Saviours
West Coast thrashers Saviours chalk up a big rush on Accelerated Living
Early this past summer, when yours truly received Saviours’ three new 7-inch singles, demo tracks released simultaneously as a teaser for their upcoming third full-length, the first thought that arose was, Why even bother recording these tracks all over again? These are perfect! Hastily tracked in the band’s rehearsal space back in April, the four originals and two covers (Saxon’s “Fire in the Sky” and Priest’s “Running Wild”) turned out to be inspired throwbacks to the turn of the ’80s when underground bands and labels like Neat churned out new release after new release with absolutely no idea how to record heavy metal properly, the energy of the performances and the filthiness of the recordings combining to create some of the most visceral, energetic heavy metal the world has known. It’s a sound that has fallen by the wayside in this era of Pro Tools and over-compression, and hearing Saviours ditch the studio polish of 2008’s Joe Barresi-produced Into Abaddon for a looser style perfectly suited to their brand of traditional metal was one of those moments where you see a band coming fully into its own before your very eyes.
As it turns out, the boys couldn’t agree more. “Dude, we considered putting the demos out as the album, we were so fuckin’ pumped on the way they sounded,” confirms guitarist/vocalist Austin Barber from a Taco Bell somewhere in California, where he and drummer Scott Batiste are nursing hangovers a day after performing with 3 Inches of Blood in L.A. “The Kemado dudes, our record label, they were like, ‘Fuck it, let’s just put this out—this is killer!’ We thought about it for a minute, we were like, ‘Cool, we could just do this and pocket 20 grand or whatever and just party.’ But we wanted to make a proper record.”
“We did [the demos] in our practice space with this guy Scott [Ecklein]. He’s in a band that shares the room with us, and he has this laptop and a USB mixer—no outboard gear, just a fuckin’ laptop, you know,” adds Batiste. “But he managed to make it work really well, just us in our little room with our gear, and that’s it. I think because they were demos, we let some shit slide, kind of; we were like, ‘Ah, whatever, it’s just a fuckin’ demo.’ We weren’t going to go back and tweak out on there, fixing everything. But I totally dig that. I love shitty fucking recordings; just as long as the energy’s rad, it’s killer, you know. Like old Jaguar stuff, all that shit, just a weird blown out [sound], taped-up drums.”
As it turns out, the more professionally recorded, aptly-titled Accelerated Living offers a slightly cleaner but by no means less intense package of nine fist-pumpin’ tracks, produced this time around by longtime pal Phil Manley of Trans Am and the Fucking Champs. “We did it at the studio he works at a lot in San Francisco called Lucky Cat,” Batiste explains. “Kurt Schlegel, who’s the sound guy for Fantômas, he used to work with the Melvins a lot; it’s his studio… We wound up using a couple Leslie cabs that used to belong to Anton LaVey that Kurt wound up acquiring at an estate sale or something like that. They’re just terrifying fuckin’ guitar tones; you can hear it on all the solos, the Leslie’s under there somewhere.”
Unlike Into Abaddon and 2006’s Crucifire, every facet of the band has been streamlined. Honed by hundreds of live performances, the foursome, including new guitarist Sonny Reinhardt and drummer Cyrus Comiskey, sounds tighter than it ever has. The songs are much more direct, best exemplified by jaw-dropper “Slave to the Hex,” which sounds like it came straight off Tank’s 1982 classic Filth Hounds of Hades. And lyrically, while Barber still loves to delve into hesher mumbo-jumbo every once in a while, he’s started to focus on more straightforward topics as well, which suits Saviours and this particular album perfectly. “I guess bein’ on the fuckin’ road forever, it’s just like any band—they just start writing songs about being on the road or whatever,” he laughs. “I tried to make a more literal approach, just a little bit. It just comes out. I just get super fucked-up usually, sit in my room, blast tunes, do a bunch of blow, get all drunk, fuckin’ stoned and weird and shit, just write shit. Then it usually takes me like a year to figure out what it was really about, and then I go, ‘Whoa.’
“‘F.G.T.’ was kind of like a planned song,” he continues. “There’s an old Easy Rider [magazine] and it’s got a spread in it. You ever see those old hobo symbols they paint on the side of trains? ‘There’s a woman here that’ll let you sleep, there are cops up the street,’ and all that shit. And there’s this killer page of maybe like 50 or 70 biker symbols, and ‘F.G.T.’ was one of them. Bikers would write it on the wall, like, ‘It’s a fuckin’ good time here’… Tons of fuckin’ people got [it as a] tattoo now—I’ve got one, Scott’s got one, Sonny, all sorts of our friends, some of the Mastodon guys got it, friends of ours from all over the world, the guys at the label have it. I was like, ‘Man, that needs to be a fuckin’ song!’”
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