Exclusive Interview with Anacrusis’ Kenn Nardi: Screams of reunion, new album, and the band's future

April 1, 2:11 PMHeavy Metal ExaminerMark Morton

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St. Louis’ Anacrusis has been out of the spotlight for many years. After releasing four incredibly technical albums for Metal Blade Records from 1988-1993 and participating in impressive tours with Overkill, D.R.I., and Mercyful Fate, the band faded into obscurity shortly after touring behind 1993’s SCREAMS AND WHISPERS. Since that time, all of the band’s material had gone out of print, yet many newer bands began citing Anacrusis as an integral influence.

After more than a decade of silence, Anacrusis’ name began to crop back up. Stormspell Records recently released ANNIHILATION COMPLETE: THE EARLY YEARS ANTHOLOGY, a collection of demos and early concert performances. And just last week, it was announced that Anacrusis is finally reuniting and heading over to Europe for the 2010 Keep It True Festival, which is taking place April 23-24 at Tauberfrankenhalle in Lauda-Königshofen, Germany. With any luck (and if there is any justice in the universe), Anacrusis will finally get its due. Read on, as we visit the past, present and probable future with Anacrusis’ architect, guitarist/vocalist Kenn Nardi.

So, it was recently announced that a re-activated Anacrusis is playing a festival over in Europe next spring. What spawned the reunion, and what lineup of the band is participating?

Kenn Nardi: We’ve only confirmed the Keep It True 2010 festival at the moment, but we plan on trying to set up a few other shows over the next year or so. It will be the original line-up consisting of myself, Kevin Heidbreder [guitar], John Emery [bass], and Mike Owen [drums], who was with the band from the beginning through the REASON album. Mike just moved back to St. Louis after having spent more than a decade living in San Diego and Las Vegas. He and I began to discuss the possibility of getting together and re-recording some of the old material or writing some new music. At the same time I had been contacted by someone wanting to release our old demo and he got us in touch with a friend who runs the KIT Festival.

Have the guys kept up with playing over the years, or has it been a struggle to recall and revisit the old material? I guess what fans would really want to know is, can you still scream?

KN: Mike had been playing in different bands over the years and Kevin and John had started a 70s and 80s cover band together a few years ago, but I hadn’t done more than some occasional recording on my PC over the years.

It was a bit of a challenge re-learning some of the old material since the last couple of tours we did were playing mostly songs from the last two album which Mike wasn’t even on. After a couple weeks things began to feel comfortable again and John joined us for a few rehearsals where we played everything as a 3-piece. Kevin came down to rehearsal earlier this week to listen in and discuss a few matters and he should be joining us over the next couple of weeks, and yes, I can still scream. Hahaha.

As for the setlist at KIT, we really want to represent as much of our music as possible, which is tough with four albums in under an hour. At this point we are trying to make a good balanced set of equal material from each album. Even though many people prefer the later albums, there are a lot of die-hard fans who would love to hear some of the earlier material and we don’t want to disappoint anyone. One thing we are working on is shortening a few things and maybe doing a couple medley-type arrangements just to fit a few more songs in.

Are any American dates in the works?

KN: So far, we have only confirmed the one festival, but we are just beginning to look into other possibilities here at home. We definitely aren’t planning on doing any extensive touring, but we’d love to do a few regional shows or festivals.

Is Anacrusis back for good, are you testing the waters, or are you providing fans with a special experience that due to money and timing, they did not get to have back when the band was around the first time?

KN: Well, at this point none of us is particularly interested in doing the full-time band thing. Anacrusis disappeared without any real “goodbye,” and over the years we seem to have grown in popularity…or at least in recognition. There are several opportunities ahead of us, so we’ll see what happens, but we’d love to give as many of the old and new fans as possible a chance to see us live. That is the starting point and the rest will depend on how much of a demand there is for us at this point.

Have you been observing how the metal scene has been evolving since the band’s demise?

KN: Not much. I still listen to a lot of the older bands I was into in the 80s and 90s, and I have heard a lot of the newer stuff. I am familiar with the general direction metal has gone in, but I’m not really familiar with the majority of the bands that are playing these days.

When the band split up, did you feel that the band was finally on an upswing?

KN: I definitely think the band continued to progress musically right up until the end and we did have new opportunities for the first time, like having the “Sound the Alarm” video shown on MTV’s Headbangers Ball. Unfortunately, the level of frustration we were all feeling at the end was enough to overshadow the positive things we were experiencing with the last album.

