God Dethroned

MM: All wars are terrible, but WWI was particularly gruesome. WWI was considered the first modern war. Were you trying to illustrate this aspect of the war in “Drowning in Mud?”
HS: That’s difficult to answer because I wanted to write an album about WWI, but I didn’t want to refer to a certain country. I didn’t want to take a political stand. I didn’t want to say something good or bad about a certain country, so I tried to write the whole album from a neutral point of view, which made it difficult. I had to write lyrics about objective things that happened during WWI without referring to a certain country, so I tried to pick out certain events and describe them. It was kind of difficult in the beginning. Once I wrote a few songs, it got easier because I knew how to do it. It is very difficult to answer your question because all the songs are about WWI and things that happened, their use of mustard gas…

MM: Yes, and that is what I’m specifically alluding to. WWI was considered the first modern war because of their use of mustard gas, chemical warfare. The weapons were modernized. It wasn’t this “I’ll run out in the field and stab you with my bayonet.” Now, you have some very powerful weapons!
HS: Yeah, that’s true. Actually, they didn’t even realize that at the beginning of the war. They still had cavalry, and they still had cavalry charges, but as you know, there is no use running on a field toward an enemy with machine guns. Everything changed during that war. Of course, there were the trenches; fighting over a few square miles for four years is really insane. They would stand in mud for twenty-four-hours a day but with nothing to drink. There wasn’t even time to get rid of the corpses, so you can imagine how hard it must have been. Half way through the war, they started using mustard gas. It was 1918, the last year of the war, when the tanks came. There were a lot of changes during that war. Every country tried to modernize and find new techniques and weapons to win the war. It seemed like no one could win the war because they were stuck in the trenches and nothing happened.

MM: I don’t think they were prepared for the technology change. Imagine seeing a tank coming at you, and you don’t even know what you’re looking at.
HS: Exactly, that’s what I tried to describe what it would be like to be behind enemy lines. What I described in the lyrics of that song [“Behind Enemy Lines”] was about this breakthrough, and all of a sudden there were tanks coming and they didn’t know what they were seeing. They were scared as hell.

MM: “Artifacts of the Great War” features no words, but it seems to tell a mournful tale. What story does this track tell?
HS: Two things: first, because it’s the outro, we wanted a sad piece of music to point out the grimness of the war and all the people that died in vain. Also, there are the artifacts of soldiers that they dig up every year, still. Every year many farmers die because not only were they digging up the remains of corpses, but also bombs that were still in the ground. The bombs tended to explode when dug up. I think it was as late as last year when this happened. You also have these war memorial signs, these gates. For instance, there is Menin Gate in Ypres. The Menin Gate holds about sixty thousand names of soldiers they could not find back in the field. The Menin Gate was too small, though, so you have the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing, which is further on down the road. It was actually in the town of Paschendale. There you have a war memorial and a graveyard, and on the wall there are something like thirty thousand extra names. They didn’t expect the Menin Gate to be too small. All in all, there are around sixty or seventy thousand soldiers that they never found after the war. That explains why they still dig up the remains of so many corpses. You have to keep in mind; most of the battles took place on the same small spot for four straight years. Every day, they fired one hundred thousand grenades on those two square miles, lowering the ground nine meters. I can’t even imagine that. And then there were all those people stuck in the mud. Years later, nature works it out again and they come to the surface. That’s really sick!

MM: You say you went back to a style from your early days, but your use of clean vocals brings a new element to your music. You sign with a clean voice on “No Survivors” and “Drowning in Mud.” Tell our readers about using this vocal technique.
HS: We also did it on the “Bloody Blasphemy” album. The song “Serpent King” also has clean vocals. In two songs, some parts of the lyrics have been written from a different point of view, not the objective point of view like we did in the rest of the songs. In those songs, there are some lyrics seen from the eyes of a soldier who survived or a soldier who died. They were written in a different perspective. We wanted to try to make it sound differently as well, so I decided to experiment with clean vocals. That’s what we did and I think it turned out really well. It provides a different mood swing in the song. Having clean parts was another thing that brought us back to the old sound.



MM: What are your future tour plans? Will we see you back in the States?
HS: We will hit the United States with Woe of Tyrants in October. I think this tour starts on September 30. We will be on the road for around three weeks. Starting September 3, we do a tour of South America until around September 21. Then we do four shows in Mexico and then we go to Arizona on September 29, and then start the tour on September 30.

MM: You have toured the U.S. twice—once with Cannibal Corpse and once as part of the International Metal Festival.
HS: The second tour [International Metal Fest] was really bad because it was booked by a tour agency called Digger International. They did a bad job. When we arrived in the States, we were headlining all of a sudden. We were supposed to be a support act to a bigger band. They were still booking the tour when we started doing the tour, so he didn’t have time to promote it.

MM: I went to the Detroit [Michigan] show at Harpos to see you guys play and you didn’t even play because I guess the club tried fucking you over in some way.
HS: They added a lot of extra bands, and then everything had to be finished by around eleven o’clock. The band before us finished at eleven o’clock, so we just couldn’t play. What can you do? This time I think it will be a lot better because the tour is basically booked. There are five shows that need to be confirmed, and then we can already start doing promotion for the tour. That will be a lot better! The package is a lot better this time. We will be headlining this tour. This will be our second headlining tour, but like I said, we weren’t even supposed to headline that one. As soon as we arrived, we were the headliner because the true headliner had cancelled. That was a bit difficult, especially because there was no promotion, whatsoever

Darren Cowan