Baton Rouge doom/sludge prolific over-achievers, Thou has returned from an almost unheard of (for them, anyway) two years of silence as far as releases are concerned with their latest and greatest full-length, Heathen. We recently sent guitarist Andy Gibbs and vocalist Bryan Funck a bunch of questions to respond to via email. It would appear they approach interviews with the same prolific depth as they do everything else. So, I’ll shut the hell up so you can read all about everything that’s going on with Thou in the here-and-now.
First off, what do we need to know about the history of Thou that hasn’t been driven into the ground in other interviews? As time has passed, have you come to any realisations about how your early days as a band has impacted how you go about existing as a band in the present?
Andy: I don’t think we have a particularly interesting back story, honestly. We’re just another group of 20-and-30-something year-old dudes who practice in a dirty, cramped practice space. I do think that our semi-rigorous practice schedule in the early days did us a lot of good in terms of figuring out what we wanted to sound like. We started out with a more post-rock-y sound and very quickly got heavier and heavier. And certainly I think that [bassist] Mitch [Wells], [guitarist] Matthew [Thudium] and I playing music together for so long has streamlined the creative process in a positive way.
Bryan: Aside from Barghest, Thou is really the only band any of us have been in that has gotten a bit of notoriety and became fairly serious. So, there are a lot of areas of learning and growth we’ve blundered through along the way – a lot of aesthetic and identity experimentation. Sometimes I wish I had a clearer idea of how far this band would go, so I could’ve kept things more coherent. I love when bands have such a strict aesthetic that you can immediately identify their record or show flyer. “Oh, this is Iron Lung. This is Crass. This is Celeste. This is Pity Sex.” On the other hand, I’m glad we didn’t pigeon-hole ourselves to any particular approach, be it music, artwork, content or whatever. We still have some willingness to approach things in new ways and that flexibility is really important to us these days, especially, with Andy living in Oakland and Mitch about to move to San Diego. I think if we had been married to only doing things one way, those moves would have killed us. As far as artwork goes, originally, I was trying to fit that “bat logo” onto everything we did. I had this idea that it would be something like our Darkthrone logo. The first few releases also had some typical, boring band tropes: track list on the back, who played in the band, our website, etc. I’m glad it didn’t take me too long to figure out that stuff like that is just filler taking up valuable real estate and contributes to a general band ego that I find useless and self destructive. I think a lot of people think of our art as “woodcuts,” but we seem a little all over the place from my perspective. And there have definitely been a few art and layout choices I’ve regretted. Mostly minor stuff that no one cares about, but things I obsess about when I look at records or can’t sleep at night. I guess we can always do endless represses till I get it right. Sometimes I think we shouldn’t have done so many splits, spreading the material out so much. I feel like we could have been choosier with some of the bands and labels we worked with. It probably would’ve made sense to bite off a chunk of the Rendon songs for a full length or bigger EP between Peasant and Summit. I think a bunch of those songs could have fit together and made a coherent album. We’re a little pickier now when we do splits, but we’re still way into doing them. These days, I think we aim a little higher with the experimentation, letting the split dictate the style or direction we want to take the songs. I think we’ve gained a good bit of focus over the last few years, as far as the writing goes. Then again, sometimes you have to go where the song takes you instead of trying to fit it into the box you want. That’s usually how we end up shaving things down these days. That’s certainly why we have a whole EP worth of songs from the Heathen session that we all really liked but just weren’t fitting within the scope of that record.
How has having a couple members spread around the country affected life in and for Thou?
Andy: As of now, I’m the only one living outside of Louisiana (Mitch is scheduled to move later this year), but we’ve been dealing with it pretty effectively, I’d say. The rest of the band practices regularly without me and when I come to town we get things done pretty quickly. Aside from writing and practicing, the financial burden of figuring out how to cover my plane ticket expenses is a pain that I don’t see going away too soon.
Bryan: We still have some Heathen burnout at the moment, so it’s a little hard to tell, but it’s seemed to have slowed down the writing tremendously. We’re trying to figure out how to approach writing with one of the main authors one the other side of the country. It’s definitely made touring a lot harder. The financial constraints we were already dealing with have sky rocketed. We have to do lots of extra planning and take more time off work than we’d like, even for shorter trips that would’ve been really easy for us to do in the past. Other than that, it’s fine. Me and the three guys in Baton Rouge have been keeping busy with regular practices, re-learning a ton of older songs and playing around with various covers. So, there’s a lot of maintenance and regrouping happening. We had a few months of stagnation after we recorded Heathen, but I think we’re on the right track now.
