Imperial Triumphant’s 2023 Spirit of Ecstasy Tour feat. Cloak and Couch Slut comes to Bogg’s Social and Supply on Saturday, February 4. $15 (adv). $20 (door). 8 p.m.
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Photo courtesy Russian Circles
Atlanta has always provided the quintessentially weird and William Faulkner-esque Southern experience that Russian Circles’ guitar player Mike Sullivan hopes for every time the group passes through town on tour.
“I do and I don’t remember Russian Circles’ first show in Atlanta,” Sullivan says of the Chicago post-metal trio’s initial stops in town, supporting their 2006 debut album, Enter.
“We always played at the Drunken Unicorn back then,”he says. “I remember at one of those early shows that we played, Brent Hinds from Mastodon rolled up pretty early in the evening. He was riding a small BMX bike and he was tripping on mushrooms. That is exactly what you want from Atlanta,” he laughs. “And that was before any of us even knew Brent! He was there to say hi to someone else who happened to be there for the show that night.”
It’s fitting, then, that just over a decade later, Russian Circles’ musical trajectory carried the group from tearing up the stage for a sweat-soaked circle pit at the Drunken Unicorn to performing under the majestic stars of The Fox Theater, opening for Mastodon in 2017.
On October 29, Russian Circles return to Atlanta, this time playing a show at Terminal West supporting the group’s eighth and most recent full-length album, Gnosis (Sargent House Records).
Drop a needle into the record’s swirling orange vinyl grooves, and songs with titles such as “Tupilak,” “Conduit,” and the album’s title track weave together a rapturous opening salvo that is as heavy as it is pure.
Each song rises and falls with screaming, oceanic riffs and gut-pummeling rhythms in an ever-growing compositional sophistication that places the group on a tier that’s far beyond the post-metal continuum.
The guitars, drums, and bass swarm and move in ominous motions, as though they were guided by a hidden hand reaching out from somewhere deep within their collective subconscious. But as Sullivan asserts, these songs are among the group’s most meticulously arranged yet.
Throughout the album’s later songs— “Vlastimil,” “Ó Braonáin,” “Betrayal,” and “Bloom”—buzzing textures coalesce around massive and doom-laden imagery, painting a portrait of a society in decay.
The bleak beauty and the darkness that binds each song together eclipses all of Russian Circles’ previous offerings, delivering a record that is as furious as it is inquisitive, conjuring a mysterious aura of spiritual anxiety that takes shape as a singular work of understated impressionism.
The title itself, Gnosis, is the Greek word for knowledge, which often appears in religious texts denoting a deeper understanding of the universe that is arrived at only through direct engagement with the divine.
“And what is the divine?” Sullivan asks while pushing the conversation closer toward the album’s unrequited mystical angst. “What if we got it all wrong?” He asks. “What if we misinterpreted elements of faith and spirituality? What if we misinterpreted the Bible? What if we’re taking away the wrong message?”
In the end, there are no answers waiting to reveal themselves within the album’s monstrous roar and crushing rhythms, only a profound sense of reckoning with the unknown.
“That’s something that’s personal, and it’s different for each person, but it’s all tied to this idea of spiritual knowledge,” Sullivan says.
Russian Circles’ co-founding members, Sullivan and drummer Dave Turncrantz have been friends since growing up together in St. Louis.
According to lore, they’re both lifelong hockey fans, and they took the name for the band from an ice hockey practice drill.
Turncrantz is a former drummer with fellow St. Louisan heavy rockers Riddle of Steel.
Bass player Brian Cook is also from St. Louis. He has performed in These Arms Are Snakes, Botch, and played bass in Sullivan’s previous instrumental math rock outfit Dakota/Dakota. Cook joined Russian Circles in 2009, replacing original bass player Colin DeKuiper.
Over the years, Russian Circles has undergone a tremendous creative evolution that balances the lilting strings and metallic aggression that forms the backdrop for 2011’s album, Empros. For 2013’s album Memorial, the group enlisted the voice of gothic-folk vocalist and songwriter Chelsea Wolfe, who expands the group’s dynamic with her voice on the album’s self-titled closing track.
Written and recorded during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the songs on Gnosis turn inward, capturing a singularly troubled time for the group, and for the rest of the world.
