Interview: Masakari (1 of 2)

Masakari are, without a doubt, one of the best bands operating in the Midwest right now.

Their sound is rambunctious, but also sly. In a day and age where deathcore bands are playing hi-fi death metal with hardcore breakdowns, Masakari flip the dynamic: they play noisy hardcore with old-school death metal guitar licks and distortion.
The end result is mouth watering.

In the first of two interviews with the band, I discuss the differences and similarities between punk and metal, as well as the business of DIY extreme music in the year 2011, with guitarist Joe Yanick.

We also discuss a 7” release available for pre-order HERE

First of all congratulations on getting on both Maryland Deathfest and South by Southwest. That’s impressive for a debut record. To what do you attribute people taking up your band in this way so quickly?

J-To be honest it’s kind of surprising us, too. As far as Maryland Deathfest, we got in contact with the guy who was putting the band list together through Greg [Anderson] from Southern Lord [who released The Prophet Feeds on CD]. He said we got in touch with him at just the right time—he was putting the list together and had just listened to the album. We had seen a couple of other Southern Lords bands on the list and some other bands that sound like us, so it seemed like the perfect time to try and get on.

And South by Southwest—Greg set that show up. He first heard our 7” when Corey from Halo of Flies [record label, not band] put it out. He just called Corey and said “I love this band; I want to help out with the new release.”

Really it’s been quite amusing because the amount of work has been surprisingly less than we anticipated! A lot has been happening, it’s awesome.

There seems to be resurgence in the metal community’s interest in hardcore—or at the very least noisy grimy hardcore—because there’s been a lot of critical acclaim for bands like you, Black Breath and The Secret. I know you guys are fans of The Secret because I totally stalk you on facebook like a weirdo… and here you are about to be playing with them. How does that feel?

J-I’m really excited. That The Secret release was definitely in my top 5 albums from last year. We’ve corresponded with them through email and twitter and they seem like very cool guys. I’ve seen videos of them live and it looks just perfect. We’re playing Cleveland with them and then again at South by Southwest. Should be a good time.

When are you playing with them in Cleveland?

J-March 30th. Them, Funeral Pyre, us, and my friend from PA’s band, Old Accusers. They sound like Doom mixed with Hardcore.

That sounds great. I loved Funeral Pyre’s record in 2010, The Secret’s record, your record. It’s sold out isn’t it? The Prophet Feeds, I mean.

J-Yeah, I guess we’re saying sold out. The LP version at least, but not the CD. The thing is Corey distributes us in America and he pressed a substantial amount. I think 1,500 copies split between 4 labels. There was only one American label—there was a Greek label and two German labels. I know both German labels still have copies. So, you can’t get them directly from the label that pressed it, you need to import it or track it down. But I wouldn’t say sold out—you can still go on a webstore and find them. On my last tour I saw it in stores. Corey doesn’t have any more copies but is looking to do a second pressing sometime this summer. We wanted one by our tour in May, but that’s probably not going to happen. Time issues.

your EP is being repressed as well, right?

J- We didn’t want to originally because we’ve done two pressings already, a 500 press and then a 90 press we took on tour with us. Corey thought [one more] repressing would be a good idea because a lot of people still don’t have it. So we decided we would change the cover because we wanted it to be something different. We wanted it to be more fun so we pressed it on three colors, 100 on white, 100 on green, and 100 on blue.

Isn’t it also available for free download?

J- When we first released it we also put it up for download. It’s always been kind of our motto that you don’t pay for the music, you pay for the packaging and the physical copy. I think the free download helped us get the word out there because we went to the blogs that were just going to rip and post it anyway and gave it to them ourselves. The bloggers said that was really cool and we get a lot of comments from people saying ‘it was sweet that you did that.’ We wanted to do it with the album, too, but Greg put up most of the money so we would be cutting into his profits and that wouldn’t be fair, so it wasn’t really possible with the album. The plan is for most of our 7”s to be released with a free download.

There is also a 7-day tour this May, right?

J-7 day tour with Rise and Fall, 3 days after that by ourselves, a festival in Ohio and then Maryland Deathfest, so all in all it’s going to be 12 dates. May is looking very busy for us.

The sound on The Prophet Feeds is very textured and nuanced for a debut, which leads me to believe that this is not your first band. What’s the history of Masakari?

J-Combined we’ve been playing in bands since we were 12 or 13. I’m 22 now and our oldest member is 24, so we’re still a young band. We’ve all played together in other bands in the Cleveland scene. When we started Masakari we pieced together who we thought would make the sound we liked.

John was in another band and we watched it for a long time—he just killed it on drums—so we knew we wanted him. We’ve been through some lineup changes.

I was playing in a band in Pittsburgh called Heartless, and we brought their bassist on tour with us to Europe. It worked so well we asked him to join. The singer and I are brothers, so we’ve been in bands together before.

Our other guitarist started on bass and moved to guitar. When we started as a one guitar band I was doing more melodic guitar lines, which are still present but we’ve toned down. The primary sound of the music was melodic and we wanted it to be heavier going into the EP. We still wanted to be melodic but we wanted short, simple songs without a lot of repetition. I’m really happy with the current lineup and hope it will stay that way.

When I listen to the record they are short simple songs, but they all blend together. To me, The Prophet Feeds is one song first, and then a series of other songs second—there aren’t these clean breaks between the songs. That works with the roman numeral pattern you’ve been doing even since before The Prophet Feeds . Was that a conscious decision or something that came together in the studio?

J- As far as the roman numerals go, we’ve been asked it in the past. On the 7” after it was released we got this email: “they’re actually counting down, does this mean you’re breaking up?”