I noticed that as part of the PR for Heathen that, in addition to the usual metal-centric suspects, that NPR streamed the new album. What are your thoughts on these non-traditional outlets showing interest in a style of music as impenetrable to the mainstream as yours? And how did a band as noisy and miserable sounding as Thou even come to their attention and consideration in the first place?
Andy: People who are into “extreme” music are getting older and finding jobs in the “grown-up” world, so it’s pretty normal that someone who works at NPR is into our type of music. Still, I don’t think they’ll be having us on All Things Considered or Fresh Air any time soon. I’m still waiting for Democracy Now! to get in touch, though.
Bryan: We hooked up with NPR after we saw that first Body thing they did for All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood. Adam Barlett from Gilead Media reached out to Lars, who’s a bit younger and comes from the DC punk scene, to see if they would want to do anything with Summit. And they did the “First Listen.” I don’t think music that’s as long-winded as ours, or any music with screaming is going to go very far in the mainstream, but we’re not particularly concerned with that. I love that NPR and outlets like that have taken an interest in some harsher music. I’d love to see more folks around who practice critical thinking and aren’t embroiled in any scene politics.
Was the sound you’ve carved out for yourselves over the years something you pointedly went towards playing, or was the sludge/doom/whatever something you fell into serendipitously? How difficult is it to summon those demons so as to write such punishing odes?
Andy: Not that difficult, to me at least. At this point, when I’m coming up with riffs it’s not a very emotional process. I’m more just fucking around until something sounds good. The emotion comes later when we’re playing live or recording and I’m reflecting more on what I wrote and how it fits in the larger context of our band. But as far as the sound is concerned, we’ve definitely been on a straight-ahead course towards heavier and heavier songs from the inception of the band to the present, though we’ve never really seemed to fit too easily into the whole doom/sludge world of H.P. Lovecraft and pentagrams. While I think our inclination towards “doom” is deliberate, I think that our sound has changed pretty organically, and we’re really just playing what we think sounds interesting instead of what sounds brutal enough or whatever.
Bryan: Before I joined the band, they were doing more of a Pelican/Isis post-rock thing. I think after they wrote that first batch of songs, they started fooling around with lower tunings and wrote “Fucking Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean.” All the Tyrant songs sprung from that first one. I joined Thou after all the music for Tyrant had already been recorded and Matthew’s vocal tracks somehow got erased. So when I stepped in, it was already headed in a heavier direction. We’ve always talked about how we don’t want to be one of those bands that eventually loses all of their heaviness and only writes really mellow songs. That being said, we’re really taken with the idea of exploring different styles while still retaining the sound or feeling we identify as ‘Thou,’ which I think relies more on a sense of melancholia than it does, “br00tal,” heavy riffs. We have plans for doing a lot more acoustic and pretty/quiet songs. But I doubt we’ll ever totally drop the harshness associated with our music. And, unless the world and everyone in it changes drastically, I don’t think we’ll ever have a rough time writing sad/angry/exxxtreme songs.
How did you managed to maintain such a prolific period of releases from 2008-2012 without burning yourselves, and the various labels you worked with, out? Or is that heavy release schedule what contributed to the comparatively lengthy gap leading up to Heathen? Do you think you’re going to be heading back into the direction of releasing shit-tons of material or is life and all that life stuff making you take a second look at Thou’s amounts of activity?
Andy: We really only look so prolific on paper. In reality, we wrote a big chunk of songs after Peasant and recorded them in a marathon recording session. The songs were then dispersed among a bunch of different splits. And from then on, each of our recording sessions have been dual-purposed. With Summit, for instance, we recorded a handful of other songs that were used for different EPs and some other odds and ends. Ditto with basically every other one of our records to date. We actually just did a catch-all recording session in November. The gap leading up to Heathen had a few catalysts: we had a long period of inactivity after our European tour in 2012 because I traveled for a bit and then moved across the country; also some of the material recorded during the Heathen sessions got pushed back in terms of release dates; and then Heathen itself got pushed back a few times, so we could get the mixes and the layout squared away. And even now we’ve had to push back the US vinyl release because the test presses weren’t sounding right! So it’s been a comedy of errors. I think our release schedule will slow down, but I’m sure we’ll manage to release at least a couple records every year. We are doing a bit more touring than we’d originally planned, but with Mitch moving later this year I’m not sure if that’ll continue. We’re really just taking people up on their offers at the moment, whether its bands we like touring with or fests we want to play.
