene or, later, the grunge scene.

There is something to be said for being part of a movement and a sound and a scene, and we just never were.

“I cherish it now,” he continues, “because I think that we look at ourselves—and I talked to Joey about this—and we’re like, it sounds like us and that’s all we care about. I think we’re really secure in that now, but for a long time it created little identity issues—especially when we were younger. You know, everybody wants to connect.

We would go play a show with W.A.S.P. or Ratt or Great White and do well, and then go play with Metallica or Death Angel and we would do well, but we still weren’t really part of their scenes.

52 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

Do I wish I had made more money?

Yeah, who doesn’t!

But in the end, I think that, especially in the music business, no way are you ever going to be able to control your destiny.

J O H N

B U S H

We were kind of like, ‘they’re power metal, they’re kind of bluesy—what are they?’ It’s kind of worked against us sometimes, I think, but I’m okay with it now.”

Their unique sound attracted the attention of the nascent Metal Blade Records. Armored Saint appeared on Metal Massacre II, put out an EP on the label and earned the lifelong friendship of head honcho Brian Slagel. Then, because it was Los Angeles in the early ’80s, the majors came courting. Specifically, Chrysalis Records. The metal bands on their roster were Michael Schenker Group, UFO and Jethro Tull.

Not surprisingly, the label didn’t quite know what to do with the band, pairing them with (post-makeup) KISS producer Michael James Jackson for their debut, March of the Saint.

It was overproduced and sales were underwhelming, so after two more underperforming records (Delirious Nomad and Raising Fear), they mutually parted ways. Armored Saint returned to Metal Blade and started writing their fourth album.

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Then founding guitarist Prichard was diagnosed with leukemia.

You can read more about that situation in the Symbol of Salvation Hall of Fame [November 2019, No. 181].

Long story short, the band lost their lead guitarist, main songwriter and spiritual brother. The blow nearly destroyed them. However, at Slagel’s urging, they regrouped, brought on Odin guitarist Jeff Duncan to take Prichard’s place and finished the songs Prichard had been demoing before his untimely demise.

Although Symbol hit the brick wall of grunge, many consider the record the band’s crowning achievement.

It’s only grown in estimation since its release, leading to the band playing the full album on tour in 2018.

Unfortunately, the combination of low sales and a phone call to Bush from Anthrax, who were looking to replace recently departed vocalist Joey Belladonna, led to the band getting put on indefinite hold. Still, the friendships endured. When Anthrax went on their own hiatus in the late ’90s, the Symbol lineup got back together, and they’ve been more or less active in that formation since (with Bush taking a few more years off to record and tour We’ve Come for You All with Anthrax).

Funnily enough, Anthrax weren’t the only ones that came calling.

Jarvis Leatherby, SoCal lifer and guitarist/vocalist for throwback metallers Night Demon, marvels at all the near-misses Armored Saint had with a certain other band that did find the success they were looking for: Metallica. Between trying to snatch Bush away at the beginning of their career and a couple attempts to hire Vera (once after Cliff Burton died, the other post-Jason Newsted), game recognized game.

“You don’t keep going back to people unless you know that there’s something there,” Leatherby reasons.

For his part, Bush looks back on his career with a certain amount of bittersweetness: “Do I wish I had made more money? Yeah, who doesn’t! But in the end, I think that, especially in the music business, no way are you ever going to be able to control your destiny. It’s just impossible. Even people that have had a lot of success, they have a hard time sustaining it. The thing that’s most important is just quality control. That’s the thing that you really can control: what you do and what you make. At the end of the day, I’m pretty good at just letting go.”

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NOD TO THE OLD SCHOOL

Of course, while there’s plenty of water under

the bridge, the band ain’t done yet. Not by a long shot. Since Bush left Anthrax for good (probably), fans got three Armored Saint full-lengths and a live album from the lineup that also included Vera, the Sandovals and Duncan. 2010’s La Raza and 2015’s Win Hands Down moved them into the future with bleeding-edge production and a more groove-oriented sound. Punching the Sky feels like the logical culmination of the path they’ve been exploring for the past decade.

Vera, the band’s bassist, principal music writer and producer from 2000’s Revelation onwards, echoes what Bush said about finally feeling comfortable to embrace the band’s own voice: “It wasn’t really until right around the making of La Raza when we were kind of like, you know, we’ve just been doing our own thing the whole time, we’re sort of on our own island, we don’t really sound like anybody else. That’s just my perception, anyway. And I have this conversation with John all the time. We just stopped worrying about everything and again, just stating the obvious, but we said, ‘Let’s just write good music’—like we weren’t doing that all along. [Laughs] But let’s just not worry and just write good, cool stuff. This freedom allows us to take subtle chances here and there to use different instrumentation and different influences, to play with production, and that’s how we operate now.”

Longtime label boss Slagel has known the band since practically the beginning of their career, and he’s watched their evolution in real time. He attributes their late-period renaissance to one particular factor: soul. And not just the kind implied by their name. “In a weird way, it’s kind of refreshing the last few years to see a lot of bands revert back to a lot of their earlier influences but adding a little bit,” Slagel posits. “With Armored Saint, there’s kind of an R&B factor to it, which might sound weird, but if you listen to it, it’s that classic metal ’70s and ’80s stuff—and then there’s that extra little tinge in there, which I think helps the riffs and some other stuff.”

Vera agrees with that assessment, but laughs when told that Slagel felt that way. “It’s funny to hear Brian say that, because I don’t think we could’ve pulled off making that sort of statement when we were making Symbol of Salvation.

He would’ve been like, ‘No way, no R&B on this record.’ But now that we’re in this arena where we can flex a little bit outside our comfort zones, it’s really gratifying to hear that somebody like Brian, who’s close to us, applauds it.”

Bush concurs with Slagel as well, and points to artists he grew up with like Stevie Wonder and the Commodores for influencing his vocal style. “We’ve always had that kind of bluesy thing and that soulful approach to try to put into 54 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

our songs and lyrics, and certainly my singing,” he says. “I think for me, I really want to be a Black guy in a heavy metal band. That’s not the way my voice sounds, but it’s the way I yearn to sing, and hopefully that creates a little bit more of an identity as well.”

Gonzo Sandoval, the group’s drummer since their inception, plays a key role in that identity, and his philosophy towards the underlying beat helps give them that rock ‘n’ roll soul. “For me, when I play drums, I want people to move,” he acknowledges. “I’m not a thrash drummer. I’m into groove, I’m into rhythms outside of heavy rock. I’m into Brazilian rhythms, even some jazz, some R&B—whatever works. But when I play it, I play it heavy, so it changes. I’m influenced by the different rhythms, I’m influenced by different drumming and different drummers; but when I play, my philosophy is, the harder you hit the drum, the better it sounds on heavy stuff. I’m also into dynamics. That’s where I’m trying to better myself in my approach to playing drums is to increase my dynamic quality and, of course, the energy and the power that I put out as the center point.”

It’s the balance between power and the classic soul/R&B influence that makes it so you can both dance and mosh to songs like “After Me, the Flood.” Armored Saint will always be metal, first and foremost—no worries about them turning into an Earth, Wind and Fire cover band—but it’s what makes them so distinct.

Unlike a lot of later metal bands that grew up listening to metal and were influenced purely by metal (or hard rock or punk), that melting pot of AM radio gold helped them break the mold early on. And they’ve only gotten better since they embraced it.

Phil Sandoval sums up their sound simply: “This one guy asked me, ‘So, what is it? Is it old-school, is it new-school, is it thrash? What kind of album is it?’ And I just told him it was Armored Saint-school music.”

FOR THE SAKE OF HEAVINESS

A new Armored Saint album starts with Vera.

He’ll mess around with some riffs, experiment with arrangements he’s never tried before, make some demos. At a certain point, he informs the rest of the band that he’s working on material and lets them submit some ideas. Bush comes in to collaborate with him and writes the lyrics.

Vera treasures his working relationship with Bush: “We’ve been doing the dominant writing for the last two records, but the guys always contribute. Everybody is always welcome to contribute, and they do; it’s just that John and I are frequently on the exact same page about where we want to end up, where we’re going just stylistically and musically. I think the guys recognize that in us and they allow us to create in this world, and then they chime in with stuff.”

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There aren’t any hard feelings from the other band members, either. Guitarist Duncan, for example, feels comfortable putting his trust in Vera’s songwriting prowess. “You know, [Vera] and John just write really well together,” he concurs. “I’m a writer, I’ve done my own records, I’ve written stuff for Armored Saint—I was a big part of ‘Last Train Home’ and ‘Symbol of Salvation’ and some others—but I’m a believer in whatever’s working for the greater good. I don’t really need to throw something in there for the sake of it. If something’s working and it defines the band’s sound, that’s the main thing that I care about—particularly the last few records, those guys are on such a roll that I don’t feel the need to have to throw in ideas just for the sake of it. I liked what was coming out. Maybe if there’s another one, we’ll see, but I’m all for what’s best for the band as a whole. I'm a fan of what those guys wrote—great to listen to, great to play.”

This time around, the Sandoval brothers sent Vera some ideas, one of which became the lead single, “End of the Attention Span.” Other than that, though, Vera’s goal was to write something that sounded like Saint, but didn’t just rehash “March of the Saint.”

“Sometimes I will consciously keep one foot in the past and put another one in front of me going forward. I want to remember where we come from and the influences that we had,” he explains. “I try to remember Dave Prichard’s picking style, for example, and I don’t want to lose that. So, playing these older songs [on the Symbol of Salvation tour] reminded me that, hey, it’s cool to remember that there’s some stuff that we did way back when, but you can present it in a new way.”

As an experienced producer, engineer and mixer who’s worked with bands like Anthrax, Redemption and Fates Warning (who he also plays bass for), Vera knows the technical side of things inside and out. That allows him to create incredibly detailed demos of each song to show the other band members what he has in mind.

