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After a couple of albums that didnt’t do that much to me, “Win Hands Down” was a fine return to form from Armored Saint, one of the real veterans of the Los Angeles-scene. As I didn’t get a chance to speak with the band back then, I grabbed the opportunity with both hands when the band’s record label, Metal Blade offered me the chance to chat with bass player Joey Vera. What are his feelings about the previous album “Win Hands Down” about five years after it was released?

– I think it was really great, and I am proud of the record. It’s a good representation of the band and like all of our records, it stands on its own and is a snapshot in time about where we were musically and everything. I love the way the record came out. It sounds great, and the songs and the performances are great too. We have kind of been touring for it for the past five years, and got a chance to play a lot of the songs live. It’s been a lot of fun.

Did you approach the new album, “Punching The Sky” differently?

– Not really, we kind of do the same things when we start writing and we really just let things come naturally. You know, it starts with a couple of songs and normally it just evolves and snowballs into a record. And we don’t really think about it too much, and we don’t really talk about it too much either. You know, we don’t have conversations like: What direction should we go in? What kind of songs should we write? We don’t really do that. The writing just started and it snowballed and I think the first couple of songs we wrote were “Bark, No Bite”, “Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants” and Missile The Gun” and so that kind of set up what was gonna come after that.

There is no title track on the album, but the title, “Punching The Sky” is part of the chorus in the opening track “Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants”.  Why did you name the album “Punching The Sky”?

– Well, we talked around ideas and you know, we were gonna call it “Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants”, but we already did that on “Win Hands Down” where the first track was the title of the record. We didn’t want to repeat ourselves in that way. And I like the idea of taking a lyric and using that as a title. That particular line really just kept standing out to me, and so I just brought it up to John (Bush) one day and I said: You know, what about “Punching The Sky?”  It’s very visual, it conjures up some really cool visual things on you, when you read that, or when you see it. It could take on a lot of different meanings. It also sounded appealing to me because it could be used as some kind of allegory in a lot of different ways. For me personally, it kind of represents the band as a whole and  what our goals are and what our intentions are. We’ve always been a band that wanted to grow and evolve and take chances musically and become better songwriters, better people, better fathers and husbands and whatever. And so, “Punching The Sky” kind of represents pushing through boundaries, getting beyond what is in front of us, including the sky. You know, they say the sky’s the limit. But we’re sort of saying beyond the sky, there is no limit. So that’s how I was perceiving it. I thought that it had some connection to us in that way. So that’s why I felt like it was a good title. I mean, I like to have things that have some meanings. I don’t like to just throw something out there with no meaning at all. I like to leave some things open for interpretation too. And John writes lyrics like that. I think that it’s good to have some connection with titles and titles of records and things like that.

With the internet, the first song that you hear from an album is very important. Joey seems happy over the fact that I find “End Of The Attention Span” a very good choice as the first single. It’s very catchy, energetic and it sounds like Armored Saint.

– That’a nice compliment. I am glad it sounds like Armored Saint.  It took us a long time to come to this place where we have people that say that to us, you know, that our band has our own sound. And we’re, glad for that. Obviously, we always wanted to have our own sound and we’ve been trying to do that for a long time. So it’s nice to hear that, that we have accomplished that. “End Of The Attention Span” has a little bit of everything and it represents us as a band. It also is kind of a broad introduction to the rest of the record even though I find the record to have a lot of diversity.

How difficult is it for a band like Armored Saint to get new fans these days? The old fans, myself included, will always check out and probably even buy the albums, but do you feel that you, with the later releases, have managed to reach out to a new audience as well?

– Well, I think in some way we are and I don’t really know how that happens. I mean, we certainly don’t work in a in a normal way. Some bands put out records more frequently than we do and they tour more frequently than we do. So we do have our own timeframe, make records every five years and we don’t go on long tours and things like that. But I think the fact that we’ve been kind of consistent since about 2010,  putting records out every five years and doing touring and stuff, has helped. Over the course of that time, you pick up younger people because they have heard of you or they’ve seen us on tour with another band like Queensrÿche or Saxon or something. Maybe they’ve heard our name, but they don’t know what we sound like. I’m aware that the majority of our fans are older, and I think that some of those people are now parents which perhaps brought us to their kids.

What is the motivation to do yet another album about five years after the last one? Is it to see the result of your own creativity? Is it to please the fans, or perhaps to be able to tour and do concerts?

– Well, you know, I think we kind of just do it for ourselves. We got to a point where we felt like we were exhausted. We were playing out a lot for “Win Hands Down”, and we never were a band that did any writing while we were on tour. So, we just took some a little bit of time off, and I think that I maybe wrote a couple of riffs for no particular reason. And then I said to John: Hey, I have a couple of riffs. I think I’m gonna finish them and see how you feel. So I d sent him some demos and then as usual, we started working pretty quickly, and from there we just decided let’s keep going. So again, it wasn’t like we were on some kind of schedule, we didn’t have to make a record. We just truly felt like writing music again. John and I have a really good writing relationship. And it’s fun too. It’s very enjoyable for us. So once it got to that place, it was like: Okay, let’s keep going. This is going great. Let’s keep going, keep going. And it lasted a long time. I mean, we don’t write very quickly, and it took us about 18 months or something to finish writing the record, but the process of it is really satisfying. So I guess the short answer is that we do it for ourselves first. And then hopefully, the fans come along with us and are willing to wait and appreciate it when it comes out.

According to the press release, the goal was to write really good music. Nothing new there really, but how do you sense that your music is good? Do you have an inbuilt quality control?

– Yeah, I think between John and I, we both bounce stuff off each other. I think our main goal is to just make things and write things that really make us both kind of look at each other and go: Wow, that’s cool, that’s a little different, that feels epic or what a great chorus. That’s the thing that sort of is the gauge for us. And it’s not to say that every single thing we write has that, but most of it does. So at least for us, that’s the gauge, that’s the sort of quality control that we look for.

Joey says he is usually quite surprised at how a song turns out when John’s lyrics are in place.

– .As you know, John writes almost 100% of the lyrics. Sometimes some of us contribute small things. Phil contributed a lyric for instance. When John and I work together, pretty frequently I’ll go through them with him and just make suggestions along the way about how to say something, but John is the one who comes up with the premises, the story, the line and the execution of it. And, you know, it’s like when I’m writing the music, I can hear his voice in my head. So it’s almost like a lot of it is kind of expected when I hear it, but there’s been a lot of times where he will come up with things that are totally unexpected and even better than what I imagined. I very rarely give him a starting point. He always comes up with his own starting point. And sometimes he’s not 100% clear what he wants to do, but he has some ideas and I help him get there with that.

Do you sometimes miss the old ways of writing songs when you were in the same room altogether? Or are you okay with sending files back and forth and working that way?

– I’m okay with the way that we do it now. It’s fine. I find it more efficient, and I find that I am able to focus better. You know, there’s something special about getting together in a room. And I would say that there’s a small aspect of that, that I do miss. Sometimes things are born out of jams and spontaneity. It would be stupid to not recognize that, of course. When you’re alone, it’s just different. It’s not really better or worse, it’s just different. However, I work better and I work more efficiently myself when I’m alone. That’s just me though. But, you know, collaborating live in front of another person, also has its merits and its benefits. It’s just that I prefer to do that in smaller doses and I prefer to work alone in larger doses.

You have produced “Punching The Sky” yourself, what exactly does a producer do these days?

– Haha! Good question! There’s this organizational and the administrative part of it. That means spending the money. I have to take care of the budget and I need to know exactly who’s getting paid. I have to set up everything, find the studios and find the people to work with. Then there’s booking the preferred rehearsal rooms or the production rooms, and I also have to hire the person who’s mastering. There are other logistics too, handling budgets for supplies, like strings, drum sticks, drum heads, whatever. And then I also have to manage the account money which comes in from the record label. There’s a lot of boring stuff that goes along with being the producer, but the fun part of producing for me, is having a vision and something in my head about how I want the end result to sound. I’m the one that basically makes decisions along the way. This guitar part should sound like that. The drums should sound like that and the vocal should sound like this. Let’s double the vocals here. Let’s make background vocals here. It’s like a painter who is making decisions, first blending the colors he wants to use on his painting, and then he’s making decisions on which colors go where. So that’s, the kind of way I can visualize the explanation. I am also making decisions on the songwriting and on what songs go on the record and, and what the sequence of the record is. Everything aesthetically involved with what you hear as the end result of the record, is basically made by the decision making of the producer.

You are still four out of the five members that performed on the very first EP, how important has that been when it comes to keeping the band alive through all these years?

– Well, it’s been important for us. We take pride in the fact that we have all the original members in the band and that includes Jeff. He was here even when Dave was here, in the last couple years of his life, so that sort of thing is important for us. We think that it helps our integrity and how people perceive us as a band. It’s not like, John bush and four other guys, you know. This is Armored Saint, we’re a collective unit. Some of us have known each other since we were seven – eight years old. So we have such a long history and that connection is something that we try to maintain. The thing that’s mattered most for us, has been the music. Each one of us has a part in presenting that music. So we feel like, if you bring different players in, different people, suddenly you, you have different personalities. Then it’s a different thing. A completely different interpretation of what it was. So, that’s been important for us to maintain for those reasons.

