Bucking The Trend

"We don't consider ourselves anything groundbreaking,” Goatwhore frontman Ben Falgoust humbly replies when asked where his band fits within extreme metal's landscape. “We're taking traditional ideas and kind of reinventing them. We don't try to burden ourselves to meet some standard set by the mass population, [but] we try to do things people enjoy.”

Blood For The Master, the Louisiana crew's fifth full-length since their 1997 formation, is a testament to this, their bile-spitting blackened death metal reaching new levels of brutality, without sacrificing the all-important songwriting component. “Maturing doesn't always mean getting less extreme,” Falgoust explains. “I know some bands get to that point where they want to go in a different direction away from that. For us, there's influences from bands like Judas Priest and we incorporate their ideas, [as well as] old black metal and thrash.

“We're evolving into our own self. You go back a few records and you can really pull out our influences. Now we're becoming our own entity. For some bands, it takes a little while to evolve into what they need to be. I'll listen to the first two records and it doesn't sound too much different; we're just more mature and evolved as a band. Even within the band, everyone has their own opinions on the way they see it. It's hard – a lot of people put us in the black metal category, but I leave it open. What we do, I would just call it metal. I understand that there have to be labels, as people want to put things into categories. Sometimes you have to create your own identity, but that's alright as we really enjoy what we do as a band. You might have to work a little harder, but you look back at the end of the day and see the great things you've achieved as a band.”

There are many differing definitions of musical extremity, but there has to be a limit to how heavy bands can be, just as there is only so many ways they can reinvent the wheel. “You can have different kinds of extreme points in [different] extreme styles,” Falgoust, who also fronts grind/sludge mob Soilent Green, says.

“That can be an opinionated thing. Just as you think things are getting to a stagnant point, something comes out that makes you go 'Holy shit, look what that band did'. They took something that was stagnant and totally reinvented it,” he says, specifically referencing how black metal bands outside of Norway eventually breathed new life into the once-stale field. “At any given moment, you can think things are stagnant, then look at what happens. Maybe a year or so passes, and then a new band or a band who's been around for a few years does something great.”

As for whether there are boundaries of brutality bands will eventually reach – even if such a marker remains undefined at this point – Falgoust believes it's also subjective. He agrees the suggestion of the definition of “heavy” may be partially due to generational gaps; your average teenager uncovering metal's thrills via Suicide Silence may perceive them to be the most obliterating music around, as it's their primary reference point.

“It's hard, because it's all opinionated about what you think is or isn't heavy and what you think of where heavier [music] can go. To me, someone who's a little older, I'll go listen to old records, then I'll stumble upon a new band also doing something new… Then you have a new generation coming through."