By Andrew Bansal
Hailing from Brooklyn, New York, Tombs is a band that has successfully experimented with a combination of musical styles in varying degrees ever since starting out in 2007. They expanded and diversified their sound more and more with each one of their studio efforts, and they’ve just released their third full-length album ‘Savage Gold’ via Relapse Records, emphatically their heaviest, most crushing and extreme metal-inspired album till date, and one that will firmly put them on the map as a metal band this year. To coincide directly with the album’s release, they’re currently on a short US West Coast run as support act to Pelican, and plenty more touring will follow for the quartet. Last Friday June 13th, the tour came to the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles and a few hours before Tombs destroyed the stage, I caught up with guitarist/vocalist Mike Hill for a detailed conversation about the new album and a variety of other topics. Read it below.
Mike, it’s good to have you on Metal Assault, man. How are you doing today?
Doing well, and ready to go here in LA!
I’m sure you’ve already heard this a lot from the press but I have to say that the new album is fantastic, and first of all congratulations on that.
Thank you very much. We put a lot of time and effort into the record and it’s sort of a culmination of a couple of years of hard work, so I’m really happy that people are appreciating it.
Compared to the previous two full-length albums I would say ‘Savage Gold’ is definitely the darkest and probably most metal album that you’ve done. Would you agree with that assessment?
I agree with that. Mainly I think it’s because of the production. We worked with Erik Rutan, and we selected him for that reason, to give us more power and clarity in our recording.
I was going to ask you about him. So he’s obviously had a big impact on the album then. He’s been a prominent figure in extreme metal over the years, specially in production.
Yeah, we’ve all been huge fans of Erik Rutan, all the way back to ‘Ripping Corpse’ and his time in Morbid Angel. Obviously Hate Eternal are an amazing band that we respect, and also his ability as a recording engineer, specially the Goatwhore records that he has done I think are amazing. That’s actually what sort of got our interest in Erik, listening to the Goatwhore records, listening to ‘Path Of Totality’ and understanding that it was a really well recorded album but feeling like a lot of power of the drums specifically might have been lost in a lot of the atmosphere. So the decision to go with Erik was prominently to tone down the atmosphere and to make more of a powerful-sounding recording. If you want to go for power, you talk to Erik Rutan! (laughs)
Aside from that, the music is different as well, and the power comes from that, not just from the production. What brought about that change as compared to the album you did before this one?
I’m not really sure that the writing process was that much different. All of our records have double kick, blast beats and metallic riffing on there. I just think that we wanted to produce something that was a little cleaner sounding, and express that side of the band as opposed to the wall of reverb, and the ‘wall of sound’ approach that we had prior. Even though there’s a lot more intense metal stuff going on on the record, there’s also a lot of clean singing and subtle moments on the album, like the song ‘Severed Lives’ is totally different than anything else on the record. So I feel there’s a larger variety of different types of songs that we’ve done on this record.
Because of how it has turned out as a final product, do you think it opens you up to more opportunities touring with different kinds of bands, may be more extreme bands?
Yeah that’s something we thought about after the fact. Once we had the final master, we realized that it’s a pretty extreme record and might open up some possibilities on the road for touring with different bands. I think at heart everyone in the band is leaning more towards being a metalhead as opposed to post-rock or whatever other alternative genres there are. We’re all death metal and black metal fans and that’s pretty much where our heads are at, really.
You’re doing this West Coast run with Pelican, which is a totally different band and doesn’t fall into the extreme category as much. It’s instrumental, proggy and the post-rock vibe is definitely present in their music. But this is also a good tour for you. You stand out as a different band from theirs.
Yeah, this is actually the third time we’re touring with Pelican. The first time we toured with them it was Pelican, Wolves In The Thrown Room and us, and the second time it was Isis, Pelican and us. And now we’re out again with Pelican. This tour sort of came together more out of friendship, and a bunch of friends getting together to do a bunch of dates. We’ve known each other for many years and have mutual respect. They asked us to do this tour with them and of course we’re not going to say No, because the shows are going to be great. They’re an amazing band and I think the whole thing is just going to be positive.
The album came out on June 10th and this part of the tour started yesterday in San Diego, so I haven’t seen you do these new songs but how are they fitting into the live set?
I feel the whole vibe kind of fits. The first three-quarters of the set is all stuff off the new record, and the last quarter is material off of ‘Path Of Totality’, and it all fits together. There’s definitely a difference in the approach of the songs but it all kind of meshes in really well. Some of these songs we’ve been playing for a year because we wrote them a year-and-a-half ago. So we’re already accustomed to playing them live with the other songs and it feels natural.
Does it help when you’ve been playing songs before going into record them for a new album?
Absolutely. I recommend that across the board. The longer you have a chance to tour on the material, playing it out on the road in front of people every night, the better prepared you are to go down to the studio and execute the songs because they’re already engrained into your muscle memory and it’s like second nature. I wouldn’t really have it any other way. We like to write some songs, take them out on the road, mix them in with the other songs, and then record them. The songs feel complete at that point, you know.