“The songs usually start out in a demo form that I create, and I program drums—there’s tons of overdubs,” he explains. “It sounds like a record when it’s done; it’s very elaborate. Then John comes over and sings over it, so we use that demo as a skeleton, basically, for the actual making of the record later. John probably told you this story already, but he sings his ass off even during the demo sessions, so a lot of the stuff that we got on the demo tape was so good and had such a good vibe that we just left it in. So, some of that stuff is from the demos and some of it is first takes.”

The demos were so good that they even fooled other pros into thinking they were hearing the real thing. According to Vera, “I’ve had engineer friends I’ve played it for say, ‘This is the record, right?’ And I was like ‘No, it’s just demos; we haven’t even started yet!’ And they were like, ‘Shit, sounds good,’” Still, there’s no

replacing the band members themselves. “There’s certainly a different life and a different sense of urgency that the album has that the demos don’t, that’s for sure.”

Duncan, for example, loves expressing himself through solos. “I think [my main contribution] comes down to the solos, because with solos I try to create kind of a microcosm of the song itself—come up with something that fits the tune rather than just jamming out pentatonic licks and showing off. I’m more concerned with what suits the song mood-wise as far as the solo goes.”

While one certainly expects solos from an Armored Saint record, there are a few surprises this time around— like a marching snare at the beginning of “Do Wrong to None” courtesy of high school drum corps member Jacob Ayala (the son of a childhood friend), Uilleann pipes from Patrick D’Arcy, keyboards from Guns N’ Roses member Dizzy Reed and even some American Indian flute courtesy of Gonzo on “Never You Fret.”

Recording took place in the early part of 2020. In fact, they finished the sessions right as California went into lockdown. Bush views it with his usual droll humor: “Well, we’re kind of lucky in that we started recording in January, so the major lockdown didn’t hit until right around the same week we handed off the record to be mixed to Jay Ruston. We were fortunate that it didn’t affect any of the recording process because he can hold up in his place and just mix it by himself. As a matter of fact, Armored Saint usually has the worst luck in the world, so we were countering our luck that time because it would just be our luck that this would happen right when we were recording.”

Thankfully, they were able to get it in under the wire, unleashing 11 more killer heavy metal tunes upon the world. Starting with the rousing seven-minute everyman anthem “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants,” which compares the struggles of everyday life to the travails of heroes from Greek mythology, all the way through the desperate “Never You Fret,” Punching the Sky hits every point you’d want from a great rock record. “My Jurisdiction” brings the funk; “Do Wrong to None” moves from the aforementioned marching snare into one of the thrashiest riffs Saint have ever written; “Lone Wolf” and “Unfair” make perfect use of Sandoval and Duncan’s guitar harmonies and Bush’s emotive voice to work in an almost ballad mode. There’s nothing that’ll be a huge surprise to longtime fans, but that’s not the point.

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I usually am,” Duncan tells us. “When I go in and record, you go in and record the parts, and you go, ‘That sounds cool,’ and you’re happy with it and all that, but then what it becomes is an exciting thing to look forward to. The album as a whole is a really exciting thing for me, so I always want to hear it right away. I don’t want to hear rough mixes that much.

I want to hear what everybody else is going to do. So, yeah, I’ve listened to it I don’t even know how many times.

A bunch of times. I might listen to it tonight, who knows?”

FLY IN THE OINTMENT

Speaking of the quarantine, it’s some-

This one guy asked me, ‘So, what is it? Is it old-school, is it new-school, is it thrash?

What kind of album is it?’

And I just told him it was

Armored Saintschool music.

P H I L

S A N D O V A L

“It’s a modern record sonically, but it stays true to the origins of the band, and yet it still shows the diversity of the band,” Bush notes.

“I think that’s what we always try to achieve— make it sound fresh, but not make it sound like it’s not who we are. That’s a difficult road to navigate there. You don’t want it to sound like it’s a follow-up to Delirious Nomad because it’s not 1986; it’s 2020. I think a lot of my peers would agree that, even if you erred on the side of conservatism, if you will, and said, ‘Let’s look back at what we did in the ’80s and try to go that route,’ well, you can’t do that. You already did that. Like I said, you want to sound current, you want to sound modern, you want to make it sound true to the band’s style, and that’s the ultimate goal.”

Goal achieved. Assuming the world doesn’t end, Punching the Sky is scheduled for an October release date. The band says there was never any talk of delaying it because of the quarantine.

They wanted fans to have something new to look forward to. Hell, even members of Armored Saint were looking forward to the new album.

“I was really eager to hear the finished product; • DEC 2020 •

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what ironic that the first single from the album, “End of the Attention Span,” pokes fun at our addiction to technology when that technology is one of the few things that allows us to safely interact with others during the pandemic. “The song, all in all, is raising the question about our dependency on this stuff more than anything,” Bush says. “I’m just as guilty as anybody else. It’s funny, because when I write songs sometimes, my wife knows every aspect of my idiosyncrasies and behavioral traits, and she’ll be like, ‘Why are you writing that? You don’t even live like that.’ And I was like, ‘But I’m trying to!’ Sometimes I write stuff and it’s my own calling to try to be better in regards to this.”

The tricky thing about having one of the best vocalists in the business (Leatherby says that, while he thinks Ronnie James Dio and Glenn Hughes are the best rock singers of all time, Bush is his favorite) is that you can understand the words. Which means you need to have damn good lyrics. Thankfully, Bush brings his wry sense of humor and down-to-earth sensibilities to his writing for Armored Saint.

“I’m fortunate that writing lyrics still comes relatively easy to me—which, believe me, I’m super grateful for because I haven’t really had a major writer’s block,” he says. “The title idea [of ‘The End of the Attention Span’] Phil Sandoval came up with and I was like, ‘Great, I love that. This is going to be easy to write.’

All you have to do is look around the world and there are countless topics to choose from. For me, the way I like to approach writing lyrics is I don’t like to be so definitive that it’s obvious. My personal approach, especially over the last three albums that we made, is to be a little more ambiguous and let people read between the lines as to what I’m trying to say,

or raising points and then maybe having that determine something else.”

A song like “Bark, No Bite” demonstrates that approach perfectly with its descriptions of someone who’s the “God of ugliness” whose “candid philosophy is ‘fuck the rest.’” Combine that with biting couplets like, “The bigger they are / The harder we fall / We’re crash test dummies / Heading straight for a wall,” and it’s hard not to read the song as being about the current White House occupant.

“My lips are sealed,” Bush laughs. “No, I mean the funny thing is it could probably pertain to so many political people through the years. It doesn’t necessarily have to pertain to that guy, but it could pertain to so many people; it’s not limited to one person. I think people are pretty much disenchanted with politicians in general, and I think that’s how Trump got elected as it is—we were just disenchanted. It’s a bummer.

You want to believe in these people who you think have everybody’s best interests at heart, and every day I’m just reminded that I don’t think they do—any of them, whatever political affiliation they have—so I gotta bust their balls.

“It’s funny, because I know a lot of people, when they think about a band like Armored Saint through the years, they don’t think of us as being a humorous band, but I really cherish being able to bring that certain element of who we are to life. I mean, dude, we have to laugh at all this shit. It’s fucking crazy, right?”

STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS

Despite never hitting the heights of Metallica or

Anthrax, Armored Saint have still touched a lot

58 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

of people over the years. Leatherby appreciates their importance to the local scene: “At the end of the day you’re like, there was Ritchie Valens and then there was Armored Saint. It’s a cool part of our history. I would crown them the L.A. metal band. They’re number one for me. I can’t think of another band that’s really been as solid, and I don’t know: I still think of them as a big band. I really do. When I look at them, I’m like, ‘Yeah, dude, they’re legends; there’s no other way around that.’”

Slagel appreciates working with Saint, noting, “I got a text from John Bush the other day just saying, ‘Hey man, the album is coming out, thanks for everything. We love all the stuff that you guys do; it’s an honor working with you.’

That sort of dynamic is really amazing, to have an artist say that, and it just kind of shows who they are and how much they appreciate everyone around them, including the fans.”

Guitarist Greg Burgess from labelmates Allegaeon can attest to that as well. “I saw them in like 2000-2001. They were touring on Revelation,” he says. “They got me out of music theory at 8 a.m., so as a student right there, that was a magic moment. From the stage, [Bush] just said, ‘We’re going to be here really late, so if anybody needs a pass for school or work the next morning,’ [and] I was like, ‘Hell yeah.’ So, I went to the bus after and he wrote on a handbill, and my teacher was just like, ‘Cool, get out of here.’”

Armored Saint even have fans in very unlikely places. “During the pandemic, my wife was walking the dogs, since that’s the one thing you could do for a while to get outside,” Bush says. “She was wearing an Armored Saint shirt

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and somebody was like, ‘Oh, cool band!’ My sister-in-law, who lives below us in a duplex, was like, ‘Oh, do you know them?’ since we aren’t the most well-known band, and he was like ‘Yeah!’ and he started explaining that he was in [this gay tribute band to AC/DC called] GayC/DC and how he’s like a diehard Armored Saint fan, so of course he wants to meet me, and now he’s my neighbor.”

That personal connection has always been part of the band, from their very beginning until today. Gonzo Sandoval, for one, doesn’t take that for granted. “We’ve known each other since we were kids,” he says. “We grew up hanging out and liking music. [We have] some agreements and some disagreements, just like friends and brothers and family. We’re in a marriage called Armored Saint—different personalities, different needs, so it’s challenging to have kept it going for so long, but truly I love the guys in my band. We are friends, we’re brothers, we’re family. We’ve gone through a lot of ups and downs, and we’re still here in 2020 with God’s blessings. I feel very humbled and honored to be able to pump out music in 2020 after starting in 1981. We have a lot more to offer.”

