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Interview with
SAM BEAN
from
WEREWOLVES

(21st January 2021)

Interviewer – Dave Bruce

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How did you all find each other and decide to share your musical talents as a group?
SAM: Matt and Dave play together in Abramelin and contacted me for screaming and bass duties. I’ve worked with Matt before in Berzerker and The Antichrist Imperium, and I’ve known Dave for years. They’re total workhorses. I couldn’t say no. The band threatened to be that rare death metal thing…people who actually get busy and want to pump out lots of filthy noise.

How would you describe your sound? Why do you think people resonate with your music?
SAM: Hateful, brutal, blackened death metal. We’re not trying to get all hipster and stroke some beards and do the dissonance thing. We’re not all nerding out over string gauges and trying to prove that we’re musicians. We want people to put our album on and get singed all the way down to their socks. Our music is a spiteful extreme-metal Kali werewolf with ten arms all giving the middle finger.

Which artist’s music and/or performance, past or present, inspires you today? 
SAM: Bestial Warlust, cause they’re lyrical assassins. Mortician, particularly that masterpiece of progressive metal ‘Chainsaw Dismemberment’.

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Your new Album is about to be released! Describe its origin and evolution. 
SAM: Fuck yeah 666, our new album WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE is out January 29th worldwide. Matt’s always writing riffs, which Dave incessantly ingests and by some digestive miracle excretes into ceaseless blasting. I add the words and hey presto, booyakasha, kill the white man, death metal magic results. We had this album ready to go by the time our debut THE DEAD ARE SCREAMING was released, I think Matt wrote it in a week. Can’t really say that this album evolved from the first. If anything it’s dumber and lacking more chromosomes.

What are the signature pieces on the album, and which is your favourite track?
SAM: We’d all give you a different response to this, seriously. My personal favourite is ‘Mission Statement’, because they are the most ridiculous lyrics ever in a song. It’s a total hate anthem. When we’re chanting HATE HATE HATE in the middle I can actually feel my thumbs shrink, it’s that devolved. I reckon the opener ‘I Don’t Like You’ sums up the vibe we’re going for, and I think the closing track ‘They Will Pay With Their Own Blood’ will be a pleasant surprise.

What inspiration lead to the album title and artwork and who is the artist?
SAM: I wanted something that actually had some reference to the outside world, because death metal disappears up its own arse all the time. So it was originally called HATE SPEECH because we seemed to be surrounded by it from every possible direction in 2020. Then it was pointed out that we’d get hashtagged into oblivion by people who couldn’t care less what our reasoning was, so we changed it to WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE, which is obviously a gallows-humour take on how weird the world is getting. Mitchell Nolte is our Taswegian Byronesque artiste, he did the cover to the first album as well. We give him the lyrics and the vibe we’re going for, this time it was “harrowing violence”, and then leave him to it. We reckon he nailed it. We feel like the big chick with the eyeball hanging out straddling that dude while ramming a cleaver through his head strikes a blow for equality between the sexes, which we are tireless champions of.

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Will the band be likely to be a performing entity or will it be a recording project only?
SAM: You’ll see performances from us probably when we can be confident that gigs will actually go ahead and won’t get cancelled moments before we step on stage, just cause someone’s got a dose of the Pangolin’s Revenge. I live in Adelaide and the other guys are in Melbourne, which means a plane flight, which means big trouble if I get caught interstate when these fuckhead Premiers slam their borders shut with no warning. But we’re all able to play this stuff no dramas and we’re pretty seasoned. When the time’s right, we go live.

If you could perform with any music artist, Alive or Dead, who would you choose? And why? 
SAM: I’d love to rewind to Morbid Angel back in 1992 or so when they were touring Blessed, that lineup with Brunelle was killer. They were so hungry. Or Brutal Truth pre 1993, back when Scott Lewis was on drums and doing those stupendous blastbeats. I’d prefer to play with them all alive, instead of dead and smelly.

Do you have any long-term aspirations as a music artist? 
SAM: Make stinking cockloads of cash, live in a ski resort in an empty chalet, alternate between writing music, eating foie gras, and skiing. I’m a man of simple tastes. Buy my album.

Finally, a few questions for some quick answers –
FAVOURITE:
Album – Panzer Division Marduk
Artist – Mortician
Movie – Braindead
Place to visit – Centrelink
Venue to play – BB Kings on Times Square. The catering is exquisite.
Food –  Pierre Koffman’s stuffed pig’s trotters. MPW can make them, I’m not fussy
Drink – VB
Person in History –  Nero. Imagine getting on the pingers with that freak.
Tattoo – (If you don’t have one, what would you get?) I don’t have any. Maybe one of those Thai Sak Yant ones that give you superpowers, so we could play even faster

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AMNPLIFY – DB