INDY'S WEEKLY ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER HIGHLIGHTING ARTS, ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
KsE still on the rise
Killswitch Engage, the Massachusetts-based quintet, has made a career of melding punk, metal, hardcore and something not yet named into platinum success on Roadrunner Records.
The End of Heartache, their third full-length, adds a new singer, Howard Jones, into the mix, but increases the intensity level several notches.
Bassist and co-founding member Mike D’Antonio says the group has maintained consistency despite personnel changes because the key members have stayed together and focused throughout.
“We have our own sound because the three main guys have always been writing,” he said in a phone chat before heading on the road. “It was pretty brutal to lose a singer, and it happened right when our [last] album came out. There was a question of the band even continuing. It was in the back of our minds that we might not go on. But Roadrunner was super-awesome and got auditions going for us.
“A label like that could have dropped us right then and said forget it, but they were really into us for the long haul. It warmed our hearts.”
The audition process led to Jones, not only one of the few African-American vocalists in metal but also one of the most intense and passionate.
Jones toured with the band extensively before Killswitch began recording The End of Heartache, so there wasn’t the usual “new guy” transition in the studio, D’Antonio said.
“When we got in the studio, it wasn’t a question of ‘Can this guy do it’ but more a question of just getting it done,” he said. “He knew what we were going for. He knew it wasn’t his old band. We were continually telling him that he needed to write not just for us but him, to put his own stamp on the songs. We didn’t want to put false words into his lyrics because he’s the one who has to go out and sing it every night.
“Luckily, he really believed in everything we wrote. So when we finished the album, it sounded a lot like what we would do normally.”
Now in his 16th year of playing bass, D’Antonio said he looks at himself and the group as seasoned veterans now. So despite the intricate time and signature changes of Killswitch Engage’s music, playing live isn’t as draining on the band as it could be.
“The band has turned into a lot more of a fun thing for everybody involved,” he said. “We like to get on stage and get the audience involved as much as possible. Not so much in the typical type of hero worship, but talking to the people, hanging out, letting them stage dive. We want them to know that we’re just the same as them; we just happen to be on stage.”
Normally, when Slayer records a live performance, the band refuses to go back into a studio to fix mistakes that occur during the concert.
“We think the flaws in what we do are a part of what we do, and you can’t really have a perfect show,” singer/bassist Tom Araya said. “Maybe there are those odd nights where you do [everything right], but in all reality, every show is never a perfect show. Everybody [in the audience] goes away thinking, ‘Wow, that was amazing.’ We go out thinking, ‘Oh, I [messed] this up,’ or, ‘I did this wrong.’ But everyone else is in love with it. They’re amazed by the intensity and that seems to carry the show on its own. So we’ve learned to accept that, hey, it’s live. If you want to buy it, we’re letting you know right now it’s a live show, so any mistakes that are on there, it’s because it was live.”
But Slayer made an exception to that rule on the newly released DVD, Still Reigning, which captures the band playing their 1986 album, Reign In Blood, in its entirety during a concert this past July in Augusta, Maine.
As the DVD shows, in playing “Raining Blood,” the final song on the album, the four band members — Araya, guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman and drummer Dave Lombardo — were drenched with a literal wall of theatrical blood.
It’s a nifty visual effect, to say the least, but it created a problem for the recording.
“I’m not going to lie to you. I couldn’t hold a pick,” Araya said. “I was completely doused and I was having a tough time trying to get any sound out of my bass.
“We were slipping and sliding everywhere,” he said “I ended up doing something that I usually don’t do, which is I slapped my bass to make sounds out of it. You know, the modern day bass players, they slap. I don’t really do that, but I had to on that one song because I just couldn’t get anything out of it. The only way I could get sounds out of it was by slapping it.”
The technical problems left the sound at the end of “Rain In Blood,” pardon the pun, a bloody mess. But rather than junk this first-time-ever spectacle, the band decided to use the wonders of modern recording technology to restore the sound that was anything but pristine during the actual concert.
