All photos by Dan Schuessler
In "Freshly Baked," we feature promising young bands or bands that are otherwise lacking the attention we think they deserve.
Download: 2009 Demo [Mediafire]
by Andrew Wilhelm (CHI)
"YOU BREED...LIKE RATS." That's the chorus to Godflesh's "Like Rats" - how romantic!
Chicago's Like Rats don't sound much like Godflesh, but they embody their spirit for a disgust towards humanity. While having formed only recently, they know how to throw down a no holds barred house show. The quintet expresses their hatred with metallic hardcore, or hardcoreish metal, depending on how you want to look at it - the perfect sound where the cover is cheap, the drinks are BYOB, and security? HA! Most of their songs are unhinged and pissed-off fast (think Hellhammer and Discharge in a cage match), but occasionally they'll throw in some Celtic Frost mid-paced riffing or even doomier passages. A procreation of the wicked, indeed.
I had the chance to speak with Like Rats guitarist Todd Nief on the band's formation, Celtic Frost, songwriting, and more Celtic Frost.
Crustcake: First, how did y’all form?
Todd Nief: Basically, this band started as kind of a one-off idea. I had sort of written black metalish sounding punkish songs. I just wrote these songs and talked to my friends Andy [Nelson, bass] and Dan [Polak, drums], and I was like “Hey, do you guys want to get sometime and make some hateful sounding riffs?” And they’re like “Yeah.” We recorded in Andy’s parent’s living room, just recorded more black metal versions of a lot of the songs that were on our demo. Andy did some gibberish Attila-esque vocals over ‘em, and I just had these songs sitting around. About a year ago, I was “Ok, well, let’s maybe actually do a band” so we resurrected these songs, changed some of the structures, change some of the vocal patterns, and that’s kind of how we got started.
Crustcake: What led y’all to go from a black metal direction to more of a hardcore direction?
Nief: What kind of happened is, the original recording was not thought out really, at all. I just wrote some riffs and pasted two riffs together. All of the songs were binary structures: “here’s one riff, here’s another riff that goes with it.” We just got together and I asked “Alright Dan, do you want to maybe play a blast beat over this or something,” so it kind of had the tremolo-picked blast beat sound. I wasn’t completely happy with the way that worked, I kinda wanted to sound more like Celtic Frost than some 90s black metal band. We sort of switched the feel up, added that d-beat feel, made it a bit more syncopated. I don’t really think of us as a hardcore band so much, because I’m really just thinking about Celtic Frost mostly. We’re about as much of a hardcore band as Celtic Frost is.
Crustcake: What about Celtic Frost is important for you and your music?
Nief: It’s kind of a visceral thing, where you really, really like a band. The way that dude [Tom G. Warrior] puts together riffs…something about it tickles a very specific area of my brain. The way the riffs flow into each other, the way that dude will come up with a riff, and then vary it, change the rhythmic emphasis, everything about Celtic Frost is wonderful to me. It’s very interesting because Celtic Frost is one of those bands when you’re first getting into metal, it’s like “Oh, Celtic Frost is very influential” and then you listen to it and “What? This is fuckin’ pussy shit compared to Suffocation” or whatever and I didn’t get it for a while. And at some point, it just completely clicked for me as I listened to more music and got a bit older. Yeah dude, it’s a very visceral, all encompassing love.
Crustcake: What do you think about the dissolution of Celtic Frost and the formation of Triptykon?
Nief: I thought Monotheist was a pretty OK record, but it’s not something I’m going to listen to regularly. But I subscribe to Tom’s blog and Triptykon posted new songs to their myspace a month ago [at the time this interview was conducted], I listened to ‘em and they were pretty good. I listened to ‘em twice and was like “This is probably something I’m gonna buy when it comes out.” It’s not something that I’m impossibly stoked on like Morbid Tales, but that dude is a fucking genius, and I’m probably going to support his newer efforts. I’m more excited about his new book [Only Death is Real] than Triptykon, to be honest.
Let me hijack this interview for a second and tell my own story. I’ve been trying to track down a copy of Are You Morbid, his autobiography of Celtic Frost and it’s a rare book. You can buy it on ebay for $100. I was about to make the commitment and fork over the cash and I had to have the brakes replaced on my car. But the Chicago Public Library has a copy and I’m probably gonna try go there sometime later this week cause they won’t let me check it out. You have to hang out and read it there because if you check it out you’d just sell it.