Exactly, man. I also wanted to talk to you about your album artwork. You’ve used a tattoo artist named Thomas Hooper for all three albums. What does that bring, using a tattoo artist for album covers? I think it’s cool and it goes well for metal bands like yours.
Thomas is a good friend. We’ve known each other for many years at this point. Though he is a very prolific tattoo artist, he’s also done a lot of work outside of that field, with painting, producing prints and things like that. So he’s a well-rounded, very deep visual artist. His tattoo work is amazing but all of his other work is amazing as well. Thomas’ approach to his work and my approach to my work are very similar, and we draw from the same basis of knowledge. So it’s a pretty open-ended thing when it comes down to making the artwork, because I basically just give him demos and bits and pieces of songs, lyrics and stuff that I’ve been working on, and he just comes up with a concept and we go from there. All the stuff comes together and it’s amazing. It’s never really what I expected it to look like but it always surpasses my expectations.
Would you say that his covers develop along with the album and at times even before you have the album done?
Usually that’s not the case. When we’re pretty far along in writing, I send him the demos. I might not have final lyrics but I definitely have all the ideas together by that point. For instance there are written pieces where I draw the lyrics from, and that stuff gets sent to Thomas. He just collects all that stuff and listens to it. He might highlight certain lines in the writing, and we just collaborate from there. And by collaborate I mean me saying that I want an image of a scorpion or a skull or something like that. He takes that idea and expands on it in his own way.
I think tattooists pay attention to detail as part of something that’s required for their profession. That itself makes the artwork that much better for an album, doesn’t it?
I think so, and also with tattooing, you really only get one shot. A good tattoo artist should do it once and not have to do it over and over again, because who wants to get needles jabbed into their skin? You just want to sit one time and have it done. So, that informs a lot of his decision making when it comes to stuff, just doing it once, get it together and sort of push it out. I think that’s a big part of his work ethic, you know.
I also wanted to ask you about New York and its musical atmosphere. There’s a few bands coming out of there that play darker styles of metal. Black Anvil for example is a great NYBM flag-bearer. What’s that atmosphere like for you? Does it encourage you to play this style of music?
Well, Black Anvil in my opinion are the only true New York black metal band, even though a lot of other bands that claim to be. They are great friends of ours and they inspire me to move forward and to work hard because those guys have been in different bands playing music their entire lives. They have a rich background in being creative, and that motivates me to work harder. As far as other bands in New York, there really aren’t that many that I feel any kind of connection to. There’s a band called Pyrrhon, which is on Relapse. Their record just came out, and they’re an inspiration to me as well because they’re such a far-out technical death metal band and I think they’re taking death metal into places where a lot of other bands haven’t gone. That open-mindedness is something that informs me in my creative process as well. So I would say Black Anvil and Pyrrhon are probably the only two New York bands that I feel any kind of connection to, honestly.
That’s interesting. Talking of open-mindedness, I think your music definitely has a crossover with the progressive genre. When your publicist pitches your band to the press, it says, ‘recommended if you like Enslaved’ and stuff like that. In your opinion, what describes progressive music? Is it the way of thinking or a particular style of musicianship?
I think it’s more about the way of thinking and the ideas behind what you can do. There’s people out there that can duplicate things and put a tag on it and be like, this is the style of music. But if the spirit isn’t there a 100 per cent, then ultimately the true power of the music is lost. So I think that having your spirit in the right place and your ideas collected in the right way really define what you’re doing, you know. You can call whatever you’re doing anything, but if you don’t have the intention there, it’s not going to really amount to much in my opinion.
So, would you call Tombs progressive music in that sense?
I would just call it dark metal. The word ‘progressive’ is interesting to me, because I think of bands like Yes and King Crimson which are way beyond my ability as a musician to play at that level, so for me to call myself a member of a progressive band would be incredibly pretentious. So I’m just going to stick with dark metal, because I play like a caveman. That’s more of my speed, really.
So for you that term is also about the musical ability then.
Yeah I would say progressive has to do with a higher level of musical ability and also the intention and ideas behind it. I mean, Yngwie Malmsteen is an insane guitar player but I don’t consider him to be a progressive metal figure, really.
Right, and lastly, after this tour what plans do you have? Are you going to continue touring and playing shows elsewhere?
Absolutely. When we get back we have our record release show in New York, and that’s happening in July. Initially we were booked to go on tour with Mayhem, Black Anvil and Inquisition, but that tour got canceled, so as a result we have a couple of months where we’re not really going to be doing anything, but in the fall we’re going to be back out on the road doing the US once again. After that, probably in early 2015 we’ll be going back to Europe for a full tour there.
Related: Review + Photos – Pelican, Tombs & Mustard Gas And Roses Perform At The El Rey
Tombs links:
TombsCult.com
facebook.com/TombsBklyn
twitter.com/Tombs666
instagram.com/TombsCult
TombsBklyn.bandcamp.com
Tombs upcoming shows:
6/18: Vancouver, BC @ Rickshaw (supporting Pelican)
6/19: Seattle, WA @ Neumos (supporting Pelican)
7/25: New York, NY @ Saint Vitus (w/ Pyrrhon, StatiqBloom & Passage Between)