By Andrew Bansal
Hailing from Boston MA, Revocation have been infiltrating minds, devastating stages and winning fans with their brand of technically skilled thrash metal, and have been highly regarded as one of the finest bands to have surfaced in recent years. Four albums deep into their career, they begin a new chapter with their signing to the prestigious Metal Blade label, under whom they’ll release a new album soon enough. Currently, they’re on a North American trek as support with DevilDriver, Whitechapel, Carnifex, Rivers Of Nihil and Fit For An Autopsy, and visited the House Of Blues Sunset Strip recently as part of the tour. A few hours before they put on yet another excellent performance, I caught up with guitarist/vocalist Dave Davidson and drummer Phil Dubois-Coyne for a chat. Read the conversation below.
First of all, it’s exciting that you guys have signed with Metal Blade Records. How did that happen?
Dave: Basically we fulfilled our contract with Relapse and we just started shopping around. There were multiple labels that were interested, and Metal Blade just offered us the best deal and also, our manager had worked with them before so he had nothing but nice things to say about them. So it just sort of fell into place.
That label has such a long history in metal, with more than 30 years. Have you kept in touch with their roster? What are some of your favorite Metal Blade bands?
Dave: For me, Cannibal Corpse is a big one. They’ve been on Metal Blade forever. But there’s so many bands on there. We’ve toured with The Black Dahlia Murder and they are super-great dudes. King Diamond too, when it comes to some of the more classic bands.
Phil: Similar for me. Obviously King Diamond I’ve been listening to forever, and grew up with Cannibal Corpse. Metal Blade has totally been a household name since we were kids, so it’s awesome to be a part of that now.
In terms of this tour, what exactly are you doing? You were here last year as well for Summer Slaughter, so this one’s kind of in between albums for you.
Dave: We’re playing a couple of songs off of the newest record that we have, the self-titled. And then we’re going back to earlier in the catalog, and we’re also playing a brand new song on this tour, just to sort of get people talking a little bit, and just because we also finished up recording a new album. I thought we should play some new stuff and we figured we’d throw in a new tune in the mix.
So you’re already done recording? That’s pretty quick, considering that you did Summer Slaughter last year and then the tour with Death Angel. So you’ve been out touring but you still managed to do a whole record in between.
Phil: Yeah, we had a lot of material kicking around from years and years ago, and we got off the road in mid-November so we did have a pretty good chunk of time to sit at the practice base and just grind stuff out. So we put a lot of work into the record, probably more so than any of our other ones, I think. We’ve recorded other records in between tours, but this one was a lot more cohesive and it happened all at once. So yeah, we’ll probably slow down a little bit after this tour, but it just worked out that we signed this new deal with Metal Blade and they wanted a record pretty soon, and we had some time and material so we just came together and made it happen.
What’s the tentative release you’re looking at for this album?
Phil: I don’t think they’ve settled on anything yet. So they’ll put out that information in a press release whenever they want. I don’t know when that will be.
That’s cool. So, for a band touring as constantly as you guys, I think the biggest challenge is to keep it interesting for the crowds, right? You don’t want them to get tired of you. I feel that a good live band cannot get tiring. I’d cite bands like Red Fang and Exhumed as examples from the Scion Rock Fest I just saw a couple of days ago. They’re great bands that people cannot get tired of. That must be your aim as well.
Dave: Yeah, I think every time we play we try and be at maximum intensity and the interaction between us and our fans is really good, so I think when we’re playing live we connect in a good way with the audience and hopefully that’s what keeps people coming back.
Right, and recently you did the Death Angel tour, and a few years before that you did a tour with Forbidden. It must have been good to go out with old-school thrash bands like that because you have those elements in your music too which their fans would enjoy.
Phil: Sure, absolutely. We grew up listening to all those bands. When we started listening to bands like Forbidden, Atheist and stuff like that, they’ve already been broken up for a while so we didn’t really expect them to reunite, let alone get a chance to tour with them! So it’s been really cool to hit the road with all these sort of old-school dudes. It’s very nostalgic for us, and the fact that they are also becoming fans of our band is a total head trip.
When it comes to multi-band tours like this, I saw on Summer Slaughter last year how quick of a changeover it was between bands. For some of them it wasn’t ideal and they suffered from that. But have you become used to being on your toes and being able to set up so quickly?
