Archive | Interviews
A lot has been happening with Death Angel lately. The Bay Area thrash legends have experienced losing key original members, gained two new replacements, and are about to release their sixth studio album Relentless Retribution on September 14. Talk about a hectic year. During their stop in Philadelphia during their tour with Soilwork, Mutiny Within, Augury and Swashbuckle, guitarist Ted Aguilar took time with us to discuss the recording of their new aggressive album, the fresh energy brought into the band thanks to its new members and what might happen in the future thanks to the “Big Four” concerts.
You’re new album supposedly has a theme that revolves around anger and rage, and cover artwork designer Brent Elliot explained further that the theme was about “betrayal by those close to you and revenge against the deceitful”. What inspired such an emotional and aggressive theme?
A lot of things actually. The band has gone through a lot within the last couple of years, from the last album to now, and it’s just a lot of things in general. Like personal experience and experiences we’ve seen people go through close to us. And the vibe that was surrounding us, there was a lot of negative stuff that happened. Not only with us but are close friends. So we kind of used all that negative energy and just let it flow into our music and lyrics. So we just did that, and it felt so great to have all this built up anger and just having to channel it through music. When we did that, the music came out as brutal as it can and lyrically, Mark [Osegueda, vocals] wrote nine of the lyrics and Rob [Cavestany, guitarist] wrote like three. And when our cover guy, Brent Elliot, did the artwork he actually read the lyrics. Before he even knew the music, he read the lyrics and he felt where we were coming from and drew up the artwork. We were just amazed by it because that artwork totally fits the music that we were writing and recorded. So it’s awesome man!
Yeah. Not a lot of bands seem to focus on the cover artwork anymore. So it’s cool to hear that you guys still put a lot of care in it.
We did. I mean, we’re happy at this point with the album. It’s old school to a sense, but today, and we wanted something like that. We were writing some really fast thrash songs! FAST THRASH! We went back to like, you know how it is when you release your first album, or when a band releases their first album, and the excitement of being in a new band and writing for the first time and recording your album for the first time? That’s the kind of energy we were having. So we just wanted to go that route. That’s what we were feeling at the time. We were happy that it came out that way.
You’ve kind of already touched upon about the changes that have gone on over the past couple of years, including with lineups. Would you say that all those changes in the lineup really helped shape who the band is today? Like with new members Will [Carroll, drummer] and Damien [Sissom, bassist], would you say that they brought in a new aggressiveness?
Exactly! I believe they brought in a new freshness and excitement. Will actually has been in the Bay Area scene for 20 plus years. I mean, he’s played with Vicious Rumors, he’s filled-in in Machine Head, he has a band called Old Grandad and has a Mercyful Fate tribute band called Hail Satan with Damien. So they’re from the thrash scene, and Will is a thrash drummer. He was the number one choice from the get-go… and he was a Death Angel fan back in the day, so it was like when he came in he knew about 90% of the songs. And Damien, it was a no brainer. He’s a world skilled musician and he was from the Bay Area scene for a long time to. So having these two guys brought a lot of freshness and more of the thrash element back into the band, which was missing. A lot of the stuff that we were writing, we were taking advantage of their skills because we knew that they could play thrash. When Rob was writing, he wrote pretty much all the music on this album, when he was starting to write riffs, Will was throwing down the thrash vibe, and we were all like “YEAH! THAT’S IT!” so yeah. It’s a change from the different lineup, but again it was more fresh, more excitement, and more thrash! Read more »
Currently in its second season, Discovery Channel reality show The Colony (airing Tuesdays at 10pm EST) has a pretty intense premise: A natural disaster is simulated, and nine “colonists” must survive for 50 days with nothing more than their wits. This year’s was filmed on 10 acres of abandoned property devastated by Hurricane Katrina. What viewers don’t know, is that colonist Amber Williams, a logger from Montana, is an avid metalhead that was pretty tight with Metal Insider well before she made it to The Colony. In addition to running a chainsaw for her day job, she has also hosted the metal show at Montana State University radio station KGLT/Bozeman. Needless to say, she rules. We caught up with her about the show, as well as her taste in metal and her radio show.
