AD: Hiya Alex! Nice to meet you!

Alex: Nice to meet you too man!

AD: You must be pretty pleased with the first week sales of Evisceration Plague, (over 9,000 in the US) and the fact that it entered the US billboard charts at 66?

Alex: Yeah...we’re very happy about that. That was its first week sales. I don’t know what the second will be for sure. The first week sales will be the biggest as all the fans go buy it in the first week, so we’ll probably drop off the chart after that...I don’t know for sure though! But we are really happy. It’s our eleventh album and we’ve been around for twenty years, and this is the one that has had the biggest first week sales compared to any of our albums. For that to happen, especially at a time when the business of selling cds is at an all time low with all the downloading now; it really makes us feel good. Because we’re doing well after a long time, and doing better than ever. So....yeah! We feel great about it, we’re happy and hopefully it will last a little while.

AD: I love the guitar sound on the new album. Was that something that you had an idea about before you entered the studio?

Alex: I think that a lot of the riffs that were written on this one really compliment a good heavy guitar sound. Pat and Rob were super-focused on getting an awesome rhythm guitar sound. On top of that, being able to work with Erik Rutan as a producer, who is a great producer and a great guitar player as well. That’s three really knowledgeable guitar players working together to get the best sound possible, and I think we got pretty close to what we consider to be our ideal rhythm guitar sound on this record. And you know, that makes or breaks a death metal record, or any kind of extreme metal record – that rhythm guitar sound is the most important part of the production. Erik, Rob and Pat were really able to nail it this time And, I think that we have material to compliment it; so those two together really made it something that we’re pleased with.

AD: Do you think that some of the songs on the new album, like “Priests of Sodom” might not have been possible on previous albums due to the different production values back then?

Alex: It’s true. You just gradually get better at all areas. That’s the one thing with our band, is that we’re always trying to get better in every area if we can. Obviously you try! You don’t always succeed. We’re trying to write better songs, we’re trying to become better musicians gradually as well. We’re trying to learn more about production and that sort of thing and work with producers that are going to help us go further in that area as well. So, we are focused on improving ALL areas of the band if at all possible. And yeah...I think you’re right. If we had had Priests of Sodom – the exact same song and the same arrangement on a few albums ago, the production and perhaps even the performance might not have been quite as good as what it was today.

AD: In The Centuries of Torment DVD, you spoke about Scott Burns being like a sixth member of the band. Is it like that now with Erik Rutan – with him being your friend, and a death metal musician?

Alex: Definitely in the studio it starts to feel like that again. When you really get comfortable with a producer it starts to become that way. It’s kind of been like that with some of the other producers we’ve worked with as well, particularly Scott – we did five albums with him and also Neil Kernon, Colin Richardson and Jim Morris – we had a great time with them. But with Erik, he is definitely one of our peers as a musician, so it’s that much more like a sixth member situation in the studio. We even let him play a solo on this album – on the song “Unnatural”. And we were so happy with the solo! It fitted perfectly – like he was actually in the band! The lick that he wrote to go over the top of the riffs, it fitted like a glove. He gets what we’re doing. He’s a death metal guitarist, and having him in there means that we can ask him questions. I mean, we write and arrange the songs ourselves before we enter the studio. But once we get in there; there are minor tweaks where we have decisions to make. Like “shall we try this or that drum beat for this section? Or shall we try this harmony or that harmony?” We’ll come up with a few different options, so it’s nice to have someone in there that we can trust completely to help us choose which way to go. And we trust Erik completely as far that goes. We know whatever his choice is going be that is going be the most brutal choice – to use the cliché word for death metal!

AD: I noticed that the solos in Evisceration Plague seem to have a slightly different dynamic about them and maybe a bit more intensity when compared to previous albums.

Alex: Like I said, we’ve been trying to hone our writing skills over the years to try to make the songs effective. By having little peaks and valleys, and having something just a hair lighter before something really intense; for example, if you listen to something like “Skewered from Ear to Eye”, there is a somewhat melodic part right before the solo really kicks into high gear. So, when the solo starts out, you might be taken aback for a second by how relatively melodic it is compared to an average Cannibal Corpse solo, but then it kicks right in to something very intense. Those kind of contrasts make a song interesting – like if you raise and lower the power levels through a song. If it’s full power the whole time, that can also be good, but not for a long song. For maybe a two minutes song like Scalding Hail – that one is full power from start to finish. But a song like Skewered, being that little bit longer; it seemed that a change in power level here and there would work better. Another example would be “Cauldron of Hate”.

