Decibel #210 - April 2022

MATT PIKE DOG DAYS OF THE PANDEMIC

VOIVOD THE FUTURE IS NOW

THE

RED CHORD CLIENTS HALL OF FAME

REFUSE/RESIST

WITH

CROWBAR BLOOD INCANTATION ORIGIN SOUL GLO CEREMONIAL CASTINGS ALLEGAEON FRIENDS OF HELL

JON

ZAZULA 19 52 - 2 0 22

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INCLUDED

APRIL 2022 // No. 210

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April 2022 [R 210] decibelmagazine.com

upfront 10 obituary:

jon zazula Losing a force to be reckoned with

12 metal muthas United States’ Benevolent Mom 14 low culture Remembering to forget 15 no corporate beer Bring hand sanitizer 16 in the studio:

origin

A monthly basis

18 friends of hell Heavy metal may or may not be doomed 20 allegaeon Grudges be damnumed 22 messa Further away, closer together 24 nequient Jane No 26 konvent Anger calling 28 soul glo Go with the flo 30 ceremonial castings Everything old is new again

features

reviews

32 voivod Anarchy in the CA

67 lead review The time to kill for Rochester death metal wunderkinds Undeath is very much now with sophomore release It’s Time... To Rise From The Grave

34 blood incantation Parental advisory?

No, surgeon general’s warning 36 crowbar Heroes of zero 38 q&a: matt pike The High on Fire/Sleep mastermind uncovers the truth behind his new solo album 42 the decibel

hall of fame The Red Chord put forth a face that only an exploding extreme music audience and this metal mag could love with their classic Clients

68 album reviews Releases from bands that aren’t physically ill by what Decibel events have become, including Abbath, Falls of Rauros and Napalm Death

54 MIDNIGHT Thrash ‘n’ Burn COVER STORY COVER AND CONTENTS PHOTOS BY HANNAH VERBEUREN

80 damage ink Count on it

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4 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

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REFUSE/RESIST

April 2022 [T210]

“I just found a photo of Greg with his PUBLISHER

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PHOTO BY PAUL ROMANO

balls hanging out.” This preceding distress call came from Decibel’s longsuffering art director Mike Wohlberg.

The artist photo in question was the Red Chord. And the testicles belonged to bassist Greg Weeks.

Could I have warned Mike that a photo ball-bomb was likely waiting for him when he went searching on our server for images of Decibel’s spring 2005 photo shoot with the Red Chord? Probably, but he should have known better. Mike’s been following the band since their Fused Together in Revolving Doors debut album, much like yours truly, getting to know its members personally around that time through mutual friend and renowned Philly-based artist Paul Romano.

That shared appreciation for not taking yourself too seriously, but putting a serious amount of work into what you’re creating was the foundation for a friendship between the band and Decibel that’s lasted the better part of two decades—the second of which the group has remained largely inactive. So, when Mike planted the seeds for a Red Chord rebirth way back in 2019, it likely resonated in a manner that Promoter X kicking the tires on them would not. It still took nearly three years for the band to fully commit to performing at a Decibel event—and even longer for one particular member, who was still on the fence just days before our announcement, but it finally happened, and I don’t think it ever transpires without Mike’s perseverance.

He’s also responsible for assembling and executing this month’s Hall of Fame induction on their sophomore stunner Clients—which, you may have heard, the Red Chord will perform in its entirety at Metal & Beer Fest Philly later this year. Looooooongtime readers may recall that Clients was (in)famously the first 10 out of 10 review score Decibel ever awarded a record, which raised some eyebrows at the time. One of which belonged to a label manager friend from Philly, who sarcastically suggested that I just skip the 10-year waiting period for eligibility and express-induct Clients into the Hall of Fame. Well, it took 17 years, but the record has now been rightly enshrined on Mount Extreme Metal, and, dude, you can come watch them play the whole thing live!

See you in June. And don’t worry about any rogue nuts. I think it’s gonna be alright. I think it’s gonna be OK.

Soundgarden’s Ultramega OK very shortly before Chris Cornell passed away. Such a vital band for me, and the article and inclusion in the HOF were 100 percent spot-the-fuck-on.

Who is the best heavy metal band, and why is it Midnight? Please note that Midnight are on the cover of this issue and are the best heavy metal band.

Rob Gross

Los Angeles, CA You're a music industry veteran, but you have been a paid Decibel subscriber for nearly a decade. Don't you realize you can just request a comp from us? Or are you a nice guy and just expensing that shit to your boss?

Wait, you’re just telling me I can expense this NOW?! I think of Decibel like I think about vinyl, merch and shows. It’s supporting artists, the arts, creative entities, etc.

I look forward to getting Decibel in the mail every month for not only prime bathroom reading, but also to learn about a ton of new bands (and get learned on some classics I either missed or were before my time). You guys also did a fantastic Hall of Fame on

8 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

I have nothing but love for Midnight, but when it comes to the best heavy metal band ever, I’m just a sucker for Pantera. Their progression from local glam heroes to the torchbearers for metal throughout a very difficult mainstream decade for our genre is just too pivotal to deny.

Their mark has been made and continues to be learned, taught, ripped off (mostly poorly) and covered by thousands of bands around the world.

Pantera made metal fun, but also introduced me to what a vicious pit was like at a very young age. I once saw a guy get his bottom lip ripped off at a Pantera/Anthrax show in West Palm Beach in 1996. The Great Southern Lipkill, if you will.

I’ll see myself out.

You’re a superfan of Clutch’s vast and diverse catalog. A couple years back, we inducted Blast Tyrant into the Hall of Fame. Did we pick the correct record, or did we totally blow it?

I am an obsessive Clutch fan to the point of annoyance to both my friends and my wife (although she does fuck with Clutch a bit; one

of several women on this planet to dig on ’em, haha), and I can confirm that you hit the nail on the proverbial head. Blast Tyrant is to 2000s Clutch what [Clutch] was to ’90s Clutch. BT is just DIFFERENT. It’s heavy, it’s melodic, it has HITS, it has their first foray into acoustic work, it’s lyrically wild and tells such a vibrant story. Neil [Fallon] is a master storyteller. The man has written a song with a killer recipe for motherfucking crab cakes.

I cannot wait for their new LP this year!

Tomorrow morning, we will announce the lineup for the Philly edition of this year’s Metal & Beer Fest. So, guess it now and we’ll see how close you came! Seriously, though, who are you booking for your dream metal festival?

Truth time: I saw the post before I answered this.

However, I was going to guess Cannibal Corpse!

I also absolutely love seeing All Else Failed on there. I worked their masterpiece Archetype at college radio and was obsessed. Such an underrated band. Kudos to Decibel for giving them the platform to shine!

OK, my dream metal festival: A mix of some weird shit will do it. Mr. Bungle playing Disco Volante front to back. Katatonia plays The Great Cold Distance in its entirety. Amon Amarth, Cult of Luna, Anthrax with John Bush, Zao (what can I say, us Jewish guys love us some Christian metalcore) and, what the hell, a tribute to Caleb Scofield and Zozobra featuring members of Cave In, ISIS and Converge.

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

OBITUARIES

JON

A

change agent in business and politics enters an organization from the out-

side and alters it for good. Although the term isn’t lobbed around the music scene much, Jon “Jonny Z” Zazula was the ultimate change agent for metal.

When there were just a handful of metal bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest—most of them attached to major labels—Zazula saw something special in the emerging American thrash scene and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. ¶ As a producer, promoter, label founder and store owner, Zazula’s support was one of the pillars of the still young genre of metal. While Metallica offered the soundtrack for a musical revolution, Zazula built the infrastructure. Zazula and his late wife Marsha had the foresight to see something special happening in the world of underground metal, beyond deep-pocketed labels and arena shows. “Without Jon and Marsha, my metal world would be very different,” says metal historian Brian Lew, coauthor of Murder in the Front Row and an early friend of Metallica. “He changed my life.

If you’re reading this, he changed your life, too, whether you comprehend it or not.”

The Zazulas used their connections and smarts to build a support system and get underground metal to the masses. The Zazulas founded Megaforce to release Metallica’s debut Kill ’Em All, and organized the band’s earliest tours.

Megaforce released a laundry list of metal 10 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

classics and Decibel Hall of Fame inductees from Anthrax, Mercyful Fate, Stormtroopers of Death, Overkill, Testament and many others. Metallica would ultimately sign with a major label and become one of the world’s biggest bands, but they never forgot Zazula’s critical early support.

In addition to fostering bands, Zazula is remembered as a mentor to others in the metal scene, many of whom still work in the business.

“I met Jon and Marsha Zazula as a rebellious suburban teen,” says Adrenaline PR founder and owner Maria Ferrero. “At 15, they took me under their wing and literally showed me the world.

They touched the lives of so many millions of people who they will never even know, and they changed the course of music.”

“Over the years, Jon was my mentor, manager and, above all, my friend,” says Venom co-founder Jeff “Mantas” Dunn. “I loved both him and Marsha dearly. It’s safe to say that without Jon’s vision and belief, three young inexperienced musicians from Newcastle Upon Tyne would never have made it to America to be supported by another young, relatively unknown band. Yes, we are talking about Venom and Metallica.”

When James Hetfield sang, “We do our best, you’re the rest, you make it real, you know,” on “Whiplash,” he could have been singing about Jon Zazula. Zazula made the metal dream real for not just a generation, but a planet. Safe travels and rest well, Jon. We are in your debt. —JUSTIN M. NORTON

PHOTO BY FRANK WHITE

ZAZULA 19 52 - 2 0 22

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

Well, here are the records that we spun most while forever celebrating Tom Brady, forever bereft on the turf.

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

This Month's Mutha: Laura Lake Mutha of Dan Lake, author of USBM: A Revolution of Identity in American Black Metal

Tell us a little about yourself.

I grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., in a big, close-knit Italian family. I completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees after having three children, and worked in a myriad of jobs: paralegal, court-reporting transcriptionist, business school teacher, estate mediation judge and manager of a statewide program in social services. I have always loved to read, and when Dan and his siblings were growing up, I must have read hundreds of books to them. Dan’s dad and I are enthusiastic travelers, having been throughout the U.S. and to 31 countries, including Italy, Norway, Russia and Egypt.

about the everyday lives of many of the artists, the jobs they held down and the families they formed while pursuing their drive to turn their inspiration into music. Dan did a great job of capturing the personalities behind the names.

Have you listened to any of the bands profiled in USBM?

Dan has provided links to his preferred metal music, but I have listened to only a few selections because the harshness of sound is difficult to appreciate. I can admire the guitar proficiency in some of it, and I am intrigued by the artwork selected by bands to represent their albums.

We’re told that Dan didn’t listen to much metal as a child. Did you play any part in shaping his artistic tastes?

Dan is also a high school math teacher. Is education something he gravitated towards from an early age?

We frequently had music playing in our house when Dan was young; from the time he could walk and talk, Dan sang along and danced with me to an eclectic array, including Neil Diamond, Gordon Lightfoot and the Beach Boys. By middle school, Dan was introducing me to artists like Richard Marx and Toad the Wet Sprocket.

As early as elementary school, Dan was tapped to help younger students. While pursuing his degree in computer science at the University of Maryland, he was asked to tutor students in the math department. He quickly learned that he had an aptitude for building a rapport with students and helping them succeed in their classes, a more rewarding prospect than spending isolated time before a computer screen.

You recently drove to Vinyl Conflict in Richmond to pick up Dan’s USBM book. How does it feel having a son who’s a published author?

Our stop at Vinyl Conflict was a fun way to see the commercial side of Dan’s work. I was impressed with Dan’s commitment to interview so many musicians, transcribe those hours of interviews and turn that huge amount of information into an interesting, in-depth read. When I read USBM, what I enjoyed most was learning 12 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

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

USBM is not Dan’s first book! He wrote an adventure story in fifth grade that was determined too advanced for a read-aloud to first graders, and he wrote a book of short poems in eighth grade, which was sadly lost by his teacher. —ANDREW BONAZELLI

Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Midnight, Let There Be Witchery  Hulder, Godslastering: Hymns of a Forlorn Peasantry  In the Woods…, Omnio  Wolves in the Throne Room, Two Hunters  The Red Chord, Clients ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  Bl'ast, The Power of Expression  Dead Kennedys, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables  OFF!, Wasted Years  T.S.O.L., Revenge  Misfits, Collection 1 ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  Midnight, Let There Be Witchery  Blood Incantation, Timewave Zero  Undeath, It’s Time... to Rise from the Grave  Napalm Death, Resentment Is Always Seismic - A Final Throw of Throes  Abbath, Dread Reaver ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  The Red Chord, Clients  The Red Chord, Clients  The Red Chord, Clients  Soul Glo, Diaspora Problems  The Red Chord, Clients ---------------------------------Aaron Salsbury : m a r k e t i n g a n d s a l e s  Exhumed, “Worming”  Fright, Fright  Deathevokation, Blood  Reversal of Man, Revolution Summer  Therapy, “Therapy”

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------Christian Larson : night cobra/necrofier  Spectral Wound, A Diabolic Thirst  Boy Harsher, The Runner  Whoredom Rife, Wings of Wraith  Selofan, Vitrioli  Kekht Arakh, Pale Swordsman

V

Y ISEMAN

TNE

BY COUR

Etiquette Advice From Someone’s Dad daughter is now a little over 10 months old and can support herself standing against furniture around the house—generally bookshelves or tables, which she then proceeds to yank everything off of because being an asshole runs in the family.

I’m telling you this not because I think you care at all about the milestones of my kid, but because she’s also taken to scooting up to us, standing up, and—while not breaking eye contact—loudly grunting and shitting. This will have mixed results depending on the amount of fruit she’s had the day prior. Anyway, this is how the internet responds every time I write about music.

I presume this happens to other people in the (ugh) “industry” as well, but they’re just more gracious (or less hostile) about it than I am.

(I threw in the visual metaphor about my daughter’s new way to express herself just in case you thought I went a little too esoteric last month. It was a phase, and I was experimenting.)

Late last year, I wrote a piece on a few projects in contemporary American black metal that I felt were interesting for the Decibel site, which—because it was a slow news cycle—lingered on the front page for a bit, like when you fart in bed but don’t wash the sheets. Keeping with the mature fecal theme of this column, my inbox began to look like the contents of my child’s diaper after an auspiciously fiber-filled day. “Hey, I noticed you wrote about this genre, here’s something you will love!” “I liked your piece, but you missed this.” “One long loud sad farting noise set to text that will be referenced in your next column.” You get the gist.

I’m not trying to generalize here, but most of these missives were written about absolutely C-tier (at best) dreck, the kind of music that brings Jell-O salad to a potluck; not even terrible, just oppressively boring image over 14 : A PRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

substance—the Wonder Bread of black metal.

And half of them were sent by the band’s significant others, pushing this shit on me like a 1990s South Street dirt weed dealer, not taking “no” or “fuck off” as an answer.

For the most part, I don’t give them a chance.

Does that make me an asshole? Yes. But so does half the other shit I do daily, so I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

What does bother me—outside of someone thinking I have poor enough taste to sample the bowl of lukewarm dogshit they’re passing down the table—is that these folks have a complete inability to read a room. I’ve never made it a secret that I hate being solicited by strangers about their music, especially if they have no real idea on how to package it for me. It might be because I’m finally starting to see gray hair, but I miss when there was some effort put into this game, rather than just a Jackson Pollock strategy of peppering every possible outlet with what amounts to the musical equivalent of an email offering to not only make my penis bigger, but richer as well.

I’ve prattled on about how much I hate PR-styled dispatches, so we don’t need to go into much detail except that I find them sterile and offensive. But these communications are meant to be spread en masse. If you’re trying to specifically court me into taking time away from obsessively listening to things that I love, but barely have time for, then you need some finesse. And don’t tell me or anyone else who made a list that we “forgot” something unless you want us to intentionally forget it for the rest of our (writing) lives.

As if on cue, while I was writing this, my daughter straddled up to the couch and, with a red face, unleashed a guttural noise and fired off a shit that went right up her back. I’m willing to bet my inbox still smells worse.

Chicago Handshake: Beer and a Shot of Liquor You’ll Learn to Love

L

eading up to a Chicago visit this

year, one item topped my to-do list—try Malört. I knew the following about Malört: It’s huge in Chicago, and drinking it seemed to stamp one with some sort of badge of honor, because it’s beloved and… bad? Online drinks publication VinePair headlines it: “Malört, Chicago’s Proudly Unpalatable Spirit, Is Masochism at Its Most Midwestern.”

“Proudly Unpalatable?” Shamelessly assertive? Boasting a devout fan base that loves it in spite of—nay, because of—its prickliness and refusal to crowd-please? An umlaut-ed “O?” Is Malört the most metal drink ever?

Anecdotally, it seems people outside the Midwest have either tried Malört once and hated it, still not totally understanding it, or have never even heard of it. So… it’s a liquor.

Swedish immigrant Carl Jeppson invented it in the 1920s to riff on bäsk brännvin, a bitter Scandinavian liquor with wormwood, VinePair says. Malört is Swedish for “wormwood.” Unlike wormwood friend absinthe, Malört doesn’t cause hallucinations—sorry.

Malört was born in Chicago and so embraced there by different communities despite its polarizing flavor—it’s all wormwood all the time, and aggressively herbaceous.

Chicagoans see it as a point of pride, and in

 Smiles and handshakes Lake Effect Brewing’s collaboration with Jeppson’s Malört has a unique taste not for the weak

recent years, bartenders have been embracing it amid the resurgence of bitters like Cynar and Fernet. Malört has leaned into the reputation. Its website states, “It’s not a drink for most people, but we’re not most people.”

Virginia Thomas is the co-owner of exceptional Chicago beer bar and bottle shop Beermiscuous, where I not only had the pleasure of drinking a socially distanced Malört shot with her, but also bought a local beer aged in Malört barrels. I asked her how a 100-year-old spirit’s impact is still swelling more recently.

“It was a kind of a grassroots ‘come up,’” she explained via email. “Bartenders were into it. The ‘handshake’ was born. You’d find out about a merch drop via Twitter—that kind of thing. I’d venture a guess that some of the popularity is that it is pretty unique… and probably a little bit that it is derisive! I’ve joked that the first time you do Malört is a dare, the second-to-ninth times, you’re just being nice/tolerating it; and then by the tenth time you actually like it.”

That “handshake” refers to the “Chicago handshake,” a shot of Malört and an oldschool, easy-drinking Midwestern beer like an Old Style. Thomas doesn’t have Old Style at Beermiscuous, but you can do a craft Chicago handshake with your pilsner of choice. The

literal pairing of beer and Malört isn’t the only way the two mingle, though. The aforementioned beer aged in Malört barrels is a gose from Chicago’s Lake Effect Brewing Company; Thomas enjoyed it and says it sold well. Midwesterners 3 Floyds, also, have aged their revered Dark Lord stout in Malört barrels. As there are beers made with Malört, so too is there Malört made with beer. O.G. Chicago brewery Revolution Brewing partnered with Malört maker CH Distillery to salvage kegs of Revolution’s Anti-Hero IPA that would go to waste during the pandemic. CH distilled the beer into a hoppy, beer-inspired version of Malört.

The time to get into Malört is now. Its fervent following and growing curiosity factor continue to lead to more collabs, interpretations and updates. Thomas points to a Malört barrel-aged cider from ERIS Brewery & Cider House, for one, as well as Chicago staple bar Nisei Lounge making its own Malört infusions, from candy cane, coffee and pumpkin spice to giardiniera, sport peppers and sauerkraut. And Malört’s availability is growing.

