Kittie - The Lion Speaks Tonight Page 2
by Martin Popoff

Morgan: "When we first started it was just a case of us doing a lot of cover tunes, anything we could get our hands on. We were just so empty. We wanted to fill ourselves with knowledge of music and whatnot so we just listened to the radio, anything that was cool, and we would just try different stuff out on our own. Growing up, we would listen to anything from like Led Zeppelin, Kiss, AC/DC, Van Halen, to like Slayer, Pantera. I think the music we come up with is just heavy, aggressive, in your face, and you can move to it. Personally I have a lot of friends who are into hip-hop, friends that are into techno and r + b, other girl bands, and I have friends who are into death metal, so we've just kind of mixed it all up. We're surrounded by so many different kinds of music all the time. I'm not very biased or whatever. I like it all." The band's sound is indeed an interesting, un-slottable mix of metals available since the days of grunge. By that I mean it's quite rhythmic, quite hardcore, definitely slammed with the sounds of Seattle, while at the same time soaking up loads of today's neo-metal from Korn to Coal Chamber. The core sound that all of this revolves around however is a bashing and almost doomy caveman metal with big, free-burning riffs, a bit of death, somewhat the post-grunge of Helmet (although Morgan owns only one Helmet album, Betty), in a few words, happy and hard confusion.

Of course, helping to bring this off in professional fashion was none other than '80s hair metal production legend Gggarth Richardson, who signed on because, well, he saw the potential that is now a reality. "Actually a guy who had done our two demos knew him and went to school with him. And he said, 'I'll give him a call and see if he wants to hook up with you guys.' Basically he hadn't talked to Gggarth in a long time, but he was going to send him all his demos he had done at the studio anyway. We recorded the CD at EMAC Studios in London. He sent him that demo and Gggarth was interested and did the album out of just loving the music. He basically did it for beans. He took his own time out from doing other projects and just said, 'OK, I'm just going to do this album'. We did it in nine days, recorded it in May of 1999, even before we signed the record deal. We just went and did it on our own. The drums were all like, one-offs. And basically, all the vocals are like, go in there and sing; there are no double vocals at all. Like I say, it was nine days, fast, furious, just getting the songs out, 12 songs in nine days, pretty hectic."

And the latest Kittie news? "Oh, definitely it has to be Ozz-fest, 100%," offers Morgan. "We're on the second stage and I think it's just an honor to the play with some veterans. Pantera is on there, Ministry is on there, so it's going to be one hell of a summer."