AD: Now Cauldron of Hate.......that song is the aural equivalent of having your face grated off in an acid bath. That has a real caustic, dragging sound.

Alex: That’s one where the guitar sound and the performance of the guitarists really complimented the riffs that I had come up with. The riffs are written on bass but I’m thinking about the guitars. I’m thinking that this is going sound wicked with Pat and Rob playing this and it did. The song is rumbling along and the whole idea as far the lyrics go – the music being written first and whoever writes the music nearly always writes the lyrics. We were thinking; “Well what can this be about?” We thought about it a bit, and I introduced the idea of Cauldron of Hate as a title. You know how they say that the wheels are turning in your head? Or gears! Well, this to me sounded like a big machine rumbling along like a tank or a bulldozer. So I thought that I’d make is about someone who is really pondering doing some really bad things, and the wheels turning in his head sound like this! Ha ha ha!

AD: You mentioned about making the songs sound a bit different and varied. One song which is a bit different from what you’ve maybe done before is “Shatter their Bones” – especially with the tempo change and solo after the second verse

Alex: Rob writes differently from what I or Pat does. Pat and I write differently but it might be a little bit closer. Paul also wrote a song including the guitar parts for “Carrion Sculpted Entity”. This time around I was very inspired, and ended up writing a bit more than the others, but we’re hoping that next time Rob can squeeze in more -,because as much I try to keep a lot of diversity within the songs, there’s nothing more diverse than having several writers. So hopefully, next time, it will be a little more evenly distributed. Not that anyone was dissatisfied with the material that I wrote. They all seem quite happy with it but I would really like it if Rob could maybe get another two on the next one, although he did write Scalding Hail with me as well. Pat didn’t write as much this time as he has done on previous albums. He wrote two on this one and usually he writes about three. I think once he wrote four but, yeah it’s great having different writers. Everybody’s style is different. We all have similarities but when it comes to creativity, we are all different writers and that’s one of the strengths of the band. I think that “Shatter....” is probably my favourite song that Rob has ever written for us, and I like all the stuff he has written for the band. It’s certainly one of the high points of the record.

AD: It is difficult to choose a standout track as all the songs have a “hook” in there somewhere! It seems that the arrangement of the music keeps getting better.

Alex: It’s always been something we focused on. Cos early on in our band; when you’re really young – and you’ve just got started; whether it’s thrash or black metal or any extreme form of music, you’re kind of trying to be the most of something! The fastest, the most disgusting, the lowest vocals or the highest vocals, or even the fastest guitar solos. That’s kind of an early goal for a lot of bands. We realised right away that we weren’t going be the “that” of anything. The thing that we wanted to be the best at, was writing the best songs and we’ve always focused on that; even since the beginning. We just weren’t as good at it in the old days. But I think by around the time of The Bleeding, we were starting to get good at it. I remember once we had got The Bleeding pretty well recorded; me and Rob Barrett had spent a long night recording and it was about six in the morning. We were driving away from Morrisound studios listening to the cassette, and I think we were listening to “She Was Asking For It” and Rob was like “These are death metal hooks! This is a catchy record that we have put together here.” It’s still brutal. There’s nothing about it where you could say that it has sold out but it’s just really catchy, and that is something that we have focused on for most of our career – sometimes more successfully than other times, but we’ve always tried to make great, heavy songs as opposed to extremity for extremity’s sake. We’re just focused on making killer, memorable death metal tunes.

AD: I agree. An example of that off Kill was probably something like Death Walking Terror, which was very catchy but very heavy too.

Alex: We definitely write them so you can remember them! Cos they’re the kind of songs that we want to hear! If you had to take a vote from the whole band, everybody would probably have Reign in Blood in their top five albums of all time. To me that album was a great example of great metal song-writing. They are short songs, but they are all memorable. They all have climax points and stuff you know? Like......”take you fucking lives!!!!!” and that kind of stuff!

AD: “......enter to the realm of Sataaaaan!”

Alex: ha ha ha! Yeah it’s amazing! Altar of Sacrifice is amazing, and Reborn. Every song on that record is great and they were all individual songs even though they were all fast, and that was something that stuck with all of us; the arrangement and the writing of the songs.

AD: So.....whose idea was it to go with the double layered vocals on Priests of Sodom?