Quarantine orders kept each of the group’s members behind closed doors, creating an environment in which no one was playing music or writing together at all: No practicing, no jamming, no happy accidents, and no opportunity for mutual organic growth. So rather than building songs out of ideas and fragments that were captured live and in the moment, fully formed demos were written and recorded in Sullivan, Cook, and Turncrantz’s respective isolation. Later, they shared their songs with each other and paired the material down to create a stylistically physical and visceral release.
“Gnosis was 100-percent written in our own worlds,” Sullivan says. “It was like, you construct a song on a blank grid, and parts are added, which is a way more immersive experience, as far as presenting a full arrangement: Here are additional guitars. Here’s how it will transition to the next part. It’s a completely different and more controlled approach for us. Before, it was kind of like, we would get together and just hope that something good would happen, which is kind of terrifying,” he laughs. “The songs on our first album, Enter, were just me and Dave jamming together in a room. Now, whenever we get together, we know what we’re working on. There are plenty of ideas to choose from. And if we don’t wanna work on one, there are even other ideas we can start hammering away at yet.”
The bass and drums for Gnosis were tracked at Electrical Audio in Chicago by Kurt Ballou, who also recorded the guitar and synth parts at God City Studio in Salem, Massachusetts. Ballou also engineered and mixed the album at God City.
Gnosis is the third record that Russian Circles has made with Ballou, following 2016’s Guidance and 2019’s Blood Year. It’s also the second album for which the group divided its time between Electrical Audio and God City.
“God’s City is great because we go there and Kurt has the home field advantage,” Sullivan says. “There are so many pedals, and so many different toys to play with, and different amps. As a guitar player, I’ll never complain about heading over to God City. It makes the record way more diverse sounding, just knowing all of the gizmos that he has to play with there. Kurt is also really familiar with Electrical Audio, and he just knows what to do instinctively, and he knows how to manipulate all the rack gear and everything,” Sullivan adds. “He has preferences for mics and compressors, and a lot of it goes off of Dave’s performances and tuning and Kurt excelling at what he does. What those two came up with is the best drum tone we could have captured.”
One of the more compelling moments of Gnosis, takes shape minutes into the album’s title track. The guitar kicks in on a delayed stereo effect, revealing wholly new dynamics and greater depths in the album’s sonic dimensions. It’s an effect that’s mirrored in the album’s closing number, “Bloom,” and was also used in the song “Campaign,” which opens Russian Circles’ 2008 album, Station (Suicide Squeeze).
“It’s interesting when you start utilizing stereo manipulation,” Sullivan says. “It opens up the field just a bit more. Just now, we were jamming during practice, and Dave had in his ear monitors so that he could hear himself playing. All of the drums were in mono whereas the guitar was stereo panned. Ideally, you wouldn’t want mono drums by any means, but having it there opened up the guitars. When some things are in stereo and some things are mono, it makes the mix deeper. The instruments hit your ear differently, and in a really exciting way.”
Back in 2008, when the group recorded the album Station, their engineer at the time, Matt Bayles, as Sullivan recalls, said ‘Let’s utilize some stereo action here,’ which is how the technique became a part of the group’s repertoire.
“That was the first time we did that, I was like, ‘Wow, this is like a little bit of stereo magic. This is awesome,” Sullivan says. “Now, we’re starting to consider how that technique is something we should be doing live, making the most of it, and not just reserving it for records.”
Part of Russian Circles appeal lies in its style and how the group adapts its brand of instrumental dirges to a more traditional songwriting style, as they do with “Vlastimil,” where the group expands upon its already colossal sound, while reinventing its own musical techniques.
The chemistry between the band’s members and Ballou is clearly on display throughout the album. His approach to production and engineering dovetails with the tension that builds throughout Gnosis’ serrated and gargantuan epics.
As such, the nature of their working relationship positions Ballou as something of a fourth member of the group. His presence has become key to Russian Circles’ creative evolution and success.
“If you find people that you have chemistry with, that’s a huge gift,” Sullivan says. “Do not throw that away.”
Together, their work has yielded a late body of work that is greater than the sum of Russian Circles’ parts, even though those parts are quite impressive, summoning a sense of the divine on their own terms as they illustrate the complexity of the group’s songs and history.
This story originally appeared in the October print issue of Record Plug Magazine.