How did you get involved with The Colony?
A friend of mine sent me a Craigslist ad. She lives in L.A., and found a listing that The Discovery Channel had done and said that they were looking for a female carpenter with mad skills. She thought of me, sent it to my Facebook profile and was like “Hey, ha ha, maybe you could be a reality TV star.” I wasn’t very familiar with Craigslist before this, so I didn’t really take it seriously, but I kind of thought about it and was like “What’s it going to hurt? It could be pretty cool to try out.” At that point, I didn’t even know what show it was. I just knew that The Discovery Channel was looking for a carpenter. So I wrote them and I said “Hey, my name’s Amber. I live in Montana. I run a chainsaw, I ride dirt bikes and I listen to heavy metal. If this interests you, hit me back.” And so they called me eight hours later and said “Yeah, we’re definitely interested.” So I began the interview/selection process after that.
Do you have any idea how many people were up for the position?
There were thousands and thousands of people! It was a cross-country search, and they had three different levels of how they were looking for people. They had just wide spectrum selections where they were advertising on the radio, news papers and any kind of outlet like that. Then they actually searched out different types of people. Like the woman who is the mechanic from Boston, she was actually on The Today Show because it’s so rare that there’s a mechanic shop that’s owned and run by a female. So they saw her through that, contacted her, and asked if she wanted to do it. So she was selected that way.
So your job -did you just take off for…how long was it taping? 50 days right?
Yeah, but two months basically because there’s a little bit of pre and post. So I pretty much had to wipe out all of April and May.
And you couldn’t tell anyone about it?
No, you couldn’t talk about it at all. I mean, in the beginning I didn’t really realize how hush hush it was. So I told all my friends. I was like ‘Hey, I’m trying out for this show and I might get it, and I got picked for finals.’ Then once I was actually selected, they’re like “Ok, it’s top secret! You can’t talk about it!” I was like ‘I already told everybody man!’ I mean, I live in a town of 7,000, people are going to know if I’m gone. (laughing) You can’t really keep a secret in a small town. So they were like “Well, just tell them that you’ll get fined a million dollars if they tell anybody.”
Obviously you love metal. Were you able to bring your love for metal into the show at all?
I think my love for music was one of the few things I was able to reach across and find a common ground with a couple of the other volunteers just because we were so different. I didn’t necessarily jibe with a lot of them. We couldn’t talk about real life in front of the cameras, but when we had some down time here and there we’d talk about music and going to shows and stuff like that. Low and behold, like Reno, him and I like a lot of the same bands, and even Sally the Mechanic likes some of that stuff to. So that kind of provided my first little in, like ‘Oh, you like Hed P.E.! Wow I didn’t know. Oh yeah, Incubus is from Wyoming…’ and stuff like that. Read more »
Of all the bands to play Ozzfest, Oakland’s Saviours may have the most to gain. Even though they have three albums out (the most recent being last year’s Accelerated Living) it’s not like they’re a household name yet. However, their mixture of Motorhead style uptempo punk swagger and Sabbathian grooves should prove palatable to any old-school Ozzy fan. Metal Insider spoke to drummer Scott Batiste about touring
What can people expect from your set at Ozzfest?
We put together a killer set that spans form the Warship EP to the new stuff. I think people will dig it. And we kicked up the visuals a bit!
This will be the first time many people hear you. What are you hoping they’ll take away from the show?
A good time, some light bruising and some killer riffs in their heads!
You released Accelerated Living on vinyl. How important do you think vinyl is in the age of digital downloading?
To us its really important. We all listen to vinyl primarily, we sequence our records for vinyl, we master our recordings for vinyl, we think of album art for vinyl first. How important is it in this age? Probably not very, but that’s of little concern to us.
Like High on Fire, you come from Oakland. You’ve toured together and are kind of sonically similar. What’s the metal scene like in Oakland?
Its cool. Oakland is a good place filled with bad people and the music scene reflects that. From Neurosis to High on Fire to Stormcrow, Asunder,Ccold Grave, Lecherous Gaze to us, you’ll find a common thread. There’s definitely something about it that is dark and weird.
What are your thoughts on touring, specifically touring in a van versus a bus?