[laughs]

The roman numerals are actually quite arbitrary: they’re the order in which that song was written. There is no one or two because the first two songs we wrote as a band we didn’t like, so we discarded them. Actually, the first three we discarded. The 7” is 7 to 4 counting down just because that’s the order we liked them in. On the album—those songs were very much a product of how they flowed with one another. We would play them live in order and then switch the order and kept changing it around to feel how well the songs played until we liked it. Those albums where each song stops and then a pause and then the next song… there are good albums like that, but those are the albums that people end up not listening to as a full album. Our album is 27 minutes long with a 6 minute outro, so I wanted people to be able to sit down, listen to it in one sitting and then maybe listen to it again. I do that with my favorite records. We figured if it flowed really well people would do that, so we were very particular about what should flow into what, what clips to use. We weren’t as successful as I want to be. I wanted to do more, but in the studio we were just taking longer than I wanted, and a lot of stuff got cut. It’s good in a way because I don’t think this will be our best album. Now that I’ve sat down with it a few times I like it a lot more; I’m proud of it. We’re going to keep writing better and better records, though.

I say mission accomplished. When I listen to your album it’s like Reign in Blood in that I have the first track’s beginning memorized and after that it flows and I end up saying to myself a half hour later ‘It’s over? Really? It felt like five minutes.’ And I play the record again.

J- Thank you very much. It actually makes it hard to play live, because when we’re writing the set list we fall into playing the album in order, and we need to break ourselves of that. On the next tour we’ll be playing three new songs, one from a one-sided 7”. The 7” will be that song and a cover—we’re actually self-releasing it. We’ll be doing three new songs, two from the 7” and a bunch from the album.

So give me a spoiler. What’s the cover?

J-It isn’t decided yet. It’s probably going to be a death metal song. We’re a hardcore punk band but we didn’t want to do a punk song because it’s too easy. We usually do Discharge covers but we wanted to challenge ourselves more, do something out of our comfort zone. We’ve jammed on some death metal before and it’s a good mix—our style with that style. It will probably be an 80’s death metal song.

I need to call your brother in a minute to ask about lyrics and such. You don’t have any say in that, do you?

J- No my brother handles most of the lyrics. Our other guitarist wrote I think two of the songs on the album. Tony will send me the lyrics to look over, but honestly I mostly just look them over and say ‘yeah this works.’ He’s a very particular writer. He won’t show anyone lyrics until they’re done, so by the time I’ve seen them he’s rewritten them a bunch of times. We do go into a project with some idea of what it’s about.

Our EP is basically a concept EP about our views on religion and how we think it affects us. That has continued onto the album with a few other themes thrown in. For example three of us own Pit Bulls, so we wrote a song about that. There’s a song about the institutions of schools.

But the ethos behind Masakari is decided. That’s interesting to me because it’s usually a hardcore thing and it seems pretty recent that metal bands are taking this… not political, but sort of more moral standpoint and projecting that through the music. Is everyone in Masakari involved in that decision, or do you and your brother decide the ethic and everyone else says OK, we’ll play that?

J-We’re all part of it together. We try to stay away from straight politics just because what hasn’t been said in a punk song about fuck the government blah blah blah. We do have one quasi-political song but you hit the nail on the head that it really is a more moral view, a more personal view on how we think things affect us. We worked all of that political stuff out of our systems in our previous bands—we’re pretty apathetic to the government. We’d rather write something that people will read and connect to and say ‘yeah I feel that way too,’ and connect with as opposed to ‘I also believe that.’

What I’ve always loved about punk music is the lyrics. I feel like it’s about the music with metal and the lyrics with punk. We mix both. I’m surprised that it’s gone over so well with the metalheads. We’ve gotten a lot of praise and write ups in metal mags and popular blogs. I didn’t expect this kind of support from the metal community. I didn’t think that we could cross over into both genres and not change our style.

That’s one of the things about your band for me. When I grew up I was in the Toledo hardcore scene—which is now completely dead. It’s such a tragedy.

J-That’s what I hear from my friends in Toledo and Bowling Green.

Yeah. In college I was part of the really small western Michigan metal scene and your band hits both spots for me. It’s multifaceted.

J- It made me really nervous because I’ve tried to mix the punk and metal thing before and it hasn’t gone over so well. The metalheads would say it’s too punk, the hardcore kids would say it’s too metal. A few of our friends right at the start told us ‘yeah, you guys are such a metal band.’ We’ve always thought of ourselves as a punk band. We were nervous the same thing would happen again. But people haven’t really worried about genre with us, which is a good thing. I obviously think genres have their place, but people rely on them and that discussion too much. It’s a shame.

That’s a big problem in the metal community and it has been for a long time but it’s sort of hitting its zenith right now. Everyone’s debating what is or isn’t whatever so much that nobody’s listening to anything.

J-Like doom, sludge grime. Is nobody saying that these bands all kind of sound the same? It’s one thing to use genre to describe something but people are using genre to decide whether or not they’re even going to listen to something. Even genres I’m not fond of have bands that I like, and I like music all across the board.

I feel the same way. Extreme music to me is like—if it has drums and a loud guitar, I’m probably going to listen to it, so why are we splitting and quartering hairs?

J-It doesn’t bother me at all, but it makes me laugh: there is this online blog that reviews a… certain style of music, and he wrote an entire review that was just him explaining why he would not review The Prophet Feeds. It’s probably better than him actually reviewing it. It really illustrated to me that we’re sitting in a different community than we used to. While I’ve always liked metal music I’ve always come at it from the punk perspective—I’ve never been involved in the metal community. It’s an interesting transition, no, not transition; addition. It’s an interesting addition to our community. Rather than moving from one scene to another we are encompassing both in our crowd or our fanbase if you will. It’s only going to make our shows more fun.

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Listen to Masakari on
MYSPACE
and
BANDCAMP

I will be seeing them at Forward Ohio, and will release my second interview with Joe's brother before then!