And nothing sums up Armored Saint better than the cover art of Punching the Sky, which depicts a mountain carved with the band’s logo exploding from the ground.

“For me personally, I see the cover as a sort of allegory about how I see our band,” Vera concludes. “We’re always trying to keep moving forward, reaching, learning. And this massive labyrinth rising up from the earth resonates with those actions. It gives the piece a feeling of age and movement. Weathered, but resilient.”

INSIDE ≥

62 BLEEDING OUT Optimum wound profile 64 CONTRARIAN Denial fiends

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

70 IDLE HANDS Do unto others 72 NOTHING It's better than something 74 PALLBEARER Is it good? Oh, yes!

Studying the Blade

DECEMBER

ETERNAL CHAMPION’s sophomore LP is

the rare fantasy sequel that’s even better than the original

15

Would've been better with Scott Burns

11

Would've been better with Colin Richardson

4

Would have been better with Erik Rutan

0

Would have been better with Mike Ivory

I

n joseph campbell’s “the hero’s journey,” the structure of a cinematic quest is reduced to several familiar steps.

One of those is called “Reward,” or—more fittingly here— ETERNAL “Seizing the Sword.” It’s the point in a story when the protagCHAMPION onist reflects upon their journey’s lessons to summon strength Ravening Iron for the story’s climax. ¶ For epic trad metal lionhearts EterNO REMORSE nal Champion, their debut LP The Armor of Ire was a step in their unwritten journey. That album first held its broadsword aloft four years ago. During that time, Eternal Champion’s lore as trad metal’s new guardian has only deepened.

Joined by fellow luminaries Haunt, Visigoth and Sumerlands—the latter sharing three Eternal Champion members—American heavy metal has been lured to the fertile lands of swords, sorcery and anthropomorphized weaponry. ¶ For its near-mythic status as a turning point in American trad metal, The Armor of Ire seems like a formative battle in a longer campaign in retrospect. The songs were sharp and distinct.

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]

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The performances were still fresh while demonstrating reverence for Manilla Road. But the album missed the crunchy distortion and brawn of Eternal Champion’s less polished demo material.

On Ravening Iron, the tireless Arthur Rizk evokes the burly mixes of the band’s formative years. Meanwhile, he and the rest of Eternal Champion lunge forward with even more memorable compositions. “A Face in the Glare” and the album’s title track pair Jason Tarpey’s contagious choruses with sky-flung reverb. While Ken Kelly’s lurid cover art is a perfect precursor for the primitive doom of “Skullseeker,” the album’s songwriting is more sophisticated than the buxom bacchanalia implies. The bluesy introduction of “Coward’s Keep” is a welcome deviation from the record’s steel riffage. That track’s croon-along chorus is fit for a longboat of bellowing druids.

Eternal Champion foreshadowed some of the album’s songs already: They revisit their The Last King of Pictdom demo and polish “War at the Edge of the End” like a new blade. “The Godblade” is a suitable interlude, concisely capturing the synth proclivities of the band’s Terminus Est EP. But “Worms of the Earth” and the terminal track “Banners of Arhai” feature a harder edge than the preceding offerings. Despite harmonized leads and soaring solos, those songs could appeal to crossover thrash and hardcore fans with tabletop gaming backgrounds.

Eternal Champion’s anthems have always dwelled more in the shadows than the sunbasking power metal of Manowar and their battle-hymn disciples. That darkness expands in Ravening Iron, where battle doesn’t just equal glistening barbarians and the spoils of war.

There is a weight to Eternal Champion’s songs that can be explored or ignored, if you’re looking for grinning escapism. Either way, Ravening Iron will satisfy students of the blade as well as trad metal newcomers joining their first campaign.

—SEAN FRASIER

BENEDICTION

8

Scriptures

NUCLEAR BLAST

The rubicon transcended

The last time I seriously considered Benediction must’ve been on their The Grotesque / Ashen Epitaph EP. That was 1994. Now, I know all 27 people who bought and will defiantly defend The Dreams You Dread (and the three albums after it) are already lining up on Facebook to call me derogatory British words they fully don’t understand, but that’s life, and Benediction, for better or worse, have been writing middling, paint-not-peeling music for too long.

62 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

Scriptures finds not only the return of frontman Dave Ingram after 21 years away, but founding members/guitarists Peter Rew and Darren Brookes very spirited, as if they’re 19 again. This is still the hardscrabble, workaday (West) Midlands-style of death metal that put Benediction and many famous others on the map—make no mistake. There are no flutes, keytars or light-up electronic hardware to be found on Scriptures.

That’s right—this is straight-up, arms-folded, circle-pit death metal from the factory.

It’s as simple as it is effective. Ingram towers over songs like “Iterations of I,” “The Crooked Man,” “We Are Legion” and early single “Rabid Carnality.” And Rew and Brookes are riffing (and soloing!) like they’re the British equivalent of heyday Rick Hunolt and Gary Holt. Indeed, there’s a fresh stab of kinetic energy in Benediction’s eighth full-length. That’s the kind of deal the two guitarists imbued on my fave EP, or maybe they’re feeling the challenge of newcomer/drum whiz Giovanni Dürst, whose previous experience in White Wizzard, Omicida and Monument is providing much-needed thrashpower metal oomph.

Expect not to be floored by innovation or intrepid, progressive ventures into former vocalist Dave Hunt’s scary backyard. What you should be ready for is unadulterated, thrashing death metal the English way. —CHRIS DICK

BLEEDING OUT

8

Lifelong Death Fantasy P R O FO U N D LO R E

Keeping the dream alive

You got three kinds of “supergroups”: ego-clashing disaster, weekend fuckaround and, occasionally, a legit good band. If Bleeding Out can be considered a supergroup, then Lifelong Death Fantasy has all the earmarks of No. 3.

With past and current members of Fuck the Facts, Endless Blockade, Column of Heaven and Abyss, there’s good reason to expect something pretty burly from these four Torontonians. And they come through, successfully delivering eight no-nonsense tracks of ’90s deathgrind that contain enough nods towards the likes of Napalm Death and Carcass that it’s hard to like those bands and not enjoy this. Of course, sounding like other stuff isn’t the most incredible accomplishment, so that’s why the band decided to also bring a whole wheelbarrow of sick shit.

There is a bounty of hummable, catchy riffs here captured by ideal production. It’s not the overblown insanity where everything is an extreme muddle, but instead retains that balance where they can blast you right in the teeth while maintaining the clarity that allows you

to still revel in the hooks. Additionally, there are clues that the band is capable of expanding their sound, with one of the two instrumentals a layered dirge that segues into piano.

At under 20 minutes, Lifelong Death Fantasy is an impressive, but somewhat insubstantial release. If Bleeding Out’s intent is to continue on like a legit band, though, there is a good chance they’d create something that really makes a mark. They have the pedigree and they have the riffs. —SHANE MEHLING

BLUE ÖYSTER CULT 6 The Symbol Remains FRONTIERS

DEEP PURPLE

6

Whoosh!

EARMUSIC

OK boomers

At 52 and 53 respectively, Deep Purple and Blue Öyster Cult barrel through their sophomore millennium.

Whoosh! clocks the former’s 21st album dating back to 1968—11th following their classic lineup reuniting for Perfect Strangers in 1984—and fifth of the new century behind the Brits’ most stable roster. The Symbol Remains ekes out a 14th studio release since 1972 from the 1960s-hatched latter and only the one-time Long Islanders’ third LP after the original band’s reunion for Imaginos in 1988. Regrettably, both never-say-die acts respond with their weakest output since DP’s Bananas (2003) and BÖC’s Club Ninja (1985).

Trailing all-eras absorption Now What?! (2013) and lithe successor Infinite (2017), Whoosh! flits Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Ian Paice, Don Airey and Steve Morse at their most pop. Wincing melodies and lyrics abound, including “Drop the Weapon” and “No Need to Shout” (“What a bunch of trash you have exuding from your ass / That’s not the shit I want to hear”). ELP lite “Nothing at All” amuses, but hooky noir ditties “Step by Step” and “The Power of the Moon” toggle between playful and noodling. As such, 1:38 instro jam “Remission Possible” gives as good as Whoosh! got.

Likewise encoring a late-career gem, Curse of the Hidden Mirror (2001), The Symbol Remains leads with core Cultists Eric Bloom and Donald Roeser crunching “Enter Sandman” cop “That Was Me,” then “Box in My Head,” fit for the latter’s 1982 Buck Dharma solo sleeper Flat Out. Uncle Buck fares awkward (“Nightmare Epiphany”) to limp (“Florida Man”) otherwise, while thirdparty lead vox flounder even as Bloom’s “The Alchemist” taps 1974’s “Astronomy” for album alpha. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

AUTOPSY - LIVE IN CHICAGO

Autopsy’s first official live album, recorded in March 2020, features classic tracks from over three decades of depravity, including a brand new unreleased track, ‘Maggots In The Mirror’.

OUT NOW

CD • GATEFOLD DOUBLE LP • DL

KATATONIA - DEAD AIR

MY DYING BRIDE - EVINTA

Live album featuring Katatonia performing an extensive set of fan favourites plus the live premiere of 3 songs from City Burials, from their May 2020, Studio Grondahl, lockdown session

Special double gatefold vinyl edition of dark soundscapes marking 30 years of the band & including unreleased rendition of ‘The Cry Of Mankind’. This edition of ‘Evinta (MMXX)’ is released on vinyl for the very first time, and includes gatefold sleeve with updated cover art & layout courtesy of Aaron Stainthorpe himself.

