Preparing for a tour is a stressful endeavor. There’s logistics to coordinate, budgets to create, musical equipment to maintain, egos and personalities to manage, setlists to create (and endlessly change), and songs to rehearse. Preparing for a band’s first tour back since the globe-changing Covid-19 pandemic was stressful on many other levels. Beyond the usual concerns of “are people gonna turn up to the shows?” and “How many of these shirts can we afford to print?” there was a zeitgeist of uncertainty permeating the entire endeavor. All of us were intently watching other tours and trying to take the temperature of the industry – some tours seemed to be going great, others were truncated or canceled outright. We wondered which of the venues on our circuit would even still be there to play once we set off.

From the outset, I knew this tour would have some unique challenges. Beyond the usual stuff, we needed a new van, and purchasing a vehicle is a big financial commitment, especially while Covid was canceling other bands’ shows / tours left and right. The possibility that we’d be unable to perform to make our investment back was very, very real. Facing a lot of doubts, I made a conscious decision to change my verbiage when things looked grim and hit a snag – rather than saying things “sucked” or were “fucked” or any other “ucked” word, I started employing the phrase “less than ideal.” It would be a string of words that would get a lot of use going into this tour.

Foremost among my doubts was how we were going to get through a four-week tour with nobody getting Covid-19. Between us, our crew, Creeping Death, Bewitcher and Enforced, there would be a roving band of twenty-one rockers criss-crossing the good ol’ US of A and any one of us getting Coronavirus could lead to a string of cancellations and other serious financial setbacks / logistical complications. Between the merch that we printed at our shop and purchased from vendors, flights for everyone, and financing a new van the week before the tour, there was a pretty significant amount of money on the line before we even took the stage at the first gig in Costa Mesa.

That sets the stage for the financial concerns I had about this tour. From the outset of putting this whole thing together, there were a bunch of other complications, and the specter of Covid-19 hung over everything. There were so many plans in place for 2020 that fell through – including a European tour, a US tour with Gruesome, and a Japan / Australia tour – I had the uneasy feeling that we were tilting at windmills as we put this tour together. A huge thanks is in order to our agent Ron Martinez at Crawlspace booking (yes, the singer for Final Conflict, that Ron Martinez) for persevering and putting together a great tour with a great package of support acts. Ron and I agreed on a couple things early on – that every member of the touring party would be required to be vaccinated and that we would avoid the South as much as possible, because in all likelihood that’s where the highest number of Covid cases and un-vaccinated people would be. That said, we ended up doing five shows in Texas, but spending time in the Lone Star state was a geographical inevitability / financial necessity. Minimizing risk as much as possible was the order of the day.

The next wrinkle in an extremely rumpled equation came when our longtime Front-of-House / recording engineer Alejandro Corredor (also my band-mate in Pounder) informed me that he would be unable to do the tour due to health issues – less than ideal, indeed. Thankfully, when I was in Chicago with Gruesome in September, I ran into Cheyenne Brandt who does sound at Reggie’s and the Cobra Lounge, who I had unsuccessfully suggested as FOH for our 2019 tour with Necrot and Gatecreeper. Improbably, she was available and into the idea. That was one wrinkle smoothed out. As Mike Hamilton always says “Tour is all about encountering a problem, solving it and then moving onto the next problem.” And there would be lots more to come.

Not to reveal too much about the “man behind the curtain” but another spanner in our works was that our longtime driver / production guy / mascot that you know and loathe as Dr. Philthy was no longer able to tour. The guy now has a marriage and a career and stuff – what a loser, right? We had known this for a while and had arranged for a new creep to come in and fulfill that pretty unique double role. Again, without pulling the curtain back too far, two weeks before tour, the guy we had lined up had a schedule conflict that meant he’d be unable to join us for the first week of the tour – less than ideal, am I right? So that wasn’t particularly welcome news, but luckily Ross tapped his Creepsylvanian pals in Ghoul and one of the numbskulls that works with them agreed to come out on tour with us until our guy joined us in Austin and, even better, they accepted turnips as payment. Another problem solved, right?

The tour was scheduled to begin October 22^nd and “coincidentally,” my birthday is October 19 (in case anyone wants to know when to shower me with Super Powers action figures, German beer or gift certificates for Spitfire Audio). My wife Camilla and I (okay, mostly my wife) set to planning a birthday party for me when everyone would be in town for rehearsals that Wednesday, the 20^th. We found the perfect spot – one of our favorite local watering holes for cider and craft beer, the Poisoned Apple. They agreed to host the party and, even better, let me take over the stereo since we’d effectively have the place to ourselves. Flights were booked so folks could come in time to rehearse / prep merch and also enjoy a righteous birthday / tour kickoff party. Things seemed to be falling into place.

When Mike arrived in California from his new home base in Ohio, I was pretty hungover after a weekend of watching Metallica and the Misfits in Sacramento – or so I thought. I went to work the next day and still didn’t feel great, but I just figured it was one of those two-day hangovers that us 40+ folks occasionally get. After work, Mike and I rehearsed, scraping layers of rust off songs that had been moldering for the past year and a half. Mike left the studio to visit some friends and I stayed behind to do a very fun interview with the Horror Flicks and Guitar Picks podcast. As the interview went on however, I could feel myself getting sicker by the minute – specifically, I could feel my temperature rising. After I finished up, I wiped down everything with sanitizing wipes to be on the safe side and headed home. I spent that night tossing, turning, and sweating my ass off. No doubt about it, I was properly ill. The next morning, I called out sick from work and told them I needed to go get a Covid test. I knew I was sick, but hey – I was vaccinated, I was fairly careful and pretty conscientious about wearing a mask etc. etc. I was sure it was the flu.

Except it wasn’t. I tested positive for Covid-19. The good news is that the doctor cleared me to come out of quarantine (assuming my symptoms improved) on the 22^nd, the day of the first show.

To say I was stressed out by this diagnosis would be the understatement of the year. I ended up testing negative on Thursday the 21^st and was at least able to rehearse with the guys once before the first show, but as far as the timing of getting infected, it was (you guessed it) less than ideal. Thankfully, I had a very mild case and I was able to pick up guitars and my computer at the studio, because the virus also put me behind on coming up with music for a film project (a Candyman fan film you can check out here), not to mention rehearsing the set and finding a new van.

I spent my time in quarantine nervously calling the guys and making sure everyone was doing what they were supposed to be doing as far as rehearsing and picking up merch that was getting delivered, etc. I grabbed my recording computer from the studio and a guitar to rehearse by myself at home so that helped pass the time. I managed to not miss the deadline for music for a film project – a Candyman fan film you can watch here.

Scouring the internet for a new van also took quite a bit of time during quarantine, but I finally found one. The downside: it was at a dealer about 300 miles away. Nevertheless, I managed to secure financing over the phone and bought the thing sight unseen. I had to fork over several hundred more dollars to get it delivered, but again, things seemed to be moving more-or-less in the right direction. The delivery turned into a clusterfuck and arrived 9 hours late, so by the time the van got to my door it was 11pm on Wednesday night (less than 48 hours before the first show) and I couldn’t really inspect the vehicle. Since I was still in quarantine, Ross had to pick the van up from my house Thursday morning to install the tow package so it could haul our trailer and the whole thing was fucked – sorry, I meant it was less than ideal, but it got done. That afternoon I tested negative (I had felt fine for several days already at that point) and the guys agreed that it would be a good idea for me to come down and cram in at least one rehearsal. We had planned to add “Rot Your Brain,” “Worming,” and “Nazi Metallers Fuck Off” to the set, but we agreed to postpone those until we could work through them at soundcheck for a few days. “Rot Your Brain” never did make it into the set, unfortunately.

