This interview was conducted by Philip A. Wickstrand with guitarist Cory Boyd and bass guitarist Gabe Franco on October 31, 2010 during the final show at Portland, Oregon's legendary Punk and Metal club, Satyricon.

Heavy Artillery has been signing some damn fine bands lately. I'm proud to say that both EXCRUCIATOR and SPELLCASTER come from my home town of Portland, Oregon. In the case of SPELLCASTER, they are all surprisingly young, with vocalist Thomas Adams being the only member over the age of 21. Their talent and song writing ability goes beyond their age as they have delivered one of the best demos that have ever reached my ears. The future is bright for these lads, mark my words.

Phil: First of all, you just played the final show at Satyricon - what are your thoughts on that?

Cory: It was great.

Gabe: Very kickass.

Cory: Good crowd, good show, good sound.

Gabe: Great audience.

Cory: A lot of fun.

Phil: How was your recent tour?

Cory: It was very good.

Gabe: It was badass - we toured all over the U.S., over to Chicago, down to Texas and California and stuff. Had a good amount of run ins with the police on the way there - actually got some guns pointed at us in New Mexico. Other than that, the tour kicked a lot of ass.

Phil: I heard the show in Chicago didn't go down.

Cory: Nah, it got canceled 'cause the promoter just didn't really do a good job promoting, so he didn't do his job very well and he didn't promote it and the opening band just didn't show up, so we were sitting there and there was ten minutes before the show was supposed to start and this opening band wasn't even there and the owner of the club was like, "So either you guys are going to pay us to play tonight or we're going to cancel the show." So it was like, "I guess we'll just pack up then."

Phil: And what is the name of this venue so that any bands reading this can not book their shows there?

Cory: It was called Nite Cap. It's like a bar in Chicago and apparently the shows are usually pretty good there, but I heard from the sound guy that there was actually a big Metal show going on that night where a bunch of old bands from Chicago were reuniting and doing like a one night meeting again, kind of like what we're doing here, so that kind of stole the big crowd.

Gabe: We did play with some sick bands on tour, too, like in Albuquerque, we played with DREAD; those guys kicked ass, they were amazing. San Francisco, we played with MIDNIGHT CHASER and met this guy Steve, he plays guitar for them, he treated us awesome; let us stay at his place and shit. And we have to say, down in Texas when we played in San Antonio, this fucking guy, Trans Am, he let us drink in his bar, like both bands for the whole night, we probably got over a thousand dollars in free booze.

Cory: He's pretty awesome. He's from a band called HOD. They're fucking rad.

Phil: All right, tell us how you signed with Heavy Artillery. [laughter]

Cory: They heard us, actually through, I know it sounds really stupid, but they heard us through our MySpace page and they heard the three tracks that we'd recorded for that EP and they liked it and I got a message from Dave, their A&R guy. He's like, "Hey guy, I really like these songs…" well, actually I think we only had one or two of them up at the time when he heard it, so he's like, "Will you send me your full demo?" So I'm like, "Yeah," shipped it to him, couple days later he emailed me back, it's like "Hey, I played the demo for everyone here at the label and they all said thumbs up all around, so we want to know what your future plans are." Then about a week later we got the contracts, browsed through them and signed our lives away.

Phil: Did you notice that part at the bottom where it mentioned your eternal soul?

Cory: Yeah, yeah.

Gabe: We saw that part.

Cory: We saw that, but we figured it was a fair trade.

Phil: Tell us a bit about the reissue of the demo. I understand it sold really well the first day.

Cory: Yeah, that's what we heard from Heavy Artillery, apparently. I'd asked how many we'd sold in the first couple days and they said they'd sold 67 vinyls and 125 of the CD's in three days, so pretty shocked to see that. I thought it was an error at first.

Gabe: Considering we're still pretty no-name, you know.

Cory: I couldn't believe people even knew who we were. Like then people started sending pictures of themselves holding the vinyl, like some dude from France - all this crazy shit, you know. It's crazy. I'm still completely shocked that people actually know who we are even though we just have an EP out. But it went pretty well, sol a good amount.

Phil: Tell us a bit about what you plan for your first full-length album.

Cory: The three songs from the EP are gonna be on there and then there's going to be about… four other songs.

Gabe: Yeah, we're probably going to have seven or eight songs.

Cory: I think we'll have seven. Pretty much every song we played tonight is going to be on there. It's pretty much songs we've played around town and stuff. I mean, it's kind of hard to tell what songs are what when we play live, but we have about seven or eight songs that are going to be on there.

