As countless young bands began claiming stake in the death and black metal influence game as quickly as they discovered the styles themselves, a wicked brew of southern discomfort was being brewed by some of New Orleans’ finest extreme music creators who decided Goatwhore to be the best moniker for their new project. Founded in the late nineties by Ben Falgoust of Soilent Green and Sammy Pierre Duet of Acid Bath and Crowbar, the band crawled along in the underground over the years, reviving old school black metal for those lucky enough to find out about the band. But with A Haunting Curse, their newest and by far most accessible album yet thanks to a heap of factors including a new, young beast of a drummer Zack Simmons tightening up the rhythm section and Erik Rutan making the album sound like real thunder living in a compact disc, Goatwhore are finally receiving the opportunity to show each corner of the sprawling metal scene how the old school is best paid homage to. QCHC’s Michael Gluck spoke with the band during their recent stop in Montreal opening for Cannibal!Corpse

Here we are with Goatwhore, now
on Metal Blade Records. Are you shocked that at your age you’ve been
signed by a label as big as this?

Ben & Sammy: At our AGE!?

Sammy: You’re making us sound like a bunch of…OLD AGE!? (laughs)

Ben: Personally, or age as a band?

For years I’ve been listening to you guys in Soilent Green and
Acid Bath. I’d say back to the early/mid-nineties. Labels are into
signing young bands these days, they’re into signing kids.

Ben: So you’re saying we’re old…

Zack: He’s saying we’re a bunch of old men!

That’s right, you’re old men. But good old men.

Ben: Well yeah, I mean, I guess; but we bring just as extreme music to the table.

No doubt, if not more.

Ben: So I guess it’s just a theory, that age doesn’t matter
in this. Metal Blade has been quite interested for a while, since
Funeral Dirge.

Sammy: They’ve been in contact with us for quite a long time.
It’s taken a very long time to get this worked out, so finally it
happened.

How has the label been treating you thus far? Are they treating you well?

Ben: Oh yeah, everything’s going really good so far. It’s a
lot different than the previous label, you know. The situation’s a
little different. Metal Blade is more of an impacting, high-velocity
label with a lot of bands on it, whereas Rotten Records was a smaller
sort of thing.

The first two Goatwhore albums were released on Rotten…

Sammy: Yes.

And Acid Bath.

Sammy: Yes

What are your impressions of that label?

Sammy: We’re not allowed to talk about that anymore!

Ben: We don’t want to go into that.

Fair enough.

Ben: Let’s just say he did what he could for Goatwhore for the time being. But Goatwhore needed to progress to another label.

Sammy: Exactly. He couldn’t do what we wanted to see as a
band, for a future; he couldn’t handle it. Being the small label that
he is. So we had to move on to something bigger and better.

Just to clarify, the reason why I said “old” before is because I’m
writing for some years now, I work with labels, and I see how excited
they are signing young bands, one after another.

Ben: Dude, for us, with age comes wisdom! And also what comes
is solidity. Because you got a lot of these younger bands, and then
talk about longevity, well many of them don’t have it.

They’ll break up after two albums.

Ben: Yeah, it’s a situation where maybe the label wants to
cash in on them real quick. We’ve seen the quote unquote trends come
and go. We’ve got a longer-term past to what we’re doing right now.

Guys in their early/mid-thirties like yourselves….

Ben: Early (laughs).

Usually by your age, most people would rather not be on tour all the
time. Guys tend to want to be with their families, or at home.

Ben: You know, it’s fun, as a small thing. Just to make a pun
out of it. We just got off the road with Celtic Frost, and we’re doing
these three shows, and you see an older band like Celtic Frost or Fear
Factor (sic). We see that they roll up in a bus, and they have a crew.
We’ve been ditching it out in a van. So to us, if one of those dudes is
complaining, it’s funny to us, because it’s like, “You’ve got it set.
You get onto a bus, you get off of a bus that drives you to another
town.” So if we were in the position of being on a bus, it would be so
fuckin’ easy for us.

You’re humble guys, there aren’t many guys like you. How do you manage that, having so many albums under your belts?