Me not being there and us having to rehearse late Thursday meant that the gear would need to be packed Friday morning, which of course put us behind schedule. Anyone who’s ever toured will tell you that there a million tiny last minute things that have to get done before tour, and our entire morning consisted of doing all of those things ON TOP OF loading all the gear and merch into the trailer.
Another less than ideal realization was that the interior of our new van was absolutely permeated with dust. The AC blew dust, when you sat down on the benches, little dust clouds would appear – the dealer had clearly never detailed the van. The check engine light had come on and we’d ran the codes and they were weird, random things that didn’t seem to affect anything, but it didn’t seem like a great omen. On the bright side, the new van seemed to be running well and was a lot bigger and newer than our old 1997 Ford Club wagon, which had broken down almost weekly on our last tour.

Our fearless FOH Cheyenne flew from Chicago to Los Angeles that same day (Friday the 22^nd), which is three hours south of our HQ in San Luis Obispo and about an hour north of Costa Mesa, where the first show would be. I knew from the get-go that she’d end up waiting at the airport for at least an hour, but she had been there for almost four hours when we finally rolled up. She was extremely cool about it and rolled with the punches like a true road warrior, which didn’t stop me from sheepishly apologizing about it. Once she joined us spirits began to rise, because all seven of us were finally in a van together pulling a trailer full of gear to our first live gig in almost two years. Sure, we arrived an hour and a half late, but just making it to the first gig felt like winning a marathon.

– To be continued…

So I’m releasing a solo album…

That sentence rarely leads to anything good, right? Usually it’s a sign of band turmoil, a frontman looking to leave the rest of the band behind, or it’s a vehicle for unwanted experimental / self-indulgent / sub-standard material that the rest of the band has rejected. I’m not sure these concerns apply here since my solo album is nothing like any of my other projects, because it has nothing to do with metal or any other kind of extreme / heavy music whatsoever.

The album is called Last Son of Krypton, and I somehow managed to talk Relapse into promoting and distributing the album digitally, while I’m pressing a small run of digipak CDs. To get the necessary shameless plugs out of the way – you can order the digipak here, and check out the album on bandcamp, Youtube, or stream it via the usual suspects. It’s essentially a film score without a film. Or an album of cinematic music that tells a story without words or images. I wrote the album throughout 2020, when I desperately needed an antidote to the year’s omnipresent doom-and-gloom, so the story it tells is unabashedly and un-ironically positive – Superman’s arrival on earth, his coming of age, and him confronting and ultimately defeating Brainiac. . Why Superman? Why film music? Why now?

Anyone who knows me even a little knows that before heavy music, my first obsession was what’s now referred to as “geek culture.” I was a comic book / sci-fi / horror / mythology kid growing up and I devoured Marvel and DC books throughout the entire 1980s (my first comic book was Amazing Spider-Man #208, Fusion, the Twin Terror, which hit shelves in the fall of 1980, and by 1990 I was reading dozens of titles every month). So as you might imagine, I’ve spent a lot of time and money over the past several years consuming the virtually limitless glut of Comic-book-based media. I remember wrapping up our 2012 tour supporting Cannibal Corpse, and there was a big party on their bus after the last show – I skipped the party because that day, Avengers came out and there was no way I was missing opening night. I’ve fallen behind on all other movies and books because there is just so much comic-book content being released on a constant basis and I’m loving it.

For years, I had been in the habit of transcribing melodies that came to me and they kept getting more and more elaborate. By the time we finished Death Revenge, I was working with my old pal Matt Widener (ex-Exhumed, Cretin, The County Medical Examiners, Citizen) to build these themes into fully realized orchestral pieces. I was fascinated by how he arranged my ideas and turned them into something listenable and I’m really proud of those parts of the record. I came up with what ended up being the main theme for my Last Son of Krypton record on a flight to visit my mom in South Carolina a couple of years ago following a conversation Ross (Sewage, Exhumed basscyst / vocalist and fellow comic-book guy) and I had about how we wished current superhero soundtracks were more optimistic sounding. I didn’t think much about it, because, after working with Widener, I realized that it would take some serious time and money to produce tracks of that quality on my own – I’d need my own studio for sure.

Fast-forward to the Spring of 2019, and there we were – building our own studio to record Horror. Now I would have full-time access to recording technology and, unbeknownst to all of us at the time, I would soon have a lot of time off the road. Like… waaaaaay too much time. For a while now, I’ve been the only person in my bands that even lives in the San Luis Obispo area, so I was not only unable to tour and perform during the worst of the pandemic, I wasn’t even able to get together and rehearse and write with the band. They kept saying “take advantage of this downtime to learn a new skill,” and I figured this would be the time to really start developing some of the themes and melodies I had written. I even started writing for a film, but that ended up falling through (which was probably for the best, in hindsight) but I found that the more I worked on this kind of music, the more interested I got. I had’t felt this energized to learn and immerse myself in a new musical project since the early days of Exhumed, when Death Metal and Grindcore occupied about 75% of my waking thoughts.

I had no idea the rabbit-hole I was plunging into as I had to learn a vast amount of new music theory (now I can throw around terms like pan-diatonicism, and voice-leading), figure out the sounds and functions of an entirely new set of musical tools (woodwinds, strings, brass, percussion, synthesizers, et al) and also learn the production and mixing techniques required to produce a digital score. I ended up writing this album three times, because every few months I had learned enough to completely change my perspective on what I’d been working on. So to say that this album is a passion project or a labor of love is trite, but in this case – utterly accurate.

Some of my earliest musical memories have to do with film music – I was fortunate enough to be a kid when John Williams was cranking out the scores for Superman II, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back, and the main melody of Chariots of Fire by Vangelis has been stuck in my head since 1981. If you pay any attention to my blog or the noise I make online at all, you may know I recently published my first short story last year in an anthology called Horrorama, so crafting music that tells a story combines two things I love. 2020 was a dark year, and I needed something positive during that time, so that’s what I endeavored to create with this record. Of course there’s villainy and conflict, but to counter all the cynicism, mistrust and anger surrounding last year, I needed a story with a happy ending. So, I wrote my own.

As life seems to often go, 2020 has either had absolutely fuck-all going on or a deluge of tasks and events piled on top of one another. I write this as I’m awaiting the results of a Covid-19 test (my wife’s boss and his wife have come down with the virus) which has forced me to postpone a trip to South Carolina to help my mom with a cross-country move. I’m also confined to the house and unable to go to work until I get results, so the past few days have been a little… well, let’s say challenging. Yeah… challenging – that’s about right. While I have a little forced downtime, I figured I’d fill folks in on what’s been simmering.

First off, this Saturday, November 21^st, will mark the airing of Butlerfest, a virtual event benefitting my old buddy Ryan Butler (ex-Unruh, Landmine Marathon, etc) who produced a bunch of records I’ve done from Exhumed to Dekapitator to even Scarecrow (more on that long-lost project later). We managed to get the Exhumed boys together in one state to perform and film a 20-minute set for this show and it was as fun and invigorating as it was exhausting and stressful.