Thomas says pre-pandemic, she found it in Vegas, Milwaukee and New Orleans. So, get the first few dare-level tries out of the way and before long, you’ll be chasing Malört varieties, beer Malörts and Malört beers.

DECIBEL : A PRIL 2022 : 15

ORIGIN

STUDIO REPORT

“We got everything set up tracking for the band’s upcoming eighth album, and even he’s surprised at Monday and did two songs, how quickly things are moving along. Especially when you consider that, then did two songs on Tuesday.

ALBUM TITLE “Three months ago I didn’t even think us being in the studio and recordWe’ve done two so far today.

Chaosmos ing an album was possible!”

We might get a third in later PRODUCER After a successful cycle for 2017 predecessor Unparalleled Universe had the band tonight; we’re already almost rounding out the before times with an appearance on 2020’s 70,000 Tons of Metal finished because there are Robert Rebeck cruise (followed by an extensive jaunt through Central and South America and a only going to be nine tracks STUDIO week of sold-out shows on a truncated North American tour), they joined the music on the album. Next week we GFM Recording, industry’s mass holding pattern until inspiration hit. start guitars, vocals and bass.

Blue Springs, MO “New Year’s resolutions are meant to be broken, but goals are made to be I feel confident in our ability RELEASE DATE achieved,” says the wily, wisecracking axe-slinger. “So, in January 2021 I decided I to get this album done in the Spring/Summer 2022 would write a song per month until I felt I had an album’s worth of material. And most efficient way. We’ve got LABEL I would do it to the calendar. Like, January has 31 days, so it’d be a longer song; a couple new twists and turns Nuclear Blast February has 28 days, so it’d be shorter. By June, I felt like I had six songs and half for people. This album is still of an album.” fast, dynamic and Origin, but When we catch Ryan on the horn, it’s a chilly Wednesday evening outside the walls of GFM unpredictable in that it’ll keep old fans enticed Recording, but inside, “Johnny Fever [drummer John Longstreth] is ripping it and the songs are smokwhile giving new listeners something to ing hot! Our producer, Rob [Rebeck], who has worked on seven of the releases in the Origin discography, grasp onto. We’re really excited about it!” thought this studio has the best drum room in the greater Kansas City area, so we’re here for a week.

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

ORIGIN

STUDIO SHORT SHOTS

PROLIFIC TECH-DEATHSTERS CONTRARIAN REJECT DOWNTIME WITH FIFTH LP IN SEVEN YEARS When Decibel called Contrarian drummer Alex Cohen (ex-Imperial Triumphant/exPyrrhon) at Solitude Studios, he had recently come off a four-day recording run for new album Sage of Shekhinah.

“I have two weeks booked here,” Cohen says. “I’m doing about one song a day. The parts are very demanding and technically challenging. For this album, I wanted to

16 : A PRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

approach death metal drumming with a different vocabulary. An advanced vocabulary. Think: Gene Hoglan or Sean Reinert. I can tell you my calves are sore.”

Cohen initially joined Contrarian for the upcoming Suffocation/Atheist tour, but has entered the ranks full-time, officially replacing Bryce Butler (now Shadow of Intent).

The reconfigured lineup is aiming to level up from previous album Only Time Will Tell (2020), emphasizing technicality and progressiveness as well as hooks and memorability.

“I wouldn’t call this a concept album,” says Cohen. “It’s more like multiple chapters in a book. Each chapter has a different theme and writing style. They’re different players, but there’s a focus on hooks and riffs.” —CHRIS DICK

PHOTOS BY JEFF CHRISTOPHER, GRINDSTOPHER PRODUCTIONS

O

rigin guitarist Paul Ryan is speaking to Decibel during the third day of drum

FRIENDS OF HELL

FRIENDS OF HELL The old school is back in session for ex-Reverend Bizarre/Electric Wizard members

T

as danazoglou doesn’t remember when he met vocalist Sami Hynninen—a.k.a. Albert Witchfinder, formerly the frontman of influential Finnish doom outfits Reverend Bizarre and Spiritus Mortis—but he does clearly remember what happened that night. ¶ “We played a show in Finland,” begins Danazoglou, who speaks to Decibel from the Mediterranean island country of Cyprus. His children shriek in the background while we discuss Friends of Hell, his new project featuring fellow renowned tattoo artist Jondix. Danazoglou and Jondix have already worked together on Great Coven, Eight Hands for Kali, Aeonsgate and Satan’s Wrath; meanwhile, Danazoglou and Hynninen’s relationship began while the former was the bassist for revered British doom lords Electric Wizard. This fact squarely places that fateful night somewhere in the early 2010s, shortly after Reverend Bizarre acrimoniously dissolved. ¶ “He came in; he crashed in my room in the hotel,” says Danazoglou. “This is the first time we ever met, and then we obviously didn’t sleep. We listened to music all night, getting drunk, and mostly we were playing Deep Purple.”

18 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

His booming laugh cuts across the crackly line.

“I was getting sick of Deep Purple and I’m like, ‘Man, Albert, should we play something else?’ And he goes, ‘No, no, we can go to MK1 and listen to their psychedelic years!’

[Laughs] I’m like, ‘Okay, here we go.

And it was Purple all night; I don’t think this is true doom!”

He chuckles at the concept, and at the lineage of his band. Yes, its members participated in some of doom’s most reverend outfits, but Friends of Hell are not intended to recreate those projects.

“Obviously, we like doom bands like Cathedral, Saint Vitus and Candlemass,” Danazoglou explains.

“And, you know, Pentagram, but we also like bands like Mercyful Fate and Venom and Bathory. And we just said with Jondix from the beginning that we want to play kind of slow—then again, Hellhammer are slow. So, we said, ‘We’re going to

play a little bit slow. And mid-tempo… Actually, let’s make albums like the ’80s Pentagram albums.’

I don’t think it’s doom metal; it’s more heavy metal.”

Whatever genre you call it, Friends of Hell play slow, midtempo, fuzzed-out heavy metal that revels in Satanism and horror movies. It’s reasonably described as a mix between the blazing classic metal vibes of Danazoglou’s other promising band Mirror (now signed to Cruz del Sur) and post-We Live Electric Wizard. Named after the second album by Witchfinder General, Friends of Hell certainly revel in their roots with occasional and unusually delightful deviations from the norm.

“I wouldn’t go waving a flag of true doom or anything like this,” Danazoglou concludes. “In my eyes, whatever I do, even if it’s faster or slower … in its core, it’s still heavy metal.” —SARAH KITTERINGHAM

ALLEGAEON

ALLEGAEON

B

ack in 2016, melodic death maestros Allegaeon were in dire straits. They found themselves the plucky protagonists in an age-old story of costs outweighing revenue, struggling to survive after the release of Proponent for Sentience, despite being four-album Metal Blade veterans and hardy road dogs. So, they did what many tech-savvy youths of the day were doing: hit the internet to appeal to their fanbase for support via then-newfangled crowdfunding portal Patreon.

While vocalist Riley McShane remembers the response as mostly positive, there was the occasional naysayer, including Decibel’s own cuddly and cantankerous curmudgeon Neill Jameson, who penned a piece taking the position that the band were holding their fans hostage and that it would be better if they broke up because no one owes anyone anything in this game. ¶ “A lot of stuff was taken out of context, and that was scary,” explains McShane. “Basically, we were saying that if we couldn’t financially figure things out, we might not be able to be a band anymore. What we were offering with our Patreon was, to us,

20 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

a modern-day fan club with a more immediate timeline for the delivery of exclusive content. I understood the negativity, but five years later Patreon is kind of the norm and part of building a band at this point. Ours is still active; there are a couple hundred fans we’re still offering content to. There have been ups and downs with it, and there was a little bit of bad blood, but I have no hard feelings towards Decibel, and I’m all for repairing the relationship and moving forward.”

So, here we are in the early days of 2022 with everyone older, wiser and in a better place as Decibel continues to kill it on and off paper, and Allegaeon are on the eve of album number six, Damnum (Latin for loss). Following a number of headlining and support runs, the quintet was about to wrap up the cycle for 2019’s Apoptosis with a final tour, which was kiboshed in

March 2020 as the world shut down.

Following this, the band, with members spread across the U.S. and Canada, surprisingly found themselves benefitting from lockdown isolation in the creation of Damnum.

“It lined up for us really well because we were about to start focusing on writing,” enthuses the frontman. “There were drafts of songs and the wheels were turning, but the blessing in disguise was that the pandemic allowed us to really collaborate on the new record. In the past, two guys would write five or six songs apiece and everyone else would put their parts on top. For this one, we took a more collaborative approach. Songs were written and everyone gave creative feedback, and that benefited the album because it sounds dynamically cohesive, like it was written by a unit and like there’s a part of everyone in every song.” —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

PHOTO BY CALEB DANE YOUNG

Burying the hatchet with technical melodic death metal wizards

MESSA

MESSA

Italian doom artisans take a pandemic-safe sonic journey to the Middle East

ON

their sophomore lp, 2018’s Feast for Water, Messa embraced the dark jazz of Angelo Badalamenti and Bohren und der Club of Gore, augmenting their “scarlet doom” sound with smoky saxophone and burbling Rhodes piano. For Close, its stunning follow-up, the Italian band has expanded their sound once again, driven this time by pandemic-era wanderlust. ¶ “We’ve always tried to embellish our stuff with outside music, not strictly from metal or rock music,” says guitarist Alberto Piccolo. “For the last album, that was jazz. For this one, we thought of doing something different. And since we were all stuck at home, we thought of [coming up with] a way to travel with our music, so we thought about adding Arabic instruments.” ¶ Before the sessions for Close, Piccolo learned to play the oud, a fretless Middle Eastern stringed instrument that he had long admired, but never picked up himself. He says the process was “very difficult,” but his labor paid off. The oud joins mandolin, dulcimer and Armenian duduk on the album, 22 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

alongside flourishes of sax and Rhodes, held over from Feast for Water. Set against Messa’s dramatic, towering arrangements, the nonmetal instruments help create an atmosphere that’s entirely their own.

“To a certain extent, we might be called a doom band,” vocalist Sara Bianchin muses. “But labels sometimes are too limited. I don’t know if doom might be the perfect epithet to describe what we do, because we play many blends of music all together.”

Bianchin’s commanding voice is the glue that holds those blends together. She can send neck hairs on end with a gossamer whisper and make blood pump hard with full-bodied belting in the space of a single passage. (Album highlight “Rubedo” provides a brilliant example of this.) Though she’s reticent to speak about their specific meaning, she calls the lyrics on Close

“the darkest we’ve ever had.” She’s also committed to making sure the listener can feel her words, no matter how they interpret them. “I’m really a sensitive person, so I write about things that I feel, otherwise it would be a futile vocal exercise, and that is not for me. I really must be 110 percent in what I sing.”

One overarching theme of Close can be found in its title. After COVID lockdowns scuttled their recording plans multiple times, Messa finally managed to get into Volpago del Montello’s Inside Outside Studio in April 2021. “The studio was beautiful, and it was nice to be all together, creating music,” Bianchin reflects. “That really meant a lot.

And it ties also to the record’s name, because we wanted to record the whole album in full closeness, all together, everybody in the same room. It was a really good context to record.” —BRAD SANDERS

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NEQUIENT

NEQUIENT

IT’S

been a long road to the release of their second album, but Chicago metallihardcore crushers Nequient are almost there. Originally recorded in early 2020, Darker Than Death or Night—now slated for a March release on Nefarious Industries—was shelved until the general state of the world improved. As you might be aware, the general state of the world didn’t improve much, but venues reopened their doors and, thus, Nequient began preparing to release their album. ¶ Nequient means “incapable,” but the quartet are far from it. Darker Than Death or Night builds on the framework that Nequient established on their first album, 2018’s Wolves at the Door—spastic, sludgy metallic hardcore with hints of death metal, grind, noise rock and thrash. The album was recorded at Bricktop Studios, where Nequient has tracked each of their releases since their first EP. ¶ “Having that as our core sounds allows us a lot of room to go into other directions,” frontman Jason Kolkey tells Decibel. “We don’t want to just be a clone of Converge or Cave In or any of these bands

24 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

from that era. We want to—like those bands did—find other sounds that we’re interested in and try to experiment with them.”

Darker Than Death or Night was recorded in the same session in which Nequient tracked Collective Punishment, an EP released in early November to give followers a sign that the band hadn’t died. The album features 10 new songs, musically and lyrically matching the evergrowing senses of anxiety and dread that are part and parcel of modern life. At their most unhinged, Nequient sound like a fusion of the Dillinger Escape Plan, Converge and Combatwoundedveteran—if those bands were feral and sludgy.

Despite the relative technicality of its composition, Nequient’s music always gives the impression that it could careen off a cliff at any moment. Kolkey attributes that to their do-it-yourself hardcore roots.

“The constant feeling that the wheels are going to fall off everything, that it’s all going to fall apart, is actually quite invigorating,” he says. “That’s always been why the hardcore angle to it is so important, so much fun. We’re all born-and-bred metalheads, but the hardcore aspect of it is what gives us the bounce and sense of connection with the audience.”

Despite the delay from recording to release, Nequient’s enthusiasm about Darker can’t be greater. “I’m absolutely fucking stoked about this record,” Kolkey admits. “The funny thing about the very long nightmare we’ve been in… it has just gotten worse. All the things that I was yelling about back then, I’m just more upset about now. There’s a lot of room for me to have that cathartic experience with these songs that I haven’t been able to have.” —VINCE BELLINO

PHOTO BY NICOLAS C TE

Chicago deathcrushers’ fury is fine-tuned and finely aged on long-delayed second LP

ritual hymns

KONVENT

KONVENT

Danish quartet vow to spend their days in pursuit of death/doom perfection

WE

didn’t really set out to sound heavier and meaner this time, but somehow we ended up doing that anyway,” bassist Heidi Withington Brink admits.

She’s talking about Konvent’s sophomore album, Calling Down the Sun. “Perhaps it’s a sign of the times? The builtup frustration from not being able to do what we love for so long and the constant cancellations, the constant fear of getting sick or somebody we love getting sick.” ¶ Although they’ve only been on the radar since releasing debut revelation Puritan Masochism in 2020, the all-female Danish death/doom quartet actually formed seven years ago. “Since our first record didn’t come out before 2020, a lot of people thought we were a very newly formed band, which wasn’t really the truth,” Brink tells us. “We just had to spend a lot of time getting to know each other, our instruments and the industry. I definitely see that as a strong advantage for us, since we are really grounded in the band because of it. ¶ “None of us can see a future without the band in it, and we’ve talked a lot about possible obstacles and how

26 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

we would tackle them to make sure the band was always thought of.”

It’s little wonder then that Konvent enjoyed almost immediate critical acclaim after their first album’s release. According to Brink, when it came to a follow-up, the real critics—and the only ones they tried to please—were themselves. “I think we were definitely more calm about making the first record,” she reflects.

“It’s never been expectations from the outside that made us uneasy; it’s more so our own minds playing tricks on us, telling us to make an even better record. It’s something we’ve had a lot of talks about ... and we just agreed that we were gonna make the music we wanted to. You can’t ever control what people are going to say or think about it, so you might as well just make the best of the process and explore new ideas.”

As for the phrase Calling Down the Sun, Brink explains, “[The] title

is a sort of metaphor for calling down the wrath of the sun upon something in your life that you’re fed up with. We feel like the sun is a strong force that both gives life and can take it away, and you can aim for something really high and never get there, and then at some point decide to stop aiming, but just call down the sun to yourself instead.”

Recorded at Ballade Studios with Lasse Ballade in their hometown of Copenhagen, Calling Down the Sun is more than everything their first album was, but meaner, heavier and better. Like Brink says, risks were taken in order to evolve. “The whole album really revolves around going in circles and being tired of self-destructive patterns ... It’s important for us to keep evolving, both as humans and musically, instead of stalling in one place and just staying there for the rest of our career.” —DUTCH PEARCE

SOUL GLO

SOUL GLO

The only direction you can expect Philly hardcore fusionists to move is forward

E

very day it feels like we’re defying the will of the universe just by existing,” Soul Glo vocalist Pierce Jordan tells Decibel. “At basically every step of the way with this record there was some obstacle, some setback. To be honest, it’s still happening. But, through that, you learn what can get done by sheer force of will—what can be accomplished when you refuse to go down. Every time we’ve made a joke about some farfetched thing happening or set a goal that seems almost impossible to us and insane to everyone else… it happens. It’s very strange. And beautiful.” ¶ Not for nothing, apparently, did the Philadelphia quartet choose the aptly titled rager, “Jump!! (Or Get Jumped!!!)((by the future))” as the first salvo from its latest full-length, Diaspora Problems. The LP is a multidimensional, wholly original soul/punk/hardcore/garage manifestation that is about as validating and expansive a proof-of-life as one could imagine coming out of this moment of insularity and death.

28 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

It’s not often you can hear echoes of Converge, ’70s fusionists War, Bad Brains, Refused and Rotting Out in a single song, but…

“The mix may be uncommon, but it’s not weird to me,” Jordan posits.

“It works because, in our hands, it’s all part of the same larger canon of black American music. Sometimes you can feel people’s intentions when they bring different influences into hardcore and it can be self-conscious to the point where it comes off as disingenuous. For us, this just is who we are. We’re practicing a tradition that was set in motion a long time before we came along.

“I feel like a lot of bands fall into a very set way of doing things,” he continues. “I just like to let shit flow. Everybody in the band is like that. None of us ever want to feel

locked into our sound. Like, I can’t wait for all these crazy records bands made during the pandemic to drop. I can’t wait to be inspired by something I haven’t heard before; connect it to the things I’ve always loved and make something I haven’t made before… Maybe the thing I like most about Soul Glo is that there’s never really a clear sign of what you’re about to hear next— whether you’re someone picking up the record or a member of the band in the practice space.”

So, is the weirdest part of the Soul Glo experience having to translate that flow state into words for people—such as, say, your humble correspondent?

“Nah,” Jordan laughs. “Living life the way I’ve chosen to live it, I’ve had a lot of training in being asked to explain myself.” —SHAWN MACOMBER

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CEREMONIAL CASTINGS

Bicoastal black metal brothers resurrect old songs for a new audience

W

hen 20th century french writer Paul Valéry suggested that creative work can never be finished, only abandoned, he had clearly never known anyone like the Superchi brothers and Ceremonial Castings, their band with drummer Matt Mattern. These guys don’t abandon shit. ¶ In December 2002, the Superchis pressed their first full-length, Into the Black Forest of Witchery, and within 18 months they had already re-recorded it (after releasing two more full albums, mind); four years later, Black Forest also got the remaster treatment. Their 2008 record, Salem 1692, earned a re-recording in 2020. Now, as the band celebrates 25 years since forming in the late ’90s, they offer up a two-CD collection comprising brandnew recordings of 18 songs across their substantial discography; they named it Our Journey Through Forever after one of the songs drawn from their 2003 record, Universal Funeral March. ¶ “We felt what we had written in our past was exceptional in ways,” says Jake Superchi, also of the fantastic melodic black metallers Uada, “but always lacked in sound and atmosphere 30 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

due to our inexperience and eagerness to push things out so that we could quickly move to the next wave of incoming inspiration. Since we had already revised Salem 1692 and had plans to do the same with another album, we decided to leave those two out and focus solely on the old days with a few newer songs to represent the journey itself.”

The newer songs include the bifurcated instrumental “The Purifier of Battle,” each part of which has been situated as the seventh track of its respective disc. This identical positioning is no accident. Superchi describes a process of ordering songs on each disc to feel like they are mirror images of each other, so each disc “feels like its own album and takes the listener on a journey through the peaks and valleys of the music within.”

