Latest Release: Empire of the Blind
Nuclear Blast
Site: facebook.com/heathen.official
The Bay Area has long since been established as the epicentre for the thrash metal movement. One underrated band that came out of that scene in the mid-eighties was the acclaimed Heathen. Whilst not exactly prolific in their release schedules, of their three prior album releases, metal fans last heard from Heathen in 2010 with The Evolution of Chaos, which hit nineteen years after their second album, Victims of Deception, noting that the band were dormant between 1993 and 2001. Now, over a decade later, we have their latest and fourth studio album Empire of the Blind which is chock full of heavy riffs aligned with a deft sense of melodicism that few contemporaries can match. The new album was written over many years by guitarist Kragen Lum, who joined Heathen in 2007. That’s because both himself and fellow guitarist, Lee Altus were gainfully employed as touring guitarists in Exodus given Gary Holt had joined the mighty Slayer. Loud Online gleefully took the opportunity to discuss the crushing new album with Lum.
Long time between albums but the new one is a good one.
Yeah, glad you liked it, it took us a while but we are certainly happy to have it done.
You signed the deal with Nuclear Blast a while back but then went touring with Exodus. Did the songs change much during that time?
Ah, I think I had about half the record written by 2014 and I started writing when we signed with Nuclear Blast in 2012. I would say, out of those songs, four of them are pretty much exactly the same. Then one of them, none of us were really happy with it. So, I sort of stripped it apart and rewrote some sections, and changed the lyrics – all of that. But that actually became the title track and that was the only track that really went through any sort of major revisions. I guess that I am super critical so I don’t even send it to the guys unless I am happy with it. Ha-ha, and from there, you know, like the one song where if people are not happy with it then I will go back and revise it. I am always open to be changing things and to making little tweaks that make a song better wherever possible. Most of the songs ended up the same but I am glad that we had the extra time though. It made the title track way better.
The world has changed substantially, even in just the last couple of years. Has your song writing style also changed?
Oh yeah, I mean, I think my song writing maybe changed or improved. I don’t know how to explain it but I spent a lot of time over the last few years analysing songs that I really liked and thinking about what it was that I really liked about them. I think a lot of that informed my writing, you know, I think it was a good thing.
The album is neatly bookended with This Rotting Sphere and Monument to Ruin. It very much reminds of Metallica’s …And Justice ForAll and Battery introductions with those volume swelling, instrumental parts.
Yeah, I mean, the idea for the whole record was to make what I call an album listening experience. So, it seems like in recent years, bands are not really thinking about the album part of it. They are not thinking about how to build a real beginning, middle and end to a record. It is sort of more of a collection of songs. I think that is probably because the album has become less important in terms of how people are just streaming today, which includes streaming songs. Also, touring has become much more important than it used to be as that is how bands make their money; it is not from the record really anymore. So, you know, I am a huge fan of that classic album experience and that was sort of my goal, to kind of get back to that a little bit. There is the bookend with an intro and outro, there are also fast songs that start and end the album and the rest of it in the middle is like a roller coaster ride with a lot of variety but also with a lot of continuity. Even the song order was something that I spent a lot of time agonising over – which songs go after which one to provide the best album listening experience.
Some musical sections even tend to indicate what is coming in the album. Harmony guitar lines and drone guitar figures also add some atmosphere in how they are arranged.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of people probably won’t notice the little details but This Rotting Sphere and The Blight are basically just one long song. They are split in the track listing so that if somebody wants to skip the intro, they can go straight to the fast song or whatever, but is all one long song and there are musical elements that repeat throughout the song. The chorus in The Blight is the same music as what is in This Rotting Sphere and there is a guitar solo that sort of repeats the middle, with some variations and stuff. Those details – that is the stuff which made the albums that I grew up listening to so magical. There was something new to listen to the second time around that maybe you didn’t focus on the first time. The drone guitar that you sort of mentioned is a good way to explain it with the second guitar part runs more or less throughout the whole Empire of the Blind song. That was not on the original demo at all and I mess around with adding it and having it sort of weave between the rhythm guitar and what the vocals were doing. When that element was put in there, it added so much depth and such an epic feeling to the song that I figured out a way to keep it going through the whole thing. Even in the middle part, you know, even in the fast middle section there is this really fast, kind of crazy pull-off guitar riff that is happening. On top of it, there is this sort of slow, almost evil sounding drone over the top of it and it just creates this cool vibe, you know. I think bands have sort of lost some of these things over the years but that is what I loved when I listened to albums. It was great to hear these elements and I would want to go back and listen to it again.
