Location: Ljubljana / Metelkova / Slovenia
Interview date: November 24, 2010
Immolation are among that handful of the finest death metal bands of today, the ones true music gourmets devoted to the extreme varieties of metal worship all over the world. Immolation is one of those New York bands considered co-founders of the “death metal” genre, or if not that, then at least a band that, by arriving on the scene as a serious player, firmed up the first steps of what was then a young genre, a new strain of metal that was already hitting such extremes of stylistic and sonic brutality that the classic, world-famous heavy metal acts led by Iron Maiden, Metallica, Judas Priest, Slayer, Anthrax, etc.. couldn’t even have dreamed of back then.
They started out as Rigur Mortis in 1986, then took the name Immolation in 1988! That year also brought major shake-ups in the lineup, so the name change was well-timed, and Ross Dolan and Robert Vigna joined as full members. The two are still the main engines driving Immolation’s musical outlook and vision of development. The partnership between Ross and Bob is also the creative nucleus that brings Immolation not just the music but all the lyrics.
In March 2010 the band released its current studio album, »Majesty And Decay«. With eight studio albums in the bag to date, the band is known as one of the most brutal incarnations the death metal scene still has to offer, and at the same time Immolation pride themselves on a perfectionist polish, along with strikingly complex songwriting that often combines, in one breath, dissonant guitar structures (motifs) set up as guitar duets, which the band then backs with demanding, progressively fractured rhythmic structures. Yes. We can say Immolation are progressive death metallers!
At the end of November 2010, as part of a package tour with Napalm Death, Macabre and Waking the Cadaver, the band stopped on one of its European dates, on November 24, 2010, in Ljubljana at Metelkova,
For an in-depth chat with RockLine, bassist and vocalist Ross Dolan took the time this round. He’s a guy known as an exceptionally sparkling conversationalist, with information just gushing out of him, he’s that well-read and knowledgeable.
RockLine: If I’m not mistaken, with your latest studio album »Majesty And Decay« you used a pre-production phase for the very first time in Immolation’s career. Why did you decide to take that step? What was the process of recording the album and working in the studio like, and will you use pre-production on future Immolation albums from now on?
Ross: We embraced new technology. Bob used a new computer program, Ableton Live. In the past we’d rehearse, play together, and Bob would record riffs right onto cassette tape. Our drummer lives in Ohio, in Louisiana. Back when we recorded the earlier albums, we were constantly driving from New York to Louisiana on weekends. We’d hammer out riffs and songs in the studio, then go home and head back to Louisiana the next weekend. It was a real pain, to be honest. Now that Bob (Robert Vigna, guitar, author’s note) has switched to this program, he can record the riffs himself and add programmed rhythm loops. Bob was able to create raw song sketches completely on his own. He then emailed them to our drummer Steve (Steve Shalaty, author’s note) in Ohio. So Steve got everything ready to go. All he had to do was listen through the stuff, the raw sketches and song ideas. They were marked out with programmed rhythms so he’d get a feel for how to approach the drumming on each song. That process made the whole thing a lot easier for us. We no longer had to schlep to Ohio and back, or rather, when we showed up in Ohio for the first time this round, Steve already had five songs finished out of the ten slated for the new album. This time we only drove down to Steve twice. So by the time we walked into the studio, the songs were basically ready except for the vocals. Even some of the guitar lines over the riffs were already recorded, and partly the solos too. So it felt great, we really only needed minor tweaks to the songs, since pretty much everything was already in place. We clung to the old ways of recording for a long time, desperately, but we won’t be going back after this new approach, and we’ll use this way of creating on future albums too.
RockLine: How do you compose? Does Bob come in first with a riff and the rest of you build around it, or do the lyrics come first?
Ross: Music definitely comes first. We always write the lyrics last. You need the music first to feel its pulse, to lead you to the right inspiration for digging through poetry. Personally, when I’m writing verses I’m always driven by the music we’ve written. It guides my imagination and decides which stories I’ll tackle. How it goes is we leave Bob completely alone for a month or two so he can record all his riff ideas and the rest. This time Bob had a whole 80 different riffs and rhythmic loops, which are those raw seeds that only then get real arrangements. We didn’t use a lot of it, either. Say something sounds great when you listen to it, but then when you get into arranging it, you realize the song has moved so far along that you can’t use the original idea anymore. Once Bob had all 80 of those riffs ready, we all had enough time to pick the best ones. Like: »69! Riff number 69 is great, riff number 71 is the definite winner, and let’s not forget riff no. 43,…« and so on, you know what I mean? This time I had no trouble with ideas for lyrics, whereas for the previous album I really struggled to scrape together decent words. Generally, though, I write lyrics with a “light touch.” So from the title and story concept on, as the songs develop, my lyrics, and with them the poetry, get upgraded too. This time there was time in abundance. The first two weeks in the studio I could spend, with no pressure, devoting myself entirely to the lyrics. On the last few albums Bob has been helping me write lyrics too, and that makes the whole thing a lot easier.
