…you can find in this long and informative interview. I did it for an American zine called Terminal Diagnosis in November 2010, I think, but I don’t know if it will be published so we decided to publish it here instead. Some of the information in it is of course a bit dated by now, but I decided to keep it the way it was. The man asking the questions is Virgil Sandberg, editor of Terminal Diagnosis. Big thanks to him, I wish all interviews was this serious and in-depth! To lighten up the mood a bit, I throw in some pictures taken by Calle and Påhl during the recording of the split-LP.
Greetings Steffe, how are things in hell? Usurpress is a newer band, so please introduce to the metal world the members of your band, a short bio and any other pertinent information you wish to disclose…
Well, hell has finally frozen over since we no longer can deny that winter has come to our part of Sweden. Stuck with this for another 5-6 month now, I guess.
Yes, Usurpress surely is a new band since we were formed in early May 2010. On the last of April (a big party day here in Uppsala, celebrating the arrival of spring) I went to see the prog band Klotet perform on a lawn. Yeah, a lawn. I like Klotet a lot and I use to go to all their shows and since their guitarist Påhl liked my band, Diskonto, a lot and went to all our shows we kinda knew each other a bit. Anyway, after the gig Påhl approached me and made a rather ironic remark about how wonderful the prog audience was. I had been toying with the idea of starting a more metal sounding band and I asked him if was interested in forming such a band with me. He accepted on the spot.
Then I wanted a drummer with a brutal, non-flashy style to balance out Påhl’s technical ability so I asked Calle whom I’d known for like 15 years but never really hung out with. He had plans about forming a similar band so he also accepted on the spot. The three of us sat down in a pub and started to discuss the sound and style of our new band and talked about music in general. A couple of days later we rehearsed for the first time.
Then I asked my friend Lawrence from thrashers FKÜ if he wanted to play bass and about a month after our meeting at the pub we recorded our 4 song demo. People may think it’s crazy to record a demo after a month but it felt completely natural for us. However, after a while it became quite obvious that Lawrence really didn’t have time for the band so he quit and I asked my old friend Danne to play the bass instead. I believe the change of bass players were for the better, although Danne is total metal, he has an understanding and appreciation of the punk scene. To Lawrence, punk is a four letter word.
Lawrence at his desk job.
What is new with Usurpress? I understand you have been in the studio recently. You are doing a split with a band called Nekros also from Sweden, are they friends of yours?
Yes, after we released the demo (55 copies on CD-R, and later also 100 copies on cassette) we shopped around for a contract. We only sent demos to labels we really liked ourselves and didn’t really care if they had a metal or punk approach. Nekros had recorded material for a 12” EP that Throne Records from Spain was about to release but when Throne got our demo they asked us and Nekros if we wanted to a split-LP instead. We thought it sounded like a good idea since it’s a bit too early for us to do a full LP and I believe Nekros thought the same. We have recorded our side now (Oct-Nov) and it will be out in early 2011, I think. Our side consists of 7 songs (6 new and 1 re-recorded song from the demo) and a short instrumental tune. Throne will also release the demo on 7” EP at the same time. Nekros consists of two guys who are quite well known in the scene, I would say. I know one of them fairly well but the other guy I have only met once and I doubt that he remembers that. I think we are a suitable combination for a split, both bands are new and playing old school-stuff without regressing to retro crap. We sound quite dissimilar, though.
It seems that you combined two well known genres dominated by Swedes, old school death metal and d-beat. What are some of your favorite bands from each genre (but only bands from Sweden)? Do you think one could say early Swedish death metal was often d-beat with interesting hooks and breakdowns thrown in?
We want to play an older style of death metal, focusing on real songs, and we are strongly influenced by crust core (“käng” as we Swedes call it). Our riffs and vocals are metal, if you ask me, but our drums are more in the punk style since we have no blast beats or double bass drums. Also our song structures are quite rock/punk as we focus on the “verse-chorus-verse-chorus”-thing, our songs are quite short (around 3 minutes) and we seldom have guitar solos. That’s the death metal we feel comfortable with.