Speaking about Dave Pritchard, it’s 30 years since he passed away. How does Joey remember him?

– Well, you know, he was pretty multi faceted. In general, he was always a really fun loving guy who was really fun to be around. A total jokester, he liked to pull pranks pranks on people, and he had a great sense of humor. He loved to party, loved to have a good time. And he will always be remembered for that. But he was also a very creative guy. He was great at playing guitar and he could also play piano. And he was also a great artist, he was really good at drawing. And so, you know, all around just a really cool and creative person. Like I said, just really fun to be around. In general, he’s still part of our psyche, he was a big part of what our sound was like back in the day on our first three records. He was a big part of that sound, he plays a lot of guitar on those records, and a lot of the ways that he played riffs was his own thing and his style. Dave has had a stamp on our sound that I never want to let go of.  Now look, I don’t want to just rewrite our whole history, you know, just over and over again. It’s very important for us to feel like we’re progressing and trying new things, but at the same time, I never want to lose sight of a little bit of that Dave’s presence. When I wrote the song “Never You Fret”, and was finished with those first couple of riffs. I said to myself, Oh shit, this feels like a Dave Prichard thing. I held on to that inspiration while we finished the song. So, that’s just an example of how Dave is always there.

You have said that at this point in your career, you feel a sense of freedom. Does this mean that you feel that you can do whatever you want and still release it as Armored Saint?

– I don’t think we can do whatever we want. I mean, I do think I’m well aware that there is a small amount of expectation from fans. But I don’t want to be bound by those expectations, as little or as big as they may seem. I need to have a sense that we can push the boundaries and try things and experiment with different influences we have and things that we want to do as songwriters. Take some chances here and there. I was describing this a little bit earlier when I spoke about how we got to a place where we felt like we were creating our own sound and feel like we didn’t have to really look over our shoulders at what else was happening around us. And this is what I mean, when I say this comfort zone is where we realized we’ve always been making our own music all along since day one. It just took us a while to realize that. Now I feel like we’re in this place where we’ve found the thing we should do. This is Armored Saint, and we can we can take chances, we can try things within reason. We’ve always had affinities for like say bluesy, hard rock. So we can explore that even more. We’ve always been influenced by rhythm and blues and things like that, even things that are slightly funky. So yeah, we feel comfortable exploring that further, even more so than we did on the last album. So this is what I mean when I talk about this comfort zone. I don’t feel like I’m in danger of ruining something. Because I think I’m pretty aware of what our parameters are, what range we can work within without pissing people off or turning people off. I’m also aware of the fact that you’re never going to please everybody all the time. So that should not be a concern or should not be a driving concern anyway, so I shouldn’t worry about that. We have to feel like we’re making honest music that comes from the heart.

I really love the song “Missile To Gun” from the new album. It’s a pretty much straightforward, heavy metal track.

– Again, that I don’t know where that came from, but after I wrote it, I heard that it had an old school thing about it. It actually reminds me of a band coming out of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. I mean, it kind of goes back to that feeling of early British heavy metal. It’s really up tempo with a great, great guitar riff, really simple driving stuff. I think it came out great.

As always, I’m also impressed by John’s voice. He still sounds incredibly good, and must be putting in a lot of work to take care of his voice.

– Yeah, he’s been doing that for quite some time now. I’d say at least for the last 10 to 15 years, he finally realized that he was getting older and that he, couldn’t just jump out of bed and start singing like he used to when he was younger. So he really has a very strict regime when he’s touring or when he’s recording or writing music, which means he’s very strict about what he does, and he has this whole ritual that he goes through. He gets out of bed and the first thing he does, is a warm up. And then he has, you know, his breakfast or whatever. And, you know, he takes time off and changes his diet. Sometimes when he’s on the road, he doesn’t drink coffee and he won’t eat dinner past eight o’clock at night, all kinds of things. He warms up for a good 30 minutes before we even hit the stage, sometimes longer. All of those things really have made an impact on the way his voice sounds. I think on the last two records, he sounded better than he’s ever sounded his whole career.

Let’s speak a little about the COVID-19 situation. You have done a couple of things, first you did a re-recording of the song “Isolation”, and you’re also doing a record release show that can be watched online. Do you think this whole thing will leave permanent marks on the metal scene?

– Well, I hope not. Hopefully it will just be a memory, and we can look back in the future: Remember that year 2020? Oh my god, what a nightmare! I hope it doesn’t have any lasting effect, for the sake of, working musicians and working technicians, people that are in the industry, but also for fans. And, I mean, I’m a fan of music too, I can’t go see any bands anymore. That sucks, it’s such a big part of all of our lives. It would be a travesty if it was permanent. I don’t think it’s going to be though. Yes, I think it’s going to take some time getting the psychological confidence back. So being in the same room with 600 people with 1500 people or with 15,000 people, it’s gonna take some time probably to gain that confidence back. But I’m really hoping that it turns around and you know, in the meantime, these virtual gigs are the only thing that artists and bands can do right now. So we’re embracing it. The record release show is going to be bizarre little weird happening, playing in a club with an empty venue It’s streaming on October 10. And it’s streaming all the way until November 8. So you can watch it on demand anytime you want for a whole month, and, it’s only 10 bucks to get in. We’re playing a full set with four brand, new songs from “Punching The Sky”. We intend to just go out there and rock out like normal. We also plan on answering questions at the end of the show. People are going to submit questions on our Facebook page, and then we’re going to take some time and answer a bunch of questions and it’s just a way for us to connect with them. We can’t go on tour. We can’t even play a local show, so we feel the need to reach out and have a connection. Also, our record’s coming out and we want to have a party.

Speaking about live stuff. There was this live album released a couple of years ago called “Carpe Noctum” Do you feel it was an appropriate live document from a band like Armored Saint? A live album from a band with your catalogue should at least be a double album and certainly not contain just eight songs?

– Well, you can be right about that. You know, I guess we need to do a double live album, something in the vein of UFO’s “Strangers In The Night”.  It’s funny, because we’ve released just about every song that you would think would be on a live record, but their all on different records.  There’s “Saints Will Conquer”, “Lessons Not Well Learned” and then there’s a bunch of live tracks on “Nod To The Old School” too, but I guess putting them into one package would make sense at some point yeah.

Joey is having a bit of a hard time naming his three favorite Armored Saint albums.

– My favorite three? That’s tough! Well, “Win Hands Down” for sure. I am gonna go with go the recent ones, so “La Raza” and “Symbol Of Salvation”.

“Symbol Of Salvation” needs to be there. That’s album is so timeless. You can listen to it and it’s still as good as it was when it was released. It’s like it almost hasn’t aged. I think that’s an all time classic.

– Yeah, that one has a special place for all of us. The album was a turning point for us. It was also a kind of rising from the ashes, as that’s where we were at that point, both as people and as a band. So that record, certainly had, and still has a lot of emotional meaning for all of us that will never go away. So yeah, that’s why that one stands out for sure.

It seems like you also had a very, fruitful period at the time because you did some demos with lots of great tracks that didn’t make the album too.

– Yeah, it was a long writing process, before Dave passed away. I think we had written 24 songs or something. And, you know, it was just a very productive time period, and also, I think, speaking about where we were musically, where we are musically now, it was an important thing for us to be dropped from Chrysalis. I guess in hindsight, to be able to write all those songs, it kind of forced us to experiment a little bit. Some things didn’t work, but some things did work well and, and we were able to grab onto some things that I think we still carry with us till this day. So it was a it was an important learning period for us.

Metal Blade is the label associated with Armored Saint, because you started there and you’re on Metal Blade again now, but how were the years on Chrysalis?

– Yeah, we started with Metal Blade, and then spent the following three or four years with Chrysalis. And you know, it was a lot of fun obviously, because we got to make three records with different producers in big studios. We also got to do a lot of touring, but at the same time, it was challenging for us because we were very young. When we got signed, we were all 20-21 years old. “March Of The Saint” came out and we didn’t know anything about the music business. The first year was probably a big slap in the face. It’s all fun and games, but It’s also business, you know. And suddenly we felt ourselves starting to lose a little bit of control of our career. You have managers and you have the record label asking you to do things that maybe we didn’t agree with, and suddenly, we felt like; Oh, this record label thinks we’re something else. They wanted us to be a little bit more of of a commercial rock or metal band. We explained that we loved the first Def Leppard record, but we weren’t gonna go the way of “Pyromania”.  And because we were an American signing, we suddenly felt ourselves feeling a little bit trapped. The label would never pay for us to tour Europe. They always said that it was too expensive and it wouldn’t be worth it. We told them that our biggest influences were from Europe, and we needed to go there and play. The label kept us from going there for four or five years. That was a really big mistake. And we were really pissed at them for doing that. So, a lot of good things came out of being on the major label, but also a lot of bad things. A lot of mistakes were made, and there were a lot of things that we would change if we’re given the chance again. But we were young, and we didn’t understand that we probably could have taken more control of our own career at the time. And those are just lessons that you learn.  

