CAVALERA CONSPIRACY - “Fuck The Groove!"

November 3, 2014, 9 years ago

Greg Pratt

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CAVALERA CONSPIRACY - “Fuck The Groove!"

When Max Cavalera took some time away from the constantly busy Soulfly and the fun side project Killer Be Killed to get down to writing the tunes for Cavalera Conspiracy's third disc, Pandemonium, he found himself in the curious position of telling his brother and drummer Igor to cut back on the big grooves. Curious because Max is known for extreme metal with a big bounce, the man being the dreaded ombudsman mediating between death metal and nu-metal, which is a very unlikely job description, but, hey, he's been doing it since he first hollered at us about our roots, bloody roots, all those years ago.

"The approach we took for Pandemonium was quite extreme," says Cavalera. "I was a bit of a dictator when it came to Igor's drumming. I kept telling him to fuck the groove. He kept going into the groove, but I didn't want every song to have a groove, so I was like, 'Get the fuck out of the groove, man.'"

Indeed, the man responsible for bringing the song "Jumpdafuckup" into the world was so intent on not having groove here, he wanted to call the album Fuck The Groove.

"The label didn't like that very much," he chuckles. "You know label people, you put the F word on everything and it scares the shit out of them. So we settled on Pandemonium. It was actually Babylonian Pandemonium, and they wanted a shorter name so I just crossed out the 'Babylonian' and we just called it Pandemonium, which is an honour to my great heroes Celtic Frost, and [their album] Into The Pandemonium."

 

 

Fucking the groove, worshipping Celtic Frost... sounds like another day at the office for an extreme metal fan, and that fan-level love of extreme music is a big part of Pandemonium. Cavalera says the record was fun to make, plain and simple.

"Going back to great fast shit with Igor, it reminded me of being kids when we just went for the craziest, heaviest, fastest sound you can get. When we were kids, we did that back in the early Sepultura days. So making Pandemonium was like that, it was a trip back in time to get back to aggressive shit again and just don't give a fuck and play fast and just make kind of a fuck-you record to everything, just go out there and blast it. It's fun, man (laughs)."

The album is the first to feature bassist Nate Newton, best known as bassist for hardcore titans Converge. Cavalera says he loves Converge and also loves what Newton does in Doomriders, a more rockin' metallic hardcore band he plays guitar and sings in. And apart from providing killer low end through all of Pandemonium, he sings on one tune.

"When I heard his singing for Doomriders, I knew I had to give him something to sing on this record," says Cavalera. "So I gave him 'The Crucible', which was about the witches of Salem. It tripped me out, because he is from Salem. He said, 'I was born in Salem; my whole life I've been surrounded by stories of the witches.' I was like, 'Wow, this is too freaky. That's trippy as fuck.' But he did a great job, and his bass is intense, the distortion of it, just brings intensity to the whole record. And he did a great job because some of the riffs are complex."

 

 

Complex but in a simple way that gives this album the familiar Cavalera sound, without a doubt. And that simplicity goes all the way down to the production, which the band handled themselves.

"We didn't want to overproduce; we actually went for more of an underground recording," says Cavalera. "We wanted something that sounded even more dirty, even more nasty. We just went for that vibe and I think we got it."

So, album number three for Cavalera Conspiracy, meanwhile Soulfly has amassed an enormous body of work (the day we catch up with Cavalera he's about to play the first show of the first Soulfly tour ever that doesn't contain any Sepultura material in the band's set list), he's got Killer Be Killed... yet all we can talk about is Sepultura. I've mentioned the band three times in this story and the last album Cavalera played on with the band came out one thousand years ago.

"It's part of it, you know?" he says, when pressed on if he ever gets tired of hearing people talk about his old band. "We understand it was a big part of our lives. And it will always be connected to us, I think like Black Sabbath and Ozzy, you'll always connect the two of them. But life goes on."

 



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