Exclusive Interview: Discussing Precious Metal with Decibel Magazine editor Albert Mudrian

courtesy of Da Capo Press

Love it or hate it, heavy metal is a style of music that will not go away. In fact, some may say that all the negative attention paid to it actually helps it flourish. However, due to money constraints, labels dissipating, and other business issues, many albums of metal’s hallowed past have unfortunately disintegrated into the ether, only to exist as shadows in the memories of the old-school fans.

Thankfully, we have people like Albert Mudrian, who painstakingly resurrects classic metal albums as Hall of Fame articles in Decibel Magazine. Hall of Fame articles are exhaustive features, part interview, part encyclopedic entry, and require the participation of every band member who contributed in the creation of the album. Therefore, any album that features a now-deceased musician is immediately disqualified from inclusion, so we’ll never see pieces on Atheist’s Piece of Time, Mayhem’s De Mysteriis dom Sathanas, or anything by Death or Pantera.

However, he released a compilation book, Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces. Throughout the book, fans can revisit those genre-defining nuggets like Celtic Frost’s Morbid Tales, Repulsion’s Horrified, Entombed’s Left Hand Path, Emperor’s In the Nightside Eclipse, Opeth’s Orchid, and even Dillinger Escape Plan’s Calculating Infinity.

Read on, as Examiner goes behind-the-scenes with Albert and discusses why extreme metal is so “precious”.

A lot of these articles in the book originated in various issues of Decibel. How long did it take to go back and expand them to compile this book?

It took a little while, actually. There are so many pieces and so many writers who contributed to the originals. So we had to go back and work with the writers on getting their outtakes and working them into the story so that it flows and makes sense. It certainly didn’t take as long as writing a book from scratch, but from the time we did the deal with Da Capo to the time it was released, it was almost a year. But the actual production was concentrated around six months or so.

When someone goes to a bookstore and picks this up, what do you want them to get out of it? Is it purely entertainment, fond reminiscence, or an educational piece?

I think it could be all of those things, really. The thing about the Hall of Fame pieces, at least through my experience with the magazine, is that people really, REALLY look forward to them. Because these are stories about records that don’t often have stories told about them. It’s not like you’re getting an oral history of a band that already has a “Behind the Music” on VH1.

These are largely untold stories about records that people who read Decibel would love. So they kinda become the defining stories for those albums, and I think that the stories themselves become definitive. If you want to learn everything there is to learn about Cannibal Corpse’s Tomb of the Mutilated, as far as I’m concerned, all you have to do is read the Hall of Fame piece. It’s going to have everything you would want to know or need to know.

I wouldn’t necessarily call this a collection of the stories; I would never pitch it like, these ARE the definitive stories of the greatest extreme metal albums. Based on our criteria for inclusion in the Hall of Fame, it would be incomplete. Obviously, we can’t do a Death Hall of Fame, a Pantera Hall of Fame, or anything like that. I think it should be billed as the definitive stories behind 25 essential records, because I think all 25 of them are essential. I also think anyone who is nostalgic to begin with will want to go back and rediscover those albums, because I think they all still hold up today.

And, of course, I think it’s definitely educational for a younger fan that wasn’t there when these albums originally came out or whose only recently heard about this stuff. I think the context of the records and the extreme metal movement gets revealed to them through reading these stories.

When you were putting this together, did you give any thought to balancing genres? It seems that as the book progressed, it sways a little heavier towards the stoner-doom rock and the proto-metalcore stuff.

Yeah, I think it is kinda how the extreme metal scene has evolved over the years, really. I think that we’re definitely conscious of trying to make it a decent overview of the whole extreme metal underground. I think the reason you see a concentration of scenes as the years go on is because the book is arranged chronologically. So, you’re going to see a period of the early nineties with a lot of essential death metal releases, and then by the time you are into the late nineties and into the early part of this decade, there really aren’t a lot of “essential” death metal records anymore. There are a lot of good records, but there aren’t any super, genre-defining records being released.

What you have are different genres that are going through their glory days. The truth is, the late nineties was the boom for metallic hardcore and metalcore bands. They were making the definitive albums for that genre during that period: Calculating Infinity was 1999; Botch’s We Are the Romans was 1999. It just so happens that, because the book is arranged chronologically, you’re going to see that progression. It wasn’t an intentional thing to load death metal here, the stoner doom here, or the metalcore here.

