One of the most anticipated releases of this year is Surgical Steel by legendary death metal outfit Carcass. Ghost Cult caught up with bassist/vocalist Jeff Walker to see what’s going on in Carcass country…
Can you talk us through the point Carcass reformed to the moment you actually started to work on the new album?
Wet got together in 2007 when Bill (Steer – guitarist) finally agreed on doing a couple of gigs. We didn’t play any gigs that year, because I walked away from the whole thing, due to certain business arrrangements I wasn’t happy about. In 2008 the whole reunion thing came about. It was never meant as a long term thing. Then 2009 came about and we got more and better offers coming in. Same thing in 2010 including a couple of events and venues we hadn’t played before. Last gig we did as Carcass was in August 2010 with Michael Amott and Daniel Erlandson of Arch Enemy. That was the closure on the whole reunion thing, because Michael made it explicitly clear he’d be too busy with his own bands to even consider doing anything in the future with Carcass. At that point we hadn’t discussed doing anything beyond the whole reunion thing, so that was quite a relief. At some point Bill contacted me about whether I’d fancy doing anything with Dan Wilding who was a member of Aborted when they toured the US. Bill has a thing with drummers and he wanted to do something musically with Dan. As for me I was really prepared and willing to do more music with Carcass back in 2009. When you’re in a band with Bill Steer, Michael Amott and Daniel Erlandson it would be wasting a great opportunity not to. Daniel would have made himself available if we would continue doing music with Carcass, but when push came to shove he had to make a decision and he decided to stay with Arch Enemy. It wasn’t really a matter of choosing for him. If he stuck around for longer, a Carcass album would have been around sooner perhaps.
It’s quite surprising that Bill Steer was interested in making a new album. Over the years he’s been pretty vocal about his lack of interest of playing anything metal-related.
That’s a falsehood created by the media. In fact, Bill would be quite angry with you if you told him that. He never said anything like that. Those are Chinese whispers as we call like to call them. He’s probably the most metal person I know. The reality is that he got disillusioned with metal back in the nineties. He still loves the stuff he was into back when he was younger, same as me. I’m not particularly interested in what happened with metal in the late nineties and early 2000’s. That doesn’t mean I disrespect my friend’s bands or anything. There are some bands that I find interesting, but most of them I couldn’t be arsed about. It’s a classic case of seen it, done it, printed it on a t-shirt. There are a lot of people out there who think they have a handle on things as far as Carcass goes. When I’m stupid enough to spend time on internet forums and check out what people’s opinions are I can only conclude they’re delusional. They don’t know us as individuals. They think they know why we have done certain things on said album and what our motives are. I wouldn’t profess on what James Hetfield does for example, so I wouldn’t comment. It’s quite stupid, you know.
Let’s talk about the new album. What’s the idea behind the album title?
Surgical placates the idea that Carcass is a medical band. Steel is a very metal title. Surgical Steel is almost a homage to British Steel by Judas Priest. I considered using the title Surgical Strike in the lyrics for a song. People can use it to describe the album in both a postively and negatively, as far as the music and the production goes. The album sleeve is very sterile and cold. We don’t try to be an ultra-technical band or something or a progressive death metal band, you know. I think the album has some thrash metal qualities to be honest.
You guys write real songs, instead of a pile of guitar riffs. Was this the whole idea from the get go?
That’s how we end up honestly. When you listen to Symphonies Of Sickness some of those songs are just a collection of riffs. It’s kind of the Brian Talisman school of songwriting. Just stick a pile of riffs together with lyrics on the top. I really enjoy that mindset. Necrotism is a progressive album in a way. Not in the way that people travel back to the seventies and relive their Pink Floyd fantasies. True progressive rock is all about trying new ideas isn’t it? We’re not adversed to having strange arrangements. For example ‘The Master Butcher’s Apron’ doesn’t have a traditional song structure. It still has hooks and has something you could consider a chorus. When I was younger I tried to avoid clichés as a lyricist and there were never choruses as such. There were certainly choruses in the musical sense, but we tried to avoid doing the obvious. We’re not against it and we understand that such things in music exist. We write riffs and we write songs and for some reason they work the way they do. We don’t sit down and discuss how a song is going to be from start to finish. We don’t apply the traditional Stock, Aiken and Waterman school of song writing like some boring death metal bands try to do nowadays. It all comes very naturally and we don’t overthink things too much. The songs on the new album all grew organically. What is interesting is what Bill considers to be the crux of a song is totally the opposite of what I think. That’s what keeps Carcass interesting. We’re a band that actually writes songs together and not like one person who writes a song in his bedroom, puts it into Pro-Tools and goes on with the next one and tells the rest of the band what to play, like so many bands tend to do nowadays.
The new album combines the best elements from Heartwork and Swansong, but it also features some nods to the first three Carcass albums. How do you see things?
This album has been jammed together to a certain extent. Again, it wasn’t me or Bill coming in dictating the others what to play. It was trial and error, especially with the drums and guitars. It was all about seeing which parts would work and which not. It was crafting in the truest sense of the word. What you hear is a Carcass album. There are certain riffs that I wrote that are a deliberate throwback to the early days, even as far back as Reek Of Putrefaction. Just because it doesn’t have torturous production, it doesn’t sound like that album. Again, a song like ‘The Master Butcher’s Apron’ has some ‘Symphonies of Sickness’ type of arrangements; for example there’s no lead guitar in that song.
The core of Carcass has always been you, Bill Steer and Ken Owen. How was it to record without having Ken on drums?
Ken had a lot of input on the first three albums, but after that the core of the songwriting moved to Bill and Michael Amott. By the time we recorded Swansong it was mostly Bill and me. In a way it wasn’t that dificult, because we exhausted all Ken’s ideas by the third album. It was really interesting to have Dan Wilding in, because he’s a different beast on the drums. The songwriting wasn’t that different, but I would like to say that in the past Bill was pretty dictatorial towards Ken on the drum parts and he didn’t have to do that with Dan Wilding. I was more like that with Dan. I guess Bill is more chilled out by now in that respect. I really wanted to keep it Carcass. What he was playing isn’t that much different than what Ken did in the past, but Dan is more technically proficient as a drummer, you know.
Ken Owen suffered from a terrible brain haemorrhage back in 1999, which pretty much pulled the plug on his musical activities. How’s he doing nowadays?
It is it what it is. I don’t understand why people keep asking me, because it’s not like we’re going to take him on the road with us after some miraculous recovery or something. He had two brain operations and it’s almost like he had a stroke. His memories have been affected and his physical strength isn’t like it was when he was younger. To use this horrible word, his condition is stable, because Ken is Ken. He’s still the same guy trapped in a physical shell that he wasn’t before. His condition isn’t going to improve or deteriorate.
Raymond Westland