Ben: We’re humble but we’re jaded. We’re jaded about a lot of
thing. Just about the industry and how things go with the industry. But
so be it. So we’ll crack funnies at the people in the buses, like
“Yeah, it must be nice, you know, to take a shower. We haven’t bathed
in a week-and-a-half. We sleep on a seat in the van. We pull up to the
venue, we’re stuck IN the van, waiting for you to do what you’ve gotta
do, and then to complain about what you don’t have going on. We just
set up and throw it to the fuckin’ crowd, get off. Load in during
freezing weather, load out during freezing weather, we just do what we
have to do.

Well, that’s the kind of perseverance that will take you guys a long way.

Ben: Definitely, I hope so. I mean, if we got huge, that
would be nice and everything. But if we got to a decent level where we
were getting paid for thing ahead of time, like a house, that would be
great. If we could have something steady. Like the Melvins. The Melvins
never got huge, but they always stabilized at a point, and they were
always able to just go on the road and make just enough money on the
road to keep their lives going. But I have to work a day job. A lot of
bands, their members have to keep jobs to keep supporting it, like a
hobby. I mean, we’ll come home with some money from a tour. But when we
do come home, it’s only enough to cover two, maybe three, months of
bills, and then we’ve got to start from scratch again.

What does the contract with Metal Blade demand of you?

Ben: Three.

What kind of pattern are you planning, if any? An album every year-and-a-half?

Ben: We don’t really…we don’t try to jump too far ahead. We
try to take things at pace. If we put this album out, it’s only been
out close to two months, and we just want to do a lot of touring to get
this cycle going. We have to go to Europe because we’ve never been
there, first of all, and second, this is our only album to get a full
release out there. All the albums before were only on import. We even
talked about the Canadian market, like doing a club tour for three
weeks to start building a solid market here. So we were thinking maybe
with Cephalic Carnage because they often come through…

They’re always here, once a year at least…

Ben: So we have that whole aspect in our heads, there’s a lot
of work. Because this is our second time in Canada, so it’s a whole new
terrain for us, and we need to build that.

Which new members have arrived into the band since Funeral Dirge For The Rotting Sun?

Ben: Well, we have Nathan and Zack, who are both on the new album…

Strong performances, some very strong performances on the album. So why the changes?
Ben: Oh, you know, certain members got to the point where they didn’t want
to be on tour anymore, or they didn’t like the direction of the band,
or didn’t like how it was going. So they’d leave, and now we have two
people who are much more interested in the progression of the band. Not
necessarily for touring, but everyone has to be riding the same wave,
going in the same direction, on the same level; instead of having one
back here, and the other doing his thing over there. I guess it’s just
gotta happen sometimes.

This interview is for a hardcore and metal site, qchc.com, so that
Converge shirt you’re wearing would definitely score you some points if
this were a video interview. What is your experience with the hardcore
scene, bands?

Ben: It’s mixed, you know. These days hardcore sounds like
it’s metal. So to me it’s not even hardcore although all the kids call
it that. To me, hardcore was Agnostic Front, Cause For Alarm, COC’s
Technocracy and Animosity…

DRI…

Ben: Yeah, DRI, Circle Jerks, all that good stuff. Just
because we’re older doesn’t mean we don’t have knowledge about it. But
the kids today who bought into it, they think that’s what hardcore is.
It’s like, “Dude, that’s Metallica guitar with screaming over it, it’s
definitely metal with no sign of hardcore.” To each his own, they’re
fuckin’ younger and that’s how they see it. We played for some
audiences like that, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. You
DO want to play in front of different kinds of people, I mean, we don’t
want to paint ourselves into this black metal corner. It’s just when a
lot of people hear a different style, they don’t even want to deal with
it, they won’t even give it a chance. But Goatwhore HAS a lot more to
it; it has punk and hardcore elements. It’s still extreme, but it has a
lot of other elements in it. We want to try to do other tours and
everything, no matter what it is. We’re going out early next year with
God Forbid, and that’s totally gonna be a different tour.

There are many Soilent Green fans on Lambgoat, so tell us what your
impressions have been while touring the small clubs in recent years and
generally what kind of reception you’ve experienced.

