Trust me, you don’t want to see what they did to the three billy-goats gruff — loveable black-metal maniacs Goatwhore
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“I can’t wait to get back into Canada, especially the western portion. The people there are always just ready to go nuts.” Goatwhore vocalist Ben Falgoust can barely contain his enthusiasm for the band’s forthcoming Canadian tour in support of their latest Metal Blade release, A Haunting Curse. While such statements are about as original as the inevitable “Nobody rocks like (insert city name here)” concert banter, Falgoust’s sincerity is unmistakable.
“I think we’re so well received because we have the knack to work hard,” he continues. “Hell, we’re coming up to Canada at a time when most bands wouldn’t consider it. We have so many friends that have almost died trying to tour your country at this time of year, but fuck it. We’re getting out the snow chains. We’re willing to get out there and keep shoving our music down people’s throats.”
Falgoust’s genuine excitement doesn’t fit the typical black metal attitude of desolation and morbid moroseness. Where many of Goatwhore’s colleagues wallow in corpse paint and satanic imagery, these Thibodaux, Louisiana natives — while still revelling in the severity and furious nature of their music — are more concerned with embracing fan fervour. Falgoust says that while Goatwhore (completed by guitarist Sammy Duet, bassist Nathan Bergeron and drummer Zack Simmons) channel the same demons into their blasts of inhuman speed, otherworldly grunts and hyperactive speed-riffing as contemporary black metal outfits, their penchant for diverse influences is what sets them apart from black metal’s archetypal hollowness and refusal to stray from a straight-up metal drive.
“When people ask about how deeply we’re into black metal, I have to say there’s more to us than that,” he declares. “Everyone puts us in this black metal category, but I think Goatwhore has more elements. Black metal is a great influence on us, back to the days of Venom and Celtic Frost, but we do have punk and cross-core edges like Discharge and Doom in our sound. We’ve got variations [on] grindcore, death and thrash metal. All these little pieces mould into Goatwhore’s version of black metal.”
Thanks to the band’s multiplicity of stimuli, the end result on A Haunting Curse is an effort that refuses to compromise itself by sticking to one specific category, while still retaining strong black-metal roots. Incorporating guttural punk rock drive with metal’s inherent low-end rumble and an overall brashness that Falgoust describes as “definitely Motorhead,” the band appeals to a vast array of extreme music fans. When seeing the likes of crusty punks mingling with thrashers and death-metal goons at shows, Falgoust feels the band’s modest genre-hopping is more than justified.
“We do have that old hardcore edge,” he says. “We want that, and it’s cool when you see the variation of people coming out. We’d hate to paint ourselves into one corner. It’s just that sometimes people stick you in this slot and you don’t have room to expand. I understand, because when I was younger, I had a one-track mind too, where I was like, ‘Fuck everything else.’ You get in that zone where you love one thing and [think] everything else will ruin your life. The social standards of what your friends think have you worrying they’ll think you’re an idiot. Eventually though, the only thing you wanna say ‘fuck that’ to, is being close-minded.”