Coordinating band activities when only two members live in the same state (and even then, we’re a four-hour drive away from each other) is never a cakewalk, but during a pandemic it’s even less fun. (quick note: Mike Hamilton was a longtime San Luis Obispo resident but moved to Ohio last year, leaving me as the only remaining Exhumed dude in town.) Generally, when we get together it’s in order to achieve a goal that we already know will generate cash in order to offset the cost of just bringing the band together – rehearsing for a tour, recording an album, etc. This time we got together to perform a benefit set and film additional footage for a soon-to-be-announced project (which should be fairly easy for the discerning reader to speculate about), where there was no label budget or guaranteed gig income – in short, no safety net. As you can imagine, every expense was spared. I want to commend Mike and Sebastian especially for toughing it out in California on a shoestring budget and never complaining – and their accommodations were far from four-star.

We rehearsed like crazy and spent a grueling fourteen-hour day filming that put everyone through the wringer – not just the band, but our fearless front-of-house engineer Alejandro, the good Dr. Philthy, the videographers at the Saucepot here in SLO, and even the folks at Hail Yourself zine who were there assisting us (all of whom I owe a massive debt of gratitude to). I can honestly say that I worked as hard on the day we filmed (November 4^th) as I ever have. Hopefully the results will get people psyched.

Obviously there will be an announcement soon about the project we filmed, but in the meantime – if you’re able, please throw some support at Butlerfest. It’s affordable, the lineup is great (I mean, Dropdead, Lago, Fall Silent and Sorrower are already worth double the price of admission) and the cause couldn’t be more worthy. Ryan Butler has been a close friend of mine for over twenty years, and he and his wife Amy have opened their home to me and the boys countless times. His production skills have made records like All Guts, No Glory and Necrocracy what they are, and his exacting engineering standards have made me a better guitar player. He’s also a person of the highest integrity who lives by his ideals and never compromises on the important things – his commitment to anti-racism and anti-fascism has never wavered. In addition to all that, he’s one of the nicest people you’ll meet, as evidenced by breadth and diversity of the benefit lineup. His battle with Wilson’s disease (a genetic disorder that attacks the liver) and the process of getting a liver transplant have been financially devastating, and I can only imagine the emotional and psychological bruising he’s suffered, so anything you can do to help is strongly encouraged.

As promised, let’s circle back to Scarecrow – It’s been well-publicized that Death Angel drummer Will Carroll was put on a ventilator after contracting Covid-19 in Europe on tour with Testament and Exodus. He was the drummer for Scarecrow and every time we’d see each other in the Bay Area or at festivals, we’d always talk about the band being “the one that got away.” Will’s health issues reminded me that we don’t have unlimited time to do everything we wanna do in this life, and that we should take advantage of the facts that a.) Will didn’t die, and b). he and I both had a year free from touring. If we were gonna get some stuff recorded, this would be the time to do it. Despite only releasing three songs, we had an album’s worth of material written back in 2008 that has languished in pre-production ever since. We scheduled a session for his drums in mid-October, which – at the time – looked pretty free and clear on my calendar. Then Mike (Hamilton, Exhumed drummer) announced he was coming to California the same weekend for his dad’s birthday and if we wanted to schedule any Exhumed stuff, that was his window of opportunity.

And so the clusterfuck began.

I frantically worked to find a venue to film an Exhumed set at, tried to coordinate around Sebastian’s schedule (he just finished another awesome Noisem record and is also recording clients at his studio in Baltimore) and Ross’s work / life / Creepsylvanian slave-laborer balance. It was… challenging (sensing a theme here?) to say the least. On top of that, my Mom and Stepdad had asked me to help by driving my mom and their dogs from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to Chandler, Arizona (coincidentally, the hometown of one Ryan Butler) and their timetable moved up to mid-November, pretty much a week after the Exhumed stuff wrapped up here in California.

I’m happy to report that Will came down to our studio in San Luis Obispo (about 4 hours south of his homebase of San Francisco) completely prepared for the Scarecrow session and utterly killed it. His recovery is complete and he’s playing drums as well as I’ve ever heard him play. I tracked the rhythm guitars and then had to turn my attention toward Exhumed. I’m very much looking forward to returning to this and doing the melody / harmony guitars and vocals in December, and then the demo will be completed by Bud (Burke, ex-Exhumed – lead guitar) and Damien (Sisson, Death Angel – bass) completing their tracks remotely. It sucks having to do this project in pieces, but I’m still dealing with the deluge of tasks I mentioned earlier. The five songs we recorded will more than likely be used as a demo to shop for a record deal. If you’re curious what the band is about, click the link to our bandcamp page, or take my word for it that it’s classic Bay Area Thrash in the Metallica / Exodus vein with a healthy dose of NWOBHM and punk influence.

While all this was going on, my ever-ambitious wife discovered that an unlikely door had opened for us – we could qualify for a home loan and afford to buy a condo in our neighborhood in Atascadero. That was incredible news, but it meant that in between working my day job, tracking rhythm guitars for Scarecrow, and rehearsing and coordinating Exhumed stuff, I also had house viewings and home inspections to add to my schedule – as well as signing lots and lots (and lots) of paperwork. Don’t get me wrong, I never thought we’d be able to afford to own property in the California, so I’m beyond stoked, but the timing was… you guessed it – challenging.

As all of this has been going on, I also finalized a deal for the digital release of a solo album with Relapse. There will be more to write about this as the release gets closer, but suffice it to say the record is quite different than anything I’ve done before. It’s essentially a sci-fi / adventure soundtrack album without a film. If you like John Carpenter, John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Hans Zimmer, etc. this will be up your alley. It’s a culmination of my love for film music and symphonic music in general and love for storytelling and specifically super-hero / adventure storytelling. It was a massive challenge (the fun kind) to hone my composition and production skills to a place where I could execute something like this, and I’m very excited that it will see release. I have no idea what the audience will be for the record or if there even is much of one, but I’ll soon be annoying people with news about it.

Meanwhile, Horrorama, the book that features my short story The Vessel, has gotten some very flattering reviews which have provided some nice moments of respite from the chaos of my life these past few weeks. I’m excited to continue writing and working on new projects which I’ve been stealing moments for whenever I can.

All the while, Pounder has been gearing up for the release of our second album Breaking the World, which will be released January 29^th on Shadow Kingdom Records. The title and cover art concept were things I talked about 15 years ago (another prospective album title I dreamt up was “Welcome to the Night” which later was the title of a Night Demon single so I was clearly mining the right vein of “heavy metal tropes” ) and my good bud Cole Barrington came up with a killer concept sketch years ago. By the time we announced the album and revealed the final cover art, a German band Blizzen had already released an album called World in Chains in 2020 with very similar cover art.

Oops.

Neither anyone in our camp nor at Shadow Kingdom was aware of the record, and a few keyboard warriors were keen on pointing out the similarities. Hopefully, if nothing else, it will get people talking about the record. We’re all extremely happy with how it came out and excited for people to hear it. I think it’s a big step forward from Uncivilized and we’ve all grown into our roles in the band. The first single will be assaulting your eardrums in a couple of weeks.