Ben: I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s weird with everything.
Because when you have…and I might piss some people off with
this…metalcore, which IS a trend right now, even if they don’t want to
hear it because it is; every goddamned mall has it and everything like
that. So it’s kind of weird, because you get this audience in this huge
scene, and they don’t quite understand what the band’s doing,
especially if you’re not in with that crowd. It seems like it’s a
social scene, and it gets awkward at times. Like you said, we’re old,
so we’ve seen things come and go, seen things change.

Nathan: We’re not dogging them, we’re not gonna be the kind of band
that says “Ahh, fuck THAT shit!” or downgrading other bands; it’s like,
if that’s what you want to do, do it.

Ben: But don’t sit here and point and say “this is this, and
this is that” without going back to the past and seeing the roots of it.

Well, that’s how most kids are these days, they don’t go back to the past.

Ben: Well, it’s like Celtic Frost, I mean, look at all these
kids going to see Celtic Frost live; it’s like, “do you realize how
much of an influence this band has on so many fucking genres?”
Everybody just thinks they had an influence on black metal, but it’s
been pretty much on all the extreme genres. And they don’t know. I
mean, you don’t have to bathe yourselves in it, but at least you should
have the knowledge so that you know what hardcore is, and what metal
is. I mean, metalcore is just the new version of crossover.

Sure, the kids today are born into a scene with the crazy double
bass, and crazy guitars, so obviously Celtic Frost comes across as too
basic for them. It doesn’t hit them like it hit you, let’s say.

Ben: But you gotta have basics. There’s gonna be a point
where all these metalcore bands are trying to be mathematical,
all-out-craziness…

Nathan: But then you won’t be able to find in their albums that will stick in your skull.

Ben: Ten years from now, you remember what Celtic Frost did
as far as the simple shit. And you’ve gotta have riffs like that, it’s
like, the whole idea of AC/DC…

Nathan: (mocking metalcore fan) It’s like that riff that goes, “Jun-jun, jun, jun-jun, jun, jun-jun, blititit, blititit…”

Ben: The problem with metalcore is that there are so many riffs that sound the same in all the bands…

Nathan: “…jun-jun, jun-jun-jun, jun-jun-jun…”

Ben: Like, the whole idea of a breakdown; how many times can
you transfer this, over and over again. It all sounds the same. Every
band that does it…who’s ripping off who? Who originally did that? And
so, I guess, it consists of them taking the good parts of Pantera and
making into a song. Will someone remember those records ten years from
now? How about a riff? Oh, they’ll remember that part, “jun-jun,
jun-jun-jun,” but which band did it? All of them. This band did it, and
this band did it, and this band did it, and this band did it, and this
band did it. Who did it first? I don’t know. They all did it at the
same time.

What is the current status of Soilent Green?

Ben: We’re just working on new shit, that’s it.

Just keep it on hold until Goatwhore is finished touring?

Ben: Yeah, Goatwhore’s got a lot of touring to do. We have a lot to prove; I
know it sounds strange because we’ve already put out two albums, but
we’re still more or less unknown…

No one has those albums, to the masses they’re unknown.

Ben: Yeah yeah, pretty much. So there’s a lot of work we have
to do still. It’s like I said, touring Canada, touring Japan, touring
Australia, doing world tours, whatever. Doing tours in the States. Like
I said, the God Forbid tour will open us up to a new audience. We don’t
want to do something stupid, since we just put this album out, and just
lag off. Because if they see that, especially with all the band they do
have, they’ll be like “Well, this band’s only going to do this, so
we’ll put them off to the side or something.” With touring, we’re going
to try to do everything we can.

Are you happy with the reviews A Haunting Curse has been getting?

Ben: I was amazed. It was actually astonishing. Because it’s
cool to find bad shit about your band, but you don’t really find them
about this album.

It’s gotten rave reviews across the board, on every site imaginable.

Ben: Even in Europe, we’ve been doing numerous interviews,
and they seem really psyched on it. That’s why I’m really interested in
Europe as well, because I know that market is more loyal…

Sammy: They’re more old-school…

Ben: And they do keep the knowledge.

For the younger guys, how does it feel being in a band with two veterans of the New Orleans scene who have toured so much?

Nathan: (laughs)

That’s press-speak!

Zack: There’s so many lessons, so much that we learned in the
beginning, that we just take that and…never get drunker than Sammy gets.