‘Evinta’ is released as a double limited edition red/black vinyl

13TH NOVEMBER

2CD+DVD-AV • GATEFOLD DOUBLE LP • DIGITAL

New studio album of supreme blackened thrash metal devastation from rising UK titans Hellripper

The new full-length studio release of brutal, hook-laden death metal devastation as Morta Skuld mark 30 years of existence

Side A 1. Cult Metal 2. Dragon Fly (Proceed Upon The Journey) 3. Floating With The Ancient Tide 4. The Fright 5. A Shape In The Dark Side B 1. Slash At The Sun 2. Rockemillion 3. The Light 4. The Solar Winds Mantra

Recently unearthed set of tracks from Fenriz’s (Darkthrone) own archive of material.

In memory of all “CULT METAL”, new or lost, like RIGID DOMAIN from Denmark.

Vocals - FENRIZ Drums - FENRIZ Guitars - FENRIZ Bass - FENRIZ

Engineer - FENRIZ Recorded by - FENRIZ

OUT NOW

OUT NOW

Thanks to K.S. and O.K. for lending me the bass.

OUT NOW All songs written & recorded 1989-1993.

CD • GATEFOLD LP • DL Layout Matthew Vickerstaff

www.peaceville.com p 2020 Peaceville Records c 2020 Peaceville Records.

VILELP876. Peaceville is a Snapper Music Label. All rights reserved.

Unauthorised duplication is a violation of applicable laws. Made in the E.U. LC01702

ALL AVAILABLE (AND MUCH MORE) FROM VILELP876-LP.indd 1

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CD • LP • DL

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ISENGARD VARJEVNDOGN

Isengard - Vårjevndøgn

MORTA SKULD SUFFER FOR NOTHING

VILELP876

HELLRIPPER THE AFFAIR OF THE POISONS

4TH DECEMBER GATEFOLD DOUBLE LP

Vårjevndøgn

www.

CD • LP • DL

18/06/2020 12:53

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@PEACEVILLERECORDS 05/10/2020 17:09

DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2020 : 63

CHAMBER

7

Cost of Sacrifice PURE NOISE

Check your priors

Ever spend months or even years avoiding a certain dish because of earlier, less-than-thrilling encounters, only to half-heartedly try it again someplace new and discover… you kinda actually totally love it? I mean, when I see tech-y/djent-y jitter riffing meets that that’s-not-a-breakdown-it’severy-verse metalcore meets super-processed atmospheric sections meets about four billion pinch harmonics on the menu, my first thought is, “C’mon, chef. I’m looking for reasons to live and this isn’t helping.” And yet, this highly galvanized, tight-as-fuck debut full-length from the ambitious, motivated Nashville quartet Chamber presents a welcome and humbling reminder that it’s less about the ingredients than how a band mixes ’em together, and the amount of heat put beneath the skillet. (Full disclosure: I don’t actually cook, so I’m trusting you, dear reader, not to get too pedantic here.)

Which is to say, Cost of Sacrifice tosses a lot of bits and pieces into the pot that probably shouldn’t complement one another so well— some touchstones to my aging metalhead ears include Hatebreed, early Every Time I Die, the heavier Devin Townsend solo records, the industrial-soundscape-meets-primeval-chug stuff that Code Orange popularized, the oddly timed noodling those crab-walking guitarists play, Converge, a Godflesh T-shirt the Chamber guitarist wears in promo photos, etc.—but the flames are magma-hot and the fusion is largely spot-fucking-on. (I say “largely” mostly because the aforementioned pinch harmonics can feel like a garnish that got a tad bit out of control, and some industrial flourishes drift into indulgent territory.) At every turn, Chamber seem intent on challenging palates. Though traditionalists may retch, Cost of Sacrifice has real flavor. —SHAWN MACOMBER

CONTRARIAN

8

Only Time Will Tell W I L LOW T I P

Tech-death innovators live up to their name more than ever

While last year’s Their Worm Never Dies came off as a bit of an afterthought to 2017’s magisterial To Perceive Is to Suffer, it was more like an agglomeration of lateral moves than any kind of step backwards. Only Time Will Tell captures the Rochesterbased progressive death metal quintet in the act of regaining their forward momentum while reasserting their hold on the new terrain 64 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

they claimed in 2019. In short, the band’s fourth album is weird AF in ways previously unbroached by anyone active in the new wave of old-school death metal... Contrarian included.

Opener “In the Blink of an Eye” tarries momentarily in some kind of Maurice Ravelfueled bullfight scene shit before ploughing through an orgy of exceedingly well-articulated riffs via guitarists Jim Tasikas and Brian Mason (sharp accents and pig squeals dominate), rendered a fuck of a lot less linear by Bill Bodily’s playful way with low-end spider webs for the ears. Whether channeling Ornette Coleman ensemble veteran Jamaaladeen Tacuma on the aforementioned track or getting freaky with extreme dynamics on “Case Closed,” the bassist acts as Contrarian’s low-key weapon throughout the album, bringing new depth and resonance to the band’s jazz-slanted agenda while constantly shelling out subtle surprises.

He also plays nicely with new drummer Bryce Butler, who more than fills founding member George Kollias’ shoes without ever stepping on anyone else’s. Same for founding vocalist Cody McConnell, whose croak is maybe a little less incongruous than Kollias’ screech, but a whole helluva lot more transparent.

—ROD SMITH

CRIPPLED BLACK PHOENIX

8

Ellengæst

SEASON OF MIST

Eclectic wizards

Despite the high turnover of humanity that has traveled through the CBP ranks over the last 16 years, the streak of musical universality and the caliber of guest musicians the band is capable of assembling, this most singular of projects still maintains an outsider status and attitude that runs through every moment of this eighth LP. Ex-Iron Monkey/ Electric Wizard skin-punisher Justin Greaves has been a divisive, mercurial figure for decades, but anyone who’s ever copped an earful of CBP will know they’re backed up by a prolific impulse for diverse and affecting music, as well as a commitment to the creative process that still produces albums as powerful and profound as Ellengæst.

“I don’t know exactly what the band is,” comments Greaves in the official bio, and the band’s stubborn introspection and pathological aversion to classification has made their music a hard sell in an era when any kind of music is hard sell enough. In a parallel world where sensitivity and ingenuity are still valued in songcraft, captivating advance cut “Lost” might even be a top 10 hit, even despite its harrowing animal rights-themed video.

Anathema’s Vincent Cavanagh lends his dark croon to opener “House of Fools,” a multifaceted beast where a smoky jazz horn is quickly overwhelmed by a churning whorl of noise; right upfront we have the most extreme example of this band’s reach. Riding through gothic countryfolk blues, weepy piano, military snare and mounting tensile guitar before bursting into a uranium-weight doom gallop, it’s a thrilling journey, and a nutshell summation of CBP’s disparate, but cohesive talents. Any tendency toward woe-is-me pretension is joyously undercut by a raucous five-minute live drum solo, raggedly dropped in to provide a primitive, visceral interlude before shimmering epic “The Invisible Past” radiantly crystallizes the band’s compositional and emotional capabilities. —CHRIS CHANTLER

DARK TRANQUILLITY

8

Moment

CENTURY MEDIA

Two new axes to grind

Dark Tranquillity, bastion of consistency and one of two NWOSDM holdovers from the ’90s, find a new path on Moment, the group’s 12th full-length. Actually, it’s not a new path per se, but a revolution or two on albums such as (Swedish) Grammy-nominated Atoma and Fiction. What’s different isn’t how the guitars sound as the Swedes turn 31, but rather who’s playing them, and how they’ve been smartly woven into the band’s sonic fabric. Indeed, longtime guitarist/founding member Niklas Sundin (now Mitochondrial Sun) is no longer an active member, replaced by Johan Reinholdz (Nonexist, Andromeda) and Christopher Amott (Armageddon, Black Earth). The result isn’t Cacophonymeets-The Gallery, but rather something far more interesting.

There are true-to-form things happening at the surface and near the core—this is, of course, Dark Tranquillity’s DNA—that are familiar. Frontman Mikael Stanne’s growl/ croon combo feels as right at home as it did on We Are the Void; Anders Jivarp and Martin Brändström’s opposing aggro/reflective songwriting stamps are in view; and the squeaky clean production, courtesy yet again of studio ace Brändström, provides all Dark Tranquillity need to launch their truculent death (“Phantom Days,” “Identical to None”) and post-modern contemplation (“The Dark Unbroken”). Moment wouldn’t be a Dark Tranquillity full-length without those things, after all.

The newly trodden lie in Reinholdz (specifically) and Amott’s interpretation of their roles as songwriters/soloists, and their subsequent integration without losing their

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DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2020 : 65

RUMBLY RU MBLY THROUGH A SPEAKER THROUGH

player identities. Take the vibrant “Transient,” the unprecedented (and wicked) 41-second solo on “Eyes of the World,” the tech-punch of “Standstill” and the oxidized metal of “A Drawn Out Exit,” for example. Here, the duo is able to challenge the status quo, while also complementing Jivarp, Anders Iwers and Brändström’s percussive/score-like thrum.

Moment may sound like yet another round of Dark Tranquillity, but it’s not. Scratch the surface, let it sink in deep; therein is where the Swedes electrify. —CHRIS DICK

DRACONIAN

7

Under a Godless Veil N A PA L M

Lifting the veil

Over a quarter-century has passed since Anders Jacobsson and founding instrumentalist Johan Ericson formed Draconian. During that time, the band has been defined by their gothic inclinations and the dichotomy of their vocals.

Jacobsson has long been the snarling harshness.

Since joining in 2012, co-vocalist Heike Langhans has been the rapture to her accomplice’s wrath.

Now five years after Langhans’ Sovran debut, Draconian wake in the midst of a world about to shatter for the band’s seventh LP. Under a Godless Veil is like being wrapped in a quilt of sorrow for an hour. The ingredients established in Paradise Lost’s seminal records with Sarah Marrion still apply, although Draconian’s inclinations have always prioritized doom before death. For the first half of the album, Draconian’s sprawling doomgaze is anchored by the familiar heft of Ericson’s halo-burning riffs. Moments of grandiosity emerge, like the contagious mantra of “The Sacrificial Flame” and the slow-burn anthem “Lustrous Heart.” Soon after, “Sleepwalkers” embodies their melancholy might as melodies crawl through the song’s somnambulist fog.