RockLine: You’re one of the few death metal bands that has kept its freshness all along, over 20 years of existence. Do you feel it’s harder to make music for Immolation after twenty years than it was in the past, say at the very start of your career?
Ross: No, no, no, not at all. The start of every album is equally hard. You go into the process of creating it from zero. But we never go in thinking we have to make a better record than the last one. We just throw ourselves at the work and that’s it. We don’t calculate in advance, we just keep an eye as we go on what’s happening with the material that’ll be on the upcoming record. But it’s easier for us now in the sense that we know exactly what we want in the studio, so it’s easier to focus on the goal. What matters to us is that when we create something, when we record something, we like what we’re doing, what we’re creating. As long as that’s the case, everything’s fine. It doesn’t matter whether the new album feels slower than the last one or anything like that. That has no real significance here, the point is that what we create pleases us first and foremost. Even the fans aren’t what matters, nobody else matters here, because we make this for us. We’re what matters most here. Before we put anything out for our friends and fans to hear, we have to enjoy what we’ve made ourselves. If by some chance we don’t like something we make, you sure as hell won’t hear it either. Trust me.
RockLine: So it’s not like you compare two albums with each other and then pick ways to make a different album…
Ross: No, no, only once, just once! Only once did we consciously approach it with a fixed idea in our heads. That was for the album »Harnesing Ruin«. At that point we decided to strip absolutely everything down. We were after a more direct album, less complex, harder. And we pulled it off. Goal achieved. We got a tougher album with direct songs that were still very ear-friendly, with the signature Immolation elements. And then we used that approach as a mold for the follow-up to »Harnesing Ruin«, since we poured elements from the start of our career into that mold, and the album »Shadows In The Light« is exactly that. 23 years are behind us and we’re still the same band. Nothing has changed in that respect. And it comes through. In our music. That’s us. Doesn’t matter when, doesn’t matter how. Even right now. And when 10 years pass from this moment, you’ll say it’s all Immolation.
When you walk into the studio to work on an album, you can’t be weighed down by trends. All that should matter is that you enjoy yourself while creating and that you’re satisfied with what you make. We in Immolation don’t write music to sell, music meant to be sold. We write music to satisfy ourselves. Nobody’s offering us big contracts to sign and make big money. Each of the four of us has a regular day job. So we create out of passion, because you have to be happy with what you do. If you follow trends you’ll always screw it up. Trends always disappear. Trends come, go, come back,… that’s why they’re called trends. Because they don’t stick around.
RockLine: What’s your take on the »Florida death metal« scene?
Ross: The scene those Florida bands built, all of it comes out of Morrisound studio. That’s the main creator of this wave and, if you like, of the very movement those Florida death metal bands belong to. So it’s really just about a studio. And a studio doesn’t dictate a scene. To me that scene doesn’t really exist. Then this happens: »Okay, those bands are from down there!« and then this happens, Malevolent Creation, Deicide, Cannibal Corpse are from New York and moved to Florida because of the studio. New York has an excellent death metal scene. We, Immolation, always couldn’t have cared less about Morrisound studio. Okay, it’s great, it’s excellent, but we were always totally unburdened by it. Whatever came out of there was great, but everything that came out of there just sounded very similar. For our first album we traveled to Germany to Harris Johns. Why? Because the guy had produced all the classic bands, from Kreator on, that whole old German thrash metal went through his knobs.. That music inspired us, »Persecution Mania«, »Pleasure To Kill«, those were albums we truly loved. So our options were Morrisound, Harris Johns and Colin Richardson, who produced Carcass, at that time their album »Symphonies OIf Sickness«. We went with Harris Johns because he worked with classic bands, we liked that, we didn’t want a Florida sound, and unburdened by geographic coordinates we set off for Europe. If we’d had a studio in New York first, we’d have had a »New York sound« and then everybody would suddenly start talking about the »New York death metal scene«. So this isn’t about a scene, it’s about the sound a studio produces. So we don’t sound like Incantation or Suiffocation, Mortician, Profanatica, Ripping Corpse, Prime Evil,… all these bands come from New York, and they’re all different. None of these bands followed trends either, which is why they’re different and each recognizable in its own right.
RockLine: What about the beginnings of the death metal movement in New York, in the late eighties?
