Massive Metaliation
Anyone remember my post on Metaliator in September? The Polish Thrashers have finally been pinned down to answer a few questions about the Thrash revival, their new material and the state of Polish metal, not to mention giving serious insight into the joys of 'madness, undead, people shooting firearms and firearms shooting people'. Guitarist and spokesman Maciej 'Gryżew' Gryżewski has painstakingly assembled the collected wisdom of the band and displayed a selection for Reaving Black
Is Poland a good place to be in a metal band? Excellent place to have fun doing that, though only as a hobby. Very often the audience can be extremely lively, fighting for metal like mad in front of the stage, making it a point of honour to make the show intense instead of just standing and watching. The underground scene is also very developed, besides tons of bands and musicians there are also many crazy bastards supporting the underground in numerous other ways. Besides obviously all things Internet (webzines, portals, radios etc.), the offline part is still alive and well, with people organizing shows, publishing home printed magazines and stuff like that (underground metal in Poland can be very fond of its traditions). Sometimes, on the other hand, it's hard to get the people to come to a show, especially in places where metal gigs aren't very rare. We have to admit there are many, many more gigs of well-known bands from abroad since Poland is in the UE, but you still see bands' tours itineraries online that have five dates in Germany, three in Czech Republic, a few in other neighbouring countries, but none in Poland. Not to mention there's no yearly metal open air festival here that wouldn't disappear after two or three editions at most – it doesn't seem to be lack of demand, as half of the audience of each Brutal Assault in Czech Republic seem to consist of Poles. The “metal industry” is probably not developed and professional enough to handle every opportunity to organize a show. But that's probably not because people don't care about metal enough, rather the fault of the economics here, with earnings still being few times lower but CD and ticket prices almost the same as in the rest of UE. As far as we know there are about three or four bands from Poland really making a living by playing heavy music, so for the rest of us it's mainly pure love for metal that's left. Poland’s a very Catholic country right? Does that ever get in the way of playing in a heavy metal band? We've personally never experienced any problems, but we don’t refer to religion in our lyrics or imagery in any way, so maybe we're not first in line for that. Some protests or petitions resulting in gig cancellations can happen, or rarely court cases of “offended religious feelings” (as we unfortunately have a law allowing to pursue this as a crime). But stuff like that mostly affects bands who like to use satanic imagery or openly attack Christianity, with more known examples being Gorgoroth, Mayhem, Marduk, Marilyn Manson, or Poland's own Behemoth and KAT. In big cities it happens rarely and mainly to bigger acts, as it gets the conservatives more spotlight than cancelling an underground show with 50-100 potential attendees. If you're a big enough band playing big enough shows and want to get free publicity from conservatives (no such thing as bad publicity, right?), do stuff like tearing bibles apart on stage or have crucified naked models as “props”... they love protesting such stuff in particular and suing over it. Other than that, at least in big cities, when you simply want to play music without all these shock rock gimmicks, you shouldn't have any trouble. In smaller cities or towns on the other hand, sometimes the underground bands can meet such backlash too, and unfortunately more often any and all bands can be accused of “promoting satanism” just because they're metal. That can happen in places where the local elected officials come from conservative parties, local clergy has an unhealthy amount of influence on said officials and on people's opinion, and especially when bands want to organize a gig at a community centre etc. which is by definition dependent on the local government. We think (or, at least, hope) places where metal shows get “outlawed” are in minority, though you occasionally hear stories about cancelled gigs from other bands. Why did you decide to sing in Polish? Mila writes most of the words, with rare additional input from other members, but Polish as the language to do lyrics in was generally agreed on by the whole band. It turned out most of us thought it's a cool idea to explore so it simply felt more genuine, even exciting, that way. Our native language isn't easier to write in, generic metal lyrics often sound very clichéd in Polish, but we believe the lyrics of our songs use some original style of expression, and in general, they work. To us there are parts where Polish sounds mighty and heavy and intriguing in a way that you wouldn't achieve with English. Of course the