Van tour is way more fun than bus tour. We’ve done both and while the bus is cozy, its not really conducive to partying or doing anything fun. Its kind of like being on a land-submarine that leaves town when all the interesting stuff starts happening. As far as thoughts on touring in general, there are way too many shitty bands, way too many reunited bands, the Internet ruined everything else and whatever’s left is already on its way to the sewer!
When Metal Insider started the No Label Needed contest, we didn’t have a “sound” or genre of metal in mind, we just wanted the band that won to have an independent spirit whose music was good. Iron Thrones embodied everything we were looking for in a winner, and the resulting EP that they recorded has also struck a chord with metal radio, as it’s currently the #3 album on CMJ’s Loud Rock chart. We caught up with guitarist Steve Henningsgard to talk about what they learned since winning the contest.
So to lead things off, what do you think you accomplished through winning this contest that you wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise?
There are a lot of small and large things from every aspect of the band. But radio promotion is something that we would have never gotten into without somebody teaching us how to do it, just because it’s not really obvious from an outsider’s point of view how to get on more than a couple of radio stations, like local stations that you know about and just hope things work out. A lot of the background, like CMJ and such, are things that you don’t really know about unless you go searching for them. A lot of the music industry works based on the mystery of not knowing how to make things happen (laughing). Working with a company that knows it and does it a whole bunch really helps when it comes to radio.
Also, anybody can write up at least a remotely OK press release if you have writing skills or if you look at other ones. There’s pretty much a format to them and there is definitely an art to it to making a really good one, but the difficult thing is getting the mailing list and the respect of the people on that mailing list to actually post your press releases, and that’s again something that doesn’t just happen. You have to build up a rapport with those people and have a consistent quality. We have a list of people and sites we can send things to, but we don’t have established relationships with them and we don’t know the exact timing that makes sense. So it’s always things you can do as a D.I.Y. band, but it’s so much easier going through someone who has all the established connections already.
How different would you think The Wretched Sun would have turned out if you just did it yourself or with the same producer that you did the last album with?
Well we did the last album ourselves, and so you can easily run into self indulgent things when it comes to production. Like putting more and more harmonies until it’s as big as you think it should be, which doesn’t necessarily fit what other people to get out of it that you want them to. But it’s definitely different then it would have been, and I wouldn’t say it’s more or less “Iron Thrones” then it would have been. It’s not like we went in there and [producer Will Putney] Will gave us all of these new riffs to learn (laughing) and then we went to play his stuff. There wasn’t even any time to. We were doing 18 hour days over and over again in the studio just to get what we had down. There was definitely an influence with the pre-production side of it. Having somebody else to suggest “maybe we bump the tempo here,” or “maybe you guys could think about how strongly you feel about this part? Do you think you could rewrite some part of it to make certain thing make sense?” Just suggestions, but suggestions that I don’t know if we would have come up with ourselves. It definitely would have been different and definitely wouldn’t have been as much of a punch in the face as this one is. That’s definitely Will’s style, just kind of a “Hey how’s it going? I’m going to kill you.” (laughing). There’s not going to be any part of the record you can ignore or lay back to. It’s just full force the whole time, which for going through the whole contest it really works as a wake up for a lot of people to have production like that. Read more »
One of the larger metal and hardcore management companies teaming up with a label whose biggest commercial success is the Kidz Bop series of compilations might be a bit of a head scratcher at first. But the union of Razor & Tie and the Artery Foundation for Artery Recordings makes a lot more sense upon further inspection. Razor & Tie has already made inroads at metal via their partnership with Prosthetic, and the for a hands-on company like Artery, a label is the next logical step for a company that does booking and management. With a relatively small five-band roster (Atilla, Bury Tomorrow, A Bullet For Pretty Boy, Chelsea Grin and I Declare War), the label has been able to flourish under Razor & Tie’s marketing thus far. We caught up with Artery Recordings label manager Mike Milford and marketing manager at Razor & Tie for Artery Recordings Sean Lynam to talk about the partnership and the future of the label.
Tell me how this all came together.