All: (hearty laughs)

You’ve learned what to avoid, then. Is there anything specific you’ve learned how to do?

Zack: To take care of yourself when you’re touring this much, you don’t want to get unhealthy, just pace yourself.

Any brutal initiations?

Ben: Shit man, good idea!

Sammy: We should have done something!

Nathan: I consider initiation just as being in the van…

Zack: Yeah, being in the van…

Nathan: Smelling Sammy’s farts, that’s initiation. I mean, Sammy’s
been amazing because he really puts a lot of stress on me to play the
bass well, he’s always been really on my back about that. So it’s
really cool that he coached me in that way. It’s great because we learn
stuff from him all the time. I know I get taught about music all the
time, so it’s awesome.

Sammy, tell me how come you left Crowbar.

Sammy: Well, it was more of a mutual thing, and mainly I’ve
been really thinking about this band a whole lot. Kirk is one of my
dear, dear friends. Still is to this day. And I didn’t want…I knew it
was about to happen with Goatwhore, and I didn’t want to put him in a
situation with me not being there for him. So it was pretty much a
mutual thing. It was a privilege to be in his band. It was like, “Look
dude, you’re my friend, I don’t want to fuck you over. Goatwhore is my
band, I love it, and I have to be busy with it. So I don’t want to
leave you in a situation where you’ll need me and I won’t be
available.” I just wanted to concentrate more on this, and not fuck
them over.

How is Kirk doing these days?

Sammy: Good, man, good. He’s chilling at his house, working on the new Down record.

Also I think he’s working on an album with the Hatebreed singer called Kingdom of Sorrow, have you heard anything about that?

Ben: I haven’t heard it, but I’ve heard about it. Kirk’s laying down some cool guitar stuff, and Jamey’s singing, I think.

Hopefully that will help expose kids to Crowbar, that’s the idea.

Ben: Yeah, well, Hatebreed does bring Crowbar out on tour.

It’s only fair, they’ve been stealing riffs from Crowbar and Obituary since the beginning…

All: (laughs)

They’re a class act though, professional like veterans. They brought out Napalm Death and Exodus recently.

Ben: Jamey’s great with that. He’s definitely worked hard,
especially with Hatebreed being where they are, they work hard. And are
always good on helping different kinds of bands.

Sammy: Yeah, not just a band that somebody’s gonna force him
to take out because it’s a popular thing. Jamey will take out a band
that he likes, that he respects, to give more opportunity to a good
opener than just some gay, new, trendy band.

Being on the road recently, how have the accommodations been
compared to those on previous tours? You’re still in a van, we know
that, but more the rider, treatment from the promoter?

Sammy: It varies. Some days we get ice water, some days we get full-spread buffet. Every day is a different thing.

Ben: Depends on your slot, too. I mean, we got treated great
tonight. But sometimes, being the first band on a tour like tonight,
we’d be lucky to get some water and some drink tickets. But you never
know.

Tell us about some of the bands you’ve been listening to these days, either veteran or new.

Ben: Oh, man. We listen to so much shit.

Sammy: I’ve been listening to nothing.

Ben: Yeah, we kind of get to a point where it’s just dead
silence. Because you play every night, and you hear the other bands
play, and the PA’s going off.

Nathan: Judas Priest-Retribution, Leave Scars (Dark Angel)…

I love Leave Scars…

Ben: Leave Scars was amazing. A lot of Halford shit, like early Priest, the Halford projects, the Retribution album…

Rocka Rolla, Sad Wings…

Ben: Of course. Then we’ve got AC/DC, Celtic Frost…

No Killswitch Engage?

Nathan: That’s not allowed in our van.

Sammy: There’s this one band that I’ve been listening to a
hell of a lot, it’s this crustcore band from Portland, Oregon called
“Hellshock.” They’re really underground, but they’re fucking awesome.
It’s just so crusty that it’s nasty, just metal crust; hard to explain,
but they’re awesome.

Kind of like Tragedy, Disfear?

Sammy: Right, like that.

Nathan: There’s this other band from Denver called Cobalt (sp?).

Ben: Dude, we just got a copy of the CD from Matt Pike from
High on Fire, and the guy who put it out just made some burns and gave
it out to some bands, and it’s really good, man. It’s kind of got this
black metal edge to it, this Motorhead vibe, kind of weird.

