CRISISACT - Turn It Off
Don’t You Dare Turn It Off
Written by: Tom Wilson - Sense Music Media
Last month saw the emergence of a new project created by brothers Joe and Dave Haley. Famous in the realm of extreme music for their work in Tassie death metal crew PSYCROPTIC, this new band, CRISISACT, is unlike anything they have done before. What happens when a drummer and guitarist famous for technical prowess try their hands at grindcore, a genre less concerned with musicality as it is with blinding aggression? You get abrasive, hostile metal delivered with surgical precision.
Pictured: Dave Haley, Matthew Young, Brett Bamberger + Joe Haley - CRISISACT
Photo courtesy of CRISISACT
“Myself and Joe were just toying with the idea of doing [something] short, fast, pretty heavy,” Dave explains from Melbourne. “I think I was tracking another album at the time, and we had some time left, so I was like, “OK, let’s lay down some drums.” So we did, and a couple of weeks later Joe sent me the complete tracks, without vocals or bass on them … When REVOCATION were out here in mid-January, I was hanging out with Brett Bamberger – he’s a very good friend. I said, “Do you want to start a grind band?” He was like, “Yeah, sure.” I’m sure he didn’t think anything of it at the time, and neither did I, but after getting the music a few weeks later, I went, “Cool, we need a vocalist.” He reached out to Matthew Young of Melbourne thrashcore troupe KING PARROT. “He went, “Yeah, I’m into it.” And that was it. It’s been the quickest band, from idea, to inception, to release, that I’ve been a part of.”
“Joe and Dave are the loveliest guys you’ll ever meet,” Young tells Sense, on the phone from Ocean Grove in Victoria. “I’ve been friends with them for a long time, so it’s nice to be able to work with them in this capacity, you know? I’ve always gone, “Fuck, they are two dudes who I would love to be in a band with.” Now I’ve got that opportunity, so it’s pretty cool!
“When guys of that calibre – and friends as well – ask you to do something … it’s like, “Of course I’m going to do this.””
An eleven-song barrage that is done and dusted in about twelve minutes, CRISISACT’s debut Turn it Off is a monster of a 7”. In Sense’s recent 8/10 review, we mentioned that the EP doesn’t sound like a lot of grind releases. Far from the abrasive, rattling harshness of early NAPALM DEATH or CARCASS, Turn it Off is what happens when you take one of the most intense musical genres on the planet and record it with state-of-the-art technology and expertise. “As soon as I heard the demos, they were perfect, you know?” reflects Youngy. “They were studio quality. It was like, “This is our grind band!”” He laughs. “It’s so well-produced … It’s not typical grind, that’s for sure. I really enjoy it.”
Tracks like You are Pathetic and Weak as Fucking Piss drip with venom and spite. How much direction did the Haley brothers give Young? “Zero,” Dave replies, flatly. “I think if you choose someone to be a collaborator, that’s what you’re doing, you know? My theory is, if I’m going to employ an artist to paint an album cover or design an album cover or whatever, I’m not going to give them guidelines … If you’re working with someone like Youngy, who is exceptionally proficient and killer at what he does, that’s the trust that you give him. It’s free reign, for sure.”
Asked about lyrical inspirations, Youngy had this to say: “My initial thought with [the lyrics] was “Don’t think about it too much” … I don’t really think about the content so much – more the pattern and some words that will fit and things that will work, and then I try and shape a theme around that … Just general discontent at the world. When you’re playing music like this, you’ve got to be pissed off, and there’s plenty to be pissed off about right now.”
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The last time I saw Matthew Young, he was belting out I’m Broken with PANTERA frontman Phil Anselmo at the Back Room in Brisbane last year, as part of the Thrash Blast Grind Tour (a poster of which is in the background of the Fuck Knows if I Die video). A champion of abrasive, unorthodox music through his label Housecore Records, Anselmo is a legendary frontman, but can also be a challenging, controversial figure. I own four different PANTERA shirts and credit the band with changing my life when I was a kid, so I had to ask – what’s Phil like?
“We’ve done lots of stuff over the years. We’ve been friends with him since maybe … 2012? We jammed with DOWN at Soundwave years ago – that was the first time we met him. We recorded a record with him [2014’s Dead Set], and we often stay at his house … We’ve toured with DOWN and SUPERJOINT and THE ILLEGALS a whole bunch of times. It’s pretty awesome to have someone like that support us and champion the band a little bit. He puts our records out in North America through Housecore Records, so it’s been a pretty cool association.”
“PANTERA were the biggest fucking metal band in the world when we were growing up, and Phil Anselmo was standing out the front. For us to have the opportunity to be friends with him and do all the things that we’ve done over the years, it’s been pretty incredible.”
Dave Haley also acted as a promoter for the Thrash Blast Grind tour, and he shares Youngy’s reverence for the groove metal titans. “I still remember buying Far Beyond Driven when it was #1 on the charts. I bought it at K-Mart in Newtown in Hobart on cassette, and it was #1 on the music charts. I remember that whole day, basically, because it was such a special moment. Not too many albums I remember actually buying.”
