GOD FORBID guitarist Dallas Coyle has written the latest entry for his weekly column on MetalSucks, “The Hard R.” In this installment, Dallas talks about the evolution of God Forbid’s sound and the way they incorporated what was going on around them into their own music. An excerpt from the blog follows:

I’m sure some of you have heard our band was on the brink of destruction during that time [after ‘Determination’], and I’m sure everything you heard was accurate. We were thinking about quitting. We wanted to be something more than we were. Jump forward to a show my brother Doc and I went to at the M&M; Hall in NJ. We’re watching KILLSWITCH [ENGAGE] play at a hall and it sounded pretty awesome. Jesse was still in the band, Adam was playing drums, Mike and Joel were still in their same positions. After the show, Mike gave me a new demo of the new stuff they’d done. It consisted of 'Numbered Days', 'Alive Or Just Breathing' and one other song that escapes me. It blew my fucking mind. And it changed the way I looked at doing our band.

We had always been a melodic band but never understood how we can utilize it with singing. We tried some singing stuff on the ‘Determination’ pre-production and it just didn’t gel. What KsE did for me personally was allow me to see how our parts were made for clean vocals and how song structure was important to being in a band. Song structure includes everything, guitar riffs, bass riffs, solos, bridges, singing, etc. If you can name it and it can go in a song, then it’s part of structure. But what KsE did on that demo for me was show me how less is more and how our band can utilize that vision using those principles.

My bro and I were also listening to ‘Wages Of Sin’ [ARCH ENEMY] and when we were talking about the record Doc said two words all the time: “Big Riffs”.

There was a lot of dissension in our band at the time because my brother and I for the first time had a clear idea of where we wanted to go with the band. This created problems because we were doing stuff on a drum machine and that pissed off our drummer. I wanted to sing on the new stuff and it infringed upon Byron’s role in the band. If any of you knew me I could be a real asshole, especially back then. I must have quit the band 4 or 5 times at that point due to frustration and blaming everyone else but myself for our success or lack thereof.

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