Lastly on the “news” list is that We Will Destroy… You Will Obey by Dekapitator is getting reissued on vinyl by Diabolic Might Records in Germany after a couple of decades of being out of print. This remains one of my favorite records I’ve done and I’m excited to see some interest rekindled in the band. We’re also working out some new merch designs for Dekap that should be available soon. I still have a bunch of riffs that were supposed to be for album number three that may see the light if this pandemic continues to make touring impossible. Clearly, I’m a glutton for punishment.

In conclusion, please don’t mistake my beleaguered tone for a plea for sympathy. I feel incredibly lucky to have a lot of great things going on in my life, especially in 2020. Of course, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little overwhelmed and occasionally kind of grouchy because of it all, but it will all be more than worth it.

Unless some things really fall apart, I’ll be starting 2021 with a new home that my wife and I own, new records and releases coming out with multiple projects and Exhumed will have put together some killer new stuff for your eyes and ears. I can’t wait to share it all with you.

Thanks for reading – stay as safe and sane as possible.

Never let the bastards grind ya down!
Harv

November 18^th, 2020

*A quick addendum: After two and a half anxious days of waiting I got a call a few hours after I posted this with a covid-19 negative test result, so I leave for South Carolina tomorrow morning!

Clearly, this has been a fucked up year. Going into 2020, I was looking forward to a European Tour with Gruesome in the spring, followed by a trip to Japan and Australia with Exhumed in May, and then in June, Exhumed and Gruesome had scheduled a three-and-a-half week US tour together. After that madness, Exhumed was supposed to be headed to Europe for festivals and gigs with Necrot in August. I spent weeks planning with our agents, merchandisers, designers, and of course the good folks at Relapse. Spreadsheets were built (and rebuilt, and re-rebuilt), T-shirt artwork was commissioned, travel insurance was purchased, visas were applied for. Of course, all of those plans have since been canceled because – well, you know why. As they say, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

I’m not here to bemoan the situation – there are many others who are in far tighter spots than I and my extended family of relations and band-mates. I’m healthy and so are my family and friends. I’m certainly not looking for sympathy nor will I ask you for money (although I’m happy to sell you stuff). My takeaway from the pandemic is that we all exist at the whim of forces far beyond our control – earthquakes, hurricanes, and uh, global pandemics. Watching the work I had put in to planning this year blow away like a fart in the wind was demoralizing, sure – but it was a good reminder that we can’t control or plan for everything, even though it usually pays to live pretending that we can.

2019 was the year that we finally planned and executed an Exhumed release / touring cycle correctly, and it paid off. We completed a grueling but awesome six-week tour with Gatecreeper, Necrot and Judiciary and managed to come out of it in the best financial shape the band has ever been in. 2020 was looking to build on that and get even more ambitious. We’ve put a pin in those plans, obviously. The good news is that most things fell through far enough in advance that the initial financial fallout was relatively muted – except for the Gruesome European tour with Krisiun, where we already had plane tickets booked and merch printed. We’ve been handling that the best we can by selling “Fragments of Psyche” cassettes, tour merch and we also have “Dimensions of Horror” poster flags in the works.

Despite everything going on, I must be a glutton for punishment because I’m somehow still optimistic about the future – I’m very excited about the upcoming Exhumed / Gruesome split 10” and CD that’s coming out June 5^th. It was originally scheduled to coincide with the dead-in-the-water summer tour I mentioned above, but with everything going on, we figured we shouldn’t sit on it. In times like these, new music is a source of enjoyment when things might seem a bit shit otherwise. (That said, I totally respect bands’ decisions to delay their records and if I had a two-year tour cycle hinging on the timing of this release, I probably would shelve it.) This is a special one-off slab of festering Death Metal that deserves to be heard, just like our fans deserve to hear new shit from the bands they dig in these trying times.

Hopefully we’ll emerge from this mandatory hiatus with a scene that’s something like the one we remember – but the unpleasant truth is that inevitably, some venues will close, some promoters will throw in the towel, and underground touring acts will be faced with lower offers and an even-more-crowded playing field as dozens of rescheduled tours coincide. Not only will the avalanche of rescheduled gigs be a total clusterfuck, they’ll be competing for ticket sales among a cash-strapped audience, many of whom haven’t had regular work for months. That’s not pessimism, that’s just realism.

The flip-side of all that is that hopefully we’ll all appreciate the scene that we’re a part of and realize how much it means to us. It goes way beyond just music – underground metal forms a unique community that binds us together just as much as our shared love for sick riffs does. Rest assured, as soon as it’s safe and sane to get back into the van and make some noise, we will be back in your town stinking the place up.

One last tangential thought – When I think about the downtime many of us have suddenly found ourselves with, I can’t help but think about the world we live in and the kinds of lives we’re leading. Lucky for me, I never get bored. I’ve been writing music, reading, getting back into running, working on a novella for Grindhouse Publishing, and I even found time to update this blog. However, I know many are going stir-crazy. When I look for an example of an enjoyable life stuck at home, I think about my Grandparents. They led quiet, but rich lives. My Grandmother Laura was an excellent pianist, an avid reader and so-so Italian cook. Her husband Ken, my Grandfather, constantly had multiple DIY projects going, was an excellent marksman and hunter, as well as a very mediocre oil-painter. Their home was their world, and they took pride in it – everything was well-maintained and if it broke, they probably fixed it themselves. Their lives would make a pretty dull book, but they were full and admirable lives nonetheless.

It’s harder to live like that today – so many of the devices that fill our homes are so specialized it’s easier to replace than repair. It’s hard to concentrate on reading a book or playing an instrument with thousands of movies on Netflix to choose from or your phone constantly vibrating with alerts from myriad apps. Of course, the real kicker is that so many of us exist in more financially precarious circumstances than my grandparents did, which is a very real source of stress and distraction. We live in a world rich with selection, but with little real choice, where getting what you want is easy, but getting what you need isn’t. In the pre-internet age so many of us felt starved for media, but now that it’s all literally at our fingertips, we see both sides of that double-edged sword: with so much signal comes nearly infinite noise. Despite all of this, I hope this forced deceleration of our lives’ paces provides an opportunity to reconnect with truly personal things that make us truly fulfilled. If we use this time to tune out some of the noise, our own voices can grow louder and clearer. And hopefully we keep raising them and listening to them when the noise inevitably returns.

See you on the other side,

Matt

May 8^th, 2020

OR: Everything I ever needed to know I learned from reading comics

In Season 2 of Broadchurch, Jocelyn Knight (wonderfully portrayed by Charlotte Rampling) says something to the effect of “Compartments. It’s how we survive in this world.” I’ll spare you any analysis of the character or the series, but if you’re into tightly-plotted, well acted British crime dramas, I highly recommend Broadchurch.

One thing I talk about often during interviews is the process of writing for several different bands and projects and if the the process is different for each. And I could basically quote Solicitor Knight verbatim – it is all about compartmentalization. As far as arranging the riffs and ideas, the process is very similar for all my stuff. If you read my earlier blogs about song-construction analysis / technique (which I’m far more qualified to gas on about than British crime TV), I truly believe that a good song is a good song, regardless of genre. If I’m writing an Exhumed song, I’m looking for a good hook, and a solid verse / chorus / verse / chorus / bridge concept. Same for Pounder, and Gruesome is only slightly different. But in terms of the riffs and ideas themselves… There is little to no overlap between any of the projects, especially as Gruesome moves forward in our homage in the Death catalog into the Human era and beyond for our next records. I can usually tell immediately where something my hands pry out of the fretboard is headed.