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On Halloween eve, Mastodon unleashed its 8th proper studio album, Hushed and Grim (Reprise). The album’s sprawling 15-songs distill the group’s legacy as the pride of Atlanta metal, and a force of nature the world over, into a punishing, real-time reflection on death, sorrow, and reclamation.
From the moment the album’s first single, “Pushing the Tides” arrived, the brutal power on display made it clear that Mastodon was coming out of the gate strong. Guitar players Bill Kelliher and Brent Hinds, drummer Brann Dailor, and bass player Troy Sanders channeled their anguish over the loss of their friend and former manager Nick John, who died from cancer in 2018, into a serpentine musical saga.
Within weeks, “Pushing the Tides” was nominated for a “Best Metal Performance” Grammy. In the meantime, the group has remained on the road playing shows across the U.S.
Dailor took a few minutes between tour stops to talk about how the ideas and imagery behind Hushed and Grim came together to form an emotionally hefty and gorgeously articulated new chapter for Mastodon.
Over the years we’ve had conversations about each new Mastodon album, and there’s often an element of the band confronting death—losing someone close—and dealing with it in a real-time kind of way. I recognize this in Hushed and Grim, but the album also feels empowered.
When you start writing an album, maybe you find out that you have less control than you imagined you did. It just starts to unfold, and maybe in the back of your head you’re thinking, “We need to be heavier, faster, and crazier.” Then the things that you naturally gravitate toward are slower, darker, and deeper. Then you think, “Maybe this is actually the vibe.”
It starts to reveal itself, and it really is the manifestation of what we’re going through during that moment in time. Nothing happens in a vacuum. When you’re creating something, the emotions that you’re experiencing with whatever you’re dealing with in life will ride in tandem with that.
Going into Hushed and Grim, We weren’t feeling too good as a group. So during the writing process, wallowing in those feelings led to what the album sounds like. Anything that sounded remotely happy was kicked out immediately. It was like, “No! I’m not happy. Get rid of that.”
Maybe by the end of the album it becomes empowered — it gets there eventually. For me, it’s a tough listen. It puts me back in these places that weren’t fun to go through, but it was necessary to get through it.
I don’t know what’s going on with us, but for the last bunch of albums, I don’t know if we’re cursed or something … I don’t believe in curses, but I’ll just say it to be fun. From Crack the Skye on, it seems like every time we go into the writing process somebody close to us fucking dies. So word to the wise, don’t be close friends with anyone in Mastodon.
In that pure songwriterly way, Hushed and Grim has multiple meanings. I first saw it as a pandemic reference. … In the early days of the pandemic I even heard someone describe Atlanta’s streets as “hushed and grim.”
Actually, I stole it from Gone With the Wind. I’ve had the title in the back of my head for a long time.
Gone With the Wind was my sister’s favorite movie, and we used to watch it every time it came on. I just really liked that phrase. It’s on a title card halfway through the film, after Sherman burns Atlanta to the ground. You see this massive crane shot over downtown Atlanta, and you see thousands of dead soldiers. Scarlett is running around tending to the wounded that are lying in the street.
Sometimes when a tragedy takes place it’s not people running around screaming. It’s quiet and there’s this acceptance that something terrible is happening, and it’s quiet. When our former manager Nick John had gone into home hospice care we all flew to L.A. to see him one last time, and to say goodbye. He was asleep in a hospital bed, his mom was there, his sister, his wife and some close friends. “Hushed and grim” was the perfect phrase to explain the feeling in that house that day.
So the Atlanta connection, the connection to Nick John in that specific circumstance, and the fact that I felt like it encapsulated the sound of the album being quieter, melancholy, and more sparse really resonated with me. … At least it’s more sparse than maybe we’ve ever been. We’ve hinted at it over the years, but this one really goes in on that slower, more methodical, take-our-time kind of thing.
From the beginning, when I was first hearing the riffs, writing the stuff with the guys, and putting it together, I had this black and gray color palette that I felt was lending itself to the album. I could see black and gray with a touch of gold. That’s the initial conversation I had with Paul Romano about doing the cover. I didn’t have anything else but the color palette.
Song-for-song, the variety goes beyond a lot of what Mastodon has done in the past. Was it your intention to make an album that’s a little more complex?