Alex: That was just an idea that I had. Cos, I’ll make a demo of the vocals and that’s always fun. Sometimes I’ll double up the vocals and this time I thought “Yeah....let’s double it up!” Probably, somewhere where I heard people doing the first double vocal was either Glen Benton from Deicide on the first album or Ripping Corpse who did it with their backing vocals on the Dreaming of the Dead album. There was some stuff like that on there. We don’t have anyone do the backing vocals. It’s George doing all of them. In fact, I think he did it on a couple of other songs on the album too. But the main feature is in Priests of Sodom.

AD: The double vocals do lend themselves the repetition of the lines in the song

Alex: Yeah....it’s like a chant almost. There’s like this evil, evil temple in this ancient city and all kinds of heinous things are taking place in there!

AD: A good video opportunity maybe?

Alex: Yeah! We wanted to do a video for it and have a bunch of crazy girls with blood all over them and stuff! It got talked about but then, you know, you present the idea to the people that are in charge of getting the money together for it – and they’re like “Well......this video won’t get played anywhere! So maybe you should try a different song!” Ha ha ha! Sometimes the great ideas...when it comes to a video....it’s not possible to make it happen. We’d love to an NC-17 video (18 rated over here) like a gore movie and we tried to mix some of that in. But the budget thing is such a major problem, and then it’s difficult to get it played anywhere in the first place. Even if it’s a fairly tame video, it’s difficult to get it played, so when it’s got tons of blood in it......but, we just did a video for the song “Evisceration Plague” up in New York State. Man, it was cold that day too! It was just a little bit south of New York City, and it was out in the country in a hundred year old barn. The general idea of the video was that this guy is escaping from a plague of zombies, who are trying to get him and that. So, he’s hiding out in this old barn. It was reminding us a bit of Friday the 13th part III because there was some barn stuff going on in that movie with Jason stabbing somebody with a cattle prod or something like that. So.....we got a really cool, evil looking zombie barn! As I mentioned, it was filmed in the cold too, no heating. So the breath you see is really us! No special effects! We certainly wouldn’t have had the money for that anyway. It was so cold that my thumbs were getting numb while I was playing in there as it was a few degrees below zero......pretty cold when you’re in your T-shirt!

AD: So.....eleven albums down the line and eleven consistent albums. Where do you keep getting the creativity from? Is it new influences? Influences from side projects?

Alex: Definitely for me personally; for sure it comes from doing some of the side projects that I’ve done over the past two or three years. It’s definitely helped my creativity. I’ve just been super inspired! But, I guess I’ve always been inspired to write. I’m speaking for myself here. I don’t want to speak for the other band members but they’re quite inspired too and you know if one of you is inspired it kind of rubs off on all of you. You get excited about the record and writing for the record. Definitely working with Erik Rutan on the Hate Eternal album where I just played the bass parts. I contributed as much as I could, but I basically just did the bass sessions for some great friends and great musicians. In Blotted Science, I was actually part of that project from the beginning and helped write some of it. Both things are learning experiences. When you play with great musicians, you learn from them. It stokes the creative fire; it really helped me. And that just gets passed from one person to the other. We’ve just managed to stay fired up; we’ve never stopped appreciating how lucky we’ve got. We know a bunch of other great death metal bands that for whatever reason it just didn’t work out for them as well as it worked out for us business wise. Bands like Immolation, who are doing great, but we always felt that they should be right there with us in terms of popularity, because they’re such an excellent band. And there are plenty of other bands like that. So we fully appreciate that we’ve been given a great opportunity here, and that plenty of others would be happy to be in our position. We don’t want to squander it by not working hard. So we always work hard on the band. We’re lucky. It’s still so much fun too! We’re playing death metal for a living! Think about that statement there! That’s what we do. It’s remarkable and we’re not going to waste it.

AD: For younger musicians starting out in the scene .Seeing the success of Cannibal Corpse is going to be pretty inspiring....

Alex: That makes us feel great if that’s the case you know. The one thing I hope, that if our career has sent any message out to young bands is that you can do what you want to do and still succeed. You don’t have to water things down to succeed. We are doing what we want to do and it’s working for us. Yeah! We never got really big; sure we slowly got bigger over the years where now we’re doing really good. If it goes back downhill again a little bit in the future that’s something that we can totally deal with, because we love what we’re doing......and that’s where you’ve got to start. If I could give a message to any young band, it’s that you have to love what you’re doing. After that, everything else will follow. Because, if you are trying to do something just to succeed, it’s almost like it is destined to fail sooner or later. I think people can see the sincerity in us. You don’t do this many records with it being this consistent without it being sincere. We just love death metal. It’s still our favourite, we’re still passionate about writing it, we’re still passionate about challenging ourselves to become better musicians, and to discover new musical ideas that could make our type of death metal more interesting. So...yeah, there is no end in sight really as far as I can see it.