So you don’t regret anything?

– It’s kind of a hard thing to say those things are regrets, because sometimes you need to go through those things in order to become better on the other side. You need to learn, you need to fall down, you need to know how to get up. You’re stronger, and you’re better when you come out. So it’s hard to say I regret them. It’s hard to say I would change things as well. Because then I’d make some other mistakes. I mean, who goes through life without making mistakes? Nobody. So, you know, those are things that sometimes you need to go through, and maybe part of it was luck? Bad luck, if you want to call it that.

You have played in different bands with lots of great musicians and also acted as a producer, you have a pretty unique competence and knowledge that can perhaps be used also when you retire as active musician?

– I never really considered seriously retiring. I mean, there’s many days where I feel like: What am I doing this for? But no, I’ve never really thought of that. I mean, I just I really enjoy what I do, and I enjoy the people I choose to work with. I don’t work with everyone. I make choices, and I like to work with people that I can call friends and people that I have something in common with. I wouldn’t like to do it in a way where it was only work, where I had to work with somebody just because they hired me for my knowledge or something. I really have to have more of a connection than that. And that’s one of the reasons why I never really became a hired, sought after producer or engineer, because then I would find myself in a situation where I’m just taking work because I need to work. And I’ve been lucky enough to be in a lot of different bands and different situations where I never had to do that. So that’s one of the reasons why I never went down that route.

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They only ever made one album, but in those 18 short, furious blasts a whole new level of extremity was born. From Flint, Michigan’s punk scene and its creators warped and horror-addled brains grew ‘HORRIFIED’ and genocide paved the way for REPULSION. The stench still lingers today, as JIM YOUNG discovered in Issue Three.

The rancid tale of Repulsion is not an unfamiliar one. But unlike many bands that faded away, were plagued by obscurity, bad luck or bickering, redemption was found when the corpse of Repulsion was resurrected in 2003. They may not be recording a successor to the landmark ‘Horrified’ any time soon, but that album ensures their permanent residence in the league of extreme metal reserved for the perverse pioneers, the virile visionaries and the ephemeral elite… Before becoming ‘the fastest band in the world’ (and pretty much inventing grindcore) Repulsion’s story began in 1984, when they were known as the hardcore-baiting metal brats Genocide, in Flint, Michigan, dubbed “the worst place in the world to be an extreme musician”. “You pretty much had to do your own thing, there was no real scene to speak of,” explains bassist/vocalist Scott Carlson. “That’s really how we got involved in punk. No matter where you went after punk came out, there was a scene. It had such a huge impact on the world that there was a scene everywhere, unlike heavy metal, which hadn’t made its mark. We got involved in that just because we knew people that were putting on shows, making their own records, whatever it was they were doing things themselves. And because we were playing music that wasn’t in any way remotely popular, it just kinda fit for us. Flint’s hardcore scene immediately took to this strange new group, albeit after some initial reluctance. “When we were going up to the first gig, we were getting a little bit of hassle from skaters because we had Marshalls and the kinda gear that they considered to be lame, and our guitar players had real guitars [laughs]. But, once we set up and started playing people loved it because we were fast and aggressive, they could thrash to it and that’s what they were there for; people seemed to go to hardcore shows just to get some aggression out and you were able to do that to our music, so people just dug it.” Despite Genocide’s hardcore upbringing, and opening for the likes of DRI and Corrosion Of Conformity, political lyrics and imagery was (thankfully) eschewed for gore and horror; a natural choice for Scott. “I’ve always been into escapism since I was a little kid. I grew up watching Universal and Hammer Horror films and just always loved it, and I was reading HP Lovecraft when I was 13 years old, so it just came natural to write about gore and horror.” One film in particular resonated especially with the young Carlson. “I remember seeing ‘Dawn Of The Dead’, it absolutely blew my mind. It’s sort of lightweight material, but when it came out, I was like 12 or 13 and it absolutely shattered my being. All I did was think of gore after that [laughs]. I got a year’s subscription to Fangoria Magazine and read that cover to cover and listened to heavy metal all day long and those two things just sort of added up.”Gore and horror didn’t just inspire the band’s lyrics and imagery, however. It was a crucial part of the mentality behind the music of what would eventually become Repulsion. “The climax of ‘Re-animator’ was sort of an inspiration for our music because there was just a million things flying at the screen, gore coming at you from every direction, and that was how we wanted our music to sound, like the musical equivalent of the climax of ‘Re-animator’ or ‘Evil Dead’.”

In the Spring of 1985, having been penpals for some time with Death visionary, and fellow imbiber of the goblet of gore, Chuck Schuldiner, Scott and Genocide guitarist Matt Olivo moved to Chuck’s native Florida to combine forces with Schuldiner and drummer Kam Lee, after the line-up of Genocide collapsed. “We thought that was the answer to all of our problems. Matt was my song-writing partner and Chuck had Kam who was his song-writing partner, but almost immediately Kam decided he didn’t want to play drums anymore and didn’t want to be behind the kit, he wanted to be the front man so he went off and eventually formed Massacre.” “We were great friends with Chuck, he had the same sense of humour as us but he had a completely different level of drive and determination and he was always very much into the idea of being really technical,” continues Scott. “That’s not what Matt and I wanted to do, we came from a hardcore background, we wanted to just bash and make noise.” The unholy union lasted only a few months before Scott and Matt parted ways with Chuck. “We wrote the first couple of songs while we were still in Florida playing with Chuck and they were really fast and he thought they were too simple and too fast, so we were like, ‘Let’s just go home and start our own band, because I think we’re onto something here’.” Upon returning to Michigan, however, they were faced with the same dilemma they had before going to Florida:

“There were no guys who could play death metal, which was just becoming a term at the time. We couldn’t find a drummer.” It wasn’t long, though,before they found a depraved saviour in the form of Flint’s own, Dave ‘Grave’ Hollingshead, then a drummer in various local punk bands. “One day, we were at the local record store that we hung out at all the time and there was an article torn out from a newspaper, which is actually on the inner sleeve of ‘Horrified’, that was hanging on a door where you could hang up flyers and shit. We were reading this thing: ‘Youth involved in grave robbing’ and we were like, ‘That guy is perfect for us – he’s a punk rock drummer, he’s a grave robber, let’s get him to be our drummer’. Once Dave joined the reactivated Genocide, Scott and Matt immediately put him to work. “He was used to playing punk rock speeds and we were trying to be brutal and heavy and as fast as we possibly could, so we were just pushing him every single day to get faster and hit the drums harder. I think he probably hated us, we used him like he was our slave, we were like, ‘Faster, harder! Faster, harder!’ He became a much better drummer because of it, but he probably doesn’t have very fond memories of learning our songs or working out the music because we were constantly badgering him [laughs].”

This speed abuse was inspired by the likes of Cryptic Slaughter, Heresy, NYC Mayhem and DRI, “bands who really were mixing punk and hardcore and metal early on”. “It really wasn’t any metal band [that inspired us], it was hardcore bands that were playing really, really fast,” explains Scott. “We liked Possessed and we also liked NYC Mayhem, Slaughter and DRI, and we thought, ‘Let’s be as heavy and evil as Possessed, but as fast as DRI’. So yeah, it was definitely important for us to have that hardcore element in our music.” Genocide’s sound was also born out of a maniacal need to make music more extreme than anything previously heard, an ideal the boys were passionate about, to say the least. “We were definitely obsessed. If we heard a band with gore lyrics we’d be like, ‘Ours have to be gorier than that, otherwise what’s the point?’ If we heard a fast band, we had to be faster. If we heard a distorted bass, the bass had to be more distorted. I loved Venom but I thought, ‘Imagine if Venom were faster and had even more distortion!’ That was sort of the mentality.” Their need for extremity was not without consequence, and like many trailblazing bands, Genocide was misunderstood and under-appreciated. “We didn’t realise we were breaking ground, in fact we thought we were cutting our own throats, because the more extreme we got, the less people seemed to like it. It was inspiring to get letters from people like Shane Embury, who at the time was 13 years old, and Trey from Morbid Angel wrote us a letter and sent me a tape. I was like, ‘Wow there’s a band that’s way more musically adept than we are’. Around the local scene with the hardcore bands and stuff, the faster we got people just weren’t getting it. People just kinda stood there and scratched their heads when we played live.”By 1986, however, the band had consolidated their sound with Dave ‘Grave’ and the addition of Aaron Freeman joining on second guitar. Genocide then changed its name to Repulsion and it became time to finally record a demo under this moniker [Genocide had recorded three demos before the name change]. The 18-track recording, ‘Slaughter Of The Innocent’, was originally intended to be sent to labels in the hopes of getting signed and recording a proper album. However, this demo would become the band’s sole LP, ‘Horrified’, and wouldn’t see an official release until 1989 “It was recorded in a few days I think,” reveals Scott. “We recorded at this small studio in the basement of this guy who recorded radio bands and things like that. When I started recording the vocals, he literally fell out of his chair and rolled on the floor laughing, which didn’t make it any easier to record them.” ‘Slaughter…’ was recorded for $300 during a “quick and painless” three days in June 1986, with drums, bass and guitars tracked in a single session.“The week before recording the album we rehearsed intensely until we had the material down very well for when we went in the studio. Although, there are pretty serious mistakes on the record because none of us had been in a studio, so when we fucked things up we didn’t even bother to go back and fix them [laughs].