It’s just the way the years moved, and I wanted to make sure it was a good overview, that it wasn’t just a death metal hall of fame book; which we could essentially do (there have been so many of them), but I wanted it to show an overview of what the extreme metal scene was capable of. If you have some kind of interest in this music, then you can pick this book up and see how eclectic the scene is.

I know that the book won’t please every fan, but it has a little something that would interest each sect of fan. However, I am wondering if you are expecting to catch any heat for calling Kyuss an extreme metal band.

Oh yeah. The truth is, it’s so arbitrary, because we’ve got Diamond Head and Black Sabbath in there.

I understand that, but at the time of those albums’ releases, the bands were considered extreme. I don’t really remember a time when Kyuss was ever considered “extreme”.

Well, I think the thing is that they are extreme in a way in that Kyuss had a greater influence on an entire subgenre of extreme music. I don’t think you can deny that any of the heavier stoner bands like Electric Wizard would sound the way they sound if not for Kyuss. And I think that sometimes that argument wins out, because we’re doing some more Hall of Fames later this year that aren’t super-extreme releases, but they are records that laid the groundwork for different parts of different scenes.

Like, we’re going to do an Accept Hall of Fame later this year. And I guess you can argue that for their time, they were definitely more extreme. But are they extreme in the sense that Suffocation’s Effigy of the Forgotten is? No. Are they even really as heavy as Kyuss was on Sky Valley? No. But yeah, we always catch heat. You’re always going to find someone who tries to call you on something.

But we already have such strict parameters on the Hall of Fame – the fact that we have to do interviews with EVERYBODY, everybody has to be alive and willing to do it. It’s our own fault, but I think it would be stupid to attempt a Death or Pantera Hall of Fame, because you’re not going to get the stories. Without the input of the people who were vital, creative forces within the band, the story is going to be incomplete, and that is not what this is about. I don’t want to make the box even smaller. We have to keep at least a wide enough door to walk through or else there will only be about ten Hall of Fame pieces left to do.

And it greatly broadens your readership, too. As soon as I saw your blip on Facebook about the book coming out, I had imagined what would be in it. And when I opened it, I was somewhat taken aback, because some of the albums I had envisioned were not in it, like Effigy of the Forgotten, the first Deicide, anything from Dark Angel, Sepultura, Autopsy, Bolt Thrower, or Pungent Stench.

It’s true; it is a tiny framework from within which we have to work. I think there’s great records that don’t get into the Hall of Fame because they might simply be personal favorites. There are albums that I absolutely love that I don’t know if I can justify doing Hall of Fame pieces on them, like Believer’s Sanity Obscure, Rotting Christ’s Thy Mighty Contract. I think they are incredible, indispensable records that I think everybody should own, but can I justify putting them into the Hall of Fame? No, either because they didn’t have that influential impact or they don’t have that consensus. Even Pungent Stench; I love Been Caught Buttering, but could you rally a consensus that it belongs in the Hall of Fame? I don’t know.

Based on the cover art alone, I would think it would be a shoe-in.

Yeah, that’s true, I forgot about that. It’s not a science, and I think that’s what makes it appealing to a lot of people, because the moment you do anything like that, you engage people in a debate, either wittingly or unwittingly. I think the easiest way that publications do that is by lists, like, “here are the Top 40 albums featuring a decomposed corpse on the cover!”

I really, really detest magazine lists. I honestly hate them all.

You know, we do them, so I can’t really say anything about them. They’re kinda like a necessary evil. They’re fun if you can do them the right way. Every year, we do an ‘albums of the year’ list, and every year, it sparks debate. I think you shouldn’t really take them super seriously, but there is an element of truth, and we obviously stand by them. I look at our albums of the year after year, and I still stand by them, but you can’t really get too wrapped up in it.

No, in my opinion, the bigger issue with these lists is when a magazine like Rolling Stone announces that they are going to compile something like the “Top 50 artists of the past three decades”, you just KNOW who is going to be on it before you even see the result. So why do it?