Well, a lot of old death bands (Master, Obituary, Autopsy and so forth) played d-beat, but often a more metalized/bastardized d-beat. We play total Discharge (Why 12”-era) d-beat exclusively. My favorite old Swedish käng-bands are Mob 47, Anti-Cimex, Skitslickers, Avskum, Bombanfall, Asocial etc, the usual stuff that everybody likes. I love these bands. I know Danne will probably punch me in the face if/when he reads this but none of my favorite old death bands are from Sweden… Of course I like a lot of that Swedish ’88-’91 stuff but I actually prefer bands/records like Terrorizer, 1:st Obituary, two first Paradise Lost, early Bolt Thrower, Autopsy, 1:st Morbid Angel, two first Death and the list goes on. Apart from brutal crust and old death metal I’d say our greatest inspiration is bands like Celtic Frost, Voïvod, Sodom etc. And also a little bit of ’70-ties prog.
I totally agree with your description of early (Swedish) death metal and I would like to think that Usurpress sounds pretty much like that description.
Old death metal rule!
Not much is published about your band, you don’t even have a metal-archives page. Are the members of Usurpress in other bands? Are you young metalheads or old lifers? Not that it matters that much, just curious.
Hahaha! We submitted material to Metal Archives but got rejected because we were “too much crust”. The songs on the split is actually more metal-sounding so we have to make another try when it’s out. It is our life long dream to have our own page on Metal Archives…
As I mentioned earlier, Påhl is in the instrumental prog band Klotet. He’s also in an experimental pop/rock-band called Villebråd where he plays guitar and sings. He has played a variety of music before, death/black, punk, general weirdness, etc.
Calle used to play in a crust band called Discontrol in the ’90-ties and after that he played in a rock band called Durakov that for some reason was quite popular locally. He also plays in a primitive/barbarian crust band called Stäket 1517.
I have played in crust/fastcore-band Diskonto since 1993 but we have disbanded now. We have released quite a few records and also toured quite a bit, among other things we have made 3 US-tours. We will release our last recording in 2011 and then it’s over. For now. I have also done a 3-year spell in Uncurbed and released some records with various punk and metal bands apart from that. My first real band was called Embalmed and we actually sounded similar to Usurpress, that was back in 1989.
Danne used to play with me in Diskonto between 1996-2001 and he has also played in Dellamorte, Insision, etc. Now he’s in Tyrant (but they are on hiatus now) and Iron Lamb but he’s probably most known for his book Swedish Death Metal.
Uh! We are old as fuck, me and Danne are born in 1972 and Calle in 1973. Påhl is born in 1981, and there is a bit of difference in our approach to “extreme” music because of that. When we were kids we thought Judas Priest, Rainbow and Sham 69 were fuckin’ heavy but when he was in same age he was listening to Carcass and shit. He has a hard time understanding why we think, say, Holy Diver is a great album.
Who came up with the term “D-beat deathcrust”?
It was Calle. He didn’t thought we were “death metal” but we’re obviously not “crust core” either. We must be “death crust”. I think he just tagged on “d-beat” because it sounded cool. Our new songs have more “traditional” metal 2-beat, but we still rely heavy on d-beat so I think it’s Ok. He has also made our rather silly, but good looking, UADC-symbol (“Uppsala Death Crust”) with two scythes and a bullet belt. People can call us whatever they like though.
D-beat deathcrust in the making.
Your songs often have a bit more than the simple d-beat chugging of many dis-bands. Do you return to this sound as a means of brutality or a nod to your inner punk?
I’d say both, actually. We like to mix the bestiality of (true) death metal and the undying hate of (true) punk. What can I say? It’s just our style, man. If the metal people think we’re too punk and the punx think we’re too metal then we just have to live with it. But nowadays many people can appreciate both styles, which I, Calle and Danne have done all our lives, and that is great! The scenes have so much to learn from each other, I think. I don’t mind playing straight punk gigs with Usurpress. However, as people, I don’t really know where we belong; we are not pretentious enough to be metal heads and not self-righteous enough to be punks… Just kidding. Or am I?
Explain the lyrical topics and aim of Usurpress. Do you consider yourselves more on the political or horrific end musically and lyrically? Can horror and evil be used as allegory for political opinions in metal? It worked beautifully for George A. Romero in Dawn of the Dead….
