BIBLE OF THE DEVIL - A Sharp Pain To The Templars! Page 3
by Martin Popoff

Adds bassist Darren Amaya on making this record conceptual, "Our last album, Brutality, Majesty, Eternity, kind of had a theme about disasters, but we didn't envision it as a concept album as much as we did with The Diabolic Procession. This is the first record we've done where there was a pre-determined theme before the songs were finished."

It's all very high-falutin' for a band called Bible Of The Devil. Sez Mark on the name of the band, "To be honest, it seemed like a way to piss people off when we first chose it, a quality we highly valued in our early 20s. I'm not crazy about it now, because it invites exhausting questions about our involvement with Satanism and silly shit like that. My stock answer these days is 'It's a euphemism for rock 'n' roll itself.'"

"I think for the first time on any of our records I am truly satisfied with the mixing on this one," adds Mark, answering as to any sense of a production philosophy, given the record's sod-busting, bulging, but scrappy and intimate NWOBHM-ish sound. "Sanford (Parker - co-producer, with the band) captured a great separation between instruments and was not shy about mixing vocals fairly high. Lyrically this record is important, so the vocals are more prominent in the mix than on any of our previous efforts. Sanford has a lot of experience recording heavy bands, and we went to him because we know his philosophy is to make it all sound bludgeoning."

"At the same time," notes Nate, "we wanted it to sound big, but not too overproduced. We kept the auxiliary percussion to a minimum this time, as compared to Brutality and Tight Empire. Also, there's more instances that Mark and I are singing together. On this record we really built it from the ground up, to make sure the guitars sounded tight together rather than doing everything live in the studio and hoping we were all on target at once! We went 12 hours a day for a week, right in a row. We'd never been able to do it that way until now, and I like the amount of focus this approach allows. No time for second guessing yourself. Summit or plummet."

Next up for Bible Of The Devil is the proverbial road, and actually, in October, Europe. Quips Nate on the vagaries of touring, "What often happens is that we'll leave a town, and then a friend's band will roll through and the locals will have stories about the crazy things we did. 'Do you know Bible of the Devil? Those guys are out of their f**king minds!' We try to tell our parents that life on the road for a rock band isn't like all of those sex, drugs, and clichˇs of insanity, but the truth is, it really is like that. At least for us. I can't speak for other, less raw, bands (laughs)."

See www.bibleofthedevil.com for more.