One of the fortunate mistakes that appears throughout the recording is the oft-imitated, but rarely-duplicated, Repulsion bass sound, which lead Napalm Death’s Mick Harris to coin the term ‘grindcore’. “I used to play a giant PA cabinet instead of a bass cabinet, so the bass always sounded really extreme and that was because I was really into Cronos; the bass sound that he has on ‘Black Metal’ is just amazing,” explains Scott. “When we recorded, I ran my distortion pedal straight into the mixing desk, in a scratch track so Dave could hear it in his headphones while he was doing the drums, and we recorded the amped bass track later on. But, the guy recording our album was smoking insane amounts of marijuana and he accidentally erased some of those amped bass tracks. So, we ended up having to use the scratch track because it was the only one that was there throughout the entire recording and it’s just a fuzz pedal going directly into a mixing desk [laughs].”

Once the demo was recorded, Repulsion sent it to “every record label in America”, but were met with “utter disappointment”. “We felt like we were about to get signed to Combat Records or Metal Blade or something like that, we thought we were going places y’know,” says Scott. “We thought everything was gonna happen for us. We weren’t thinking we were gonna be huge rock stars, we just thought we were gonna be a band that would tour with other bands that we liked and be accepted in part of the heavy metal music industry.” But, ‘Slaughter…’ was simply not a direction heavy metal labels in America were prepared to take at the time. “We sent the demo out to all the labels and it was just complete silence. Well, some of the labels were kind enough to at least reply, like Metal Blade and a few others. You know that they actually listened to it, because they said, ‘Hey, good job, but we’re not interested. Keep it up, send us your next material, blah blah blah’. Even the labels that were signing heavy heavy metal bands were not into us.” It would be three disheartened years until ‘Slaughter…’ was released. Repulsion went on hiatus three months after the recording, and then broke up in November 1987. “We were moving in different directions. No one gave a shit, and we didn’t give a shit anymore,” Scott laments. “I guess it was just a matter of being six months too soon. It definitely wasn’t like we were light years ahead of our time, it was just a few months. We started to hear things like Napalm Death and Morbid Angel and realised that there were other bands out there that were like-minded musicians. There was no Internet or anything, it was really like you were just on an island, and had we stuck a little bit longer we would have found more kindred spirits and we would have ended up playing with those bands and being part of that scene.” “Maybe we weren’t even ahead of our time, we just weren’t discovered,” reflects Scott. “But,we were lucky enough to be discovered later on. There are plenty of other bands out there, like Insanity from San Francisco. They never made proper recordings so it took years and years for people to discover them.”

The ‘Slaughter…’ recording lay festering, until in 1989, when Carcass gorelords Bill Steer and Jeff Walker entered the picture. Having recently gained enough clout to start their own imprint on Earache Records, and having been fans, to say the least, of Repulsion for quite some time, Bill and Jeff offered to release ‘Slaughter…’ through their imprint, Necrosis Records. Earache gave Repulsion some money to finally mix the grinding slab, and the demo became the album, ‘Horrified’ “We definitely felt relief,” says Scott, of howRepulsion reacted. “It was like, ‘Fuck yes! This is amazing! I can’t believe this is happening’. You couldn’t ask for a better label at that time to put our record out, we just immediately jumped at the opportunity. It was like vindication, finally people understand what we were doing and we were extremely happy about it.” 1989 was an ideal time for ‘Horrified’ to be released, but to really appreciate how devastatingly groundbreaking it is, consider when it was recorded – there were only a few bands that sounded anywhere near as extreme as Repulsion in nineteen-eighty-fucking-six. But, how does Scott see the album today? “I think ‘Horrified’ is a great record and,without trying to sound arrogant, it’s my favourite death metal album. I don’t really care for bands that are more extreme than that, because in order to get more extreme you pretty much have to start using studio trickery. To me, Repulsion still is the cutting-edge extremity when it comes to just organic sounds, just guitar, bass and drums, our whole ensemble taken to the Nth degree. “I think the fact that it was recorded so organically is what sort of makes it timeless,” explains Scott. “You can listen to it now and it doesn’t sound dated to me. It doesn’t have any of those things when bands started recording at Morrisound in Florida, where you’re like, ‘Oh that sounds like it’s from a certain era’, and then the Swedish death metal thing, which is fantastic as well, but has that sound which makes you think of an exact year. Our record kind of stands on its own because of the way it was recorded, which was just completely natural. It has a signature sound to it I guess.”As much as this is about an album that changed extreme metal, the band itself must be considered too, since this sole LP is Repulsion. “Our creative arc was much like the record, very short and extreme. The band was around for less than a year really, so it was just so intense for those months. That’s like all we did, we rehearsed five or six nights a week and when we weren’t rehearsing we were writing, I was sitting in my room writing lyrics or coming up with riffs.”

Scott, however, remains modest about the whole nine yards (horror, pain, gore, death) of Repulsion’s legacy. “The labels don’t really mean a whole lot because I know that there are plenty of influential bands out there, but I do realise that we are an influential band. I couldn’t be prouder to have been an influence on people like Nicke Andersson, these people have gone on to do amazing things, way more amazing than I’ve ever done. “Some people say, ‘How do you feel about bands like Napalm Death nicking riffs from you?’ and whatnot,” Scott continues. “I’m grateful for it because if it wasn’t for those bands we wouldn’t be talking right now. They put us on the map. We gave them inspiration, but they gave back as much, if not more than, what they took from us, so we are extremely grateful for all those bands.” With ‘Horrified’, Repulsion’s grotesque vision was finally realised and, in typical Repulsion fashion, that vision lasted only briefly, though it still violently resonates in extreme metal today. “I think we reached the pinnacle around the time that we recorded ‘Horrified’, because we actually did go back into writing mode after that and things started to slow down and get a little tamer and we lost our inspiration. With ‘Horrified’, I think we said everything we needed to say about that kind of music. Once we got it out of our system we were done.”

A new Cirith Ungol-album, their first in nearly 30 years, simply can’t go unnoticed here at Metal Squadron. I called drummer and original member Robert Garven to get all the details on the long awaited comeback from what must be considered as one of the founding acts of epic heavy metal. Robert, when Cirith Ungol disolved you said that you would never touch the drumsticks again. What made you reconsider?

– Well, you know, I was pretty firm on that. And I never thought that we would ever get back together. And that’s why Greg (Lindstrom) and I put out “Servants Of Chaos” on Metal Blade, with a bunch of our old stuff that we never thought would see the light of day. And some of that, I wouldn’t say it’s embarrassing, but it was our early stuff, and it was kind of more primitive. I think we did that, because we never thouhgt it was going to be another reunion or anything. We were 100% positive of that. But then, Oliver from Keep It True started emailing me around 2003 saying: “Hey, you guys should get back together at the festival I put on every year now. It’s really popular, and people would love to see you.” I just said: “Hey, look, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen.” Then, I had a friend, Carl Valdez, who was a drummer in this punk band, Ill Repute which is a local band that is kind of well known around the world. Carl kept telling me about his buddy Jarvis, who’s in Night Demon, another local heavy metal band. Carl said that Jarvis wanted to talk to me about Cirith Ungol. For a while, I kept saying that I wasn’t really interested. I just didn’t want to talk about the band. Of course, over the years, I’ve done interviews. But really just to keep the name of the band and our music alive. I never really expected any money from it, or for us to get back together. I just thought that what we did was significant. And I thought that some of our music should be at least listened to by newer generations. So anyway, Carl kept bugging me saying: “You got to meet my friend Jarvis.” So after some time, I met him. And we talked for a while. And, you know, he said: “I’m going to put on a local festival (Frost and Fire) here in our hometown with bands come from all over the world. Would you guys consider doing a signing session?” We talked to most of the members of the band that were still around and agreed to do it. So he had a two day festival like Friday and Saturday night with bands from all over. A lot of people showed up from all over the world. And it was just a really cool event. Sunday afternoon came around with a few more bands playing. So we sat down at a table and got a couple of pens and a line of people queued up to get our autograph and have som records signed. It was quite a large number of people. I mean, we were really impressed by how many people were interested. And most of them were younger, and they probably hadn’t even been born back when we broke up in 1991. So that was pretty amazing. Oliver from Keep It True was there to check out Jarvis’ festival, and he said he wanted to talk to us across the street in this little sushi bar. Jarvis asked us what we thought about the festival and the signing session, and we told him we were blown away. He said that he was going to put up another edition of the festival next year, and wanted us to headline, right there in our hometown. That was  exciting for us to think about, so we’re kind of mulling that over. And then Oliver goes: “I’ve a similar offer. Everything is booked for this year, but if you guys are interested in getting back together and play, you can headline my 20th edition one. As a matter of fact, if you and Tim (Baker) want to come over in a couple of months to check out the one that we have going on, you are both welcome.” In our mind, we were all, you know, thinking about this as a possibility. So Tim and I went over there, checked it out, and we were really impressed. When we came back, we sat down with the band. And, you know, we decided to give it a go.