Superchi clarifies that revisiting the songs was never about altering their substance; the process

conferred unforeseen benefits: “The biggest value of this experience for me personally is learning to listen more, as well as allowing the patience it takes to do so. Taking on the mixing duties again—making sure each and every part can be heard and remain dynamic without drowning out other aspects within the song—was challenging and time-consuming. It taught me a lot about how to approach something of this magnitude, and will guide me through many future recordings. I think learning is the most important thing that we can do in this world, and in order to do so we need to listen.

“Sometimes it’s not so easy, but if we allow the time we need to process and then revisit with fresh ears and understanding, things always become more clear.

That can apply to any part of our lives as well; not just in the music department.” —DANIEL LAKE

PHOTO BY CODY KETO

CEREMONIAL CASTINGS

LABYRINTH OF HUNGRY GHOSTS N E W A L B U M O U T M A R C H 11 T H

AVA I L A B L E O N C O L O R E D V I N Y L , C D & D I G I T A L

Prog metal legends

VOIVOD

use non-killing technology to complete their 15th LP S TO RY B Y

JOSEPH SCHAFER

3 2 : A P R I L 2 0 2 12 : D E C I B E L

oivod have always been ahead of the curve. The Quebecois quar- about releasing a double vinyl like The Wake with

tet has been turning heads since 1982 with their mutagenic blend of thrash, hardcore, prog and whatever else strikes their fancy, always wrapped in a dystopian sci-fi aesthetic courtesy of founding drummer Michel “Away” Langevin’s retro-futuristic artwork. Now the members of Voivod are living in a world much like the post-apocalypse depicted in their music—and they’re responding in kind with a new album, Synchro Anarchy. ¶ The band’s forward-thinking and genre-fluid approach to outsider metal hasn’t always made things easy. “Sometimes it’s played against us, let’s say when grunge was huge,” Langevin says. “In the long run, I think we’re appreciated and respected because we just kept going and did our own thing the whole way.”

But recently the world finally caught up to Voivod. The band’s fanbase has ballooned thanks to their status as a legacy act with plenty of creative juice left in the tank.

“It seems like all of these decades being some sort of futuristic heavy metal band … were only preparing us for what was coming,” Langevin agrees.

Voivod’s 2018 concept record The Wake won a Juno award—Canada’s much-less-out-of-touch equivalent to a Grammy—for best hard rock/ metal album. “We were really surprised how well-received The Wake was,” Langevin says.

“People just embraced it. It’s an intricate album, so it gave us the confidence to move down that fusion metal path for the new material.”

Tours with YOB and Revocation followed, as did a set at Maryland Deathfest. Plus, one typically Voivodian curveball—a performance at the prestigious Montreal Jazz Festival.

“It’s a moment that I will always remember,” Langevin says of that historic set. “The crowd went really wild because there were a lot of Voivod fans there; but because the Montreal Jazz Festival is so prestigious, people from all around the planet were in Montreal at that time. I’m sure many of them were intrigued by this concert.”

Sections of that set were released in 2020 as EP The End of Dormancy, including the title track performed with a full brass section. According

to Langevin, “Chewy [Mongrain, guitarist] had the brilliant idea of inviting a brass quintet; we call them the metal section. He wrote a chart for everybody. He teaches jazz at college, so he has a huge musical knowledge that he’s applying to Voivod.”

Ever-resilient, Langevin didn’t allow the COVID-19 pandemic to stymie the Voivodissance.

Unable to tour, the band adopted livestreaming with a series of performances dubbed Hypercube Sessions, including full-album sets for Nothingface and Dimension Hatröss. The sessions were so successful that Langevin is planning on further performances of less ubiquitous albums like The Outer Limits. If Voivod couldn’t have their victory lap on the road, at least they could celebrate their discography online.

Neither did Langevin stop working on a worthy follow-up to The Wake. Voivod embraced digital collaboration in the course of writing Synchro Anarchy before polishing songs off live in the studio. While the process put some pressure on the band—“Why do you think we called the album Synchro Anarchy, man?”—it resulted in their self-produced 15th studio album.

Synchro Anarchy continues the band’s recent jazz fusion-inspired approach, but also incorporates the driving punk-inspired energy of the band’s earliest recordings. “It’s probably more urgent and direct, and we sort of wanted it that way,” says Langevin. “We could not think

interludes and all that. So, there are a couple of shorter punk songs for sure, like ‘The World Today’ or ‘Sleeves Off.’ It’s definitely a psychedelic album, even though it’s compact and punk.”

Sharing files digitally forced Langevin to program drums during the writing process, which affected Synchro Anarchy’s rhythmic feel.

“I would program bits of songs without music, just drums on the computer, so the other guys could build from it,” he says. “That we spent quite a long time building the album while sharing files online gave a sort of syncopated style to the music.”

According to Langevin, even though COVID-19 may have affected the album’s writing, it didn’t inspire much lyrical content. However, Synchro Anarchy presented another storytelling challenge—how to keep conjuring sci-fi worlds when reality seems so much like a Voivod record.

“Many people ask me, ‘How can you still find subjects to talk about when we’re living in a sci-fi world?’ And [that’s] exactly it. There are more subjects to pick from because sci-fi has caught up with Voivod,” Langevin says. “Since Snake [Bélanger, vocalist] was forced to write parts of the lyrics in his isolated confinement, I can feel the dystopian vibe of what’s going on in the lyrics. The condition of the planet affected the music. It’s a fairly dark album, but there are a couple of classic optimistic messages in Voivod terms. In ‘The World Today,’ Snake is saying that if you want to live in a better world, you better contribute to it being a better world.”

So, now that everyone is living in a Voivod future, how will the band continue thinking in future-perfect tense? Langevin has a few ideas, including long-awaited reissues of the band’s early records on Noise Records, as well as their albums released on MCA, whose master tapes were long thought to be lost (not to mention a potential first-ever vinyl release of their 2003 self-titled record). Whatever the future holds, not only will Voivod be there to meet it, but, if the past is any indication, Langevin and co., will be thinking one step ahead.

People ask me, ‘How can you still find subjects to talk about when we’re living in a sci-fi world?’

And [that’s] exactly it. There are more subjects to pick from

BECAUSE SCI-FI HAS CAUGHT UP WITH VOIVOD. MICHEL “AWAY” LANGEVIN

DECIBEL : APRIL 2022 1 : 33

EVOLUTION CALLING Death metal space lords Blood Incantation chart their own course with the instrumental synth escape Timewave Zero S T O RY B Y

PHOTO BY

Jonathan Horsley

Alvino Salcedo

lood Incantation might have temporarily decommissioned the supernova guitar riffs and blast beats to design an extraterrestrial synth soundscape, but their very essence and credo remains unchanged.

Timewave Zero, the Denver death metal iconoclasts’ feature-length EP, doubles down on previous releases’ inter-dimensional cosmic energy, urging us to cast our eyes toward the night sky, to journey within, seeking out uncharted realms of our consciousness. Comprising two tracks, “Io” and “Ea,” each split into four acts, Timewave Zero is audacious, cinematic and expansive, and won’t unduly surprise anyone who has paid attention to their creative endeavors since guitarist/vocalist Paul Riedl and drummer Isaac Faulk started the band in 2011. ¶ “The ambient thing has always been a part of our sound, and it has been a conscious effort to integrate that even more on every record, so this was just the logical next step,” Faulk says. “It is the distillation of all these disparate elements sprinkled throughout our previous records. These deep space ambient parts are like little portals into this other world, the other side of the musical universe that we have inhabited the whole time.”

The EP’s title is an explicit reference to the late ethnobotanist and mystic Terence McKenna, whose writing has had a profound influence on the band. As Faulk explains, there doesn’t need to be any lyrics for the record to have a unifying theme. In pulling the listener through the wormhole, into a three-dimensional fever dream scored with sounds redolent of Holst, Vangelis, John Carpenter, and Angelo Badalamenti, it makes them a pliant vessel for Blood Incantation’s mind expansion program.

“The band has always been about expanding consciousness,” Faulk says. “Finding new ways of thinking about things, posing questions about the lineage of the human race, human consciousness—this album is the perfect contemplation on that.”

Timewave Zero was also 100 percent gamed out.

This was not Blood Incantation taking advantage of a black hole in the touring itinerary; this was written in the stars from day one—“Second album was gonna be green logo, like Morbid Angel; third album was gonna be ambient because fuck everybody,” says Riedl. The band has sounded more hostile on record. Their 2016 3 4 : A P R I L 2 0 2 12 : D E C I B E L

debut, Starspawn, sees them augment pummeling old-school death metal with doom and prog.

2019’s Hidden Histories of the Human Race splits the atom to bring technicality, brutality and longform storytelling into equilibrium. But Timewave Zero is Blood Incantation at their most radical— a riposte to the underground’s aesthetic timidity, and to an era in which counterculture has been swallowed whole by online commodification, creating what Faulk describes as “non-culture.”

“It’s kind of crazy because it is as if there is a future, although culture has stopped,” says guitarist Morris Kolontyrsky. “We are moving forward into this future without any sort of evolution.”

The word ambient doesn’t adequately describe Timewave Zero. This is the age of ambient entertainment, streaming television that’s little more than audio-visual soma, background noise offering little to engage with. Timewave Zero’s atmosphere is way more reactive—it seizes your consciousness, as though changing the air pressure, slowing the pulse and taking the clock offline. It is, for instance, impossible to write this feature while listening to the record. Other activities are similarly discouraged.

“You could put it on when you are driving, but we don’t recommend that,” Riedl says. “All the tuning is to 432 Hz. It washes over you like a cosmic ocean of sound. People all the time are picking up on this: ‘Dude, this zonks you out when you listen to it.’ There’s actually a warning on the layout, like, ‘Hey man, don’t operate heavy machinery or a vehicle while under the influence of this recording.’ We don’t wanna be liable for some dude putting this on on a long drive and passing out.”

How best to experience the recording? It doesn’t matter if it’s Roy Orbison or Krzysztof Penderecki; as with any piece of music, the more intensely you listen to it, the more musical information is absorbed, the deeper you sink into it, and Timewave Zero is laced with psychotropic triggers to take you someplace else. Whether you want to drop a little acid, fold under-the-counter mushrooms into your omelet or be 100 percent straight before pressing play, you’ll trip regardless.

“If you focus on it, there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening that will gradually unfold like a weird mosaic or a painting,” Riedl says.

“If you just put it on with headphones, dude, and lay down in a dark room—take a drug or don’t—you are gonna lay down and float away somewhere. You’re gonna go on a little journey in your mind, with your eyes closed. Anything else is going to add to the experience; we’re not telling you to take the drugs with the record, but if you do take the drugs with the record, you will have a crazier time. But regardless, the music draws you into this cosmic landscape. You put on a Blood Incantation record and it takes you into outer space, inner space, some cosmic landscape. Doesn’t matter what record; you’re gonna get that effect.”

It’s like Riedl explained to us back in 2016: Whether inner or outer, space is the place. And with Timewave Zero, Blood Incantation remind us that the message is the same as it ever was: You are the stargate. You have always been the stargate.

There’s actually a warning on the layout, like, ‘Hey man, don’t operate heavy machinery or a vehicle while under the influence of this recording.’

WE DON’T WANNA BE LIABLE FOR SOME DUDE PUTTING THIS ON ON A LONG DRIVE AND PASSING OUT. Paul Riedl

DECIBEL : APRIL 2022 1 : 35

Sludge pioneers

CROWBAR

thaw their first new album in six years, Zero and Below S TORY BY

Sean Frasier

3 6 : A P R I L 2 0 2 12 : D E C I B E L

PHOTO BY

Justin Reich

2020

was supposed to be different for N’awlins sludge traildozers Crowbar. Hell, it was supposed to be different for us all. The year marked the 30th anniversary of founding vocalist/guitarist Kirk Windstein’s dependably slow ‘n’ low project. The Decibel Hall of Famers had a new record recorded and ready to swing like a wrecking ball. But instead of honoring three decades of sonic excess with a new album, the band pressed pause on the release amid pandemic chaos. ¶ “A lot of bands released something in 2020 and didn’t get a chance to tour on it,” Windstein laments. “We didn’t want to put it out just to rush it, do a couple videos, and have it be buried and forgotten.”

Instead, the band kept their 12th LP, Zero and Below, frozen for two years as uncertainty seized the music industry. Now Crowbar are ready to thaw their album and bludgeon listeners with new-to-us down-tuned bangers. The familiar elements remain for the Crowbar faithful: Zero and Below is as dark and heavy as a midnight avalanche. The band balances their signature grimy groove with scrums of hardcore punk (“Bleeding From Every Hole”) while nodding to Carnivore’s Retaliation. It’s intentionally old-school throughand-through, down to the influences that helped chisel Obedience Thru Suffering out of pure granite.

“Whenever we pick up the pace and pick up the tempo to do faster stuff, it’s more of a hardcore and punkish thing than a thrash vibe,” Windstein explains. “The whole idea of Crowbar was to go in the opposite direction when thrash was king. And [thrash] really was, when you’re talking about heavy music [in 1990].”

But Zero and Below doesn’t just revamp past glory; Crowbar wield new implements from their songwriting toolbox throughout the record.

Inspired by Motörhead’s Rock ‘n’ Roll album, “It’s Always Worth the Gain” is straight-up arena sludge by way of AC/DC. “Denial of the Truth” unfolds with the patient, poignant minimalism of Windstein’s solo music. His tortured bellow still possesses the power to make a line like “the underworld is burning down” sound plausible in “Her Evil Is Sacred.” But like the album title implies, Crowbar and returning engineer Duane Simoneaux achieve a colder atmosphere on this release.

“As we were doing the record, I remember telling [guitarist] Matt [Brunson] that a lot of this stuff has the winter-y vibe of a European band from the ’90s,” Windstein notes. “Our first real European tour was a long seven-week thing supporting Paradise Lost on their Icon tour. I love that album. It was freezing fucking cold, because we were in Germany and Sweden. Snow was piled up 10 feet high on the sides of the road.

The heater went out on the bus and there was ice on the windows in the back lounge. After the shows we were drinking beers and writing Black Sabbath and KISS in the ice with our fingernails like little kids. We felt cold every minute of that tour, and [Zero and Below] reminds me of that.”

Windstein has toured for over a quartercentury since, and has battled the gamut of weather-related unpleasantry. While Windstein

chats with Decibel, a surge of freezing temperatures fittingly rips across half the country. The weather should be milder when Crowbar heads out on tour with Sepultura and Sacred Reich in March. But pandemic-related postponements are more of a threat than weather at this stage.

Windstein is all too aware of how COVID can change the scope of a tour: He contracted it on the last day of his tour in November 2021.

But Windstein is eager to get back on the road and share tracks that have been locked in a metaphoric vault the past two years. It’s an opportunity to see the impact of the songs on an audience for the first time. That impact can be visible and physical as the crowd devolves into a pit. But with Crowbar’s music the hidden impact is just as notable.

In his lyrics, Windstein expresses strength through vulnerability. Song to song, he advocates for personal growth and mental health. His words have been inspirational lifeblood for the downtrodden. Asked how often someone tells him Crowbar’s music changed their life for the better, Windstein quickly replies, “When I’m on tour, it’s literally every day. And it’s a great, great feeling.”

Crowbar’s music still feels like confronting the shadows of your inner self. Windstein admits that in his earliest days as a writer he was searching for his own voice. Peter Steele was a muse. Phil Anselmo helped write the lyrics for the eponymous Crowbar album. Windstein’s wife even helped pen some lyrics on Zero and Below.

But over time, Windstein’s scream-into-themirror approach adopted a bullish inclination towards motivational themes. Existence doesn’t have to feel like punishment.

“We have one superfan in Germany who lets me know that he thinks my lyrics are too happy now,” Windstein laughs. “No, they’re not happy.

I just no longer want to stab myself in the lyrics.

I’m finding the light at the end of the tunnel, and I take dark subject matter—substance abuse, addiction, depression—and show there’s hope.

“People have told me they lost their wife, they’re going through a dark time in their life with drugs, and my music helped me get them through tragedy. A lot of people need someone to be there with them as they experience something. They need to know someone can relate to them. So, knowing my music has done that— there’s no better feeling than that.”

DECIBEL : APRIL 2022 1 : 37

interview by

QA j. bennett

WI T H

MATT

PIKE HIGH ON FIRE and SLEEP guitarist discusses his new solo album, lyric book and—why not?—cryptids

38 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

I

haven’t been to a hockey game in forever.” That’s what Matt Pike tells me. People are saying it’s very High on Fire or

us when we get him on the Decibel hotline. As it turns out, the High on Fire mastermind and Sleep guitarist is up in Seattle to catch a game between the Kraken and the Sharks. “My drummer Jon from the Automaton thing bought me and Chief tickets so we could have some fun.” ¶ Let’s decode that sentence: Jon is Jon Reid, formerly of Portland sludge kings Lord Dying.

“The Automaton thing” is Pike’s debut solo album, Pike vs. the Automaton.

“Chief” is Chad Hartgrave (of San Diego stoner trio Archons), who plays the bulk of the bass on said album. If you’re reading this, the chances are excellent that you’ve already seen the video for the song “Alien Slut Mum,” which features Pike and his bandmates, along with producer Billy Anderson, ingesting catastrophic quantities of booze and drugs before being chased through the Oregon wilderness by various cryptids. ¶ As it turns out, Pike has been plenty busy during the plague years. In addition to his first solo album, he put together an illustrated book of his collected High on Fire lyrics called Head on a Pike and started a Patreon account. When we speak with him, our man is just days away from flying down to L.A. to jam with Big Business drummer Coady Willis, who recently assumed the throne in High on Fire. “I’m getting a lot done, but I’m still waiting to find out if I can even tour this year,” he says. “I wonder who’s gonna win that argument, you know?

But I’m learning to use the internet more, where they pay you to hang out at home and make things.”

Head on a Pike collects all your High on Fire lyrics going back over two decades. What did you think when you saw over two decades of your life’s work put together like that?

Seeing how much material there was really tripped me out. Jesus Christ, you know? Just when I thought I was being lazy. But what would happen if I had tried to write a novel and I did it inside a couple of years? I’m kind of a pussy compared to that.

Who came up with the idea to do a lyric book?

It was my wife’s idea. But I came up with a title, Head on a Pike. They used to put people’s heads on pikes and raise them up to ward people off in the days of tribal feudalism, and my family name happens to be Pike, so it seemed clever. But in this case, it’s stabbing my own brain. [Laughs] You’ve also got a solo album on the way. From what I gather, Pike vs. the Automaton is very much a product of the pandemic.

Yeah. I mean, no one could go anywhere. Jon was the only guy that would stop by my house.

[Laughs] I didn’t know if he had caught it or I had caught it or whatever. It was just like, “You wanna jam?” So, we just started making tunes, and then we started recording in my garage. Then, when things opened up, we cruised over to Billy’s house. It was like starting a band in high school.

PHOTO BY JUAN CARLOS CACERES

You live in Portland, which went crazy during the summer of 2020. You had the pandemic like everywhere else, but the political protests were especially heavy and the whole West Coast was on fire. How close was all of that to your house, and how did it affect your mentality?

The BLM protests weren’t that close—that was all downtown. I went down there a couple times and did burners in my El Camino just because I could. I was just checking it out with my wife, Alyssa. But the fires were close. You had to wear a mask inside anyway because the smoke was so bad. I told my wife and dog to go to the coast, so I got them out of the house. But I got a lung infection—my lungs haven’t been the same since. I had every weird air filter thing you can think of going at the same time, but it was still bad.

Were you already jamming with Jon at this point?