“They could kind of pick sounds out, clean them up and bring them out, you know what I mean,” Araya said. “They were able to do that with just that one song.”
Slayer will have plenty of opportunities this fall to work out the technical glitches that came with the wall of blood effect as the band headlines the Jagermeister Music Tour. At many stops, the band will again end “Rain In Blood” in a downpour of blood, using a specially designed truss loaded with 150 liters of the liquid.
Alas, the wall of blood will not be part of Slayer’s performance Nov. 7 at the Egyptian Room at Murat Centre because the venue cannot accommodate the “truss of blood.”
Whether Slayer will actually perform the entire Reign In Blood album that evening is an open question. Araya was cagey in answering that question.
“I’m not really sure what we plan to do,” he said. “We’re going to have to mix things up because last year we did Jagermeister, that’s when we actually did Reign In Blood live. We did it the entire tour.”
It would make sense, though, for the album to be featured. Reign In Blood, which runs just 28 brutal, breakneck minutes, is considered by many to be the album on which Slayer came into their own.
It was the fourth album for the band, which formed in 1982 in Los Angeles, and with songs such as “Necrophobic,” “Altar Of Sacrifice” and “Postmortem,” it epitomized the dark and gruesome subject matter that would also become Slayer’s signature.
As much as any album, Reign In Blood positioned Slayer front and center as part of a handful of groups whose bludgeoning brand of music placed them at the most extreme end of the heavy metal genre.
As the ’80s moved into the 1990s, Slayer continued to improve, with albums such as South Of Heaven (1988), Seasons in the Abyss (1990) and Divine Intervention (1994), considered by many to be among their best efforts.
Still, Slayer found themselves in the shadow of two other bands whose careers started around the same time: Metallica and Megadeth.
The latter two bands both pushed their music in a more concise and melodic direction during the 1990s, a move that, for Metallica in particular, paid off by turning the group into a multimillion selling act.
Slayer, though, never sweetened their decidedly non-commercial sound. And while the band has never enjoyed major commercial success, Slayer has attracted a sizeable and extremely loyal fan base.
In fact, the band’s most recent studio CD, the 2001 release God Hates Us All, might have been the most extreme Slayer album yet. King agreed with that opinion in an interview with this writer in 2001, shortly after the release of God Hates Us All.
“It’s definitely over the top in all aspects,” King said. “Musically Tom’s screaming. We definitely got a performance I’m happy with out of Tom, and that was key. A lot of the stuff that was written had to be sung the way it was sung. Anything less than that just wasn’t acceptable.”
Touring behind God Hates Us All brought about a major change, though, for Slayer. Drummer Paul Bostaph, who had replaced original drummer Lombardo in 1992, quit the band, leaving Slayer in need of a replacement for touring. Araya said Slayer’s manager took it upon himself to contact Lombardo to see if he would fill in, at least for the time being. Soon the original drummer was back in the fold.
“That’s how it came up,” Araya said. “He [Lombardo] was like ‘Sure, yeah, I think it would be great. Yeah, I’ll play with the band while they look for a drummer.’ That was basically how it came about. Then during the course of the tour and in searching for a drummer, we talked and he let it be known that he would be really interested in working on a new album with us if that was possible, if we were into it. We were like ‘Yeah, that would be cool.’”
In Lombardo’s first stint in Slayer, there was considerable friction between the drummer and the other band members. Araya seemed reluctant to discuss in detail the tensions and what issues had to be resolved for Lombardo to rejoin Slayer.
“You know what resolved those? Maturity. Time and maturity is what resolved that,” Araya said, noting that things have gone smoothly with Lombardo since he returned.
In fact, the band is going ahead with plans to record a new studio album early next year, with the band’s favored producer, Rick Rubin, a likely candidate to partner with Slayer for the sessions.
“We’ve got everything ready,” Araya said, noting that the album will probably retain the intensity of God Hates Us All. “All we basically need to do is sit down and fine tune everything and record it. So hopefully we’ll do that at the beginning of the year and try to have something for the summer.”