– Now unfortunately, Flint (Michael Vujejia) lived in Las Vegas, which is around an eight hour drive from where we live. And the plan was for him to play all along, but it became obvious really soon that he wasn’t going to be able to make practices just because of his job and the distance involved. And so Jarvis, since he kind of got us together… You know, he’s playing bass, he’s in Night Demon, playing in several other bands as well. Also part of the deal was he said he would manage us, if we got back together. And so, you know, it just kind of seemed obvious that if he wanted to play bass, we thought that would be a great a great addition, since he’s also a younger guy with a little bit more energy and stuff. So that’s how I decided to get back, you know, and pick up my drumsticks. The reason I never wanted to play again wasn’t because I didn’t like heavy metal or I didn’t want to play drums. When the band broke up, we were kind of bitter on a lot of stuff that was going on in the music industry and our record company at the time. So it was just like, if you had a girlfriend that you broke up with, and you said: “I’m never gonna go out on another date, ever again.” It was kind of one of those things. But I’ve been haunted over the years, I woke up in the middle of the night sweating and screaming, thinking I was in a band or we’re recording an album or buying a new drum set. So the thought of playing never left me, I just pushed it on the back burner.

Have you played the drums at all for all these years? And was it too hard to to start doing it again more regularly?

– Jarvis’s band, Night Demon, has a little band room and they let us go over there. Dusty, the drummer, let me use his drum set, so I sat in there and played for a little bit. The next step we had was Jimmy (Barraza) coming in, and we were playing some of the stuff from some of the albums that we worked on with him before. And Tim showed up one day, and I think we said: “Hey, come on over. We’re jamming.” When he showed up, we gave him a microphone and so we were all in there playing. I mean, it came pretty naturally to us. That’s one of the amazing things about a lot of people who are listening to the new album or the single “Witch’s Game” are saying: “I can’t believe these guys sound like Cirith Ungol.” Well, we are Cirith Ungol!

Through interviews I’ve read, I can almost sense that you feel you deserved a bit more back in your active period. Something along the lines you have experienced since you reformed maybe?

– Well, you know, we were buddies back in the day. We were hanging out with bands like Rush at the time. They made it big. A lot of the bands that we were hanging out with, like Y&T, we saw a lot of these bands rise up, and become really big. I don’t think we felt like we deserved a lot, but we thought our music was certainly on par with a lot of the bands that we were playing with. As a matter of fact, a lot of the bands seemed like they were kind of trendy. We didn’t really see them as true metal, at least not the metal that we grew up on. We kind of felt like we were the standard bearers. So yeah, I don’t think we felt like we deserved any attention, but we felt like we should get at least a little bit. It’s like the sunlight was shining on everyone else, and that we were off in the dark.

As you mentioned, you were kind of fed up with the whole music business. In the booklet of the compilation that you mentioned, “Servants Of Chaos”, you write that “Talents were wasted by an industry that promotes not music, but greed, and not art, but hype.” Are things really better now?

– Once again, when you’re bitter, you say things. I think what’s ironic, I talked to a bunch of people over the years. And you know, all you have to do is watch documentaries about bands on TV. I recently saw one about Led Zeppelin and another one about Kiss. Every band has been somewhat screwed over by the record companies, whether you’re a small band like us and never really sold a lot of records initially, or you were like a giant band and sold millions of records. It doesn’t mean that sometimes you don’t get money, but most of the bands have had trouble over the years, dealing with record companies or managers. When I look back on that, I think maybe I was being a little bit overly sensitive, seeing how everyone else had the same experience. That said, the internet comes in, and it literally destroys most of the major record companies, and pull up the ability to be heard, just by pushing a button, you know. You could mention a band I’d never heard of, or I can mention the same to you. I sit here at my computer, I could make a few clicks on my keyboard, and I could be listening to one of the old bands from the 1970s that almost no one had ever heard of. So I think the Internet has brought a lot of music, and music listeners together, like no one else could have now.

– Also, we were friends with Brian (Slagel) who started Metal Blade Records. Back when we first put ou our first album “Frost And Fire”, which we released as a demo to try to get record label attention, I remember one night in his record store, when we went: “Hey, you know, we have this new album. Our dream is to be famous, play heavy metal.” And he goes: “Hey, I dwant my own record company.” Over the next few weeks, we were talking with him, and he hooked us up with the guys that actually imported our record to Europe, and ended up being our record company. A the same time, he started getting his own record label together and he says: “I’m gonna put out a compilation album. Would you guys like to be on it?” This was “Metal Massacre 1”.  We said, of course, and put a song on there – “Death Of The Sun”. And, you know, the rest is kind of history. I mean, his company just took off. Now fast forward when we got back together. The first person we thought of, and the first company we thought of was Metal Blade. We had a pretty good working relationship with them back then. And now it turned out it’s been the most perfect relationship you could imagine. All the guys at the record company are really supportive of the band. As a matter of fact, several employes, especially in Europe, are big fans of the band and when we played some of the shows, they show up. It’s just an amazing situation. I think we realized that this is a company that we actually have so much history with. We’re both walking down the same path. We love heavy metal and wanna play heavy metal music, and Brian and his company has been one of the biggest promoters of heavy metal. I think that we actually found a record company that understands us and we understand them. And every project that they put out, we look at it and we talk  to them about it. And when it finally comes out, and we see it, everyone in the band is blown away.

When I listen to you, and what made the band break up in the early nineties, it seems like it was mainly outside factors, and not what you did on records, in live settings or the decision making within the band. Was it really only outside factors that destroyed the band back then?

– Yeah, pretty much. You got to look at it, we were together for so long. Remember, the first member to leave the band was Jerry (Fogle). Jerry left the band because when you’re together for so long, and you’re not making any kind of headway, it’s like you’re swimming up the river upstream. You know, you can do that only for so long. And I think you got to give us credit, we were together for 20 years at least, maybe 21 possibly, if you count when we were first starting. You don’t expect a lot of money or recognition, but you expect at least not to be drowning. At the time, we were looking for another guitarist and we brought Jimmy in, and was to actually have two guitarists. We had no intention of replacing Jerry, after all he was the original member, and an ubelievable guitarist. But somehow he saw that as threatening. And even though we tried to convince him, it didn’t persuade him from leaving the band. So you know, here we are with Jimmy playing guitar. And he was a fantastic guitarist, about 10 years younger than us, and he really felt like he was a member of the band. We’re getting ready to put out our forth album “Paradise Lost”, but then Mike Flynn, our bass player, quit the band. We had to actually go and try to find some other members to replace him just for the album. We ended up with a couple of guys that we just found locally, they played on the album, but they weren’t serious about being in the band for any long term commitment. And so right after the album was recorded, they actually left the band. So we found another bass player, Vern, and he played with the band for a while.

– Then at some point, the album came out. And there was zero record company support. As a matter of fact, I remember them telling me that they wanted me to call a couple of the record companies in Europe to see whether they would pick our album up. It was amazing, because our previous three albums have done better in Europe than in the United States. And the fact they wanted us to actually try to contact record companies overseas, was just amazing. We had signed a three album deal with Restless Records, but one day I got a letter in the mail saying they had decided not to pick up the contract for the other three albums. In quick succession after that, Vern left the band, Jimmy left the band, and suddenly me and Tim were sitting there. And we’re just kind of looking around thinking where the landscape of heavy metal is headed. All the hair bands were going on, a lot of the faster speed metal bands were popping up, and it just didn’t feel like there was a way forward for us. And so you could say it was all outside forces. And it kind of was. I mean, no one in the band hated each other. I just told you, I just watched a Led Zeppelin and a Kiss-documentary, but none of us were fighting, or angry with each other. And musically, I don’t think we were at that different odds. But let’s say you are four guys that you show up to work one day and the business you work for is gone. Let’s say it’s a restaurant and that the kitchen burnt down over the night or something. You’re standing around in the the waiting room saying: “Well, are we gonna work here today?” You see the restaurant and what is left,  and you figure, there’s no future and you go home. I think that’s what happened with the band. The music world, or at least the music listeners around the world were changing. And we wanted to still play the same heavy metal that we grew up with. Black Sabbath, early Deep Purple, Uriah Heep,Thin Lizzy, all that kind of stuff. And so we just kind of thought, if this is moving in this direction, maybe there’s no more room for us? Me and Tim looked at each other and we talked about getting some more members back together, and we talked about what we had to do bring them out or feel like we do about music, and it just seemed like an impossible task, so we just decided we’d lay the band to rest, you know.

There are countless stories of bands around, and at the same time that kind of split up because they tried to go in a different musical direction and doing more commercial or mainstream stuff. Was there never any pressure on you to do that?

