REVIEWS
INTERVIEWS
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UNRESTRAINED! MAGAZINE
By Adrian
www.unrestrainedmag.com
I’m proud to say that the Canadian metal scene is growing in all directions these days. There are good, solid scenes in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal and now you can count Eastern Canada as another hotspot.
One of the most promising acts to emerge from Halifax, Nova Scotia is grind/black metal act Thy Flesh Consumed who just released their debut for Civilian Death Network titled End of Blind Obedience. Word of mouth has been good for this band in the last little while, and they’ve delivered the goods with the new album. Who knows, the next flood of great metal acts may surface from out East—I know my East Coast metalhead buds RealDeadOne and Necromaster are praying so.
"The scene here is of course small seeing as Halifax is far from major centre points of travel. Bands don’t come out this far usually, although many up and coming Canadian metal bands like Martyr and Anhkrehg have played here recently," starts bassist Randy ‘Crust’ Jeddry about his hometown’s music scene. "We have world class bands here like Hellacaust and Terratomb, as well as New Brunswick bands like Slaughter of Saints and Black Frost. One thing the Halifax scene has over other places is the unity of the metal and punk scene," he adds, "We’ve played with many punk bands like System Shit and Slitch and we hang out with them a lot. Graham (a.k.a. Crucifuck) of Hellacaust also played in a punk band and Gerald [Smith; drummer] was also in System Shit. We consider the three Maritime provinces to be one scene. We have a local messageboard (www.maritimemetal.net) that we use to support the scene. So far there is no metal infrastructure so any shows we do consist of the hard work of many dedicated people, but isn’t that what having a scene means? The one drawback here in Halifax is that we don’t have an all-ages venue. Period. We can play for the drunks (and trust me, there’s plenty) in the bar circuit but it’s tough for young and/or extreme bands to get their music heard at all."
So, what does Jeddry think sets Thy Flesh Consumed apart from the local and Canadian scene? He answers, "We derive our music from several different styles and mix them together in each song. Also, the subject matter of our lyrics kind of sets us apart. We don’t sing about generic metal topics like gore or Satan and shit like that (not that there’s anything wrong with that). We try to stay rooted in reality. We may sometimes go overboard with the nihilistic attitude, but it makes us feel warm inside."
I was going to ask you about that and the lyrics…
"Our vocalist Pete [Mestre] handles most of the lyrics. He writes a lot about animal rights, anti-racism and anti-capitalism. Some songs’ subjects cover religious tyranny, the corporate media and pollution. These things are important to us and we think they deserve attention. There is a lot of real evil in the world so we don’t see the point in singing about demons and fairies. We [the band is rounded out by guitarist Dave Burns] have more of a resistant/revolutionary attitude to most of the songs. We all listen to bands like Impaled and Bathory, but it wasn’t something we wanted to do. Seeing as we did that Blasphemy cover (‘Atomic Nuclear Desolation’), we have no problem with devil worshippers if their tunes are cool!"
Pretty cool idea to cover a cult band like Blasphemy.
"Yeah," he agrees. "Dan is a big Blasphemy fan so he suggested it. We just thought it would be a good cover as Blasphemy are a very influential band and they’re from Canada. We were also playing with the idea of ‘Satan’s Curse’ by Possessed but ‘Atomic Nuclear Desolation’ suited us better."
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