By Greg Pratt

Danish thrash/hardcore/metalcore band PITCHBLACK are no strangers to controversy, having had the honour of being the first band their record label had to issue a parental advisory sticker for, but with their second album, The Devilty (released on Mighty Music), the band has taken their trouble-making to new heights.

German distributors are refusing to deal with the album due to its blood-drenched cover, depicting a dead body with a plastic bag over its head.

“It turned out to be just as brutal and grim as we hoped,” says bassist Dag Jacobsen on the cover, “but it actually turned out that it was too violent for the German market, so they’ve banned the cover and forced us to make a special edition for the German market. We think it's quite weird, because it obviously is a fake picture, not a real corpse covered in blood. But we just laugh at it, and thank the German market for a great story and lots of attention in the media (laughs).”

It’s certainly an age-old metal tradition: reel ‘em in with a shocking cover, or, better yet, make the cover so shocking that people can’t even find it, so people are talking, the media’s talking…

“A bloody cover is always meant to offend or catch people’s attention,” says Jacobsen. “We chose it because it catches attention, and because it symbolizes what all the lyrics are about: all the evil in this world. A violent and bloody cover always draws attention.”

What also might draw some attention to this album is the band actually getting heavier, actually going against metalcore trends and subtracting clean vocals instead of adding them.

“The Devilty is a lot more brutal and straight to your face than [debut album] Designed to Dislike. There are almost no clean vocals on The Devilty, which dominated a lot of the choruses on Designed, and all the riffs and the sound has become a lot more thrashy and dirty. Designed was a lot more of a traditional melodic death/thrash record.”

Add to the mix what Jacobsen refers to as a “total guitarist make-over” since the first album, with two new six-stringers in the mix, and the band’s sound is indeed a different thing than it used to be, and one that sounds very refined and polished on the new disc, even if it does occupy some strange turf between Swedish hardcore like Raised Fist and straight-up Yank metal like Lamb Of God.

“We just play straight-forward metal that invites people to slam dance and mosh, like the good old days,” says Jacobsen. “All the members in PitchBlack are around 30 years old, and I think we're in at a point where we just want to play brutal, relatively simple metal. I guess you can say that we blend thrash, hardcore, death metal and rock and roll. We're not seeking to invent a new genre, but, on the other hand, we don't wanna be a cliché.”

That element of nostalgia is a continuing theme talking to Jacobsen, although that’s a bit surprising, given just how modern the disc sounds, not just in terms of production, but also with all those current sounds clashing and colliding. But, really, all those current sounds have their roots, and it’s those roots that PitchBlack really love.

“We think we're playing a kind of metal that most bands seem to have forgotten,” he says. “A lot of our riffs might as well belong in the mighty ‘90s; a lot of other bands are busy sounding modern and up to date. Not that we specifically seek to sound old school, but we think that there was a lot of great inspirations back then, which we use to make our own style.”