– Yeah, kind of, in a way. It’s funny, a lot of the bands at the time, were starting to play really fast metal, you know, and on our third album, “One Foot In Hell”, we had a song called “Blood & Iron”, which was a little bit more upbeat. But I think we always wrote songs, not based on how fast they were, or what kind of song It was, we’d write a song, and if it was slow, it was slow. If it was fast, it was fast. But we didn’t actually try to cater to any of that. And we did talk about it over the years, we talked about where the music industry was going. But no one could see us putting on heavy makeup and weren’t women’s clothing. To us, it seemed kind of weird. I mean, it was just something that we didn’t really want to do. When we met with the original record company we signed, with, Greenworld, which turned into  Enigma, which turned into Restless Records, so we were actually with them over three different corporation- or companies’ periods, I think it was maybe after “King Of The Dead, they called us and said they had someone who was really interested in managing the band.The first thing he said was: “All the bands in LA are doing this. I’ll manage you, but you guys gonna have to change your style, start wearing lipstick, and start dressing up in womens clothing.  We said we needed to think about it, so the guy left the room and like, five minutes later, we said: “No, we’re not gonna do that.” The record company was pissed at us, and this guy said: “You guys are idiots, and you are never going to be successful. But if that’s the way you want it, that’s what you want.” He ended up working with Guns N’ Roses. He was the guy that brought them out of the shadows. You fast forward to, like, 20 years later, you know, we’re all sitting in a room going like: Man, where’s the lipstick?  But I mean, I don’t think that was the road that we were going to take. No, that’s the one thing that I’m proud of, is that we stayed true. With this new album, I keep hearing the same thing over and over again. To me, it’s like the biggest compliment you could ever get, when people are saying, the new album sounds like  we did a fifth album back in the day.

One thing that has impressed me is that there seems like you have had a plan from the start with this reunion. You have been well prepared for the live gigs, I guess you probably knew that you would only get one shot at this.

– We decided to reform in 2015 and 2016 we played our first show at the “Frost And Fire”-festival here in Ventura. Then we did Keep It True in 2017. But even though we all kind of wished there was going to be more, we were pretty sure we’re gonna play just one or two shows. We’re gonna play “Frost And Fire” here, and we’re gonna play “Keep It True”. Just because we love our music and we wanted to share it with some new generations of fans, but it seemed like more people were interested in the band so we kept playing more shows. Obviously, we’re not touring like an average band will tour. Like Night Demon goes on tour for two or three months, playing six nights a week. We can’t do that, over the time we broke up, a lot of the guys in the band had careers and families and stuff like that. And also too in the United States, our vacation time you can get from jobs, is very small, nothing like the civilized European countries, right? So we’re stuck to playing just a handful of shows every year. But that has been working out pretty good for us.

– In 2018, Tim found some information online about these guys making a movie, called “The Planet Of Doom”. We were kind of excited because on our third album, now we had a song that I wrote the lyrics to, called “Doomed Planet”. We thought it would be cool if they used our song in the movie. We contacted the producers, and it turned out they’re big fans of the band. We made arrangements to use our song for the closing credits. I’m not sure if you know about the movie, but there’s 15 different artists grouped with 15 different bands. There are no talking in the movie, it’s all just animation with the music. We wished we could have been one of these bands, and worked on a song for the movie, but we figured we missed the boat on that, and that’s how it was. Suddenly the producers called us back up and said: “Hey, one of our bands dropped out for one reason or another.You guys want to write a song for the movie?” Since we’ve never done that before, we got very excited about it. So we wrote a song specifically for the moviea and Tim wrote the lyrics to fit the storyline of the movie. And that one actually came as out as a single “Witch’s Game” in September 2018. As soon as that was released, there were a lot of reviews and people saying: “Wow, I can’t believe these guys still play the same as they did, and  sound just like they did. We hope that there’s maybe another full length album.” And even though we’ve been working on material since we got back together, I don’t think we ever thought anything would come out of it. We were just doing it, because that’s what musicians do.  As a band, you work on material. So, but as soon as we heard all those positive responses, we talked to Metal Blade Records, and we said: “Let’s do another album.” About the same time we’ve been planning on doing a live album. As soon as the band got back together, Metal Blade wanted us to do a live album for our reunion. And so that was in place, and it came out in December 2019, after it had already been in the works for around a year too. So this new thing, we were keeping it under wraps, as we just didn’t want to step on the other project we were working on. As soon as the live album came out, we kind of let people know that we were gonna have another studio album out too.

I mentioned that it seems like you have been taking one step at a time. First with a song, “Witch’s Game” and anticipating the reception of that one, then doing the live album, which is kind a safe thing to do with the quality back catalogue that you have, and so a full studio album. 

– You’re right. But you know, the longest journey begins with one single step. You did say something about us just having one shot at this. We sort of knew that. Still, I don’t think we were  thinking about that when we were writing music. It was more along the lines of: How can we write the heaviest song? We want to play the heaviest music possible. And I say this to everyone I talk to: I will let you be the judge, but we didn’t put these albums out for any other reason than our love for heavy metal and playing the heavy music. Most of us grew up on that. You know, when you go to a concert and you see a band and they’re playing super heavy, and it just blows you away. We want to be part of that! That’s it’s kind of our dream come true. Just to play the music.

So you weren’t sure when you reunited the band that there would be a new studio album?

– I don’t think we had any real confirmation of that until after “Witch’s Game” came out, but we started working on material right away. It was all kind of primitive stuff, we were just coming up with songs and we bought some digital recording equipment just to work on demos. So as soon as we wrote a song, we recorded it, we put down vocals and went back to do overdubs for some lead guitar, and maybe do a couple of different versions of it, trying to whip them into shape. After “Witch’s Game” came out, I think we realized that a new album was a possibility. I think it’s a really good song and the movie is possibly coming out sometime next year. We’ve seen all sorts of little clips, you can go on YouTube, or Instagram, and they always have updates. Some of the stuff is really amazing. A lot of the bands on the record are probably more doom metal than us, but it’s just an amazing group of artists and musicians. I think when this thing comes out, it’s gonna blow everyone away.

What exactly has been Jarvis’ role in getting the band back together? You mentioned a bit about the importance of the Frost And Fire festival, but being away for so long it was it important for you to have someone that knew the scene and the right people like he does?

– Yeah exactly, we never had a proper manager. As a matter of fact, I did most of the stuff. And I probably alienated more people than I made friends with, but I was always trying to push the band. I think Jarvis having all the contacts in the music industry, obviously he is a natural at what he does. They call him the hardest working man in rock and roll. He’s playing in five bands, and he’s managing a bunch of bands. It just was a perfect thing. And to answer your question, we wouldn’t be talking right now, if it wasn’t for him. That’s the honest truth. He is very supportive, you know. When Night Demon, go off and play on tour, we sit back at home and practice and work on songs and stuff. When he’s back, we take it up. So it’s been a really good relationship. Everyone that likes our band should thank him for getting us back together. Because he deserves the majority of the credit, that’s for sure.

He’s both playing in the band, acting as the manager and being a fan as well, that’s quite a few roles, right?  He said, In a recent interview, he said that it was his job to protect the legacy of the band. Aren’t you able to do that yourself as original members of the band?

– Well, you know, I think we’re doing that. I think what he’s talking about, is sometimes… I mean, when we signed our deal with “Paradise Lost”, we actually had a entertainment lawyer who was pretty famous, recommended by the record company.  So we went talk to him, and he looked over the contract and said: “This is a great, sign it!” And it turns out, we signed away almost all the rights for the songs and the music forever. And years later, I contacted the guy back and he said: “Oh, yeah, but that’s what everyone was doing.” We told him that it would have been something we might have wanted to know when we signed it. I think what Jarvis is talking about isn’t necessarily the musical legacy, it’s the whole legacy of the band. When wet got back together, if we hadn’t had a manager, who knows what kind of contract we might have signed or deals we would have made? To be honest, this has been a package deal. He’s been helping the band out immensely, got us back together and set us on the right foot. The music and stuff, that’s all classic Cirith Ungol, but without someone like him as a guiding force, we’d be lost in the wilderness.

Many drummers are quite anonymous in a band, but you have supplied lyrics, written liner notes, compiled stuff for compilation albums and are doing interviews. How do you see your role as a drummer compared to the usual drummer, if you if you know what I mean?

– Well, you know, I was one of the original founders, me and Greg put the band together. And we had a friend Jerry, that we brought on board to play guitars. So I was one of the original members. A lot of the drummers that I meet in bands, they’re important factors in their respective acts. Not in every band of course, but for bands that maybe never made it and became famous, a lot of drummers probably are doing more than they get credit for. My love for music is so strong and was so strong, and since this was a band that I helped found, sometimes some of these duties fall to me by default. My drumming style is very unique,  some people don’t have many good things to say about it. It is maybe like, 95% style and 5% technical ability. And I’m fine with that, because when I get all worked up, and I’m playing, no one can stop me. I like to call it performance art. I mean, for me, I’m more like a caveman in a trance when I’m playing than some proficient drummer that can play both jazz, country, rock and blues.

