(photo by Gene Smirnov)
Got your copy of Decibel‘s June issue yet? This month, we have the opportunity to celebrate Baltimore ball-breakers Noisem and their thrashy death-grind punishment by looking back at their experience so far and tapping into their hunger for whatever comes next. Grab the mag to hear their thoughts about pre-Noisem antics and their pride in their latest beast, Blossoming Decay. And, oh yeah, here’s a stream of the whole new record from Bandcamp, for you to jam while you read. On second thought, don’t do that, unless you want to turn the magazine into ragged, glossy confetti. The energy here is incredible. Don’t miss out. You can purchase Blossoming Decay at A389’s webstore here.
Following the stream, read a few of the band’s thoughts about the album – a Deciblog exclusive, since this part never made it to the magazine.
Disclaimer: A bunch of our interview with Noisem sounded a lot like this:
Sebastian: Yago, what is it like joining your first band and suddenly this shit happens over the course of a couple years?
Yago: Unexpected. Best way to put it. I don’t know what else to say about it.
Tyler: It sucks that you can’t put tone in an interview. Girls would be reading that and be like, ‘Woah, he’s so mysterious.’
Yago: I mean, I always expected it to happen. I was more ready than I realized, and not ready at all.
Tyler: Goddamn! That’s what you need the button for. That’s a fucking mysterious line right there.
Harley: Sebastian, do something about the dog.
Sebastian: No, I think the Double-M is coming by.
Harley: Yeah, I know, but do something about it.
Tyler: Who’s Double-M?
Sebastian: Mail man. Millie doesn’t like mail men.
Sebastian: Millie is the pit bull girl with the inside out vagina. She milks herself. Drinks her own breast milk.
Tyler: It’s fucking disgusting. I’ll sleep over here, and she’ll do it at night, like this far away from your head and…
Harley: You’re trying to sleep and she is just chugging milk out of her own tits.
… Which is awesome, but rather than subjecting you to pages of similar silliness, we thought we’d let them tell you about the way they feel about their new album (streaming above).
Was everything written before recording sessions?
Sebastian: For the most part. Some things were left for the heat of the moment, the kind of spark you can get from when you have to get down to it and write something. Or a lot of it was stuff that you couldn’t really plan out ahead of time, like I didn’t really write any guitar solos this time, I just kinda played, improvised. Just whatever the song needs.
Harley: And there’s a lot of focus on more songwriting than soloing.
With Agony you wrote the solos?
Sebastian: When I would demo them here, in the basement, I would kind of improvise something, just whatever would come to me, and I would listen back to it and change what I didn’t like and keep what I liked. It would change from there a little bit, but usually it was pretty much the same thing all the time. I wanted to have that consistency, just to see if I could do it. I knew I could do something different every time, but I wanted to see if I could do it the same every time.
Sebastian, you were the primary songwriter for Agony? Is that still true of Blossoming?
Sebastian: Yeah, that’s me. For this new one, there was a lot of input from everybody, but still for the most part it was me writing and demoing stuff. Listening to everybody – like, ‘Hey, what do you think I should change?’ We whittled it down to the nine songs that we have on the album. I think at one point I had about fourteen songs ready, but there were a couple that we cut because we didn’t think they were too good. We might try to rework them, or take parts from them…
Harley: But at the same time, we’ve already taken some parts from them to use for the songs that we did use.
Sebastian: Right now it’s just discarded riffs that I’ll probably never use. Maybe I can sell them on eBay or something. Didn’t Metallica try to do that shit?
Was any of it stuff that you worked out on stage?
Sebastian: There was song that, I guess, came to be what it is now from playing it live so much. It was “1132.” I wrote that before we left for the Black Dahlia Murder tour, so we’ve had it for a long time. We started playing it live at some point and it kind of took a different shape after a little while. We were practicing it, changing things. It’s different from the original, but it’s how we play it and what feels comfortable to us to play live. I like that we were able to do that for this one. For Agony, it was kind of the same thing, but it was just songs that we had. Like, “Alright, that’s a song. Cool.” That’s how we treated it. There’s a song, we’re going to play it live now. For this one it was more like, “We have a song, let’s play it live and see what we should change.” Yeah, we let the shows do the work this time.
Did the lyrical approach have any effect on any parts in the music?
Tyler: Not necessarily. Even though the structures of our songs, whether you want to say they’re more primitive or more technical doesn’t really matter. We still stuck to a verse-chorus type thing, and I tried to write to that structure. I was trying to put something more hard-hitting and heavier, rather than the stuff we were writing about on Agony.
Tyler, did you have musical input too?
Tyler: Yeah. Not necessarily with the riffs, but with a lot of the structure and trying different thoughts on drums.
Any songs you had a strong opinion about, musically?
Tyler: Not really. I feel like Sebastian definitely killed it, wrote an album I would like to hear. That made it a lot easier. At least, what we have now. At first there were a few songs I wasn’t that into, but we replaced them. I’m really proud of how this record came out musically. I feel like everybody did a really good job writing it. I don’t see this as a political band, but I still like to take some of my own politics and put them into the lyrics. Try and be more articulate. It’s just more an examination of a lot of the stuff that I see everywhere – again, ‘blossoming decay’ – watching something try to build from what it once was.
What about songs you have a strong opinion about lyrically?
Tyler: Definitely ‘1132’ and ‘Blossoming Decay’ and ‘Cascade’ are the three that I really am proud of, lyrically. Especially ‘1132’ – that song’s pretty much about more personal stuff.
Sebastian: It’s right there, where I don’t think we’ll ever be able to match that rawness, coming from not being pressured before. This is our first with a little bit of pressure.