We are not an outspoken political band but each individual lyric deal with a specific topic. They are all reflections around a subject, i.e. they have a meaning and not just a bunch of words that look cool and happen to rhyme. Having said that, I can understand that it might not be easy to understand what the lyrics are about and that they might make no sense to people. I have written lyrics about political/social issues for almost two decades now and I am continuing to do so, the difference now is that I don’t really want to let the lyrics speak for themselves anymore. I can even go so far as saying that I don’t really care if people don’t understand what the hell they are about. The classic anarchopunk zine Profane Existence wrote that the lyrics of our demo was attacking religion, they wrote: “The lyrics are very well written, going above and beyond the typical and repetitive condemnations of the church.” None of the lyrics of the demo was about religion. I’m not saying that they have misunderstood the lyrics, but they made a different interpretation of them, and their interpretation works for me as well. In my opinion, the important thing to do when you want to interpret a short piece of literature, like a lyric or a poem, is to pinpoint which lines that are the key. Once you have found them it’s usually easier to start unravel the rest of the text. Apparently, they found other keys than I did, which is more than ok with me.
Ok, that was the answer to the first part of your question, the answer to the second part is: Yes, I believe you can. I am doing it. If I’m doing a good job is not for me to answer. The thing you have to be aware of is, how many will understand your allegory? Is it important for you as a writer that many people understand it? How many? 1 out of 3? 1 out of 20? 1 out of 1000? If no-one, absolutely no-one, understands your allegory, is it still an allegory or is it just you claiming that “this lyric has a deeper meaning, I am smart”? Also, I don’t believe in trying to hard to find hidden meanings/messages/themes in lyrics that obviously are not there. If someone, after having studied “Chapel of Ghouls” (by Morbid Angel) came up with the hypothesis that the song is actually about the foreclosure of a farm in North Dakota, I would strongly disagree. Sometimes things are what they are. Sometimes there are no layers. Sometimes people just want to write songs about chapels full of fuckin’ ghouls.
Misinterpreting one of Danne’s jokes about The Book of Habakkuk.
Should metal be a thinking man’s genre or a hedonistic escape from the toils of the world? Is it a celebration of misfortunes or a dire warning? How about punk? Crust and metal often have similar imagery but different opinions about the significance of said imagery. An example is the continued use of nuclear war, mushroom clouds, apocalyptic scenes, etc. Are we longing to celebrate the death of our species or bringing an awareness of impending doom? What use is it?
Can’t it be both? Preferably at the same time. Perhaps the really thinking man is the one who is trying to escape the toils of the world using hedonism as a weapon. No, seriously, intelligence is of course always appreciated in all aspects of life, metal included. The question is; how do you measure the intelligence of a band? In most cases we can only do that by reading the band’s lyrics and interview answers and that is a very blunt instrument in my opinion. I have always admired the lyrics of Martin Walkyier (Sabbat (UK)/Skyclad). I find them intelligent, thought provoking and extremely well written. He must be an intelligent person. Then look at another band with the same name, Sabbat (Japan), read their lyrics and compare them to the English Sabbat. Do we have one intelligent band and one stupid band? Of course not, what we have is one band with a very talented lyricist who has total control of his mother tongue and one band that suck at expressing themselves in a foreign language.
Our perception of an intelligent person is far too often someone that expresses our own ideas and beliefs in a more articulate way than we are capable of ourselves. “Intelligence” is hence often boiled down to language skills. When it comes to the English language, I have the vocabulary and grammar skills of an average American 11-year old so its not farfetched that your readers assume that I also have the intelligence of an 11-year old. On a closing note about intelligent bands, I tend to look for honesty and integrity in a band rather than something else.
“Is it a celebration of misfortunes or a dire warning?” All of a sudden I feel like ol’ Gezol here… “Sorry, don’t understand question.” Questions like these ones are very hard to answer since I have very little (if any) insight in what other bands feel about these topics and the answer can therefore only be a speculation from my side based on my opinions, but since you’re interviewing Usurpress I guess our opinions matters in this case. Very well, Usurpress does not celebrate misfortune in any way, suicide-BM might, but we’re pretty far from that genre. Misfortune sucks. Oppression sucks. Injustice sucks. We are clearly on the side of the downtrodden; we do not celebrate war and “evil”. In our lyrics the protagonist who’s telling the story (if there is such a character, the storyteller might also be an outside observer) is often on the side of evil, the oppressing side, but that is just a way to make the lyric more interesting and powerful.
