All Jason Decay can remember is waking up to someone asking if he was okay. Cauldron's vocalist-bassist thought his band's tour van was parked in front of a 7-11 somewhere. He didn't even realize he was upside down until someone took his seatbelt off and dragged him through the broken window. It wasn't until he got up and walked around that he saw what had happened. "It was totally surreal," he says. "I couldn't believe it. I thought I was dreaming."
As it turns out, Decay and his bandmates — Ian "Chains" Kilpatrick (guitar) and Myles Deck (drums) — and their tour manager, Henry Yuan, had been in a serious accident. It was about 1:30 a.m. on a Texas highway. The Toronto trad-metal trio had just played a show in Dallas and were heading to their hotel. Yuan was driving. Deck was in the passenger seat. Decay and Kilpatrick were crashed out in the back. A car in front of them drifted onto the shoulder, where it smashed into an abandoned vehicle. The debris from that wreck shot back out onto the highway, where it blew out three of Cauldron's tires and sent them rolling across the median, almost directly into oncoming traffic.
Somehow, Decay, Deck and Yuan escaped with minor cuts and bruises. Kilpatrick was thrown 20 or 30 feet from the van. He cracked vertebrae in his neck and back. He broke his sternum and hipbone and suffered quite a few deep lacerations. His scalp had to be stapled back together. He spent a week in a Dallas hospital before he could head home to Toronto. Obviously, the rest of the tour was canceled.
That was February of 2016. Today, Cauldron are about to release their first album since the accident — and fifth overall. Entitled New Gods, it's a highly melodic blast of traditional metal inspired by everything from classic Metallica and Dokken to the gleaming pop-metal hits Desmond Child wrote for Kiss in the Eighties. "I like the feeling you get from a good melody, so that's what I try to write," says Decay, who fondly recalls listening to Canadian songwriter Corey Hart's 1984 synth-rock hit "Sunglasses at Night" and Motown master Stevie Wonder in the days before his heavy metal conversion. "Once I heard Metallica, it all changed," he says. "I heard Def Leppard and AC/DC around the same time. That's when I realized music was really good, that it could be sticky like glue."
That's an excellent way to describe Cauldron's entire catalog, which kicked off in earnest with 2009's revivalist masterpiece Chained to the Nite. Incongruously released via U.K. extreme-metal powerhouse Earache, the record reveled in fist-pumping sing-alongs like "Chained Up in Chains," "Conjure the Mass" and a dazzling cover of Eighties hair farmers Black N' Blue's "Chains Around Heaven." While enduring a revolving cast of drummers that could rival Spinal Tap, Decay and Kilpatrick unleashed a steady stream of infectious metal with 2011's Burning Fortune, 2012's Tomorrow's Lost and 2016's In Ruin. But while all of those albums traded in vintage metal themes like chains, fire and impending doom, Decay says New Gods is a lot more personal.
"I lost some people close to me during the making of this record, including my dad," he reveals. "So the lyrics are a lot more personal for me than maybe they have been in the past. The album title kinda sums it up, I think. Everything that we've been through has maybe altered our outlook on life or changed what we thought before."
It's safe to say that Kilpatrick seconds that emotion. When Revolver catches up with Cauldron's guitarist, he's folding laundry on a day off from Stained Class, the heavy metal record store he runs in Toronto. He opened the shop — named after Judas Priest's groundbreaking 1978 album — with a friend in late 2016, but has since become the sole owner and operator. "It's heavy on death metal and traditional metal," Kilpatrick offers, before adding that Stained Class' extensive vinyl stock is about half used and half new.
"We used to have a lot more used records, but it's hard to track down old metal stuff sometimes. People want original Possessed and Celtic Frost records, but collectors don't really part with those. I mean — I don't. I'm hoarding that stuff in my apartment. I'm not gonna sell it!"
Two-and-a-half years on from the accident, Kilpatrick has more or less recovered from his injuries. "I lost a lot of feeling in my lower back and my ass, but I'm kinda used to it now," he says. "I did a year of physiotherapy and all that crap. Considering the state I was in when I started, it made a huge difference. I'm sore here and there, but I don't really care. It's all done with, as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't affect me as far as anything I wanna do."
It was Kilpatrick who came up with the title New Gods. "There's been a lot of negativity following the band around, starting with the accident," he says. "There's some personal issues we're struggling with as a result — depression, anxiety — that have been reigning over us like our new gods. So that's kinda what that means."
As it turns out, he didn't exactly pluck the title out of thin air. "I was incredibly stoned listening to the Meat Puppets, and I was looking at the back of the sleeve to see what song I was listening to," he explains. "It was called 'New Gods.' Jason and I were butting heads over the album title for a long time, so I just said, 'Fuck it — that's the title.' I also like that it made us sound arrogant, like we're calling ourselves the new gods of the scene or something. I wanted it to be nebulous as to whether we were just being arrogant or if it was something deeper than that."
Cauldron have already completed several tours since the accident, including dates with NWOBHM luminaries Satan and Swedish goth-metal superstars Tribulation. (They've also got a handful of East Coast dates and a two-week Euro tour lined up for the fall.) Kilpatrick was understandably nervous about climbing into a van again, but he says the experience wasn't nearly as bad as his first day back in Canada after the accident.
"When I got back to Toronto from Texas, I took an Uber from the airport to my house. I had my neck brace on and everything. The guy actually started driving onto the highway overpass going the wrong way. I just started screaming at him, like, 'What the fuck are you doing?!' The last thing I needed was to be in another car accident. Needless to say, he got a one-star review."
