Jeff Walker (Carcass) Chimes in on His Decision to Tour With Deafheaven
Carcass recently announced a tour with Deafheaven and Inter Arma, which caused people to come out of the woodwork and talk about how the latter two acts are hipster bands making hipster music for hipsters by hipsters. I don’t see why any of this is such big deal — if a band makes good music, then who am I to judge them? Bottom line: I just want more good music.
But you didn’t click on this article to get my opinions on hipsters and metal, you clicked it to see what Carcass bassist/vocalist Jeff Walker had to say. Well, without further ado, here he is in a new interview with Decibel:
“Like I said, back in ’13 when they and us were hitting all the end-of-year critics’ list I thought it would have been cool to do a tour with them, Gorguts and Inquisition as we’d all made the end of year lists. Deafheaven’s manager had dismissed it out of hand as she said she didn’t ‘get it…’ plus she thought I’d dissed them once as I made a joke about their pink album cover, ha ha! What’s interesting is that they’re moderately successful [as Carcass is] and I think it makes a strong ‘package’—they have a slightly different audience to us so, at the end of the day we’re trying to put bums on seats here and trying to reach people who have never heard Carcass—and believe me there’s a lot of them!”
Looks like Jeff has been trying to get this organized since ’13. Personally, I think it’s a great idea, and I don’t understand why more bands don’t have this kind of mentality. Variety is the spice of life, after all. Who knows, maybe Deafheaven would have earned some respect from metalheads that are hellbent on bashing them if they just saw ’em live… probably not, though.
Walker went on to talk briefly about Deafheaven and their effect on the North American black metal scene:
“As far as the hipster thing goes… it’s definitely a more interesting take on U.S. ‘Black Metal’ to me at least—kinda makes more sense to a European than Americans standing in the woods in corpse paint with a toffee hammer ‘round their necks trying to be all necro!”
I get what he’s saying here. These days it’s a bit of a cliche to walk around in corpse paint and gauntlets. When you’ve got U.S. pop artists embracing the ludicrousness of death metal fonts, and fashion companies making fake designer black metal inspired clothing, it detracts what all of this once stood for. Sure, these things make for a great stage presence, but when bands like Behemoth can perform without makeup and still rule, I think it’s safe to say there’s a place for black metal artists that just want to embrace the sound and mentality of the genre, not all its pomp and circumstance. Then again, I’m pretty sure I’ve read comments about Nergal being a hipster, too, so I guess even he’s teetering.
Inter Arma being lumped into this category makes even less sense to me. But I’m not even going to start on that one.
Feel free to disagree in the comments. You’re going to anyways.
[via Metal Injection]