Nathan: It’s weird, but it’s fucking awesome.

Ben: I think he said it was just one guy, he just tracks it,
lays it up. No label, it was six songs, and the name of the band was
Cobalt.

The guys will hopefully read this and appreciate your support.

Sammy: Yeah, and Skeleton Witch. They’re actually from Ohio.
We’ll tour for, like, forty days in a row, and the bands will all be
kind of the same. They’re a great new band, too.

Nathan: Every time we play with them, we’re watching them play and we’re just amazed.

Sammy: It’s like killer old-school thrash…

Nathan: Kind of like Mercyful Fate.

Speaking of Ohio, have you guys heard of older hardcore bands from the area like Integrity and Ringworm?

Sammy: Integrity, yeah.

Nathan: Ringworm…a couple of guys from Keelhaul were in Ringworm.

Ben: Keelhaul kind of sounded like Mastodon before Mastodon.
It’s funny. I’ll have it on and will be like, “Is that Mastodon?” No,
it’s Keelhaul.

Nathan & Zack: (laughs)

Ben: But Keelhaul’s way fucking better.
Could it be one of those many instances where a big band “secretly” steals a better band’s sound?

Ben: I don’t know, it might not be a secret. Who knows, they
might not have even known about each other. But Keelhaul, they were
fucking heavy, that’s for fucking sure.

They did three albums, I think. Some on Hydrahead.

Ben: Yeah, they’ve always been awesome.

Hypothetically-speaking, if you guys ever get big enough in the
underground that majors come sniffing, but under an unwritten condition
that you compromise your sound a bit, would you still sign?

Ben: No. Absolutely not. Then we don’t sign to a major. It
defeats the whole purpose. Because if we did something like that, it
would ruin the basis of what we do. It might bring in a new audience,
it would ruin the basis of what we would have built until that point.
And if you lose that, and do bad, you go back down and…

Sammy: You’re fucked all the way around.

Ben: So if we had to compromise, we’d say “forget it” because we need to keep that solidity there.

Mastodon, for example, on their new album bring in more singing and
traditional song structure. It’s arguable whose influence that was,
whether the label, or the band. I mean, they just performed on Conan
O’Brien, which was obviously paid for, so do you think they compromised
at all to become more marketable?

Ben: Well, I think with that new album they still have a
basis of Mastodon, it’s just that the vocals are more melodic, and the
they started to make the guitars a bit more conventional. So I don’t
think they’ve been affected that much just yet, but who knows down the
line what will happen. Personally, I think Lamb of God was affected.

Hugely affected, I fully agree.

Sammy: Big time.

Ben: You listen to that and compare it to their past records, there’s a lot of things that have changed.

First, there are much less politics on the new album, they almost
completely took that out. Everything is 4/4, there aren’t anymore cool
transitions, they now have epic gang vocal choruses; it’s obviously
engineered for the masses. How do you feel about that?

Ben: Yeah, I can see that. We know some of them, and I don’t
know what they’re in this for, or whether they wanted to go a certain
way, but from a listener’s perspective, I was like, “wow, this is
different than what they were doing before.” It actually sounds like
Pantera.

Sammy: Which might actually be a tribute to Pantera.

Maybe, but I feel that the Pantera sound should be left to rest
along with its creator, out of respect. It just doesn’t sound authentic
coming from another band.

Ben: In a sense, yeah, in the sense that there was already a
band who sounded like that and got huge. It’s like a band five years
from now putting on costumes and makeup and fucking shit and tries to
look like Slipknot.

In the nineties, Pantera were huge in Quebec.

Ben: They were fucking huge over here!

Sammy: They were fucking huge everywhere!

Ben: They were the biggest metal band.

How has Dimebag’s death affected you guys personally and on a professional level?

Ben: It’s a fucking shame that it happened. It sucked because
some of us stayed at his house before while we were on tour, so we
definitely did share some small moments with him. He was a cool guy,
man. He was really fucking cool. Totally down to earth.

Sammy: If you were at his house, he drank like crazy and he
made sure you drank like crazy along with him. But he would make sure
everything was taken care of for the group of people that were there
with him.

