By Aaron Small

“We just write shit we like; we’re not trying to beat some kind of goal, we just do what we enjoy,” states GOATWHORE vocalist Louis Ben Falgoust II in regard to the ten songs that appear on Blood For The Master, his band’s fifth album, due in stores February 14th via Metal Blade.

The ferocious Blood For The Master is the hardest hitting music emitted from New Orleans, Louisiana in quite some time as opening track ‘Collapse In Eternal Worth’ immediately delivers a lethal blow. “There’s a lot of intensity, even the last song (‘My Name Is Frightful Among The Believers’), we close with such an intense piece too,” comments a deservedly proud Falgoust. “On A Haunting Curse we had some intense things, but with the duration of that and then Carving, we’re starting to fall more into our own place, our own element and not necessarily be this band where you can pick out all the influences like CELTIC FROST, VENOM, BATHORY. We’re adding in more classic metal, like JUDAS PRIEST ideas and structure. Nowadays, it’s difficult to be original. I think it’s at the point where the originality comes from taking something older and reinventing it in a sense. The cycle has been done so many times, it’s really hard to be completely and 100% original.”

One element setting Blood And The Master apart from the rest of the Goatwhore catalogue is the fact that it’s the first album to feature bassist James Harvey. Although he joined the band in 2009, this marks his recording debut. According to Ben, “James fell into place really well. He was already in (guitarist) Sammy (Duet)’s other little band RITUAL KILLER, so they had a musical bond there. James is younger and he fits more with Zack (Simmons, drummer) age-wise. But the unique thing about Zack and James is they are younger; there’s a lot of people their age now that aren’t into the more classical kind of metal like MAIDEN, RAINBOW, MOTÖRHEAD. But those guys understand it, dig it and listen to it a lot rather than conforming to the new idea of whatever’s popular. I’ve got a version of the album with no vocals that I use to rehearse sometimes because Zack comes in and out of town from Arizona, and James comes in and out of town from Florida, so we don’t always get to jam as a full unit. I’ll go in the room, set up the PA, play the music and sing against it; it keeps the dust off. It’s cool to listen to that and hear each one of them – the progression Zack has taken from Haunting Curse to now, the way he incorporates his fills and how he plays. Sammy and Zack work so well off of each other when the material’s being put together. James didn’t write a lot on this record, I think he was a little hesitant, just sinking into what Goatwhore is, but he is a really good person to have for the composition and the way things should be laid out. He points out different structures and how they should sit; he adds a different element as far as that goes, and I’m sure as the band progresses and he sinks in even more, you’ll see more come out of him. He’s a really smart dude and he’s got a lot of good ideas.”

Seeing as Goatwhore is geographically displaced across three different states, during the writing process, is the band emailing mp3 files back and forth, or do you set aside time to get together and work on new material? “There’s not too much writing when we’re not together. Sometimes Sammy and Zack just go into the room for a while to bounce ideas around; the vocals don’t really fall into play until the whole song is pretty much structured. But I come to the jams when they’re writing stuff ‘cause it’s always good to have an outside perspective. It all really works well. Sammy used to use a little tape jam box to record his riffs, up until recently he was doing that. It took a lot of time to listen to the tapes, so we started dropping all the riffs into a computer program. That made them easier to see, instead of play – oh that sounds cool, play – no not that one, play – yeah maybe that one. Now we can actually sort the riffs and see what goes together. When we write songs, it’s not necessarily beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes we start in the middle, finish it up and then tag on the beginning; or we start at the end and go completely backwards. It all depends on how the parts fit; some songs roll out in a day, and some songs take two weeks to roll out. Sometimes we write a whole song and at the end of it we’re not really happy with it, so we ditch it or tear it apart. We’re picky, but not to the point where we say, Carving got a good response, what are we going to do to outdo that? We threw that idea out the window. This was a new record; we started from scratch at point A.”