No, I think that’s the result of having more time to work on it. There was no tour looming. In the past, there’s always something we have to go and do. I don’t want to say that it rushes things, because early on we wrote Leviathan in like three months. But we had a lot of time with this one. We worked on it, and kept coming back to our garden of songs and watering them and watering them. We poured over these things like a barista in a San Francisco coffee shop [laughs]. We really took our time making sure certain parts are what we wanted them to be, building on bridges, and getting into the nooks and crannies that maybe we wouldn’t have discovered if there was a hard time constraint.
Even during Crack The Skye, it was like, “Ok, we need to go play Bonnaroo now.” It’s a mind shift to go from writing and pouring over new songs to practicing “Crystal Skull” and “Blood and Thunder.” So it’s the result of being able to stay in writing mode longer, without any hope of going on tour, ‘cause that wasn’t happening! It was like, “In fact, your industry will be the last one to come back. So now, we’re out here trying to figure it out while staying safe and making sure that our tour can happen. Just yesterday we had a scare with a false positive. This could all be taken down so easily, and everybody goes back home and loses hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That’s the general mood everywhere right now.
Yeah, it’s all hanging on by a thread, but we’re hoping for the best. Getting back to your question, we’re probably most known for complex arrangements. Anytime we come up with something that’s lesser than, people are surprised. But if a simple song reveals itself and we dig it, we’ll go for it. We don’t put on the idea that we have to be proggy all the time, or that every song has to have a thousand riffs, and within those riffs there are hundreds of little riffs. A lot of the time we’re taking stuff away, saying to ourselves, “My God, this song has five bridges. What is going on here?”
It also feels like the band has mastered working at West End Sound and Ember City Studio. Emperor Of Sand through Hushed and Grim encapsulates an era for Mastodon’s sound that has developed since the studio was built. You know how to get the best possible results out of that room.
Yeah, we’re comfy-cozy in there. And if we didn’t have the studio we wouldn’t have been able to make the record. We couldn’t fly to L.A. or anywhere else to record because of the pandemic. Getting David Bottrill to say yes and come to Atlanta and live there for three months while we worked on it was paramount.
The album’s cover is a departure for Mastodon, both in color and orientation — it’s kind of a landscape image.
Yeah, it has Nick John as the Green Man in the middle of the tree. It is expansive; that’s the middle panel of a nine-panel piece by Paul. We were both on the same page as far as having a twisted tree be the main focus, and that it would reveal the seasons as you go around. So the panels are the different seasons. And there are all sorts of Easter eggs in there that Paul takes from the lyrics and song titles, and whatever any of the band members offer. He always fits everything in somewhere. There’s a reference to Jakuchu’s “Elephant and Whale” diptych in there. There’s all sorts of fun stuff in there. I wanted the fan base to know when they saw the cover art that, at least in my perception, they were getting something different. So we wanted it to be a departure, and to look different from the rest of the album covers, while reflecting the mood of the album.
Nick John as the Green Man: I tend to think of the Green Man mythology as being about regeneration, or it being about a new beginning. Is that part of what you are projecting with the artwork?
My whole made up afterlife mythology was that your soul enters the heart of a living tree. In order to say goodbye, it lives there for a whole calendar year, and experiences the seasons to reflect on the life that you had. And that’s how you’re able to say goodbye to the natural world.
… As if we needed any more afterlife mythologies, here’s one more for you! [laughs]
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Danzig, Cradle of Filth, Crobot, and Necrofier play The Eastern on Sunday, May 15. $47.50-$79.50.
Read RadATL’s review of Danzig Sings Elvis.
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Before the weekend gets underway, be advised that hometown metal titan Mastodon has rolled out a new video for the song “Pushing the Tides.”
It’s the first look and listen to the upcoming ninth album, Hushed and Grim, out October 29 via Reprise Records, just in time for Halloween. It’s a scorcher, too—a new number with a touch of that old Leviathan vibe right out of the gate.
The album was produced by David Bottrill (Peter Gabriel, Rush, Tool) and features a guest appearance by Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil. More info coming soon. In the meantime, press play and click the album cover below, courtesy of Paul Romano (Remission, Leviathan, Call of the Mastodon, Blood Mountain, Crack The Skye), for pre-order info.
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Mastodon celebrate their 21st anniversary among the sharks at the Georgia Aquarium.
On Thurs., July 15, Bill Kelliher, Brent Hinds, Brann Dailor, and Troy Sanders play a live-streaming show amid the aquarium’s most elegant predators.