Yeah, but what’s crazy is that he works at a paint store, and they considered him an essential worker. He manages a mom-and-pop paint store, you know? It was just weird that he had to go in at all. I’m glad he was able to work, but why is painting your house essential during the pandemic?

The record is pretty psychedelic. Was that the plan when you started writing this stuff?

Well, I was kind of wanting to do something a little different with respect to High on Fire and Sleep. But look, it’s obviously gonna sound like

Sleep, and I’m like, “Of course it is, dude! It’s my guitar playing.” But I tried to make it different.

I tried out different vocal patterns, like “This one’s gonna be like David Lee Roth” or “This one’s gonna be like Entombed.”

The same thing with the solos. I’d wanna do one like Brian May, so I’d study his stuff for a day and then do the solo. Then I’d study Michael Schenker for a day and do one like that. I was just mixing it up, and I think it turned out great.

I think it’s one of the best things I ever did. But I was surprised to even finish it because me and Jon and Billy are all ADHD. So, finishing things is not one of our good qualities.

It’s true that some of these songs could’ve easily been High on Fire tracks. Did you ever get the feeling that you should save some of these for the next High on Fire record?

Oh, I totally did. Stuff would come up where I’d be like, “No, that’s a High on Fire riff, dude.”

So, there’s a couple that I saved for High on Fire. For the most part, me and Jon either went D-beat or completely weird, out-there prog. But yeah, some of it turned out like High on Fire or Sleep. If you have a style or signature, people are gonna recognize it.

You’ve said that “Trapped in a Midcave” was the song that got the creative process for this album rolling. What about that track made you feel like you were on the path?

That one kinda sounds like a Sleep riff, but it’s actually more of a KISS riff. That’s the one I tried to sing like David Lee Roth on—it’s also the one with the Michael Schenker solos. So, that’s a good example of me trying to mix it up. It makes things more interesting and experimental. This whole thing’s experimental, you know? And I did want it more psychedelic.

That song also has the sound of a crowd cheering at the end. Why’d you do that?

Just ’cause it’s funny. And we were all on mushrooms and doing whippets and hitting gongs. Jon was doing all these percussion tracks—there’s vibra-slaps and gourds on there, and egg shakers and all sorts of weird shit. There’s a bunch of samples from The Twilight Zone and Charles Bronson and stuff like that. And having guest people on it was another thing I wanted to do.

Brent Hinds from Mastodon plays with you on “Land,” which is probably the most differentsounding track on the album—it’s like an acoustic country kind of thing.

Me and Brent were messing around before the pandemic. We were gonna start a project DECIBEL : APRIL 2022 : 39

 Cryptids laughter

(from l to r) Jon Reid, Matt Pike and Chad Hartgrave aren’t interested in your regular lions, tigers and bears

Your wife Alyssa does vocals and plays bass on “Acid Test Zone,” which is the craziest track on the record. What’s the story behind that one?

She plays Hammond organ on “Land,” too. She’s a super badass pianist. But with “Acid Test Zone,” me and Jon were out in the garage jamming that tune one night, and she came home kinda buzzed. She was angry about something, too, and that song kinda sounds like Extreme Noise Terror or something. We were recording, so she grabbed one of the microphones and started screaming into it. It sounded rad when we listened back, so I asked her to do it on the record. She wasn’t singing any lyrics or anything—she was just screaming—so I wrote a bunch of lyrics to her syllables. We had done LSD the night before, so I wrote a song about acid using her vocal pattern.

When she did it again in the studio, it came out almost exactly the same. It was weird.

together—we still are—but we didn’t get much going yet. We jammed a bunch, but didn’t have many songs together. I had written “Land” with my wife, just sitting on the couch, messing around, so I asked Brent to play some guitar and lap steel on it. He killed it—he did the whole Billy Gibbons/Chet Atkins kinda thing. I mean, he’s got that bluegrass, chicken-pickin’ style that works really well in Mastodon. I took the first solo, and then he took the rest and fucking kills me on it. I had to go back and change my guitar tone a couple of times because I was like, “Fuck him. He’s probably playing through $40,000 worth of crazy gear.” [Laughs]

was 16, and her skirt is riding way up above her crotch line. Once we pass her, our buddy goes, “Oooh, slut mum,” in his British accent. We all fell down laughing, just the way he said it. I also had this dream after my mother died that she was this huge gold alien. So, I just kinda combined those two as a working title. But we didn’t come up with anything else, so it stuck.

The video for that one is all drugs and cryptids.

I’m guessing that was your idea.

Yeah, yeah. The making of the whole album was like that video. It was weird.

Cryptids are popular up in Oregon, aren’t they?

What’s the story behind “Alien Slut Mum”?

You know how in England they have the chavs, the soccer hooligan dudes? All those dudes have girlfriends that wear high heels that look like… there must be more broken ankles on a weekend in Manchester or Nottingham than anywhere else in the world. I remember seeing this dude in a fight with some other hooligan, and the first guy’s chick pulls a sign out of the ground and starts hitting the other dude with it, in her high heels, and I see her ankle go.

So, I have this picture in my head as we’re walking up the street, and we see this lady pushing one of those strollers with three kids in it.

She looks like she’s been pregnant since she 40 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

Oh yeah, dude. We got Dogman, Sasquatch— people see all kinds of weird shit. I personally haven’t, but I do believe there’s a Dogman and Bigfoot. I go camping every once in a while—not as much as I’d like to, because the whole state burned down—and there’s times where I know there’s a predator around. I’m being stared at.

You can feel it. You can’t hear a bird or an insect or anything, and that’s usually when a large predator is around. We have black bears, but there’s other things out there. Between Northern California and Washington, there’s a lot of places for one of those things to hide. People might think I’m a kook, but too many people see ’em. They convict people for murder with less witnesses.

[Laughs] That song is about making a bad deal.

There’s a line that goes, “Step right up, you made a deal with a knife.” So, a throat cobra could be a knife to your throat. It could be anything you want it to be, though. Todd co-wrote that one with me, and I gave him a knife to do the track.

He had it with him in the vocal booth. But he really loved that lyric, and he did a great job.

The last time I saw you, High on Fire had just finished recording Electric Messiah, which you won a Grammy for. That must’ve been unexpected.

I wouldn’t have sat like 400 yards back from the front row if I thought we were gonna win.

My foot was in a cast, and I was using a cane to walk. [Laughs] But it was a cool experience.

We really appreciated all our peers and just the whole head trip of the thing. But yeah, I got it on my mantle.

Ever since they gave the 1989 “Best Hard Rock/ Metal Performance” award to Jethro Tull over Metallica, I’ve considered the Grammys a fraud.

But seeing you win makes me feel like someone over there must be paying attention.

Yeah, maybe they are. I hope so. I feel like my work’s been appreciated because it’s real musical work and not me looking to be the next boy band. I’m looking for musical greatness, and I want that work documented. After I’ve passed on, I want people to be able to use that work as an influence or inspiration for future endeavors to add to the giant library of recorded music.

PHOTO BY JUAN CARLOS CACERES

I do believe there’s a Dogman and Bigfoot.

You’ve got Todd Burdette from Tragedy on the song “Throat Cobra.” What is a throat cobra, anyway?

the

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

definitive albums

by

michael wohlberg photos by

paul romano

Surrounded, Yet Isolated the making of the Red Chord’s Clients

WE

will, and have, ruin biggest album to date and help usher our sets for a good in a new era of extreme music that joke.” Such is the ultimately saved the old guard that so modus operandi of quickly rejected them. And though the mid-2000s metal pilband was more than comfortable having lars the Red Chord, a laugh at the scene they called home, as described by longtime bassist Greg Clients showed a deep care for its daring Weeks. An absolute touring machine compositions and subject matter. Rather on the back of their 2002 debut album than the glorified violence and misogyny Fused Together in Revolving Doors, the Boston of some of their contemporaries, vocalist quintet very quickly made a name for Guy Kozowyk focused on his immediate themselves both in musical style and surroundings as a young working man— stage presence during some of death metone filled with inescapable disability, al’s leanest years. Melding high-velocity addiction and taboo—to tell the stories DBHOF208 death metal à la Suffocation, Immolation of those who largely went unheard, even and Dying Fetus with the more accessible if he didn’t quite understand it himself mosh parts of Buried Alive and Madball, at the time. the Red Chord were deemed too hardcore This final product culminated in a Clients for underground metal purists, finding a coveted prize from a certain fledgling home in the fast-rising metallic hardcore metal rag: Clients landed Decibel’s first-ever M E TA L BLA D E scene of the Northeast. perfect score in our reviews section (May M AY 1 7 , 20 0 5 And if their music was too divergent 2005, No. 7). While others were quick to These are our people with traditional death metal sensibilities, brand the band with the maligned label their live shows were downright heretical. of “metalcore” or claim the album to be A mischievous joy was ever present on the inferior to Fused Together, Decibel scribe faces of the band as they regularly mocked Kevin Stewart-Panko writes in his review, the crowds they drew. Overly colorful merch “In this day and age of bands developing proclaiming their love of sandwiches. Ridiculing the bands they were instant followings by pandering to the lowest common denominator… touring with while onstage. Smiling. The Red Chord regularly found the Red Chord attained their success by throwing caution to the wind and themselves to be the odd ones out in nearly every situation, a position taking their awesome songs and robust live show anywhere that would they enjoyed with nihilistic glee as their following grew larger with each host ’em. Truth be told, it’s this quintet’s songs that have made the differsubsequent tour. ence and caused their profile to explode, car bomb-style.”

While the band’s first record established their brand of technical death Tastes may change, but with this induction, our praise of Clients metal, sophomore effort Clients is what announced their presence to the certainly hasn’t. This is it. Guy Kozowyk, Greg Weeks, guitarists Mike metal world at large. Signing with Metal Blade in 2004 and securing the “Gunface” McKenzie and Kevin Rampelberg, and drummer Brad Fickeisen, backing of one of metal’s biggest and most recognizable independent welcome to the Hall of Fame. Come sit down and tell the boss what’s on labels, the Red Chord recovered from near self-destruction to release their your mind.

THE RED CHORD

PHOTO BY PAUL ROMANO

DECIBEL : 4 3 : APRIL 2022

DBHOF208

THE RED CHORD clients  Fixation on bad-ass riffs The Red Chord at their practice space during the writing of Clients, December 3, 2004.

After Fused Together in Revolving Doors, the band saw some lineup changes, namely bass and drums. First, how did Greg Weeks come to join the band?

I was in a band with Mike [McKenzie] and [original Red Chord bassist] Adam [Wentworth] called Beyond the Sixth Seal. When I joined that band, it was through our friend Brendan [Roche]. He’s the drummer of Sixth Seal. Brendan said, “Did you want to do two shows on bass?” I didn’t play bass; I was a guitar player. And then two shows turned into, like, a bunch of tours with them—one of them being a European tour with the Red Chord. I don’t know what a couple of them were going through, but they didn’t get along that well. I remember Brendan and I looking at each other, saying, “I am so glad I am not in that band.” On that tour is when Adam and [original Red Chord drummer] Mike [Justian] were like, “This is gonna be our last tour.”

And then Guy [Kozowyk] approached me—I think it was because I was the closest guy in the room—and he said, “You ever think about playing bass in the Red Chord?” And I was just, like, “No. Never thought about it and I don’t think I will.” So, we flew home, and he called me again.

By the third time he called me, I was like, “Yeah, OK, fine.” And Adam was nice enough to come teach me everything off of Fused. Adam rules.

GUY KOZOWYK: We were actually traveling together during what I think of as being an implosion of the band. From ’99 to 2003, we just played everything and anything that we possibly could. That little stretch ended when we went over to Europe. During the course of that tour, we got close with Greg and further apart from each other. Mike J. had gotten behind the scenes an offer to join Unearth. He eventually opted to take that opportunity. Adam, I think, had just kind of had it and wanted to try some other things.

We bonded with Greg, and it was funny because we were just like, “You wanna consider coming aboard?” And I think he was looking at us like we had eight heads because he’s like, “You guys are a wreck.” It was nice that we transitioned into Greg and he ended up being just a real long-standing member. He’s obviously got a huge personality— that was really important to the group.

GREG WEEKS:

In November of 2004, you formally announced the addition of Brad Fickeisen to the band. What led to him being a permanent member?

BRAD FICKEISEN: I had actually listened to the Red Chord quite a bit years prior to that opportunity. I got a phone call from a friend of mine saying that the Red Chord was looking for a new

“We were trying to be Suffocation and Naked City at the same time. And we ended up sounding like neither.”

MIKE “G UNFACE ” Mc KE NZIE drummer. I had already been playing to Fused Together on my kit, of my own free will, on my own free time. I knew it all, so I reached out to Kevin Rampelberg to set up a tryout. That was kind of the intro into everything. I think they had me back two or three more times before it kind of felt like, This is less of the tryout period still and now we’re practicing. It wasn’t until five or six more times until somebody was like, “So, in case it wasn’t obvious, we’d like you to become the fifth member.” [Laughs] KEVIN RAMPELBERG: We were trying out drummers. We had a lot of talented people, a lot of not very talented people. Brad came to our practice space. He nailed every single song the way it should have been. I knew him from a local band called Eviscerate, way back in the day. A black metal band—they used to wear the corpsepaint and everything. After we heard him, we’re talking to him, we’re feeling him out, and he was a great dude. All of a sudden, we’re like, “Where do you practice?” He’s like, “Well, I currently don’t have any drums; I just play on pillows.” It just completely blew us away. We were like, Holy shit, he’s that good.

WEEKS: I want to say we did “Like a Train Through a Pigeon.” He fucking nailed it. He blasts so loud. We were talking about stuff afterwards and we were like, “How did you like the APRIL 2022 : 4 4 : DECIBEL

songs? How did you learn them? What kit did you use?” He goes, “Well, I didn’t really practice practice on a kit.” For a week, he would set up a laundry hamper; he would flip it over and take a kick drum pedal so it would hit the plastic. I think he said he sat in front of his sock drawer so he could practice his hands while he was kicking his feet. I’m like, “OK, this guy has to be our guy. This is insane.”

MIKE “GUNFACE” MCKENZIE: It felt right, musically. I found out later, once we started talking about it, Brad and I listened to a lot of the same stuff when we were younger—particularly some specific Christian death metal bands that I didn’t know anybody listened to, like Tourniquet and Mortification. So, when we played together, it just felt really normal. It was like finishing each other’s sentences. We’re already on the same page with what kind of music we want to write.

We just started writing right away. We were very informal about everything at the time anyway.

KOZOWYK: We wanted to just put the word out and just get whoever we could through the door and just give a test drive. We tried out a whole bunch of guys. They were primarily local to the New England area. I will say when Brad came through and auditioned, he just definitely really blew our minds. I was actually surprised. Kevin and I were in a band called Ictus; that was

DBHOF208

THE RED CHORD clients We had some of the early songs being “Upper Decker” and “Fixation [on Plastics],” but then it was nice to take a mindset and a theme and run with it. It just happened to be about things that were going on in my life and places that I was working. A lot of the songs had actually been field-tested in terms of we got out on the road and we play it, and you play it so many times that they start to adjust a little bit. There was a lot of that with Fused Together, there was a little bit of that with Clients, and then by the time we got to the later records it was more like, write and go and the tracks would evolve at a later date.

FICKEISEN: Strenuous, dude. [Laughs] Because I lived on the other side of the state, I would take a Greyhound from Amherst, Massachusetts to Boston. Kevin would pick me up and I would sleep at his house for a week and we’d practice.

Then I’d go home for a couple days and we’d do it all over again. It was six-, eight-, 10-hour days in our rehearsal space just hammering shit out, left and right. At the time, too, it wasn’t only writing. We were also practicing stuff from Fused Together because they wanted the influence to cross from Mike Justain and have similar aspects of that album in the new album so that it wasn’t a complete 180 between the two. Which thankfully equaled out because I already had listened to them quite a bit.

KOZOWYK:

the precursor to us becoming the Red Chord.

Brad was in a band called Eviscerate, which was a local black metal band. I remember us playing with Brad and being impressed with the drumming because he was just so fast. I would never have thought that this master blaster with corpsepaint would have been as well-rounded and just such a heavy-hitting guy as he was. That kind of set the tone for everything with Brad.

What was the writing process like for Clients?

RAMPELBERG: Fused wasn’t the biggest record in the world, but we kept on selling consistently.

We kept on selling more and more every week, so we were like, “We don’t want to stop this momentum.” When we started to record, we had to physically say, “OK, we need to stop touring.”

We practiced eight hours a day, Monday through Friday. It was like a job. We would all bring songs and riffs and everything to the table. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of technology to really record stuff, so it was really figuring stuff out together. It was a great atmosphere. It was the first time Gunface really got to put in his two cents with the songs. We had the core group; we had the people we wanted, the talent.

WEEKS: I was the guy who was not as comfortable bringing stuff in as a writer. Mike and Kevin definitely were, so they would bring in full songs.

I remember I used to record any riffs I had on this TASCAM four-track [recorder], and I would bring my cassette player to practice and play it. I believe that I’d play it and then someone would say, “That’s a cool riff,” and then, like, a riff would end up in a song. I didn’t really start writing songs for the band until [2007’s] Prey for Eyes.

McKENZIE: We were getting together five days a week in this place in Hanson, Massachusetts called Priority of Music. It was this creepy-ashell place that we took a bunch of pictures in.

The hallway that our practice space room was in was full of hospital beds. There was this one room that had little kids’ drawings and little kids’ shoes and other creepy shit. It felt like a fucking nightmare place. I demoed stuff on a BOSS BR-8. There was a lot of freedom for everyone to contribute their own voice. It was like, We’re gonna play the fastest shit we can possibly play, the most notes I can play at once. And then as soon as we got into the studio to record “Black Santa,” I was like, “What was I thinking? Now I have to record this?” It made me a better guitar player, but I regretted some of those songs the second we got into the studio and I had to record my tracks.

Visual artist PAUL ROMANO discusses how he gave Clients its memorable face

I

went up to Boston to hang out with them.

I photographed [the clients] as much as I could. Guy [Kozowyk] photographed them after the fact, too, and sent me some other photos. And then I photographed all of the band.

I wanted the actual people to be a part, but they weren’t directly portraits. I cobbled them together in Photoshop. I printed them out as a negative, and then as a cyanotype, which is a Victorian photographic process. I wanted to reference that whole era of Victorian portraiture. Around the [Victorian era], people were trying to figure out criminology things.

They believed that if you got all of these photographs of parts of criminals, like eyes and ears and everything, that you could figure out just from physiognomy, they’re a criminal.

Real backwards process, but it fascinated me.

I wanted to reference all of that—how people are looked at, basically.

APRIL 2022 : 4 6 : DECIBEL

On occasion, I did take some images from old medical textbooks, too. I know Antman’s mouth was part of an old orthodontic textbook that I had where the mouth was stretched. I wanted that look for the suggestion of mandibles. Then I hand-painted them, and then they were re-photographed. I wish I scanned them, but they were still wet and I needed to get the project in.

It was actually my favorite layout—the whole experience of going up there, and the camaraderie that we built at that moment. They stayed with me so much; we really bonded. It made for good art and good music. That record is so heavy, but if you look at the subject matter, it’s pretty crazy stuff for a death metal-ish record. These sensitive stories about these people who have these very tragic lives. They were very different. It was very much a thinking man’s metal. Even though they were so good at breakdowns, it didn’t necessarily draw the thinking out of the men. —MICHAEL WOHLBERG

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“You see these people and they’re just completely out of it, hooked on prescription drugs and not understanding what it is. Now we realize that it was people getting hooked on Oxycontin.

I had a front row seat essentially to talk to some of these people that were in the throes of it.”

