Cannibal Corpse : Blood, sweat and fears...
| Boring to death is certainly not a term befitting Cannibal Corpse : each and every of their lp's, one as brutal as the other, appears like a low budget splatter movie, each title forming one scene. Short but efficient as a gunshot, sharp as a razor, this time with a new production by the master Colin Richardson, a sudden impact with the usual incredible cover sleeve (often censored), the typical Cannibal Corpse album leaves you breathless, with your heart racing, your skin sweaty, still looking for the source of those monstruous sounds, hidden in the dark and pursuing the naive mislead and the mocking septical ones to devour them alive, rip off their flesh with sharpened teeth and be delighted at the sight of the bloody mess they caused. A death metal speed by definition, lethal by principle, deadly by ambition. After a totally incredible "Gallery of suicide", "Bloodthirst" pursues the hard road of evangelization of the livings by the wall of sound and the taste of the fresh meat made in Florida. Death is maybe not the end, but certainly a means... Interview on a cold evening before a pretty hot gig with cannibal's Paul(tergeist) Mazurkiewicz. |
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-Your new lp, "Bloodthirst", is produced by Colin Richardson (Machine head, Napalm Death, Fear Factory,...).
How did you meet him and how was it to work with him? -Great work with him of course : he's a great producer, and we wanted to work with him, so we sought after him and basically our record label contacted him and asked him if he wanted to do the record. So we did and he was interested, fortunately for us, because we think that he definitely is the best producer today. It was cool to work with him, he's a great guy, we had a lot of fun, he's very down to earth and very easy to work with. -What did he bring to Cannibal Corpse ? -Just the sound, really ; we didn't do anything differently that we normally do ; he had nothing to do with the whole writing process, none of our producers never really did. He got us the sound that we really needed, and especially in the drum sound and the guitars sound. I think it's apparent that if you listen to the cd's, back to back, you can tell that "Bloodthirst" is the best sounding, and because of those two sounds : drums and guitars, there's no overproduction, Colin brought a mightier sound and made it just more... "in your face", as we can say. That's pretty much what he brought to the band, he helped us along... -Do you feel that you reached a new step with "Gallery of suicide" : new sound, new members ? -Yes, sure, and I don't know when we thought it was a natural progression, I guess maybe since we have George in the band, I think we all thought that was the beginning of a new era and a kind of new band in a way, because George kind of brought the band what we needed in the vocal department. So, once we did "Gallery...", it was good to be able to work with George for the whole year, working on songs and everything and getting things up together. For "Gallery...", it came together very well, it was just a little experimental, on some songs like "From skin to liquid" or "Sentenced to burn", different from what we were used to writing, but it gave us a little more variations I guess, something good for us like a stepping stone, I don't know what you could call it. "Gallery..." is a great album, and I look at it as a natural stepping stone for the band, like now I look at "Bloodthirst" as being better than "Gallery..." and I hope I'll look at the next album as being better than "Bloodthirst" : I guess that we are constantly moving the scale and getting better on all aspects, the writing and the rest... -You still have problems with your cover sleeves : for "Bloodthirst", there are two again... - Sure, we're gonna do that every time, because there are always gonna be some problems somewhere, I'm sure, so we can see what the record labels want to do with that : if it was up to us, it would only be one cover for the albums, but I don't think we have as much problems as we had in the past. "Bloodthirst" has a pretty brutal album cover on the "offensive version", but I don't think it is a very offensive album, not like, say, "Butchered at birth" or "Tomb of the mutilated" : there you could understand people having problems with certain songs, but "Bloodthirst" is much more fictional and science fictional, somewhere different. We knew we might have problems so we did the two covers, and both works are good to us. -Vincent Locke, who draws all your cover sleeves, is also an inker and cartoonist : are you comics fans yourself ? -Oh sure, but more in the early days, I was a big comics fans when I was younger, I'm not as much today, and Jack, the guitarist, was too.That's the way we found Vincent, who was drawing "Dead world comics" and we were interested in him drawing for us. Alex and George liked comics too, but what I like today in comics is definitely not the same as it was in the old days... -Where does your inspiration come from : movies ? Comics ? Books ? Real life ? -Nowadays it's mainly imagination : in the early days, we watched a lot more movies, read a lot more books, we were into that kind of subjects. Today, for example, for the six songs I lyrically wrote for "Bloodthirst", I basically just had the music and the song title and I just thought in my head what the song should be, using my own imagination and trying to make a kind of a story what would make me a bit uneasy, something disturbing, sick, that's all I really do now, we try to experiment much the same way, we just have a lot of everything accumulated over the years and we brought our imagination upon it. -About censorship : is it only in Germany or do you suffer from it in America too ? -It's pretty much Germany, America is not as bad as people think : everybody always thinks that America is where