Mike Milford: For the last good five to seven years the Artery Foundation has always done management and what now. We’ve managed bands along the lines of A Day To Remember, The Devil Wears Prada, etc., and over the last, it’s been about a year hasn’t it Sean?
Sean Lynam: It’s getting close to it. Yeah definitely.
Mike: Yeah we’re getting close to a year. Eric [Rushing, Artery Foundation Owner/CEO] met with Razor & Tie originally about working a couple of other things, and talked to him about the label and kind of just out of nowhere the label started up. I don’t have a long story for you on that one. Everything seemed right. Everything worked out. The partnership worked out really great, and now almost five or six months later we have four releases out now. The first one was Chelsea Grin, and things have just continued to be doing well. We should be doing some more in the near future.
How did the idea of a label come about?
Mike: Eric did a label in the past called 720 records. He did a lot of the Sacramento releases. He’s always had that in his blood, doing record labels and he’s always done national shows as well. It just kind of went along with our company. We know exactly what most artists today want from their record labels and it just kind of makes it easy because we know exactly firsthand what they want. So we decided that it would be better for us to step in there and start doing it as well, and we have really close relationships with all our bands on label. We’re a close family. We treat it that way. We’re always there for our bands, and it just made sense. It wasn’t one of those things we’re like ‘Hey let’s go out, do this record label because we can make tons of money on it.’ We just wanted to give bands what they wanted and what they deserved and the tools that they needed to be able to become successful like touring musicians and what not.
Sean: Yeah I wasn’t personally too much involved in the forming of the label. I kind of jumped on board after I heard about it and said ‘Hey we got this Chelsea Grin record coming out in a couple of months. We’ve got to start working on it.’ But it’s a community type of thing. They have a definite sound to the bands and all the management really takes care of them whenever they come through New York and they say really great things about the management side, and extending into a label is the next step as far as creating the whole community. Read more »
This weekend, a music festival will take place that people will be traveling to from all around. A diverse group of bands will play, and this resurrected annual event will be a gathering point for many. No, of course we’re not talking about Lollapalooza, we’re talking about the GWAR-B-Q! Sure, the indie rock staple in Chicago might have Soundgarden, but does it have Little Ozzy? GWAR mastermind Dave Brockie caught up with Metal Insider to talk about this weekend’s festivities, their forthcoming album (and second in a year) and what the future holds for the band.
So tell me a little bit about the new album.
Well, we’re working hard on our new album, slaving ceaselessly for our masters GWAR. The new album is called GWAR’S Bloody Pit Of Horror. Yeah, we’re fully aware that there’s a weird Italian horror movie from the 60’s called Bloody Pit Of Horror, but it’s not called GWAR’S Bloody Pit Of Horror, so we changed it just enough to not get sued. After Lust In Space was over, we still had a whole ton of awesome songs and we just dove right into it as soon as that tour was over. Being the mightiest band in the universe, we decided to make our 25th anniversary two years long and release two brand new albums in that space of time whereas most metal bands you’d see out there, I don’t know, even the most prolific ones are lucky to get a new album out every two years. Here we are dropping two kick ass records over the course of just over a year after Lust In Space, this one will probably be out before the year is up. We’re just going as hard as we possibly can to show GWAR all the hopeless adulation and the incredible respect and love that they deserve. Yeah, it’s pretty weird how I speak about myself in a third person (laughing).
(Laughing) It’s kind of cool though. You have to turn it on and off I guess.
Yeah, the line has become so blurred that it’s pretty much indistinguishable at this point.
Was Metal Blade (your new/old label) surprised to hear that you were already going to come out with a new album so quickly?
I mean if they were surprised it was a pleasant one. Even with all the huge touring schedule we have this year and all the other cool stuff we have going on we were just like ‘We never want to forget what really got us here.’ Everyone knows GWAR for the crazy show, but I think a lot of people have taken our music for granted just because our show is just so over the top. You could be playing Tchaikovski up there perfectly and people would still say ‘Ah, the show was better.’ So we’ve always had, not really a chip on our shoulders, but that makes us try all the harder to make the music as awesome as possible. We just keep hammering people over the head with it, just over and over and over the head with it, and sooner or later they’re going to finally knuckle under and fall to their knees and let GWAR ream them for every drop of soul that they have. Read more »
It’s the last thing you’d want to be faced with during an already stressful period of time: You’re less than an hour away from show time, you still need to warm up and all of a sudden there’s a last minute interview you weren’t prepared for. But nevertheless, Shadows Fall drummer Jason Bittner took the time to chat with us during the Rockstar Energy Mayhem Fest’s stop in Camden, NJ this past weekend. As he warmed up for the show, he discussed the band’s new live DVD and how owning your own label isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, especially with how bad the industry is doing.