Album finale “Ascend Into Darkness” continues to shape despondence into downbeat balladry, ending on a bittersweet, but silver-lined note.

But Under a Godless Veil veers on bleakness fatigue around the album’s halfway mark.

While the ethereal post-punk of “The Sethian” offers new textures, “Burial Fields” feels like an aerial view of a cemetery from stratus clouds. From the first clean strums of “Sorrow of Sophia,” there’s a sense of autumnal rumination. Some of Under a Godless Veil passes like you’re watching the cold seasonal turn with frost creeping on the windowpane. Despite the spare, minimalist compositions that dominate the runtime, the record still succeeds as a sweeping mood piece. —SEAN FRASIER 66 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

Erosion of Clarity

BY DUTCH PEARCE

ANCIENT TORMENT

INTELLECT DEVOURER

SELF-RELEASED

CALIGARI

Of Wolves and Pain On Of Wolves and Pain, Providence, RI-based quintet Ancient Torment burn through two epic tracks of melodic black metal. Not quite the “Black Fucking Metal Torture” they make it out to be—at least not compared to the likes of NE compatriots Sanguine Relic, et al.—but Of Wolves and Pain is certainly vicious, relentless and rehearsal-raw. Again, not so raw that its details are lost to noise. Ancient Torment blast through those windy hollows of analog production with honed riff skills, battle-ready human drumming and forgeborne songwriting chops.

HORRIBLE

In the Abyss HEADSPLIT

Five tracks of subtly rockinfluenced straightforward death metal from Quayde LaHüe bassist/Christian Mistress drummer and Speaker Rumbly veteran Reuben Storey.

“Insanomania,” a song about driving yourself insane by stressing over going insane, opens a dripping and airtight demonstration of bone-breaking, Autopsy-worshipping monomania that’s practically an homage to the death metal tape-trading days, considering its handwritten liner notes and all-around DIY approach. In the Abyss will make for a rowdy good time, and even those unfamiliar with Storey’s other bands will pick up on some outré sensibilities here and there, especially in that title track.

DELIQUESCE

Engineered Frailty L I F E A F T E R D E AT H

Based Australian tech-death trio Deliquesce play a different kind of OSDM. First off, with Adrian Cappelletti (Incinerated, Lurid Panacea, etc.) on guitar, you know shit’s going to be wild.

But if Deliquesce’s demo spurs a movement and bands start pulling more inspiration from Effigy of the Forgotten than Onward to Golgotha,, you’ll hear no complaining from Golgotha this rumbly speaker. Four tracks in less than seven minutes only serves to pique my interest without properly sating it, so for now repeated listens will have to suffice. But a full-length better be on its way.

Demons of the Skull Part of the first wave of Australian death metal of the early ’90s, Intellect Devourer split up before recording a proper fulllength. But after reforming (for the second time) back in 2012, the band, featuring original drummer Denny Blake (who went on to play in Martire, StarGazer and more) has finally released its debut album. Demons of the Skull counts nine tracks of evidently timeless technical death-thrash from some of the most accomplished extreme metallers Oz has to offer. These songs have waited for almost 30 years to be released in this form, pushed to their fullest potential.

Now witness vengeance executed.

SEEP

Souvenirs of a Necrosadist GURGLING GORE

Finally discovered the origin of that earth-shuddering plop heard back in mid-August. It was this tape dropping. Based in Maine, this duo called Seep have dragged up from their basement the perfect mixture of death, doom and brutality. It’s easy enough to hear what bands inspired the demo’s sound, but only when isolating individual parts. Otherwise Souvenirs of a Necrosadist stands alone, dripping in gore and overflowing with perversity and potential.

IESCHURE

Cold Stars of Eternity LES FLEURS DU MAL

Three years after her heartstopping debut LP, Ukraine’s bedroom black metal succubus Ieschure returns with a two-song EP titled Cold Stars of Eternity.

Eternity. On its title track, a plaintive tremolo-picked melody haunts a simple beat coming from what sounds like a toy drum set. The atmosphere is chilly, but alluring, and Lilita Arndt’s flower-killing screams lull you deeper into the hazy depths. That the following/final track sounds like a black metal song played far, far away is no doubt intentional. You’re being carried off. This worsens the hunger pangs for more material, but Cold Stars should not be taken for granted.

DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2020 : 67

EVILDEAD

6

United $tate$ of Anarchy SPV/STEAMHAMMER

It’s still “we, the people,” right?

Emerging at the tail-end of the ’80s, Evildead have always sounded like an amalgamation of every thrash band that already blazed a path in the fertile West Coast scene and beyond. After unveiling their competent 1989 debut Annihilation of Civilization, they followed it up with the more commercially palatable album The Underworld (1991)—a sonic shift that was perfectly in line with similar zigzags by Metallica, Megadeth and Testament. Featuring gruff vocals reminiscent of crossover bands à la D.R.I. and Suicidal Tendencies, blazing guitars that placed them squarely in the Vio-lence and Dark Angel territory, and fittingly thin production that appropriately elevated the leftist message in line with releases

by Sacred Reich, Nuclear Assault and Anthrax, Evildead are a competent, yet unremarkable band that struggled because their predecessors did it more memorably.

Fast forward to the present day and Evildead have officially returned. Multiple original and former members make up the fold; their collective résumé includes stints in Agent Steel, Abattoir, Body Count, Death, Bitch, Despise You and many more. United $tate$ of Anarchy is the result of their reunion. On paper and in practice, it feels like the band has (quite intentionally) picked up exactly where Annihilation of Civilization left off. “Napoleon Complex” is a thorough takedown of the “American Mussolini” with squealing guitars; “Greenhouse” features an environmental message set to a backdrop of group chants and rollicking progressions; “No Difference” kicks off with lounge-music instrumentation before shifting into an aggressive and crunchy takedown of “fucking tweets.”

All told, it’s listenable and doubtlessly made by extremely competent musicians who worship at the altar of thrash. Unfortunately, it’s also an album that is unremarkable, making United $tate$ of Anarchy a passable exercise in thrash, just in time for election day. —SARAH KITTERINGHAM

FATES WARNING

5

Long Day, Good Night M E TA L B L A D E

Mediocre afternoon

Setting off car alarms since 1982, Fates Warning hammer out their 13th and longest-player in Long Day, Good Night. Initially Priest and Maiden disciples, the Connecticut combo peaked at domestic NWOBHM keepsake Awaken the Guardian four years later 68 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

behind Bruce Dickinson adherent John Arch before transitioning to Ray Alder, who hit the Halford highs on 1988’s No Exit. Since at least A Pleasant Shade of Gray a decade later, Alder and original axeman Jim Matheos inhabit the nexus of progressive and melodic.

If that intersection strikes cold black fear in your hesher heart (here, sir!), you’re not man enough for 72-plus minutes of Long Day, Good Night. After all, Fates Warning didn’t survive nearly four decades fearing any genre classification one way or the other. New Age, metal— whatever, dude. You probably piss sitting down.

Formidable starter “The Destination Onward” rolls out a gatling gun of guitar, all heft and recoil, but exhibiting restraint and maximum arrangement. “Shuttered World” loosens a sidewinder riff. “Alone We Walk” then introduces motivational metal—clean, bold, generic—while “Now Comes the Rain” seemingly crosses over into Christian rock, and “The Way Home” misses only Dennis DeYoung crooning, “Babe, I love you.”

“Scars” crunches (“We all wander with our heavy heart’s disguised as a monster, the most fragile kind”), and 11-minute centerpiece “The Longest Shadow of the Day” works o-u-t, but balladic boulders “When Snow Falls” and “The Last Song” simply crush, and not in the good way. Alder sings the shit out of everything, having snuck into a studio in locked-down Madrid where he lives (and sleeping there because of COVID-19), but deep, stilling, crooned long cuts castrate. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

FIRES IN THE DISTANCE

4

Echoes From Deep November PROSTHETIC

Ashes you leave

I’ll be closing this review with a quip about the band’s name sounding like a banal Nextdoor alert to us Bay Area folk. It won’t be funny or cleverly insinuated, and obviously it won’t be surprising, but, oh, it’s happening. How does that understanding make you feel? Well, after listening to Echoes From Deep November, I can totally relate.

FITD have a sound that’s just a hair south of unorthodox, which they do almost nothing with. The sluggishness of the tempos spell doom-death, the spaciousness of the structures might suggest something a bit more cerebral and the dominance of keyboards whispers prog, but what the listener’s ultimately getting is unbuttered, lukewarm toast: a familiar vehicle that suggests promise, but isn’t in any shape to be served to paying customers.

There are several problems here, but the most systemic one lies in the band’s refusal to elaborate on the core ideas that they advance in the album’s first track. This record doesn’t provide a journey—just a 45-minute time-sink on a treadmill at its lowest setting. Perhaps that’s an intentional motif, but if you really crave a meaningful approach to tautology, go listen to a Caretaker album or, hell, save yourself a step and wait for that joke I promised about eight sentences back. The doldrums on this record feel incidental rather than purposeful—that is, until the closing instrumental arrives, at which point the band switches from decaf and forks over a handful of meaningful harmonic and rhythmic phrases. Where’ve you been, guys?

The show’s almost over!

