THE RED CHORD has done it again. Somehow, in a genre that completely suffocated under its own rainstorm of noodles, these guys keep making great albums. The band's debut, 2002's Fused Together In Revolving Doors, took technical metalcore to new places: heavy, focused, solid. With their follow-up albums they continue to impress through the growing numbers of countless technical metalcore bands by not being too technical, not too hardcore, just heavy and damn good.

And their new disc, Fed Through The Teeth Machine, is even more streamlined, more concise, heavier.

"It wasn't like we went into it saying, 'This is what we're going to do.' It just sort of happened like that," says vocalist Guy Kozowyk. "We've always wanted to incorporate more melody and soul and emotion into our leads. It just happened that we ended up writing this ferocious, direct and to-the-point record."

Kozowyk is beaming about the disc, despite the fact that the first 10,000 copies have many an error in the booklet (oops). Part of the reason the band seems re-energized is that they are down to a four-piece now after deciding they would become a one-axe band.

"We're rolling with the bad economy," laughs Kozowyk. "Honestly, it's not exactly like we're losing sleep over it. It was a choice of our own to do it that way; I feel more comfortable doing things as a four-piece, I feel like we're tighter as a band, we're definitely tighter as friends and as a unit overall. There's more room in the van, there's a little bit more money to go around."

Kozowyk says the decision didn't affect the songwriting any, as it was already agreed that guitarist Mike "Gunface" McKenzie and bassist Greg Weeks were going to write the majority of the riffs anyway. Riffs that, somehow, still sound fresh, even four albums in.

"Especially with the overabundance of breakdowns and things like that, it's really tough to go write a record and have it be heavy and moshy without doing riffs that have all been done before," says Kozowyk. "I feel pretty outstanding about the way that it came out and the fact that it's extremely different from anything else we've done and it's different from all the other stuff that's out there."

And what about that strange, extremely metal album title? Kozowyk says it came from the Discovery Channel show How It's Made; despite how ominous it sounds as a metal album name (face it, plop anything on the cover of a metal album and it sounds ominous), it has innocent origins precisely why the guys were drawn to it.

"It's a reference to zippers or something like that," says Kozowyk. "It was done in a really innocent tone and way, but it flowed with what we were doing lyrically. When you think what it means, there are a million and one things that come to mind. When we talked to the artist about it, he came up with this crazy mouth with machinery and dental cleaning components around it. It turned out pretty awesome that everybody that's heard it has had a very different interpretation of what it meant."
"A different interpretation" not words one usually uses in regards to, well, anything to do with a band that can even loosely be called metalcore. (And The Red Chord falls under this category pretty loosely, being more or less death metal with a hardcore vibe, grind parts and a greater willingness to think outside the box than a lot of our beloved sweatpants-wearing longhair quartets.) But, different interpretations spring up naturally when a band is this focused on just being themselves.

"We're not the heaviest band, we have standard tuning, we're not the fastest band," says Kozowyk. "People who set out to be the fastest band, it just ends up being noise. Our focus is trying to be the most creative and original band we can be while also being good songwriters and doing stuff we enjoy and believe in."