Crustcake: Is that a problem in Chicago, people selling books?
Nief: I have no idea. I called to see if they had the book and they’re like “yes, but you can’t check it out,” and I assume it’s because if you look on the internet, you can sell it for a $100 and they don’t want something like that out of their possession.
Crustcake: Are you a fan of Cold Lake at all?
Nief: Dude, honestly, that record is kinda goofy, but the riffs are Celtic Frost riffs, and they’re good. So it’s really funny to hear Celtic Frost riffs in a more pop context, especially because Tom said some really funny stuff cause he’s always doing the (Tom Warrior voice) “ugh” and “hey!” – have you heard the record?
Crustcake: Yeah.
Nief: On the first song, the riff comes out and he (Tom Warrior voice) “Check this out!” It’s kind of stupid, but the riffs are still good.
Crustcake: Why did y’all choose the name Like Rats? I know it’s a Godflesh song, but I don’t hear a lot of Godflesh in your sound?
Nief: It’s more kind of like, a lot of the lyrics of the band and the message of the band have to do with sort of, some anti-civilization attitude, like being in touch in something beyond civilization, before civilization. In the Godflesh song, the lyrics are “You breed like rats” and that sort of message about the way human civilization has spread and it’s disgusting and awful is pretty integral to what we’re trying to convey with the band.
Crustcake: What other topics do you explore in your music?
Nief: The lyrics I wrote are mostly about evolution and being in touch with a broader perspective of where man fits into the world and a connection nature and things like that. The stuff that Dan wrote, I’m not gonna put words in his mouth, some of his stuff is about, I don’t know, emotions or something.
Crustcake: Which songs did you write lyrics for on the demo?
Nief: I wrote lyrics to the second song [Sun] and I wrote lyrics to the last song [Speciation], which we refer to as “Grief” because it kind of sounds like Grief.
Crustcake: Yeah, most of the demo is fast, but the last song slows things down a bit. What led to that direction?
Nief: Dan and I came up with that song together, we just had some riffs…Dan is a really big doom metal fan, and there’s a lot of doom in the sounds that we’re going for. Celtic Frost has a lot of that doomy sound. Everyone really likes Incantation, they have a real doomy sound, and a band like Asphyx, things like that. We thought that incorporating a few plodding sounding riffs would be appropriate for what we’re trying to do. It’s not something we want to always do, but some of the newer songs we have are a bit slower, and just sort of that crushing, mammoth…I was gonna say mammoth grinding, but that sounds kinda stupid. But that fits in with the overall aesthetic that we’re going for.
Crustcake: You run the blog Primitive Future, where you display a wide variety of music. Do these wide tastes inform Like Rats at all?
Nief: That’s actually difficult question to answer. I just saw Until the Light Takes Us, and Fenriz from Darkthrone talks about that too. I’m just completely obsessed with music, I can’t stop thinking about it I can’t stop listening to it. It’s not a problem for me, but other people would probably view it as a problem if they understood the extent of obsession. Some stuff definitely does creep in to the way I would write a metal song or a hardcore song or whatever. I really like the melodies of something like Richard Strauss - that is similar in the way of those classical composers would vary scenes. You get that in any death metal composition. Some of the other stuff, just an overall sense of songwriting is very important to me, but I would hesitate to say that I am informed by fuckin’ Moby Grape or whatever if I’m writing a Like Rats song. But the way that music flows, the way that parts relate to each other is kind of - I feel it’s a universal, intuitive sense, where someone has that sense, they can compose great music in whatever style they choose.
Crustcake: What led to the release of the s/t demo for free on the internet?
Nief: Andy, our bass player, owns a recording studio, so he was able to record it for us and make it sound good, but it’s really just a demo. We’re a new band, we haven’t even been playing shows for a year, and we just have these recordings. If people want to have it, they can have it. I feel that way about pretty much any music, I’d rather someone have it than not, no matter how they get it.
Crustcake: Any other comments you want to make?
Nief: Support your local green grocer.
Crustcake: Thanks for taking the time do to the interview.
Nief: This was cool, I’m stoked.
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