Ben: All the way into the morning, for everyone who was
there, he’d make sure everyone was fine and having a good time. He was
constantly on top. Then when get got up, it started again. He was like,
“come here, go here, drink this, drink this, you go here, take this.”
If you were up and you didn’t have a drink…

Sammy: You were fucked, man! He’d make sure you drank enough for each person there.

Classic.

Ben: But like I said, we never got close to him, although it
kind of affects because we shared moments with him. He didn’t have a
real big influence on me and Sammy because we’re older, but maybe for
these guys (pointing to Nathan and Zack) he did. It definitely did
impact things in the industry since they were so huge, and some of the
things he did on the guitar, he created a new style of metal and
everything. I was never the hugest Pantera fan, but they did set a
niche in metal to increase the expansion into a more extreme style. And
then Slipknot had a similar effect after Pantera, and so on. We really
don’t have a big one right now. Maybe Lamb of God or Killswitch, but
not now at least. They haven’t even touched the cusp of what Pantera
achieved.

It’s partly due, I feel, to many of the new bands being shape
shifters. Pantera weren’t shape shifters; well, at least from ’89
onward. After their hair metal phase, they were pretty much the same
band until they finished. But Shadows Fall, Killswitch Engage,
especially Shadows Fall though, are trying to appeal to different
crowds, which in a sense they have to because the metal scene has
become so diverse and sub-sectioned since the early nineties. That’s
why I think it’s harder now to sell a million records.

Ben: But the thing is you CAN appeal to different crowds if
you just stay in the grain of your thing, and just adapt a little here
and there. If you want to change it too much, you lose people, and you
lose the power of the riff like Nathan said. It’s like that Pantera
riff, man, you’ve got ringtones of that Pantera shit. It could have
been the simplest fucking thing, but it was something that caught you,
a hook. And we do that too. Of course we blast, and go completely
fucking madness, but we have moments where we stop and slow it down
because we want to have something that just fucking rocks.

When you’re on stage, do you ever worry about some crazy coming up and starting shit?

Sammy: No.

Ben: They’d be afraid of us because of what we’re wearing.

Sammy: We wear enough spikes and stuff that we’ll crack somebody if they come near us.

Ben: They might come onstage and then we’ll hit them with
spikes. We’ve had that happen a couple of times. One of us will just
kneel down on someone’s face, and there would be blood, and them just
rolling around. It’s like the Dimebag thing, that question raises a
whole new thing.

Sammy: Exactly right. Someone comes onstage, you don’t know what kind of shit he’s going to pull out of his pants.

I’m happy to hear how you guys are so grounded, yet driven at the same time. Any final words? Messages for qchc.com?

Sammy: Why are you lookin’ at me, man! But for now, I just
want to say that we love being in Canada; the people’s energy, and
we’re being treated so well.

Ben: I pretty much love Canadian music. Gorguts, especially.

Sammy: I’ve got something to say!

Alright let’s hear Sammy’s final word.

Sammy: You guys have got some beautiful women, that’s for damn sure.

OK, just to clarify for our readers, that’s not on qchc but in Montreal, Quebec.

Sammy: (laughs)

Anything from you, Ben?

Ben: (silent)

They’re gonna love to hear that.

Ben: It reminds me of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back where at the end…

Sammy: They get the fucking million dollars and then fly
around the country, just beating up all these little kids (makes
punching sounds).

Ben: They just trace everyone down; they’re like “Are you
so-and-so?” “yeah,” and then beat the fuck outta them. Because it’s
like the theory people talk about the Internet, where people love to
talk shit, but it’s probably some little kid just flappin’ his mouth in
some small town. But I love reading the comments. Whenever there’s a
post about a band that I’m involved with, I’ll go straight to the
comments; we all do that. It’s like, “Go look at the comments, go look
at the comments.”

Sammy: It’s so fucking ridiculous, some of them, that it’s just fucking great.

Ben: I’ve got something to say: I read one time when someone called us “mall-core.”

Sammy: (laughing) Yeah, yeah!

Ben: Yeah, we’re mall-core. I’ve got a final thing to say
just to stir ‘em up. Just remember, if you come to see Goatwhore,
whether it’s thirty minutes or an hour, school is ALWAYS in session.