The vultures swooped down long ago, and the hyenas were
gathering not long after, but people are still picking over the bones of
Carcass. Some of those people even used to be in the band.
"It's funny," sighed Jeff Walker, "I had the romantic idea that all Carcass
albums were really well-received until 'Swansong', but that just wasn't the
case. Even 'Symphonies of Sickness" got slagged in Metal Forces. But
'Swansong' still sold really well in this country, even though about all
the press we had was the one feature in Terrorizer and a bunch of bad
reviews"
And now with the advent of Black Star, Jeff Walker could well be getting
even more bad reviews. But who cares ? When he snarls 'Let's rock!' at the
start of 'Smile', and the band kicks into one of those Dr. Who-style NWOBHM
riff/arpeggio spirals, the answers has to be. "F*** yeah!' At a time when a
score of bands from Dark Tranquillity to the utterly godlike Hammerfall are
dusting off their old Maiden and Running Wild records, and the trend for
Retro-styled, True Heavy Metal shows no signs of abating, Black Star makes
perfect sense. I'd even go so far as to say that the much delayed
'Swansong' may well have come out too early, not too late. Whatever: Black
Star's debut erases all the tentativeness to be found in 'Swansong', not
least by jettisoning any pretences towards Death Metal. It rules.
"The funny thing is, it is a continuation," Jeff points out. "Maybe you can
hear something of Year Zero or Cathedral in Griff's guitar playing. And
with Carcass, if you asked any of us, we always said it was HEAVY Metal! I
was never that convinced that Death Metal was a particularly new style of
music. Equally, with this new band, there are obviously still Death Metal
elements to our sound; it's not evolved radically. It's Post Death Metal",
he concludes with a knowing smirk and a nod towards Mr. Whalen's trend
categorising skills.
But is it really then just Retro Metal? Isn't there a bit more to Black
Star than this other term would suggest?
"It's not as Old School as people make out! That's why we stopped doing
gigs, because we got sick of seeing constant references to the Tygers of
Pan Tang. I mean, rather Tygers than Korn, but I only own one Tygers of Pan
Tang album! With Iron Maiden, I have 'Number of the Beast' and 'Piece of
Mind'. And I never rated Black Sabbath that high. I always had much more
for Trouble. I still do! It's weird, both me and Griff were into Discharge
and Punk when we were kids. I had a brief flirtation with Hard Rock when I
was 11, but I got more into Hardcore. Then into mid'80's I got into extreme
Metal - the first Bathory album and Kreator. So, maybe, I'm playing stuff I
have never been into. Work that one out."
But then, why make the change?
"It's in my nature to do something that's not popular. This is more kinda
rock 'n' roll in style, and we call it Bastardised Hard Rock. I mean,
that's all that Death and Thrash Metal ever were. Heavy Metal corrupted the
Blues and Thrash just corrupted it further until there was absolutely no
Blues left! And now that's utterly over-saturated. I'm sick of clicky
kick-drums locking to the riff. That's been pretty played to
death. Technical Death Metal was always style over substance, and that's
really easy to achieve. But it's hard to write song that people can yell
along to and punch the air to!"
He has a point, and it's one underlined by the sheer
Heavy Metal-tastic nature of not only Black Star, but the rest of the
traditional-style revivalists. Marry up the blatant aggression of Thrash
and Death Metal with a surfeit of old-fashioned melody and a Doom-style
groove, and the result is unequivocally, beautifully fashionable
METAL. This - and the same can be said of a dozen other bands - is Metal
played not for the love of arenas of Live! Sold Out! Tonight! - style
success, as was the case twenty years ago, when Heavy Metal ruled the
commercial roost. Nor is it Metal played in order to break all land speed
records in the frenetic pursuit of total extremity. Been there, done that,
says Jeff. No, this is just Metal played for the love of itself. In that,
it's ever-so-slightly autistic, and largely uncarring of what anyone else
thinks of it. The way, just possibly, it was meant to be.
"You've got your old dinosaurs perpetuating their careers," begins Jeff. "I
saw Kiss last year at Donington, and I saw the Sex Pistols at Finsbury
Park, and they were both just ridiculous. I'm very suspicious of all these
reformations, and it's also very sad that no bands were ever allowed to get
onto that level from the late Eighties and early Nineties. Apart from
Metallica, no Thrash or Death Metal band ever broke through. They proved in
this year because they couldn't have a Donington because there was no one
left to headline it! Metal's gone underground, as people like to say. And
that's because Metal has been popular since the early Seventies, like all
styles of music, it burns itself out at some point. To say it'll continue
for ever is bollocks. Every other style has come to an end eventually!
Okay, I know I'm negative bastard anyway..."
Yep. I know. I remember us having this exact same conversation just before
Kiss came on at last year's Donington, in fact.
"Okay, so Metal's still big as an underground form. As we proved, it doesn't
need the big labels like Columbia, it's gone independent. That's a good
thing, really. It's the real alternative now, and the joke is, alternative
rock is the mainstream. The real indie scene is either Metal or dance
music."
It turns out that Jeff's quite happy with his, and this, current
situation. Having seen Carcass sell less through a major label than on an
indie-label, stardom doesn't seem like much of an option. And in an
exclusive, shock revelation, he lets slip that shortly after Morbid
Angel's break-up, he was approached by the band's management to replace
David Vincent! (As, apparently, was Tomas from At the Gates.)
"Yeah, I was asked to join Morbid Angel. Like I'd be comfortable wearing
leather trousers! Me being 5'5" and all! That was a funny period, with
everyone splitting up or having line-up changes - At the Gates, Morbid Angel
and us. To tell you the truth, I felt a bit more vindicated when Sepultura
split. Most of those bands had been going ten years and that's about the
length of it. Maybe it was just my late 20s crisis! I've been playing
extreme music since I was 17 and I don't really want to be 29 and
pretending I'm an angst-ridden teenager into blastbeats. That's what the
first song 'Game Over', is about on this album. Itäs a statement of
intent. There are still elements obsessed with carcass- I should know,
because I still get the emails every day asking for transpositions of the
guitar riffs! They're gonna have a field day slagging us off and being the
disgusted Carcass fan. I don't give a f***. Carcass did well, but we were
just lucky.
"I've been revitalised," he concludes. "You're a bit more hungry and
enthuastic when you're playing to 20 people than 200 or 2000."
