Blood For Master live at The Parlor March 2012
Blood For Master interview 4/7/12
by Shawn Truitt
We are here in the studio live with Blood For Master, a great Austin, Texas Metal band that a bunch of us got to see at The Parlor during SXSW12, it was a rippin’ up show and felt like we really had to get them in here, talk to ‘em, see what they had to say, let ‘em run their mouths a little bit and play some great music. Could you guys introduce yourself and the people that are not here?
A: I’m Aaron, vocals and guitar and we got Rick here, do you wanna say hello to everybody?
R: Hello everybody and I play guitar in Blood For Master and not with us today is James, our drummer an outstanding drummer and Brian plays bass, plays the six-string bass and plays it pretty well, very well actually (laughter). We were looking forward to coming in and doing this show. We got that kinda last minute, we were a last minute add on for that and it turned out pretty good (3/16/12 show).
Yeah, that was quite the line up and things got a little out of control at a couple points of the night but that’s the way it’s supposed to go. We should thank Jasmine for putting that show on at The Parlor and support The Parlor. So, I should thank you guys for supporting KAOS (http://kaosradioaustin.org/) because I know you’ve played the Saturday Night Drunk Club a couple of times so we really appreciate you taking the time to be with us.
Tonight is a full moon; is that going to affect the interview in any way?
R: Probably yes,
A: That’s when we get our best drinking done.
There’s definitely gonna be some drinking happening and it’s already started. Just in a general way, could you describe the genre of your music or some of your basic influences?
A: It always seems that every time we meet people that talk about the band I guess everybody has a different interpretation. I’ve heard Sludge Metal or Doom Metal, I don’t guess when we started we wanted to make it sound one way or another, just a standard four-piece band. I don’t know what do you think Rick.
R: That about sums it up, I mean it’s Doomy, it’s Metal, it’s a little old school; there’s a lot of modern stuff too it. I’ve had some people come up after shows and say “you really listen to a lot of Slayer don’t ya’ dude”. Well, kinda yeah. “YEAH, I thought so”. We’ve never made any conscious decision to put anything like that in the songs. I don’t really care what people call it really if they show up and they like it and come and see us some more, then it’s all good.
Absolutely, I would agree with that. The Slayer aspect, I would agree with but I hear, especially in your leads as much Judas Priest with your style of leads and the progression of your guitars as much as I hear Slayer. Also, there is that Doom aspect especially on the CD but on the live show it seems to be a lot more electric, I don’t want to say faster but it has a whole other energy to it that I was really impressed with. Do you make a point of having a difference between your recorded music and the live shows?
A: The CD we probably did about 2 years ago now and we really haven’t done any other recording other that a couple of live deals that we do with a little RO9. We do a lot of writing, we probably spend more time in the Music Lab, hanging out in there writing than we do playing. Just for personal satisfaction and just hanging out and writing good stuff. We probably only play one or two songs off of that CD anymore and the rest are stuff we’ve written since then. I guess a lot of it has a little more of a dynamic element.
R: The CD is from a couple of years ago and we’ve grown a lot and we’ve begun to throw a lot more ideas into what we’re doing too. I think that’s coming out in our shows, making the shows more dynamic than the CD is. Definitely.
You sound like you are preaching a little bit. How’d that come about?
A: A lot of people ask me that question like whenever we go to the shows. People talk specifically about the song Walk On Water, how that came about and I always tell ‘em, crack jokes on the microphone at the shows because I did grow up in a Southern Baptist Church when I was a little kid. My family was really big into that; we were always at Sunday school. I guess I rebelled against that when I was a little kid. I remember reading in an interview with Bad Religion and they were asked “well, why did you name the band Bad Religion” and they were just like well we just wanted to…anything to piss my parents off is what I wanted to do. I guess there is a huge aspect to that, like using that sermon style approach. Talk about something obviously other than Jesus or whatever. I guess it just came from that. When we first started playing it didn’t really dawn on me that that was going on until a lot of the people in the crowd would come up and say that to me.
The old band I was in, the very first show that we ever played we realized that the guitar player’s mom was an actual preacher and had a church in East Texas somewhere. Of course all the lyrics in those songs were as fucked up as we could possibly make them and after the show she came up to me and introduced herself. The very first thing she said was “Wow, you really have a sermon style delivery of your songs. Of course I was happy that she didn’t punch me in the face.
That would be very unchristian like. So Rick, are you preaching Metal through your guitar?
R: No. (laughs) No, just jamming out. You mention the preaching stuff, the beginning of the song Annihilate and Crucify; there is a little mini sermon there. We don’t always do that but that recording was from a Dirty Dog Show (Dirty Dog Bar) and I like when we include that in the beginning. It ads a nice bit of drama, it’s a show.
Dirty Dog has a great sound system, if you don’t go there you really should. Can you give me a rundown on the equipment you use and the CD, getting the music completed, printed, put out and released?
A: Ultimately the band started, if we are going to go back that far, James and I were in another band called When Cougars Attack. That band fell apart and James the drummer and I knew immediately we wanted to start another band. He had a couple good friends, Brian who is the bass player in our band and of course Rick and right away we started writing. In a short amount of time from some songs we had left over we started working on and Rick had some great ideas for songs so we had a pretty fair amount of songs that we wanted to do something with. If you are going to play around here you really need to have something to give away or sell so that people remember the name. A friend of ours was going to school down in San Marcos and she needed to do something for her capstone project and it worked out good for us. We didn’t spend a lot of money on it, it was a learning experience for all of us at the time and that’s been roughly two years ago. The songs you were asking us about, a lot of the new sounds or new songs sound totally different than a lot of the old stuff and what is on that CD. I guess it’s because the CD has been roughly two years ago. The new stuff has evolved since then.
R: Absolutely it has. Aaron handled financing that CD, it was his baby. We wanted to get that done and most of the material on it was already written that he wanted to play with When Cougars Attack. For whatever reason they were not able to. We would really like to get another one going because we do have a lot more material.
Where can people get the Blood for Master CD or obtain some of your music from download?
A: You can get the CD from Facebook and Myspace, we have a Paypal link. Or you can just e-mail us at bloodformaster@gmail.com and I’ll send you the Paypal deal. We still have a couple of them left from the first printing. You can hear the songs and download them our Reverb Nation page.
Have you toured, are you looking to tour and if you did who would you like locally to support and go on tour with?
A: That is a really good question. No, we have not currently toured with this band but we’ve played some out of town shows. I guess it really comes down to finances and we spend way more money on beer than we do on anything else. (laughs) We have not decided against touring it just something that has not come up yet. We spend a lot of time at the Music Lab hanging out having fun. Our immediate goal is to hang out and write music and have fun of course inconsequently we go play shows and here and there. We have played shows with really good bands around here like Hot Rails To Hell, Unmothered and Of The Sun. We play a lot of shows with the Texas Metal Collective, a booking group from around here. We are really stoked to work with them because they are people that are really listening to the bands and want to support local Texas Metal. We really stand behind what they are trying to get across.
R: The show coming up at Dirty Dog on April 26th is going to be a Texas Metal Collective show. We also have a show June 10th down at Stardust in South Austin. That would be a Sunday night and we go on about 11pm. To talk about some bands we’d like to play shows with or tour with but I’m almost afraid to mention any more of them because I know that I’ll start forgetting them too. There is Headcrusher from Columbia and those guys kick ass, they are really really good. Love to do shows with Of Gods and Empires and Brink of Disaster, which are some other bands from the Metal Collective. Slay the Dawn is getting ready to have another show too. Any of those bands we love doing shows with.
