Media Without Drama… Unless we’re trying to get bands to FIGHT!

Written by: Tom Wilson – Sense Music Media |Tuesday 04 January 2021

“[FRENZAL RHOMB] are the one band you don’t want to take on in a fight.”

Can you feel it? It’s getting closer. The snarling beast that is FULL TILT is about to rumble to life in Brisbane before trekking across the country, battering eardrums with a lineup of supreme Australian talent, so it seemed fitting that my interview with Sydney deathcore titans THY ART IS MURDER is set against the backdrop of a thunderstorm. As the Brisbane rain hammered down outside, guitarist Andy Marsh fired up the vape and talked three degrees of SLAYER, and why he doesn’t want FRENZAL RHOMB to turn him into a Human Target.

Pictured: *Lindsay McDougall + Jason Whalley -* FRENZAL RHOMB
Photo by: *Jimmy Wah -* ***Sense Music Media***

The Interview

All in all, this has been a pretty mature and grown-up interview, but that’s not going to get us clicks, so I’ll ask – out of the FULL TILT lineup, who could THY ART IS MURDER take on in a fight? I reckon you’ve got a shot with FRENZAL RHOMB.

Nah … They’ve been hanging out at punk squats for thirty years – those guys would absolutely murder us. That’s the one band you don’t want to fight, is FRENZAL. A hundred percent.

You reckon Jay and Lindsay could throw down?

Jay and Lindsay? I’d love to witness it, but I wouldn’t want to be involved. Those guys would probably be psychos. I’d get smashed over the back of the head with an SG. I don’t know what bands that we could fight. Everyone in THY ART is about 6’3”, and 100kgs, and our bass player … he bench presses, I don’t know, two hundred or something kilos, so I wouldn’t want to get into a fight with him. We’d just put him at the front and go, “Alright, come on, we’ll beat you all, let’s go.” He’s an animal! Have you seen him, man? I think on his three lifts he does over a ton. He’s a psycho! He’s one of the strongest people you’ll ever see … it’s actually mental. So no, you don’t want to fight THY ART IS MURDER. And our [other] guitar player is an Irish boxer! [Laughs] He’s a psycho too! So me and C.J. will just be sitting on the sidelines watching it all go down. It’ll be great.

What’s it going to be like to sink your teeth back into Human Target?

[Laughs] I don’t know! We’ll see what challenges lie in wait for us next week at rehearsals. Mostly, we’re just excited to play a show … This has been our jobs now for about a decade, touring and playing shows and whatnot, but even when we were younger and playing in local bands and doing this and that, we’ve never had two years in between shows. We did one show in June, I think, on the Sunshine Coast, and that’s been more than six months ago. I’ve never had a break longer than six months! In the last decade, I wouldn’t have had a break longer than maybe six weeks, so it’s going to be interesting to exercise that muscle of “let’s do rehearsals”, “let’s make sure we know how to play our instruments”, “let’s make sure that we know how to even headbang in time!” [Laughs]

I am absolutely loving your guitar tone … It’s crushing.

Yeah, well, we spent a lot of time making those. [Laughs] So I’m glad someone likes it! We used a lot of real amps, if you care about the nerdy stuff … It’s really important that it’s aggressive and articulate for the riffs, but also heavy. I listen to a lot of tech-death bands, and their guitar tone is great for the riffs, but when it’s time to be heavy, it’s not very, very heavy … And in some bands, it’s really heavy, but it’s not going to work for real fast, intricate kind of stuff. That’s always a challenge for us. We’ve got a great producer, Will Putney, who spends a lot of time with me helping get the sound out of our heads that we want the record to be. But yeah, I’m glad you liked it! [Laughs]

In terms of that important distinction of guitar tone in technical death, that’s one thing I really like about latter day DECAPITATED, like Blood Mantra and albums like that. The first track I ever heard of that was Instinct, and I was like, “What is this?”

