DESPISED ICON - "I Don't Understand Why People Take Labels So Seriously"
June 8, 2007, 17 years ago
The following report is courtesy of MTV.com:
DESPISED ICON are often ascribed the "deathcore" tag by people who, well, are driven by some strange desire to erroneously label metal bands. But Alexandre Erian - who, along with Steve Marois, comprises the Montreal metallers' two-pronged vocal affront - doesn't really give a rat's ass what anyone thinks the band sounds like.
"We've been doing what we do for five years now, and all of a sudden, that word 'deathcore' pops up, and people are calling us deathcore, calling other bands deathcore, and, I mean, I guess it's all right - it's just music," explained Erian, the former drummer for Canadian death-metal outfit Neuraxis. "But we don't want to be associated with this trend. We've been doing this a long time, and we don't feel like we're hopping on any bandwagon at all. And we're probably going to keep playing what we play, even if the trend dies down."I don't understand why people take labels so seriously," he continued. "I guess you could call us 'deathcore,' or 'death metal,' or 'death metalcore,' or 'death metal with metalcore influences,' or 'metalcore with death-metal influences.' I like to let the music speak for itself."
Despised Icon's third LP, The Ills of Modern Man, which was released late last month and sold more than 2,000 copies its first week on store shelves (the label shipped a mere 8,000 copies), is unquestionably some of the band's heaviest material to date. Erian said that was no accident, but it definitely evolved naturally, over several months of touring.
"You don't want to put out the same album twice, and this album came out exactly two years after our previous effort, (2005's The Healing Process), and so we've toured quite a lot since then," he said. "We've improved as musicians, and we've toured the death-metal circuit (with the likes of BEHEMOTH, MORBID ANGEL, SUFFOCATION and CRYPTOPSY), so we've added a few new influences here and there, to spice things up and make things a bit different. But overall, it's the same band - same sound. I think this record does come across as being a bit more heavy than the previous one, but it wasn't intentional. It just came out that way. So, at least now kids can say we're not selling out or anything because this album is actually more brutal."Read more here.