As being in multiple active bands is somewhat of an anomaly and being the primary songwriter in multiple active bands across multiple sub-genres is even more of an anomaly, I’m often asked where my ability to create this kind of mental “sorting system” came from, and like so much of the framework of my thinking, it was formed in my childhood as a result of my obsession with superhero comics. Don’t worry, I’m not setting you up for a 5,000 word essay about the Scarlet Witch’s love-life or which incarnation of the Justice League is my personal favorite. There is a point here. As a kid I loved Marvel comics like the Avengers, Alpha Flight, and of course, the X-Men and Spider-Man, as well as DC books like the Marv Wolfman / George Perez era of the New Teen Titans and the Paul Levitz / Keith Giffen era of the Legion of Super-Heroes. When John Byrne, my favorite Marvel artist at age 10, moved to DC to revamp Superman, my allowance money followed, just as it did when Frank Miller left Marvel’s Daredevil to work on The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One for DC. Despite having sincere fandom for properties developed by the House of Ideas (Stan Lee’s ever-so-modest name for the Marvel bullpen of the 1960s) and their Distinguished Competition (Stan’s name for DC – get it?) I was acutely aware from a very early age that the characters existed in distinct, separate universes. The only time those universes collided were when I got my Secret Wars and Super Powers action figures out to engage in a battle royale – then all bets were off and I got to explore the burning questions of the 1980s elementary school set, like which Dinobots could beat Wolverine and if Superman could defeat Skeletor. But I digress. The point is, I learned – directly from being a comic book fan – at a very early age to take the ideas that populated my imagination and sort them into different, discreet internal worlds, and to sort my comic collection by publisher, the physical manifestation of that mental sorting process. Now that geek culture (or as I call it “nerd shit”) has taken over mainstream pop-culture, I can FINALLY use these terms to explain myself to people and have many of them actually know what the fuck I’m talking about.

I imagine each band as existing within its own distinct universe, possessing specific immutable laws and boundaries which define the work I do in creating material for them. As I’ve always stated, I prefer to create within some kind of boundaries, as it gives structure to the project. Without any boundaries or rules, music can come out sounding really unfocused and arbitrary, which I find annoying to listen to (Mr. Bungle drives me up the fucking wall). I love R&B, Powerviolence, Synthwave, 1960s James Bond soundtrack, Delta Blues, AOR and Crust Punk, but mixing them together in one project would be a stylistic clusterfuck of epic proportions. Here’s a quick outline of how I sort things out (compart)mentally for my bands. (See what I did there?)

Exhumed tunes to B and our lyrics have remained stubbornly fixated on the same gory, morbid imagery and aesthetic since the beginning of the band. The defining sonic element of Exhumed is that it’s primarily kinetic. There aren’t many down-tempo, introspective moments in our discography (though Death Revenge inserted some) because the attack is the core element of the sound. Even mid-paced tunes like “The Shape of Deaths to Come” or “Night Work” stay away from dragging the beat or being “doomy.” Tonally, we focus on diminished intervals, chromatic, descending riffs, and what I call “The Death Metal notes” B, C, D and E flat (or, on the 6th string, open-string, first-fret, third-fret, fourth-fret – the Scream Bloody Gore opening riff note combo). We also use a fair amount of traditional metal melodies for the solos, to provide a bit of contrast (although not-so-much on the new record).

Dekapitator shared much of that kinetic energy, but we tuned to E, my vocal technique was totally different, and we focused on recreating the thrash template that was woefully uncool when we started the band in earnest in ’97. There’s the tried and true E, G, A, B flat combo (“the Metallica riff”) and lots of more chromatic stuff in the early Kreator vein, with pull-offs and “wheedlies” a la Exodus and Destruction. On the second album, we also included little moments that directly referenced bands like Slayer and Rigor Mortis and the leads got a little more aggressive, as more melody crept into the riffing.

Pounder uses mostly melodic riff ideas rooted in traditional minor scales, and additionally uses some pentatonic, blues based progressions so that whatever we’re doing still feels rooted in “rock” rather than “power metal,” which sometimes gets so melodic that it feels sugary to my ears. Plus my admittedly-limited vocal skills are more suited to gritty hard rock than to soaring melodies, so it makes sense to retain that feel as much as possible. There are ocasionally Phrygian and Harmonic Minor patterns in there for contrast as well, but those darker-sounding palettes aren’t the main focus. We also use more ascending riffs and progressions, as the music is more upbeat than my other bands. The “Stagefright” chord progression of ascending up the minor scale to build tension is one of my favorites to employ here. We tune to D, which helps me hit some of the pitches in the vocal melodies with less strain, although I have a bad habit of simply writing higher-pitched melodies that are still at the upper limits of my range, which is something I’m really trying to work on going forward.

Gruesome of course, emulates Chuck’s riffing sensibilities to the best of my abilities. We tune to D, and try to capture similar sonic approaches with each record to various Death albums. Chuck added new elements to his arsenal each record, with Scream… being firmly rooted in Phrygian progressions, as well as pioneering the aforementioned “Death Metal notes,” and many variations of the “Halloween riff” (Tonic, Fifth and Minor Sixth). There were some primitive stabs at traditional minor licks and riffs in the intro for Denial of Life and the verse of Evil Dead, but they were fairly unsophisticated. Leprosy didn’t bring a ton of tonal changes, but it did see a lot of modulation (playing the same riff or progression in different keys) and began a long tradition of Chuck arpeggiating power chords and creating riffs out of tapping sequences. Of course, the execution and production were leaps and bounds ahead of Scream… as well. By Spiritual Healing we can hear some traditionally melodic stuff infiltrating the formula as well as an affinity for shamelessly flashy sections peppered throughout the more traditional Death Metal stuff. Chuck also incorporated more tri-tones on this record, which would become even more prominent on Human. There was also a noticeable reduction in tempos on Spiritual…, and a real focus on articulating the 16th note tremelo picking integral to Chuck’s (and Death Metal’s) style. It should go without saying that the addition of James Murphy elevated the musicality of the solos immensely and set the standard for Death Metal lead guitar at the time. Human brought the same level of ambition to the rhythm section, with Sean Reinert’s drumming in particular being a paradigm-shatterer. Chuck’s riffing continued to evolve with the inclusion of “add9” chords and expanded use of tri-tones, as well as some non-traditional time signatures, but Human is truly where he fully grew into his riffing style. The next two albums continue in a similar vein, with Individual Thought Patterns focusing more on riffs played in a higher register and utilizing rhythm hooks, and Symbolic simplified a lot of the riffs and incorporated more traditional metal melodies and hooks, giving it a more confident and streamlined feel. I don’t really count Sound of Perserverance as a Death record, as it was written as a Control Denied album, so I’m not going to mention it here.

