Goatwhore: No Rest For The Wicked
After 25 years, New Orleans’ death metal veterans GOATWHORE are showing no signs of slowing. With their eighth studio album – Angels Hung From The Arches Of Heaven – is unleashed upon the world, founding guitarist Sammy Duet cuts a pensive, contented and invigorated figure. Maybe it’s because for the first time in GOATWHORE‘s long, dark career, they are trying things that they’ve never done before.
“A lot of bands go through the motions like ‘this is what we’re known for, this is what the fans expect’ and I hate that. Even some of my favourite bands have put out a record you totally expect,” he explains in his Louisianan drawl. “We always strive to take it to the next level, even if it takes going down a different path, but not going so far off the path it no longer sounds like the band. There’s always room for improvement, no matter who you are.”
And take it to the next level they have. Angels Hung From The Arches Of Heaven features some of the band’s most sinister (as if the name wasn’t a dead giveaway) work to date and is the culmination of five years of work.
And while the evil, malevolent air hangs thick around the album, they’ve pushed the boat out and expanded their sound, too. Album closer And I Was Delivered From The Wound Of Perdition is a dark and brooding number that shows the band go into a completely different gear. Still crushing at its core, Sammy describes it as “the big, slow, crazy, dark forest-inspired song” and actually admits that it was never written with GOATWHORE in mind. “I was going through some tough times, let’s just put it that way. The way that I deal with when life hands you a bad card is to write music – it’s very therapeutic for me. I wrote this without any band intention at all. But I presented it to the guys and they said ‘absolutely, we’re taking that shit’. I’m looking forward to see how it goes over in a live setting.”
Another facet of Sammy‘s ‘take it further’ credo was realised in the decision to bring somebody else in from outside of GOATWHORE to work on the record. And there was only ever one person worthy of that honour: Kurt Ballou. “We wanted to work with Kurt on [2017’s] Vengeful Ascension, but our schedules didn’t pan out.” Fortunately, there were no schedule issues this time around and so Sammy and the rest of GOATWHORE – completed by vocalist L. Ben Falgoust II, bassist Robert ‘Transam’ Coleman and drummer Zack Simmons – entered the studio as a de facto five piece for the first time since 2003.
“We’re all big fans of Kurt‘s work. The sound he gets on the records he produces is massive. I’ve never had somebody from outside the band give opinions on the songs so when we agreed to work together, he asked for demos, he wanted to hear what was going on. It was a no-brainer for us to go with him and the proof is in the pudding on the album.” And the proof is plentiful. Across the 12 songs of Angels Hung From The Arches Of Heaven, GOATWHORE has achieved a richness that can often be forgotten in death metal. By balancing the sinister overtones with the subtle details, they’ve created here a potential new pinnacle of their career.
Sammy also fondly describes the experience as being like having two guitarists in the room – something that hasn’t been a feature of GOATWHORE in almost two decades. “My entire life, I’d been in two-guitar bands, so it was refreshing to have a different set of ears from someone who is also a guitarist. He would be like ‘why don’t you shift the riff a couple of notes up just for this little part and then shift it back’. It wasn’t big changes he made within the songwriting. It was just very small ideas here and there that made big differences.”
As prosperous and productive as this all sounds though, it’s been a long and winding road to get Angels Hung From The Arches Of Heaven out into the world. “I started collating ideas in 2017. And Death From Above was Ben’s idea and he brought that idea up when we were writing for [2014’s] Constricting Rage Of The Merciless,” explains Sammy. “Coincidentally, we were going to take off 2020 to finish working on the record, and then as you all know, we were forced into a vacation. So even though the pandemic was a horrible thing, it worked in our favour to create this record.”
Rest assured though that GOATWHORE don’t intend to take their time with getting a tour underway. Fresh off of a 25-date, 25-city US tour with INCANTATION when we spoke, Sammy is eager to get back out on the road. “We get cabin fever pretty fucking quickly,” he beams. With a European tour in the books for early 2023, that will signal the first time they play a lot of this new material. “We played Born Of Satan’s Flesh because we released the song the day the tour started, but in the day and age we live in, if we had played any other songs from the record before the record’s out, it would have been on YouTube and people would have been hearing it and it would have been a fiasco. It’d be like spoiling the end of the movie before the movie’s out.” Now that the album is out, at least there won’t be long to wait to see the director’s cut.
Angels Hung From The Arches Of Heaven is out now via Metal Blade Records.
Like GOATWHORE on Facebook.