Mark Holmes of Metal Discovery recently conducted an interview with bassist Alex Webster of Florida-based death metallers CANNIBAL CORPSE. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.
Metal Discovery: So you have the "Global Evisceration" DVD just come out a couple of weeks ago. How much involvement and input did the band have in what footage was and wasn't included on there?
Alex Webster: You know, really, what it ended up being was mostly Denise Korycki. She's the filmmaker and she pretty much does all the editing herself. I think she had a friend who did assist her in Brooklyn when she got home from touring with all the footage and everything. The vast majority of what you see there is her and her hard work. She was the one who cobbled it together and the story that it winds up telling; creatively, it's all her. Obviously, the footage is us and just us being ourselves, playing on stage and doing what we normally do but the way that it's put together is her. We had nothing to do with the editing. She would send us a rough draft and if there was something we didn't like, we'd ask her to change it, but there was very little of that. I guess it was our idea in the first place to do something like this and have a sort of travelogue/live DVD, which is something which we really hadn't done before but the creative part, and the reason that it is so good, is because of her hard work and her ability to tell a story on the DVD, instead of it being really dry. By the time you get to the end, you've travelled with us.
Metal Discovery: Your popularity's soaring these days! You're still on the up!
Alex Webster: This is true, you just never know. There are certain bands that have little periods throughout their career where, all of a sudden, they're bigger than they were for a little while. I think even bands that have been very consistent still have those little peaks and valleys like IRON MAIDEN or SLAYER, whatever bands we look up to for having consistent careers. You know, they've also had areas where they've surged in popularity a little bit too. We're experiencing one of those and we're also prepared for it to go away. We'll take the good with the bad but, right now, things are good.
Metal Discovery: I think that's probably aligned with certain scenes and subgenres of metal where their popularity seems to peak and trough at certain times so, you know, when death metal soars I guess you're there at the forefront.
Alex Webster: Yeah, that's the nice thing is that we were able to reap the benefits of our consistency paid off, I guess you could say. We just kept going and going, even when death metal wasn't very popular in the late Nineties when black metal was really a big thing, and its popularity had definitely eclipsed death metal at that time. That's fine; I mean, black metal's a great genre of metal too so we're cool with that, but we were aware that death metal wasn't the next big thing anymore. That was fine, you know, we just kept plugging away and then, all of a sudden, deathcore and even metalcore kind of started drawing more mainstream music fans into heavier kinds of music. I think metalcore directly led to deathcore and then deathcore directly leads to bands like us doing really well.
Metal Discovery: Definitely, yeah, so it sort of comes full circle almost.
Alex Webster: I think it does. It was something that we kind of always knew this killer music, and I'm not just saying CANNIBAL CORPSE, but I'm saying death metal in general, well played death metal like MORBID ANGEL, DEICIDE, NILE and that kind of stuff it's something where we always knew that it could be more popular than it was. It was just waiting to get the word out there but without radio play and without video play it was tough. I think having the deathcore scene in combination with modern technology and the Internet, it's really helped to get the word out there, and now you see bands like us and SUFFOCATION are able to play festivals like Bloodstock and all these big festivals. NILE plays all those big festivals too and it never used to be that way years ago. So all of us who stuck it out have been able to reap the benefits.
Metal Discovery: So you've just carried on doing your thing and waited in the wings for the scene to get popular again kind of thing.
Alex Webster: Yeah. I mean, we didn't know this would happen, but we're glad it did, and we realized that the potential was there. All along, I think we knew that death metal is killer. We love it and knew that more people could like this. If they didn't know about it they might be scared away by the album covers or something but if they see it live or give it a listen and I think that's where we're at now, like if you go online you can hear any of our songs on YouTube for free. There's no investment to learn about bands now and that's the flipside of you know, everybody talks about the negative side of the Internet with illegal downloading and whatever, and it's true that has hurt the music business but it's also true that the word has spread a lot. There's no doubt about it.
Metal Discovery: That's an interesting way to approach it. And I've read you're going into the studio in September this year for a new CANNIBAL album. How are the writing sessions going for that at the moment?
Alex Webster: Very good. We're trying to what I've been trying to do, on the last album I ended up writing seven songs and I was a little concerned that maybe having to work so hard learning the material that I wrote, it kept [CANNIBAL CORPSE guitarists] Pat [O'Brien] and Rob [Barrett] from doing a whole lot of writing. They were busy practicing the material that I gave them. What I've done is I've been trying to lay off the writing for CANNIBAL just a little bit. You know, I'm holding back just a little bit as far as the amount I'm writing and letting Pat you know, what's cool about Pat doing the SLAYER thing [filling in for Jeff Hanneman on SLAYER's European tour] is he already has a pretty good head start. He's almost finished with his third song that he wrote by himself whereas on the last album he only did two entirely. So he's already ahead. What we'd like it to be is probably three to five songs a piece. Most likely we'll try and make it four Rob writes four, I write four, and Pat writes four. Paul [Mazurkiewicz, drums] does lyrics for Pat's songs and Rob will do lyrics for his own. That's the plan right now. Whether or not it turns out to be exactly divided that way is hard to say, but I'd like it to be that way. As much as I'm happy with my own songwriting, and I am willing to shoulder the burden of writing the last share of it if necessary, I would rather have it divided up more evenly amongst the band members. It just makes for more variety. As much as I try to inject variety into my songs, there's nothing that's going to create more variety than having other songwriters.
