Casket Feeder: In Service Of Violence
There are few matches that work quite as well on paper as death metal and hardcore; both grippingly ferocious at their best, plenty of bands have found there is much to be gained from marrying the crushing weight of the former with the sheer urgency of the latter. With their debut full-length Servants Of Violence, Milton Keynes’ CASKET FEEDER prove this just as well as anyone else, following in the footsteps of everyone from MASTIFF to VENOM PRISON with a record that places them right among the very best of the UK’s thriving underground.
As with just about every band you speak to nowadays, the plan was to get this ball rolling a lot sooner, with Servants Of Violence arriving nearly a full four years after the band’s last EP Scalps. You’d think it would’ve been frustrating to sit on a record as solid as this one for as long as they’ve had to, but interestingly the delay has come with a few perks. “It’s given us a lot of time to sit with the record ironically,” explains guitarist Connor Cazalet-Smith. “Obviously it’s fresh to everyone else but it’s given us a lot of time to think about what we want to develop on moving forwards. We feel like we’re more towards finding our sound than we ever have been, but obviously there’s always room to try and improve and grow.”
“There wasn’t any sort of expectation for a full-length so I think we had a bit more time just not to rush it – that was good,” adds vocalist Matt Downes. “And obviously we had the whole pandemic and a chance to reflect on the whole process; for example it was originally going to be 11 tracks but we just decided to take one off and release that as a single [the excellent Wormwood released last year]. I personally didn’t feel any pressure.”
As indicated, the results find CASKET FEEDER at their most considered, their most fully-released – the sound of a band working out exactly who it is they want to be. It’s arguably more ‘metal’ than their earlier offerings, with the band paying more attention to the overall craft of their songs whilst also working to push themselves as writers and musicians. “Around writing demos for the album it was much more of a collective process,” continues Downes. “So I think in that respect a lot of individual influences kind of brought themselves into the music. That definitely played a big part in the overall sound of what the album is.”
“We wanted to write the best songs we could write,” emphasises Cazalet-Smith. “Like putting more hooky parts in, more ear-worms and that sort of thing, even if that’s a riff or a particular lyric or something. That’s from playing live and watching other bands who you look up to and seeing what it is that takes a band to that other level. You learn a lot of that first-hand, you see crowds reacting to things and even as a punter it’s like ‘what makes me excited watching a band? what can we learn from that?’”
Of course, none of this means that the hardcore fury of the band’s early releases is completely gone. Cazalet-Smith stresses that he was particularly keen to work with a producer who knew hardcore arguably even better than he knew death metal. Their choice: Stu McKay – a safe pair of hands whose CV includes everyone from MALEVOLENCE and DESOLATED to INGESTED and DYSCARNATE. It’s no surprise then that the results speak for themselves.
“He worked us really hard, but in a good way,” laughs Cazalet-Smith. “We tracked the whole record in five days – we slept on the studio floor. He was amazing as well, he basically did 12-hour days with us and didn’t charge us any extra for the extra time. He could see we really wanted it and we had such fun tracking the record, all of us. It was amazing but we took it deadly seriously. We were all there to support each other and get the best takes. It was fun but it wasn’t like let’s piss around and have a jolly and I think that fed back into us nailing this record.”
Coming in almost as the icing on the cake, or perhaps the fuel to CASKET FEEDER’s fire on Servants Of Violence, is the record’s equally ferocious lyrical content. Rejecting the often more fantastical horrors of death metal for a real-life exploration of the world’s cults of various guises, Downes’ lyrics provide a scathing reflection on the demise of civilisation that places the band’s feet arguably more firmly in hardcore than anything else. “I was watching a lot of documentaries and reading a lot of things about history, politics, religion,” he explains. “Taking a step back once the lyrics had been written it kind of made sense that they all had this recurring theme of cheery subjects like war, disease, famine and death – it made sense to have that four horsemen aspect because it brought in the religious side of it as well.”
Taken as a full package then, Servants Of Violence should add CASKET FEEDER’s name to the ever-growing list of bands responsible for this exciting moment we’ve been having in heavy music lately. Cazalet-Smith and Downes are both stoked not only on their own album, but also on the wider scene in general; they have every right to be on both counts.
Servants Of Violence is out now via self-release.
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