Pharaoh is a treasure in metal’s underground bunker. The group has released three, classic heavy metal albums through Cruz del Sur that have gone unnoticed in the metal universe. Perhaps, this lack of attention occurred because, like so many of the progressive and power metal bands of today, they refuse to wank off with their instruments. Another possibility is the absence of a major record label such as Metal Blade or Roadrunner. Whatever the case may be, this group deserves much more attention.
They deserve more exposure for many reasons. First of all, Pharaoh plays a brand of heavy metal that just smells nostalgic. Each album could have fit in with various metal scenes from the mid-eighties. The golden days of metal still live on today, but some groups are mere posers. Pharaoh understands and performs well the conventions of classic metal: epic choruses, shredding leads, fist pumping riffs, memorable parts, galloping bass lines.
Some may recognize their name from a couple of Iron Maiden tribute album appearances. Others may recall the Tim Aymar name from his time singing in Chuck Schuldiner’s Control Denied. Control Denied’s sole release, The Fragile Art of Existence preceded Pharaoh’s first recording, After the Fire by four years, leading some to wonder where Chuck found this golden voice. Although his vocal approach differs in the two bands, those enamored with his singing on the aforementioned CD will not be disappointed upon hearing Pharoah.
If you have yet to hear Pharaoh, the group’s current album Be Gone is a good starting point. Each member of the group offers a detailed look at this spectacular offering in the following interview.
Blistering.com: How do you feel about your new release, Be Gone?
Matt [Johnsen, guitars]: I feel pretty damn fine about it! When we released The Longest Night we thought we were pretty badass that we had put out an excellent album, but it wasn’t long before I was thinking about how we could top it. With precious few exceptions, every band eventually follows an excellent release with a not-so-excellent release, and as a writer, I’m very aware of this fact and I worry that I’ve crossed that line. But even before we started recording Be Gone, I knew that we were set to outdo ourselves. Be Gone is considerably less immediate than its predecessor, so I know we will see a lot of reviews that say, “This is good, but not as good as The Longest Night,” but I’m confident that after some time, when people have had a chance to live with the album for a while, the consensus opinion among those who think about Pharaoh at all will be that Be Gone is where it’s at.
Blistering.com: What was the recording process like for this album? Did this recording stay consistent with past efforts or was it different?
Matt: It was fairly similar in most ways, but significantly different in a few. First of all, it took less time than any album we’ve done before. After the Fire was recorded over a period of two years and The Longest Night took about eight months to record and mix. From start to finish, Be Gone only took about five months, which is still a long time but we also recorded a lot of extra material to be released later. The second big change was that Tim recorded all of his vocals at my house and not in the studio. Recording a Pharaoh album involves such considerations as “do I have enough vacation time banked for this?” and by the time we got to vocals, I didn’t have any time left. So, [producer] Matt Crooks brought the entire signal path that we would have used to record in his studio, and we set up a sort of mobile studio in one of my spare bedrooms. Tim flew up for five days at a stretch and we recorded his vocals after I got home from work.
It was a very exhausting month for me, but I think the results speak for themselves. I had to record Tim by myself, without Matt’s assistance, and that was a technical challenge in and of itself, but I also had to bear the burden of keeping Tim on track and in good spirits. This is sometimes harder than you’d think! But the basic method of recording stayed the same: everyone records their parts individually, and I tag along to make sure the project doesn’t run aground. I’m there for the recording of the drums, bass, guitars, and vocals, and for this go-around, not even Matt Crooks was a constant presence. It’s time consuming and a little wearying, but it’s the best we can do and it works well for us, considering the small amounts of money that are involved.
Blistering.com: Multi-layered guitars are a major facet of a Pharaoh record. Please explain the guitar tracking process. How does this layering affect your music?
Matt: Because we don’t (generally) play live, we never take into consideration how many guitars can be playing at the same time. Sometimes there’s only one distinct part. Sometimes, there are as many as eight. We record three tracks of rhythm guitar for every song, and these three are mixed hard left, hard right, and up the center, respectively. Then we start piling on the melodies and solos. All bets are off at this point. Sometimes I double or even triple the melody parts, sometimes I don’t, depending on the texture we’re looking for. A lot of those decisions are made on-the-fly, usually by Matt Crooks, who likes to torment me by demanding that I flawlessly double a tricky part. He does this to cause me pain, I am sure.
Anyway, we recorded the guitars a little different this time insofar as we recorded them all direct and then re-amped them at a later date. This is a very clever process where you basically record the raw signal coming out of the guitar, and then play it back through a special piece of equipment and pipe that into an amp, at which point it’s like playing straight through the amp. This lets us record the parts and get the best takes without having to worry about the guitar tone.
When all the guitars were tracked, we assembled a mighty stack of amps (seven, I believe) and went to work finding the exact tone for every little melody part and lead. Then, it’s just a matter of playing back and recording the direct tracks through the amps. A little tedious, but it opens up a lot of tonal options that would be hard to capitalize on if the amp settings had to be determined at tracking time. Concerning the effect of the layering on our music, I think at this point I’m so used to it that it’s just the way I think about guitar. It felt comparably strange when we played this stuff live and there were only two guitars. It felt downright unnatural.
Blistering.com: “Buried at Sea” contains a truly epic chorus line. How did you develop—musically and lyrically—the heroic aspect of the song?
Matt: By the time I heard it for the first time, the lyrics were done. In fact, this was the song around which we based the entire concept of the album, but the original incarnation of this song was a bit of a mess. Kerns realized he had written himself into a corner, so he handed me a complete-but-flawed song and asked me to fix up a few parts. It was definitely a challenge coming up with music that really felt of a piece with what he’d written, because the good parts from his original composition had a really powerful vibe. I struggled with this for months and then in a single day I wrote all of my contributions. It’s like the song suddenly made sense to me, so I know what you mean about the heroic aspect. All things considered, this is one of the simplest songs on the album from a guitar point of view – there are very few overdubbed melodies and the ones that are there are rather simple in themselves. There’s just something about the riffs that Kerns wrote that pound this song into your skull. Capturing that was merely a matter of respecting the space and the subtlety of what he envisioned.
Blistering.com: What is the storyline of this song?
Chris Kerns [bass]: The Earth itself is likely a living thing, and also the existence of life as we know it is kind of secondary to the life of the planet itself, because our experiences and capabilities are limited to what the Earth has to offer. It’s also true that we can prove to be expendable, and that nature can eliminate us like in the way our bodies would eliminate an intruding virus if it wanted to….and if that happened, the Earth will still live on afterwards. The flow of the music is supposed to support that too: it starts off simple, as to paint a picture of how quiet and simple the Earth must have been before people populated it. Next, things get more tense as the populous does things to harm the balance of nature more and more over time, then the oceans rise to wipe out all life as we know it with the “rough waters” theme, and finally at the end the Earth is back to being eerily peaceful with that simple repetitive passage that ends it.
