You know you’ve made it to rock’s Big Time when interviewers catch you as you’re boarding a jet, instead of loading the tour van. And although Athens, OH’s Skeletonwitch didn’t happen to be boarding their own Iron Maiden-like 747 when we reached them, they’ve got too much going on these days to make it all happen on four wheels. Their latest long-player, last year’s Breathing The Fire, was a standout metal album in a year filled with standout metal albums. Sure, they have chops, gear, and a pro ‘tude, but more importantly: they rule. I chatted with guitarist Scott Hedrick as the band was hopping an airplane from Los Angeles to Ohio.
You’re swinging through Boston next week with Doomriders, who are not quite the same kind of metal that you guys are. You must have that happen a lot, being the odd man out on a bill.
We feel that way, sure, but we love it, we welcome it. It’s fun to mix it up, we use death-metal elements and thrash-metal elements and Viking-metal elements. We play what we like and what we’re into and what we feel, and because it’s a mix we can play with a lot of different bands. I mean, if you’re a straight death-metal band doing balls to the wall ’90s death-metal, you wind up on bills with eight death-metal bands. And it’s fun, and I love death metal, but after a while it just blows your skull apart, and you become desensitized with it because there’s no dynamic.
When the band formed, was there any discussion of what direction the band was going to follow?
Funnily enough, there wasn’t actually a lot of forethought involved, it was just what we wanted to do. I met Nate, our guitar player, who had been in a bunch of other bands, and he had demos of a bunch of songs, and we started writing songs together. And our only influence was that the riffs we wrote had to give us chills or get us excited. It didn’t matter if it was a Sabbath-sounding riff or a death-metal part or whatever. We didn’t really care what genre it fell into, the only rule we have is that there aren’t any rules. If we’re into it, we’ll do it.
It’s funny to see how half of the reviews mention the way your band is holding the torch for the ’80s thrash revival, and the other half bemoan the album’s lack of adherence to strict ’80s thrash rules.
You can’t not read reviews because you want to hear what people think and all, but reading reviews is so funny. And it’s like religion, you know, because no one’s right! Or if everyone’s right, then we’re all fucked. One guy’s all like, “This is just a boring straight-ahead thrash record!” and this other guy is like “I thought this was supposed to be pure thrash, what is this other bullshit?” I mean, it’s just music, man, just call it metal if you like it, you know?
Do you guys consciously go for an ’80s thrash aesthetic, and/or have you been trying to avoid it in the direction the new album takes?
It’s definitely not something that’s conscious, that’s for sure. We all love a lot of ’80s thrash, of course; we’re huge fans of that stuff, so that comes out just from us liking it. But there’s never a conscious ’80s aethetic, about trying to sound like this or look like that. We’re just a bunch of crazy longhairs from Ohio — and we listen to thrash but we listen to Immortal and Amon Amarth and Mercyful Fate, constantly. And we keep getting lumped into that ’80s thrash resurgence, which is a little bit of an annoyance, really, because I feel like it pigeonholes us a bit. I think that there are fundamental differences between our albums and other bands that get lumped into that thing: like blast beats and ’80s death-metal grooves and black metal parts. A lot of those bands are very one-dimensional, intentionally, trying to sound like DRI or whatever. And we get that a lot, you know, “Oh, you’re just another one of those bands!” But we don’t limit ourselves like that at all, so it really seems like a very limited assessment.
It seems like, with the whole ’80s thrash thing, a lot of it is almost humor-based, like making metal into a kind of funny thing.
Yeah, totally. And the thing is, we have fun playing metal, but our metal isn’t meant to be funny. One of the first shows I ever saw, when I was 14 or 15, was Slayer in Columbus Ohio — it was evil, it was dark, it blew me away. At the same time, between songs Tom Araya said some funny stuff or cracked a joke, he was really comical. He had a good balance of metal and having fun — it was over the top, but that’s why we enjoyed it. You can have fun with it without making a parody of it. And a lot of thrash revival bands make a parody of it, and we take it really seriously, music, lyrics, everything. But we’re having fun while we’re doing it, we have a smile on our face while we’re headbanging. But metal changed and shaped our lives so it’s not a passing joke or something.
The whole phenomenon of Anvil and that movie about them: people went to the movie thinking “Oh hah-hah, metal, isn’t that ridiculous, oh ha-ha, imagine caring about music” or whatever, but at the end everyone in the audience is like “Hey what’s this tear doing in my eye?”
Totally — I loved it, by the way, we saw it on tour and were way into it.
Do you ever find it a challenge, in the current super-saturated metal market, to distinguish yourselves?
I think that there are a lot of bands out there right now, especially with the internet and whatnot. But you know, I think we distinguish ourselves by just doing what we do and not forcing it. We challenge ourselves, whether it’s touring for five months without stopping or rewriting and rewriting songs, but we don’t push ourselves to do something that’s uncomfortable. We’ve known bands that we’ve toured with that have talked to us about, you know, “What kind of sound should we go for, what kind of sound is going to sell now?” And that seems crazy to us. To distinguish yourself, I suppose you can wear dumbass outfits or whatnot, but that kind of thing usually reeks of someone trying too hard.
Speaking of trying to hard, do you have any comment about the recent thing where Demi Lovato posted a tweet about her love for Skeletonwitch?
Oh, that’s really funny, someone showed that to us and we were like “Who is this?” And it’s some Disney star, and she put up some thing about working out and playing Skeletonwitch at the gym. And you know, it takes all kinds, and if she’s into it that’s cool! Apparently she’s Christian, which, you know, I hope she isn’t listening to the lyrics too closely, but whatever. We mostly think it’s funny and our drummer’s waiting until she’s 18.
SKELETONWITCH + DOOMRIDERS | GREAT SCOTT, 1222 COMM Ave., Allston | February 17 @ 9 pm | 18+ | $13 advance/$15 day of | 617.566.9014 orGREATSCOTTBOSTON.COM