Phil: Going to be putting "Four Loko" on there? [laughs]

Cory: You know, we've had a couple people ask that and I think we might put it at the very end after five minutes go by, just at the very end as a bonus hidden track that people will hear if they leave the CD on or something, but we'll probably just record it in one take, just really shittily…

Gabe: Sloppy and do it drunk.

Cory: Like very sloppy and we'll do it while we're drunk on Four Loko if it's not banned by then. [laughter]

Phil: Recommend a book for our readers and then tell why you recommend that particular work.

Cory: I would recommend "Sound of the Beast" by Ian Christe. That's a good book. I just read that one not too long ago and I mean, most of those Heavy Metal books, like histories and stuff, I'll browse through them for couple minutes and it's just shit you already know; it's pretty basic stuff, but that guy really did a good job of really… showing a lot of stuff.

Phil: Though he did call METALLICA Power Metal.

Cory: Yeah, yeah - he did. [laughter] He called 'em Power Metal, that was a little weird. I thought it was a pretty good book. I thought he did a pretty good job, you know, kept it exciting - it wasn't just "This band is from this place and this band's from here" - he really dwelled in all kinds of different things with Metal and stuff, so that was pretty good.

Gabe: You talking about band bios or…?

Phil: Any kind of book. And Playboy is not a book. [laughter]

Gabe: Well, there goes Hustler. [pause] I would have to say… I actually just finished reading a book called "At the Mountains of Madness" by HP Lovecraft and if I was going to recommend a book to someone, it would probably be that just 'cause it's really interesting if you're into the whole Sci Fi/Fantasy thing, which I am sort of into, so it's a pretty interesting book.

Phil: That's the first time I've ever asked that question to two people and I've read both of them. [laughter]

Cory: Nice.

Phil: Okay, where do you see yourselves a year from now?

Cory: Dead… just joking. [laughs]

Gabe: Doing coke off stripper's asses. [laughter]

Cory: Well, next year in March is the plan… the full-length is supposed to come out and once that comes out we just want to tour non-stop, as much as we possibly can. When were on tour, we actually had this manager, Marco Barbieri, he does WARBRINGER and BONDED BY BLOOD and some of those guys…

Phil: Oh wow, if he does WARBRINGER, you really will be touring all the time! [laughs]

Cory: Yeah. And he came out, and I don't want to say anything for sure 'cause he never made any promises, but he came out and he said he liked us and stuff, he said it sounded good and everything, like "Yeah, let's stay in touch" and I just talked to him the other day and he said he's looking forward to hearing the full-length and seeing where that goes, so if our full-length does well and that guy takes interest in us, we will probably be touring all the time. And maybe playing in some pretty high end venues if he gets us on a package tour, like with WARBRINGER or some band like that, playing at the Hawthorne or whatever. That would be insane.

Gabe: We'd be very stoked about that.

Cory: Yeah, that would be really cool. I mean, I love doing the DIY tours, like what we just did - that was really, really fun, but that would just be mind blowing to play in front of hundreds of people every night, that'd be crazy. But that's pretty much the goal for next year - tour, put out the full-length, see where that goes… oh, go over to Europe. Canada and Europe are like our two…

Gabe: Going up to Canada. I hear that's a good Metal scene.

Cory: We received a lot of really good responses and stuff about the EP from people up in Canada, so definitely want to do Canada on the next tour and obviously try and get over to Europe, like as soon as possible. It's just really difficult with the whole cost of traveling over there and everything, but I talked to the dude from Keep It True fest and he said he'd get back to me if there was an interest in having us over, so that'd be cool if we could get on there next year or something. That's be rad. But that's pretty much it - tour, put out the full-length.

Phil: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Gabe: Thanks to everyone who came out on tour, farewell to Satyricon.

Cory: Farewell to Satyricon.

Gabe: I hear the guys from Satyricon are moving over to Branx, new venue, I believe it's in SE, so that should be cool.

Phil: It's the old Loveland space.

Gabe: So hopefully that works out good. But other than that, thanks to all the fucking fans and people who've supported us. I mean, it's only been a year and a half, two years since we started and the response we've gotten is really, really good.

Cory: Yeah, a lot of really cool people, so thank you. Thank you for doing the interview.

Spellcaster

Interviewer: Philip A. Wickstrand

Formed 2009
Portland, Oregon  USA
Label: Heavy Artillery Records
Genre: Heavy / Speed Metal

CURRENT LINE-UP:

Thomas Adams:  Vocals
Cory Boyd:  Guitar
Tyler Loney:  Guitar
Gabe Franco:  Bass
Shad Covert:  Drums

DISCOGRAPHY:

Spells of Speed EP (2010)

(Click on Photo to Enlarge)

November 19, 2010

PHOTOS BY PHIL A. WICKSTRAND

(Click on Photos to Enlarge)

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