CHIMAIRA
A year ago these Ohio metal merchants thought it might be all over for them, but with a new label, lineup, and sense of purpose, they are enjoying nothing short of a Resurrection
By Jonah Bayer
Chimaira frontman Mark Hunter may have a well-earned aggro profile, thanks to having penned such pit-stirring anthems as “Pure Hatred” and getting a gnarly Paul Booth tattoo that covers most of his left arm. But today he intentionally offers a counterpoint to that menacing image, sitting before Revolver and gently cradling Cupcake, an 8-week-old Toy Fox Terrier (think the Taco Bell Chihuahua, only about half the size), in his lap.
“I always look forward to new people coming to our concerts who know me through my relatives and don’t know anything about the band,” he explains as he tenderly strokes his pint-sized pup. “They think, Oh, he’s such a nice guy, and then I get onstage and they‘re like, What the fuck happened?”
Hunter and the other five members of Chimaira—guitarists Rob Arnold and Matt DeVries, bassist Jim LaMarca, keyboardist-sampler Chris Spicuzza, and drummer Andols Herrick—are seated in the group’s rehearsal space in a nondescript warehouse on Cleveland’s west side. The band recently completed work on its fourth album, Resurrection, and with the exception of Spicuzza, who just dropped his Chipotle burrito bowl on the floor, everyone seems quite happy—hopeful, even. And they have every reason to be: Armed with a new label (Ferret), what they consider to be their best album, and the return of a key member (Herrick), Chimaira seem poised to have a very good 2007. And to think that a year ago, they thought they wouldn’t be around to release another record.
“There was a very dark period when [former drummer] Kevin [Talley] was in the band,” Hunter recalls of the time just before work on Resurrection began. (Talley replaced original drummer Anders Herrick in 2004.) “We didn’t want to do it anymore because we weren’t happy. And a lot of it was due to Kevin, so we decided to get rid of him.” Asked to elaborate, Hunter is quick to stress that it wasn't the drummer's playing but his personality. "We're an easy bunch to get along with, but when it comes to living and having a working relationship, we're set in our ways. And if someone says they know what we can do better, it's just like, ’No, you don't,’” Hunter explains. "That was my problem with Kevin: He thought he could run the band better than Rob and I had been doing for all this time."
"He really didn't appreciate what we'd put our blood, sweat, and tears into for so long," Arnold adds. "He just walked into Chimaira, and our band was 20 times the size of any band he had ever been in—and he really didn't appreciate that at all." Despite their failure to see eye to eye, the bandmates insist they are still friends with Talley. (The drummer, who currently plays in Daath [see page 56], did not respond to our requests for a comment.)
Drummer drama wasn’t the band’s only problem at the time. After releasing three full-length albums on Roadrunner, Chimaira felt like they were no longer being promoted properly and that the label was ignoring them when they most needed its support.
“There were a few people at Roadrunner who really believed in the band, but the higher-ups didn’t,” Hunter maintains. “It doesn’t matter when the people under the higher-ups are rooting for you and want to do all this stuff, because when the boss says no, they can’t make anything happen.”
(Asked to comment on the band's decision to leave the label, Monte Conner, Roadrunner's senior VP of A&R, offered us this statement: "Chimaira are a very hard-working band—extremely driven and passionate about what they do. But after three albums together, Roadrunner and Chimaira just had enough of each other. Sometimes that happens between a label and a band, and it was the case here. I'm still great friends with Mark, and all of us at Roadrunner wish the band nothing but success moving forward.")
And yet, it was a Roadrunner event that brought Herrick back into the fold. The drummer agreed to play on a few songs for the label’s 2006 25th-anniversary all-star concert in New York City and used the occasion to tell Chimaira’s videographer, Todd Bell, that he regretted leaving the band. After Bell told him about the taped confession, Hunter wasted no time in calling Herrick to confirm the story—and after a brief band meeting, Talley got the axe and Herrick was back. “We’d only had other drummers because Andols quit,” Arnold explains. “And when we realized he was interested in playing with us again, we tried to do everything possible to make that happen.”
So why did Herrick leave in the first place?
“I had a complete meltdown,” the skinsman explains, which would surprise no one who’s seen Chimaira’s 2004 tour documentary, The Dehumanizing Process. “I was playing terrible shows night after night and feeling miserable, so I just hit the eject button. The initial reaction was that I felt relief and that there was a weight off my shoulders, but it didn’t take long before I was like, Huh, not so much.”
With Herrick back in the band and their label woes behind them, Chimaira decided to name their fourth full-length Resurrection—a far more hopeful moniker than the disc’s working title: Another One Bites the Dust.
*****
Hunter and his bandmates may be in a much more positive state of mind these days, but that isn’t always a good thing. “It was hard this time around to come up with inspiration lyrically because I was in a place mentally where I wasn’t upset about anything,” Hunter admits. “I was almost scared when I had to start writing because I didn’t want to force anything and just write lyrics because they have to be done. I really enjoy finding things that are inspiring from within.”
In order to get into the proper mindset, he had to revisit the frustration he felt in the days when he wrote tracks like “Stigmurder” (from 2004’s The Impossibility of Reason) and “Inside the Horror” (from the band’s self-titled 2005 disc). The first song he wrote lyrics to was “End It All,” a paean to the disillusionment he felt on the road that includes lines like, “Another city/Another state/Another country/It has always been the same.”