In the rather extensive and highly detailed band history on www.anacrusis.us, you frequently mention that you are a fan of bands like The Cure and New Model Army (whom you covered on MANIC IMPRESSIONS). For someone who is so into non-metal music, how did you come to embrace the genre? Or was that just another facet of what made the Anacrusis sound unique?

KN: Most people like a variety of music, even those who play in metal bands. Maybe it’s Kiss or Zeppelin or maybe it’s the blues or a little country music or rap, so I never understood why people were shocked to learn that I was into a band like The Cure. It wasn’t an elitist thing or me saying metal was “beneath” me or something. I like loud drums and guitars as much as anyone, but I love melody and intelligent lyrics most of all, and The Cure and NMA were two bands that I respected and loved listening to. I do believe I wore my influences on my sleeve more than some, though, and this definitely contributed to making Anacrusis sound different from your average thrash band.

A band literally years ahead of its time and completely underappreciated in its time, does the fact that so many bands are influenced by Anacrusis amaze you ? It also seems like every band nowadays down-tunes their guitars.

KN: Well, we definitely weren’t the first band to tune low, that’s for sure, but we did seem to be ahead of the curve on many levels. I’m not sure how many bands are doing things like tuning very low or combining strong dynamic breaks, or melody contrasted with screaming because of us, but there may be some. It is more likely that we were just slightly ahead of some of the current musical trends. Sabbath tuned low, Venom used distorted bass, and Celtic Frost used orchestration, but I think the way we brought all of these elements together was unique. It is always flattering to see how much of Anacrusis conversation is on the Internet these days, and the overwhelming majority of it is very positive. I do occasionally see an interview with some new band, and one of the members will cite their influences as Metallica, Slayer, Anacrusis…and I’m like “Whoa…does anyone even know who that is?” I know how important my influences were to me, and I consider it an honor to be called an “influence” by someone else.

If you can actually remember, what was going through your head when you were writing and tracking the ANNIHILATION COMPLETE demos? They sounded like nothing that was out at the time.

KN: I have always loved recording and the entire process of putting music together. I always approached our demos more like albums, as far as recording methods go. The ANNIHILATION COMPLETE demo was something the band and I took a lot of time putting together. The version we just released was the second version of the demo, and there is a certain atmosphere that we captured that was largely lost on the hastily recorded SUFFERING HOUR album. I believe our second album REASON sounds much closer to this demo than SUFFERING HOUR did, and a lot of that was due to the mix. Sonically, they are not the best sounding demos by anyone’s standards, but I love the dark, doomy sound of those early recordings.

What inspired you to go the route of separating the guitars in the mix, with one in the left speaker and one in the right? That’s a tactic I hadn’t seen really utilized since the 1970s.

KN: I used to love to listen to KISS ALIVE! and ALIVE II with headphones and pick out who was playing what. I always thought most of the 2-guitar bands panned the guitars to the sides, but maybe since I credited Kevin and myself as “right guitar” and “left guitar” people noticed it more with us.

What did you think of the tag “alternative metal”? I know bands don’t typically being lumped into categories, but I thought “alternative metal” consisted of bands like Faith No More and latter day Bad Brains. For some weird reason, Anacrusis was tossed into that lot in the day, too.

KN: I guess we were in many ways an “alternative” to the usual metal band. Anacrusis has been labeled everything from doom to speed metal to thrash to power metal to progressive metal to alt metal to…I know I am forgetting a couple. We covered a few different styles of the heavy genre over the years, so it’s hard to categorize everything we did under one label. I guess nowadays we’d even be considered emo due to our lyrics.

When you were looking at the scene back then and creating your music, did you actively strive to be different, or did it just happen by sheer experience?

KN: I always wanted to do something unique. There are always better singers or better guitarists or drummers out there, so I knew from the beginning that originality would have to be our strong point if we ever wanted to stand out from the crowd. However, I always tried to make music that I truly enjoyed, rather than just being different for the sake of being different.

The 1980s were a great time for metal, because there was so much going on everywhere you looked, but it didn’t seem that a lot of bands were happy with Metal Blade. Did it have something to do with them basically being the only game in town for many years, and their stable was so large that every band did not receive equal attention?

KN: I can only speak for our band and our experiences with them. Metal Blade was a classic and well-respected label going back to the early 80s. They were pioneers in this genre and some of the first metal I ever heard was on the early METAL MASSACRE albums, so despite what we’d heard about them from other bands we decided at the time that we would sign with them. That “honeymoon” period was great and they gave us a lot of attention at first, but as time went on and the albums got better and better critical acclaim, the label just never seemed interested in pushing the band. That is not to say they did nothing at all for us, but they just generally seemed disinterested in Anacrusis after the original rep who signed us was out of the picture. I doubt that they are any worse than any of the other independent labels from that time. Most bands are throwaways or tax write-offs or whatever, so the only hope a band has is to use them as a stepping stone to hopefully be picked up by a major label (at least back then). I’m sure you could find a thousand bands with the exact same story as ours, and we knew that even at the time, that being a metal band from St. Louis in the 80s didn’t offer us many opportunities.