In the Fall, Shadows Fall asked fans to help get you guys on Mayhem Fest using Twitter or Facebook, and here you guys are now! How has the response been?
The response on the tour so far has just been amazing actually. The shows have been great. The crowds have been great. We’ve been meeting a lot of kids at the signings afterwards and it’s been a lot of fun. Obviously we thank the fans tremendously for helping get us on here. We actually had a little incident yesterday that we just found out about with someone who had something to do with the tour package in some way shape or form in St. Louis and with someone who helped get us somewhere with this. They were supposed to have tickets and passes, and something went down. Our tour manager didn’t know what was up, and they ended up driving five and a half hours for nothing. So now today we all feel like shit. We got to do something good for these people, so we’re going to make a $1,000 pack of merch and send it to them. In good faith, it wasn’t our fault. We know that without the fans, we’re nobody.
It’s been about a year since the band created your own record label, Everblack Industries. How has the experience been so far?
I can’t really give an honest answer to that question because we haven’t seen any difference in anything as far as, like we’re still broke (laughing). So I don’t know if starting our own label was the right idea for this business. It just seems like every business model that we come up with we fall short in some way shape or form. I think it would be a great thing if we were a little bit bigger of a band that sold enough units. The problem is that nobody buys records anymore, and when you’re trying to base a business model off what you think you’re going to sell, you have to remember that what you sold two years ago you’re going to probably sell a third of now. It makes it really tough when everybody has to continue making a living out of this. So we’ll see. Read more »
It’s been eight years since the release of Beyond The Valley of the Murderdolls. But after a long hiatus, Joey Jordison and Wednesday 13’s horror punk/metal project The Murderdolls is making a big return. While his bandmate pulls drumming duties for Rob Zombie during the Rockstar Energy Mayhem Fest this summer, Wednesday is tagging along on the tour to push the band’s sophomore album Women & Children Last. He sat down with Metal Insider to discuss the process leading up to the new album, getting to work with Motley Crue guitarist Mick Mars and what the future has in store for the Murderdolls, including a Fall tour with Zombie and Alice Cooper.
So the Murderdolls are back! After such a long period of time being on hiatus, what brought this project back into existance?
It’s a conversation that’s been going on for years. When the band went on hiatus in 2003, the idea was that we would record in six or eight months again and it just didn’t happen. Joey [Jordison] did Slipknot and I started doing my solo stuff. Then I did another solo record and he did another Slipknot record. Then he goes on tour with Korn, Ministry and Satyricon, and I did two country albums in the process. It’s been eight years, but we’ve been busy and consumed with everything. So it might feel like a long time, but maybe not as long for us because we’ve been so fucking busy. But about a year ago the conversation started getting more serious about doing a new Muderdolls record again, and Joey just called me out of the blue one morning and was like “I’m ready to do this if you are,” and I was like “Let’s do it!” We’ve been passing songs back and forth for eight years now. It wasn’t finished songs. It was like ideas and riffs and things here and there, but we had over 50 or 60 song ideas. When we got into the studio, we had 30 that we wanted to do, and we figured we can’t do 30. So we started chopping on them and chopping down and chopping down, and then we got down to 19 tracks and wrote two songs in the studio. Read more »
Piggy D. is more than just a backing bassist. In addition to playing a heavy role in Rob Zombie’s stage show and new music, as well as his own solo material , Piggy has worked as both a musician and artwork designer with artists like Alice Cooper, Lita Ford and many more. During the Rockstar Energy Mayhem Festival’s stop in Camden, NJ, the bassist/guitarist sat down with Metal Insider to discuss the new version of Hellbilly Deluxe 2 (which includes three new songs, re-edits and new artwork), his experience with working with Zombie, Cooper and Joey Jordison and how the art of the album is dying in a struggling industry.
