CHOOF - Here Come The Bastards
Bong-Blasting Sabbath-Worshipping Grind From Hell
Written by: Tom Wilson @thetomwilsonexperiment - Sense Music Media | Thursday 24 March 2022
It’s dirty, it’s ugly, it’s noisy and it smells a bit like bong water. What is it? It’s the demo tape of Melbourne quartet CHOOF, and if you’re a fan of nasty grind and massive riffs, it will be music to your ears. If you’re not, it will take your head off. Ahead of their show at the Bendigo Hotel with KING PARROT, HIGH AS HELL and FRANKENBOK, CHOOF axeman Adam cracked open a VB and shot the shit with SENSE.
I’ve had a few listens to the tape and it’s fucking harsh. How long has it been in the works for?
The drummer and I, Jack, we were jamming together for a long time, probably since 2019 I think. So yeah, the songs have been around for a while, and then with all the COVID stuff, we just kind of kept jamming … sneakily. [Laughs] But the actual recording itself was pretty quick, because we knew the songs, and then Jackson, our bass player, joined, and Jake [our singer] joined very soon before we recorded … The songs that are on there were around for a while. Some of them, two years, some of them we just wrote before. Just a mix of everything, you know?
What were some of the songwriting inspirations that went into it? What kind of lyrical subject matter was being dealt with?
I mean, Jake writes all the lyrics, our singer, and he’s way into just all kinds of gnarly shit. He likes different horror movies, and one of the songs is about Edward Penishands … [Laughs] Which is weird … I’m trying to think what else. Lines in the Sand he wrote about … that’s more of a political one about the Middle East situation and things going on there with all these bogus wars that are happening. But Jake writes all the lyrics, so yeah … he does everything from weird horror movies to horrible crimes. [Laughs] Any kind of fucked-up dark stuff, he’s all over it.
So far, so grind … The artwork for the tape is hectic – the black & white one with the skull. Who did that for you?
That was Jackson, our bass player. He just whipped that up in Photoshop. I don’t know how it came together as such … Our drummer Jack did the logo. That was from a beer that we enjoyed in Belgium one time, so we just kind of liked the look of that, so we were like, “Let’s use that font, and just have “CHOOF”,” you know? I like the idea that you can read it. It’s very legible. There are a lot of band logos and it’s all a bit much.
It just looks like barbed wire.
Yeah, something like that. So we just thought, let’s just go for a … I guess it’s an old English style, I’m not sure. But yeah, Jackson did the artwork for our tape, the bass player. It’s a bit confusing, because my name’s Adam, but the other guys in the band are Jack, Jackson and Jake, so I get confused myself when I’m referring to someone.
CHOOF - Adam, Jake, Jack + Jackson
Photo by Wild Rose Pictures
How much choof went into the inspiration of the band name?
You know what’s funny? I came up with the band name, but I don’t really smoke too much myself these days. But the other guys in the band, they’re all over it. They’ve got all kinds of vapes and gizmos, and just your standard billy … [Laughs] I can’t remember how, but I just thought that would be a cool name. It’s like one syllable – just get it out. And I also liked it because then people would think we were a stoner band, you know? The drummer and I played in stoner bands before – like a stoner metal band – and we were going to do that again, but then we just thought, “Eh, that’s enough – let’s just do some fucking blast beats … keep the big riffs, but then, when they get boring, we’ll do the blast beats.” Because you know, eight-minute songs and all that … just get on with it! [Laughs]
It’s like, “Oh no! I’m an hour late to the stoner metal show! It’s okay, they’re only two songs into the first band.”
Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, so we’re kind of trying to flip that. It would happen a lot at our earlier shows, where people would think that … And it’s good too, because we do have some big riffs and stuff, so we can play with bands like that. I’m happy to play. But we can also play just grindcore shows and punk shows and things like that.
The track MDK – is that a reference to the old videogame or Demolition Man or something?
Nah, it’s a reference to wrestling … Murder Death Kill Club. It’s something to do with deathmatch wrestling … It’s something about deathmatch wrestling, where they use cheese graters on them, and there’s all that fluorescent lighting stuff where they smash glass, and there’s a lot of blood. Bit of a fun reference to that.
What were your first exposures to grind? And what was it about the genre that resonated with you?
I mean, to be honest … I come from a more straight-up heavy metal thing … All the classic stuff – SLAYER, PANTERA, HIGH ON FIRE … a lot of stuff like that, and also all the stoner kind of slower stuff. As far as grind goes, nothing really stuck out to me. It was more, “Well, we kind of know how to play, so let’s give this a go,” you know? So it was kind of like, trying to bring the big riffs that inspired me from bands like HIGH ON FIRE and NEUROSIS, things like that, but then also adding in some fast stuff with blast beats … It was never really a thing of we were going for a grind sound – it just kind of happened that way. We all just love heavy music. Our drummer Jack likes a lot of PORTAL, and he has that influence in there. There was never any one thing with grind, or “I want to do that.” Probably the main thing, at least for this band, Jack and I were playing in a hard rock band for, like, six years. Because we grew up with heavy music, and we went and saw Phil Anselmo doing his solo stuff at The Corner Hotel, and that sort of made an impression on us – we should be doing some heavy shit. Especially Jack, our drummer … When we were in the hard rock band together, we sort of had to keep him on the leash a little bit, because he’d want to do crazy shit, and it just … “tone that bit down … it’s rock ‘n’ roll”. In this sort of style, we’re more in our element of what we grew up with. So after seeing Phil Anselmo playing the crazy death metal stuff … I grew up loving CANNIBAL CORPSE and all that shit, so it was just that, and we love punk as well. It’s all smooshing it all together and seeing what works! [Laughs] … Even the album that [Phil] was touring at the time [Choosing Mental Illness as a Virtue] was pretty influential. I like a bit of craziness – just trying to jam riffs together that might not make sense at first, but just jam them in there. There’s weird time stuff there. We don’t know any time signatures or whatever that is, but we just try to get shit-hot riffs and put them together, and if that means there’s a punk one into a doom one into a grind one, well, that’s how it’s going to be.
So what are the plans for the rest of 2022?
So we’ve got the KING PARROT show. We’ve got a show at Whole Lotta Love with this band TONGUESCUM and NEPHALEM and ALGOR MORTIS. Then we’ve got a KING PARROT show … We’re doing a few awesome supports just at the Bendigo Hotel. There’s a band called IRONHAWK from Tassie. They’re real cool. They’re fucking awesome, kind of badass old-school heavy metal – a bit MOTÖRHEAD-y. We’ve got that coming up. A band called STALKER, we’re doing that at The Bendigo, and we just recorded a 10” vinyl in Frankston a few weeks ago, and that’s going to be all new songs that we wrote. On the tape and stuff, there were things that Jack and I just wrote together, whereas on this new recording we just finished, it’s getting mixed right now, they’re all songs that we all wrote together. The bass player wrote a lot of songs, I wrote a few songs, and we all jammed them out and put our own spin on them. So it’s pretty exciting, because that’s the first thing that’s not, you know, songs that have been sitting around for ages. It’s just stuff that we smashed out together. That’ll be happening … I want to say before September, but, I dunno. [Laughs]
CHOOF play The Bendigo Hotel on Saturday the 9th of April with KING PARROT, HIGH AS HELL and FRANKENBOK.
CHOOF – Jack, Adam, Jake + Jackson
Photo by Wild Rose Pictures