Speaking of: My dumb old word count won’t allow for that joke I promised. Damn! Now how’s that for a twist? I mean, it’s not great, but at least it’s something. —FORREST PITTS

GOREPHILIA

8

In the Eye of Nothing M E S AC O U N OJ O / DARK DESCENT

Simplicity of death

The American death metalloving Finns have returned with a third album that once again proves there’s simply nothing better than death metal done right. Pentatonic chug progressions; almost-puking vocals; pinch harmonics like the sudden squeals of the damned as they’re prodded with hot irons; dizzying blasts conjured by frenetic fretboard friction; sudden shoves into drastically different tempos—this is the stuff of killer Floridian death metal. On In the Eye of Nothing, for 43 minutes straight, Gorephilia smash all of these boxes (and some other unexpected boxes, too) with their own dead-eyed seriousness that leaves no choice but headbanging worship.

“Walls of Weeping Eyes,” the opener, begins with a frenzied Azagthothian call-out. When the toms come swooping in, the song feels like it’s falling away underfoot, sending you rushing into the pit of this record. The following eight tracks prove equally as inescapable. While the temperature never rises above a slow boil, In the Eye of Nothing’s restraint results in a more consistent experience than Gorephilia’s last album, Severed Monolith. Replacing the unhinged ambition that fueled that 2017 sophomore slayer with a more deliberate and mid-paced speed, these Finns nail a transitional leap that caused even their Floridian antecedents to trip.

With fewer interruptions of anything resembling filler, In the Eye of Nothing is a thoroughly crushing experience from beginning to end, and

DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2020 : 69

an exemplary album regardless of its novelty.

Rather than rehash the same album mid-career, Gorephilia slowed down, added more groove and did what so many other bands have attempted and failed to do: They killed it. —DUTCH PEARCE

IDLE HANDS

7

Don't Waste Your Time II LO N E F I R

You wish your band’s leftover tracks were this great

Having released the glorious Mana in 2019 and after making the best of a national tour alongside King Diamond and Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats, Idle Hands (who announced a name change to Unto Others as we went to print) know how important it is to capitalize on the momentum last year brought. But when a global pandemic throws everything into uncertainty, how does an ambitious band do that? In the Portland band’s case, they decided to revisit a pair of tracks written and recorded in 2017 and left off the band’s 2018 EP Don’t Waste Your Time. Keeping the basic tracks intact, they gave the songs a spit and polish, and have released them as a limited edition 7-inch.

Both tracks don’t stray from the group’s aesthetic, a hard-driving yet brooding hybrid between Sisters of Mercy, Type O Negative and Blue Öyster Cult. The musically uptempo, but thematically downbeat “It Doesn’t Really Matter” expertly plays up the misery, opening with a devastating existential salvo: “Suddenly you’re born cut from your mother’s cord / You get to dream with open eyes, then mother dies cut from another side / And you may do what you decide, but it doesn’t really matter.”

The dryly humorous “Puppy Love” is even better, coming across as a beer-fueled monologue, the ramshackle statements achieving tipsy profundity: “‘This next beer,’ she said / ‘I dedicate to all the beers I’ve ever had, all the beers that I have dranken / Do you want to kiss,’ she said.”

Capped off with guitar flourishes and fun synths, it feels lifted from BÖC’s Fire of Unknown Origin, leaving listeners craving more. —ADRIEN BEGRAND

INSIDIOUS DISEASE 7 After Death

NUCLEAR BLAST

Old dogs, new pandemics

After a decade in quarantine, Insidious Disease return during a goddamn pandemic. As the profound saying goes, timing is everything, and Messrs. Silenoz, Embury, Laureano, Cyrus and 70 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

Grewe—most of whom will be familiar to anyone with a grasp of extreme metal history—are here to play thrashing traditional death metal during the deadliest of modern times.

The band’s 2010 debut was a solid showcase of OSDM mechanics, spanning suffocating Floridian maulings, serrated Scandinavian battery and even Polish brutality. It was released during a time when playing to those particular scene influences wasn’t as popular as it is now—back then, DM was still all about soulless displays of uber-technicality; the musical equivalent of masturbating at 300 bpm while looking at yourself in the mirror.

Second LP After Death is hewn from the aforementioned influences, yet has more concise and concussive arrangements, a greater emphasis on butcherous vocal/guitar hooks and an untameable energy that belies the age of its creators.

This is all topped off with a resounding production job (which might unsettle a few paunch-saddled DM diehards) and characteristically creepy artwork from the renowned Dan Seagrave.

Overall, Insidious Disease’s horn-locked syncopations and expert command of tempo (Embury and Laureano are, unsurprisingly, a heavyweight rhythmic tag-team throughout), searing riffs, solos, leads and dominant screamed ‘n’ growled vocals all fit together perfectly with recent works of Nuclear Blast labelmates Vader, Possessed, Memoriam and Sepultura. —DEAN BROWN

JOHANSSON & SPECKMANN

8

The Germs of Circumstance SOULSELLER

(No longer) trapped in purgatory, a (once) lifeless object is alive

If we can be honest for a moment, the legendary status attached to Rogga Johansson and Paul Speckmann doesn’t make the pair immune to bouts with tedium. In fact, if we can be brutally honest for another moment, while both gents have knocked it out of the park at various points over their combined 60 years of service on the good ship death metal, both have also posted up more mediocrity than the Jordan-less Chicago Bulls, ’70s Washington Capitals and pre-2015 Canadian men’s tennis combined. With that in mind, an uncertain grumble initially greeted the sight of this, the fifth Johansson & Speckmann full-length, in our promo pile.

BUT The Germs of Circumstance confidently sheds the past as it roars out from behind years of midline middling. The claustrophobic production quality highlights an entirely different tack, and works to great advantage. Excess space and

reverb have been drained from the guitars, bass and pissed-off mid-range snarl of Speckmann’s doubled vocals. The previously booming drums, which sounded like they were emerging from the end of a concrete hallway, have been flattened out to provide more in-your-face power jabbing. The result is a record that rips and shreds, with incisive instrumentation barreling along at a tight clip; and overall, a parallel is drawn between The Germs of Circumstance and the changes Slayer made from Hell Awaits to Reign in Blood.

Of course, a killer sound is only part of the battle. That killer sound complements killer songs like “Generations Antidote” and the title track, only to leave an obvious question hanging in the air: Why can’t this pair of death metal veterans consistently do more of this sort of thing in the 4,500 (give or take) other bands they play in? —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

MACABRE

7

Carnival of Killers NUCLEAR BLAST

El Cynico spits in your general direction

Has it really been nine years since Mud City nutjobs Macabre released Grim Scary Tales? Time flies when your primary subject matter is psychopaths violently decommissioning their victims.

Carnival of Killers sees the return of Corporate Death, Dennis the Menace and Nefarious in all their gross (and musically competent) excellence. They’re now—nearly four decades in—no different from when you loved (or hated) them on classics like Gloom and Sinister Slaughter. In a way, Carnival of Killers is a time warp that only Macabre could pull off. They’re still writing vioaggressive songs (“Your Window Is Open,” “The Lake of Fire”) about serial killers. That hasn’t changed. Neither has Macabre’s penchant for turning toy/beer commercial ditties (“Stinky,” “Joe Ball Was His Name”) and polka/spiritual songs (“Warte, Warte,” “Them Dry Bones”) into their own grotesque visions.

The production is also genuine Macabre.

They’ve chosen to stay old-school, with Tomek Spirala’s capture recalling the time before Pro Tools and cheap, multi-core CPUs. From tracks like “Tea Cakes” to “Now It’s Time to Play” and the impressively rendered “The Murder Mack,” Carnival of Killers aligns to Macabre’s consistently morbid designs.

Certainly, some newcomers to Macabre’s perverse style of metal will find the playful, penisin-hand approach alarming, as it’s like being exposed by some unexercised office lackey on the “L” while some good Samaritan pepper-sprays him for his unwelcome indecency. The future

Uniform: Shame out now

Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou: May Our Chambers Be Full october 30, 2020

Molchat Doma: Monument november 13, 2020

sacredbonesrecords.com

DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2020 : 71

relevance of Carnival of Killers is, however, with the diehards, ’cause it’s been a verifiable lifetime since Sinister Slaughter had desired or requested (or forced) airtime in the old house. —CHRIS DICK

7

MÖRK GRYNING Hinsides vrede SEASON OF MIST

Shadows from the past

Generally, when Mörk Gryning are brought up in conversation in black metal circles, their first album is the topic of discussion. Debuts, in the black metal world, are a black pit of expectation and bar-setting. Generally, nothing beats the first album, especially if it’s from the early-to-mid’90s. 1995’s Tusen år har gått... ticks all the marks, and it’s ultimately unfair for a band as surprisingly talented as Mörk Gryning 25 years later.

Hinsides vrede is, if nothing else, a lot of things.

It ultimately wants to be—and succeeds at being—a competent black metal album, but

Mörk Gryning, ever the tricksters, find quite a few pots in which they can stick their grimy fingers. The band’s sixth album, and first in 15 years, shows a group that has “outgrown its shoes.” Mörk Gryning are suddenly much more than just a black metal band, and the progressive nature found within Hinsides vrede—with passages that feature unexpected clean vocals, earth-quaking dynamic changes and a near-progressive rock sense that goes beyond black metal and further into metal’s past—makes the album follow suit stylistically.

The big issue with thoroughly modern albums like Hinsides vrede is that, while the band has found a larger world in which to exist, therein does they lose a bit of their ground identity.

Hinsides vrede is black metal, but maybe not as much as their previous record, and this trend goes back all the way to the debut. Does not being as black metal make this album bad? No way. I’d even venture so far as to listen to it again down the line... but maybe after listening to the debut a few more times. —JON ROSENTHAL

THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF

ACE OF SPADES M U S T B E P L AY E D

MOTÖRHEAD, Ace of Spades Box Set 9 BMG

Let’s go ahead and assume that there’s no need to explain to Decibel readers why Motörhead’s fourth album needs to be feted on its 40th anniversary in such robust fashion as this. That was laid out pretty thoroughly when we inducted Ace of Spades into the Hall of Fame 10 years ago (issue no. 67), when Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister, “Fast” Eddie Clarke and Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor were all still among the living. Though that issue is long sold out, the full story was preserved for posterity in the Decibel Hall of Fame Anthology Volume II, which is still available.