The point of all this is to expand on the concept of compartmentalizing the writing process by creating and following a loose set of guidelines for each project to ensure that I’m not just making Exhumed records under multiple monikers. My goal has always been to justify each project’s existence as it’s own independent thing. I’m not hoping that Exhumed fans buy Pounder records just because I’m in the band if they’re not into traditional metal (although that’s flattering and nice if they do). I want Pounder to exist as a completely independent entity and the last thing I want anyone thinking when they put on Uncivilized is “that really sounds like the guy from Exhumed.”

As far as my ambition to create multiple standalone projects with “lives” of their own, of course part of it is ego-driven. I hear something and think “Fuck, I can do better than that” and I’m willing to at least try and put myself out there and see what happens. The bigger part of it however, comes from sheer love for music in general, and metal in particular.

Relating things back to comics, my personal hero is Jack Kirby. I could burn through 10,000 words about why I admire him, but I’ll summarize his greatest hits here for you. Kirby is best known for co-creating of pretty much every classic Marvel character of the 1960s that’s not Spider-Man or Doctor Strange. If you’ve seen Thor: Ragnarok you know what a Jack Kirby Marvel comic looks like. He also pioneered romance comics in the 50s, did monster books in the late 50s and early 60s, co-created Captain America in the 40s, and did war and western comics in the 40s and 50s. In the 70s he expanded the DC universe and gave it its most compelling villain, Darkseid (Thanos was Marvel’s Darkseid knockoff), all while trying new “magazine-size” formats of comics about gangs of the 20s and supernatural phenomena, while incorporating photo collages into his work. He also worked in animation, defining much of the visual look of Thundarr the Barbarian (the most metal Saturday morning cartoon ever) and created tons of lesser-known properties for comics and animation, including an incredibly bizarre comics adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

My point is, the guy was prolific as fuck and he did good work across multiple genres that has stood the test of time. I think to myself: if Kirby can do romance books and create the Eternals, I can play grinding Death Metal in Exhumed and power ballads in Pounder. I’ll never measure up to his accomplishments, but I can try my best to embrace the spirit of his work and his work ethic. Even as an industry veteran in his fifties, Kirby continued to push himself and the comic book medium to do more, explore more and be better. I try to emulate that drive in my own work, and I guess I’m an “underground metal veteran” at this point. I’m trying my best to be like Jack – indefatigable, fearless, generous, and always exploring. It’s great to look back on my previous accomplishments, but new vistas ahead are far more interesting.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some riffs to write.

On March 18 (fully 18 days behind schedule) we entered our newly christened Darker Corners studio here in beatiful San Luis Obispo, California to finally begin working on the 7th Exhumed full-length. I haven’t been able to update this site because things have been too hectic. I’m just now beginning to be able to gather my thoughts, if I’m honest.

By now, a band building their own recording studio is far from novel. It’s an idea that had been floated in various iterations in the Exhumed camp a few times over the last few years. I’ve always been resistant to the idea. It’s expensive, it’s labor-intensive, a recording studio can quickly turn into a money pit, and I never really wanted to be an audio engineer. I figure, I’m the main songwriter, lead vocalist, and one of two lead(ish) guitarists. I’m also the point of contact for our label and agents, and I manage a decent amount of our online presence as well as the day-to-day tasks such as advancing shows, fulfilling mailorder and other miscellaneous shit. And I have a full-time day job, at least 2 other bands, and avwife and a dog. I’m not really looking for another hat to wear. (I also never wanted to fulfill our own merchandising site, so as you can see, I don’t get my way too often) Ultimately we were more-or-less pushed into this course of action (as I discussed in my previous blog posts), but thankfully, our long time Front-of-House soundguy / guitar-tech / fifth Beatle Alejandro Corredor relocated to the Central Coast, so we had an audio engineer (he also plays bass for Pounder and engineered and mixed Uncivilized).  And with Mike’s extensive construction background, we had someone who could plan and execute the building side of things professionally and affordably. If we were gonna do this, the timing wasn’t gonna get much better. But I still had misgivings.

My mindset was “never make a record where you live.” If you make a record where you live, things will invariably come up that distract you from the process – your job, your relationship, your friends, other life-events, etc. etc. Those are all important things that rightfully demand your attention, but when I’m making a record, I cherish the two weeks when I get to pretend that the recording process is the most important thing in the world and nothing else gets any serious attention. When we were working on Death Revenge for 10-12 hours a day in Orlando Florida at New Constellation RMP with the incredibly-skilled Jarrett Pritchard, the only non-album things there were time for were eating, shitting, sleeping and washing down the session with a few beers wile nodding off in front of the TV for the night (I  think I started Rogue One four or five times, great movie to fall asleep to) .

Though my worries proved sane and prescient their fruition was nowhere near as dire as I feared. We continued to work efficiently, even in the midst of full-time employment, life-changing personal events and all of the day-to-day demands of family, job, pets, etc. I’ve found the life / recording balance difficult to maintain, but as we limp towards the finish line of the process, the excellent results are proving difficult to argue with. T-minus one day before I board a plane bound for Mexico and our ensuing Latin American tour with Beyond Creation, just about everything is recorded. Once we’re gone, our engineer / co-producer Alejandro will turn everything over to Joel Grind (of Toxic Holocaust fame) to mix and master and we should be able to approve the mixes from the road and keep things on schedule. So despite delays caused by everything from shipping mix-ups, rain, the existential morass that is Home Depot, and a bunch of other stuff I am too brain-fried to remember right now, things seem to have pulled together. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding when the album comes out and people love / loathe / ignore it, but as of now, at the 11th hour, I’m feeling pretty okay about everything. Of course, writing something like this is exactly how you jinx things, right? So, fingers crossed.

{Here’s an aside I think is relevant – I’ve been occasionally asked why we’re on such a tight schedule and we need to be done recording by the time we leave for tour April 2nd. “Surely,” their reasoning goes “now that you have your own studio, you can call our own shots and take as long as you want to make records, right?” Well, technically we do – and I can see why people would think that, but… let me tell you a little something’ about the good ol’ “Music Biz.” While streaming, online downloading and YouTube make music accessible instantly, in underground metal, physical media is still a very important aspect of an album release. In light of that, the renewed interest in vinyl over the last decade+ have caused manufacturing lead times to steadily increase. Most record pressing-plants shut down in the 90s, and the few remaining wax-merchants have struggled to keep up with demand now that Major Labels are getting American Apparel shoppers to drop $35 on 180-gram Rumours re-presses. Also because of the internet, releases have to be more precisely coordinated than ever. In the 80s, when Pac-Men roamed the earth and Rappin’ Rodney was high art, album release dates would often be staggered in different markets with no impact on sales. In the internet era, once one person has a record, everyone can potentially get it overnight. So things need to be more controlled than ever as far as timing the release across multiple digital platforms, mail-order, and yes, brick-and-mortar record stores (the higher profile the release, the more crucial this is). All of that means that once every element of an album is approved (mix, mastering, sequencing, song spacing, artwork, layout, etc) it takes about 5 months before the label can to take it to market (assuming their release schedule can accommodate it).