we're gonna be more censored and have most of our problems, but most problems we've had over the years are from Germany. It's pretty good everywhere : it's selling in New Zealand, in Corea, in Australia it sells again and problems have been resolved. Except in Germany, and we know why there are problems, everything that happens in the States is very minor. We are fortunate, it could be worst and we could have a lot more trouble than we have, and we've been around for eleven years, seven records, we're still doing what we believe in, we're touring, no one stops us. -What is the worst thing, attack or criticism, you have heard about your music ? -That we sucked ! It was terrible : I remember when the first album was reviewed by Calvin Sharp, when he was more of a journalist before Brutal Truth, he wrote that we were the worst band ever, we sucked, we were terrible ! It's always kind of funny when people give us a review, especially back then, it's the big one, the early one, and those people didn't know if we would be around for eleven years, so they could only speculate and think. But lately we've got pretty good reviews, some here or there are always bad, but for the most part, we've been accepted by of course our fans but also a good part of the press which like it : I've never seen in the nearly years something totally negative or that bad. But the first reviews are very important, and if you say that nothing is expected to be done or you're just the worst band in the world or you've put out the worst album of all times... So we're here, eleven years after ! We don't think about press too much, you can't : you just have to do your own thing and that's it. We did it, we moved on, we know what we did is what we wanted to do and we feel good so we'll keep on doing it, and so we'll prove a lot of the people were wrong, by sticking around and being as successful as we are ! -You've always got incredible titles : do you make a contest to find them? -Not really, we just do a lot of brainstorming, a lot of sitting around, make many phrases and jokes : some of them are stupid and some might be pretty cool, and maybe we look at them for two months and finally decide that would make a song. We did it for "Bloodthirst", with a piece of paper circulating between us, and all of us did write something or bring ideas ; we do it that way for each record now, much more than in the past. -In Strasbourg, you shared the bill with Black metal bands, such as Marduk : what do you think of black metal bands ? -I don't listen to black metal so I don't think anything about it, but there are some good bands : I like Marduk, they are fast, they are brutal, they are great guys, but I don't listen to it, I listen to death metal only nowadays. I like what we do, and that's the more important thing I guess ; I love Cannibal Corpse music and playing in our band. There are a lot of great new bands but I'm not listening to it a lot, and I never get black metal records and I don't listen to it. But George listens to Marduk and a lot of Black Metal. -You appeared in the "Ace Ventura movie" : how did it happen ? -Jim Carrey was a fan of death metal and a fan of Cannibal Corpse ! He requested us to be in the movie, and that was basically as simple as that really. The record label called us up, saying that Jim Carrey's people wanted us in the movie. We accepted of course and flew down to Miami Beach and filmed for four days on location and that was great : meet Jim and the director, they were all happy for us to be there and we were very honored to do it. It was crazy ! On top of that the fact that Jim Carrey was a death metal fan : I don't know if he still is or if he's into something else, but he had our records and was citing our titles. It was quite interesting and definitely cool but we didn't keep in touch, so... The movie helped us out because so many people came to see it and saw Cannibal Corpse and I know we won a lot of fans from the movie. -Isn't it frustrating not to appear in a real gore movie, or at least a horror movie ? -I don't care, it doesn't matter to me, it was cool to do a movie, I really didn't care. If it is was a gore or horror movie, we would be in the situation we're actually in, maybe on stage playing. But maybe a song for the soundtrack. Otherwise, the thing is pretty ironic, to see Cannibal Corpse in a slapstick stupid comedy movie, is it certainly weird but cool. It's good for the contacts for the band, but I never thought about being in a horror movie, it really doesn't bother me. -Would you write a soundtrack for a movie like that ? -I never thought of it, I'm not much of a musician myself, but the others maybe, or later, if Cannibal Corpse doesn't exist anymore and that every member has the time to compose or interests himself in other directions, but not now, not as a band I think. Who knows what could happen in the future ? It's hard to say... -What attracted you first in death music and what bands or records influenced you ? -Maybe the fact that we've been attracted to music by the time it was all kind of building up, all the thrash and death metal scene ; we were that age and it was amazing and I loved it, the bands, the rock which was on the radio, the heavy songs. When you're a kid, the Kinks seem heavy, but when you discover Black Sabbath or Iron Maiden or Metallica, or Slayer of course, at that point, I was looking for the heavier thing ; and then Kreator came, and Sodom and Morbid Angel, and the death metal took the extreme to its limits for the most part. Slayer is an influence for everybody who's into this kind of music, as well as the early Metallica days, and the punk bands like DRI, COC, the Accused, the whole lot of speed, crazy, frantic bunch of bands. -What is the future for Cannibal Corpse ? -What is the future for dead bodies ? To come back ! ! ! Interview by Jean Paul Coillard |
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