Skinless - Noah Carpenter
Posted on November 16, 2007 at 8:00 am by admin
Way Too Loud: Yesterday I spoke with 3 Mile Scream, and they were really familiar with you.
Noah Carpenter: Yeah, we played with them in Montreal last year.
WTL: They spoke of the tradition of your chicken fighting mosh-pit.
Noah: We’ve tried that a few times, but the bouncers like to break that one up pretty quickly. I think the bouncers see that as a little dangerous because you get a couple of girls on top of big guys running around in a pit, and somebodies going to fall on their head, or knock themselves out. It could be pretty bloody. It lasts for like a minute, and then it gets broken up, so it’s pretty fun while it lasts. We kind of put a stop to that one because it’s usually not very effective. But it was a good try! We like to switch it up!
WTL: I’ve heard a lot of people draw comparisons between Skinless and hardcore, but you’ve said before that there’s no connection.
Noah: Me personally, I’m not a huge fan of hardcore, but there are members of the band, like our old drummer Bob Beaulac played in a lot of hardcore bands before he joined Skinless, so I think when we got to the songwriting process, I would bring my death metal riffs, and he would end up putting his hardcore style drumming in there. He knows death metal as far as blast beats and stuff, but then we would have the breakdowns, and I thought it sounded really heavy, and I don’t necessarily think it’s hardcore because there’s groovy breakdown parts. People can call it whatever they want, it’s our style, and I never intended it to be hardcore when I started, but certain other band members, when we put the songs together can add their touches, and maybe that’s the way it came out. So, whatever!
WTL: Have you ever thought about taking advantage of that with the way current events are?
Noah: Not really. We fit best with death metal bands. We do well with the different scenes. Hardcore kids can appreciate us because we do have the breakdowns, and we’re still definitely a death metal band. We don’t really try to get on hardcore tours, we try to stick with death metal bands, but the area where we’re from, Albany, New York, there’s a lot of hardcore there, and the kids come out because they like what we do, and it’s good because there’s that blend of death metal and hardcore [crowds]. We don’t really try and pump up the hardcore aspect of, we just say we’re brutal death metal.
WTL: Now that you mention brutal death metal, quite a few people have in a way come to an agreement on the term. How do you see yourself fitting into that?
Noah: It’s hard to say really. Some people call us the New York style, but we’re not from New York city, we’re from New York state, but we do have similarities to Cannibal Corpse, Internal Bleeding, and Pyrexia and those old New York bands. I don’t really care what people label us as, we’re just going to do what we do and they’ll call it what they call it. For a simple basic description, I just say brutal death metal, maybe New York style. Brutal death metal with groove or whatever! That pretty much gives you a general idea of what it’s about.
WTL: You seem to have a really good grasp on how to use samples.
Noah: We like them short and effective, something quick and humorous to break up the music. When we’re watching movies, we look for that funny little sound bite that we think will work between songs, and we’ve definitely found some good ones so far!
WTL: I’m not completely familiar with your earlier material, mostly that it focused on…
Noah: Gore? In the early days it was about things like poop and piss and “Crispy Kids”, and “Fetus Goulash”, and now so many bands, these goregrind bands sprung up, and there’s only so many songs you can write about that stuff. Blood and guts, and piss and poop. We grew up in the process. I started the band when I was 17, and now I’m in my 30’s, and over the years you kind of want to change what you write about, and now we’re focused a little bit more on warfare and battle instead of gore.
WTL: The war aspect, is it on real-life issues?
Noah: The lyrics are kind of ambiguous. The one song that’s definitely about a specific thing is the first song on “Trample The Weak Hurdle The Dead” is called “Overlord”, and that’s about the d-day invasion in Normandy in World War II, which was called “Operation Overlord”. The rest of them don’t hit specifically on anything. We made it kind of “foggy” on purpose. We don’t want to get into political issue.
WTL: You on’t seem to be to worried about trends. Both you and Cephalic Carnage have used clean vocals before.
Noah: We had clean vocals on 2 songs on the “Sacrifice To Survival” album. That was something that happened in the studio. Sherwood was recording his vocals in a separate room, and he said “comes come in and check this out”, and he did a singing part, and while we were recording that album, we were looking to step out of the box a little bit. We didn’t want to write an album just like our first 2 albums. We were feeling a little more experimental in that year. So we told him “yeah, roll with it. It sounds good”. We tried a few different things like the clean guitars, almost like an acoustic mellow deal that builds into “From Sacrifice To Survival”. We also had Neil Kernon producing the album which gave it more of a lean crisp sound rather than dirty and grungy sounding like the first 2 albums. When it came to “Trample The Weak Hurdle The Dead” we wanted to get back to where we started, just making it heavy without all that extra experimental stuff, just get to what we’re good at. Just straight up heavy.
WTL: Is “From Sacrifice To Survival” the only video that you’ve done?
Noah: We’re currently working on another. We’ve tried a couple different times. We were filming last year and it came out too dark, then we went on tour for 6 months, and then we finally got around to re-shooting the video for “Overlord” tow weeks ago. Actually we changed from “Overlord” to “Deviation Will Not Be Tolerated”. It’s in the editing process right now. There’s a little bit of filmed to do for the side story, but the band filming is done.
WTL: In “From Sacrifice To Survival”, at the end it says “to be continued”. Is that going to be a stand alone not to be continued?
Noah: I would think so, since 2 of the guys in the video aren’t in the band anymore. We might do something again with that concept, the backyard wrestling kind of deal. We might play off that down the road. The next video has nothing to do with that really. There’s zombies in it!
WTL: With the lineup changes I know Sherwood…
Noah: Sherwood has been replaced by our bass players brother. John Longstreth was with us for a year. He recorded that one album for us in 2003 and toured, so pretty much for 2003 he was with us. Then Bob Beaulac came back and recorded “Trample The Weak Hurdle The Dead”, then his wife had a baby, and he wasn’t able to do the 6 months of straight touring because of his new commitments, and now we’ve got Chris Mahar with us, and he’s pretty much been with us ever since that last album came out last year.
WTL: I know you said prefer to tour with death metal bands, but there does seem to be a group of kids now willing to try new stuff.
Noah: I’ll tell you what worked for us. Back in 2002, we did a stretch of 10 dates with Hatebreed, and I really think that fans of Hatebreed could really get into our stuff because we have those hard type breakdowns, and we got a great response from their fans, so I’d love to do a full tour with them. A band like that, their fan base can get into our stuff, but like I said before, I think the death metal tours are most effective for us.
WTL: Are there any bands you’d like to mention who you’d like to tour with?
Noah: I’ve been able to at least play shows and tour with a lot of the bands that I looked up to in death metal when I first started, like Suffocation and Obituary. Those are the main 2. We’ve played with Decide and Cannibal Corpse, and a lot of the big names in death metal, and one of my favorite death metal bands, a band that I’ve never seen live is Bolt Thrower. I would love to tour with Bolt Thrower, and our singer Jason is a massive fan of Bolt Thrower. I think they’re one if the heaviest bands on the planet, and I don’t think they ever make to North America. Maybe someday, even if it’s a festival in Europe, it would be great to see Bolt Thrower if even play with them.
WTL: A picture I saw one time, they had a dude in a wheelchair crowd surfing!
Noah: Nice! It sounds like something we’d do!
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November 30th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
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