Yeah, there are several ways you can go with it. Of course, you can always go the Metal Sucks route, which creates its own kind of backlash, I guess. I get it. It is the kind of thing that are fun and they engage the reader. But then it’s always fun to write back saying, “Your list sucks! Here’s what it should be!” It’s fun, but ultimately, what does it mean? Did Torche sell more albums, because we made them Album of the Year? Maybe a few more, but do they get a plaque to hang on their wall? No.

Another thing I realized when reading through the book is that every metal fan has his own core of influences and group of classic albums that he/she cherishes above all others. It became really prevalent when I started pondering things like, “Why did they choose that album by Carcass?” “Why choose that album by At the Gates? I thought Terminal Spirit Disease was a much better album than Slaughter of the Soul.”

Oh yeah, it’s interesting. Slaughter of the Soul is not my favorite At the Gates album either. Mine is The Red in the Sky is Ours. But you can’t deny the importance of Slaughter of the Soul. It IS a great album. But it’s a combination of things, really. I think it has to be a great album, and it has to have some kind of cultural impact on the scene. And as much as I loved The Red in the Sky is Ours when it first came out, as much as I paid upwards of $70 for the LP on eBay last year, it’s just not the record that represents their legacy. And that’s all part of this.

Even the band’s can’t figure it out. I mean, that Carcass album we had in there, Necroticism; most people will argue that the record that SHOULD be in there is Symphonies of Sickness or Heartwork. Those are valid points, too. Necroticism also happens to be my favorite album by them, and it captured everything that they were about up to that point, and everything they went on to do after that is encapsulated in that record. Whether somebody wants to admit it or not, that has all the defining elements of what Carcass was about. It’s fun to argue over these records, and the bands tend to do it, too. I know Jeff Walker was surprised that we picked Necroticism. He said that he would have picked Heartwork or Symphonies himself.

But then, they were also a band completely oblivious to the fact that they were so influential to the scene. What I did think was really, really cool was the fact that you included Paradise Lost’s Gothic in the book, because Paradise Lost has caught so much s*** from metal fans over the years. And it seems like those first couple albums seem to have gotten lost in time. I’m not even sure if they are even still in print.

I think Peaceville may have reissued them, I’m not sure. But even the albums that followed, like Shades of God, Icon, and Draconian Times; are they even still in print? I seriously doubt it. Honestly, I think Paradise Lost is one of the greatest metal bands of the past 20 years. I adore them. I’ve even enjoyed their past few records. I think that when a band like that moves so far away from metal in such a short span of time, it’s unfortunately taken them a really long time to regain their credibility with the metal community. And that’s fine, if people want to accuse them of not being a “real” metal band because they walked away from it, then whatever.

But the truth is, those records like Gothic, Lost Paradise, Shades of God, and Icon are lost to a generation of music fans that have no idea what Paradise Lost used to be about. I mean, that record singlehandedly invented numerous subgenres, like gothic metal and death doom. The things they were doing on that album would go on to influence the funeral doom bands like Thergothon. There’s no way that you can’t connect Gothic to the first Thergothon album, and that went on to invent funeral doom. So yeah, having Paradise Lost in there was utterly essential. I don’t think anyone can make an argument to me that it shouldn’t be in there.

I know from talking to you in the past that you are a serious early Earache advocate, and when I got the book, those entries were the ones I was initially drawn to. They were one of those labels that were paving the way for the new, new, new wave of British heavy metal, and Peaceville was doing a little bit of that, too. But it is a chapter in metal history that a lot of kids really know nothing about.

I think that Earache has a more cache with a younger audience these days, because they are a bit more relevant in the long run, because they have changed directions a number of times – whereas Peaceville has stuck with the thing they do really well for the past 18 years or so. Obviously, Peaceville started out as a noisier, crustier punk label, and then went on to do some of the grind stuff. But by the time they were releasing Gothic, the first My Dying Bride EP, and Anathema’s Crestfallen EP, they pretty much found their niche. Of course they experimented with other directions here and there, but they’ve pretty much stuck to their core sound and values, and I think that it is a much smaller, more compact genre than what Earache has done.