$19.99 (advance). $24 (day of show). T-shirt and poster bundles are available as well. $1 from each poster sold will be donated to the Georgia Aquarium.
The performance will be available on-demand for 72 hours starting July 16 at Midnight Eastern time. Your ticket will grant you access to this replay window.
In the meantime, Mastodon’s latest offering, “Forged by Neron,” appears on the soundtrack for Dark Nights: Death Metal Sonic Metalverse motion comic. Press play below.
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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, an early incarnation of the group now known as Ecryptus was born as a melodic death metal band hellbent on exploring the blackened depths of the cosmos. It was the early aughts, and the group’s singer and guitar player Mike Michalski took lead of this ragtag band of thrashers who knew from the beginning that they wanted to do more than write what he calls “pretentious love songs to Satan.”
One day, while wandering around the annual sci-fi and fantasy Sodom and Gomorrah that is Dragcon the group came face-to-face with an ancient order of Force-wielding rockabilly punks with a penchant for theatrics—Grand Moff Tarkin. Featuring Atlanta artists and underground impresarios Jim Stacy and Shane Morton, GMT pushed the Star Wars theme to the extreme, with an array of spot-on costumes, props, and a legion of stormtroopers to do their bidding.
In an instant, Ecryptus emerged with an arsenal of wholly new and sinister Star Wars-themed black metal to serve the Dark Side.
“Grand Moff Tarkin did their thing with unapologetic campiness,” Michalski says, “but we wanted to make serious songs and treat the source material how many bands treat Tolkien. So we thought, how can we hint at the Dark Side of Star Wars without getting completely sued?”
In 2008, Ecryptus unleashed the Astral Crusades EP, breathing life into the group’s campaign for Darth metal supremacy with songs such as “Imperial Revenge,” “Abandon All Hope,” and “Execute Order 666.” More than a decade later, the “Rancorous” b/w “Execute Order 666 MMXVIII” 7-inch summons a supernatural whirr of cosmic grind, making their transformation to the Dark Side complete.
“Ecryptus,” according to Star Wars lore, was the name of the cavern deep below the surface of the planet Korriban where the ancient Sith species first encountered the Dark Side of the Force. Most of the songs the group has recorded and played live deal with the more horrific scenarios that are woven throughout the Star Wars canon that people only familiar with the films might have never thought too deeply about: being sentenced to death by Rancor, being frozen in carbonite, enslaving an entire planet of wookies, and so on.
“Rancorous” opens with a mighty roar before a spiraling assault of blast beats and demonic incantations rise over searing guitar leads that burn with the heat of Vader’s red lightsaber. On the flipside, “Execute Order 666 MMXVIII” resurrects what has become Ecryptus’ unofficial anthem with a new recording, celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Astral Crusades’ release. The song chronicles Anakin Skywalker’s perspective of executing Emperor Palpatine’s “Order 66” to slaughter the Jedi. “Making the Emperor say “666” was fun,” Michalski says.
The line up at the time of recording the “Rancorous” single featured Michalski, aka Lord Crypt, performing alongside bass player Lord Tenebris, born Allen Keller of Degradations, drummer Dan Solo, aka Danny Ryann (ex-Gigan), and guitar player Ryan Lamb. Lamb moved to Orlando shortly after the songs for the 7-inch were recorded. Lord Abraxas, aka Justin Brown (ex-Synapse Defect), now plays guitar.
The 7-inch arrived pressed on a multi-hued galaxy of vinyl colors: Cauterized Saber Wound, Mace Windu Purp Surp, Ghrey Rey, Opening Crawl Rotten Banana, Gamorrean Guard Mucus, Sarlacc Puke After Trying To Digest Boba Fett, Luke’s Lame-Ass Saber, and Dagoba Green.
Live, the group takes the stage sporting sith-corpse paint, robes, armor, Dragoncon-acquired lightsabers, and their friend Scara Slayfield wearing her best “Hutt Slayer” Princess Leia outfit, serving drinks to the stage, and adorning the monitors.
The group recently finished recording material for a new EP that’s due out in the Spring of 2021. More recent Ecryptus songs draw inspiration from the expanded universe—characters from Star Wars comic books, novels, and video games.
