WITCHERY - Hard Metal Hellride! Page 2
by Martin Popoff

One thing folks notice with a Witchery album, and something that brings about a good-time vibe to the proceedings, despite the grimly fiendish nastiness of the band's writing, is a certain loose-bolted organic-ness. Don't Fear The Reaper doesn't find the band letting up at all with respect to letting down their hair.

"We try to stick with the old methods of doing things," explains Sharlee. "We still record all the basics together, the guitars, bass and drums, rather than putting on one instrument at a time. The first album was extreme, because you couldn't even repair stuff. There was something wrong with the tape recorder; it needed some bias adjusting or something. Because if you tried to punch in to something you had already done, it left a big gap. So everything you heard, we had to take everything again if we had to do something different. But this one, we've been able to punch in and repair bits and pieces and put overdubs on it, guitars and voices, whatever we needed."

Writing-wise, Sharlee says the dynamic is pretty much business as usual. "Most of it is Jensen and Richard (ed. Patrick Jensen and Richard Corpse), which is quite normal in bands - the guitar players do it (laughs). One song on there, Ashes is definitely a step away from stuff we've done before, partly because it's got keyboards on it. It's also a bit moodier and the lyrics are quite dark, and not so funny, if you can put it that way. It's a little bit more depressive than anything we've done before."

"It's the good old things that belong in metal," laughs Sharlee, asked about lyrical themes in general. "It's all graveyards and ghosts and things like that. We haven't changed much in that department. We just try to do clever things that give pointers to the past as well. We deliberately steal stuff from other people, if we think it's funny, and see if people can spot it. It's never just one thing. It's little things here and there in certain songs, that we just pick up. For example, if you listen to Plague Rider, there's a little bit of Mercyful Fate in that one, and Damned In Hell as well. Cannon Fodder has a little Slayer here and there. And then lyrically, The Ritual, there is actually stuff that is more or less stolen from Destruction. But it was so blatant and so obvious that Jensen actually called Shmier and said, 'Well, I've done this; what do you think?' And Shmier was like 'Hey, go for it; I don't care.' Because it wasn't even sugarcoated in any way."

WITCHERY - Hard Metal Hellride! Page 3