Bryan: These guys had spent a year writing and recording Tyrant before I joined the band and slapped my ramshackle vocals and mealy-mouthed lyrics over their hard work. So that one shouldn’t even count. Half the Oakland Singles songs were also written before I came on board. We kind of sped through writing and recording Peasant, for better or worse. The Rendon Singles stuff was a pretty good chunk. We just hit a good spurt of writing, started going in some new directions musically, and came up with a few long songs. Summit and the stuff we did with that had a lot of starts and stops, a few different spurts. Songs got scrapped or totally re-worked. We wrote the last couple of songs for that record the week before we went into the studio. It was pretty stressful. And then [drummer] Josh [Nee] joined right after that record, and brought in this renewed energy that led to the To the Chaos Wizard Youth stuff. It never really seems that drastic from our point of view because we’ll have a few songs for a while that we play, then we write a few more and on and on. There were definitely times when we’d ramp up the pressure to get a release done in time for a tour or whatever. But then again, there were also plenty of deadlines we missed because we just couldn’t produce the material, or something didn’t come out quite right, there was some technical issue or someone else flaked on us. I’m not really sure how things will pan out over the next few years as far as output goes. We’ve been a little burnt out from the Heathen, Sacrifice, and Released from Love stuff. If we weren’t having practices to get ready for all these tours, we’d maybe be working on some new stuff. Right now, we’re focusing on Heathen and old songs for the March and April tours. When we get home, we’ll have about two months to pull together some very basic ideas for the second collaboration with The Body. The July tour will mostly be collaboration sets, and we’ll be recording the second record with them about halfway in, once we get up to Providence. After the July tour, we’ll probably take a couple of weeks to recoup then start digging into the various new ideas we have. If inspiration strikes us, we might get a spurt of material, but there’s no telling. After we recorded To the Chaos Wizard Youth, we spent a couple of months working on a Fiona Apple tribute. That got put on hold, and we started writing for the Cower split. I think we spent a good month or two banging our heads against the wall on that one till we finally hit our stride and banged out a handful of songs we were happy with. We’re always really ambitious in the brainstorming stage, but we’re also fine with shelving or abandoning a song or idea if it’s not working or doesn’t meet our standards. We definitely won’t be touring too much over the next few years. We’re not living on the streets or squatting, but none of us are really well-off financially. It’s pretty hard for some of us to even miss out on work, let alone save up the money we need now to make tours happen. The April and July tours we’re doing are going to be pretty rough. As of right now, we’re not looking to do anything else till April or July of next year, and that will probably be out to Europe for no more than a few weeks. Life stuff is definitely a huge factor for us, juggling all our other responsibilities, significant others, family, bands, shows, volunteer projects, work. We’re all in our late 20s and early 30s, so those things have definitely started to pile up.
Ok, Heathen. Did you have any specific goals about what you wanted to achieve going into the writing and recording of the album? Mistakes you wanted to avoid, stuff you wanted to deliberately experiment with, anything in particular you wanted to do differently or the same as past recordings, etc.? How did the actual recording of the album differ from other studio experiences?
Andy: I would say this is our most calculated album to date, for sure. Ever since we recorded Summit I feel like we’ve got more and more anal about the way the records sound, especially the full-lengths. I went into the recording sessions expecting to have a very intense few days of meticulous nit-picking and marathon overdub sessions, but it actually went very smoothly, mostly due to our recording-wizard James Whitten. The process was very similar to everything we’ve recorded Summit-and-beyond, since we’ve used the same studio every time and James knows exactly what we’re going for. We usually have a little chat beforehand about what kind of tone we want to get and all that, so we’re all on the same page. We were definitely looking to experiment more with clean parts and less ‘metal’ stuff, most of which found its way onto the album via interludes. I think in the future we’ll work more on incorporating that stuff into the songs themselves. At this point, I’m not worried about us sounding heavy enough, so my attention is on other things. I guess in the earlier days of the band I felt like we had to constantly throw in the heaviest riffs we could muster, and now I just want to come up with interesting melodies and mess with walls of feedback. Overall, my goal was to come out with the most cohesive-sounding album we could, and in that I feel pretty good about the job we did.
