Ben Falgoust - vocals Sammy Duet - guitars, vocals Pat Bruders - bass Zak Nolan - drums
Forgoing their Scandinavian brothers in arms' fascination with orchestration, gothic drama and vampiric twaddle, Goatwhore's incendiary, hateful Bayou black metal instead celebrates such evil pioneers as Venom and Bathory, with a bit of Florida death metal thrown in for good measure.
Fueled by Ben (Soilent Green) Falgoust's hellish wailing, Sammy (ex-Acid Bath, Crowbar) Duet and Ben Stout's flesh-peeling riffage and Zak Nolan's unrelenting drum battery, Goatwhore's Rotten Records debut, Eclipse of the Ages Into Black, is a gleefully demonic exhibition of raw ferocity. The only respite comes from the chunky, Celtic Frost-ish "Invert The Virgin," "Gravedom" and "Commanding the Legions of Hell," complete with some Tom Warrior-signature death grunts.
"It's not a good black metal album unless you've got a couple good 'Ooh's!' in there," opines Duet. "But I like really raw, attacking black metal, stuff that doesn't fall into this whole pretty fuckin' Highlander, ride your horse with a sword, vampire black metal. Just evil sounding shit.
"I always wanted to do stuff like this in Acid Bath, make it more fast and heavy. Finally I have band that is just straight up evil music."
Eclipse delivers evil sounding shit by the truckload, be it the openly satanic "Perversions of the Ancient Goat," "Commanding The Legions of Hell" and, of course, "Satanic Millennium," or darker, more abstract fare like "Desolate Path to Apocalyptic Ruin," "The Beauty of Suffering" or "As The "Reflection Slowly Fades."
"I'm not either about God or Satan," offers Falgoust, who shares lyric-writing duties with Duet. "I'm into dark literature, Marquis de Sade stuff, Vlad the Impaler, occult books. I'm really leery about the whole religious sense and the whole evil sense."
The satanic material is Duet's doing. "It's something I've believed in for a long time," he said. "I've always been drawn to it. When I was a kid you could almost say I had a skull fetish. Halloween would come around and I'd have to have every skull in the store. It was weird.
"When I was like 14, I was into Iron Maiden and I was always looking for the more evil bands. I went to the record store and saw 'Welcome To Hell' by Venom on vinyl with the big pentagram on the cover and that's what got me into the whole thing. From there on it destroyed my life."
Goatwhore's history traces back seven years, to Duet and Nolan's black metal jam sessions between Duet's Acid Bath commitments. With Duet handling guitar, bass and vocal duties, the pair got some songs together and made some four-track demos. Acid Bath fell apart in 1997, allowing Duet to dedicate more time to Goatwhore, which became an actual band when Stout and bassist Pat Bruders were recruited.
A drunken strip joint insult provided the band its name. "Me and a couple friends were checking the chicks out and drinking, having a good time," Duet recalls. "And this chick came out and her face was all weird looking, and she was doing her thing and wanted a dollar and my friend, he's a really rude type of guy, just screams, 'Get the hell away from me you Goatwhore.' And I thought, 'well, that's the name of the band.' "
Goatwhore played around the Southeast as a four-piece until a drunken brawl left Duet with a broken jaw and unable to sing. Enter Falgoust. "Sammy had his jaw wired shut and Goatwhore had a bunch of shows scheduled so I offered to assist," Falgoust said. "I liked the stuff they were doing, so I filled in and after his jaw healed up we talked about it and just left it as it was."
Despite their responsibilities with Crowbar and Soilent Green, respectively, Duet and Falgoust (who also works as a chef and occasionally supplies tour transportation for bands with his van and trailer) are committed to Goatwhore and intent on taking the band as far as it will go.
"I've always taken this project very seriously," said Duet. "This is definitely not a hobby or a side project, this is a very serious band. And we want to be known as a band, and not as Ben Falgoust from Soilent Green's side band or Sammy Duet from Crowbar and Acid Bath's band. I'm totally against that, we all are."
Goatwhore, who have opened for the likes of Napalm Death, Obituary and Ancient as well as headlining their own animal carcass-littered, blood-splattered shows, hope to tour this summer. From there, Duet notes, "Hopefully we'll just keep doing what we're doing, just making more evil music and getting more experimental, not in a bad way, not incorporating all this false stuff, just making it rawer and weirder and darker."
