When Steppenwolf immortalised the term ‘heavy metal’ in their berserk 1967 biker anthem Born To Be Wild, they were borrowing from a source that had very little to do with music. The words had been previously deployed by William S Burroughs, appearing in his 1962 novel The Soft Machine, then again in the sci-fi hackery of 1964’s Nova Express: “With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms – Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporised bank notes – And the Insect People of Minraud with metal music.”
Traditional military speak for ‘fortified guns’, the phrase was immediately Hoovered up by Creem and Rolling Stone rock critic Lester Bangs, who regurgitated it in 1968 to describe a show by Detroit’s MC5. The signature sound is one that rolls up from the bowels of the Earth like an erupting volcano, but the effect is more than just physical. Done properly, heavy metal can loosen your very mind from its moorings.
Black Sabbath, heavy metal’s original chapter, are masters. As John Doran writes on thequietus.com, “Perhaps one of Sabbath’s most under-appreciated songs is… Children Of The Grave: an impassioned plea for politicians, media and the powers that be to tell the truth, over a galloping riff and clattering percussion. They were and still are the prime contradictory truth about heavy metal. Tough guys who threw peace signs. Headbangers who smoked weed but cautioned against the depression it could cause. The bringers of a violent new noise who railed against the war in Vietnam. The producers of a sound that was at once primitavist and virtuoso. Literate and loutish. Frightening but fun. The harbingers of a sound that was brand new, while carrying on a tradition that was jet black and centuries old. Sometimes obviously daft, always limitlessly righteous.”
Among the poster boys for this daft-but-righteous duality are Tool, cited by re-emerging Phnom Penh metal peddlers Splitter as sculpting their sound. “The thinking person’s metal band” is how Patrick Donovan of The Age described Tool: “Cerebral and visceral, soft and heavy, melodic and abrasive, tender and brutal, familiar and strange, western and eastern, beautiful and ugly, taut yet sprawling and epic, they are a tangle of contradictions.”
Here at Thea Heng Music School on Nehru Boulevard, wedged between guitar cases in a windowless room with granite-coloured foam slathered over walls and ceiling, duality is again the order of the day. Above thunderous drums and battering thrash guitar riffs soar piercing vocals and weird, experimental guitar melodies. Splitter call them ‘Squeedleedees.’
After more than six months offstage, busy evolving from a clean-shaven indie rock quartet into a 3/5-bearded heavy metal quintet and writing an album’s worth of original material, Splitter’s new line-up debuts at Showbox this week (“Not so much a hiatus as a gestation period,” says vocalist Sean Barrett, who’s quick to point out that his name is an anagram of ‘A Better Satan’). The end game: recording their first album.
The members, all but one in their twenties, all sport slightly crumpled cargo shorts and faded t-shirts. Bass player Wayne is loudly wishing he’d worn something he didn’t fish out of the laundry basket. We’re on the roof of Thea Heng on a muggy Saturday afternoon, taking a rare smoke break between tracks. Among scattered empty beer cans, the conversation turns to Tool, the use of odd time signatures and the importance of musical experimentation.
“Squeedleedees should be a proper music term,” says Doug, the band’s experimental guitarist. Sean nods solemnly and then giggles: “Pentatonic squeedledees!” Classically trained Norwegian jazz drummer Henrik, grinning from beneath a hefty ginger beard, slaps his palms on his thighs in a complex rhythm: “Drum moves have names like that: paradiddle and parama flimflam…” All five shriek in unison: “SQUEEDLEEDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
Pressed to define Splitter’s sound during a rare moment when he’s not pogoing up and down in a sweat, Sean shrugs. “I have a really hard time answering that; I’ve been trying to do it since I joined the band. The short answer I give is that it’s metal for stoners but that’s not sufficient. It’s progressive but driven, I guess. Progressive in that we’ll use weird time signatures, play outside the major key, have weird instrumental breaks. Stuff you’d expect from bands like Tool and The Mars Volta, but with a more gut-level punk rock kind of force about it. It walks the line between going out really far into experimental metal land and still having a bit of an edge, but that’s largely the drummer’s fault; he’s a very energetic chap. Doug has a background in sound engineering, so he’ll use a myriad peddles and his music theory abilities and paint really fun weaves over what Ryan does… I jump a lot.”