Bryan: I think like most musicians, we wanted this record to be better than the last one. I’m really proud of Summit, but it just wasn’t as expansive as I had hoped it would be. If we hadn’t had other records on our plate at the time, we probably could’ve included “Voices in the Wilderness” and “Bonnet Carré” on that record. Then again, if we had included those songs (which we had written earlier on), we wouldn’t have had the pressure on us to write “Grissecon” or “Another World is Inevitable.” Regardless, to me, all of those songs, even though they fit together, still sound like they could’ve used a little more refining – either in the studio or the practice space. The only other goal we were really married to was getting across the lyrical themes of nature and physicality. After Matthew and I had a long talk about his ideas for “Free Will,” I expanded those ideas to include the need for prescient experience and active participation. Sound-wise, Matthew had written “Free Will” pretty early on to set the tone for things. So we had a pretty clear idea of where we wanted to go. At some point, when things were looking a little bleaker with the amount of songs that were coming together, we talked about doing some black metal stuff on here and having one side of the record be Heathen and the other side as Magus. But I think towards the end of writing we dropped that thought because we knew we had almost too much stuff for a singularly-themed record, plus all the black metal ideas had been mangled into other things. We also talked about having all the interludes early on. We wanted to have little bits tying all the songs together into one, big piece, but also write these little parts that could almost stand alone as their own songs. We talked about having some electronic pieces, drone and noise stuff, just whatever we could think of. It ended up being just a few guitar things and the long ambient piece we tied into “Immorality Dictates,” but I’m really happy with all those songs, and I’m definitely hoping we can do more of that in the future. I think the biggest thing we wanted to avoid with this record was having the same level of stress we did just before we recorded Summit. We didn’t quite succeed on that end, but we definitely made some small steps towards improvement. Really, we had a big chunk of the material pretty close to being done before the last week of rehearsals. It was more a matter or fleshing some songs out and tightening things up to our standards. “Ode to Physical Pain” was the biggest writing project we had in that last push, and I was probably more than a little annoying about us finishing that one. I just loved that first riff. It’s probably my favorite thing Matthew has ever written. The actual recording was pretty typical for us. We spent a day or two tracking with The Body for the collaboration, then two days of tracking Heathen and the EP tracks, maybe a day of just overdubs, all of that at the Living Room in Algiers. We did some of the guitar overdubs and most of the vocals at James Whitten’s space. The recording got a little hairy with people’s work schedules. I think we’ll probably all try to free up more time on the next one, so there’s less down time and we can do more with the studio. The only real difference with this recording is that we were all a lot more locked in with James on this one, as far as getting the sounds we wanted, ideas for overdubs, stuff like that. James Whitten is essentially the sixth member of Thou at this point. I’m not sure we would sound anywhere near as good as we do on the records without him.
Were you able to consciously say at any point in the creation process that, “Yes, this particular current event/album we were listening to/this relationship I’m in/kick ass amp I bought/financial hardship I suffered/etc. has contributed to the direction of Heathen”?
Andy: Yes and no. Obviously, no one creates in a vacuum, but like I mentioned earlier, the emotional content is something I usually reflect on after the writing is done. It’s weird because my feelings about a song are sometimes totally different from the lyrical content. “Feral Faun” for instance: we played that song live for the first time the day before I moved out of New Orleans, and I was going through a lot complex emotions about leaving all my friends behind and all that, so to me that song is forever tied to that feeling regardless of what the song is actually about.
Bryan: I’m of the mind that all of your life experiences add up to who you are at any given point. But lyrically with Heathen, I definitely wasn’t focused on a singular issue; with each song I was just trying to dig into the minutiae of the broader themes of the record, but those were all still pretty general ideas—accessing the wildness within our beings that is restrained by society; opening ourselves to nature and the physical world; our insignificance within the larger context of the universe; the usefulness of pleasure and pain. I tried to tackle all of these things from the culmination of my life, thoughts, and hopes—rather than restricting the lens to a singular experience. I feel like that limitation would have been the antithesis of Heathen: all experience has some value and can be useful.
How would you characterise Heathen against previous full-lengths or those EP/split releases you’ve found Thou fans gravitating towards as most popular or definitive?
Andy: I think this is definitely some of our more accessible material, despite the lengthy song times. We’ve taken to saving our more abrasive stuff for EPs/splits and focusing on melody for the full-lengths. I think anyone who thinks Summit is our best album is going to love Heathen. And anyone who thinks Summit is the worst should just wait a little while until the next batch of stuff comes out!
