Interview:


You've just released your second full-length album, The GOD Standard. Please explain the title and what is this album all about. How would you describe the music on it to someone who doesn't know your band?
The title is a play on words in reference to "The Gold Standard". I was having a conversation with someone who argued that the words "In God We Trust" being printed on United States' currency was in violation of the separation of church and state. My argument to the contrary is that the US dollar was worthless without those words being printed on it. The idea that our money is backed by God is a complete sham and a dupe to the rest of the world, but we are no longer backing it by gold so why not some fictional divinity? We are no longer giving our money value via the gold standard, but rather the God standard.
The title track and the album art plays on the concept of money being worshiped in place of a god. We chose to wear suits in our photo to play on the Wall Street vibe that matches the concept.
Our music, across the board, is raw, extreme heavy metal. The songs on this record are raw, brutal, and honest! We take inspiration from classic death metal, thrash, traditional heavy metal, black metal, and melodic death metal. I like to believe the songs on this record reflect those influences.
Two albums in almost 2 decades of activity seems a bit underachieved, am I right? I guess the line-up changes have something to do with this, but do you think you've finally settled on a steady line-up to start delivering more material, more frequently?
Unfortunately, you are correct about how things have played out and how infrequent our output has come. We have existed in a cycle of form line-up, write songs, play out, someone quits, go on hiatus, rinse and repeat. We released a few E.P.s early on with the same line up, but when it came time to finally commit to the first record, we had gone through 3 line-ups. It was actually finished by just myself and my brother and followed by a 3 year hiatus. The second album was no different. We had gone through 3 bass players by the time it had finished.
We live in a college town with a very cyclical music scene, so finding committed musicians for the long haul is a challenge. On top of the challenges of keeping a solid line-up, life has often found a way to supersede musical aspirations. Career changes and stuff going on outside of music have pretty much left the band more of a hobbyist kind of thing for me and the other members. I've made a lot of big career and life changes in the last few years, and Nick our guitar player has a career so we aren't in a position to tour and place the focus and money into making Altar of Flesh our number one priority.
As for producing more output more frequently, I have to say that I am probably more interested in focusing on singles and possibly E.P.s going forward. Locking in to creating a full length album becomes kind of cumbersome at a certain point, but I think singles or E.P.s can offer much more flexibility and the ability to record and release stuff more often.

All about this new album screams DIY, from the production to the cover artwork, am I right? I guess you used a home studio, but why using drum-machine for the recordings? Was it an aim of yours to have everything as rough and unpolished as possible? Are you satisfied of the final result?
We did record in a home studio but we did not use a drum machine. We did use an Alesis DM-5 to re-sample the kick drums to help them cut through the mix, but the rest is acoustic drums. I employed a few different compression and recording techniques through the production of the drums that I think did make them sound a little too sharp and a little less natural than I would have liked.
As for the recording being "rough and unpolished", as you put it, we did not want to put together one of the typical digital recordings that sounded like it had been cut and pieced together. We want to keep a more natural and honest sound and keep it a bit raw. It is way too typical to hear bands who sound amazingly tight and clean when they can over produce and edit their recordings to the max but sound loose and shitty live. We sound like what we sound like. I could have edited until we had a perfect record; using digital techniques to realign the timing, edit the leads and whatever, but I prefer to keep our sound real.
Overall, I am satisfied with the album as a whole. I probably could have spent another year mixing, remixing , and re-re-mixing until I was blue in the face, but at a certain point you just have to let it go and move forward. We've been given good remarks from our fans so it has passed the most important test, as far as I am concerned.

You've shared the stage with titans of the genre like Morbid Angel, Monstrosity, Vital Remains or Malevolent Creation, how would you describe your live show? Please describe your best gig to date.
I think our live show is where we flourish. We approach a show with the intention of getting our point across without a lot fluff and filler. We open with two songs of full power, back to back, none of the looking at our shoes and bullshitting with the audience before playing the first note. We try to deliver a set that keeps a certain pacing and playing songs of different tempos to avoid the set being too boring or predictable. We have had our share of rough gigs like any band that has been playing as long as we have but I think we bring the brutality!
There have been so many good shows, that it is hard to pin down our best gig to date. I would rank playing with Monstrosity at a place called The Liar's Club in Tampa Florida pretty high on the list, running up a $500 bar tab with Gardy Loo in our home town of Tallahassee is pretty high on the list, and forcing Lowbrow (Obituary/Six Feet Under and Nasty Savage members) to play their set a little faster than normal after following us on direct support in Mobile Alabama is another I would put pretty high up on the list. Though, I think the best gig might just have been playing direct support at a festival in Tampa with a bunch of local bands and one regional band who were kind of ripping through the Florida scene at the time. Most of the locals were doom or melo-death but we came out and played some of our real nasty, old school gore-core shit. We had the pit spinning for the 30 minutes we played and everyone ended up leaving after the headliner came out. The singer had a sword and armor, but I guess the crowd didn't have anything left when we finished. It was a cool gig.

Still related to your live activity, please tell us how often you get to play live over there. Have you had any tours or plan to maybe promote the new album in a tour? How hard is for a band like yours, without the backing of a major label, to get slots on fests and tours?
Well, its really an up in the air kind of thing for us. Sometimes we will be able to line up 2-3 gigs a month, other times, its a dry well! Since we are very DIY, it really depends on our level of focus and social media activity with how often we play. We are planning to begin hitting things pretty hard again in 2018. Hopefully getting back down to Tampa and a few of our favorite places to play in the region. Every Autumn/Fall our region becomes kind of unfriendly towards rock and metal shows since clubs and bars tend to focus on Football season. So we are just working on some new material to add to the set and pick things back up early next year.
This is a very different time for DIY musicians than it was even a decade ago, so I am not sure how much major labels have to offer bands anymore. Some very underground acts have crowdfunded world tours and stuff like that so I suppose if we really put our minds to it, and pooled the resources available to bands today, we could possibly buy onto major fests and tours. The internet has really changed things for bands.

You're from the state of Florida, how do you, as locals, see the legendary Florida Death Metal scene? What is it left of it?
Most of the death metal legends are from the Tampa area, so when we have played down there we have met some of the legendary players and they've attended our shows and stuff like that. Its pretty cool to see some of those guys still active in their scene and going to shows.
I get in trouble when I answer the "whats left of the scene?" question, sometimes. Its always a roller coaster, it seems. It has peaks and valleys, but it depends on which part of Florida, obviously. Tallahassee, where we live was going strong back when we came out of hiatus in 2013. It was kicking ass here! Slowly, attendance to the shows has become less and less and clubs respond by not booking as often. Other parts of Florida are going a lot stronger, but they often go through the same cycles of less and less people supporting for a few years, then a surge of support again. I suppose its to be expected....

November 2017


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