Caley: See, he was living in Maui and he didn’t talk to me for a long time. The last time I saw him was at the Murderfest and without giving away any details, he was being a rock star there.
Harvey: [laughs loudly]
Caley: He was like, “Yeah I’d like to talk to you more but I’m doing my own things, man” and being a total rock star. So anyway, he said he’d hit me up and like to jam sometime when he’d move back to California. Northern California, I have to stress. He was like, “Yeah let’s jam," so I joked that it would be cool if we started Exhumed again. He said that if I could get Leon and Danny onboard again that he’d be down to do it. I was like, “Whatever dude, shut up.” And then he was like, “no, dude, seriously.”
Harvey: [laughing loudly with Caley] It really did happen that way! He’s serious! It really happened that way. I was at work one day and I had this really shitty job selling TVs in Hawaii. I was at work, well, not really at work because I was just fucking off and not actually doing any work. But it sort of just snowballed into this record that came together pretty quickly. It gained momentum and it kind of took on a life all its own.
Caley: So to make this as short as possible, we got the guys together and were sending the music back and forth using a web space. I’d do demos and send them to him and vice versa and we were both on the same page. It took very little change to get the record finished. When we finally got into the studio, barely anything changed from what we were doing. There were little tiny things here and there like a break thrown in, but it was just so easy to do. That’s when you know you have a good record is when it all just flows and comes naturally.
Harvey: That’s the thing with [All Guts, No Glory] is that it was so natural, so quick and effortless. There was no strain on us. We had literally four rehearsals as a band before we actually recorded it.
Caley: It was extremely visceral. There was little to no thought even put into the record. No thought whatsoever was actually put into it [laughs]. The lyrics, though, there was a lot of thought put into it and that’s where he comes in.
Harvey: Well, yeah, I’d just sit at home with the word processor.
Caley: Musically it was simple. We have even more songs that we didn’t include on the record.
Harvey: We wrote like 22 songs total.
Blistering.com: You guys say it was easy writing these songs. For someone who can’t write any music whatsoever, exactly how is it easy to write your songs?
Caley: Well, he’s different than me. For me, I just play my guitar and basically don’t think about anything at all. So a lot of the riffs are horrible, ridiculous. So what I then do is a process of eliminating the bullshit. The good riffs I then play to a click and add the drums later. I use Drumkit From Hell and it sounds like a real drum kit and it really solidifies the sound. It’s cool because it sounds like a real band but it’s not; it’s just me. With the demos I’d send to him, it made them sound like a real band who just recorded a real demo. That’s what made it so easy.
Harvey: And that’s what made it so easy to rehearse. I’d use a drum machine, he’d use Drumkit From Hell and it was pretty easy.
Caley: With the riffs, I’d spend hours on the riffs for some songs and then there were some where I’d have just four riffs and it came together quickly. But most of the time I’d just jam. That’s what you do when you’re a musician trying to write songs. You just keep jamming away until you find something that works and then from there you just start honing in on it and go from there. What’s your process?
Harvey: For me, do you remember that show Magnum PI?
Blistering.com: Yes, with Tom Selleck and his mustache.
Harvey: Tom Selleck always had this little voice in his that was telling him stuff. Well, there’s this little voice in my head that is always giving me riffs [laughs].
Caley: So is this voice more rhythmic?
Harvey: Sometimes it’s rhythmic, sometimes it’s more melodies, sometimes it’s both. So as long as I listen to that voice more than I listen to my own conscious brain, it usually comes together pretty quickly. Then, once you get one part, it naturally leads to another part. If you know what sounds good to you, once you get that one part it comes naturally. I used to have this saying of, “Let the riff decide.” What’s the beat? Let the riff decide. What’s the vocal pattern? Let the riff decide. It’s like the Metallica thing where it’s all rhythm guitar and everything else is secondary.
Caley: The songs that I wrote are more linear and then he’d come in with the change. Like the song “Necrotized” where he came in and suggested a bass break. The song originally was very long and boring. We had the same riffs over and over for a long time and then a bass break for four bars and it was pure genius [laughs]. That’s what we do is take something and just add things to it.
Harvey: That way it doesn’t become monochromatic. Not that I’m actually into the music, but I like to study pop music patterns and stuff that’s in, like, musicals. You take a song that goes from part to part to part and it’s like a journey. It ebbs and flows and there’re pushes and pulls and some modulations and there’s a lot of that in pop songs and musicals. That’s something that a lot of death metal bands don’t do. Most death metal bands will just go with this part, that part, this part and then a break and then another part and it just goes on and on. It’s like they’re involved in a footrace or some other sort of competition. There’s really no point in it.
Caley: the whole of what we’re doing here is that we’re entertainers. You can say that we’re musicians, but that’s ridiculous. We’re entertainers. We make our money by doing what? Entertaining people. If you have songs that have energy to them and have dynamics, and most death metal bands don’t do that. Whether it’s a drum fill or a bass line or something other than the riff going on and on forever, it needs to be interesting.
Harvey: What’s funny is that using these little pop devices is actually so much easier and so much less work than doing it the other way. Instead of cramming in like 400 notes when this other band only had 320, therefore it’s better! I’m not into the whole Olympics aspect of it. Maybe when I was 15 it was interesting… well, no, because back then it was more or less the punk rock era and it was the same sort dynamic.
Caley: I can’t speak for the rest of the band but I’m just not good enough to play that way. I can’t do Origin yet so we just don’t do that.
Harvey: Fuck, we couldn’t play Origin if we tried!
Caley: We are trying to write songs that are still heavy and intense but the main thing is that we need to still be able to play these songs live. We don’t want to just stand there; we want to put on a fucking show. Like Kiss or somebody where people will remember the show where the band was rocking out, there’s a chainsaw, there was blood leaking out of skulls or whatever. We try to have something different than what you’d see at a typical death metal show.
Harvey: There’s always something to catch your attention. I don’t want to see a band come onstage in street clothes and play 64 arpeggios. I understand the music and how it works, but I can’t do it. I don’t have the attention span to do it and I understand how to do it but it’s just boring. We’re more like a rock & roll band playing death metal.
Blistering.com: The overly technical stuff just doesn’t do much for me. Nile is great and Atheist, obviously are the best ever at technical metal but everything else is just… meh.
Caley: Oh, Atheist is cool. They’re awesome.
Harvey: What’s great about Atheist is that they’re playing jazz, but with death metal.
Caley: What’s also great is Kelly [Shaefer] is just so awesome. All those guys are awesome and what’s great is they have their own thing going on.
Harvey: They’re not trying to be anything or anyone else. They’re all about qualitative achievement, not quantitative achievement.
Caley: The ego aspect of it is just not there; it’s all about music.
Blistering.com: Speaking of egos…
[Both laugh loudly]
Caley: Uh-oh. Here we go. What are you going to ask us?
Watch for the second part of Sloan's chat with Exhumed to post February 28.