Read the entire interview from Metal Discovery.
More...
Metal Discovery: So you have the "Global Evisceration" DVD just come out a couple of weeks ago. How much involvement and input did the band have in what footage was and wasn't included on there?
Alex Webster: You know, really, what it ended up being was mostly Denise Korycki. She's the filmmaker and she pretty much does all the editing herself. I think she had a friend who did assist her in Brooklyn when she got home from touring with all the footage and everything. The vast majority of what you see there is her and her hard work. She was the one who cobbled it together and the story that it winds up telling; creatively, it's all her. Obviously, the footage is us and just us being ourselves, playing on stage and doing what we normally do but the way that it's put together is her. We had nothing to do with the editing. She would send us a rough draft and if there was something we didn't like, we'd ask her to change it, but there was very little of that. I guess it was our idea in the first place to do something like this and have a sort of travelogue/live DVD, which is something which we really hadn't done before but the creative part, and the reason that it is so good, is because of her hard work and her ability to tell a story on the DVD, instead of it being really dry. By the time you get to the end, you've travelled with us.
Metal Discovery: Your popularity's soaring these days! You're still on the up!
Alex Webster: This is true, you just never know. There are certain bands that have little periods throughout their career where, all of a sudden, they're bigger than they were for a little while. I think even bands that have been very consistent still have those little peaks and valleys like IRON MAIDEN or SLAYER, whatever bands we look up to for having consistent careers. You know, they've also had areas where they've surged in popularity a little bit too. We're experiencing one of those and we're also prepared for it to go away. We'll take the good with the bad but, right now, things are good.
Metal Discovery: I think that's probably aligned with certain scenes and subgenres of metal where their popularity seems to peak and trough at certain times so, you know, when death metal soars I guess you're there at the forefront.
Alex Webster: Yeah, that's the nice thing is that we were able to reap the benefits of our consistency paid off, I guess you could say. We just kept going and going, even when death metal wasn't very popular in the late Nineties when black metal was really a big thing, and its popularity had definitely eclipsed death metal at that time. That's fine; I mean, black metal's a great genre of metal too so we're cool with that, but we were aware that death metal wasn't the next big thing anymore. That was fine, you know, we just kept plugging away and then, all of a sudden, deathcore and even metalcore kind of started drawing more mainstream music fans into heavier kinds of music. I think metalcore directly led to deathcore and then deathcore directly leads to bands like us doing really well.
Metal Discovery: Definitely, yeah, so it sort of comes full circle almost.
Alex Webster: I think it does. It was something that we kind of always knew this killer music, and I'm not just saying CANNIBAL CORPSE, but I'm saying death metal in general, well played death metal like MORBID ANGEL, DEICIDE, NILE and that kind of stuff it's something where we always knew that it could be more popular than it was. It was just waiting to get the word out there but without radio play and without video play it was tough. I think having the deathcore scene in combination with modern technology and the Internet, it's really helped to get the word out there, and now you see bands like us and SUFFOCATION are able to play festivals like Bloodstock and all these big festivals. NILE plays all those big festivals too and it never used to be that way years ago. So all of us who stuck it out have been able to reap the benefits.
Metal Discovery: So you've just carried on doing your thing and waited in the wings for the scene to get popular again kind of thing.
Alex Webster: Yeah. I mean, we didn't know this would happen, but we're glad it did, and we realized that the potential was there. All along, I think we knew that death metal is killer. We love it and knew that more people could like this. If they didn't know about it they might be scared away by the album covers or something but if they see it live or give it a listen and I think that's where we're at now, like if you go online you can hear any of our songs on YouTube for free. There's no investment to learn about bands now and that's the flipside of you know, everybody talks about the negative side of the Internet with illegal downloading and whatever, and it's true that has hurt the music business but it's also true that the word has spread a lot. There's no doubt about it.
Metal Discovery: That's an interesting way to approach it. And I've read you're going into the studio in September this year for a new CANNIBAL album. How are the writing sessions going for that at the moment?
Alex Webster: Very good. We're trying to what I've been trying to do, on the last album I ended up writing seven songs and I was a little concerned that maybe having to work so hard learning the material that I wrote, it kept [CANNIBAL CORPSE guitarists] Pat [O'Brien] and Rob [Barrett] from doing a whole lot of writing. They were busy practicing the material that I gave them. What I've done is I've been trying to lay off the writing for CANNIBAL just a little bit. You know, I'm holding back just a little bit as far as the amount I'm writing and letting Pat you know, what's cool about Pat doing the SLAYER thing [filling in for Jeff Hanneman on SLAYER's European tour] is he already has a pretty good head start. He's almost finished with his third song that he wrote by himself whereas on the last album he only did two entirely. So he's already ahead. What we'd like it to be is probably three to five songs a piece. Most likely we'll try and make it four Rob writes four, I write four, and Pat writes four. Paul [Mazurkiewicz, drums] does lyrics for Pat's songs and Rob will do lyrics for his own. That's the plan right now. Whether or not it turns out to be exactly divided that way is hard to say, but I'd like it to be that way. As much as I'm happy with my own songwriting, and I am willing to shoulder the burden of writing the last share of it if necessary, I would rather have it divided up more evenly amongst the band members. It just makes for more variety. As much as I try to inject variety into my songs, there's nothing that's going to create more variety than having other songwriters.
Read the entire interview from Metal Discovery.
More...