It is also in the chorus part to Shrine of Apathy. So, it is a good technique.
Well yeah, I mean, there are a lot of overdubs. That is one thing that this band has never been afraid to do; add elements to the songs. If you go back even to, you mentioned the classic Metallica albums, they would add layers and elements of things in there, even just as ear candy. They would never be able to play all of it live but it made the recording and made the actual songs so great. So, that is something that we like to do. Lee and I are big fans of adding those elements. There are so many guitars in Shrine of Apathy of that you would probably not even know that they are all there. We even put in an e-bow which is buried deep in there but if you took it away, you would miss it, you know, it adds something. It is just cool ear candy to sort of listen and it adds some sort of feeling to the songs. That is what we were trying to capture, especially with a song like that one where it is a ballad. I wanted to do a classic ballad like those ballads from the seventies like Dream On or even Stairway to Heaven, well, I mean nothing comes close to that but I mean, where those ballads made you feel something when you listened to it. I didn’t want to just put a soft song on the record. That is what most ballads are these days, where it is a soft song or you know, a quieter song for the album. But, they don’t necessarily make you feel anything. I think that is kind of where we were going with the whole record.
There is a different style with an almost hard rock approach for Sun in My Hand where even the solo is a slow, melodic part as opposed to ripping shredding.
Yeah, I mean, I think that for Lee and for me, we both play for the song. In the solos, I do not feel the need to play something fast or show off and do anything flashy. It has got to suit the song. For a song like that one where it is maybe a little more accessible, the solo fit and it had to fit what was there. Actually, that is one of the first songs that I had demoed for the album and it didn’t change. Even the solos are the same.
There is an excellent instrumental track on the album titled A Fine Red Mist. What was the thinking or approach behind that?
The idea behind that was to hark back to those classic instrumentals where instead of it just being shredding the whole time, it was a song where some element of the music, in this case a guitar part, is taking the place of the vocal. So, it is still a catchy song and there is a song arrangement to it and that was how that song started. Then in the middle section I kind of had this idea of how cool it would be to get all of my Bay Area thrash heroes to play together on a song. So I called Gary Holt, Rick Hunolt and Doug Piercy who used to be in Heathen for the first two records, and I asked them if they would all play solos on this song. So I sort of designed this trade off solo section that builds and builds then had those guys do trade off solos. You get to hear the original Exodus guitar H-Team and the original Heathen team. It end up just coming out really cool and you know, I think that is actually a highlight on the record for me, partly because I liked the way the song came out and partly because I got my sort of teenage heroes to all pay together on one of my songs.
I was going to ask you about those solos because the aggression of them seems to escalate and they all sound different.
Yeah, I spent a lot of time in college studying classical music so basically what I did is some modulation but it is all in the same key. But, it is just modulating and going up the scale, little bits at a time and sort of building and getting more intense as it goes. It gets maybe a little darker as it goes and then by the end, it just sort of drops off a cliff and I just reprise the intro and it sort of goes into a bunch of crazy guitar stuff after that.
Rhythm guitars are mixed well with separation such as being panned left for the instrumental, which fits the song construction. How does Zeuss [producer and contributing engineer, Christopher ‘Zeuss’ Harris] approach that sort of thing overall, across the album?
I actually recorded all of the rhythm guitar tracks here at my house as I have a studio here, and then, for mixing everything, the idea was, we wanted to capture a hybrid between that classic late eighties, early nineties analogue production and with a modern sound. So, we did a number of things to make happen. One of them with the guitars, we wanted to still have that super Wookiee, we call it, sound that was on Victims of Deception and those old Metallica records where you had the guitars just sounded huge but also really clear so you could hear all of the articulation and everything. What I noticed over the years with mixes is that the guitars have gotten away from the studio sound and they are very mid-rangey. On the scooped sound, it is hard to fit the bass in there. We went to great extremes to have both so that you could still here the bass on this record and it wasn’t like …And Justice for All or something, but still have that really heavy guitar sound. Zeuss was great, he completely understood what we wanted and he is basically the same age as I am so communicating with him and everything was easy, you know, communicating to him exactly what we were looking for and he just did a great job. Recording the drums, he got a great drum sound that sounded natural and you could still hear all the parts and the overheads, everything – it was the same with the bass sound. It was a chore trying to fit the bass in with the guitars as fat as they are but he did it, he did a killer job. Every bit of the production came up well in the mix. He really went above and beyond and everybody in the band is happy with the results.
