Welcome to Manchester, not for the first time I'm sure - have you seen much of the city?
Travis (vocals): Yeah, we’ve been here once before – we walked around Piccadilly Gardens for a while… there’s a Subway!
How is the long-awaited European Tour going so far?
Travis: We’ve got a nice bus, but it’s sort of a gratuity after the shit we had to go through in Portugal. We had a huge 20 passenger thing, and it died on the side of the road, in the middle of Portugal in a super-hot area that looked just like where we live in Southern California. I guess it could have been worse, we could have been stuck on the side of the road in Southern California! So that was pretty rough, but it started out amazing, we did Obscene Extreme in Czech Republic, and that was really neat. Also, the new bus has a Playstation; our drummer is from Chile and he’s freaking out about the World Cup at the moment, so we have some soccer games on there.
I guess on tour you see different attitudes to vegetarianism; has anything really stood out?
Josh (guitar): Not really- it’s pretty much the same everywhere. The food quarter at Obscene Extreme was all vegan, it was really cool, but everywhere else was like the US… you know, same old shit.
How do you define your music?
Travis: That’s an area for Josh, I believe… you write the music! Oh wait, Dave’s here…
*Brief interlude while Dave the drummer comes in with two crates of beer*
Josh: As far as terms that people would throw at it, it’s a mish-mash of everything we listen to in the extreme metal world… death metal, grindcore, black metal… all sorts of stuff thrown in.
Travis: If we could integrate Country music, or attributes from another genre, we totally would…
Josh: We could give you a list of our influences and what we like, but there’s a very conscious effort not to be too derivative of any one subgenre. Some bands make the decision, “We’re gonna be a… whatever band”, and that’s where they draw all their influence from, and that’s very apparent usually… I think it throws people too, they want to hear a band that fits a certain label… and if we don’t fit in with what they want and they can’t give us a name.
Travis: BRUTAL SLAM!!!
What has caused your music to change so much over the years?
Travis: I think that’s just natural evolution, from kicking out certain people, bringing in new people; but nothing to do with the changing of times or genres, I mean we pay zero attention to what’s going on. We look at technical prowess of certain people, and we admire that, but I don’t think we carry anything back with us. For example, the bands we tour with will be hardcore or deathcore or whatever’s cool right now. We pay attention to their music, but mainly so we can figure out why the hell that stuff is popular, you know? We’re flattered and glad that people care about us, and like our music, because we’re not trying to ‘keep up’ or do anything that doesn’t make us happy.
Your album artwork and videos are pretty disturbing- how important is shock to you?
Dave (drums): I don’t think we focus on shock, really – we have a vision and we try to make that possible, but we don’t go for shock value. For example on the latest record, we wanted to put something out there with intense and disturbing imagery, but we didn’t really need any blood or guts to get the message across. Unfortunately tons of bands that we like don’t focus on putting any thought into their artwork, generally speaking.
Josh: You have to put it in context too: if you look at a Prosthetic Cunt album cover then anything we do will seem pretty tame in comparison.
So you work with concepts rather than relying on shock value?
Travis: We work on concepts for each album; they’re not concept albums per se, but it’s all very conceptual… going out of your way to make an album cover that’s gory for the sake of being gory is just a poseur way of getting attention. That’s not artistic. But then, we’ve stumbled across what we want for our next album cover, and that’s really… over the top, I think. It’s actually disgusting.
Worse than 2004’s Humanure, with the cow defecating human remains?
Travis: Well, it’s real. Humanure is super gross but it’s still obviously fake. But this one… they’re gonna have to have something to put over it in the store ‘cause it’s just too horrifying.
What’s on the agenda after this tour?
Dave: Well, next year we have our last album with Metal Blade, and we intend to bust our asses to put out a great release. Obviously we’re going to continue, but we’re just trying to do one thing at a time. After this tour cycle, we have a lot more international dates, and we’re going to try to come out here far more often in future.
Travis: Yeah, we need to be more consistent… We’ve had issues in the recent past with people who couldn’t really leave the country, so we would ping-pong between going and not going… it’s also really expensive to come over here! It’s not really like a holiday, there’s so much to take into consideration; but I think we have a plan for the next album!
