By Aaron Small

Not only is Carved Into Stone, due in stores April 24th, PRONG’s ninth studio album, it’s easily their best effort since they issued Cleansing in 1994. “There’s been a couple of weird attempts in the middle there,” concedes former CBGB soundman, original member, songwriter, vocalist and guitarist Tommy Victor.

Formed in New York City in 1986, Prong took the underground by storm with a pair of independent releases – Primitive Origins and Force Fed. This led to Epic Records signing the trio and unleashing the highly successful Beg To Differ, Prove You Wrong, and Cleansing albums. When Rude Awakening failed to meet label expectations in 1996, Prong was abruptly dropped. After a decade, the band was done as the rhythm section moved onto join GODFLESH, while Victor relocated to Los Angeles and hooked up with DANZIG. With a new millennium came new perspective, Tommy recruited fresh faces and released a live album in 2002, followed by Scorpio Rising in 2003. Prong was back, sort of. In addition to continually playing with Danzig, Tommy also joined MINISTRY. This added activity would push the next Prong studio album, Power Of The Damager, to 2007.

Now in 2012, a revitalized and refocused Tommy Victor has brilliantly recaptured the classic Prong sound with a modern vengeance. “I don’t know if that’s entirely what we wanted to do, but it seemed to come out like that. We just wrote a lot of songs and picked out the best ones. Of course a couple production decisions had to be made, being a little bit more primitive maybe; I hate to use the hackneyed expression ‘old school’, but that’s sort of where we went on a lot of those decisions. There’s nothing electronic in the whole thing, everything played, nothing cut and paste.”

The aforementioned “lot of songs” amounted to 25 initially, which were narrowed down to 15, with 11 finally being recorded. Tommy readily admits that discarding songs is a difficult process. “Yeah, there was a lot of demoing done; there were three stages of it. Apart from the actual writing of the songs – which you’ve got to do on your laptop, and then get in with the band – it is kind of brutal. You have a piece of music and you’re trying to put vocals on top of it; you have to write a lyric. In some instances, you’d have to do three different approaches and then that gets thrown in the garbage pail. You’ve just got to keep writing and let the chips fall as they may. Steve (Evetts, producer – SEPULTURA, SYMPHONY X) came in at the last moment. We had a week of pre-production and we actually cut some of the songs we thought we were going to wind up recording, and brought back a couple from an earlier demo to sort of combine a couple of things. He was really helpful with that process. It’s really great that we got Steve to do this record; he had a lot to do with the way it sounds, the way everything came together. We wanted that. I didn’t want just a strict engineer, some guy that was going to primarily make it happen. We wanted a guy that had a lot of pro-active input; that’s something I haven’t had in a long time. I think that’s what the failings of later releases have been attributed to. We didn’t really have somebody that was on top of me to get the best performance, dial everything in precisely. It was just getting through the whole thing.”

Although the current Prong lineup of Tommy, alongside bassist Tony Campos (MINISTRY, SOULFLY) and drummer Alexi Rodriguez (3 INCHES OF BLOOD) has been together for three years, Carved Into Stone marks the first recorded effort from these metal musketeers. “There’s been a lot of time in between,” explains Victor. “We had a couple tours Tony initially came in and did. We started writing with him while we were on the road in a hotel room or backstage, then we got home and continued that. Alexi would come down and we’d jam out ideas with him.” Despite what seems to be a rather loose-fitting arrangement, Victor has no doubt Prong’s current incarnation is solidified. “We are brothers in arms, we’re just trying to make a living here. I’m always brothers in arms with everybody that I ever play with. To get to the point of making a record, you have to have some kind of intimate – for lack of a better word; I didn’t mean that sexually,” laughs Tommy. “When you’re putting your heads together and you’ve got to sit in the studio for several hours, or in a van travelling… I’m not taking away from anybody else we’ve worked with because I was happy with Aaron (Rossi, drummer) and Monte (Pittman, bassist) previously, and of course Ted (Parsons, drummer) and Mike (Kirland, bassist) in the beginning.”

Much like the age old question – what came first, the chicken or the egg? What came first, Carved Into Stone the album title or the song? “The song,” answers Victor. “I thought that applied to packaging and the general definitive aspect of the record; being affirmative with the imagery that’s almost presented in the song of some kind of outside force helping you make decisions and apply yourself. It’s almost this futuristic force that comes in and zaps into primitive times with the beam of the Prong logo embossing that into rock or stone. It just applied to the whole goal of the record, if there was one. It worked well and reflected what was going on in some of the other songs too, being that there is sort of a reference to each record within the songs; that just came naturally almost. There’s a lot of different styles that Prong sort of tried to approach, and it all came together really with writing a lot of songs and seeing what was going on.”

Artist Vance Kelly, known for his work with DOWN and THE SWORD, crafted the Carved Into Stone album cover. “He was so helpful and so awesome. I’ve worked with guys who are whining all the time about making changes, he put so much work into this thing; congrats to him.” And when it opens up, there’s much more on the inside. “Oh yeah, the whole thing is crazy! He’s got this biomechanical bone/chisel device that he designed that’s a great art piece just in itself with almost like a Pushead reference in there too. It’s completely brilliant. Then there’s a very sexy picture of the three of us, our faces are sort of distorted.”

This summer, Sony is going to release a Prong Legacy Best Of album, which Tommy whole-heartedly endorses. “One of my oldest friends, Mark Newman, he works there and he put together the perfect list of songs; he knew what to do. It’s pretty obvious, there’s a couple that people may not be ultimately familiar with, but for the most part anybody that knows Prong… it’s going to be cool!” Back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the thought of a Prong Greatest Hits was probably unimaginable? “Absolutely, it’s something I really didn’t think about at all. Not that we had real hits, it’s a re-visitation more than anything. It’s not like we’re BOSTON or something.”

Catch Prong on tour with CROWBAR at the following shows:

April

5 - Dallas, TX - Trees
6 - Houston, TX - Scout Bar
8 - El Paso, TX - House Of Rock
11 - Hollywood, CA - The Whisky
12 - Flagstaff, AZ - Orpheum Theater
13 - Gallup, NM - Slopshot Billiards
14 - Denver, CO - Marquis Theater
16 - St Louis, MO - Fubar
18 - Cleveland, OH - Peabody's
19 - St Paul, MN - Station 4
20 - Chicago, IL - Cobra Lounge
21 - Detroit, MI - Harpo's