Did you find your rhythm guitar style has changed at all as a result of being in the touring party of Exodus?
Ah, no, not really. I mean, of course, there is one riff on the album which everybody picks out and says it sounds like Exodus but the one thing you have to remember is that Exodus was the band that influenced all of the other bands in the Bay Area, and from the very beginning. I’m looking on my desk at a stack of cassettes that are Lee’s original Exodus demos and bootlegs that I am going to transfer to digital. Lee even made his own mix of the Exodus Turk Street demo; that is how big of a fan he was. So, he knew the band and all that. My point with saying this is that Exodus has always been part of the Heathen DNA, going back to the very beginning. Any bands that came out of the Bay Area and claims they weren’t influenced by Exodus is lying because they were ‘the’ band. So, I don’t think my technique changed from touring with them but I did learn some of Gary’s unique techniques that he does for rhythm guitar stuff but we don’t have any songs on the record that use those necessarily. That is like his thing and we don’t want the band to sound like Exodus. We still sound like Heathen which is the thrash metal stuff, obviously, but mixed in with kind of epic stuff from bands like Rainbow and harmonies from bands like Thin Lizzy and song writing from old bands like Scorpions. There are a lot of influences that are there and I certainly improved as a player from playing with Exodus and doing all that touring, that is for sure.
Guitar wise, has it always been ESP guitars with EMG81 pickups and Mesa Boogie amplifiers? That is the classic thrash metal sound.
Yeah, but it hasn’t always been ESPs, I used to play Jacksons for a long time and I mean ultimately it is that heavy sound and getting the EMG81s with the Mesa Boogie amplifiers – that is the Heathen tone but we played Jacksons back on the first two records too. So, you know, we use the Mesa Boogie Mark series amplifiers on this record, just like on all the other Heathen records. That is really where the tone comes from, so to speak.
For the vocals, there is an element of David White’s vibrato that sort of reminds me of Steel Panther. Ha-ha. But they fit well.
Oh, ha-ha, that is interesting, I will make sure I tell him that. It is like a hard rock vibrato, and you’ve got to remember that Heathen is unique which has affected the band in both positive and negative ways. We have this melodic singer who can really sing anything and he could easily be singing hard rock stuff. Or, he could be singing more aggressive stuff, he is capable of a lot, there are not many bands in thrash metal where the singer can do a ballad like David could. In that way, maybe that is a compliment with the Steel Panther thought.
The album artwork is great. Did you present a concept or a full idea to the artist?
Travis Smith [Overkill] did the artwork and he did the artwork for the last Heathen record. He has also done all the prototype album covers for me, going back to the first EP/CD that we put out. So, I have known him for a really long time and he’s very easy to work with – we basically got on the phone and talked about some ideas and then he mocked some stuff up and sent it to me and we went back and forth and just tried to develop the idea. He and I are able to communicate with each other really easily, you know, since we have been together on different projects for a long time. He just has this amazing ability to visualise things that are in the lyrics and to capture the vibe of the album. It’s a really cool album cover and the idea is that the empire is ruins, sort of in the background and then there is this monumental sized skull with a blindfold on and it is almost like it was the top of a statue. The concept of say Escape from New York was what I first referenced to Travis in terms of what I wanted, the poster are for that film had the giant Statue of Liberty head on the ground and that is kind of where it started. I wanted something that was bleak and dark because that kind of a lot of the social and political lyrics, elements of the music that are very dark. So, he captured the feel really well – it came out great.
Thanks for talking to me. The album really is very good.
Awesome, thanks so much, I am glad to hear that you like it, we have been getting a lot of really good feedback. We are hoping that while people are stuck at home that they take a chance on listening to it and enjoy it.