OBITUARY Bassist: We've Never Tried To Sound Like METALLICA Or SLIPKNOT

Simon Milburn of The Metal Forge recently conducted an interview with bassist Frank Watkins of Florida death metallers OBITUARY. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

On whether he thought OBITUARY would still be going hard at it at more than 20 years since the band's inception:

"That's a good question. Y'know, yeah, actually I did [think I'd still be playing in OBITUARY 20 years on]. Even back when I first started with the band, I just kind of pictured myself as this is the band that I've always kinda wanted to be with. The guys in the band, me, Donald, John and Trevor, have always been great friends from the moment we met each other. We've always got on really tight with each other, never really had any major issues between one another and it was just something that I saw in the future as what I want to do for the rest of my life, and I really didn't want to do it with anybody else but those guys."

On what makes OBITUARY stand out from other bands:

"See, the thing is with us is when we write music and we put stuff together, we try not to be like anybody else. That's our goal — our biggest thing. People would be like, 'You guys sound like CELTIC FROST' or, 'You guys sound like SLAYER,' but we're always trying not to sound like anything. We want to sound like our own distinct thing. We've never tried to sound a little bit like METALLICA or a little bit like SLIPKNOT. We've just always wanted to be just so heavy, so brutal, we had this idea in our heads that we wanted to be old school and we wanted to keep true to what we do and I think that has a lot to do with how our style and how we evolved to what we are. We're definitely into metal. We're fans of old school metal and thrash and stuff like that but we really don't keep up with a lot of new stuff that's out there now. New death metal, it's almost like it's saturated there's so much stuff out there. So we kinda just keep it to our own vibe and what we do. When we get together to write a record, we just have this vibe of evil brutality and it just kinda flows out of us. It's crazy when we get together. It kinda just pours right out of us and it's that unique style. We know what that style is. We know what we have and when we sit down a put a record together, and we listen to it when it's all finished, we're like 'Yep, that's OBITUARY. No doubt about it.'"

On whether there is still some room to try new things without straying too far from what defines the band's sound and style:

"We've messed around with it in the past. Y'know, like with the 'World Demise' record we got a little bit of an industrial feel to our shit. We've messed around with different things — more punk, more hardcore vibes on certain stuff but I think our whole sound is that stuff as well in a an overall aspect. We have an industrial feel to some of our music, we have a punk rock/hardcore kind of feel to some of our music … so we definitely just have something that we turned up. We feel that we our bound by some things. Like, changing the vocals, then it really wouldn't be us. Or if we tried to do the guitars a little more melodic, it wouldn't be us. If we tried to slow things down or speed things up to like blast beat style, that wouldn't be us. So we have kinda experimented through the years, we've messed with certain things here and there, but the old formula that we've always had from the first time we ever started writing music together was brutal, evil, heavy, as old school as we can possibly get and when we keep to that formula it comes out like we want it. That's what we did with the last two albums — 'Xecutioner's Return' and 'Darkest Day'. We were like 'I want to write this album like this old school, heavy, brutal … I don't care what's going on in the world right now… I want this to be the most brutalest OBITUARY record possible.'"

On the band's 2004 comeback album, "Frozen In Time":

"Well, 'Frozen In Time' was a record that we got back together after not playing together for a long time and we had Allen West in the band with us and he wrote a lot of the riffs for that album. It was almost like we had this whole new fresh thing coming up and then we realized we had to put out another record with Roadrunner, which was a big nightmare for the band prior, and that really was like a kick in the balls to us. Like, 'Aw, shit! We gotta put a record out with them now?' So, when we were doing the album, I mean, we put what we had into it but it was still kinda like very solemn and we were quite discouraged about what was going on although the record company kept on telling us, 'Don't worry! Even though we have masses of big bands — SLIPKNOT, NICKLEBACK — don't worry, we're gonna make sure things work out for you.' Then Allen West at the same time was dealing with alcohol and drug problems and really wasn't putting his all into the record, and it was really a discouraging thing. When the record came out, the record label pretty much turned their back to us and we were doing shows and stuff and we weren't getting much support from people in the industry and it was almost like lots of people were turning their backs on us… and at the same time, Allen was so messed up, he was messin' up shows. He wasn't able to play right. It was ridiculous how bad things got with him. We were always chasing after him making sure he played the right songs and do the right thing and it got to a point that he went to prison. Right when he went to prison, it was just like a big weight got lifted off of us. At that point, we had no record company, we didn't have this drunk guitar player to deal with anymore and we were like, 'Wow! This is the four of us. We're fresh. We want something new. Let's grab it by the balls and really go for it.' We went in the studio and we finished up 'Xecutioner's Return' and Ralph Santolla happened to be in the studio. He threw some leads in, hung out with us for the night and we were like, 'Man, this is new. This is fresh. This is feeling back to the 'Cause Of Death' days.' It just flowed. It was like, boom — a breath of fresh air. It really felt good to have control of our records, to have control of our business as OBITUARY and to have control of our members and make sure everything in the band is running smoothly. No one is up there drunk and they can't even play which is a huge embarrassment to us. I mean, we all party, we all drink, we all do whatever. But at the same time, it's not good to have kids pay money to see us play and the last thing I need to be is past drunk on stage."

Read the entire interview from The Metal Forge.