Throughout your career, it seemed like Anacrusis was always a few steps ahead of the songwriting and technology curve. Did you feel a little bit like George Lucas, when you would revisit and update older material? It seems like a good chunk of the Heaven's Flame material never went to waste. And even after the band split, you continued to rework songs for your 94-95 demos. What is your take on this experience?

KN: Hahaha. That’s not the first time I’ve been compared to George Lucas for “re-visiting” old material. I am a perfectionist by nature and I always think things could be better or sound better or whatever. I never saw anything wrong with recycling good ideas instead of letting them disappear forever. I am always experimenting with new things, musically and recording-wise and I need material to work with. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is use an old idea with a new twist if I’m not feeling particularly creative. I’ve never been a prolific writer and most of what I write, I end up using. I hate to struggle through an idea for nothing or to write something that will never be heard, and that is why I try to let nothing creative go to waste.

It’s very interesting watching the DVD that accompanies the ANNIHILATION COMPLETE set, because even on the Heaven’s Flame performances from 1986, you came across as seasoned pros. How much time did you spend in the basement/garage just working on how you would perform live?

KN: My older brother Sam was the real showman of the band in those days. He wasn’t a great player, and most of what he knew on the bass I had taught him, but he had great stage-presence and that made a big difference for a three-piece band onstage. I had to handle all the guitar stuff and most of the vocals and he would cover the whole stage, which made it easier for me. We also had Chad Smith on drums who would later join Anacrusis for the MANIC IMPRESSIONS album. He was a very good drummer even when we were just teenagers and a good drummer can make the whole band sound more professional. We spent a lot of time trying to make Heaven’s Flame come across like something more than just a local band.

The reason I included that footage is because Heaven’s Flame was such a big part of what molded the early Anacrusis material and so much of that material found its way into Anacrusis over the years, especially in the beginning. Kevin and John were both into Heaven’s Flame and came to see us play several times before I joined them. I believe Kevin (and maybe John) is in the crowd in that video.

Were all these videos from your personal archive, or did you have to collect them from other sources? If the former, I was wondering if you may have been a bit of a musical pack-rat.

KN: Kevin and I always held onto the old videos of the band. Often when we’d play a show, some guy from one of the bands would set up a camcorder and offer to tape you too for $20 or whatever. Looking back, I wish we had filmed more, but I guess we have a decent little collection of shows from the early days. I have a few others that I didn’t include, but these were the best for what we were wanting on the DVD. People sometimes forget that it wasn’t like it is now where everyone has these tiny little cameras and video on their phones. The Heaven’s Flame show was filmed on my Dad’s huge camcorder that you put the whole VHS tape into, and it is the only video that exists of that band. Luckily, I also had a cassette of the audio recorded through the board, and with today’s technology I was finally able to painstakingly synch up the clean audio with the video footage.

How did you come to team up with Stormspell Records to release the ANNIHILATION COMPLETE demos CD/DVD package? It is a relatively young label.

KN: I was contacted through email by the guy that runs the label asking me about putting out the old demo stuff. I had spent many months going through stacks of all my old cassettes and digitizing everything to see what was on them all. Since I had done all that work already for the website, I figured why not? Unfortunately the original master cassette was lost years ago and all any of us had were 2nd generation, normal-bias, high-speed dubbed copies. I took the best copy I could find and cleaned it up as good as possible. I think it sounds pretty close to the original though, which was originally done on a 4-track cassette multi-track recorder. I thought the idea of doing an “early-years” compilation was cool, so I crammed as much material on the CD and DVD as I could to try and give a well-rounded picture of early Anacrusis and our roots. It isn’t for everyone, but I think fans of the early material should really enjoy it.

Did the Stormspell folks want something specific in the package, or did you hand-pick the material that went on it?

KN: Stormspell originally wanted a few other things like maybe some early Heaven’s Flame demos or maybe both versions of the ANNIHILATION COMPLETE demo, but all of the source material I had was pretty crude. I decided I’d rather do a CD/DVD instead of a 2-CD set of stuff most people would just grab off of our website. Ultimately, I selected all the material and cleaned everything up for the final package. Everything is built around the pre-SUFFERING HOUR band and particularly the ANNIHILATION COMPLETE demo. I tried to include as much as possible without too much repetition and even stuffed a few other recordings onto the DVD as background music for the slideshows of early photos.

