Thanks to a history of monster lineups, Soundwave has become a globally revered event. By virtue of this, playing at the festival is a feat that sits well on any artist’s CV. But there are not many bands that can say their first-ever gig was at Soundwave. Then again, there aren’t many bands that boast as much star power as Killer Be Killed.
Evolving from a collaborative experiment between Dillinger Escape Plan vocalist Greg Puciato and thrash legend Max Cavalera (Soulfly, ex-Sepultura), by the time they knuckled down to make last year’s self-titled LP, the band’s lineup had grown to include Mastodon bassist Troy Sanders and The Mars Volta/Antemasque drummer Dave Elitch. These guys are no strangers to our shores, and according to Puciato, it makes perfect sense that their live debut will be at Soundwave.
“Troy and I were there last year in separate bands,” he says. “The very last day of the festival we were in Perth, standing outside of our hotel getting ready to leave, and he was like, ‘Well Greg, maybe I’ll see you next year here. Maybe we’ll play together.’ It was said in a way like, ‘There’s no way in fucking hell we’re ever going to find time to play.’ That was last March and we had already looked ahead up until September and couldn’t even find a couple of weeks to play.”
This might read as exaggerated banter, but a closer look reveals just how busy the band’s four members are. For starters, Mastodon are in the midst of an unprecedented global boom, while Dillinger have only just wrapped up the touring campaign behind 2013’s One Of Us Is The Killer. Elitch won’t actually join Killer Be Killed at Soundwave, due to his commitments with Antemasque, who are also on the bill. Then there’s Cavalera: now in his mid-40s, the Arizona-based Brazilian hard rock guru currently fronts both Soulfly and Cavalera Conspiracy.
Verily, it’s a miracle that the group’s debut album came together at all. “One of the first times we got together, we had written a bunch of stuff that I thought was really cool,” Puciato says. “Once you realise that it’s working, then it’s like, ‘Oh shit, we have to do this!’ Then it becomes more frustrating than anything, because you know it might take another year and a half to get to the point where you can record the record, because you’re only able to get together for a week at a time every three or four months.”
The restrictions on the band’s working hours aren’t reflected in the recorded output. Sure, Killer Be Killed contains frequent outbreaks of breakneck thrash and hardcore, but it doesn’t sound borne of a hurried recording procedure. Oddly enough, Puciato prefers working against the clock.
“A lot of the creative process is kind of winging it a bit and not overthinking,” he says. “You can’t overthink too much when you have such a strict deadline. The more time you give me, the more I’ll overthink my ideas. There’s something to be said for short bursts of creativity.
“When we would get together we would know that we only have four or five days, so we would just work from noon to midnight for those days and bring everything that we had to the table.”
Enacting a creatively successful partnership is more complicated than simply throwing together a bunch of musicians. No matter the level of individual merit, there’s no guarantee they’ll establish a harmonious bond. Aside from Puciato’s contribution to Soulfly’s ‘Rise Of The Fallen’ (from 2010’s Omen), the foursome hadn’t previously collaborated. But as the record shows, this wasn’t an issue.
“There was something really cool about knowing that the whole band was completely open-ended,” Puciato says. “I’ve known Troy for 12 years but I had no idea what writing with Troy was like. You think of Mastodon and you think of riffs and crazy drumming and three people singing, but I never really knew that Troy is actually an amazing bass player. He’s really good.”
The same goes for Cavalera. “You can tell that he’s been the main guy for a long time in his band, because if you walk out of the room for 20 minutes, Max will write the whole damn record,” says Puciato. “It’s incredible how much creative energy he still has. He just does not stop writing. We nicknamed him the riff-pisser because he just pisses out riffs like there’s nothing to it.”
As well as being a powerful force throughout the record, Cavalera’s abundant creative energy gave Puciato a positive look at what the future might hold. “A lot of people do their best work when they’re young,” he says, “and then there’s other people, like Nick Cave, who keep doing good stuff until they’re really old. You have to keep yourself creatively minded. You can’t start to think too much as a careerist, because then you start operating defensively. You have to do what you’re going to do and try to live as a 15-year-old and be excited about music and writing.
“Max is still exactly that person. Writing with Max felt the way writing did when I was 15, writing music with my friend in his parents’ basement and we were just trying to write thrash songs. He’s somehow preserved that vitality that so many people lose.”
Catch Killer Be Killed atSoundwave Festival 2015alongsideFaith No More, The Smashing Pumpkins, Incubus, Slipknot, Fall Out Boy and many more atSydney Olympic ParkfromSaturday February 28 to Sunday March 1. Also supporting Lamb Of God at the Metro Theatre on Thursday February 26, tickets online.Killer Be Killed out now through Nuclear Blast/Universal.