Earache incorporates all sorts of different types of bands, so they are going to have a broader appeal. Peaceville is relegated to a certain type of sound in people’s minds. Growing up, to me, Earache and Peaceville were the two most important labels based on what they were able to produce. They both had bands that were representative of different genres within extreme music. They had the most important stuff to me.

Well, also, Earache didn’t have the occasional distribution problems that seemed to plague Peaceville for a time.

Yeah, yeah, that obviously helped them. People were able to get their records in America without paying those exorbitant import prices. But you know, in the early 90s, Peaceville had pretty decent distribution in America through Caroline and then through Futurist. It wasn’t until the middle of the decade where they were a bit lost with having decent distribution. But now, I think they pretty much have it together, and of course Earache still has a big presence here.

But Peaceville did do something way above and beyond for metal fans at the time. I think out of all the labels, they had the best samplers.

Oh yeah, Volume 4. That was a great one. That was actually the first time I heard At the Gates. Earache had a defining sampler with Grindcrusher in '89, but it was originally vinyl-only and wasn’t available here. But, no, you’re right; Peaceville definitely had the edge with samplers.

Getting back to the book, how did J. Bennett end up with the lion’s share of the stories?

Bennett was the guy back in the early days of Decibel most willing to go through the pain of assembling the Hall of Fame articles. They really are time-consuming, frustration, and generally a ton of work. But Bennett was willing to go that extra mile and help connect the dots, get the interviews, basically do all the transcription work, whatever. We’re working on issue #60 of Decibel, and he’s contributed to every single one of them. He hasn’t done a lot of them lately, because he’s been writing a lot of cover stories for us. And I obviously am not going to load a lot of extra work onto someone writing a cover story for us. Doing a cover story and a Hall of Fame piece is literally asking someone to put together 12,000 words in a month. That’s probably more work than one person should be doing.

Have you ever had to kill off a Hall of Fame piece, not because of death, but because you simply couldn’t track down the members?

Oh, tons of times. There are a number of Hall of Fame pieces at various stages of completion because we haven’t been able to get some people, or some people were available and then disappeared, or they agreed to do it and had some time to think about it and changed their minds. Some of the Hall of Fame pieces in the book took forever to complete. The Converge one, in particular, for a while, we had all the interviews in the can except for the guitarist Adam, who wouldn’t do it, because there was some animosity over the way he exited the band. That thing sat on the shelf for a long time, before he was able to be convinced to do it.

I’m at the point right now, where I try to have a number of Hall of Fame pieces in the works at the same time, in case one falls through, we’ll have a backup plan. In the issue we’re working on now, we actually had to use a backup, because the one we wanted to do fell apart due to animosity between band members. It’s really strange to me that people act this way, because ultimately, they’re just sharing a page in a magazine. They don’t have to be in the same room together or on the phone together. Not wanting to preserve their legacy just because they don’t like the old guitarist just seems stupid to me.

I was actually shocked that you were able to get some of the guys you did, like Tom G. Warrior and Phil Anselmo. These are guys who either don’t want to talk at all, or they only want to look forward.

Yeah, we have some good relationships with people because of the magazine. And some of these bands actually follow what we do, and they see the way we’re going to present it. We’re definitely not selling anybody short with this. It’s such a big piece and you get to say everything you want about the time period, or the album, or the members you worked with.

Sometimes artists are really into it, and sometimes they’re not. We were just trying to do one on Dio’s Holy Diver record, and apparently there’s some animosity between Vivian Campbell and Ronnie James Dio, because Vivian won’t do the interview. I was shocked because he’s not even willing to talk about this record.

Well come on, when you’re playing at Walmart with Def Leppard, what do you need Decibel for?

Yeah, you’re definitely at the apex of fame there.

But the book is really great, because you guys went that extra mile to be as complete and concise as possible. I think my favorite parts of the books are those sidebars you did with Hammy, Vincent Locke, and even Jeff Walker talking about Napalm Death’s Scum.

Like I said, the goal of the pieces is to be the definitive stories of the albums themselves. The moment you’re committed to doing a Hall of Fame, you can’t half-ass anything. You’re talking to everybody; you’re gathering pictures from that time period. You’re really presenting it as well as you can, and there’s a lot of stuff that we gather for these things that just never see print. Some of that stuff has obviously made it into the book.