So – do the math – if we left the record partially finished, did our Latin American tour and returned to polish it off throughout May, it would likely be approved for manufacture sometime in June. That means we’d be looking – best-case-scenario – at a November release date. Any delay (and with Necrocracy we experienced 5 months worth of them, so they are very, very real possibilities) and we’d be looking at 2020, since very few albums are released in December. Everyone is too busy buying Xmas shit then, and between inclement weather and the Yuletide shop-a-ganza, December is an impossible time to tour. Since touring is our primary source of band income (you’ve read about this phenomenon elsewhere by now, right?) we plan to be out on the road in the states immediately upon the album’s release and then head to Europe quickly after. That’s about two months of touring, which means that we need the record to drop in October, so that we can be home before Xmas season really kicks into high gear (about December 10). Besides, I’m looking forward to yet another Thanksgiving dinner at Cracker Barrel (that was sarcasm). So, realistically if we don’t have the record signed off on by April 15th, our prospects for of anything financially-sustaining for the rest of 2019 begin to rapidly dim.}

Meanwhile, back at the main subject of this blog post…

As far as the studio itself, we opted for an older ProTools HD rig, simply because it was much more affordable than even the stripped down current version. We set up 16 channels of pre-amps, and ran a snake from the live-room to the control room by rigging the wiring up in a manner not wholly unlike the electrical wiring in the rebel base on Hoth (sorry for all the Star Wars references).

We already had a some drum mics, but we picked up a couple more, as well as lots and lots of miscellaneous clamps, cables, and things of that nature. We found some really cheap office furniture on Craigslist and got a bit more from Mike’s move, snagged a free office chair from Facebook marketplace, slapped a couple posters on the wall, and lo and behold, it was starting to look like someplace you could make a record at.

As our April 1st deadline began closing in on us at a rate that I would describe as “ever-increasingly alarming,” and I felt a bit like Luke, Han, Chewie and Leia in the Death-Star trash compactor (okay, last one, I promise), we turned to Alejandro to assemble the technical stuff in the studio, so he did the vast majority of wiring things up and such. I acted as the mediator between our shopping list and our budget, trying to find places where we could get things cheaper and determining what was really necessary (we began tracking with a mouse that only worked when we used a paper towel as a mouse-pad, and even I had to admit that we needed to “splurge” on a $30 track-ball mouse).  We would have been able to begin earlier, but we had an order for a pre-amp that was not fulfilled, and then an Amazon Prime delivery that stretched into a 4-day debacle, so by the time I was sitting in the control room listening to Mike’s first drum take, I felt like we had already ran a marathon. Fortunately (mild spoilers to follow) this new record doesn’t have the expansive scope of Death Revenge, which had film-score elements, tons of guitar layering, and complicated vocal arrangements, lyrics and sequencing to put together. I think on top of building and assembling the studio, tackling a project that complex would have been an act of hubristic self-sabotage, like when Luke abandoned his training on Dagobah to take on Vader at the end of Empire. (fuck, where do these keep coming from?!?)

The good news is that we’ve all made a bunch of records at this point and once we finally arrived at the point where we just needed to execute the songs, it was so much easier than worrying about how much drywall we could fit in the van and when the hell our TRS snake was getting delivered. Sitting down to record the songs themselves really turned out to be a relief and a massive release of the tension that had built up over the course of the building phase of things. The only things I particularly like about being in a band are the things that directly involve the music itself, and I can honestly say that I’ve never felt like there were so many obstacles between the songs and the (nearly) finished product as there have been for this record.

Looking back on the process, I’m now at a point where I can feel good about the material and about the recording as it stands so far. The myriad of hassles we’ve all endured to pull this thing together have been worth it. Of course, come October, when the record should be released, this could all blow up in my face and the album could be universally panned, but until then, I’m gonna enjoy feeling pretty good about what we’ve accomplished. I’m just gonna relish finally being able to get a good night’s sleep now that the most difficult stages of the construction and installation are in the rear-view. Fingers crossed that the force is with us.

 

Day 4,234 – The war drags ever on. Okay, that was an exaggeration. But it’s now March 3rd and we’ve been building a recording studio (for a full recap, refer to my previous blog post) in beautiful San Luis Obispo all 63 days of 2019 so far. Of course, we’ve juggled construction with our day-jobs and “normal” lives, which has proven to be at least as challenging as anticipated, although our significant others have been real troopers throughout the process (my dog has been less understanding, but I’ve bribed her with lots and lots of bones and squeaky toys).

At the time of this writing, the live room is finally finished and is sufficiently acoustically “dead” to record in, and soundproofed thoroughly enough to satisfy the most finicky of neighbors (like ours). I can’t tell you what a relief it was when the decibel reader confirmed that the room was more than quiet enough for us to rehearse / record at all hours (including 9-5, M-F) in the industrial area of San Luis Obispo where our studio is nestled. Even though our first run-through of songs we’ve been playing forever would be generously decribed as “rusty as all hell,” I couldn’t help grinning like an idiot just be jamming and cranked up again.

I’d like to take a moment to rockognize the herculean efforts of our drummer and all-around workhorse, Mike Hamilton for doing the lion’s share of the construction work involved, and more often than not, with a smile on his face.

For those of you who are curious or are thinking about building something similar (take my advice: don’t!) here’s a brief outline of what we did. (Keep in mind, “we” means mostly Mike, but Dylan, Alejandro and I helped a bit)

Step 1: We built the frame of the jam room, a box inside our warehouse space, with storage up top and a nifty stairway to get up to the storage area. That was all done last Autumn, while I was on tour with Gruesome.

Step 2: We framed a wall on the right-hand side (the one with the finicky neighbor) with 1 layer of rock wool (insulation), and one layer of drywall.

Step 3: We did a layer of rock wool and two (!) layers of drywall on the ceiling.

Step 4: On the right-hand side wall, we left a 2″ air gap, then framed another wall, with another layer rock wool and three (!!!) layers of drywall.

Step 5: We framed the back and left-hand walls with a layer of rock wool and 2 layers of drywall.

Step 6: We framed the front wall / doorway, then left a 2″ air-gap and framed the inner front wall / doorway, both with a layer of rock wool and with 2 layers of drywall on the inner wall and 1 external layer of drywall on the front wall. We also lined the space between the two doors with foam and hung foam on the inside of the doors themselves.

Step 7: We carpeted the floor.

Step 8: We covered the right-hand side wall with sound-dampening foam, and then built sound traps – basically wooden rectangles insulated with, you guessed it, rock wool, wrapped in fabric, and hung them around the room to deaden as much sound as we could.

Step 9: We built a 3″ drum riser, insulated the bottom with (wait for it…) rock wool, sealed the bottom. We also lined the bottom with pieces of rubber from a (non steel-belted) tire in 1″ intervals.

Step 10: AKA, the fun part – we moved in the gear.

Now – we’ve furnished the control room, received delivery of our (admittedly dated) Pro Tools rig, and have ordered all of the myriad cables, microphones, monitors, mic clamps and accoutrements necessary to actually record the mountain of new material that we’ve accumulated for this next Exhumed record.

Because my philosophy is “if there weren’t deadlines, nothing would ever get done,” we have until April 2nd (when we board our flight for beautiful Monterrey Mexico to begin a 20 day Latin American tour which will be immediately followed by a week-long West Coast tour) to record a new album and EP. So in one sense, a huge amount of work is complete, which allows us to undertake another daunting task – recording the fucking record.

A month sounds like plenty of time right? Except that we haven’t been able to rehearse while the studio has been under construction. So there’s a fairly significant wrinkle in the equation. But fear not, dear readers – that’s never stopped us from undertaking a recording before.