Ross: Honestly, there was barely a movement, actually there wasn’t one at all. Back then every musician understood the situation sort of like this: »Oh, I’m in a band« and that’s it!« We were surrounded by friends. When members of other bands listened to us, when we were recording an album and playing, they laughed at us and asked: »What the hell are you doing? Are you even normal?« We just looked at each other, looked down instead, laughed, acted like nothing was up, and kept working. What we were doing really was different from everything before. We enjoyed it and we didn’t care what others thought of us. Likewise early bands like Autopsy or Death, their first demo recordings, were one of a kind, and we come from their school. We were more progressive than classics like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Kreator, Sodom, Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax., Venom, Hellhammer, Celtic Frost. We were after a more advanced form in terms of achieving greater crunch, heaviness. Yes. The scene was really thin back then, it was underground. And then we wrote to each other, we’d send letters, and when I heard of, say, the band Annihilist from Sweden, I sent them a letter saying I liked their music and asking if they could send me their demo and so on,… then I contacted another band, like Autopsy from California. The scene was really small.
RockLine: But an effective one.
Ross: Absolutely. And all the bands were completely different from each other, every band back then had its own clear, recognizable identity. Not like today. You hear some new band, any band, something new, and it reminds you of ten other bands. Today it’s harder and harder to realize your own musical identity
RockLine: How happy are you with Nuclear Blast Records?« Majesty And Decay« is the first album out on that label, so why did you decide to make the switch?
Ross: Simple. Because our contract with Listenable Records ran out. Listenable Records did an incredible job for us. Excellent label, but with too little reach outside Europe. And we wanted to break into the US. That was the basic reason for our move to Nuclear Blast Records. We’re very happy with the choice. It was the only logical option for us, in the sense of: »All roads lead to Nuclear Blast Records«. I’m convinced that at this point, with the first album out for them, they’ve done more for us than similar labels like Roadrunner Records, Metal Blade Records, Century Media Reocrds would have, with the exception of Listenable Records, who’ve always truly given their max for us. That’s the only label I can’t throw under the bus, ha, ha, ha,….
RockLine: »Majesty And Decay« sticks to different themes than we’re used to from Immolation. You usually attacked the middlemen between god and the real world in your lyrics, and now you turn more to sociological themes, to the history of wars, which dominates the new album. Obviously you’ve exhausted your ideological arsenal tied to the concept of the Church and religion.
Ross: Definitely. Imagine what it must be like when you put out five studio albums and religion and the church are the dominant theme? Basically you’ve said everything you had to say. People probably know well already that we in Immolation are atheists and that we’re surely not done with religion. It was a strong theme of previous records. It even remains a theme of the new record to a degree, only it returns to it in a somewhat different way. Take the song Power And Shame on the new album, a very anti-religious song that draws on the book »Hitler’s Pope«, that is Pope Pius XII. It deals with World War II and events involving the Church’s ties to everything that was going on, that is, its connection to and its reaction to the events of the Nazi Germany era. It’s a song with an anti-religious bent, but it settles accounts with the Church’s actions from a different angle. The rest of the album mostly leans on wartime situations, especially World War II, a period I see as one of the key ones in human history, so it’s a very strong starting point for the poetry of the new album. On the other hand, I also read a lot about this stuff myself and I’m interested in it, so it found its way into the poetry. In any case, the new album also takes on a sociological side, relations between people, the very state of those relations. The album is very dark, a typical »Immolation child«.
RockLine: How would you describe the evolution of the Immolation sound over your years on the scene?
Ross: There’s no plan behind it. It’s a completely natural process of development. Like I said, we don’t plan stuff like that and the sound is whatever it is. We don’t know how anything will sound until the album’s done. We just know what we want, what kind of sound we want. In 23 years you get a lot more mature, in character and as a musician. We’re more mature in how we perceive things too, and all of that together shapes the change in sound. So if the musicians in a band don’t evolve, the band’s sound can’t evolve either. The evolution of sound is necessarily conditioned by the maturing of the band members, that is, a gradual evolution of sound.
RockLine: How do you like how the current tour is going?
Ross: Very much. Considering you have to spend five to six weeks together in a package like this, it’s smart to pick the company of bands made up of normal people. The guys in Napalm Death, Macabre, Waking the Cadaver are genuinely good people. I even dare say they’re the coolest people we’ve met since we’ve been knocking around on tours. I’d add the guys from Cannibal Corpse to that, truly wonderful people. All these musicians are also big music fans, big fans of bands, and we’re the same. Besides, we already know Macabre very well, since this isn’t our first tour together. It feels really good. Like a kind of brotherhood. And the fans of our music who come to our shows are great too, one of a kind. The feelings are really excellent. And tonight, when we play here in Ljubljana, it’ll be another unforgettable night. We always feel good here. Don’t expect us to be reading the Bible during the show. Anything but. We’ll blow you away! Ha, ha, ha,…
questions prepared by: Rok Klemše
interview conducted by: Aleš Podbrežnik
text translated and edited by: Aleš Podbrežnik
You can read RockLine’s report from the Immolation concert of November 24, 2010, in Ljubljana (Menza p.k.) HERE