We just did a piece on Judge’s Bringin' it Down record, which I know made a lot of people happy, and made a lot more people unhappy. We only had 6-7 pages for it in the magazine, and we ran out of space. We had Q&A sidebars that couldn’t get in, so we put it in out blog. So if we do another anthology someday, maybe we’ll put it in there. But I appreciate that you picked up on that, because we really try to blow these things out and make them as definitive as possible.

Another thing that stuck out in my mind while reading through the book was the obvious influential musicianship of the artists who put these albums together. And it made me think back to the time when these albums were coming out, tech magazines wouldn’t give any of these bands the time of day. But now, it seems like these same magazines are doing a little bit of catch-up or back-pedaling, making up for lost time by acknowledging metal bands’ existence.

You’re right. I remember back in 92 or 93 when there was a Morbid Angel transcription on one of those guitar rags. My friends were freaking out, because they could finally get the tabs for the song. But for the most part, those magazines were unwilling to legitimize these artists as the accomplished musicians that they were. But at some point over time, it probably had something to do with the changing of the guard on the editorial staff – new people from different generations who understood the value of these artists.

There are still a few publications that are ultimately dinosaurs, who will never give props to these musicians, but I think this change has allowed some of these bands to become legitimized. You even have places like SickDrummer.com, which is great; it’s something geared specifically toward these musicians. I just hope that at some point the other publications rise up like that.

What reminded of this subject was when I was reading through the Tomb of the Mutilated piece, and it took me back to about 93 or 94, I was perusing a newsstand and happened upon a copy of Bass Player Magazine with a feature on Alex Webster. It completely blew my mind.

Yeah, it’s like, “No s***! Why hasn’t this happened before?” And when it does finally happen, it seems so strange, but at the same time it makes perfect sense. And young kids who are going to become interested in playing bass aren’t going want to read about Billy Sheehan. You know, they’re going to get to read about Alex Webster, and that’s great, because it’s helping to shape the next generation. If you look at it now, you might argue that there’s probably a little too much of it, with the glut of technical metal bands that all sound the same at this point. I mean, it’s cool, but at the same time it’s like, “can you guys write a riff I’m going to remember?”

But I think the most entertaining things I read in the book are those moments when the artists themselves demystify those one-time horrifying genres, like the part about Emperor stealing Varg’s bubble bath.

That’s just great. That’s the stuff I love the most, honestly. And I think that’s because as someone who was an uber-fan growing up and becoming entrenched in this side of the industry, you can sometimes get up-close-and-personal with a lot of these people who were like gods to me at one time. So the demystification process started a long time ago, and now, it’s great to get these hilarious anecdotes you wouldn’t possibly imagine were possible when you were younger. Like, in 93-94, I had a particular vision of what these people were. And to read these stories now, it’s just ridiculous. Some of it is still intact, but I think it makes it more real. People want to be able to identify with heroes like that. And those little stories, while obviously funny, go a long way to connect the reader with the artists as normal people. If the stories can deliver that, along with being educational, I think that’s great.

I think that really shone through in your DarkThrone piece. Out of everybody in the book, I think those guys seemed to talk the most.

Yeah, Fenriz is a chatty dude. And it’s really funny. When I originally approached them about doing the story, Fenriz was totally not into it. He felt there really wasn’t anything to say about it. He said, “It just came to me over a couple week period, we recorded it, and that was it.” And after a 12,000-word transcription later, it turned out he had a lot to say.

I think that those guys are really incredibly down-to-earth and approachable. I think a lot of people are starting to figure that out, especially after the past three or four Dark Throne albums, when they went back to Peaceville and put out The Cult is Alive, where they were getting more old-school and bringing more punk elements into their sound. They’re demystifying themselves, and there are parts of the Transilvanian Hunger piece will bring that out.

But I don’t think it’s going to diminish the way people feel about that album. All that emotion he had when he recorded that album is intact; it’s there, committed to tape. It’s just that those guys are not the same guys now as they were when they recorded it. If I was to interview Fenriz and Nocturno Culto back in ’94, it wouldn’t have gone anything the way it does in the book. It’s that time that passes that enables people to open up more about the motives for the music at the time.