BRUTAL TRUTH
Re-Sounds of the Animal Kingdom
By: Interview with Danny Lilker by John Gnesin
It seems that almost every day we hear news that another essential band in the pantheon of extreme metal is reuniting and with this news often follows feelings alternating between intense excitement and trepidation as to the re-formed group’s motivation. No reunion has seemed more inevitable or has been more highly anticipated than that of New York grindcore legends BRUTAL TRUTH, who on the eve of a repackaging of their two studio releases for Relapse, Sounds of the Animal Kingdom and Kill.Trend.Suicide, have played two very well-received comeback shows with much more live action on the way. I had a chance to catch up with bassist Danny Lilker, a legend in underground metal for years, who has performed with NUCLEAR ASSAULT, ANTHRAX, and SOD among others to question him on the means and ends of the reconstituted BRUTAL TRUTH.
Of course, the biggest question at this point is whether this is merely a reunion or an actual comeback. Should we be happy with the chance to catch the band in a live setting again (or for the first time for the younger kids), or should we be salivating for new BRUTAL TRUTH material?
“It would definitely appear that we are a functional band again, although I don’t think Gurn (guitarist) will be able to participate this time due to domestic commitments. However, Jody Roberts from SALT THIS EARTH (and ex-KALBAS and AS THE WORLD BURNS) has proved himself to be a worthy replacement. Also, he lives in Rochester, where I live now, so it will be easier to write music, which I’m sure people are wondering about!”
No kidding, Danny.
The band’s final studio release, Sounds of the Animal Kingdom seemed, in retrospect, to be a premonition of the band’s demise. Building towards the progressive and catchy death-grind of Need to Control, which marked for many the band’s commercial peak, they found themselves not only moving on to Relapse Records following that release, but actually meeting the label half-way, seemingly combining their unstoppable creativity with the more chaotic, unstructured, and almost barbaric sounds that were a trademark of the label’s releases at the time. Sounds... and the Kill.Trend.Suicide mini-album which preceded it represented a primitive regression in the band’s sound, not only shaving the fat from their grindcore stylings, but adding in layers of sludge, post-hardcore and electronic atmosphere; creating songs that were bewildering in it’s sonic anarchism, unrelenting in their assault upon the listener.
Danny describes the evolution of the BRUTAL TRUTH sound as a process that runs opposite to conventional wisdom on the way bands are supposed to develop. Rather than slowly building structures out of chaos, it seems that BRUTAL TRUTH started with very clearly defined musical goals, which were then deconstructed over the course of their career:
“You have to remember that a lot of the older songs on the first record were written by me in my bedroom to amuse myself before the band even formed! I was really enamored with the old grind stuff on Earache and I wanted to emulate it, which we pretty much did on Extreme Conditions... Slowly but surely, we moved past that and found our own identity; and that coincided with wanting to stretch out a bit and not do such cookie-cutter type grind songs. That’s not to put down the bands that inspired me early on of course, but eventually we just started incorporating whatever we wanted to, regardless of whether it was “metal” or not. Having Rich (Hoak, drummer) in the band definitely changed it up a lot ‘cause Scott didn’t smoke weed! So it all got a little more weirded-out after that musically, and by the time we wrote for Kill Trend... we were a much more cohesive unit, having fully integrated Rich, which might account for the more abrupt change you were talking about. And of course as Rich got more familiar with playing grind, he got a lot more fast and crazy!”’
As was clear at the time, these changes split the band’s fan-base in half, between those who preferred the more traditional grind of the group’s first two records and those eager and willing to embrace the head-fuck of the latter two efforts. While the whole of BRUTAL TRUTH’s catalog has had a major impact on listeners, and especially those listeners who went on to form their own musical projects, I was curious as to how Danny felt about hearing his own ideas thrown back at him by a new generation of bands that grew up with
BRUTAL TRUTH.
“Now that you have MySpace, bands will send me messages and comments and when you go to their page, we’re on a lot of band’s “influences” lists,” Lilker reveals, “I’ve certainly had a lot of people in bands come up to me throughout the years telling me what a profound effect we had on their style, and I’m totally flattered by that. As far as what “period” of ours inspired certain bands, I guess you could tell a band like PSYOPUS would’ve been more inspired by Sounds... while one of those brutal Polish death metal bands probably would’ve got more out of our first album, y’know? It’s all good to me, after all, I had my influences, so it’s pretty cool to be an influence to others down the line and keep passing the torch, to get all emo and poetic about it!”
The re-uniting members of BRUTAL TRUTH themselves have never lost their passion for extreme music, even though their newer projects might not yet be the household names featured on Lilker’s resume. “I’ve been playing in a band here in Rochester called CRUCIFIST since Dec’94. It’s got a couple of dudes from the great Rochester doom band ORODRUIN, in fact the band was formed so those guys could play some other styles of metal they dug that wouldn’t fit in a doom band. We do have a little doom in our sound but we are mostly like 80’s black/death when there was no big difference between the two. We’ll soon be mixing our full-length recording and we’re talking to a few labels regarding that. Kevin does VENOMOUS CONCEPT with the NAPALM DEATH guys and Rich has been fully active with TOTAL FUCKING DISTRUCTION pretty much since we broke up in ‘98. They’ve toured around the world and have a shitload of releases out there (Including a new split 7” w/MACHETAZO out now on Relapse!) as well as a new full-length. Jody still plays in SALT THIS EARTH as well as playing with us.”
BRUTAL TRUTH’s Sounds of the Animal Kingdom & Kill.Trend.Suicide have been combined and re-released with extended artwork and liner notes as well as a rare bonus video. The band will be headlining the 2007 Maryland Deathfest on Memorial Day weekend and are in talks for even more touring going forward!
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