AD: So what’s it like supporting rather than headlining?

Alex: You know. As much as we definitely prefer to headline, it has been a lot of fun! Because; one, you are getting to see a lot of fans that wouldn’t normally come to see you play. You’ve got your hardcore fans who are really getting the pit going but you also have a bunch of people just standing around, checking it out. That’s nice to see as well, because they’re learning about the band. They can make up their own mind about whether they like it or not. Hopefully, you’re winning a few people over and that’s your goal you know? When you go out opening for a band, you’re hoping to introduce your music to a few new fans in addition to playing for your core following but headlining is generally better. You get all the perks – your own dressing room and the best catering, and so on and so forth and of course you get to play a longer set, so that your fans are one hundred percent satisfied. That’s one thing that we have heard from fans, is that they’re enjoying it, but it’s only 45 minutes long. That’s how it goes this time around, but next time around we’ll be headlining.

AD: So what happens when you reach the stage when you can’t play one song off every album?!

Alex: We’ve tried to keep it going so that we can play one song off every album when we headline, but for the shows when we headline, we’ve been missing some. We’ve got three rotating sets for this tour when opening for Bodom and also a fourth set for when we’re headlining like tonight. We have three of these headlining gigs mixed in to help us pay the bills, because when you open, you don’t get the lion’s share of the money! It’s fun to do these shows at the smaller venues, because although it’s been fun to play the huge places, the small places feel like it’s coming home as we spent most of our career playing in small clubs. So we really enjoy it.

AD: With the way media is today and with limited TV and radio coverage, by supporting other bands, do you feel that this is a way of exposing fans to the music?

Alex: Well, the way I look at it, is this; I’m not going say that we’re not here to support our band and make our band bigger. Of course we are! We’re trying to make our band more popular. That’s a normal thing to do when you’re in a band but at the same time, we are going to be able to pass on any new popularity that we get down to the rest of our scene, to the rest of the brutal death metal bands. If we do a tour like this, and we gain some fans from this, then when we go out on a headlining tour on a strictly brutal death metal package then the bands that are opening for us will also feel some of the benefits of us having a done a tour like this and then when they go out in turn and do their own tours – it helps spread the scene around. If a few bigger bands like us or Morbid Angel or whoever end up going out doing some bigger gigs or that sort of thing; when we then do the headlining tours, it helps the other bands out. It publicizes the whole death metal scene in a way, and I think that it is a really good thing. I swear that the other night in Manchester, which was an amazing gig; along with Glasgow which was awesome too. We met a kid afterwards who said that he thought it was great and it was the first time that he had even heard us. That’s the kind of thing where you know that this was definitely a good idea to have done this tour. We are introducing our brand of death metal to a different audience. The regular fans are there and having a good time, and then there are also the new people. It’s a good feeling, and we just want to keep things going! I think it benefits the whole scene when you get the bigger death metal bands coming out and doing tours like this, spreading the word.

AD: One final thing. From watching the Centuries of Torment and Evisceration Plague DVDs, it seems that the band are at a point where things have never been so good, both musically and as a unit?

Alex: It’d the best it’s ever been. The five of us; how we’re getting along right now. It’s always been pretty decent, but this is the best line up. I guess it’s natural to say that when you’re in the present time, but it does feel like the best- it really does. Having been in the entire time, this is my favourite line-up and this is my favourite time. I’ve never been more motivated about being in this band than I am right now. I’ve always been motivated, but it’s not decreasing! I think the other guys feel the same way. Like I said before, there is no end in sight. I mean, you can’t keep it going forever but I don’t see the end in the future. It’s certainly not anytime soon! We all get along great and it’s more of a unit than it ever has been with any of the other line-ups. All the guys who were in the band were cool guys too but this is the line-up that is working together the best – no doubt about it. That’s Alex Webster’s opinion but I think the other guys would feel the same way too.

AD: Alex....thank you very much for your time and best wishes for the rest of the tour

Alex: Cheers man!

Evisceration Plague is out now on Metal Blade records and is well worth breaking into the piggy bank for! You can also read more about Cannibal Corpse at:

For more on the band check out http://www.cannibalcorpse.net
http://www.myspace.com/cannibalcorpse

Interviewed by Andy Duke

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