When it comes to actually meeting his musical idols, Dave is reserved, explaining that he occasionally avoids them because “Some of the ones I’ve met, I wish I hadn’t.” He’s very diplomatic in not naming anyone he didn’t like, but he is more than happy to talk about the ones he enjoyed. “Meeting EMPEROR, and getting to know them, especially Ihsahn, touring with him and then touring EMPEROR out here, that was awesome, because that’s someone I’ve revered since I was young and getting into music. Then, meeting him, it was like, “Wow, you are everything I hoped you would be.” That’s always reassuring, and reaffirming … It’s kind of cool, when you’ve looked up to bands, and you tour with them, and you become friends with them. THE BLACK DHALIA MURDER, touring with those guys … touring with bands like ABORTED and OBITUARY and the larger of the death metal bands … it’s cool when they’re actually cool too. I’ve been very fortunate.”
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Pictured: Andrew Livingstone-Squires, Matthew Young, Wayne Slattery, Ari White + Todd Hansen - KING PARROT
Location: Phil Anselmo’s property, Louisiana
Photo by: Danin Drahos
KING PARROT are about to release a four-track EP. “We did some songs probably two or three years ago now, when we were over in the States and we had a week off,” explained Youngy. One of the legs of the tour had been cancelled, leaving them with some time to kill while staying with Phil Anselmo in New Orleans. They asked to use Nodferatu’s Lair, Phil’s studio. Lucky for them, it wasn’t booked out. “We wrote these four tracks that are going to appear on this EP that we’re putting out, and that was it, man … We never did anything with them. We were probably going to re-work them for our new record, but considering we can’t really rehearse or jam right now, we just thought, let’s put these songs out just to get them out there … It’s going to be coming out as a 7” EP, and it’ll be out digitally as well.”
I mention that, in our recent feature on Jason Fuller, the BLOOD DUSTER bassist sung the praises of Young and his work ethic, putting in the hard yards promoting KING PARROT through any means possible – spending days plastering bill posters around town. “[Jason and I] have done lots of stuff over the years. He’s obviously recorded a couple of KING PARROT records, and he’s always been someone that, when I looked at the way we wanted to run KING PARROT, I looked at BLOOD DUSTER, and saw the way that he did business. I wanted to sort of replicate that to a certain degree, but in my own way. They were definitely inspiring to me. With KING PARROT, the idea was, “Let’s create an Aussie band that sounds like an Aussie metal band, that’s fucking intense and draws inspiration from all these other Aussie bands, but let’s try and fucking do it overseas! Try and take it over to the States, and over to Europe and Asia, and do all the stuff that all of these bands that we all really love didn’t really get the opportunity to do.” That was kind of the goal of KING PARROT. That’s what we set out to do, and that’s what we’ve done.”
It turns out, he used to get more from the young bassist than just musical influence. “I used to buy weed off Jason when I was a teenager,” Youngy laughs. “Feel free to put that in.”
The red carpet interviews are solid gold – the band sticking out like sore thumbs, with drummer Todd Hansen telling a reporter, “We’re just here for the free feed.”
“We’re walking on the red carpet and all that sort of stuff, and people were like, “Who the fuck are you guys?”” He bursts out laughing. “We were like, “Yeah, don’t worry. Go and interview someone else.””
The hundreds of hours spent building the profile of the band have paid off, with KING PARROT the heaviest band to ever be nominated for an ARIA Award (twice). "We’ve been both times. Our record label bought us tickets to go. It’s a …” Youngy’s voice trails off as he tries to describe it in the most diplomatic way possible. “We were very out of place, let’s put it that way! We didn’t belong there, that’s for sure.”
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Pictured: EP Cover - Turn It Off - CRISISACT
If you passed Matthew Young on the street, you probably wouldn’t give him a second glance. He’s not a big guy, and he’s not terribly imposing. Put him onstage, however, and you will witness something amazing. Energetic and frenzied, he prowls and stalks, glaring at the audience with bug-eyed intensity and bulging veins. His trademark high-pitched screaming sounds like it is stripping away at the lining of his throat. It sounds like it hurts. “When we first started KING PARROT … at that point in time, I was still smoking cigarettes and drinking a lot of booze and carrying on like a dickhead. [Then] I got clean and sober, so I stopped drinking, and I stopped taking drugs, and I stopped smoking cigarettes too … When I was smoking cigarettes, I would go to rehearsal and I would thrash it out, and I could do it, but it just sounded fucking weird, and then I would always lose my voice … When I quit smoking cigarettes, I started doing these vocals, and my voice just went like that when we were at rehearsal. The dudes kind of looked around and were like, “What the fuck is that?” I was like, “I don’t know, man. Let’s just keep doing it.” So we just kept doing it, and the voice just kind of created itself after I quit smoking cigarettes. It wasn’t a strain on me at all. I’ve never really lost my voice doing that vocal style … Doing the CRISISACT stuff as well, I’ve been doing a lot more of the low [vocals], and that seems to work just fine too.”
Young has been clean and sober for almost a decade – which might surprise some people, particularly given the booze and merriment of some of KING PARROT’s live performances. “It was a long time coming, that’s for sure. People say, “Oh, why don’t you drink anymore?” I say, “I was forced into an early retirement – I was that good at it!” Yeah man, I’d had enough of doing drugs and drinking. I got clean and sober when I was thirty. I was an everyday drug and alcohol user for fifteen years, so I’d just had enough, man. My body wasn’t coping. I always pushed it to excesses, and there had been some times in my life where I pushed it way too far … It wasn’t something that I used to share with a lot of people … It just got to a point where I was really sick, man. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, you know?”
Sounds like it was a good time to Turn it Off. With a successful band, an army of fans, industry recognition and four kids (the latest born just two weeks before our interview), sobriety seems to suit him. Cheers to that.
Download
Turn it Off is out on September 17th on Dead Set Records. You can check out our review here.