In fact, that story and this extravagant collection of music, videos, printed matter

72 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

(book, tour program, etc.) and more are perfect companion pieces. In our HOF story, when Clarke talked about how the title track was labored over more than any previous song the band had written, you can actually hear early versions to witness how they ultimately tweaked the main riff to transform it into the classic it became. Or when they discussed the 16-track recordings they did in Wales during the writing process, those demos are part of this collection. And that little anecdote about Lemmy getting pissed at one point in the recording because producer Vic Maile made his bass sound like a bass?

Well, you get a small snatch of what angered him in one of the alternate versions of the non-LP track “Dirty Love.”

NOTHING

7

The Great Dismal RELAPSE

Existential sound swirlie

Please, please, please—you have to believe me: I did not want to make some “turned up to 11” hackery a centerpiece of this review. Honestly. But diving into the vast and churning ocean of sound that is The Great Dismal, tossed to and fro by cresting waves of miles-of-effects-boards distortion, dragged deep into highly pressurized depths and shot up from that drink into the deliriuminducing ether, the strengthening undertow pulling listener and record alike to many exotic sonic locales far beyond where even adventurous releases like Guilty of Everything (2014), Tired of Tomorrow (2016) and Dance on the Blacktop (2018) previously ventured… well, I hope you can understand my dilemma.

Yes, Nothing’s rather brilliant amalgamation of My Bloody Valentine/early Catherine Wheel-esque shoegaze, indie (the cleaner parts of

One of the many brilliant aspects of this box is that it not only goes deep on the whole writing and recording of Ace of Spades— including rough versions of several tracks that didn’t make the cut—it documents the band’s live sets on the resulting tour, both on CD and DVD. You can feel the energy with which they attack songs like the title track, “The Hammer,” “Jailbait” and “Love Me Like a Reptile.” Though it’s a scorcher here, “Fire Fire” likely wasn’t played much beyond this tour, which makes its inclusion one of many little rarities. And for an extra treat, the band’s collaboration with Girlschool, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre EP, is included.

The Ace on Your Screens DVD is the comic relief of the whole set. It primarily documents Motörhead’s hilarious TV performances (mostly lip-synced) and interviews from this era.

Frequently, the studio audiences —especially on the European shows—consisted of doughfaced adolescents, most of whom looked befuddled by the sight and sound of the trio.

The pièce de résistance of the DVD, however, is the inclusion of an awkward interview with Taylor, who’s laid out on his back in the hospital after breaking his neck, just before Christmas.

And, yes, the interviewer does wish him a “Happy Christmas” at the conclusion.

It’s unfortunate, however, that the unkempt gentlemen who created this glorious noise aren’t here to bask in the glory of such a well-assembled tribute to their efforts 40 years ago, and the lasting legacy it created. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

DECIBEL : DECEMBER 2020 : 73

album opener “A Fabricated Life” and “April Ha Ha” would not be out of place on, say, a Mineral record), high-end alt-rock (the Soundgarden-y vibe sprinkled across “Ask the Rust”; the Luscious Jackson groove of “Say Less”) and Britpop (“Catch a Fade” is reminiscent of Supergrass) remains largely consistent. It’s just… turned up to 11!

Seriously, though, The Great Dismal is as epic as its title. The record feels like all of Nothing’s past work was condensed into a sun, The Great Dismal is a magnifying glass, and the band is going to go around setting consciousnessrefracting fires in your neocortex and thalamus.

You know there’s some eclectic shit going down when you see a song titled “Bernie Sanders” sandwiched between tracks titled “Famine Asylum” and “In Blueberry Memories.” The Great Dismal—not just a weirdly perfect tagline for 2020, but also one hell of an immersive listening experience, too. Just be sure to crank it up to… fin. —SHAWN MACOMBER

OLD MOTHER HELL

8

Lord of Demise CRUZ DEL SUR

The real Mannheim Steamroller

Having written about heavy metal for a long damn time, I cannot overstate how tiring it is digging into the latest advance music by a hyped German band (courtesy of a European publicist most often), only to hear it devolve into a cookie-cutter version of Gamma Ray, Helloween, Blind Guardian, Primal Fear or, god help us, Axel Rudi Pell. Germany will always be an historically significant country in the development of the metal genre, but although there’s nothing wrong with honoring tradition, oversaturation of any subgenre will eventually see its wheels spin rather than rampaging along like it did in the 1980s and 1990s.

Bless the good folks at Cruz Del Sur for cherry-picking the best in traditional, melodic heavy metal, and they have found a good one in Old Mother Hell. A hard-working trio from Mannheim, Old Mother Hell released their fun self-titled full-length in 2017, and their new follow-up further solidifies their no-frills, yet very catchy sound.

“Less is more” is something that power metal bands rarely follow, but the spartan set-up of Old Mother Hell—one guitar, bass, drums— works to their advantage, especially on Lord of Demise, which was recorded live off the floor.

The production is raw, yet comfy, with enough space between the instrumental tracks to allow the songs to breathe a little. As a result, standouts “Betrayal at the Sea,” “Avenging Angel” and “Finally Free” explode from the speakers 74 : D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 0 : D E C I B E L

thanks to the emphasis on dynamics. Bolstered

by Bernd Wener’s Kürsch-esque snarl, this is enough to restore one’s hope in German power metal. —ADRIEN BEGRAND

PALLBEARER

7

Forgotten Days NUCLEAR BLAST

Quarantine for months (inside these riffs)

The third song on Forgotten Days is called “Stasis,” and it can be tempting to accuse the Arkansas natives of shuffling in place around their now-familiar brand of fuzzbucket doom spliced with Brett Campbell’s plaintive clean vocal style. Beware: First impressions of Pallbearer’s records are often untrustworthy.

Some of the songs’ chuggy spines might feel a bit predictable, and maybe “Silver Wings” and “The Quicksand of Existing” share that meanderthen-pounce relationship that worked so well for “Dancing in Madness” and “Cruel Road” from 2017’s Heartless, but the band continues to follow its progressive country-doom muse through a series of creatively uncomfortable chord juxtapositions, charming vocal melodies and emotive solos. As with every album before this one, Forgotten Days develops lusher blossoms and more persistent thorns with each successive spin.

Where Heartless announced itself with commanding guitar swagger and immediately propulsive rhythms, Forgotten Days oozes toward consciousness on a reluctant sprawl of dirty, throbbing feedback. Five minutes later, the title track spasms and sprains its everything, a moment of perfect psychosis in which Pallbearer really flex their veteran status. “Riverbed” dabbles in the kind of sublimely mellow melodic shit that gets bands booted from Metal Archives, and the song is all the better for it. Closer “Caledonia” is as regal a march as a psychedelic rock song has ever managed to muster. Pallbearer’s most intriguing triumphs fold the band’s full decade of studio experience into multiple layers of climbing sonic ivy. Despite the nagging feeling that Pallbearer have said some of these things before, Forgotten Days succeeds in subtly broadening the quartet’s already admirable palette. —DANIEL LAKE

HENRIK PALM

8

Poverty Metal S VA R T

Make it big

When the eponymous, industrious, prodigal punk behind Poverty Metal visits London Town, he heads for two places—the [Doctor] Who Shop, which is coincidentally nestled in the same East

End backstreets that were once run ragged by a certain Messrs. Harris and Murray, and that one dodgy Camden stall that sells the bootleg Amebix and Suicide T-shirts. And that is as much as you need to know about the fetid pools in which Palm dredges his inspiration: crust, early heavy metal, experimental noise and eccentric BBC sci-fi soaps.

Kickoff track “Bully” oozes the desperate angst of the underdog, immediately invoking a kitschy space opera à la Tommy or Breaking Glass, where Palm leads a pack of survivalist street rats through long-forgotten leather bars once found in Soho alleys, futuristic Mohicaned-misfit playgrounds and dustbowl dystopias. The electropop, metallic skronk, Voivodian innovation and bizarro British indie nods all collide to create a timely soundtrack to the “new normal.” “Last Christmas” is not a Wham! cover, but on Poverty Metal, nothing is surprising. However, everything is possible. —LOUISE BROWN

SÓLSTAFIR

8

Endless Twilight of Codependent Love SEASON OF MIST

From Iceland with (co-dependent) love

By starting with a 10-minute track that sounds like the post-black metal version of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” Sólstafir announce their intention to continue exploring rock’s liminal spaces on their seventh full-length. Unlike other bands that mix metal with other genres, though, metal isn’t their point of origin—it’s a flavoring. That’s what makes Sólstafir stand out. While the pieces they construct their post-everything rock from may seem familiar, they weld them together in utterly unexpected (and organic) ways.

The band claims that the lyrics on Endless Twilight of Codependent Love deal with depression.

I don’t speak Icelandic, but the overwhelming air of melancholy to the music seems to confirm that. From the raw-throated howling of Aðalbjörn Tryggvason to the general downbeat nature of the music, these songs wallow in gloom. It’s hard to classify this on the extreme end of the spectrum for a lot of the runtime. Despite drawing on Gojira guitar weirdness (“Drýsill”) and doom tempos, it’s not until halfway through (on “Dionysus”) that they embrace the black metal side of their pedigree. Even then, they mix it with post-rock jangle and a galloping rhythm reminiscent of Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia.” The miasma hanging over the album still makes it all feel heavy—emotionally, if not otherwise.