What about the the lyrical side of things? Did you like approach writing lyrics differently compared to what you did in the past? I guess it’s been a long time since you last wrote a lyric for a song.

– Well, you know what? I worked on f the lyrics to some of the best songs in the past. Tracks like “King Of The Dead”, “Doomed Planet”, “Nadsokor”, stuff like that. With this album, Tim has always been writing, you know, tons of lyrics. He has so many lyrics down, that we could probably put out another eight albums. So he was always writing all these really great lyrics, all very dark and dystopian.

– What I’ve always tried to do is, one song an album or something. I enjoy writing lyrics and so on this album, I wrote the lyrics to “Legions Arise”.  I wanted to do a song that would be part two, lyrically of “Join The Legion”, which was on our last album, “Paradise Lost”, and basically saying: Hey we’re a heavy band, we’re trying to spread true metal across the globe. Come join us in our fight to do that! My thought for “Legions Arise” was I wanted to say: Hey, you know, we’ve been slumbering for eons, but we’re rising now. It’s kind of like a call to arms to get all the people that either supported the band in the past or new people that like the music, to follow us and join us again  as we try to resurrect our mission to vipe false metal off the face of the earth or whatever. On the rest of the album, though, for the lyrics, Greg wrote two songs “The Frost Monstreme” and “The Fire Divine”. Those songs, I think were kind of a nod back “Frost And Fire”. Kind of episodes of the band, based on sword and sorcery and fantasy themes like that, with the rest of the lyrical content coming from Tim, all based on his dark vision of the future.

And that seems to fit quite well with the dark times we are in at the moment.

– Yeah, unfortunately! We kind of crack up sometimes, you know, Tim always shows me some interview where someone says we’re the grandfather’s of doom rock or whatever. But I mean, I think music over the centuries, plays out what’s going on around you. All you have to do is look around and see where mankind and our planet is headed and the environment. And so I think, a lot of our songs over the years, even though they’ve been fantasy based, I think some of them also portray a bleak future. Like I said, it doesn’t take a Nostradamus to look around us and see where we’re headed right?

Are there songs on the album that are closer to your heart than the rest?

– You know, actually, I like all of them. I like “Legions Arise”, the upbeat tempo of it. But you know, every song on the album is good. A few of the ones, you know, I’m more partial to than others. “Fractus Promissum” is one of those songs, there’s a cool double bass drum beat in there with a cowbell. And I’ve been recently talking with Ray Phillips, who was the original drummer in the band Budgie, which was one of my big influences. And I told him, we have a new album coming out, we’re working on a song. There’s a song that they did, which I really loved, called “Whiskey River”, which is on the album “Squawk”. It had a drum beat that I just always felt trigged by, so I told him that I, to honor him was going to try to slip one of these drumbeats in there that’s similar to what one of his was. He thought that was really cool. And you can hear that it made it through the cut.

Comeback albums, at least good comeback albums are really hard to create. What was the biggest challenge for you making this new album?

– I’d say it was time, because we were trying to finish it up for the very the end of the year, because the release of the album was to coincide with our playing a double headlining night at “Keep It True”. And with all this stuff that’s going on, you know, the concert got postponed. And there’s some talk about it even being postponed again. I’m not even sure where this is going. But you know, we were so excited to get the album out. And we wanted it on sale at the show, so we were trying to wrap up all the mixing. So I think the hardest part of it was, after it was all done, just trying to get it together. I don’t see anything difficult in there other than that.

– When you recorded before it was all on tape and now it’s digital. That came with a few different things. I think tape always sounds better than the digital recording, but digital recording is so much more flexible. Like let’s say I mess up a drum beat, back in the day, you’d have to just redo the whole song over. Now you could just drag that snare beat over into where it belongs. Same thing with doing all the overdubs. Back in the day, I remember, on “King Of The Dead” or something, we did like seven takes of lead guitar. And every one of them would be deteriorating from the first one and we were like: “Oh, my goodness, if we could have just kept those first earlier versions, maybe they would have been the best ones?” And with digital thing you can do a 100 takes, then decide to use number 99. Now we obviously didn’t do that many, but I’m just trying to explain the difference between the tape and the digital thing. Digital just is so much more flexible. Also when “Paradise Lost” came out, one of the best songs on the album, which was the title track, there was a part which I just loved and it had this chugging drumbeat and that guitar pumping. And for some reason, the way the producer was working on the album, and we didn’t have a lot of control over that, there was a part in there that was messed up. When Tim went to sing, his singing wouldn’t fit in there. I was standing there in the studio and they actually rolled the tape onto the ground and just cut it off with a razor blade. I have that rolled up somewhere in a drawer and I remember it has a little note on it saying: “The best 20 seconds of Cirith  Ungols music in our entire career.”  And that’s how I felt when it ended up on the cutting room floor. But back to digital recording, if you had that same issue, you could just go in there and reinsert the right part and continue on like nothing ever happened. So I mean, there was a bunch of great things about it. But I think also you lose a little bit of that spontaneity.

Do you feel that you have made the album that you wanted to make? Or the album you think the fans want to hear? Or is that one and the same thing in your opinion?

– I don’t know, to be honest, because I think that we were working on an album that we wanted to hear. I keep going back to that. You know, I don’t even like using the word “fan”. I always tend to use “friends”, because fans seem kind of condescending. You know, someone’s a fan of mine, or whatever. But the reality, is everyone in our band, are fans, you know. I’m a fan of other bands. I mean, there’s bands that I worship, and I’m sure there’s guys that like our band the same way. There’s definitely bands that I look up to like they’re gods. I think that’s the beauty of this, to be able to create music that other people enjoy and respond to, is the reward and why we’re in this. I don’t know if that makes sense to you, but that’s how I feel about it. I think everyone in the band, we’re writing music, to create good music. We weren’t thinking about whether this sounded anything like our old stuff .My joke amongst people is that this is Cirith Ungol 5.0, like a new version of us. I was actually worried that people would think that we changed too much. I hear people say: “Wow, it sounds like you never listened to music for the last 40 years.” I thought maybe our new stuff was too modern for our older listeners.

And but you can really hear that it’s the same band. It sounds a bit more modern, but you can still hear it’s Cirith Ungol.

– Well, you know…Jimmy’s guitar work which is just fantastic. Jarvis’s bass playing on the album also came out really good. Tim’s vocals and my drumming are so unique, and I think if he’s sang and I played drums on any song, it would sound like Cirith Ungol.

You did an exclusive track for a flexi disc coming with the Decibel magazine. Did you record even more songs?

– We did a few other things that we’re setting aside for maybe some future projects. But I want you to know, the work goes on. People were surprised that we wrote, “Witch’s Game”, but we were writing all sorts of other material at the same time. You know, this album is done, but we’re working on other material right now. And the hope is that we’ll have some future projects. I mean, obviously, there’s nothing concrete. If there was, I could tell you about it. There is  no plan to do anything after this album, but that doesn’t mean we’re gonna stop moving ahead. Like you said, one step at a time.

I know there are some people that would like you to rerecord some of your older, unreleased stuff. I think this track on the flexi disc you did for Decibel magazine is in fact an old song.

– Yeah, did you hear that one already?

No, not yet.

– Well, there are some bad versions of it going around on YouTube. It was on a flexi disc, so it probably doesn’t have the dynamic range of a full, lossless recording, but I think the song came out pretty good. And you know, people asked why wasn’t that on the album? Or why wasn’t “Witch’s Game” on the album? There’s a very simple answer to that. We conceived “Forever Black” to be an album that would be really brooding and dark. When we found Michael Whelan’s painting, it just fit to a tee what we thought the music was. We were just really excited about that. We haven’t had a full album out in 29 years, and we’re not going to have an old song that we redid on it. “Witch’s Game” is fantastic, but we released it as kind of a limited edition single. And we thought that was such a cool thing to do. I know a lot of people complained It was kind of expensive, but I think they only made 1000 records and that was probably the only amount they’ll ever make, right? And so to us, that was a really cool stand alone project.

Manilla Road is a band that you were always, maybe not compared to, but at least named alongside. What was your relationship to Mark Shelton and the music of Manilla Road?

– Well, you know, after we got back together, it was a really close relationship. A lot of the shows that we played, they were playing. So we played together, we got to know each other, the members of the band and became good friends. I mean, it’s hard to become close friends in any concert settings, because, you know, you’re in and out. But you know, we saw them play a bunch of times, and appreciated, their artistic talent and their music. But I have to be honest withyou, our whole life was about searching for music. And I remember Greg and I would go to record stores in LA, and we searched through import bins for records from all around the world. Right across the street from our high school there was a record store, and me and Greg went there one day and he pulls out this record and shows me. It’s  Black Sabbath first album, and he goes: “I wonder who these guys are?” We were looking at it, thinking it looked really cool and that the guys must be good. So, you know, we were right there when this kind of early wave of heavy metal was created. We were always trying to search out bands and stuff. And here’s the irony of this. We thought we were the band that knew every other band. You know whether it was Lucifer’s Friend or Night Sun from Germany. We listened to Budgie, Thin Lizzy’s first album and Scorpions’ first album, years before anyone in the United States even knew who they were. We were playing alongside Manilla Road at the same time, but none of us in the band never even heard any of their stuff back in the day.  People say: “How can that be?” And I don’t know, I think maybe, we were searching for more  European stuff, while we were missing the stuff that was sitting around us.I don’t think that we would have neglected someone that significant otherwise.