The forthcoming EP is tentatively titled Kyram Beskar’gam, and, if you watched the The Mandalorian—and you know you did—you already know the title is Mando’a for “Death Armor/Metal.” The new EP will feature songs with titles such as “Cauterized Saber Wound Massacre,” “Planetary Enslavement,” “Compulsion to Disintegrate,” and “Digested over 1000 Years.”
“With each new release, we give in to our anger,” Michalski says, “and become more the Dark Side’s servant …”
In the words of Darth Vader, “You don’t know the power of the Dark Side!”
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Mastodon‘s latest single, “Fallen Torches,” is a longtime staple of the group’s repertoire, but has remained unreleased until now. The song—one of the first recordings made in the Mastodon-run Ember City Rehearsal Studios in Atlanta’s Capitol View neighborhood—is the opening number on Medium Rarities, a 16-song compilation gathering odds and ends from the past 20 years of the group’s history—7-inch singles, “White Walker” from the Game of Thrones soundtrack, instrumental outtakes, and various live recordings including a scorching rendition of Metallica’s “Orion.”
“Fallen Torches” also features a guest vocal growl courtesy of Scott Kelly of Neurosis. True to Mastodon form, the song could embody the perfect metaphor for American politics, the global climate crisis, human interaction eroding in the face of the internet … Or not. When taken at face value “Fallen Torches” is a white-hot neckbreaker driven by mammoth riffs and rhythms that rival the almighty white whale behind Mastodon’s classic 2004 LP Leviathan. Meaning lies in the ears of the beholder, albeit quite ferocious.
Medium Rarities is out September 11 via Reprise Records. In the meantime, check out another brand new Mastodon scorcher, “Rufus Lives,” which appears on the Bill & Ted Face The Music soundtrack.
“Alcoholic Polyneuropathic Freaks in Hell” — it’s a phrase that captures a colorful, albeit accurate, snapshot of most Georgians’ mental state as we grapple with the realities of returning to life after sheltering in place over the last month. It’s also the title cut from Misanthropic Aggression’s latest 7-inch on Boris Records.
On the heels of releasing 2018’s Inability to Cope EP, bass player and lead vocalist Jake Benedict, drummer Tyler Peacock, and singer and guitarist Chris Hammer are back with three-songs that plunge the group’s blend of hardcore, thrash, black metal, death metal, and crust punk into much greater depths. Benedict’s low rumble and Hammer’s demonic shriek create an urgent tension over Peacock’s staccato rhythms. After live-streaming a 7-inch release party on April 20, Benedict took a few minutes to talk about the new songs and finding Misanthropic Aggression’s sound.
The Alcoholic Polyneuropathic Freaks In Hell 7-inch is Misanthropic Aggression’s first new release since 2018, correct?
Yes! The first thing we did after releasing Inability To Cope was to write the song “Blacklisted.” I had already written the guitar riff, so we started arranging it. We worked for about a year and wrote “Black Listed,” then “Retirement From Life (Last Day of Work),” then “Alcoholic Polyneuropathic Freaks In Hell.” Chris came up with the title for that one.
That song feels timely, as many Georgians are struggling with Governor Kemp easing up on the shelter-in-place order.
Yeah, because you’ve been at home for like a month, drinking too much, and you feel like you’re in hell!
We played with Sanguisugabogg at 529 on March 11, 48 hours before the shit hit the fan. The morning after, I got an email saying my son’s school is canceled effective Monday. He hasn’t been back since.
When we played on March 11, COVID-19 was already here. People were wigging out, about half the normal crowd was there, and people were already wearing masks. They were high-elbowing instead of high-fiving. It was a trippy night.
You know there’s a problem when even the crust punks are washing their hands!
Big time! There was a line out the bathroom door all night, just to use the sink!
“Retired From Life (Last Day Of Work)” is the second entry in a catalog of anti-active shooter songs. “Active Shooter Syndrome (A.S.S.)” from Inability To Cope was about the Mandalay Bay shooting in Las Vegas. I heard the news about it and wrote that song. “Retired From Life …” is about the poor guy who worked in the security shack at the FedEx facility in Kennesaw, maybe six-seven years ago. Basically, he was shot in the gut with a shotgun and lived, but he’s had 80-90 surgeries since then.
I thought about how lyricists like Chris Barnes from Cannibal Corpse write. As a kid, it was terrifying to read first-person perspective songs about being murdered. To twist it in with the urban style that we’ve always had I did a first-person narrative about being killed on the job. I was almost afraid to do it because it’s pretty controversial. But the lyrics are so clearly anti-shooter that it won’t come across like we were glorifying it. But it is supposed to be horrific.