G U Y KOZOWY K Guy, the album is famously based on your personal experiences. Who are the “clients”?

Could you elaborate on that story? Why did you choose this as the lyrical focus for the album?

I was at this old-school pharmacy that had one of those old soda fountain type of set-ups. You could also get your prescription filled, sit down, and order a cup of coffee and a sandwich. I was working as a counter person/ short order cook/whatever other general person in this store. I was directly across the street from a [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority] station, just outside of Boston. There was a hair academy right next door. Then there was a halfway house; it was a transitional living from post-prison sort of house. On the opposite side of the place, there was a transitional living [facility] for people that had disabilities. A lot of them had mental health issues, a lot of them had physical disabilities. They definitely needed some additional support from day-to-day staffing.

I was literally dealing with clients of the store.

Particularly the people that were in the assisted mental health facility, a lot of them had a completely different worldview and reality than most other people that had a more structured life.

Nobody gave them the time of day, no one was really listening to them. I started having these

KOZOWYK:

more in-depth conversations with some of these people because that was what was around me.

Looking back on it, it was the start of the opioid epidemic. It was kind of tough to understand at that point through the eyes of a lateteens/early-20s person. You see these people and they’re just completely out of it, hooked on prescription drugs and not understanding what it is. Now we realize that it was people getting hooked on Oxycontin. I had a front row seat essentially to talk to some of these people that were in the throes of it. It took me a long time to understand that some people just didn’t have a choice. You heard a lot of the same stories: “I got hurt.” “I was in pain.” “I started taking this drug and then I couldn’t get off.” I hear that quite a bit now many years later in my new walk of life.

It’s not an isolated incident. It’s not the simple, “Why did you just not do that?” I didn’t understand that necessarily at the time.

Clients saw you recording at Planet Z Studios with Christopher Harris, a.k.a. Zeuss. Why did you decide to record there? What do you remember of the recording sessions?

We had our stuff locked down. We knew exactly the way everything was gonna go.

We played through the songs so much before we

KOZOWYK:

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physically got there. Everybody went in and they hammered out their takes as quickly as possible.

That also comes about when you’re on a budget.

In terms of working with Zeuss, you listen to these records that he had done at the time and everything that he put out, especially in that era, was just over the top and in your face.

Especially on the heels of Fused Together, which was a little bit muddier, a little bit dirtier, we were just like, “I wonder what will happen if we put our sound through this guy that just pummels people with his recordings.”

WEEKS: He did a bunch of great records. He was in Massachusetts, which was also big for us.

Zeuss was awesome to work with. He was a lot of fun, but he kept us on task. I remember we didn’t have any money. I brought two basses.

I was borrowing one and I had my own at that point. He’s like, “This one sounds like shit, we’re gonna use that one.” I was like, “Oh, OK.” He’s like, “OK, so string it up.” And I was like, “Oh, shit.” So, I took the new strings off the bass I thought I was gonna use and put them on the old bass, because I could only afford one set of strings. And I put them on and was like, “All strung up!” [Laughs] McKENZIE: I think there were a couple records that Zeuss did that we especially liked, but one of them was the Hatebreed record Perseverance.

We were like, “This record sounds so huge and heavy. Imagine if we could take this and apply it to our stuff.” We were there for a few weeks. We tracked four guitars for all the tracks. We had Forbes [Graham] from Kayo Dot play trumpet on that record, on the beginning of “Clients.” We wanted a Naked City-sounding wild horn sound.

We were trying to be Suffocation and Naked City at the same time. And we ended up sounding like neither. I remember hearing the rough mix after we tracked it and just being totally floored. I’d never been part of something like that before, with that much care.

RAMPELBERG: I remember it being a really good experience. We picked him because he had a great clean sound. We liked the way the Hatebreed records sound, the Shadows Fall records sound; he was mixing Crowbar. We’re a huge Crowbar-fan band. The instrumental on Clients is a Crowbar song. If we could have Kirk [Windstein] sing on this, it would be a Crowbar song. We did the drum fills as they did on [2001’s] Sonic Excess [in Its Purest Form] in that song.

He had the right price, too. He was a great guy to work with. It was the first time we really got the professional feel of a studio.

FICKEISEN: The session was basically anywhere from 10- to 16-hour days. Very meticulous. I remember hearing it and only thinking that it almost sounds too clear. You can hear every note, you can hear every staccato beat, every blast beat. It took me a little while to actually appreciate it. There were a lot of other bands that I go back and listen to that were pre-2004, where

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THE RED CHORD clients

the recording was just a little not there enough to know what was going on. Now I listen to it and the clarity is something that I super appreciate.

Clients was (in)famously Decibel’s first 10 out of 10 review. Do you remember any impact from that?

WEEKS: A lot of people saying, “Why?” [Laughs] I couldn’t believe it. It was an honor. And we’re in good company at this point. With me, you do all this stuff, but in my mind, no one hears or cares about it, or sees it. You just do it for yourself and that’s fun. And then this magazine that we love gives it a 10 out of 10. You’re just like, “Somebody thought this record was perfect.” And that makes me feel uncomfortable. If it was perfect, we wouldn’t have made other records. To get those magazines and to just see that in there, it’s a sense of pride.

RAMPELBERG: Honestly, the first thing I did was open the magazine, look at it and say, “I need to see what they gave other bands.” So, I’m scrolling through and I think I looked at Opeth at the time, it was like, 9 out of 10. I’m like, “Are we really getting a better score than Opeth?” I was a little shocked by some of those things. Flattered beyond belief, don’t get me wrong. Never would have thought that we would have gotten a perfect score in a magazine at any point. There were people at shows coming up to us; we actually signed the magazine a few times on that review.

Without a doubt, I think that was one of the bigger impacted items that made the Red Chord, the Clients release, honestly. It was a big deal.

KOZOWYK: I feel like it was exciting for us because Decibel had been so stingy with handing that out. We were really big fans of what Decibel was doing, so it had a personal bragging rights to us. It made us feel pretty good that these folks that we were really aligned with actually really liked us as fans more so than just, “Oh yeah, we get along with those guys, they’re cool. I guess we’ll cover their band.” You just stepped out and really said, “No, not only do we like you as human beings, but we love your music.” We definitely got a little bit of the residual, “Wow, Decibel gave you guys a 10 out of 10?” That was at a pivotal point for everybody.

McKENZIE: I know Metal Blade used that in their promo stuff. It’s very fun to be the first 10 out of 10, and obviously Decibel is not an easy 10. It was a really nice compliment and exciting. We didn’t really have a lot of our stuff reviewed before that. Fused Together got reviews and stuff, but it trickled in because it didn’t have a big promo cycle. It was especially fun because I think the next 10 out of 10 was Converge. We used that to bust their balls a little. We were like, “Oh, you guys got a 10 out of 10? Yeah, we got one a few years back.”

FICKEISEN: Quite honestly, initially I was like, “I feel like maybe this is bullshit just because we had previously and very candidly hung out with [editor-in-chief] Albert [Mudrian] in Philly.” [Laughs] Months later I truly realized how much work and effort we put into everything we did for the album and how much the rest of the guys put in even before I joined.

Looking back on it now, I realize that I totally agree: The 10 out of 10 was justified. It’s a great album and I’m not saying that because I’m on it. It was innovative; it didn’t sound like many other types of metal or metalcore, or whatever you want to call it, from that time period.

Well-deserved, much appreciated.

Only two months after the release of Clients, Kevin left the band. Why the sudden departure?

RAMPELBERG: At that point, I was touring for about five years. If you haven’t been in a band before, it’s a tough life. I had a girlfriend that was with me the whole time. There were ups and downs, of course. The last year I was in the band, out of a 365-day span, we played over 300 shows. It was a labor of love. I loved playing. I didn’t love to travel. I would have to say mental stability is the reason why I left, as well as just wanting to settle down. I got married, I have a kid. I don’t regret it at all, but I love that it happened, and it was a dream come true. It was an amicable split. I love those guys in the band. We all hugged, we were all sad to see it happen, but it was just time for me.

KOZOWYK: Life gets in the way. Touring is not for everybody. It’s extremely physically and mentally demanding. Especially in the early days of any group, you’re essentially living like a nomad.

You’re playing different places and camping out and sleeping in a vehicle. It’s extremely taxing on any relationship you’re gonna have. I couldn’t imagine trying to go full-bore right now in the manner that we did it, especially at the time. I think Kevin was getting ready to settle down.

There’s no hard feelings. I totally understand now why people might opt to have a family life, seek to have a career and a little more stability.

McKENZIE: Kevin had been in the band since the beginning, so it wasn’t quite as sudden as maybe it appears. He was definitely not into being on the road all the time. The Red Chord was ramping up, and when Clients came out, we were ramping up even faster. We were taking tons of tours and I don’t think he was into that. Back then, mid-2000s, there was an explosion of heavy bands and heavy band interest. We were kind of riding the wave that was happening at that time along with a bunch of other bands from our circle. Plus, we were all young, so we’re like, This is a great opportunity. I probably could have done with a little more time off, but I was also kind of like, This is it, we’re doing it. I’m not gonna say no. I get to play my guitar and I get to play what I like. Kevin, he was just wanting to be home more.

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FICKEISEN: We were touring like crazy. He was in a very serious relationship. His girlfriend, now wife I believe, was hanging in there for the whole process. I don’t think any of us realized how heavy it was going to hit once shit took off.

It’s kind of relevant to how I left, too. I spent seven years on the road with those guys nonstop. I don’t even know how many shows we played. At some point, your home when you’re home is not your home anymore. You’re with family, loved ones, friends, whatever, it doesn’t feel like home because you’re so active and your brain’s going a million miles an hour when you’re on the road that it’s very hard to adjust back to normal life when you come home for only a couple days or a couple weeks at a time. I feel like it did the same thing to him that it did to me—just years later for me.

WEEKS: The band is wild. It’s filled with wild people. I love Kevin. I think it could have been a being-on-the-road thing; it could have been that he missed the people at home. Some of the guys in the band are easier to get along with than others. I’ve always said that a band is a family that you get to choose, and then after a tour, you’re really upset you chose that family.

It was tough losing him. He genuinely was just a fun guy. He was a big part of the sound. At that point, too, no one was a teenager anymore and maybe he was thinking about his future when the rest of us didn’t care about our future. He’s probably smarter than us.

You did extensive touring for Clients, notably landing a spot on Ozzfest in 2006. What do you remember of the live shows?

It’s kind of crazy because we had a couple really great Clients opportunities on that cycle. We had done a very brief stint on Sounds of the Underground where we jumped on for the first couple weeks. Suddenly we were playing the equivalent of New England Metal & Hardcore Fest every night, where there were 3,000 or 4,000 people at some of those shows. Ozzfest, being a festival that, when I was in my later years of high school, I would have gone to and seen bands like Neurosis and Vision of Disorder and Earth Crisis. Suddenly we were in the mix for even just being in that conversation. It was really exciting and flattering. The business end of that definitely doesn’t make it as fun, but the fan part of me [was great] as a 16- or 17-year-old kid suddenly being a 25-, 26-year-old guy going out. You were always playing to extremely large crowds.

WEEKS: Ozzyfest! I don’t think we were really used to playing places where they said you can’t do X, Y and Z for insurance reasons. Kind of being pulled to the side and being like, “Hey, you can’t really throw water balloons at people.”

I understand exposure. I don’t want to sound like I’m not happy we did it, but to me, I always just wanted to play cool underground shows or cool tours and just be out on the road all the KOZOWYK:

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“I don’t think we were really used to playing places where they said you can’t do X, Y and Z for insurance reasons.”

GRE G WE E KS time. I remember Guy calling me, being like, “What’s it feel like to be a band that’s gonna be on Ozzfest?” And I was like, “I don’t wanna do that shit.” And that was the one time I was like, Oooh, I think I hurt Guy’s feelings. [Laughs] McKENZIE: It was a lot of fun. We were riding a little bit of a buzz of being a new band that had a record that people liked. We’d never played to that many people before. It felt like a dream.

We were on tour with Strapping Young Lad. I remember watching Gene Hoglan every day. Ozzy, obviously, System of a Down, who I wasn’t a fan of, but they put on a cool show. The Disturbed guys were very cool. Really friendly guys.

FICKEISEN: I remember driving out to the first show and basically thinking I was going to throw up the entire fucking way there because I was so nervous. [Laughs] I remember rolling up and seeing some familiar faces and some idolized faces from people I had been listening to for decades prior to this. That was our first U.S. tour in a bus. It was literally the perfect time to do it because, at least for me, I was partying quite a bit harder than the rest of the guys in the Red Chord. They like to get weird, but they don’t like to get weird by drinking. I was like, “It’s free beer!

We can drink Jägermeister all day. We get off the stage at 11:45 in the morning some mornings—I got 10 hours to drink.” It was just an endless party, from start to finish. Very quickly, into the first couple of days, we noticed people from all of

the bands, from all of the stages, were coming to watch us play just because we were so out of control as far as the type of music we were playing.

If given the opportunity, is there anything you would change about this album?

RAMPELBERG: There’s a few things sound-wise where we made decisions that I regret, but minor things that probably no one really notices.

Maybe I wish we could have written another song or two, but other than that, no, I’m happy with it.

KOZOWYK: No. Honestly, I felt pretty good about it. We spent a lot of time on it, and we had an idea. When people ask me questions about lyrics and stuff, I always found that Clients was easier for me to discuss as an adult and to present in terms of being proud about it. I actually wrote a whole album about these random different walks of life and a whole different perspective. It was the only time that we’d ever done some sort of a concept, and I felt like the concept held up in terms of 15, 16 years later.

FICKEISEN: The only thing that I wish I had spent more time thinking about would be to clean up some of the things I thought would be easily editable after the recording was finished.

[Laughs] Wasn’t sloppy at all. There’s a certain degree of messiness just because that’s the way the music made it. There’s a lot of different time signatures, different tempos, different dynamics.

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The writing process was harsh because we had to move so quickly and I wasn’t able to mentally or physically adjust enough to just sit back and be like, Yup, I got this. It was a lot of learning, a lot of studying and a lot of output, all at the same time, which was demanding. Fun, but demanding.

WEEKS: I’m gonna be a real bass player and say I would have liked to have been louder on it.

That’s it. I think it was good. I mean, if Decibel likes it, what else do I need? My whole life, I was just determined to be in a touring band. That record helped me achieve that and I never took it for granted, every tour we did. So, no, I wouldn’t change anything. It was a ton of fun to do. There was a lot of learning around the band at the time, and we got to do a ton of cool shit that not everyone gets to, and I appreciate that. And that record helped that.

McKENZIE: No, I’m not going to change anything.

It’s a picture of where we were at that time and how we were thinking—what our ideas of good music were. I don’t want to change a picture of me when I was 6. And they shouldn’t have changed the original Star Wars. Just leave it. That’s just how it was. The way I see all creative work is once you make it and you put it out into the world, it’s not yours anymore. It now belongs to the world. They get to perceive it how they want; they get to talk about it how they want. And people are gonna say, “Wow, this guy sucks. I hate him!” And that’s how it’s gonna be. [Laughs]

BALLAD IN BLOOD

NIGHT OF THE DEMON

THE HALFWAY HOUSE

BLOODY PIT OF HORROR

After a wild night of sex, drugs and clubbing, a young woman finds her straight-laced roommate brutally murdered.

A group of students head into the forest to investigate a series of Sasquatch attacks.

When the crew of a photoshoot breaks into a castle, they unleash the madness of the owner.

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When a missing teen’s sister goes undercover at Mary Magdalen Halfway House for Troubled Girls, she’ll expose an unholy conspiracy.

MANSION OF THE DOOMED

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE 4K UHD

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PHENOMENA

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A surgeon finds himself up to his armpits in eyeballs after he begins removing eyes of abducted people.

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LIMITED EDITION

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Now, re-experience the film that shocked and divided the world in 4K Ultra HD.

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BLACK CANDLES When a young couple visits in-laws in the countryside, they discover a haven of the occult.

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THE ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN

MODERN VAMPIRES

A disgraced American biologist experimenting with genetics creates an army of “fishmen”.

When a new vampire shows up in LA, the Count wants her gone.

Her only chance at immortality lies in the fangs of Dallas.

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THE GOOD EXORCIST ...Not today, satan!

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DITCHED

XPIATION

Desperate to escape an overturned ambulance, a group of paramedics discover that they are the victims of an ambush.

In a large isolated cellar, a mysterious aristocratic woman begins torturing a man while videotaping it.

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BEWARE OF THE KLOWNS

HOBO WITH A TRASH CAN

This is their town now.

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A homeless man gets caught up with monsters and government conspiracies in a series of tales.

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STO RY BY

ADEM TEPEDELEN P H OTO S BY

HANNAH VERBEUREN

While the world went up in (figurative) flames,

’s

masked maestro,

ATHENAR, ATHENAR

indulged in a whole lot of sonic sorcery

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: APR 2022

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Do

we really want to know that Venom bassist/

vocalist Cronos is a fitness instructor named Conrad Lant when he’s not marauding onstage? Somehow the image of him sporting a headband, gym shorts and runners while exhorting his spandex-clad class to give him “three more deep knee bends!” just doesn’t feel very metal. He and his original bandmates—Mantas (Jeff Dunn) and Abaddon (Tony Bray)—like KISS before them, took on personas to be larger than life, to create an image bigger and more interesting than what their day-to-day reality was in the depressed economy of early-’80s England. Their music may have been amateurish, their pyro-laden stage show only slightly less so, but they got every bit of the attention they sought—praise and savagings alike—and, for better or worse, they turned it into a very influential 40-plus-year career.

This idea of obscuring one’s identity or creating a mythology to accompany one’s art obviously isn’t a new one. Since Venom and KISS (and even before them), any number of bands and artists—from David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust to the proliferation of black metal musicians taking on unpronounceable pseudonyms and

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painting their faces—have added elements to their art that go beyond the music… enhancements, if you will. However, the motivation for doing this can’t be assumed to be the same. Yes, it’s an attention-getter, but it can also potentially allow the performers a certain amount of anonymity.

On record, Midnight have always been a one-man band, formed—if such a word is appropriate when talking about a solo project—by Cleveland-based multi-instrumentalist Athenar in his basement in 2003. Athenar has a Christian name, so to speak, but this story is about Midnight, and Midnight is Athenar, and Athenar is Midnight. And since Athenar wears a hood on stage that obscures his identity, we won’t necessarily dwell on the particulars of who the man is behind the hood. A quick Google search will get you his name, and maybe even his picture, if it’s that important to you. And maybe, as it turns out, he’s a fitness instructor in his real life. But do you really want to know that?

Raise the Dead

There are two things that distinguish Midnight—

the Venom-meets-Motörhead, NWOBHM-riffing music, and, as noted, the hoods Athenar and his sidemen wear onstage. It could be argued that it’s the combination of the two elements that makes Midnight compelling. There’s a certain menace to the look—black hoods, black jeans and shoes, bullet belts—that complements the raw, punk-informed metal and Athenar’s overthe-top lyrics. Separately, the elements have impact, but together the effect is explosive.

M

M

X

X

Ritual Earth’s debut LP “MMXX” reverberates the electronic radiation of all things Doom, Space, and Psychedelia. Heavy, Slow, Atmospheric and Dark. Seven charged, dystopian transmissions set to the pulse of the dying universe to come.

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DECIBEL : APRIL 2022 : 57

When Athenar made his first Midnight recordings in 2003, however, there was only the music.