Dave: Yeah you’re kind of forced to get used to it, otherwise you have to cut songs and that’s obviously something that no one wants to do. But it can be a challenge for sure, specially when it’s a smaller stage and sometimes things are running behind and it’s not even your fault. There’s a variety of factors that can make a show run late or things get pushed over into your time slot. So you’ve just got to hustle and the biggest thing is helping other bands. As soon as the band before you has finished playing, you have to get on the stage and help them out, and hopefully they’ll return the favor. But so far on this tour everyone has been really good about helping each other out and getting kits on and off. Fit For An Autopsy have been nice enough to let a lot of the bands on this package use their cabs, so that’s been cool.
Yeah, I feel that sharing equipment can go a long way towards making this process smooth. Why doesn’t that happen more than it does?
Phil: Well, drummers are finicky and we hate any sort of tiny change in our rig and we complain about it non-stop if we have to endure some small difference in our setup. So, generally most drummers don’t want to share gear. But when you’re doing Europe and stuff like that, you don’t really have a choice, specially in festivals when they make ten drummers share a backline kit. Oh my God, you just hear everyone bitching about it the entire day, myself included. But yeah, generally people are cool about sharing gear and everyone realizes that we’re kind of all in it together making the show run smoothly, so any little thing that anyone can do to sort of speed that process along, people are generally accommodating.
So basically it comes down to the drummer and you call the shots when it comes to this type of thing.
Phil: Kind of. We drummers are just the biggest divas and we have the most annoying gear to deal with. I wouldn’t say we’re calling the shots, but we’re just the biggest burden on everyone.
Talking of festivals, I was at Scion Fest last weekend and this year they had 26 bands across four stages. I caught a bit of everything but I felt that most people didn’t even bother. They were just set on seeing 3 or 4 of their favorite bands. So do you think that’s why America doesn’t really get festivals? People would rather just see only a couple of bands anyway and they don’t really try for anything more than that.
Dave: I don’t know, that’s a good question! I think just in general in Europe there’s a long history of metal tradition there. Not that there isn’t here, but for whatever reason they just seem to really embrace metal across the board over in Europe. And may be it’s because they grew up with those festivals for a long time. Here we have the New England Metal Fest, Scion has been doing some stuff and there’s Maryland Deathfest, but even for those you get at most a couple of thousand people, or 5000 max. Over in Europe, it’s like 100,00 people and it’s an event. That could be part of the reason why those festivals continue on, because it’s such a massive gathering of people from all sorts of different countries and cultures.
Phil: I think another reason is that Europeans seem to box themselves into specific musical genres a little bit less than people in the US. In most of those big festivals you’ll have KISS playing the same stage as Cattle Decapitation, obviously very far away in the day but still there are people there who love all that shit and they want to see all those bands. I feel that people here are a little more, I wouldn’t say narrow-minded, but they’re into what they’re into and they’re reluctant to reach out to other genres. I mean, obviously there are exceptions to the rule but I kind of get that sense a little more here.
Right, I guess people don’t have enough interest or stamina to check out all of the different bands.
Phil: Yeah, it’s tough man, standing for 12 hours straight, watching bands and getting hammered. That takes a lot of stamina. It’s not easy!
Related: Review + Photos – DevilDriver & Whitechapel Co-headline Heavy Lineup At House Of Blues Sunset Strip
Revocation links:
facebook.com/Revocation
twitter.com/Revocation
instagram.com/Revocation
Remaining tour dates:
6/03: Milwaukee, WI @ The Rave
6/04: Joliet, IL @ Mojoes
6/05: Kokomo, IN @ CenterStage Bar and Grill
6/07: Knoxville, TN @ The International
6/08: Cincinnati, OH @ Bogarts
6/10: Toronto, ON @ The Opera House
6/11: Pittsburgh, PA @ Altar Bar
6/12: New York, NY @ Stage 48
6/13: Philadelphia, PA @ Theater of the Living Arts
6/14: Baltimore, MD @ Baltimore Sound Stage
6/15: Charlotte, NC @ Tremont Music Hall
6/16: Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade
6/17: Orlando, FL @ Firestone Live
6/18: Ft. Lauderdale, FL @ Revolution
6/20: Houston, TX @ Scout Bar
6/21: Corpus Christi, TX @ House of Rock
6/22: Dallas, TX @ Gas Monkey Bar ‘N Grill (Outside)
6/23: Austin, TX @ Mohwak