Jay Randall: We absolutely love that record. It was a project record. First, we had the concepts. Then we laughed ourselves sick over it. Then we actually had to commit and service it. Getting it all organized was hard. You are talking 99 songs. It was bananas.
When people who know the band’s back catalog really well heard the new album what did they think?
Everyone at the label (Relapse) is in love with it. There are a lot of people that come from that same period and background as Scott and I have. You are talking about a label that bought up Cryptic Slaughter’s back catalog. Everyone there is pretty well-versed in our influences and appreciates it completely.
Some of the younger fans that might not know that sound or appreciate it might feel a little shorted on this one. It’s weird, we’ve sort of spearheaded a genre of these bedroom drum machine guys. Altered States is like the holy grail for a lot of those bands. There might be a little backlash from that but we’ve always done whatever we wanted with each record and this is no exception. It’s not like we aren’t ever going to do another record of 30-second blast songs.
Do you feel in any way responsible for unleashing the wave of porngrind?
I never thought I was coming off like that. I didn’t expect it to have that impact. Even some of the comments and people who friend request us on MySpace, it’s kind of shocking to me. I feel kind of pigeonholed with the whole scene and I certainly don’t want to be lumped in with it. I write lyrics with my own selfish intentions. I find them funny and a good read but I wasn’t trying to force us into one particular genre of anything.
Do you think some people don’t see the irony in your lyrics and approach?
It’s unfortunate. There are people that get it , who get the mindset behind it, and the people that take it for face value and blindly cheer it on. And some of those people scare me.
The new material does give you an opportunity to play what would be considered a full set.
There’s definitely the potential to recreate these songs live and maybe even adopt a live drummer. But we’re so many states away from each other and at this point if we played the expectations would be so high that it would have to be spot on.
We’ve also never been that band. I’m not sure if I fancy myself a performance artist. I’m not sure that I’m that guy. I don’t feel any shame in that. I just don’t know if I can get up there and stage rage. I’m not sure that’s my thing.