Mayhem Fest has been going on for the past few weeks now. How’s it been so far?
Unbelievable! It’s been really good. We get an hour every night to do what we do. We sort of try to cram everything into one hour. It’s an hour of power, so don’t blink or you’ll miss something.
Well with all the crazy visuals I don’t think it’ll be easy to blink.
(laughing) Yeah, right! I don’t blink.
You’ve been in the band for a while now, but Hellbilly Deluxe 2 is your first record with Zombie.
The first studio record, yeah, as well as the live record [2007’s Zombie Live]. It was really cool. We just did it as a band and now we’ve redone it. So now it’s coming back out. The version that’s on the market now is going away. You’re not going to be able to buy it anymore. So there’s a new version of the record coming out with three new songs that are in the record. So it’s a new record.
Wait, so it’s a deluxe version or a new album altogether?
It’s a deluxe version, but it’s actually the original or ‘what it was supposed’ to be version. It’s very confusing. This is the way the record was supposed to be the first time. There’s new artwork, there’s a DVD, and there’s music that’s not on the version that’s out now. This is Hellbilly Deluxe 2 “redo”/the way it should be.
So you re-recorded each song?
No, we didn’t re-record it, but there’s edits and there’s new music on it in the context of the record that really makes it.
I see. Well what makes the “re-edits” different? Besides the artwork and new songs.
It’s got a different vibe. The artwork plays a huge part of it because it’s all new and it’s really dark. The new songs are really dark and really heavy. Probably some of the heaviest stuff he’s recorded ever. It’s really cool. We’re all really jacked up about it. Read more »
Usually, when there are problems at a recording studio, it means that a hard drive crashed or a band member keeps flubbing a passage. For The Human Abstract – currently recording their third album at The Machine Shop in Weehawken NJ – it recently meant calling an ambulance because their producer, Will Putney, was bleeding profusely from his head after wiping out on a metal staircase during a rainstorm. 57 staples (a hospital record) and one day later, Putney was back on the job (scroll to the end of the interview for a look if you’re not squeamish). Metal Insider, conveniently located next to the Machine Shop, recently got a chance to talk to guitarist A.J. Minette and new vocalist Travis Richter about the band’s lineup changes, their new direction, and working with Will as opposed to self-producing.
I’ve got to start by asking about the obvious. Will Putney hitting his head and almost dying. What happened?
Travis: We were in the tracking room and Will went out for a little smoke break or something. Dean got a phone call and he just dropped everything he was doing and walked out the door and I followed him.
A.J.: Yeah I heard something like “I’m at the stairs” and so we opened one door. I figured somebody was just trying to get in. I didn’t really know what was going on. And then I just heard the small detail about someone bleeding at the stairs and I just ran out, pulled my sweatshirt off.
Travis: We ran around the stairs. At first we looked around and I didn’t see anything. I stayed at the top and you ran down at the bottom and said “yeah, he’s down here.” I ran into The Syndicate and said ‘hey, you guys know Will right? He needs to go to the hospital.’ He came back today and he said he fell on the bottom of the stairs. He said he hit his head on the side of the rail. He has 57 staples.
It looked like a shark bit his head.
Travis: It was crazy. There was a lot of blood on the ground. When we went outside, I instantly took it really serious because I noticed so much blood. I was like ‘yeah, this guy’s really hurt.”
And he’s perfectly fine now right?
A.J.: Yeah, he’s back today recording. He only took one day. Read more »
A lot has been happening with Death Angel lately. The Bay Area thrash legends have experienced losing key original members, gained two new replacements, and are about to release their sixth studio album Relentless Retribution on September 14. Talk about a hectic year. During their stop in Philadelphia during their tour with Soilwork, Mutiny Within, Augury and Swashbuckle, guitarist Ted Aguilar took time with us to discuss the recording of their new aggressive album, the fresh energy brought into the band thanks to its new members and what might happen in the future thanks to the “Big Four” concerts.
Posted by Zach Shaw on Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Interviews