Bryan: To be honest, I’m still amazed that people like our band at all, so I can’t really speak to what’s popular. I’m really proud of Summit, but I’ve always felt like it got an inordinate amount of attention and acclaim compared to our other releases. I definitely think that Heathen is by far the best thing we’ve written so far. Is it the definitive Thou release? I think we used a lot of our usual tricks, as far as riffs and melody and song structures. So in that sense, it’s very prototypical for us. But I also feel like we still have a lot more to offer in some other, more drastic directions. Regardless of how the record ends up being received, we’re all really happy with it, and I feel like it’s raised the bar for us on the next record.
There’s a quote on the Gilead press page that goes a little like so: “RIYL: Nature, the sensual world, sexual decadence, pain and ecstasy, actively experiencing the present…” Discuss.
Bryan: I wrote that out of frustrated boredom with those stupid one-sheet recommendation listings I see all the time. Admittedly, I understand the usefulness of the shorthand, but most of those things are hilarious if not completely wack-a-doo. I just wanted something that clearly stated the thematic elements of our record without falling into the hyperbole of a poorly written record review or the laziness of musical cross comparisons.
Judging by your website’s exhaustive listing of all your songs/lyrics, I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and assume lyrics aren’t something created as an afterthought. In that case, how would you say Heathen differs thematically and/or lyrically from other works? Did you find that being as prolific as you were for a few years made it increasingly difficult to come up with unique twists on those topics which interest you, or even fresh topics to focus on? Were you ever guilty of repeating yourself, subconsciously or not?
Bryan: Writing lyrics is my only real job in the band, so I definitely take some time. I’m not sure how this one compares lyrically to the other stuff. I’m happy with everything. I’m sure there’s my usual enormous helping of hyperbole and melodrama. There are definitely metaphors and images I find myself constantly coming back to. It would be funny to do a word count of the lyrics and see how many times I use variations of fire, ocean, night, death, etc. Hopefully, I’m putting some unique spin on the more typical metal tropes. I’m not really overly concerned with revisiting a topic. I feel like if I’m writing about something again it’s usually because I have more to say or a different way to say it. I think the world we live in is a bottomless well of topics for me to write sad or angry songs about. So I’m not too worried about running out of source material any time soon. I have an overactive imagination and a big mouth in general, so I could probably talk endlessly about most things. I’m a Pisces. Heathen, and the next big record Magus, are meant to be deeper explorations of the hopeful vision of Summit. Each record is meant to tackle one extreme of the dual-natured individual it might take to actualize that concept. Magus is going to be about the ethereal – theory, history, philosophy, magick – while Heathen is about the physical world, the senses and active experience,
What’s the who/what/where/when/why and how behind the cover image? I’m tempted to say that the image doesn’t fit in with the path of highly-detailed, ornate, almost woodcut/early industrial age-looking images you’ve used with many of your covers, but then again, it’s not like every cover has looked like To Carry a Stone and Dwell in the Darkness… Anyway, what gives?
Bryan: The woman on the cover of the CD is Julia Prinsep Jackson as “La Santa Julia” by Julia Margaret Cameron from 1867. I feel like those Cameron images are actually a lot closer to the woodcut stuff we use; it all has the same medieval, magickal, old world feel to me. I was just looking for something that had the same sort of hopeful-yet-despondent feel as the images from the Summit CD, but also looked markedly different.
Thou’s website is at noladiy.org/thou/. You can easily spend hours reading lyrics, reading updates and downloading their discography free of charge!
