DEATH ANGEL Guitarist Explains New Album Title

Metal Covenant recently conducted an interview with guitarist Rob Cavestany of San Francisco Bay Area metallers DEATH ANGEL. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metal Covenant: For me the [new DEATH ANGEL] album ["The Dream Calls For Blood"] is a typical DEATH ANGEL album. So what did you do to minimize repeats from your last album, "Relentless Retribution"?

Rob: I think we just had to only live the life that we lived since "Relentless Retribution" and that was enough to generate a different emotion and inspiration. We were on tour for three years straight. That alone, if anyone can imagine what that will do to you psychologically, being on tour for that long. You immediately think of what a blast, what a big party it's been and, "You guys must be having a great time." Which is true — it's not like we're fucking not having a great time. We love music and we love being on tour and playing in front of crowds and being surrounded by our other friends who are great musicians and great bands. But also there's the other 22 hours of the day that you have to exist when you're not on the stage. Just traveling and missing your family and friends. One day you're fine and so happy and one day you just wake up and it's just a long hard day to get through, that day. It's always great to release it on stage, but you know, after a while it builds up and all this shit. You know, the dark side of all that, was the inspiration of the darker sides of the album and the good side of it is that we got really, really tight with our lineup, because we had a new bass player and a new drummer on the last album. After three years of living together and jamming with each other on almost every single day, we grew so much tighter together as friends and as musicians and as a unit. So that also is, I think, apparent in the difference of the fire of the last album and the playing of this album, so that's happening in there.

Metal Covenant: So what about the album title ["The Dream Calls For Blood"]? What made you decide to go for it?

Rob: The title is basically our motto. It's what we're talking about, you know. In our point of view the dream being our band and keeping the band going and making music for your life. The blood is all the sacrifice and all hard work that goes into it and that's the metaphor for that. It's not only meant for music. It's also meant for other people to relate in their own life and goals that they're trying to achieve and the sacrifices that it takes to achieve these goals. And along with that, there's also a tinge of aggression in there about other people that cut corners and don't quite go through all the steps it takes to achieve the goal the right way. So there's a little bit of a middle finger to those people that go about it that way and don't fully respect what it takes.

Metal Covenant: So this maybe explains some of your intensity in the music and also your whole writing mode?

Rob: Most definitely. I'll throw in one other, if that wasn't enough: fuel for the fire. Toward the end of our tour, we realized that we had reached the 25th-year anniversary of our debut album, "The Ultra-Violence". This album had been unavailable and out of print for a while, and stuff like that, and a lot of people were looking for the album, so we re-released the album and then switched up our set. We were doing kind of a set to give a tribute to our album, so we were playing the whole "The Ultra-Violence" from beginning to end on tour. That was, like, you know, a double-edged sword too, in a way that it was doing two things at once. We knew it was gonna be killer thing to do. The crowd was gonna fucking like that, the old-school fans and then it was gonna be fun to us to do that all of a sudden after… [pause] We probably never even done that since we wrote the album. I don't know if we did that before. Then I also knew, another secret key was that if we were doing that every night, it was gonna affect the music we were currently writing. In a good way, that people would be glad about too, because that album's widely accepted and I can see why. In those days, when we were writing that album, we had far less parameters of musical influence and we were much more narrow-minded into metal, you know. You can never recreate that and I don't even wanna try to recreate that, 'cause you're, like, a whole other person when you're young. By playing that album from beginning to end for so many times live in front of a crowd, I think that's about the most you can do to yourself to actually bring yourself back closer to that feeling again. With that in mind, that also, you know, it snuck its way into the music as well.

Read the entire interview at Metal Covenant.