Have you published the lyrics?
The lyrics aren’t posted anywhere yet. I’m such an amateur when it comes to actual music industry stuff. After the records are produced, your PR campaign starts. So as soon as you send off the masters the records get pressed. Then Perfect World Productions, who’s doing our PR, sends out press kits. Once the records come in they get sent out for distribution. Boris Records has distribution through MVD. That takes an additional four weeks. I didn’t know all that, and when we picked the April 20 release date I was working off of my DIY experiences: ‘The records will be here and we’ll get in the van and go!’ The 4/20 release date isn’t official. The distributor’s release date, and the reason it’s not on Spotify or anywhere else yet, is June 8. That’s when I think we’ll post the lyrics.
As soon as we finished this one we turned around and finished a new song for the next record. I want to write about COVID-19, but I need to approach it carefully. It’s a slippery slope talking about this virus; you could easily upset people’s political sensibilities, and I don’t want to be seen as a political band. So I’m figuring out how to approach it lyrically.
That’s tough. The anti-active shooter songs — talking about real-world incidents of gun violence — can easily be construed as being about gun control. It doesn’t get more political than that!
Yeah, it could be taken that way. Personally, I see a pattern of antisocial narcissism at work in these shooters — lonely, loser-types, incels who are incels because they have no personality. I noticed that a lot of them have these traits in common. That’s kind of what made me want to chronicle these incidents, and have more than one song about the subject. The title, “Active Shooter Syndrome,” is a play on “active shooter situation.” In my opinion, there seems to be a syndrome here.
What has changed for the group between these two releases?
It’s a cliché, but we’re figuring out our sound. We had this idea to mix five musical genres: punk, thrash, death metal, black metal, and crust. The first release leaned heavily toward punk and hardcore — we had the cover of SSD’s “Boiling Point.” There were hints of death metal, especially in the long musical section in “Herd Rejector/Unbound Descent,” which Chris composed. There are some sludgy parts, some death metal parts. With the new release we went for more of a first wave black metal sound. If you listen to the long section right after the first chorus in “Alcoholic … ,” it has a second wave, almost Gorgoroth or golden era Dark Thrown back-and-forth going on. Real grim black metal. There’s a lot going on in that song, and I don’t want to sound like I’m tooting my own horn, but I’m really proud of it.
Tell me about the sample at the beginning of “Alcoholic …”
Chris did that. It’s the voice of James Dickey, who was a poet laureate in ‘66. He wrote Deliverance.
The lyrics for that song are two-pronged. I have developed alcoholic polyneuropathy, I guess from drinking liquor for 13 years. I’ve started getting real bad tingling in my hands and feet, my skin and scalp crawl, I break out in hives. So the lyrics are about my personal experiences with it, but it’s also a warning to learn better coping mechanisms than substances. It’s definitely in keeping with my amateur psychology that I like to incorporate.
At the end of “Alcoholic …” we take a hard left turn into a weird death metal theme, which is a riff that I wrote. Sometimes I’ll write parts for Chris, but in this song, the whole end, I said, “You do whatever the hell you want, man. These are the parts I wrote. This is the subject matter. Run with it.
Impetigo is a gore-grind band from Illinois, from the late ’80/early ‘90s. They rule, and their vocals have a real strong influence with all the echo and trippy, kind of rubber banding in and out that you hear.
Who did the artwork?
The artwork was done by a Ukranian artist who goes by Warhead Art. He’s done three pieces for us — he did the centerpiece. Chris did the layout. The art is in the middle, and there’s a frame with little stars in the corners. Chris did those, and hand-drew the “Alcoholic Neuropathic Freaks In Hell” logo around it. The stars represent the synapses misfiring in your body due to alcoholic polyneuropathy. It’s what causes the pain, which I thought was a cool idea. The photo on the back with the bricks was taken at the ruins of an old civil war-era mill — Nickajack Creek — up near Smyrna.
The idea was to keep it real simple. No lyrics sheet, no insert, no thank you list. It’s just three songs. The whole thing is influenced by the old Amoebix, Anti Cimex 7-inches; real simple, old-school hardcore shit.
Rad/ATL 