I’ll keep you guys posted next time I come up for a breath.

Excelsior true believers!

Harv and the lads

So… I haven’t done a blog post in a while. I’ve been super busy the past few months, but I’ve toyed with a few different topics to address here. Each idea I had wasn’t feeling quite right for different reasons: Too sappy and over-share-ish (I’m fucking sick of writing songs about people who have recently died because it’s depressing as hell, and I should tell my bandmates and friends how much I love them before somebody else croaks); too repetitive (did you ever hear about the time Exhumed played in [insert city name here] and we partied so hard that we almost [lost our shoes / got arrested / accidentally did PCP]); or too much like an advertisement (GuitarPro is amazing, I use it for EVERYTHING, you should too). So I held off until I had something I thought was worth barfing onto the proverbial page over.

Well here I am barfing so…

To bring in 2019, Exhumed is undertaking something that’s new to all of us and will provide brand new opportunities for us to fall on our collective face. We’re building a recording studio where we’re gonna track a new album by the end of March. That’s the short version. The full, unexpurgated tale as it stands so far is below.

Some background to get you up to speed… When Erik Lindmark (R.I.P.) picked up stakes and relocated Unique Leader Records from beautiful San Luis Obispo, California to the land of Orange Juice and “Florida Man,” he sold his buddy Mike Hamilton (his former bandmate in Deeds of Flesh) the label’s old screen printing press. So, for about the last year and a half, we’ve been printing a lot of our own merch. For a while, we shared a rehearsal room and had the screen printing shop set up in a warehouse space in front of it, but eventually we moved into a different rehearsal spot where we had our own room with space for our ever-expanding piles of gear and ample wall-space for me to decorate like my bedroom circa 1989.  While it was a big improvement having a rehearsal room all to ourselves that had enough space for 3 full-stacks, a beer fridge and my vintage Slayer and Venom posters, it wasn’t the most practical thing paying two separate rents – one for the rehearsal room and one for the screen printing shop, not to mention trucking back and forth between both locations.

Circumstances changed at the screen printing shop, and there would no longer be enough space for us there – which was a problem. Our landlord at the shop however, presented us with a potential solution – a space in an industrial complex was opening up that would be big enough for a jam room, a screen printing shop, and band / personal storage. The whole situation appeared to be extremely serendipitous. I was on tour with Gruesome when this all went down, so I only had second-hand knowledge of what was going to happen, but it seemed great.

If you’re thinking “there’s gotta be a ‘but’ coming up here,” congratulations astute readers, there is. When came to the studio the first time, there was already the shell of a rehearsal room built, with a stairway leading up to a storage loft – so far, so good I thought. I’ve rehearsed in a few different industrial / storage type facilities throughout the years, and the general rule has always been that after a set time (usually between 5 and 6 pm) you can start making noise, but not before. After that time though, you could knock yourself out cranking amps and bashing cymbals to your heart’s content. I glibly assumed that circumstances at our new HQ would be similar. I’ve been wrong lots of times before dear reader, and this was definitely another one of those times. While we were trying to organize the new space / print merch / rehearse for our Fall tour with Revocation, it became clear that our new neighbors liked to work nights and did not like a Death Metal band making a racket in an industrial shop with a high-ceiling and a metal rolling door.

After going back and forth with the other tenants in the building and the landlord, we were put in an unenviable situation. We had moved all of our gear, screen printing equipment and personal storage stuff into a space where rehearsing was going to be impossible. Moving back to our old jam room was not an option. Finding somewhere else to rehearse, and then setting the shop up in yet another different location would be a major hassle and could take months. Soundproofing the jam room would take piles of cash that we simply didn’t have, and we would have been spending all that dough just to make the neighbors happy, which wasn’t my idea of a good use of our money.

The only way forward (or at least the only way that wouldn’t make all the money, work, and energy we’d already expended be a total waste) was to build a soundproof room that we could not only rehearse in, but record in, never mind the fact that nobody in the band is an audio engineer. We were planning on doing a new record within the first quarter of 2019 anyway, so rather than blowing our recording budget to go work with a pro (which has been working out really well for us), we decided to blow our recording budget on building a basic studio ourselves and buying the gear we’d need to make a record in the same building that we rehearse and print merch in (which is virgin territory). What could go wrong?

Thankfully, I’ve had pretty positive experiences with largely “homemade” records – Uncivilized by Pounder was recorded almost exclusively in people’s bedrooms, and Savage Land by Gruesome was recorded primarily in Gus’ rehearsal studio in Fort Lauderdale. First off, we talked our long-time Front-of-House Engineer Alejandro Corredor (and Pounder bassist, who also recorded and mixed Uncivilized) into advising us on the studio gear we’d need to create something suitably non-shitty and for some construction advice. Between his input, that of some local friends, and of course, information on the interwebs, we cobbled together a construction plan.

Thankfully, Mike and Dr. Philthy both work in construction when they’re not on tour playing blast beats and splattering people with blood respectively. I’m more of “make a spreadsheet about it” kind of guy, so it’s a damn good thing those two know how to do drywall, build decks and stairs, and all other sorts of extremely practical stuff. After assuaging our hand-wringing neighbors and getting the landlord and the record label to sign off on our dubious scheme, we set things in motion.

We’re currently about a week into the work, and despite an experience at Home Depot that could have been Kafka’s inspiration for The Trial, I’m excited about this project. Every band dreams of having all of the means of production under their direct control (that came out a little more Marxist than it sounded in my head), recording, merchandising, artwork, etc. and this is a big step for us to get as close to that goal as currently possible. Also, it’s cool that this record is gonna be a challenge, because I like the tension that comes with the possibility of failure. We’re doing something we’ve never done before and entering entirely new territory without sacrificing the core of what the band is all about – we’re way outside of our comfort zone and that makes the whole experience fresh and invigorating – also potentially nerve-wracking and stressful, but hey, you take the good with the bad. I’m also stoked on a personal level, because I’ve already learned a lot about construction in general (I still suck at it, but at least I have a grasp on what the hell it is we’re doing at this point) and I’m going to be diving head-first into learning about setting up a studio and engineering a record. Of course we’ll have adult supervision from Alejandro as we get tones and track the album, and we’ll then send it off to our buddy Joel Grind for mixing and mastering, so we won’t be letting the lunatics run the asylum just yet. Lastly, I’m very juiced about the new batch of tunes we’ve worked up and excited to get Sebastian involved in the writing and recording process of the album.

A band is like a shark, it’s gotta keep moving or it dies, and this is a new area of things for us to explore and a new challenge for us to come together and meet. One of the reasons that band-mate friendships tend to last forever (or flare out spectacularly with a lot of bitterness) is that in a band, you’re working together to achieve stuff you really care about and you have to overcome obstacles together, and that forms a really deep bond that goes way beyond “Oh hey, that’s Marlene from my fantasy football league.” As construction continues, I’ll try and keep things updated here with our trials and tribulations. So far my sore shoulders and the surprising lack of complaints I got after putting on my Janet Jackson / Jodi Watley / Paula Abdul playlist have been the most noteworthy developments. We have until the end of March to build a studio and rehearse / record a new album, so the gauntlet has been thrown down, so it’s time to put up or shut up. By the length of this missive, it should be abundantly clear that shutting up isn’t in my nature.