The aforementioned “outside perspective” provided by Ben is normally supplied by the producer. But seeing as producer Erik Rutan (HATE ETERNAL) helmed the previous two Goatwhore albums (Carving Out The Eyes Of God and A Haunting Curse), and the two bands are touring together in February and March, he seems to be one of the boys as opposed to the producer. “We have a good relationship with Rutan. The first time you go in the studio with somebody, you’re kind of familiar with them but not really. So you’re kind of quiet, trying to feel the person out. Once you get past that point and you understand people, you start making a regimen in the studio. We have this whole plan when we go in there; basically this record was really smooth. Get in there and unload the drums, spend a day putting new heads on them and tuning them. After that, start tracking the drums with a scratch guitar track. Finish with the drums, start getting guitar tones, start doing them. Then the bass and finally like three weeks in, you’re starting the vocals. Then mixing and mastering. With vocals, on Carving, Rutan and me had this discussion about waiting so long to do vocals; you’re not broken in. So in the second week, late at night, after they’d finished tracking and it was time to cut the recording for that night, he had to burn all the stuff to the computer. So while that was going on, he let the songs run and I went through them to get myself back in the grain of things. So when it came time to do vocals, I was ready to fucking go with it. The whole situation is really comfortable, everybody gets along really well. We joke and bust each other’s balls, but Rutan will definitely make sure the quality is there; he’s very stern about that. But it really is a looser experience now, at the point of being the third record with him.”

Blood For The Master is also a lyric from ‘Collapse In Eternal Worth’, Ben explains how that phrase became the title of the album. “It was kind of based on the album art. It wasn’t like, let’s call the record this. The album cover folds out and there’s blood pouring down into images, and some of it makes fun of things. Basically the cover itself is a big pun because of blood bleeding from a wrist that looks like it’s nailed to a cross.” It could be depicting Christ without saying so. “Yeah, it could be that or it could just be some dude that got nailed onto something. Christ wasn’t the only one ever crucified; it was a form of torture. In essence the idea is, in the Catholic religion they have communion with wine and bread, which is basically the blood and body of Christ, so it’s like a pun built into that, flowing into the skull and around an image. I got an idea from Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528) who did really old wood cuts, he did one based on Cain and Abel; basically the first confirmed idea of murder in a Biblical sense. But we altered the image and what was Cain looks more like a goat creature man.”

This can be seen in the lyric video for ‘Collapse In Eternal Worth’, which can be viewed below. “That’s all in the foldout of the CD. When we did the lyric video that was a big deal to use the art ‘cause all the art is so detailed; and it makes a point. It’s not detailed as far as colour, it’s black, white, and red, but it’s really sharp and distinct. So after the blood flows around that image, it trickles down into a crest halo type thing that’s above an image that represents Lucifer. It’s more old-school like Hieronymus Bosch (1450 – 1516), it has the skeleton face and the stomach with the souls in it; he’s feeding himself souls and he’s got 12 wings. There’s a big thing within all the lyrics about death, not just the basic idea. In the last eight years, I got really infatuated with death and the actual worship of death. There’s occults that worship death and different variations within – the reaper that has the scythe in his left hand or his right hand, or the globe in his left or right hand, or the hourglass. It’s crazy how even within one kind of belief, it can still branch out into so many different styles. To me, death is more almighty than anything beyond that because it is the absolute, and we know it’s there.”

The vinyl, available in three different versions: red with black splatter, half red/half black, and standard black, features different artwork as opposed to the CD. “With the vinyl, it’s a gatefold record and on one side is a cloaked figure with a scythe; it’s a skeleton head, basically representing death with his arm extended. On the other side is another image of death with the arm extended underneath, and in between the two hands is an hourglass – the liquid or the sand inside the hourglass is souls. You can also look at it in the sense that we’ve put a lot of our own blood, or ourselves, into everything we’ve done since the duration of time. So is the master actually what we’re going after and trying to achieve in a musical sense? It’s not necessarily the basis of everyone going ‘Blood For The Master is for The Devil.’ Yes, we do have a dark side and we do sing about Satanic imagery, Luciferian imagery; but some of us are really interested in The Occult. We read a lot about it and we delve into it; yes the subject matter comes out like that. I’m sorry it’s not about ponies, clouds and flowers.”

More and more metal bands are releasing vinyl these days, but trying to buy a record player anywhere other than eBay is no easy task. Ben jokingly reveals why was it was so important for Goatwhore to issue Blood For The Master on vinyl, “Cause I have a record player. I don’t care if any anybody else has a record player; I have one. On a real note though, people still collect vinyl just to collect it, like comic books. And you can find record players at pawn shops.”