I think your website is one of the most comprehensive collections of audio and video ever made available from a band to its fans. You can actually see and hear the band evolve. How long did it take to put that site together? And to offer everything up freely kinda leaves me scratching my head, since Anacrusis material is pretty collectable among metal fans.

KN: I emailed a guy named Evan Howell way back in 1999 because he had written some great, in-depth reviews of all the band’s albums. This was at a time when no one had any idea what ever happened to us, so I wrote to him through his Remnants of Reezon website and let him know I would gladly offer info or photos of the band if he needed anything. He offered to put together a simple website covering the band, with a “history” written by me. Over the years, I have updated and completely re-worked the website to include lots and lots of material on the band. My goal is to make it sort of an online “box-set” for anyone interested in Anacrusis. We weren’t making any money from the band and all the old stuff was out of print or collecting dust or in boxes in the basement, so I decided to archive everything for us and the fans that were still out there. I believe the website has had a lot to do with keeping Anacrusis’ name alive for all these years.

Tell me about the CRUEL APRIL project. How long was that in the works, and why was it never officially released? It was quite a departure from Anacrusis in that it harkened singer-songwriter music of the 1970s with a modern twist.

KN: After nearly a decade of barely picking up the guitar, I was bitten by the musical bug a few years ago. At first, I began to mess around with learning some of my favorite songs on acoustic just for fun. Eventually I decided I would like to write some new music in a completely different style from Anacrusis. I began writing songs on acoustic one after the other and recording them on my PC. I would come up with an idea, track the acoustic to a click-track and then build the other instruments around whatever I imagined for the song and finished it in a few days before moving on to another. I had no specific direction musically, so it was great, creatively to be unhindered by any particular genre or expectations. I really love the songs I wrote during that period and I eventually recorded about two dozen songs. The first half of them ended up on the CD I put on the website. Some of the others were completed but I haven’t done anything with them and a few heavier songs may be re-worked for Anacrusis if we decide to record any new material. I never intended to release the CRUEL APRIL stuff, which is why I posted it for free. I had hoped to try and put together a band to possibly play some of that material out around town, but I couldn’t seem find anyone interested in doing so at the time and eventually abandoned the idea.

How were you able (allowed) to take back all the Anacrusis material and put it up freely on the web without Active or Metal Blade crying foul? And did you catch any flack for re-mixing MANIC IMPRESSIONS? And speaking of that remix, what do the other guys think of how you retooled it? It’s much more organic and airy now.

KN: I just did it. Hahaha! I honestly wasn’t sure if any of the albums were still in print at the time and figured no one would really care if I posted them for the handful of fans we had out in cyberspace. We were not getting any royalties for the music and no one has ever told me to take them down, so until they do I will post everything I have for people to share. As for MANIC, I always loved that album, though I hated the mix, so I paid someone to bounce the masters down to my hard-drive and I re-mixed it all on my computer a few years ago. Since I was the main writer and producer of the album, I didn’t really ask anyone what they thought of me messing with it. It had never sounded like I or any of the other guys wanted it to even at the time, and now it is closer to what we had initially hoped to end up with. I did it mainly just for my own pleasure anyhow, but I think the other guys have to agree that most things about it are better now.

I have to say, the remixed version of “I Love The World” with the prominence of the keyboards and echoed vocals is really haunting.

KN: I never thought our version of “I Love the World” had enough of the atmosphere of the original, and I was happy to give it another shot with better results. Everything on the re-mixed version was there on the masters and I didn’t re-record anything except one tiny acoustic solo in “Far Too Long”, which was completely missing from the master tapes I got back from the studio. We ran out of time and the mix was done very quickly and some things were left out either by accident or poor judgment. I don’t see anything wrong with having a second chance to make it sound like we wanted it to.

Anything else you would like the fans to know about the current status of Anacrusis?

KN: Like we discussed earlier, we have officially joined the line-up of the 2010 Keep It True Festival in Germany, where we will perform with the entire original line-up including original drummer Mike Owen. Mike, John our bassist and I have been rehearsing together for several weeks and Kevin, our guitarist, will join us next week. We are all very excited to get the chance to play the old songs again for both old and new fans and hope to set up a few more shows either here in the States or in Europe. So, if anyone out there knows of a festival that they think Anacrusis would fit well with, spread the word and let them know you want to see us there, so we can get the ball rolling to try and make it happen.