03.07 Machine Head: The Blackening

Lead Guitarist Phil Demmel Shares How the Killer New Album Took Shape
By Andrew T. Jones.

Machine Head has been a hard-hitting metal band since its inception in the early nineties, but along the way they’ve been through a lot of changes. The band has almost fifteen years of experience, and while most bands tend to fall into the same formula after years of writing together, Machine Head has ironically drawn their biggest fan base from deciding to just do whatever they want to. Since their last album, The Ashes of Empires, which is the first album they written with no drive to make a “big hit single.” Machine Head has honed their sound to what has really made them stand out. And their newest album, The Blackening, no doubt will prove to be the album that brings to fruition what they started on Ashes. Not many bands (especially fast metal) can keep your ears guessing and your interest piqued through nine-plus minute songs. That takes major talent. Every song is enthralling, diverse, and far beyond what you would expect from any national act metal band. But to really get an idea of what this band has done, and how far they’ve come to achieve a masterpiece like The Blackening, I had to get the full story from the guys themselves. So I spoke with lead guitarist Phil Demmel to find out what has brought Machine Head to where they are now and what makes The Blackening such a powerhouse album.

Pulse: Now where most fast technical metal bands are notorious for really short songs, how did you guys start getting into the nine minute plus epic kind of stuff you’ve got going on?

Phil Demmel: Well, it just came from writing good stuff. We didn’t want to lose any of it. As we were writing, it just seemed like we were feeding the song what it needed. I mean if it needed to be shorter then we shortened it, but the parts we came up with, they all fit in. If you listen to the songs, and of course I’m biased, but they don’t drone on.

P: Yeah, when I saw there were only eight songs I thought at first, “Is this an EP?” Then I was like, “Oh, okay.” Now, you’ve spoken of wiping the slate clean with the last album The Ashes of Empires. Is that true of The Blackening as well?

PD: I think that we’ve kinda continued the formula that we used on Ashes, just from the point of writing for ourselves. I mean 75% of that album was written before I joined the band, and it’s kinda taken the role of, “Hey, let’s not try to write singles or try to write for labels, let’s just kick out like we did before.” And I think that formula’s the same, but material-wise we’ve really pushed ourselves. I think that Ashes was not really watered-down, but kinda dumbed-down a little bit, where as on this one we’ve thrown in some really, really hard riffs to play for us, you know?

P: Do you think that what’s been going on socio- politically in recent years has inspired the aggression of the music on The Blackening and not just the lyrical content?

PD: Um, no I don’t think so. I don’t think from a musical standpoint that’s the case. I think that it just comes from us. We’ve been telling each other since touring for Ashes that we knew this was going to be the best Machine Head album. Because of the line-up and the current mood of the band, we knew that this was gonna be THE one. So I think it just comes from the hunger caused by, especially here in the States, not getting the respect from a lot of promoters and a lot of the media to where we get lumped in as, “Oh yeah, you guys are Bay Area thrash like Testament and Exodus and blah blah,”, but people don’t realize that when Burn My Eyes came out in ’94, that was like Far Beyond Driven [Pantera, and RIP DBD], so when you put it in that perspective I think and refer to The Blackening as the second album. You know since Ashes [we’re] a new band. There won’t be another Burn My Eyes. I like what we’re doing now.

P: What would you tell your die-hard fans to expect from this album?

PD: It’s brutally melodic. It’s unrelenting.