second reason is that most metal bands in Poland have English lyrics, and it is gratifying to do things differently than most. That's always what everybody mentions about us, can't argue it's a thing that helps us stand out. Also, more often than expected, people surprise us with knowing and singing the words at shows, even to unreleased songs... that probably wouldn't happen so much if the words were in English, so we also feel it's easier for people to relate to these lyrics. Can you describe your lyrical themes just for those of us who aren’t Polish speaking? Some of the lyrics are more straightforward, about madness, undead, people shooting firearms or firearms shooting people – stuff you'd expect from a thrash band. Some of them contain a little less serious fragments, but they're not dominant, there are no deliberately humorous songs. Then there are the lyrics that also use topics like surviving a nuclear attack or epidemic, but use more means of poetic expression and rather focus on showing the feelings of dread or other related emotions. Continuing that way, there are also some that could probably be stand-alone poems besides working as song lyrics, because they're more open to interpretation and metaphoric or mysterious – even when inspired by something, that source of inspiration is not evidently clear from the lyrics. But even they paint mostly dark and dreadful pictures, using symbols like knives or dismembered bodies. There’s been a big resurgence of old-school style thrash metal in the UK and USA in the last few years. Have any of the newer bands influenced you? Musically not really. Maybe we just didn't search well enough for fresh sounding ones, but as of now it feels you don't really need to know the new bands' music to learn the “know-how” of playing thrash. It's all there in the old stuff, plus more of the old bands tried to sound less similar to each other, to bring their own sound to the genre. Then there's this whole image thing with “new” thrash that some bands still like to adopt, posing how cool and “true” they are just because they are into thrash and not something else, while still waving the anti-poser flag. That would be fun if done in a distanced way, but it gets so over-exploited and makes the genre look clichéd and even ridiculed by people, like black metal once was. It makes this whole “resurgence” feel like a retro-themed fashion fad instead of something permanent, something to be treated seriously by outsiders. We might have been more into that “thrash till death, kill the posers” stuff too if we hadn't seen a share of bands doing that and how quickly it got old and that it simply comes off as snobbish – so you can count that as an anti-inspiration. Don't get us wrong, it's good there are many thrash bands and a thrash scene again, you have bands you can play with and people who want to listen and have fun to that kind of music, it was much harder to find that (at least in Warsaw) just a few years back when we started. We'd just like to be finding more cool, fresh music in the genre and less slogans and posing. That said, there are bands that were able to make some enjoyable music. For example Toxic Holocaust 's stuff is simple, but its rawness gets the job done, and you can't accuse them of “stealing” from anybody in particular. Some early Lich King stuff is nice from the humorous side, it takes special skill to be a funny band and not come off as trying-too-hard cool guy wannabes. You can also learn much as a musician from watching an energetic and professional live show, from bands like Suicidal Angels or Evile. To be honest, when it comes to bands younger than eighties, we're probably mostly inspired by fellow thrash bands from Poland. For example, early Headbanger songs got that sincere energy in them. Not to mention many bands we had opportunity to play with, like female-fronted veterans The No-Mads, thrash/hc Świniopas also with Polish lyrics, or guys like Thermit, Psychopath, Rusted Brain, that you can learn a thing or two about playing a tight live show from... and also our whole band was floored by the debut LP of Terrordome, we really recommend listening to that one, crazy stuff. Do you ever get to play outside of Poland? That is yet to come. Warsaw is in the middle of the country, which itself is not small, but still has an underdeveloped highway infrastructure... it's far to every border. Bands from cities near a border often play in neighbouring countries, for us it'll require some undertaking to set something up. You have to watch out not to go on a “holiday with metal”, where you arrive and they tell you the ticket sales were too low to cover your costs – that does happen to everyone from time to time, but it could hurt in case of a longer, international trip, so we'll need to ensure the local bands or promoter are solid. We're open to invitations though (it would be much easier if such invitations happened in the first place), especially when we finish recording our new stuff, we'd like to see how it'd be perceived abroad. There’s