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Dismember.
 Every so often in this job, you get that glorious chance to speak with a band you've always been dying to interview. For me, Swedish death metal veterans Dismember are one such group; I've been listening to them for about a decade now, and was therefore very excited to learn of their impending tour here, their first. "Hopefully, the tour will make a lot of old fans happy: the people that have been following us since our first album", says vocalist Matti Karki. "Also, it's just a great opportunity and honour to play in Australia at last."
Dismember have a fairly impressive discography, with six full-length albums to their name so far, and a new (as-yet untitled) one scheduled for release next January. The band's gore-laden first album, 'Like An Everflowing Stream', was released back in 1991, and not long thereafter raised the ire of censors both here (where the album was actually banned) and in England. "Soon after it was released", Karki informs me, "there was a shipment of our records going from our label at the time to its English distributor. Customs made a routine check of the shipment, picked our album up, looked at its cover, and said, 'What is this?' Then they looked at the song titles, and saw this song on the album called Skin Her Alive. They wanted to ban the album from the UK because they thought it was sexist and stuff; they used some stupid Victorian law that said that "indecent and obscene" art is not allowed into the UK. So we had to go to court. We weren't actually the ones on trial - it was the English distributor instead - but we had to go there, witness the whole thing, and listen to the whole album in court! You could see the barrister sitting there, trying not to laugh because no-one could actually hear any of the lyrics! The prosecutor didn't win the case, so the English distributor was free to distribute our album after all. The experience actually gave us the title for our second full-length album, 'Indecent And Obscene', because that's what they were trying to ban us for being."
Another release with an interesting tale connected to it is the band's somewhat generically-titled fourth album, 'Death Metal'. "We had a lot of trouble with our record label at the time", says Karki. "We couldn't work with them because we were just constantly fighting and arguing over stuff. By the time we recorded the album, they were telling us things like, 'Hey guys, death metal is dead. You can't play this music any more. You have to change.' And that just pissed us off. When we were recording the album, some of the hatred we felt for the record label went into the songs because they're pretty aggressive. We didn't have a title for the album, so one day, when everybody was gathered in the studio, [drummer] Fred [Estby] went, 'We should just call the album 'Death Metal' to give the label a big 'fuck off', and everybody went, 'Yeah! Brilliant idea!' So that's how we gave the album its name: it was like a big middle finger to the label!"
Over the years, the focus of the band's lyrics has changed somewhat, moving away from the sort of straight-out gore that was a prominent feature of the group's first two albums to subjects such as war (which Karki, a self-confessed history freak, claims is a big interest of his) and hatred of religion in all its guises. Songs about mental turmoil have also become more popular; as Karki opines, "There's a lot of psychic sickness around these days. In the last couple of years, we've had some really strange things done here by mental patients. The Swedish mental health system isn't one of the best; its budget is getting less and less, and mental patients are being released prematurely. We've had some really bad murders committed by mentally ill people. The Swedish foreign minister was actually murdered by a mental patient a couple of years ago. She was shopping in some big store here in Stockholm, and he just stabbed her to death. And there are also people going wild with things like baseball bats and axes. So that rubs off on the lyrics because I think, 'What the fuck is going on in these people's minds that makes them do this?'"
James Brazel
 | Dismember play at Fowlers Live on Fri 28 Oct with Gospel Of The Horns and Cauldron Black Ram. |
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