As I mentioned earlier, we are not an outspoken political band but we do have common ideas of belief and we might use traditional metal and/or punk imagery as a way to enhance our message. The same symbol can be used by two bands with totally opposed views on the world, the symbol itself is determined by its surroundings, so to speak. People have always been fascinated by symmetric symbols, the cross, the pentagram, the swastika and even the circled A are all very powerful to the naked eye. We [mankind] want to use them, we want to fill them with ourselves. Digressing like a maniac. Whiplash.
Hedonistic escape from the toils of the world.
Do taboo “evil and satanic” topics still have the power to frighten people or is our age so secular that it doesn’t matter anymore? Sweden is one of the most un-religious nations in the world, and yet there are probably thousands of black and death metal bands in Sweden who seem to legitimately worship the horned one.
Perhaps not, I guess ordinary people are more scared of, or confused by, bands that uses nazi lyrics or extremely misogynic lyrics, like the porno/goregrind-bands do. I know I am. Still, I doubt that bands use satanic lyrics/aesthetics mainly to frighten people. I think it has become so common within the metal scene that bands don’t even reflect upon it any more. It’s been diluted for sure, but I don’t really care. What happened to you, Satan? You used to be cool.
Sweden is in fact one of the most religious countries in the world, you just have to be Swedish to understand that. We worship the sun and the summer feverishly. We have never been a Christian country, we are a country of sun worshippers.
Satanic (or at least “satanic”) bands are quite common in Sweden, yes. It makes sense if you look back in history, Bathory was the first Swedish (real) metal band that caught any attention from an international audience and many of my countrymen are very proud of Bathory. Then we have Watain (from our home town Uppsala) which is huge at the moment so a lot of people think that satanic stuff is the way to go if you want to get attention. I sincerely doubt that Ghost would have had the same impact on people if they had written songs about motorbikes and beer.
Satanic imagery in the studio.
Tell me about the name Usurpress. Did you want to use the name Usurper but couldn’t because of the semi-popular Chicago band? Is the Usurpress a character of some sort?
“Hey, let’s call our band Queen Crimson!” No, I saw the word by accident and checked it up a bit and according to some linguists the word was so rarely used that it was not to be considered a “proper” word and that the masculine term “usurper” should be used on both males and females who usurps something. That made me wonder a bit; was that behavior so unfeminine that there was really no need for a certain word for it? I found that trail of thought rather interesting. Is it possible to alter our perception of what men/women/mankind “should” be like by adding or take away words in our language? As you can see, my spell checker doesn’t like the word; it would like me to use the masculine form. Anyway, we kinda liked the name so we used it and I think we’re only band with that name. At least I hope so. The name will probably make more sense after your next presidential election. Hi Sarah, what’s up?
Also, while we’re on the subject of linguistics, I must add that I really enjoyed the word “semi-popular”. Wonderfully derogatory. That band is quite ok, though.
Påhl playing a semi-popular guitar.
Close here with any announcements or thoughts about the current situation of the world. How fucked are we as humans? Also, feel free to leave any contact information so people can send you love letters or death threats (and naked photos)…
That’s a pretty tall order… Anyway, I can’t really say that I am that worried about the survival of the human race. I am much more concerned about the survival of all other races/species. In a near future, all that will be left are humans, domesticated animals and rats. Other mammals, fish, birds reptiles don’t stand a chance. Not so cool.
On a lighter note, thanks for this interesting interview and if anyone wants to get in touch with us, write us: usurpress666@yahoo.com. However, I see little point in giving away a lot of stuff for free so please keep your begging to a minimum. Loves letters are welcomed, death threats by mail seems a little 1994, but go ahead. I don’t want naked photos, please put some underwear on your photos at least. I don’t mind if the people on the actual photos are naked though. I’m from Sweden. Take care and support paper zines!