A veteran of numerous Cleveland metal units stretching back to the late ’80s, he had taken the usual route of starting bands with school chums. “We started farting around while we were in middle school,” he says of those early efforts. “We had a band called Atomic Fear— taken from a line in Sabbath’s ‘Children of the Grave.’ We had six songs and we recorded six songs. We made one copy of that. [Laughs] There was another band called Steaming Feces that was pure noise and had lyrics about other school kids.

It was just the kind of stuff you do when you’re in seventh grade, just fucking idiotic shit.”

Though not necessarily widely known and respected on a national or international level, Cleveland has always had an active metal scene, and it was local bands like Destructor, False Hope and Black Ax that provided early inspiration for Athenar. “Black Ax were a couple of years ahead of me in school—they were in high school and I was in junior high—but they were making up what I thought were fucking great songs,” he says. “I realized that [playing metal] wasn’t just something that Tony Iommi or James Hetfield could do; I could do it, too.”

Another musical discovery, which would have a profound musical impact on Athenar and Midnight, was Cleveland’s notable punk and proto-punk scene stretching back into the ’70s.

“A couple years later, as I got into my mid teens, I started to go back and figure out the Cleveland history of Dead Boys and Pagans and Black Death, of course,” he says. “Also, the Electric Eels, Breaker—there was tons of great shit from Cleveland. But Cleveland wasn’t [considered] a cool town. It still isn’t [considered] a cool town.”

After “farting around” in his various early efforts, his final pre-Athenar/Midnight band, Boulder—where he played bass and sang— lasted for more than a decade and released numerous EPs and splits, as well as a couple of full-lengths for Tee Pee Records. Though, as he sardonically notes, Boulder “existed longer than Led Zeppelin,” it ultimately lacked cohesion and focus. “Influence-wise, it was all over the board,” he says. “And musically it was kind of that way, too, because we loved Melvins and weird kinds of stuff, and Celtic Frost, Krokus— it went from any kind of stuff we actually liked.

It wasn’t like we decided to start a doom metal band or a speed metal band; it was maybe too much all over the place.”

This would be a pivotal lesson learned as Boulder came to an end in the early 2000s and the idea of Midnight would soon be born. “[Boulder] had just run its course,” he explains.

“We had been doing it for so long. Some people [in the band] wanted to do one thing and others wanted to do something else. After so many years, you can only try and force your will for so long before you sort of see where it’s going and

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then decide not to do it anymore. You can only do so much.”

Welcome to Hell

It’s telling, then, that this particular ending is the backdrop before which Midnight—conceived as a one-man band—came into existence. With no bandmates to debate with over direction or their songwriting contributions, Athenar could fashion everything from top to bottom—concept, sound, image, etc.—and make all decisions unilaterally, whether it be touring, releasing material or just laying low. It started with the music, however, and the directive for that was simple.

“I kind of had an idea of what I wanted to do,” Athenar affirms. “I wanted to just cut off the fat.

I wanted to do more song-oriented stuff.”

Though he had always just played bass (and sung) in previous outfits, Athenar had become proficient enough to do it all himself, including recording. “[Boulder] practiced at my house,” he explains, “so drums were always there. Our drummer had a four-track [recorder] that was there. I just started horsing around on his drums and four-track. That was the start of it.”

Night Demon bassist/vocalist Jarvis Leatherby—the veteran of, by his reckoning, 36 bands—who manages Midnight via his Iron Grip Management company, completely understands Athenar’s impulse to strike out on his own.

“When you’re in a band, you live and die by what everybody else does or doesn’t do,” Leatherby says. “For [Athenar], it probably started out as a project where he figured he could play all these instruments and wanted to do something on his own. His ability to play all the instruments was good enough for the music he wanted to make.

He enjoys playing all of them, even though he’s not going to be a drummer in a band, and he’s not going to play lead guitar onstage. He gets his fill making Midnight records.”

“Before this, I thought you had to be a real musician to play all the instruments,” Athenar affirms. “But I finally figured out that wasn’t the case—when I was 25 or 26 years old—that I could half-ass play all the instruments myself to at least put down a blueprint of what the song should be.”

The “blueprints” Athenar was laying down in Midnight bore a striking resemblance to early Venom, an influence he fully embraces.

“Venom [have] songs, they have hooks,” he says.

“They probably listened to the same things that I listened to—KISS, Judas Priest—when they were writing Venom songs. In a way, I wanted [Midnight] to come from the style of Venom, but I was probably listening to the same kind of shit and taking the same kind of influences they had [in the early ’80s]. Them being from Northern England and me being from Cleveland, we probably come from similar regions as well—kind of shitty areas—so we have that in common, as well.”

Another aesthetic that Athenar shared with Newcastle’s gnarliest was a distinct avoidance of virtuosity. “I was never that metal guy of wanting to have things be perfect,” he says. “That’s just the kind of metal I’ve always liked. That type of imperfect metal was always my preferred style.

“When we were kids and heard, for instance, the Sodom EP, In the Sign of Evil, and you’ve got one guy [in the band] playing one thing and another guy playing something else—we thought it was amazing. Even as kids we knew that. That’s something you can’t replicate. There are tons of people who can play exactly the same music and start and stop at the same time, but to do [what Sodom did]—record it and release— that’s ballsy. That’s true art. [Laughs]” Unfettered by the pursuit of musical perfection, and armed with a love of Venom, Motörhead, the NWOBHM and punk rock, Athenar very inauspiciously launched Midnight—actually while still in Boulder— with a demo recorded in 2003. “The first recordings were just the first recordings,” he says of this early effort. “There was never any intent to shop it around to labels and see what happens.

My one friend had a step up from my four-track recorder—he had an eight-track of some sort— and he offered to record some of my stuff. I had six songs, and those first six songs eventually got put out as the Funeral Bell 12-inch EP. That was the first thing I recorded and the first thing that got put out.

“My buddy Omid [Yamani], who had a label called Outlaw Recordings, put it out [in 2003].

He just made a hundred copies, because he liked it and wanted to put it out. It actually turned out to be a pressing of 123, because the pressing plant over-pressed it. Yosuke [Konishi] from Nuclear War Now! heard a copy and really liked it, and wanted to know if he could reissue it. So, he did that [in 2005 as Complete and Total Fucking Midnight] with some extra songs I had recorded since that time. The Nuclear War Now! [album] was the first bigger release where it was more than just a hundred copies, and that’s what really got it out there.”

Launching Midnight as a “solo” project, Athenar was initially content to keep the project in his basement and issue his recordings via small-pressing releases on a plethora of indie labels—Outlaw, Shifty, My Mind’s Eye, etc.— for the first few years, eschewing playing live.

“Initially, we were just going to play one show after the [Funeral Bell] 12-inch came out,” he says.

“The idea was to play one show just to announce that there’s an album out, and that was it. Then I thought about doing it as a one-man band, so as not to be in a band. I would play along with a four-track recorder or a CD—just something very ghetto, very low-key. I did a few gigs like that for a couple years, and then in 2007 I actually started playing as a band again with two guys that I knew.”

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Cleveland Assault

When you have such a defined sound and lyrical approach, I think it helps to have something visually, just something to go with it.

I knew I couldn’t look likAthenar e myself.

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Up to 2007, Midnight as a live unit wasn’t really known outside of Cleveland. Since it was started solely as a recorded project, with no aspirations to play live, no touring was done and the menacing, aggressive stage show that the band is known for today hadn’t yet coalesced. In fact, Athenar initially sort of had to be dragged out of his basement by those two local musician friends. “They literally just came up to my house with drumsticks and a guitar in hand and said, ‘We know the songs; let’s play them and have a band,’” he laughs. “It was an intervention-style thing.”

With a reluctant commitment to play more live gigs, Athenar knew that a visual presentation that matched the material was going to be important. “When you have such a defined sound and lyrical approach,” he says, “I think it helps to have something visually, just something to go with it. I knew I couldn’t look like myself. [Laughs] “It is me who comes up with the [music], but it wouldn’t have the same impact if it was just me walking [onstage] in a pair of camo shorts, flipflops and a Priest fucking jersey. There are certain bands, without mentioning any names, who are currently really good musically and have a lyrical theme and an image with their album covers and lyrics, and then you see them live and they’re just four dudes wearing band T-shirts. What the fuck?”

Thus the donning of black hoods became Midnight’s signature. It was a way to create a bit of mystery, especially when the band would play beyond its local scene where no one knew them, and it obviously lent a certain degree of anonymity. “I can’t tell you how many shows or festivals I’ve been at,” says Leatherby, “where I’ve walked around with the band [without their hoods on] and we’ll pass somebody wearing all Midnight gear, and they don’t know who the hell the band is. It’s not that they’re trying to hide it, but the band never goes out of their way to say, Hey, that’s us!”

More importantly, however, the image needed to be cohesive. “I didn’t want to go onstage looking like a generic band,” Athenar says. “I wanted to have a specific look, but I also wanted it to be easy. I didn’t want it to be elaborate; I didn’t want to put on KISS makeup or costumes, or something like that. I wanted it to be as simple as it could be. It was kind of part Mentors [with the hoods] and part Motörhead, with the bullet belts, and Venom-y kind of stuff. It was something easy, but I just knew I wanted to have a look.”

Convincing the members of the early incarnation of Midnight that a unified look was important wasn’t always easy, though. “Some of the other guys that have played in the past

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were pretty drunk off their ass, so they didn’t give a shit,” Athenar says of the early live forays.

“They would wear whatever they happened to be wearing at the time, which may have been Anthrax jams [shorts] and flip-flops. And they’d just put on a hood. Me being me, as much as people might think I’m a tyrant, I would just be like, I guess that’s what’s happening tonight—he’s gonna wear jams and flops. [Laughs] Just as you see any band developing their look, I guess there were early stages.”

Though Midnight was more active live, as Athenar continued to create and release new material in the ’00s and early ’10s, they never fully committed to touring. In fact, as Midnight’s profile rose via full-length releases like Satanic Royalty (2011) and No Mercy for Mayhem (2014), numerous offers were made to the band, and Athenar mostly turned them all down.

“From 2007 to 2015, it was mainly just weekend gigs and, as idiotic as this sounds, [we’d] fly to Finland for a day to play a show, and then fly back,” he says. “Or [we’d] fly to Australia to play two shows and then fly back. I was just like, I don’t want to be away from home. It’s a waste of time going on tour, playing the same songs every night. That was just my shitty attitude of things, looking at the negative side of whatever’s thrown at me.”

One positive from this period, however, was a full reboot of the live band—guitarist Commander Vanik (Shaun Vanek) signed on in 2012, and drummer SS (Steve Dukuslow) in 2014—something made seamless by the fact that members had always worn hoods. “I think [the hoods] work well as far as interchangeable members of the band,” notes Leatherby. Athenar’s new sidemen may have been able to easily adapt the look, but recreating the Midnight style and sound—a product of Athenar’s “imperfect” skills—had its challenges. Basically, he didn’t want the aesthetic cleaned up too much by more proficient players.

“At the beginning, I was trying to figure him out, learning him as a writer and a player,” Commander Vanik says of his early days in Midnight. “He’s anal about making sure the integrity of the song is held. As far as the little nuances, we work through them afterwards; but I’ll learn the songs, listen to them and kind of get the idea of the song in my head and get the overall feel. I’ll try to emulate what he does, but using my own personality. He’s more about the song itself. He doesn’t ever just sit there and say, ‘You’ve gotta play the solo exactly the same.’”

“Yeah, definitely, he figured it out,” Athenar says of his guitarist. “He’s a smart dude. He knew what to do—just hang a little bit loose.

I’ve heard him explain it to other people who have asked a similar thing, and his usual response is, ‘Nothing’s ever palm-muted, dude.

Never palm-mute, everything’s open.’ Yeah, he figured it out. Same with SS on the drums; he just learned to loosen up, that’s all it is. There’s

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no ego behind it; it’s all just about conveying the energy.”

Commander Vanik and SS have already put in eight years as sidemen with Midnight, and have been crucial to raising the band’s profile. “When people see the band live, the energy transfers so well to the audience,” says Leatherby. “The I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude and the destruction that happens onstage are something that not a lot of [bands] do anymore. I think that, along with people getting a taste of the music live, there’s the whole cult vibe where, because they’re a masked band, they’re easy for everybody else to buy into.”

To Hell and Back

Unfortunately, just as the rebooted live lineup had solidified and Midnight’s notoriety was ascending (including an appearance in the Decibel Flexi Series in 2014), a personal tragedy befell Athenar in 2015 and the band more or less ground to a halt. “From 2015 to 2017, I really didn’t do anything,” he explains. “Things weren’t good. Things were bad.” As the sole creative force of Midnight, Athenar’s descent into a self-described extended “funk” could have been the band’s death knell. Fortunately, an offer to be part of the 2017 Decibel Tour turned out to be a fortuitous catalyst to keep moving forward.

“The reason I started touring was to break my… funk,” he explains. “I needed to do something. I just needed a change of sorts, and that’s what it took to realize, What do I want on my gravestone? That I sat at home, jammed records and looked at Slayer picture discs on the wall?

And when I went out and [toured] and put my feet in the water, I realized it’s not that bad and there’s that chemical in your body—all those endorphins, or whatever the hell it is—that helps you to feel better. I realized that there was some kind of life out here, outside of my basement. That helped. That is the reason why [I started touring]. If I was concerned with selling more records or more T-shirts, I would have done it a long time ago. There were people offering me tours, but I had never wanted to.”

The spring 2017 Decibel Tour preceded the release of Midnight’s third full-length, and last for Hells Headbangers, Sweet Death and Ecstasy, which dropped in October 2017. In addition to discovering a newfound appreciation for touring, this was the beginning of an incredibly prolific and active period for Athenar. It also saddled him, as the lone decision maker, with a lot more on his plate beyond just writing, recording and playing music. Which is where Night Demon’s Leatherby entered the picture.

“I’m the gatekeeper of [Midnight],” Leatherby explains. “I’m involved in every angle of it, with all the business and every single detail.

Somebody’s gotta do it. He didn’t have that for a lot of years, but for the past three years we’ve been doing well with it.”

Relieved of this burden, Athenar said yes to festival dates around the world and more tours—including a North America run with Obituary and Abbath in fall 2019—and signed on to Metal Blade records for album number four.

Recorded in late 2019 by Nunslaughter guitarist Noah Buchanan, and slated for release in January 2020—with spring tour dates scheduled to follow—Rebirth by Blasphemy arrived around the same time as COVID-19. Tours and festival appearances planned for 2020 were obviously canceled and a whole lot of tour merch bearing 2020 dates went unsold. With the country in lockdown, Athenar returned to his basement and kept making Midnight records. A lot of them.

Don’t Burn the Witch

Midnight’s latest Metal Blade opus, Let There Be Witchery, was actually recorded around the same time that Rebirth was released in 2020. Since no one knew there was a looming pandemic, Athenar figured he’d knock out a new album before a busy 2020 got underway. “The intent was to tour the shit out of [Rebirth], so that January I had the tunes for [Witchery] and was ready to record, because I figured I’d be busy touring for most of 2020. I wanted to record it while I had the chance and everything sounded good.”

However, after his first session at Mercinary Studios with Buchanan, Athenar wasn’t initially happy with what he’d done. “I took whatever I [recorded] that day and listened to it in the car,” he explains, “and of course it’s not going to sound anything like the finished product, but I thought at the time, This sounds like shit; it sounds like a fucking pansy album! I’m so weak and wimpy.

Everything just sounded wimpy to me. This was without vocals; it was rough, first-day shit, so there was no room to judge it at that point. It just put me in a shitty enough mood that I went home that weekend and just [wrote] a whole new album, just nasty shit.”

Even with a new album’s worth of material in hand, Athenar wisely didn’t just trash the Witchery material. “I got it all out of my system on that weekend [when I wrote the new album],” he says.

“The next week I went back in the studio, put more shit on it and listened to it and thought it sounded great. I think [Noah] did a great job in kind of taking it and maxing it out, just making it as big as possible without it sounding like overly dumb big.

It’s still raw, because that’s the only way I know how to play. The raw playing’s going to come out no matter how much you try to polish it.”

“It’s like any artist: You criticize your own music, you’re very critical of it,” Commander Vanik adds. “[Witchery] maybe didn’t hit him right away, at the beginning. It may have taken the second mix to where he started to hear it as a record, and it sounds better. Also, sometimes an album comes together after it’s mixed. Once it’s finally put together, it’s like, Okay, now the vision is complete; I can actually hear it, so I like it better.”

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I still write with pen and paper.

There’s no iPad involved, or whatever. It’s still all the same—very low-key, very… what’s the word…

not done well.

Athenar

“It did take a couple of mixes, and a little extra effort to get it, I think, to where [Athenar] wanted it to be,” says Buchanan.

“And actually, it was just adding more distortion to everything. [Laughs] Because he wants it to hurt. He wants it to scream out at you.”

Let There Be Witchery—whose title is drawn from the combination of the songs “Let There Be Sodomy” and “Szex Witchery”—is a perfect continuation of the sleazy Midnight sound and aesthetic. The riffs are grimy, the lyrics are scummy and the music is raw, angry and filled with nasty hooks.

“When I heard it, it sounds like Midnight,” Commander Vanik confirms. “There’s nothing on here that’s super-progressive or outside of what the band’s sound is. Anybody who is into Midnight is going to love this one, too, because it’s got Midnight written all over it, just like the other ones.”

“The process hasn’t changed—nothing’s changed in the way that I do stuff,” Athenar admits. “I still go into a small studio to record stuff and I still just make shit up in the basement and record [my demos] on a four-track. I still write with pen and paper. There’s no iPad involved, or whatever. It’s still all the same— very low-key, very… what’s the word… not done well.” [Laughs]

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Black Metal

Considering Midnight started as merely a base-

ment/studio project nearly 20 years ago, with no aspirations much beyond releasing some EPs and splits, it’s noteworthy that Athenar already has the next several years mapped out, and, by our reckoning, at least three albums currently in the can beyond Let There Be Witchery. Though we can’t give you all the details—not even Athenar knows them at this point—we can offer some teases.

About the album of “nasty shit” Athenar wrote while recording Witchery, Buchanan had this to say: “The songs are a lot [faster], and the whole process for this one was way more punk rock than [Witchery]. Part of it was, it was the third time for us working together and we just decided, Fuck it, let’s make this as filthy as it can be. It’s my favorite [Midnight album]. I play guitar in Nunslaughter, and I like filthy shit.

It’s a bit more of an aggressive album. I hope it comes out sooner rather than later, because it’s a really good record.”

Another pandemic pet project is Athenar’s tribute to some of his local musical heroes.

“There’s a covers album of northeast Ohio bands— Synastryche, False Hope, James Gang, Pagans, Electric Eels and all kinds of bizarro [acts]—that’s done and ready to go.” And even as we spoke in December 2021, he was preparing

to go back into Mercinary for yet another session with Buchanan. “I’ve got a shitload of other songs that I’m set to go into the studio and record in a couple weeks,” he says. “I’m ahead of the game as far as recording goes.”

Soon enough, though, the hoods will come out of storage, Athenar will leave his basement and Midnight can return to terrorizing audiences in person, starting with a scheduled U.S. spring tour with black metal heavyweights Mayhem and Watain. Midnight may not have a lot in common with those bands musically—other than a love of early Venom, perhaps—but they all share an approach that emphasizes the outrageous and extreme, in one form or another, whether it be taking onstage names, soaking oneself in pig blood, or hiding your identity behind a mask.

“It has to be over the top; otherwise you’re middle of the road,” Athenar says. “I’d much rather suck ass and be ridiculed—like, look how dumb that is!—than have someone say, ‘It’s okay, not bad.’ How many reviews did you read about Sodom’s In the Sign of Evil when it came out that said, ‘This is the most piece of shit, garbage thing you’ll ever hear’? But it’s lasted the test of time. The worst thing you can be is mediocre.