After that, it wasn’t long before Resurrection’s lyrics started to come easily, including some of the most twisted material the singer has conceived to date. “Worthless,” which sounds like a mashup of Hatebreed and Slayer, features lyrics like “Nobody cares if you die.” “There’s definitely dudes out there who are worthless, and I can’t stand people like that,” Hunter explains. “Either I go out and stab them in the neck, or I sing about it—and I’ll probably end up stabbing someone in the neck anyway, but for now I have to get it out by singing.”
The music that provides the backdrop to Hunter’s violent ranting is no less aggressive. The sound of glass shattering and a woman screaming segue into “The Flame,” a relentless midtempo number with ominous minor-key melodies and guttural vocals; and while “Needle” is reminiscent of Chimaira’s early material, the song’s structure is far less predictable—prepare to be caught in the mother of all mosh pits when they perform it live.
“With The Impossibility of Reason, we proved to ourselves that we could write [radio-friendly] songs, but it’s not what we’re about,” Hunter explains. Indeed, despite Resurrection’s occasional tuneful passage (such as the atmospheric “Killing the Beast,” which sees Hunter laying off the screams and showing off his surprisingly strong singing voice), it’s difficult to imagine traditional-sounding metal songs like “Black Heart” being marketed to the eyeliner-wearing emo crowd. Which is just how the band wants it. In fact, the real challenge was to make sure Resurrection did not sound like…a Chimaira ripoff. “That was one of the coolest things about this record,” Hunter says with a grin. “When you’re younger, you come in with a riff, and it would usually sound like Slayer or Metallica. This time, it was like, ‘Dude, we already wrote that riff!’”
*****
Chimaira’s hometown shows are always out of control, but the excitement is nearly palpable a few nights later for the band’s seventh annual Christmas concert. While technically it’s the day after Christmas, the 1,300-plus diehard fans packed into both levels of the House of Blues don’t seem to mind, and despite the venue’s inherently corporate aura, this feels like a real metal show. Hell, in Cleveland, even the security guards sport Integrity hand tats. After opening sets by local acts Bowel and Forever in Terror, as well as Indianapolis’ Demiricous, the lights are turned up to reveal a blood-splattered Chimaira banner. The theme from Rocky begins to blare over the P.A.
Herrick walks out, takes a seat behind his massive drum set, and launches into The Impossibility of Reason’s “Power Trip.” He is quickly joined by the rest of his bandmates, and together they go on to blaze through their relentless 90-minute set like well-trained athletes, barely taking the time to catch their breath before launching into the next tune. DeVries and LaMarca stay stage right, locked in a classic headbanging stance; Arnold effortlessly rips solo after shredding solo with his guitar propped perpendicularly to his torso; Spicuzza cheerleads from behind a wall of keyboards.
Then there’s Hunter. Pacing the stage with microphone in hand, the Chimaira frontman resembles a twisted preacher as he exhorts the crowd to sing along. “Do you remember when people would lose their shit at a metal show?” Hunter screams into the mic a few songs into the set, then points, with some dismay, at the lone dude who’s actually moving around. (He appeared to be amped up on more than just music.) “I don’t give a shit—maybe you guys think it’s a Michael Stanley show,” he says, referring to the Cleveland classic-rock staple.
With that out of his system, Hunter and his cohorts launch into Resurrection’s title track. The song alternates between midtempo metalcore and breakneck thrash, with Hunter spewing such motivational lyrics as “determination, perseverance, resolution—resurrection” over a double-bass beat so fast that it almost blurs into a continuous guttural rumble. As they do for every other song of the set, the crowd scream along to each word, but not because the album leaked. The track, which Ferret posted on Christmas Eve, got 30,000 plays on its first day.
As for the crowd itself, it seems to encompass every type of metal fan, from grizzled-looking bikers to fresh-faced teenagers sporting As I Lay Dying sweatshirts. In fact, the only common trait is a lack of the self-consciousness (many of them are wearing Chimaira Christmas shirts, which were sold at the show) and pretension that appear to be gaining a foothold in today’s increasingly fashion-conscious heavy-music scene.
“When we started this band, we didn’t want to just play with the clique bands that were popular, because we thought we’d be lumped into that category,” Hunter notes a few days later. “The thing I’ve always thought was cool about our fans is you look out into the crowd, and you can see so many different kinds of T-shirts. There’s dudes wearing Dimmu Borgir shirts standing next to kids wearing Pink Floyd shirts.”
But while Hunter is grateful for the band’s younger fanbase, this longtime headbanger still gets most excited when he sees seasoned metalheads getting into Chimaira’s sound. “It’s great to see the young kids, but my favorite is when you look out into the audience and see the older guy who saw Slayer in ’86,” he continues. “I’ve been listening to metal my whole life, and I appreciate some of the newer bands, but I’m at the age where no one is as good as Slayer—so it’s cool to see people with the same type of purist attitude coming to our concerts and saying we’re actually doing something right.”
In reality, though, the guy wearing the weathered Testament T-shirt doesn’t have a lot of options these days. Chimaira are part of an endangered species: a real metal band who aren’t playing the genre because it’s trendy, but because it’s what all the members have been doing in one incarnation or another for over half their lives. And while Chimaira’s band members quit their jobs five years ago in order to maintain their intensive touring schedule, it’s only been in the past six months that they’ve been able to live comfortably off the band.
“Us and bands like Shadows Fall and Killswitch Engage came from nothing,” Hunter notes proudly, “and now we’re kicking ass.”
