This interview was conducted by Philip A. Wickstrand with guitarist Cory Boyd at the Tonic Lounge in Portland, OR on October 14, 2011.

The Portland area has been blowing up for great Metal bands in the past few years. We’ve had a huge influx of talented bands and one of the youngest, with only a single member over the age of 21, is SPELLCASTER. Evoking images of the best of the Traditional and Thrash bands of the ‘80s without sounding like a clone of any of them, SPELLCASTER have quickly made a name for themselves in the underground. With their demo being reissued by Heavy Artillery last year and their full length debut this year, there is no telling how far they can go with the proper exposure.

Phil: First of all, tell us a bit about the debut album, Under the Spell.

Cory: It’s got some new songs on it that weren’t on the EP. It’s more polished, sounds better than the EP. I think we got better as musicians too, so that shows. I just think it’s a lot more overall… it’s pretty cliché, but it overall just seems like it’s better than the EP, obviously.

Phil: What influenced your decision to re-record the tracks from the EP since they’re still available digitally (on Amazon)?

Cory: I think the big reason we wanted to redo them was because when we first did them for the EP, I felt like listening back to them, obviously like I said, I feel like we’ve gotten better at our instruments and better as song writers and stuff, so I just felt that we could do them better and I also wanted to redo it for the full-length since it was going to get a wider release so that anybody who may not have known who we were when the EP came out would have a chance to hear those three songs ‘cause they’re the first songs we ever did and seem to be a crowd favorite, so we just want to make sure people can hear them still.

Phil: What’s the newest song chronologically on the album?

Cory: The newest one is Sands of Fear; that was the last one we wrote.

Phil: Do you think that it stands out as far as maturity in song writing compared to the others or just something that you like every bit as much as the other tracks?

Cory: I like it just as much as the other ones, but I definitely think it’s the most technical song we’ve done; it seems to have the most crazy riffs that we’ve done and stuff like that. We definitely tried to add some more guitar harmony, like some dual lead type shit into that song, so I feel that it’s probably our most technical song we’ve done.

Phil: What was the time in the studio like?

Cory - It was good. It was going kind of slow at first but then it seemed like all of a sudden everything just kind of meshed together well and we started really banging shit out, so it was good; went smooth, drank a lot of beers.

Phil: Did the producer help you with anything you hadn’t thought of working on before?

Cory: Hmmm… let me think… [pause] He tried some different micing techniques, which was kinda cool, just to get a beefier guitar sound. I’m kind of disappointed with the way my guitar sounds, and it’s not Gabe, the producer’s fault at all, it’s my own fault because I found out that my guitar had a Jazz pickup in it’s stock and I didn’t realize that until we started recording, so I got a new pickup that’s way more “Metal” sounding, so half the album sounds good on my side and the other half’s kinda muddy, but he helped us get really cool guitar sounds and stuff and for solos he had us try a lot of different kind of delays and things, trying accurately to get what we were going for, so he definitely helped us out.

Phil: Tell our readers a bit about the artwork. You got the guy who did the artwork for PRIEST’s Painkiller, correct?

Cory: No, it’s actually a different guy. We were originally going to have him do the artwork, but he does all his stuff really digitally now and that was not what we were aiming for, we were going for the classic, hand painted artwork and he sent us a mock-up of what he’d come up with and it wasn’t what we were expecting, like we were expecting a Painkiller / Ram It Down looking cover and it was super photo shopped, digital, like really 3D and we did not want that at all, so we just kind of parted ways - there were no hard feelings, we just told him we were trying to shy away from the digital stuff and we ended up actually contacting Andrei Bouzikov. He did the album cover. He’s done stuff for MUNICIPAL WASTE, he did The Art of Partying and their new one, Massive Aggressive, he’s done SKELETONWITCH and HATCHET and a bunch of bands like that. He did a really, really good job; he did it real short notice. We came up with the concept for the cover, but who sketched it and made it on paper was our friend Brandon Sterling from Washington. Vancouver. So he actually is the person who came up with that and Andrei Bouzikov just painted it, so Brandon actually pretty much drew the album cover.

Phil: How have sales been so far, if you know?

Cory: Apparently they’ve been pretty good. I’m not sure of the exact amount but I actually talked to Heavy Artillery a month ago and asked how the sales had been and they said the vinyls were pretty much sold out and the CD’s were just about sold out. I’m not sure how many CD’s, I know there were about three hundred vinyls pressed, so I guess those are gone and they’re already working on doing another CD run. So pretty good so far.

Phil: How much touring are you planning on doing on this album? I know last time I interviewed you, you had been talking to a guy who does a lot of booking for bands like WARBRINGER and such, so have you been in touch with him?

Cory: We haven’t really been in touch with him that much, but surprisingly, we’re doing a show in Las Vegas, where he lives, and he’s actually going to be there. We didn’t even contact him, he’s just like “Yeah, I’m going to be at your Las Vegas show,” so hopefully we talk to him, see if something gets worked out. But we have some other news that’s really good that could definitely make the touring stuff go up a notch, but it’s not really official yet; it’s still kinda up in the air, so I can’t really talk about it. It would be a very, very big deal. It would help us a lot. We’d be touring probably all the time.

Phil: How many songs to you have ready for your next album?

Cory: So far we only have one because we’ve been fucking being lazy. [laughs] We need to kick it up a notch. We just got a rehearsal space, like a legit one, so I think that we’re going to start kicking out the tunes a lot faster now. We want to have another album ready to go by early next year, hopefully. That’s the plan, like maybe March at the latest.

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

Cory - I just finished reading At the Mountains of Madness, that’s a good one. That’s a good one, but the second story… the book I had was At the Mountains of Madness plus two short stories…

Phil: Is that the Del Rey pressing?

Cory: Yeah, the one with the guy holding his shirt with the ribs showing and stuff. The second story, The Shunned House, is pretty cool. It’s like a vampire type, creepy story. I recommend that. That whole Del Rey pressing of the book is really good.

Phil: And if you like HP Lovecraft, I would also highly recommend Clark Ashton Smith. His stuff’s a little harder to find and usually more expensive ‘cause most of it’s out of print, but I’d say he’s much better than Lovecraft and I like Lovecraft a lot.

Cory: Well, shit, I’ll definitely check him out then.

Phil: Okay, is there anything else you’d like to add?

Cory: Thanks to everybody who’s bought the album and come out to any of our shows and supported us in any way.

Spellcaster's Cory Boyd

Interviewer: Philip A. Wickstrand

November 23, 2011

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PHOTOS BY PHIL A. WICKSTRAND

(Click on Photos to Enlarge)

(Click on Photo to Enlarge)

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)
Under the Spell (2011)

Check out Chris' review of Spellcaster's Under the Spell here