Barbarians Unite

A criticism levelled at heavy metal is that it’s none too subtle. Everything’s loud and in your face and what even are they singing about? Metal fans know that’s bullshit, and that there are a slew of bands out their pushing boundaries, utilising awe-inspiring dynamics and writing the type of music that might change those stigmas. Conan ain’t one of those bands though.

“It’s quite crude I suppose in the way that we deliver it,” Conan’s guitarist/vocalist Jon Davis reckons. “We’re not particularly sophisticated in the way we write or perform.”

Case in point, the band’s third album Blood Eagle. The meaty six-track offering sounds like a horde of marauders drunk on bloodlust pillaging a village. And according to Davis, the intensity of the album has only been amplified as the band have turned their attention towards touring the material around the world.

“The songs always do evolve a little. The most notable changes have been to the paces of some of the songs; some come across a lot slower now that we’re playing live, and the ones that have a bit more urgency on the record – that tends to be magnified live. So stuff gets heavier and faster to emphasise the point that the slow bits are supposed to be slow and the faster bits are supposed to be speed up.”

That’s what Davis promises Aussie fans ahead of Conan’s first-ever run of dates Down Under. Straight-up doom fury, no frills. Just three dudes on a stage with bullshit loud amplifiers.

“Live, we sound more urgent and in-your-face, there’s more feedback and we’re playing everything louder. And everything becomes bigger than what it is on the record, we like it slow so we play as slow as we can, and as loud as we can, and then we like the mid-paced riffs so we try and do them as best we can. It’s probably not the professional way of doing it, but we just go for it.”

Though it might not be professional, Davis is unapologetic about Conan’s approach. In fact, he thinks Blood Eagle is the perfect template for what the band are hoping to do when they sit down and start work on album number four.

“If you look at Blood Eagle, although it doesn’t seem sophisticated in any way, you compare that to the album before that, or the shorter releases we’ve done, or even our first album, and I think you can hear our technical ability improve a bit with each release. We’re playing more technical riffs and the arrangements are a little more interesting. We’re not Mastodon or anything like that, but we don’t want to be. Because I’m not into that sort of music to be honest, so it wouldn’t feel right to do something like that.”