You have played with a lot of new bands with younger musicians as well at these festivals. What is your impression of the heavy metal scene these days when it comes to songwriting, originality, image and stuff like that?

– Well, it’s unbelievable. A lot of people have said, and this is true, that everyone’s focusing on all these bands from the eighties. Bands like us and all these the older generation of metal heads, and they say that the stuff of the new generation of guys isn’t as good. That’s just total bullshit! There’s so many good bands out there. And all these new generation of bands, especially playing the kind of epic, heavy metal that we did, are great. When the time comes for us to pass the torch, because we exit stage left for one reason or another, there is no doubt in my mind. All of these bands will be the guys to carry the torch forward. And so, you know, the irony is that, 20 years from now, you’ll be talking about all the bands, these younger bands now. We’ll be like Mozart or ancient history, right? But these new bands will be the guys that people are focused on. I guess the irony is, the grass is always greener on the other side. And, you know, people are always looking at something that they can’t have. But I mean, I think that’s the deal with Oliver and Keep It True and Cirith Ungol. It’s like, trying to bring back people that were dead, you know. Let’s bring back someone that they had no chance of hearing. And I think that was maybe some of the lure to our band. It’s like Captain Ahab chasing the white whale.  But the reality is that there’s music all around us. With the different sub genres of metal, whether you like death metal, speed metal, black metal, doom metal or stoner rock, whatever you call it, I think it’s just so beautiful that the giant metal community can embrace all these different types of music. The shows that we played with the most diverse group of bands, I think, were the most fun. We got to hear and see bands and music that we probably would have never been exposed to.

It can also be the other way around.I was considering the festival you did in Finland in 2018, but there wasn’t a lot of other bands that I like on that lineup.

– Yeah, but Blow Up was a wonderful festival. I’m not sure whether they’re going to do it again. There were some questions when it was over, with the promoter saying it might be the last one. I think with a lot of festivals, the promoter says that. Yeah. There’s so much stuff going on, it’s so tiring. That was a unique experience. It was just beautiful there. It was all rainy and stuff and cold the day of the show, but the day afterwards, the sun came out. It was just a remarkable experience. And like I said earlier, we we’ve only been to Norway for just like an hour. So, if we all make it through all this to the other end, my dream is that we can visit some more of the Scandinavian countries. They’re so fantastic. We’re really bummed out a lot of these concerts have been cancelled. And not only that, like the loss of life and the people suffering right now. It’s hard to concentrate on the music when you see so much real true pain and suffering. Our music reflects that, but once again, in no way am I trying to, by talking about the band, to diminish the real pain and suffering that’s going on in the world at the moment.

You mentioned Rush earlier. The passing of Neil Peart affected us all, but was the guy important for you as a drummer?

– Neil was one of those more technical drummers, something I could probably never achieve.But here’s the story: I had a friend in Canada and he said: Hey, I got these buddies in a band called Rush. They’re playing up here and they’re really good. They’re hard rock or heavy metal like you guys. They’re coming down through Los Angeles, if you get a chance, you should go see them. So we went down and saw Rush at Whiskey A Go Go. I think it was the first show they were playing Los Angeles, and there were just a handful of people there. So we went backstage and made friends with them, hung out with them, smoked a little pot, like everyone was doing back in the day. People shouldn’t get too upset, because it was probably really bad pot, smoking it wouldn’t even get you high. But it was kinda like a social thing. And every time they came to town, we go down and hang out with them. Other than their music ,we just became friends with them. Once again, not real close friends, but every time they came to town, we go backstage and we share stories and talk about stuff. And they were just a really good group of guys. I didn’t know that Neil Peart was sick. I guess a lot of people did, and the fact that he passed away, so untimely is just a real tragedy.

Let’s round this off with a little about your previous albums. And I would like to hear, what do you think about each one of them starting with “Frost And Fire”?

– Well, like I said, that album was originally conceived as a demo, and we never really considered it originally to be our first album.  The thing was, we couldn’t really get any response from record companies from sending out tapes, so we thought, this will really get someone’s attention to do a full album. So that was kind of like an original version of all our music, and we actually put most of the more commercial stuff that we thought would make it to radio airplay on there. When I think of “Frost And Fire, I think of the clarity in there. When I’m listening to it. I can hear the bass, the guitar, the singing and the drums. Everything is clear as a bell to me. Tim doesn’t like his voice on the first album, but to me his voice sounds like a one sided razor blade just slashing through the album.

What about “King Of The Dead”?

– A local heavy metal radio station, played “Frost And Fire” when it first came out. And they said: “This is too heavy to play on a radio station.”  So you play Black Sabbath and you play Deep Purple. How can our stuff be heavier than that? I think in retrospect, they meant it was too different, not too heavy, but just too unusually strange for them. The whole attempt on Frost And Fire” was to get radio airplay. Songs like “King Of The Dead, “Finger Of Scorn”, “Cirith Ungol” and “Atom Smasher”, those songs are from the same era as “Frost And Fire”. We left them off the album because were thinking  songs like “Better Off Dead”, “I’m Alive” and “What Does It Take” were more for radio listeners. And so when we were told that our music was too heavy to be played on the radio, we were going: “That’s our most commercial music!” That was the stuff that we thought everyone would like, right? So for “King Of The Dead”, we decided to pull out the stops, and put our heaviest music on there. And let noone tell us what to do. That was the album we probably had the most control over. My parents even loaned me money to pay for the recording, which we paid back, of course. To me the album was very heavy. I thought it was very consistent and heavy.

Moving on to “One Foot In Hell”.

– Well, we left Enigma, and we signed with Metal Blade. “One Foot In Hell” was our first full album on Metal Blade. We used a couple of different recording studios to record the basic tracks and stuff. I remember when it came out, I was really happy with it, because to me it reflected the music that we were playing at the time. And although sometimes that’s one of our underappreciated albums, I think there’s quite a bit on there that’s really worth a second listen to people that haven’t listened to in a while. My short take on that album is that it is consistent. 

We’ve already spoken a little about Paradise Lost. But let me hear a bit more what you think about that one as well.

– When it came out, I was horrified. Recently the producer passed away and I got a chance to be with him and talk with him and not only bury the hatchet, but become friends again with him, just to lose him in the last few months. It was a real heartbreak for that to happen. But when the album came out, we had very little control over their production of it. Everyone in the band went in separately to record their parts without even hearing the other people. And we weren’t allowed to be involved in that. To me, I just thought that was the opposite of how a recording should go. It should be all hands on deck. And so when I heard the finished product, I cried. When Metal Blade rereleased it recently, I had a chance to go back and revisit it. And think what’s amazing, is that some of the best music we ever did is on there. My short comment on the album is that it’s inconsistent, mainly because we put some other songs on there by a few of the members I talked about earlier. We weren’t forced to, but our band has always been a group of really good guys. So we figured, hey, these guys are playing in the band, we should put a couple of their songs on the album. The problem was, it’s obvious that they’re not real Cirith Ungol-songs. “Paradise Lost” consist of some of our best work, but there is some inconsistency, due to the songs that weren’t really technically our songs.

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Markov Soroka’s father suffered a severe heart attack earlier this summer and, though he survived, was left without a job nor insurance in the wake of such tumult. Now the Soroka family faces at least $66,000 in medical bills. It is our hope that this compilation, featuring some of the very best of the metal (and beyond) underground, will help ameliorate some of the financial woes which they face.

We will also concurrently be running a raffle for the original hand-painted artwork by Calvin Cushman, as well as original artwork by Karmazid (Tchornobog logo et al). At $5 per ticket, you are welcome to purchase as many “tickets” as possible (Paypal the total amount as Friends and Family to sorokafamilybenefit@gmail.com) between 10/2 and 10/4 (at midnight PST), with the winners being announced 10/5. Global shipping will be covered by the artists.

Markov Soroka’s father suffered a severe heart attack earlier this summer and, though he survived, was left without a job nor insurance in the wake of such tumult. Now the Soroka family faces at least $66,000 in medical bills. It is our hope that this compilation, featuring some of the very best of the metal (and beyond) underground, will help ameliorate some of the financial woes which they face.

We will also concurrently be running a raffle for the original hand-painted artwork by Calvin Cushman, as well as original artwork by Karmazid (Tchornobog logo et al). At $5 per ticket, you are welcome to purchase as many “tickets” as possible (Paypal the total amount as Friends and Family to sorokafamilybenefit@gmail.com) between 10/2 and 10/4 (at midnight PST), with the winners being announced 10/5. Global shipping will be covered by the artists.