Regardless of who’s living where, they aren’t going to be home much in the next couple of months. Here’s where they will be:
*West Coast with CLOUD RAT*
04.11.14 – Champaign at Error Records (702 S. Neil Street) at seven pm with Weekend Nachos, Enabler, Northless, Angry Gods, and Doomsayer // Skeletal Lightning Fest
04.12.14 – Iowa City (matinee) at Public Space One with Darsombra and Aseethe
04.12.14 – Omaha at The Westwing at ten pm (301 S 38th Avenue)
04.13.14 – Denver at Mutiny Information Cafe (2 S. Broadway) at nine pm with Primitive Man and Swells
04.14.14 – Billings at Black Sparrow Tattoo Club (1940 Grand Ave) at seven pm with Show for Nobody
04.15.14 – Seattle with Ô Paon and Samothrace at Blacklodge at nine pm
04.16.14 – Olympia (matinee) at Ralph House (407 Fairview Street SE) at one pm with Reivers and Hysterics
04.16.14 – Portland at Slabtown (1033 NW 16th Ave.) at eight pm with Ô Paon and Druden
04.17.14 – Portland (matinee) at 10128 NE Pacific Street at one pm with Reivers and Contempt
04.17.14 – Salem at Wisp House (805 Church Street) at seven pm with Hell and OSS
04.18.14 – Sacramento (matinee) at Oak Park Boiz House (3644 1st Avenue) at twelve pm with Tom Hanx
04.18.14 – Berkeley at 924 Gilman Street at seven pm with Negative Standards, Sutekh Hexen, Ragana, and Ritual Control
04.19.14 – Santa Cruz (matinee) at Streetlight Records (939 Pacific Avenue) at three pm
04.19.14 – San Francisco at The Lab (2948 16th Street) at seven pm with Kowloon Walled City
04.20.14 – Oakland (matinee) at Toys in Babeland at three pm with Reivers
04.20.14 – San Jose at San Jose Rock Shop (30 N. 3rd Street) at seven pm with Folivore
04.21.14 – San Luis Obispo (matinee) at Frankie Teardrops (759 Francis Avenue) at two pm with Agowilt
04.21.14 – Goleta at Hard to Find (7190 Hollister Ave) at seven pm with Dangers
04.22.14 – Pomona (matinee) at Aladdin Jr. II (296 W. 2nd Street) with Trapped Within Burning Machinery
04.22.14 – San Diego at Che Cafe at seven pm with Dangers
04.23.14 – Riverside (matinee) at Blood Orange at twelve pm with Moxiebeat
04.23.14 – Los Angeles at the Echo (1820 Sunset Blvd.) at eight pm with Dangers
04.24.14 – Phoenix (matinee) at Wallstreet at three pm with Dross and Funerary
04.24.14 – Flagstaff at The Hive at nine pm with Swamp Wolf and Seas Will Rise
04.25.14 – Albuquerque at Gasworks (2429 Quincy Street NE) at seven pm with Bathhouse and Predatory Light
04.26.14 – Dallas at Taqueria Perditos (4910 Capitol Ave) at nine pm with Orgullo Primitivo, Terminator 2, and Pissed Grave
04.27.14 – New Orleans at Mudlark Theatre at seven pm with Bitchface
*East Coast and Midwest collaboration tour with THE BODY*
06.27.14 – write/practice
06.28.14 – write/practice
06.29.14 – write/practice
06.30.14 – Baton Rouge
07.01.14 – Birmingham at The Forge (5505 1st Avenue) at seven pm with Lume
07.02.14 – Greensboro at Legitimate Business
07.03.14 – Richmond (matinee) at Empire the Bar at two pm
07.03.14 – DC
07.04.14 – Baltimore (matinee) at Sidebar (218 E. Lexington Street) at noon with Curse
07.04.14 – Philadelphia with Hirs, Pissgrave, and Backslider
07.05.14 – Jersey City (matinee) at WFMU (43 Montgomery Street)
07.05.14 – New York (matinee) at ABC No Rio
07.05.14 – New York
07.06.14 – New London (matinee) at The Orphanage (300 State Street) at one pm with Empty Vessels and Snow Orphan
07.06.14 – Amherst with Rozamov
07.07.14 – Boston with Curmudgeon
07.08.14 – Providence at Machines with Magnets
07.09.14 – write/record in Providence
07.10.14 – write/record in Providence
07.11.14 – write/record in Providence
07.12.14 – Syracuse with Bleak and Blood Sun Circle
07.13.14 – Pittsburgh at The Shop
07.14.14 – Detroit at Trumbullplex (4230 Common Wealth) at seven pm
07.15.14 – Grand Rapids
07.16.14 – Michigan City at Carbon Room (9833 W 300 N) at eight pm with Angry Gods
07.17.14 – Chicago at Club Rectum with Ash Borer and Hell
07.18.14 – Oshkosh (collaboration sets) at Masonic Center (204 Washington) at five pm with Ash Borer, Hell, Inter Arma, Protestant, and Oozing Wound // Gilead Fest
07.19.14 – Oshkosh (Body solo) at Masonic Center (204 Washington) two pm with Bastard Sapling, Mutilation Rites, Kowloon Walled City, Geryon, False, Sea of Bones, Owlfood, Hexer // Gilead Fest
07.20.14 – Oshkosh (Thou solo) Masonic Center (204 Washington) at one pm with Barghest, Loss, Uzala, Lychgate, Seidr, Generation of Vipers, Alraune, and Northless // Gilead Fest
07.21.14 – drive home