a lot of media attention on Polish death metal at the moment. Is it as popular there as it is over here? Are you all Behemoth and Decapitated fans or is Metaliator a bit of a backlash against all of that? As far as we know, no one in our band is actually a fan of Behemoth or Decapitated, but some of us appreciate death metal more than the others. It seems that death indeed has been the strongest metal genre in Poland for the last few years. Behemoth and Decapitated, together with Vader, are definitely the biggest metal bands here. There is some truth in this “backlash” factor you mention, but we started the band more because of local bands that followed these trends, as there weren't really any fast thrash bands in Warsaw a few years ago. We listened to Motorhead, Venom or Kreator at home, than went to some live shows and saw another band that were playing death/groove stuff with muddy down-tuned guitars, Cookie Monster vocals and dead serious faces. We wanted to see a band with that rock and roll, punky spark, crunchier sound, with energy, speed and joy of playing, and the local scene didn't really have such a band. We're not playing “against” any other bands, people are often nice to meet even if their music doesn't get us very excited, not to mention they're usually more proficient with their instruments. Plus we'd of course jump at the first opportunity to be the opening act for either of the bands you mention – so we have neither need nor point in bashing anybody. On the other hand, the youngest metalheads nowadays seem to be very interested in thrash metal. Exodus, Overkill, Kreator or Tankard gigs are the ones where you see the most teenagers in the audience. It wasn't like that three or four years ago, at least in Warsaw. In some cities we played recently, even when we were the only thrash band playing on a given gig, the youngest people in the audience had mostly Slayer or Kreator t-shirts and responded well to our show. What are the five most important bands to come out of Poland? We could probably name even more (like, seven) bands from Poland that are most important to us but how are we supposed to know which of them really came out? You'd know that better than us. We'll just write some random stuff to check out, whether they are “important” here in a national scale or not: - Acid Drinkers, it's a mystery why they're not well promoted abroad (and we're saying this not even being hardcore fans) – they do their thing for almost thirty years, their sound is not a copy of bands from other countries, they sing in English and even had lots of cool covers recorded... basically the perfect material for a band to make it abroad. - KAT, in Poland the most influential thrash band - Dead Infection as one example of the strong Polish grind scene, though maybe known to grind fans - we also have some solid bands if you like doom and related genres, like Belzebong or Dopelord, or for example (more mixed genres or “Polish” sounding probably) Corruption or Blindead - and also check out the bands we've mentioned in the earlier question – No-Mads' or Terrordome's latest LPs are world class stuff.
Thrash is traditionally a very American style of metal. Do you think we should all be paying more attention to European bands? Why don’t European thrash bands get as much recognition as US bands? They don't? There's really no great difference in attendance when Sodom or Kreator are playing in Poland or when Overkill or Exodus do. No, seriously, let's not analyse the topic that was probably analysed a million times, we can just say that European thrash bands are worth listening to, even if only for variety in the genre – there are some unique sounding bands that didn't follow the well defined Bay Area sound, instead finding their own. Please also take note that your (UK's) own Evile seemed to be the most successful of the new thrash bands, like the first that was really treated as a serious world class band, not a retro-themed tongue-in-cheek act. When’s the new material going to be released? How have the band progressed since your last set of recordings? Actually we are now in the middle of recording our second batch of songs. It should still be 2012 when it's done. Let's have that written here as a deadline to try and keep to by the way. We are recording five songs. We've played quite many shows, so the band is playing tighter - there are a few rhythmical intricacies on the new stuff potentially showcasing that, but not enough to kill the energy, we tried not to overdo. There is still stuff that could be described as carelessly wild (not to say 'silly'). Probably a bit more US thrash inspired riffs here and there, as the previous material was composed before Jan joined the band, and he's more into American stuff. Hopefully everybody got better at their instrument and it will be heard, though still not too much guitar soloing going on. We're also aiming for a clearer sound and better production. In general, the overall direction stays the same, some songs are fast and some are even faster.