Vogg [Wacław Kiełtyka] has got the right hand from hell … I don’t want to limit him by saying he’s the best rhythm guitar player in metal ever, because he is an insanely well-rounded lead guitar player. He went to like the [Academy of Music] in Poland for Accordion or something, he was telling me. We’ve toured with him – he’s a good friend of mine – but yeah, that dude’s a psycho. He could play any guitar amp and it would sound like him.

You guys once toured with the mighty SLAYER. What was that experience like?

I dunno, we were doing a touring festival with them called Mayhem Festival, about six or seven years ago. It’s like the Warped Tour but for heavier bands … So, you know, [at] big festivals, you don’t really hang out with a lot of people. You see the people who play before you and after you every day on that stage, and that’s kind of it, so we were just hanging out with WHITECHAPEL and SWORN IN – this band that isn’t around anymore – most days, and SLAYER would play on their stage. I don’t know what they do really – drink Jägermeister and be old people. [Laughs] Kerry King is married to my mum’s cousin or some weird thing. I told the label, because we’re on the same label. I said, “I just want to meet him, and see if he’s a cool guy.” And he was like, “Nah, I don’t want to meet this dude.” So I was like, “Ah, nuts!” I started punishing him, like, “Uncle Kerry! Let’s hang out!” He’s like nup – didn’t want a bar of it! Three degrees of separation or whatever.

Ouch! That’s brutal!

I was like, “That’s cool, man. You’re way too cool for us, I get it.”

Oh dear. No matter how good the rest of the interview is, you know that’s the little quote that’s going to be sticking out. [Laughs]

Oh man, the folks at Nuclear Blast were all about it. They were like, “Yeah, sick! Metal’s in the family!” I’m like, “We’re not related, at all.” It’s my mum’s second cousin or something is married to the guy, you know? But whatever. They wanted to try and make a story out of it. [Laughs]

What drew me to you guys, other than the riffs, was this absolutely sensational video I saw taken at a festival a few years ago of your singer orchestrating a wall of death while ripping his shirt open and doing a Michael Jackson impression … Of all the amazing tours and stuff that you’ve seen, particularly in Europe and whatnot, what are some of the craziest things that you’ve seen in the crowd, or seen at festivals?

There’s honestly way too many to even think of. They’re generally things that we’ve done because we’re so fucking stupid, or drunk, or just tired from touring. We played a massive festival once, and I had been at an after party of a festival the night before that we played, and drank a lot of booze … I didn’t want to play. I was like, “I’m dead. I can’t.” Sean [Delander] was pushing me on these road cases with wheels to the stage, like, “You’re going to do it! You’re gonna be fine!” I just walked out there on stage, and they have cameras and big screens on either side of the stage. The camera zooms in on me, and I’m just vomiting off the front of the stage. [Laughs] CJ has obviously got a highlight reel of crazy stuff that he’s done – the Michael Jackson thing, and one time he lit a bible on stage, which people thought was planned, but someone just threw a bible at him! [Laughs] He pulled the lighter out of his pocket, and was like, “Oh well, I guess I’ll just put this on fire” … We played a festival at a farm in Austria about ten years ago to, like, thirty people, and they were all on the floor rowing. Germans are weird, man. We’ve seen it all at this point, I think.

Some quality battle vests too, I’m sure.

Oh yeah … ultimate European metal lords, double-fisting beers, crazy patch jackets … just disgusting metalheads. [Laughs] Like, they haven’t even left the festival from last year. They’ve just been living there in a tent.

They’ve got an ever-increasing bracelet full of [concert] wristbands!

[Laughs] You see them, man! You do! I’m like, “You’ve got more of those than I’ve got upstairs in my little box where I keep them all, all on your arm! Have you showered in the last twenty years?” But I will say, one great thing about the Euros is that it’s not generationally segregated. People from all walks of life attend those festivals … Over there, you see a lot of sixty-year-old people – and maybe older, I don’t know – hanging out with young people, drinking beers and watching music. It’s sick. I wish it was a little bit more like that down here. We’ll see!

Following the New Year’s Eve KNIGHT & DAY Festival in 2021,
THY ART IS MURDER will play FULL TILT in 2022!