The worst thing someone can say to a band or an artist is, ‘Yeah, you’re OK.’”

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INSIDE ≥

68 ABBATH Panda expressing 70 DARK FUNERAL Pandas impressing

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

74 MYSTIC CIRCLE Pandas finessing 74 SCHIZOPHRENIA Bandanas possessing 76 ERIC WAGNER Propaganda's depressing

The Whipping Dance of Decay

APRIL

12 999,999, 999,999, 999,999, 999,999, 999,999

1 0

Death metal bands that make Chris Barnes physically ill Death metal bands blocked by Chris Barnes on Twitter Death metal magazinEEEEEE about to get blocked Death metal bands looking forward to the next Six Feet Under album

What history tells us about how UNDEATH transformed from competent death metal tribute act to savvy extreme music trailblazers in two short pandemic years

H

armony makes small things grow,” Sallust argued.

“Lack of it makes great things decay.” But what if the CaeIt’s Time… to Rise sarian writer and politician was off by a couple words? What From the Grave if lack of harmony makes great things out of decay? ¶ Though SalPROSTHETIC lust would no doubt resent the editorial suggestion—those angsty Visigoths burned his fucking house and gardens down, after all—to partially repurpose a rejoinder from the modern philosopher Bill S. Preston, What about death metal, you (pre) medieval dickweed? ¶ After all, when this most disharmonic of subgenres had its first transcendent moment in the late ’80s/early ’90s, it was as paradigms, walls and borders were crumbling in dramatic fashion. Napalm Death’s “The World Keeps Turning” video, then in Headbangers Ball rotation, reveled in this collapse, as did bands as otherwise divergent as Asphyx (“As we let our children suffer / in a paradise long gone /

UNDEATH

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]

9

DECIBEL : APRIL 2022 : 67

Utopia was never within reach / But we still kept believing / in the madness and the lies”), Obituary (“We’re the cause of death”), Morbid Angel (“Burning cities / All is well” from “World of Shit (The Promised Land)”), Carcass (“Keep on Rotting in the Free World”) and… well, let’s just say a gaggle of shredders and gurglers were more prescient about the true nature of the “end of history” and “triumph of democracy” than a lot of Ivy League throat-clearers.

So, perhaps it should come as no surprise that, as populist caterwauling and pandemic pressure now reveals grave societal cracks and fissures globally, death metal is once again experiencing a renaissance—and few bands seem to have tapped into this joie de mort better than Undeath on It’s Time… to Rise From the Grave. The Rochester, NY quintet’s sophomore full-length is not merely a breathtaking leap forward from 2020’s Lesions of a Different Kind, or even an impressively progressive evolution of a long-established sound—this deftly executed, seamlessly wrought riff-apocalypse feels like an achievement for extreme music, full stop.

Which is to say, boasting about as much diversity as any band this side of un-“un” Death and an evocative, well-balanced (cue worshiping GIF) Arthur Rizk-mastered production, the Suffocation by way of Slayer meets latter-day Carcass and Cannibal Corpse vibe on Rise From the Grave is within both the context of Undeath and death metal history equivalent to a further turning of the extremity focus ring: cleared, more concentrated and vibrant as capital-H Hell. Raised up with the sole purpose of dying more spectacularly. Henry Miller said, “I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.” Undeath will seize you by the fucking throat and make you believe it. You’ll choke out a hoarse, “Thank you.” Because the songs are that goddamn good.

—SHAWN MACOMBER

ABBATH

8

Dread Reaver SEASON OF MIST

Serenity now!

When Olve Eikemo stepped away from Norwegian institution and dB Hall of Famers Immortal to go solo, I was bullish on the prospect. The first album released under his stage name Abbath aptly continued the roguish black metal style he helped invent. Since then, a cascade of lineup changes and (to these ears) a disappointing follow-up spoiled that goodwill.

But good music forgives all foibles, and Abbath’s third solo outing, Dread Reaver, more than makes up for the fallow years that 68 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

preceded it. It’s a strong suite of songs that adds some strut and swagger to Eikemo’s triedand-tested sound.

Studious readers already know that Eikemo also fronts a Motöhead cover act called Bömbers. Much of Dread Reaver could have been released as a Bömbers solo album, and that’s a good thing. Songs like “Scarred Core” and “Dream Cull” sport bass-forward rock ‘n’ roll songs powered by near-constant double bass.

These future live staples more than earn the “Overkill” tropes they quote.

It’s not all biker jacket fare, though. The second half of the record trades the motorcycle for a hell stallion by revisiting the galloping sound that Immortal innovated on tunes like “Septentrion.” To his credit, Abbath sounds just as convincing in both modes while keeping his songs digestibly concise.

Dread Reaver isn’t perfect—the Metallica cover isn’t necessary, and the production sounds a bit too saturated—but it’s the most confident black ‘n’ roll statement in Abbath’s discography. Long may you ride, Olve.

—JOSEPH SCHAFER

AEVITERNE

8

The Ailing Facade P R O FO U N D LO R E

Four crooked limbs

Aeviterne began as the result of ex-Flourishing guitarist/vocalist G.B. and bassist E.R. joining drummer par excellence I.J. for something like a death-industrialized version of Flourishing.

And Aeviterne’s debut 7-inch, Sireless, sounded like the former noisy New York death metal band’s incredible lone full-length, The Sum of All Fossils, except created in a post-future age with drumming provided by one of the best players in modern USDM. Then, while writing their fulllength, Aeviterne brought in S.S., the guitar-half of Gath Šmânê, for whom I.J. drums. S.S. also plays in industrial/goth/doom metal anomalies Luminous Vault—and now we’re beginning to conceptualize the magnitude and depth of Aeviterne’s debut full-length.

An album more brutalist than brutal, The Ailing Facade is a work of textures, atmospheres and intellect as much as it is a composition of various distorted riffs, drum fills and lyrics delivered in throaty snarls. What this quartet has created with The Ailing Facade makes perfect sense if you’re aware of what the various members have been up to for the majority of their public music careers, yet it also defies description, as the layers of experiment run deep and the overwhelming feeling of elation consistently outruns the withdrawn critical moderation.

More than a record where repeated spins reveal different sounds hiding among the strata, The Ailing Facade seems almost to alter the perception of its listener while enticing them further into its unpredictable depths. Guarantee any fan of death-tinged heavy music who might stumble upon this record will soon find themselves trapped within its manifold rooms and corridors. —DUTCH PEARCE

ARKAIK

7

Labyrinth of Hungry Ghosts THE ARTISAN ERA

The answer is glowing in the wind

It may not be the sort of recognition a band six albums in is hoping for, but Arkaik will more often than not be recognized around these parts for the cover of 2012’s Metamorphignition and its depiction of a cosmically illuminated figure with an irradiated Bob Ross-ian/Raoul Hernandez-ian afro.

Sure, the album may be a minor benchmark on the more-notes-than-you tech-death scene, but the world remains in dire need of public figures proud of their ’fros, especially 40,000-watt ones that can glow in the dark and communicate with aliens.

Intricate mazes are the order of the day on Arkaik’s new album, with the cover speaking volumes to the sounds and themes therein. The first half of Labyrinth of Hungry Ghosts is akin to organized chaos with an 8.5-inch hate-on for space; they feel the need to suffocate almost everything with the actions of an unoccupied limb, finger or vocal cord that otherwise could be resting or working in the interest of dynamics. Listening to the record’s first four tracks is like staring at a blackboard-consuming math problem before being bum-rushed by a bunch of Rhodes scholars wielding the entirety of the WWII section of your average bookstore.

It isn’t until the midpoint and “Wayward Opulence” that a greater sense of sonic elbow room emerges with keyboards and Voivod-like riffs hanging in the air instead of saturating it like Louisiana humidity. “To Summon Amoria” pokes tech-death with thrashy arpeggios and haunting Arabian/Egyptian melodies to excellent effect. The pan flute (or whatever it is) atop the Obscura/Death residual riffing is a bonus that works, despite all indications saying it shouldn’t.

“The Vertical Road” summons Cynic’s melodic strength, and closer “Eminence Emergence” climbs on BTBAM’s roller coaster for a leftover to smarter ’80s shred albums by Joe Satriani and Stu Hamm. It’s not often an album works its attractive magic during its second half following an uneventful first half. Such a tangled maze they’ve weaved! —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

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SEPULCHRAL

From Beyond The Burial Mound

Catchy, putrid, crusty death metal that will make you jump from your coffin!

CD, LP ( BLACK & BONE )

SOULSELLERRECORDS.COM

DECIBEL : APRIL 2022 : 69

ATOM DRIVER

7

Is Anything Alright N E FA R I O U S I N D U S T R I E S

Screamin’ with the Jersey Quartet

Atom Driver, the Garden State supergroup featuring members of Deadguy, Good Clean Fun and Buzzkill, have put out a handful of EPs, and here’s a new one, Is Anything Alright. And yes, some of this is alright, some is really good, and some just isn’t.

This is the first album with Chris “Crispy” Corvino taking the mic, who, for my money, always had the best nickname in Deadguy. But he is not taking the vocal approach of either iteration of that band, instead adopting a party scream vibe, which sits nicely with everything the band is doing here. And when they are doing the angular post-hardcore thing, it’s a great time. Fans of bands like Drug Church will appreciate the raucous, melodic throwback of “High Protocol Party.” And the strongest stuff here—“I’ve Turned Into a Monster” and “Seven”—are where the band builds off oddtimed riffs to create the sweaty aggression that seems to be their true wheelhouse.

But there are only six songs, and both “Easy Lover” and “Happy” feel like they were written to move in a different direction. It’s not that they sound completely incongruous, but they’re closer to just punk and roll; fairly forgettable songs that you’d expect from some cool New Jersey dads, but not the ones who put together the rest of the album.

Atom Driver love their EPs, and Is Anything Alright is a pretty decent one. But it feels like they’re very close to that next release being pretty great. —SHANE MEHLING

CAILLEACH CALLING

6

Dreams of Fragmentation DEBEMUR MORTI PRODUCTIONS

Come for the vocals, stay because it’s on

First off, an elephant in the room: Didn’t Debemur Morti Productions release another album with an eerily similar cover not too long ago?

You know the one—the post-rock-with-blast beats album that someone said was “drenched in sax” or something asinine like that. Anyway, when I first saw Cailleach Calling’s debut album’s cover, I was convinced it was stolen.

Imagine my surprise when I noticed the two bands were labelmates. (And apparently their old drummer even plays on this one… my god.) Look, I get the whole “urban black metal” thing, but maybe 70 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

we can put a moratorium on “overexposed skyline photo album covers.”

Cover aside, Dreams of Fragmentation is surprisingly refreshing in that it’s an atmospheric black metal album that doesn’t sound like the melodic musings of a refrigerator at high speeds. What does this mean? Well, for one, you can actually hear what’s going on for the most part (though I will say some of the more heavily arpeggiated guitar parts get a little lost in the mix), and, more importantly, it isn’t post-rock masquerading as black metal.

There are actual riffs and progressions at play here, which is a pretty nice departure from the becorpsepainted Friday Night Lights soundtrack we’ve been told is black metal for the past decade.

This album’s highlight, though, has to be its vocals. A particularly possessed performance, vocalist Chelsea Murphy’s banshee shrieks are some of the best I’ve heard in a long time, but it doesn’t just end there. Murphy’s range is pretty astounding, moving from deep growls to horrific Nazgul screams within single verses.

It’s pretty neat to hear someone really pushing those physical limitations, even if the album is just kind of okay. —JON ROSENTHAL

CRYPTIC HATRED

8

Nocturnal Sickness THE OTHER

Adumbral gratification

I’ll begin with an observation that will—without question—bring these lads zero pleasure, but I gotta say, Cryptic Hatred’s an adorably silly name, ain’t it? It’s the kind of opaque metalism that would’ve gotten my pulse absolutely racing as a tyke. Hell, it’s the kind of handle that I would’ve run with for one of my own high-school DM ensembles (at least until it occurred to me that Cryptic Detestation sounded way cooler). What I mean is that Nocturnal Sickness is aesthetically full-to-bursting with the sort of youthful zeal for classic Finnish/Scandinavian death that immediately stokes the coals within my otherwise chilly heart. Even so, I was caught flat-footed by how KJV-level righteous this record is. Sure, Cryptic Hatred demonstrated clumsy promise via their Free From the Grave demo, but they have— in every fashion—over-delivered on their debut LP. This album destroys.

Thankfully, though these bloody-minded scamps may be “free from the grave,” they’re in no way free from Grave’s influence (or from that of fellow Finns Demigod and Abhorrence. for that matter). This is clearly a recipe that Cryptic Hatred can whip up with their eyes

closed, and they execute it perfectly via a slate of tightly constructed tracks, an imperious manipulation of nauseating ambiance and a borderline flawless production. The tones and mix captured on Nocturnal Sickness will clarify your fucking butter, as will its suite of sour harmonies and discreet yet clever rhythmic whorls furnishing these passages with grain and contour. The fact that Cryptic Hatred are so deadly even with their umbilical stump still attached implies that they’ll soon be holding court with the likes of Lantern, Krypts and Hooded Menace as the very finest in their class. My advice? Snag a copy of Nocturnal Sickness on vinyl while it’s still affordable.

—FORREST PITTS

DARK FUNERAL

7

We Are the Apocalypse

CENTURY MEDIA

What were you expecting?

If you’re looking for edgy, innovative black metal, just keep on walking.

You won’t find it in this review. Dark Funeral stopped being edgy decades ago, preferring to deliver simple, straight-ahead Swedish black metal loaded with melody and delicious blasphemy, leaning hard into the campier side of the genre. Unlike their contemporaries Marduk, who still have a sneaky way of surprising listeners on their new material, you know exactly what you’re getting from Dark Funeral. You might as well call ’em Ahriman-Heljarmadr Overdrive.

After all these years, there’s still an endearing quality to Dark Funeral, especially since bringing vocalist Andreas “Heljarmadr” Vingbäck into the fold for 2016’s album Where Shadows Forever Reign. The guy is a phenomenal extreme metal vocalist, possessing a mighty snarl as well as an uncanny talent for enunciation. Coupled with founding guitarist Lord Ahriman’s predilection towards streamlined, simple arrangements, that album was a blast of black metal at its most cornball fun, and the new follow-up We Are the Apocalypse is an equally strong continuation of that sound.

Songs like “Nightfall,” “When I’m Gone” and “Let the Devil In” embrace black metal clichés so fervently that you can’t help but admire the band’s dedication to beating that horse that was clubbed to death at the end of the 1990s. When a band can sell a listener on such facepalm-inducing titles as “Nosferatu” and “Leviathan,” they deserve applause. Ultimately, We Are the Apocalypse is quintessential heavy metal: escapist, bracing, flamboyant and unabashedly silly. Goodness knows metal needs more of the latter these days.

—ADRIEN BEGRAND

DECIBEL : APRIL 2022 : 71

DESULTORY

8

Into Eternity MDD

DESULTORY

7

Bitterness MDD

Before they swallowed the snake

Swedish death metallers Desultory released their debut album, Into Eternity, in the winter of 1993. They fell into the “too little too late” category (though then-label Metal Blade tried otherwise) with follow-up album, Bitterness, fully solidifying the Stockholmites as B-tier minor celebrities.

The years after, however, have been kinder to Desultory. The reformation in 2009 produced two well-received albums of similar quality—if not better in some cases—with Singaporean label Pulverised. The label also hopped on the reissue hearse, remastering and expanding (via demos) both Into Eternity and Bitterness to a modicum of fanfare. This is, of course, before the Morbergs caved a second time in 2017, presumably for good. Just before and now since, Desultory have enjoyed a revival thanks to YouTube, where good (but unlucky) and bad (not Desultory) are pseudo-elevated by kids looking to “own” and then “claim” something about a scene or style they were never a part of (for obvious reasons like age).

Well, the grave diggers at reissue specialists MDD have re-unearthed Into Eternity and Bitterness in their original Metal Blade configurations.

That’s right, like most of MDD’s catalog, this is gap-fill and not much else, but that’s OK considering physical (CDs, mostly) has given way to streaming, and the physical that’s out there is commonly unavailable or inexplicably expensive.

Musically, Desultory ply the Stockholm thing (think: Unanimated, not Carnage) competently, their melodic sense and thrashinflected riffs setting them apart (then and now). Revisiting the pieces almost 20 years later confirms the sentiment then that Into Eternity had more to offer than its counterpart in Bitterness. Don’t let that sway collectors (of CDs) and the curious from exploring MDD’s timely, if abstemious re-redux. —CHRIS DICK

EUCHARIST

I Am the Void REGAIN

This isn’t the Eucharist you’re looking for

The belabored—and 72 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

6

somewhat otiose—Star Wars deck serves a point here. Swedish melodic death metal geniuses Eucharist have finally awoken from their selfimposed eonic slumber irascible, defiant and hell-bent. Guitarist/vocalist/composer Markus Johnsson is the only Swede left from the Mirrorworlds days. Drummer/confidant Daniel Erlandsson has had bigger fish to fry in Arch Enemy (and for a time in Carcass), and has subsequently exuviated amicably from the neareternal toil of Eucharist’s orbit.

For all expecting an expansion (or at least continuation) of such egg-headed, if artfully crafted mind-benders as “Dissolving,” “Demons” or the W. A. R. Compilation - Volume One tracks, expectations are a violent bitch. I Am the Void is Swedish black metal. There, it’s done.

With drummer Simon “BloodHammer” Schilling (Marduk) behind the kit and Johnsson helming everything else, there’s a palpable sense of regression; perhaps purposeful, the true reasons embedded firmly in Johnsson’s suffering artist cranium. Imagine more caveman Bathory and way less “whoa” Vivaldi. The crux of that statement can be observed in midalbum raven-claw “Mistress of Nightmares.”

Here, Johnsson reserves his evil trill renown in the mid-section for a rather monochromatic martial aesthetic to either side of it. There are similar feats in “Darkness Divine,” “Nexion” and the title track, but the air of enterprise so exalted in the ’90s has been replaced by sheer aggression, the kind exuded with middling effect long ago in the undistinguishable blasts of In Battle, Thy Primordial, et al.

Maybe “Where the Sinister Dwell,” “Shadows” and “In the Blaze of the Blood Red Moon” will convince over time, but diehard Eucharist pursuivants are well-advised to approach I Am the Void with an understandable amount of caution.

—CHRIS DICK

FALLS OF RAUROS

8

Key to a Vanishing Future GILEAD MEDIA

A light that consumes all rotten wood

Now well over a decade removed from wearing their influences as their sleeves on their first couple records, Falls of Rauros have reached a moment in which they sound like no one but themselves. With 2019’s standout Patterns in Mythology, they presented a fully formed identity, and on Key to a Vanishing Future, the band has again harnessed that vision and channeled its skills into an even more focused and forceful statement. At this point, the Mainers concoct a kind of

blackened post-rock, albeit rather more crunchy than shimmery, due in part to their burly rhythm guitar sound and blast-furnace vocal delivery.

Across these six remarkably consistent songs, Falls pair antipodal guitar and bass tones that render the album simultaneously dreamy and dirty, which aptly aligns with the lyrics’ apparent attempt to awaken the audience out of a sort of decrepit, distracted slumber. The words are opaque enough to encourage multiple readings, but if they’re not largely intended as timely cultural commentary, we will happily eat the magazine you’re holding right now.