While toned down from previous efforts, Endless Twilight still contains everything that makes Sólstafir great. In fact, it demonstrates ways to

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use metal sounds that don’t overpower everything else. It’s because it’s all focused on one goal: to bum you the hell out. —JEFF TREPPEL

SPIRIT ADRIFT

9

Enlightened in Eternity 20 BUCK SPIN

Into glory ride

A great philosopher once reasoned “‘Ascension,’ and that’s all they said,” and indeed, from the first notes of Spirit Adrift—classic rock, metal and doom by a mid-tenor who sounds more like an astral prophet—Nate Garrett shot the stars. The fourth full-length for the now Austin/Phoenix split of the starcrawler and drummer Marcus Bryant, Enlightened in Eternity rockets out front of the rest.

“I was born in Armageddon / A billion years in a millisecond / The universe in a single cell / Seeker of heaven, creator of hell,” intones the new Texan on “Harmony of the Spheres,” an LP title proxy alongside seven others.

Sleek and kingly opener “Ride Into the Light” materializes like Lawrence of Arabia out of the desert, Garrett staking self-possession in a disclong procession of pronouncements: “In victory, it’s clear to me / There’s something more that I must be.” Astride a black steed rocker with hefty stones, and first in a series of perfect solos, our Peter O’Toole stand-in attains “Astral Levitation,” its doom vestiges lashing at a NWOBHM tempo and pulpit-pounding command. Bristling corker “Cosmic Conquest” rides a snaking electric lead evocative of Tribulation’s “Melancholia” on its way to eradicating all past vocals with hellaciously righteous intonation: “All I want to be: one with everything.”

Total spirit possession thus bundles rock deity omnipotence spanning “God of Thunder” to God Says No. Ten-minute dirge “Reunited in the Void” finalizes Enlightened by Eternity by returning to Spirit Adrift’s earliest forays into forever. Nate Garrett no longer dwells among us, but above us, around us, inside us; that which puffs out chests, seeks ear-bleeding battery and engages in circular man prancing. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

SUBZERO

7

“House of Grief” 7-inch U P S TAT E

Back on the right side of the tracks

When you think NYHC, Subzero aren’t the first name that comes to mind. Nor are they the last.

For various reasons, there have been moments since their 1989 formation where they have been 76 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

first (vocalist Lou Di Bella beating terminal stage 4 acute lymphoblastic leukemia) and last (a hiatus from 2009-2011) to pop into the brains of genre proponents. Musically, they’ll never be representatives of NYHC in the same way as Agnostic Front, Madball, Cro-Mags or Sick of It All, primarily because they’ve always managed to squeeze in just enough to have ears perk, eyebrows crook, and someone turn to their workout buddy or sparring partner to stop and ask, “Is what we’re hearing troo haad-caw?” They did it in bite-sized morsels throughout three previous full-lengths, were taking part in Smiths tributes before it was cool and have now returned with their first new music in 14 years.

House of Grief’s title track is actually the only new tune; the B-side is a re-recorded version of the title track to the Necropolis album.

As expected, it’s a din that will appropriately accompany time spent getting tattooed and punching authority figures, with nods to noise rock, elegiac Rollins Band-gone-goth spoken/ sung parts and Chaos A.D. slamming weaved into the rough exterior. “Necropolis” is as unkempt as one would expect from a 16-year-old tune, but still buffers typicality with a sweet little palmmuted shuffle. An encouraging revival this is.

Let’s hope they keep the momentum rolling.

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

SULACO

7

The Privilege SELF-RELEASED

The spotlight’s on shorty

The lack of attention afforded Rochester’s Sulaco over the course of their 17-year stead on the steaming turd orb we call Earth remains a mystery. The variegated deathgrind outfit has not only issued rock-solid releases on a who’s-who of extreme music cult labels, but have a celebrity/ legend in one Erik Burke (Brutal Truth, Nuclear Assault, Napalm Death, Lethargy and more) joined by members of Contrarian and MungBeanDemon, which you’d think would generate copious curiosity. At the same time, a dearth of touring has likely kept Sulaco’s name from the spotlight, and the proud winding weave of their material lacks appeal to lizard brains on the hunt for sonic simplicity. Still, the Amerks keep trudging along; this time issuing their sixth release independently.

The Privilege packs as many twists and turns in five songs as a F1 racetrack, careens around corners and curves, and blasts the straightaway stretches as quickly. Comparisons to Human Remains, Discordance Axis, Brutal Truth and Ripping Corpse come fast and furious during “Fix This” and “Warning Signs,” with the shad-

owy brutality of the torture implements doing their business on the cover of Severed Survival, only with more bookish precision. The guitars engage in a spidery lurch with a rhythm section locked into tempo changes and accent flurries.

A full complement of Sulaco’s skill is displayed on “Full Tomb” as it swings from Metallica down-picking and grind to jazzy tussles and Soilent Green wave-cresting, all cohesively hammered out in two minutes. “Sulakka” closes with a wash of free-noise threatening to burst into tensile and sludgy tech-metal.

It’s conceivable that Sulaco’s muted profile has also come at the hand of the band’s technical impenetrability. The Privilege maintains that trait, but with accessible flashes stirred in at EP length, this newest recipe might end up working best by exposing listeners to manageable chunks and not overwhelming the willing/ curious. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

THROANE

6

Une Balle Dans Le Pied DEBEMUR MORTI

A bridge between worlds

Its title translates to the French equivalent of “shoot yourself in the foot,” but that’s glass sticking out of that person’s pied.

Kind of like how Throane are billed as a black metal band, but this is an industrial-sludge EP. Created by multi-instrumentalist Dehn Sora, Une Balle Dans Le Pied hosts a number of completely obliterating sections and the darkened passages between them throughout its time-bending 13 minutes. Going into this expecting black metal will likely result in confusion. Une Balle is composed of pounding, monochromatic rhythms detonating continuously within an atmosphere like a massive, but empty warehouse on a likewise deserted planet. For all of its tritone chords left ringing, this stopgap EP at times does resemble something like a modern-era experimental black metal band toying with the possibility of going cosmic sludge.

Une Balle begins with plenty of strength and focus, like Thorns’ self-titled debut reimagined

by Intronaut. Then the crush gives way to doom, which dissipates into dark ambient. Now colossal, frigate-sized riffs move through the howling void, their sense of direction somewhat aimless.

Throughout the EP’s latter half, parts seem to drift by as if suspended in a vacuum, disconnected from the larger idea of a song.

An enticing peak at great and massive things to come—and not without its effective moments—Une Balle Dans Le Pied feels too much like a transitional EP, like a lost piece to something much bigger. —DUTCH PEARCE

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by

EUGENE S. ROBINSON

JARBOE + ME,

SITTING IN A TREE I hope you don’t get all caught up

in this #metoo thing.”

The speaker was, of all people, my mother. Funny that she who birthed me and raised me and knows me better than most would not know this about me.

“C’mon, mom, what kind of animal do you think I am? I don’t...”

I finished the sentence, but I wasn’t thinking about the sentence I finished. I was thinking about Jarboe from Swans being in the studio to record on Oxbow’s An Evil Heat.

“Eugene? These lyrics are… nasty.” And she laughed. In literary terms, I’d have called this foreshadowing, but we finished the record and were pleased with the experience and the sonic outcome beyond all measure.

So, it was no surprise when sometime later Jarboe called on the occasion of a record she had done with Neurosis, and asked me to perform a song with her live. I wouldn’t be singing; instead, what she wanted was for me to be shirtless. Then she’d have a makeup artist write the words to a poem in white ink on my back. In the middle of the song, 80 : DECEMBER 2020 : DECIBEL

I would walk out with an apple and drop to one knee and present her with the apple.

Simple, right?

“The boys in Neurosis told me to tell you, ‘NO penis onstage!’” And she laughed.

“C’mon, Jarboe, what kind of animal do you think I am?” I believe myself, first and foremost, to be a musical artist. As arch as that sounds, what it means in very practical terms is that I’m not GG Allin, and not every show comes with free cock shots. I was almost offended.

Almost.

“But what can I do?”

“What do you want to do?”

“Well, when I’m onstage, you know, pretty much ANYTHING could happen.”

“That’s fine.”

“ANYTHING,” I say, raising my eyebrows.

“Fine. Just no penis.”

So, showtime. I show up, strip, and they slather my back with, “I am the seed of mystery, the thorn, the veil, the face of grace, the brazen image, the thief of sleep, the ambassador

of dreams, the prince of peace.” There were more words, but that’s all I remember.

I wait in the wings. No one’s been really clear about the signal, but when Steve Von Till gives a look that seems especially significant, it’s GO time. And what happens at GO time? ANYTHING. Which is to say, I approach Jarboe and, seeing her standing in front of me in a tight silk-seeming black dress, I do what I feel. So, forget the one-knee thing. I bite the apple through, smash it into her hand, grab her and pull her to me.

This seemed RIGHT. To me.

I weighed 245 pounds then. At 6’1”. And pulling her close to me, my ANYTHING felt like it was perfectly mated to her “fine.” I felt less like the prince of peace, though, and much more like Prince. I didn’t kiss her. But it was a hug that was… nasty.

After the show, there were smiles and I went on my way. A job well done.

Later, on a Scott Kelly solo tour—I did spoken word, he did music—he filled me in: Jarboe’s

boyfriend wanted to kick my ass since word on the street was that I had molested her onstage.

I said I hadn’t. I imagined this was some relationship scene that they dug doing: the offended girlfriend, the avenging boyfriend.

Then I closed in on maybe the realer deal: kneeling and handing off an apple? No contact. Hugging a man with an erect penis? Way too much contact.

And being in the grips of someone who just won’t let go even if you don’t ask them to let go? Might suck.

In my mind, though? I still felt like “anything” covered it, but you know, mice don’t really dig playing with cats. So, later I sought Jarboe out at Supersonic Festival in Birmingham to explain. She was playing, and I moved to the front of the stage smiling. Trying to radiate harmlessness. She sensed me more than saw me, and when she did, she sort of froze. I figured I’d leave her be. It made me sad.

But as soon as I could, I called my mom. “Uh, yeah, mom? Listen, about that #metoo thing…”

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