Thrash guitarist Ryan, from the neck up nothing but beard, teeth and baseball cap, leans back against the roof terrace railings and takes a slow drag on his hand-rolled smoke. “You’ve got barang bands doing covers and Khmer bands doing stuff that’s hard as fuck. It’s nothing but pop-rock or deathcore. We offer something in between: a sound that’s heavy, but you can still groove to it.”
Doug, a founding member, conjures forth the experimental sounds of both Tool and The Mars Volta, while the down tuning (although they choose C over D) is a nod to Pantera, “the first to combine the drop D power chord with actual music theory virtuosity,” says Sean. “The Deftones are another one because early on they went back and forth between rapping and screaming. A few albums into their career they were all being very melodic but in a way that felt heavy on a heart level, which is hard to explain.”
Splitter – so christened when North London-born bass player Wayne, yelling for an amplifier splitter once in Sharky Bar, dropped both Ts and inserted a glottal stop much to the crowd’s amusement – squeeze back into the tiny practice space. Power chords. Scratchy noise. Chiming melodies. Thunder-roll drumming. The tidal wave of sound keeps coming. Atop soar man-possessed vocals: now a screech, now a whisper.
Lyrics probe everything from the peculiarities of expat life to more personal demons, including psychotic breakdown. Lube tells the cautionary tale of a girl ‘who took too many drugs and had to go home’; Purple, the dangers of women who turn out to be men, and Bitches on the Balcony surely needs no further introduction in a town like this. “Game Over is a fun one; probably our favourite to play,” says Sean. “It’s a heavy riff and the lyrics are on the surface pretty standard punk stuff, but one or two steps deeper what it’s really about is people who try to get rid of local religions so they can put themselves in the place of the people’s god. I think Pol Pot’s a good example of that; Mao Tse Tung’s a good example of that, too. But on the surface it’s basically Another Rise Above, by Black Flag: ‘You have power, we don’t. We are good, you are bad. We will get you.’”
Delving significantly deeper is Sharks and Spiders. “This one’s really interesting because the first and second parts are musically and lyrically very different. It’s about having a psychotic breakdown, which is something people write about a lot but the second half is about the other side of that: whatever gets people through it. For some people it’s religion; for some people it’s a creative outlet, some maybe find a significant other. It’s something that takes you outside of yourself at the end of the psychotic breakdown and it’s about the process of going through it. You can find songs by Nine Inch Nails about breaking down, but no one ever writes about the process of coming back together after the fact.
“The line ‘Every spider squatting’ is a reference to Infinite Jest, a novel that takes place in Alcoholics Anonymous, where addiction is referred to as ‘a spider that lives in the brain’. It’s about different types of addictions and neuroses being broken down by whatever gets people out of it, whether that’s painting or going to church. I started writing a lot but writing’s pretty insular, so it doesn’t you out of yourself. I think it was more playing in punk bands. Instead of just writing something and having it collect dust in a notebook, I was working with other people, screaming and jumping, things like that. Not much has changed. Splitter was once very indie rock, a little slower, gloomy, a little stonerish. There’s a lot more energy now.”
Each song is delivered with heavy chord progressions that tread the ground between classical traditions and brutal primitivism at punishingly loud volume. Only it’s the sort of punishment you can’t help but want more of. “A lot of the bands we consider our influence aren’t really metal in an obvious chug-chug-chug, rurgh-rurgh-rurgh kind of way. It’s more heavy in the way it feels. The Deftones are a good example: when you listen it’s not Cookie Monster vocals v drums, it has a certain sincerity to it. Lester Bangs, in his essay about Elvis, talked about the music giving him ‘an erection of the heart’. That’s from a Thomas Pynchon novel: ‘His heart became erect then came.’ That’s the type of stuff we want to give our listeners.”
WHO: Splitter
WHAT: Original heavy prog-metal
WHERE: Showbox, St. 330 (cnr. St. 113)
WHEN: 8pm March 9
WHY: A sound that’s heavy, but you can still groove to it