Ex-CONTROL DENIED Frontman Talks About CHUCK SCHULDINER, Power Metal's Resurgence

Dom Coccaro of the Associated Content recently conducted an interview with former CONTROL DENIED and current PHARAOH frontman Tim Aymar. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Associated Content: Power metal has seen a resurgence in the past few years. To what do you accredit this to?

Aymar: Boredom, I guess. Seriously though, what I've noticed is the lack of great hooks and great playing and melody, and you know, power. There's a lot of anger in much of the "new metal" but not a lot of power. I'm talking mainly about the radio though, not reality. It's weird, man. I see the world through the eyes of a metal singer, so in my world it's never gone away, so I don't notice a resurgence. I just keep on keepin' on. But there have been some killer bands come out over the past few years, and I mean really awesome bands. I don't know how familiar you are with MILLENIUM or any of the projects that Jorn Lande has been on, but dude, seriously, if you haven't heard him...well maybe I shouldn't turn you on to him, because you'll forget all about me. I won't even mention Harry Conklin or any of the other really good singers out there making this kind of metal cool again. Just kidding. I really think that our kind of metal has made a big comeback because of the vocals. It's cool to sing again. People miss hearing vocals that are sung... by singers, if you get my drift. Also the riffing in the guitars and bass is cooler, as opposed to one finger, dropped down, slide tuning, cheater chord, no chord progression riffs. Although I'm not picking on anyone in particular, there's been enough of that around to become really boring. Brian Posehn explains it very well in his video "Metal By Numbers".

Associated Content: PHARAOH isn't strictly a power metal band, but obviously, the influence is there. What are some of your favorite power metal albums?

Aymar: That depends on how tight you want the spread to be. I think PINK CREAM 69 "Games People Play" was a f*cking awesome album, ARAKAIN "Farao" was a killer too, and everything DIO has ever done is cool, but I don't listen to power metal albums. I only listen to metal albums that happen to be power metal because someone else felt the itch in their sphincter to have to call it something more specific than metal. Metal goes so many directions and what some would call "pure" power metal is different from band to band anyway. I'd rather drop all the semantics. I'm a metal fan, a metal singer. Who's the dickhead who started all that gay sh*t anyway? I mean, I've seen people going at it over whether YNGWIE and SYMPHONY X were the same kind of metal or not. Who cares?

Associated Content: I know you've been asked a million questions about Chuck Schuldiner, but I'm going to ask one anyway. What did you learn from him while recording CONTROL DENIED's "The Fragile Art of Existence"?

Aymar: That when you pay that much money to do a recording, you don't make your own f*cking coffee. Again, only kidding. O.K., in all seriousness, what I learned was how to exploit more of the strange things my voice will do. Now that I think of it, maybe that's what I'll do more of on the next PHARAOH CD. I always tend to sound a little different on every record I do, so I probably won't have to try very hard. If you've heard 313, TRIPLE-X, PSYCHO SCREAM, CONTROL DENIED and PHARAOH you'd hear six different approaches. I think with Chuck's guidance though, I learned to throw it all in the bag and shake it up.

Read the entire interview at www.associatedcontent.com.