The songwriting throughout Key to a Vanishing Future is lean and thoughtful, and Evan Lovely’s bass is a marvel everywhere on the record (see “Known World Narrows,” “Daggers in Floodlight” et al.). One of Falls’ most stunning aspects is their willingness to clear space for an unrepentantly bodacious guitar solo at multiple points throughout the album. This is by no means a shredfest, but the solos add color and heat to some of Key’s most introspective corners. Overall, the album encapsulates a mingled brew of hope and despair that is as familiar and fraught as a facemask in this third decade of our fucked-up century. —DANIEL LAKE

FATHER BEFOULED

7

Crowned in Veneficum

EVERLASTING SPEW

Unleashed in the priest

As with the Roman Catholic Mass, so it is with death metal—a little Latin goes a long way. Our textbook is inconclusive as to what “veneficum” means in this context. Is it magic? Sorcery? Poison? Who can say? We’ll concede that Father Befouled’s grasp of the classics might be more advanced. The main thing is that the Atlanta, GA old-schoolers’ latest album title sounds gnarly when spoken aloud—faintly lethal, blasphemous—and sure goes with the music, which, in keeping with the Father Befouled style, is a feast of morbid, suppurating arrangements.

The mood might be 100 percent downer, but there are dynamics. Moments such as the midsection of “Dethroned Enslavement” see the bottom fall out of the jam, and we are left seasick in doom metal’s funereal doldrums before a pummeling storm restores equilibrium. Of course, this style can be traced back to Incantation and has no shortage of contemporary practitioners, and yet there’s still plenty of life in it, movement in the ooze, and something so appealing about the very texture of Father Befouled’s sound. You need a shower after listening to

MESSA

FAMYNE

DEATHBELL

Close

II - The Ground Below

A Nocturnal Crossing

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Soaring up out of the Italian Doom Rock underground and into larger arenas, Messa’s new album “Close” draws us further into spellbinding textures and immersive dynamics. Described as “Stevie Nicks fronting Black Sabbath,” singer Sara’s colossal voice will take you on an emotional rollercoaster ride.

Garden-fresh trail-blazers from Canterbury, UK, Famyne drag the epic tradition of British Doom Metal kicking and screaming into the 21st century on their epic new album “The Ground Below”.

With morbid clanging trips of psychedelic rhythms and shadowy atmospheres, Deathbell’s brand of mystical Doom is both transcendent and sombre.

Why not try the Svart webshop? w w w. s v a r t r e c o r d s . c o m DECIBEL : APRIL 2022 : 73

36 minutes of decomposing electric guitar. Link Wray once stuck a pencil through the speaker cone to make it rumble; here it sounds like Justin Stubbs and Derrik Goulding buried their amps in a 14th-century plague pit.

Caveat emptor: Some might argue that Crowned in Veneficum can occasionally sound dangerously like background death metal, starved of action and the orthodox pleasures of a grand musical set piece.

The atonal hurdy-gurdy of “Miasmas of Sodom,” the punk-ish death squall of “Katabatic Deliverance” and the expansive “Utter Abomination” deliver a credible rebuttal. —JONATHAN HORSLEY

MYSTIC CIRCLE

8

Mystic Circle AT O M I C F I R E

A fire-breathing return

Last year German black metal blasphemers Mystic Circle released new music for the first time since 2006. The single “Letters From the Devil” was just a splash of red before the massacre. But the song revealed the resurgent dark passion defining the band’s eponymous comeback record.

Mystic Circle’s 1998 concept album Drachenblut detailed the adventures of a dragonslayer. The record reflects a time of genre metamorphosis, as black metal luminaries like Emperor and Dimmu Borgir embraced synths and symphonic extravagance. Mystic Circle intentionally captures some of that throwback ’90s flavor, and band mastermind Beelzebub’s venomous croak hasn’t aged a day. But this album is about transformation, not time-warping back to the waning blizzard of Norwegian black metal.

“Seven Headed Dragon” is brilliant blackened death with a contagious chorus and mournful, memorable solos. Cradle of Filth never forsook the allure of Iron Maiden lead guitars paired with metal most macabre, and “Letters From the Devil” similarly sizzles. Beelzebub packs the album with solemn guitarwork (“Hell Demons Rising” and “Curse of the Wolf Demon”), but never surrenders to those lachrymose leanings.

The album’s mix permits each exquisite gothic flourish to survive erasure when drummer A. Blackwar—returning for a second stint with the band—ignites his blast beats.

The keyboard arrangements are occasionally overpowering, and the band often risks evilerthan-thou cheese (see: the chants of “six six six” in “Satanic Mistress”). But Mystic Circle have successfully slayed the sour memory of 2006’s The Bloody Path of God with this hot-blooded revival. I would call it a return to form, but the material is even more ferocious and focused than their early offerings. This comeback album is an Ouroboran triumph. —SEAN FRASIER 74 : A P R I L 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L

NAPALM DEATH

9

Resentment Is Always Seismic — A Final Throw of Throes CENTURY MEDIA

Little earthquakes

It’s only been about a year and a half since Napalm Death released their 16th studio album, the quite fantastic Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism. And they’re closing the books on this era with a mini-album that has an even longer title: Resentment Is Always Seismic — A Final Throw of Throes. And for what it needs to do, it does its fucking job.

“Mini-album” is a weird, almost lawyerly term, but here it makes sense. Six songs and two covers aren’t enough for a full-length, but at nearly a half hour it’s hard to consider this a mere EP. And the band hasn’t just dumped the rejects from their last recording session; this is a speed run of their breadth and creativity with grind, D-beat, some huge riffs, sludgy hooks and a pulsating, orchestral remix.

The most surprising thing is their cover of “People Pie” by the band Slab! This 1988 industrial song I’d never heard, by a band I’d never heard of, may initially seem like an odd choice due to its funk inflections and, ahem, backup singers. But considering ND’s love of the genre, and a bass tone that inspired Godflesh, it syncs well with the cover of Bad Brains “Don’t Need It” as faithful odes to their influences.

Resentment probably doesn’t carry enough heft to make this a mandatory release for casual fans.

But there’s enough here worth visiting—and revisiting—to make it the perfect bridge to wherever Napalm Death go next. —SHANE MEHLING

ROTTEN CASKET

7

First Nail in the Casket

LY C A N T H R O P I C C H A N T S

Death(r)evocation!

Dutch death metal maven Frank Bergesson calls Rotten Casket home.

Though the old-schoolers had a different lineup on previous releases, Bergesson successfully tractor-beamed members of prominence on new EP First Nail in the Casket. That’s right. Master Martin van Drunen now fronts Rotten Casket. Along for the ride (and in for the kill) are Asphyx drummer Stefan “Husky” Hüskens and Sodom guitarist Yorck Segatz. Certainly, the inclusion of van Drunen alone is enough to get naysayers off their subreddit thrones, but Bergesson’s overall assemblage of music and talent has that never-dying OSDM merit to it that we—yes, Decibel—can’t shake. Across four tracks, Rotten Casket burl through gallop-prone death metal

with just enough grit and shaky disposition for it to ring true.

Opener “Covid-119” kicks off with van Drunen losing his vocal mind—amazing, by the way— before Bergesson and Segatz find some serious Dismember headspace. “Bonetomb Residents” continues Rotten Casket’s (dead) horse ride through the proverbial cemetery; this little ripper of a song dips more into Sodom’s “Bombenhagel” than “Soon to Be Dead.”

Side B differs a sliver. “Caskets on Wheels” and “Coffin Birth” crush skulls with simplicity and efficiency. There’s no innovation here; just unadulterated savagery with a few production sleights of hand. Van Drunen’s vocals on “Coffin Birth” are pulled back a bit, giving his lastbreath vocals a chance to feel more forlorn and less caustic. That’s a welcome touch to Rotten Casket’s otherwise calculated delivery. By no means is First Nail in the Casket mandatory in 2022, but hearing this five years from now will probably elicit a much different, more rabid response.

—CHRIS DICK

SCHIZOPHRENIA

8

Recollections of the Insane

REDEFINING DARKNESS

I hear voices

The biggest dampener of digging through mounds of releases every month is when you discover a band on a full-length debut and the songwriting is simply too weak.

When a formative band has no defined style and seems to be pulling at random from a clutch of influences without the ability to arrange those inspirations into anything close to a cohesive sound underpinned by sensible songcraft, it’s not long before you find yourself scurrying back to time-tested classics for sustenance. But among the yearly deluge of average-to-disappointing upstarts, there’s always a select few that kick the gates open and come storming through like Lucifer’s henchmen on flaming horseback. Belgian melodic black/death thrashers Schizophrenia are one such band.

Following a promising 2020 EP, Recollections of the Insane is everything you’d want from a debut in this style: snarled vocals that sound enthralled by Jon Nödtveidt’s troubled spirit, replete with memorable hooks; powerful, incisive riffs and tempo-churnin’ rhythms that crisscross between thrashing mania and death metal spinejolts; guitar leads/solos that display the technical flair of icy Swedish BM, but also can shift into red-hot note flurries; production that recalls classic ’90s texts, yet does so in a contemporary fashion; and an overall energy that immediately encourages frenzied headbanging. In fact,

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there’s very little, if anything, to fault about Schizophrenia’s musicianship and the band’s ability to draw from various aspects of extreme metal history—from Dissection to Death, Kreator to early Sepultura—and do so in vital, exciting, forward-pushing ways. —DEAN BROWN

SLÆGT

4

Goddess CENTURY MEDIA

Don’t forget to pack a toothbrush

Slægt were, at one point, a competent (even pretty good) black metal band.

Their earlier work—including debut full-length Ildsvanger—showed signs of greatness to come, assuming a sloppy, riff-filled and hateful form.

I’m not sure what provoked such a sudden shift just a few years later, but Domus Mysterium’s blackened heavy metal just wasn’t doing it for me. That isn’t to say this album and its successor, 2018’s The Wheel, are bad—they are in reality just as competent and exciting as Slægt’s first era— but there was a disconnect between the music and me. I guess I wanted more of what came before. Selfish, I know.

Nothing could, however, prepare me for what was to come. Goddess, the band’s fourth fulllength, is what could be called “a real mess.” One of those days-long disasters that involve getting backup to really get the gunk out from between the tiles with toothbrushes. Following in Tribulation’s footsteps, Slægt have once again abandoned something they might have been pretty good at in favor of cashing in on the “stadium goth metal” fad. It’s like you take the worst parts of both black metal and the Sisters of Mercy, throw them in a blender, and add enough rock sugar to keep the kids hyper and happy.

Aside from a few pop hooks, there really isn’t anything new or special about Slægt aping a successful and already washed-up sound. Did they hope to find something new by lifting riffs from the same source and putting black metal vocals on top? Was it really going to be that easy? No way, and thus we have yet another variety of Diet Tribulation (or Tribu-Lite-ion). —JON ROSENTHAL

TWISTED TOWER DIRE

7

Crest of the Martyrs Demos N A M E L E SS G R AV E

Cresting 20 years later

Twisted Tower Dire haven’t exactly been on the receiving end of the hype their newer peers have benefited from, but they’ve become one of the genre’s more resilient bands over the last 20 years. 2019’s Wars in the Unknown was a rousing 76 : A PRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

slice of swords-and-sorcery heavy metal, and unlike the eight-year hiatus that preceded that record, the band has returned in comparatively quick fashion, surprising their audience with an album of demos for their near-classic 2003 album Crest of the Martyrs.

Although it might seem like a stopgap release, this collection of tunes recorded in 2002 offers a thrilling glimpse of how special this band was, and still is. Late singer Tony Taylor—possessor of a voice that fits neatly between Michael Kiske and a before-he-sucked Geoff Tate—leads the charge on instantly memorable songs heavily indebted to Manilla Road and Omen, selling every line with the fervor that the sound demands. When you have tracks like “Axes and Honor,” “To Be a Champion” and “Fight to Be Free,” the singer has to exude that bravado like a Wagnerian tenor, and Taylor sounds fantastic, the demos benefiting greatly from the gritty immediacy of the recordings.

It doesn’t get any better than the timeless “The Reflecting Pool,” which merrily dips into the proto-prog-power metal of Manilla Road’s “The Ninth Wave” with a little “Queen of the Reich” for good measure. Dynamic, rampaging and furiously catchy, even in demo form, this will please longtime fans and serve as a perfect introduction for new listeners. —ADRIEN BEGRAND

VIO-LENCE

8

Let the World Burn M E TA L B L A D E

Welcome to 1984…

The Bay Area is the birthplace of thrash. Sneeze and you will hit a great, if not iconic, band: Metallica, Exodus, Death Angel and more. Violence were also key players in the scene. They released three ripping albums, including their classic 1988 debut Eternal Nightmare, before calling it a day in 1993. Founding guitarist Phil Demmel went on to play with ex-Vio-lence guitarist Robb Flynn in Machine Head and that was that.

Vio-lence, however, just couldn’t stay buried.

The band played a single show as a thank you to fans who supported vocalist Sean Killian during an illness and liver transplant. When Demmel left Machine Head, Killian texted him and they decided to become a working band again in 2019.

Enter one global pandemic and we have new material from a band that last recorded when Bill Clinton was serving his first term.

Vio-lence 2022 look different than they did in 1988. In addition to Killian, Demmel and original drummer Perry Strickland, they’ve added former Overkill guitarist Bobby Gustafson and, amazingly, a dude who spent 18 years in Fear Factory (bassist Christian Olde Wolbers). This group has put together a beyond-solid EP that captures

Vio-lence’s primal ferocity. Demmel is in fine form and appears happy to be liberated from Machine Head; he solos with vigor and intent. Killian sounds more polished, but no less fierce than during the band’s heyday; his performance has shades of his fallen thrash comrade Paul Baloff.

Everything about this EP screams thrash: the simple cover of bodies on stakes; the apocalyptic vibe; the perfect EP runtime; the blistering leads and the relentless energy. Throw in some Air Jordans and Milwaukee’s Best and it’s like you’re back in a Reagan-era pit. Is it new and different?

Fuck no. But the old ways still have power, and Vio-lence haven’t forgotten how to wield them.

—JUSTIN M. NORTON

ERIC WAGNER

8

In the Lonely Light of Mourning CRUZ DEL SUR

Run to the light

As 2021 expired, so did my father, only mom and me attending him in the hospital room (tomb) while his ghastly death rattle rolled into shudders, shakes and spasms.

Crying out, “Please,” he died 45 harrowing minutes later, mouth hanging open. My life-giver is haunted by the thought of him in anguish, but I experienced it as his soul physically wrenching itself from the flesh.

In the Lonely Light of Mourning also soundtracks a dying man: thematically, tonally, spiritually.

Tolling cantor for Trouble, Blackfinger and the Skull, Eric Wagner completed his solo bow last year before touring with the latter doom scalpers, all of whom contracted COVID, but only the unvaxxed frontman succumbed. Gallows requiem, these eight posthumous cuts paradoxically burst with life.

Opener “Rest in Place” tiptoes in on a deep, delicate, sonorous thrum from Trouble/Skull bassist Ron Holzner before bent and bending riffs uncork a bluesy dirge: “It’s been a long, lonely winter / At times I thought my spirit broken.” Rejoinder “Maybe Tomorrow” burrows a sulfuric clog cleanser bristling Skull headsman Lothar Keller as Wagner contemplates, “Where will I be this time tomorrow if I die today.”

Physical Graffiti-like scrum “Isolation” pulses first Trouble bassist Sean McAllister.

Cello elegy “If You Lost It All” references said brick shithouse (“In my time of dying with the pain now”), after which the second side slides into unblinking lamentations. From deep midtenor to the edge of shriek, Wagner’s every sigh and exhale lands. In his last dB interview, the singer acknowledged defying his own life expectations, but celebrated that which electrifies Lonely Light of Mourning: “I like the way I sound now. I sound mature.” —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

DECIBEL : APRIL 2022 : 77

DECIBEL : APRIL 2022 : 79

by

EUGENE S. ROBINSON

AND THE

BEST HARDCORE BAND EVER AWARD GOES TO… T

here are scenes in movies

where you start to become vaguely aware that what you’re seeing you are never going to see in “real” life. Not the big-ticket items like people dodging bullets. Or never going deaf after said bullets are fired. Or how about never dying after getting struck with any of those bullets?

Not those. More the ones so common that the fact that you’ve only seen the scene in a movie doesn’t even move you anymore.

In this instance? It’s the simple shock and awe of your protagonist sitting bolt upright in bed, sleep interrupted by a thought so Brobdingnagian that they’ve been electrified awake. I’ve never been there when that happened to anyone, nor has it ever happened to me.

Until it happened to me.

Now, a little history: I became radicalized by music in 1975. Or rather, I was radicalized and the music seemed the perfect soundtrack in 1975. KISS, AC/DC and Led Zeppelin seemed convenient 80 : APRIL 2022 : DECIBEL

vehicles for a world that had started to sound off-key to me.

Which cued me up perfectly for when punk rock hit New York in 1977. Then the predictable paths into New Wave, side trips into disco, and then in 1980 or 1981, hardcore.

(Much credit should be extended to Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline of Western Civilization, truth be told.) And I saw all the hardcore there was to see, even sometimes playing with all of what I saw: Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks, Fear, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, and the list goes on and on. I say this by way of saying I had actually missed not much of anything that was happening from 1977 to when hardcore started to shift into second- and third-generation hardcore through the mid-’80s.

The sound was uncompromising.

And listening, as I still do, to hardcore today, it’s that sound that once attracted me and still does. But it’s now become mood music. And it has to share stage time with lots of other music I like whoring around with.

And then a song comes on my ever-shuffling playlist. I listen to it.

Eat dinner. Fall asleep. Hours later, when I’m sitting rigidly upright and staring into the inky darkness with a lyric working its way through my head, I whisper…

When it’s us versus them, you can always count on me…

So, there it is, and this is a point I’m presently now willing to fight over: Sick of It All are the best hardcore band ever.

Now I have to qualify that. Are they a better band than Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Black Flag, SSD, Agnostic Front, Cro-Mags and all of those other first-wave OGs? I’m not saying that. What I am saying is that by way of a band that clearly wanted to embrace something musical that stylistically was this thing called hardcore, they were it.

They didn’t also want to play reggae like Bad Brains. Or hip-hop like the Beastie Boys. Or really even much of the so-called crossover metal. Or even delve into agitprop like the Dead Kennedys, MDC and all of the bands with political aspirations.

Well, “want”? That I don’t know.

But they didn’t.

And that lyric perfectly served up that ethos that’s given hardcore the kind of steadfast listenership and staying power typically only seen in multigenerational metal families where the grandparents are going to shows with parents and grandkids.

When it’s us versus them, you can always count on me…

It’s as perfect of a lyric as you’re likely to find, and in as few words as possible it drives the point home that we will never leave you. True or not, just saying it makes it feel much more the former and not at all like the latter.

Moreover, it can frame relationships well beyond just the clubs.

And when I see how poorly those first-generation cats have secured their legacies with legacydestroying lawsuits, politics, personal weirdness, bad planning and, in some cases, even worse music and life choices, I’m glad to end the issue with a Sick of It All call to steadfastness.

You may disagree, but you know, when it’s me versus you?

You can always count on me to say you’re wrong.

ILLUSTRATION BY ED LUCE

MUSIC PRESENTED BY

BEER PRESENTED BY

A N N I V E R S A R Y

S

- 1982-2022 -

CORD

E

E

TA L B

ADE R L

M

JUNE 10-11, 2022

PERFORMING

EPICUS DOOMICUS METALLICUS IN ITS ENTIRETY

PERFORMING

Game Over

IN ITS ENTIRETY

PERFORMING

PERFORMING

IN ITS ENTIRETY

IN ITS ENTIRETY

TWO HUNTERS

CLiENtS

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