Last month Goatwhore came to town on December 5th with Lillake and Crowbar at the 5th Quarter Lounge in Indianapolis. And the MWMC’s were lucky enough, thanks entirely to Indy Metal Vault’s Bryan Coffey, to get an interview with Goatwhore’s lead vocalist Ben Falgoust after their set.
MWMC: Can the fans be looking out a new album in the near future?
Ben Falgoust: Yah, yah. Sometime in like mid-2017. We actually just tracked everything and now we’re waiting on the mixing process and then everything will just unfold from that point.
MWMC: How do you guys kill time on the road?
BF: Driving. (Laughs).
MWMC: You guys don’t have much down time then?
BF: No, I mean usually we play shows and sometimes, well not sometimes, most of the time at night we go out places or we go to someone’s house and we hang out for a bit. But then we get up, depending on the drive. Drives can range from, well like tomorrow is easy because we’re going up to Ft. Wayne and it’s only like two hours away. But we came from St. Louis and it was like, it’s only three and a half hours but we changed from central time to Eastern Time so you gotta make up that hour too. So it all depends. And ya know in the duration of the drive you gotta stop and get fuel, you gotta stop and go to the bathroom and you wanna eat. So sometimes a three hour drive and turn into a five hour drive because of stops and things like that. But usually ya know, sometimes we can get to towns early enough we can go to, like this evening we went to Kuma’s to go eat before the show. So sometimes we get to try out the spice of the town. I think a lot of the time the regular default kinda places fall into place a lot because of time. You know trying to move and get to one place in a certain amount of time. So sometimes you just have to settle for the dollar menu.
MWMC: So you guys don’t really get a lot of free time on the road.
BF: No not really, it’s really just most of it is playing and drinking and moving on the road, you know.
MWMC: You guys tour like not many other bands though, I mean like you guys are pretty relentless with the touring. You guys are always out there.
BF: Yah every now and then we get an off day and we try to, depending on where the off day is in between point A and point B at that current time. We try to check, luckily with things like cellphones and GPS now you can kinda search and be like, “well hey let’s get to this point and stay there and go do these things” on a day off. And that way it’s not just like a day off. But sometimes you have like serious hauls. Like the day off is there because you have to do a haul from like Seattle WA. to Denver CO. or Denver to L.A. and the day off is basically the entire fucking drive trying to get from point A to point B.
MWMC: Have you had any opening acts that stood out to you guys that we should keep an eye out for?
BF: Umm, yah we have. There’s been a bunch of stuff on tours. My memory doesn’t serve me so well, but. There’s been a bunch of, you know, different things. But you know, this doesn’t have anything to do with the United States but I have to say when we did Australia the last time we went there. Australia has a lot of fucking good bands. And their kinda like opening the shows and stuff like that and they have some really good fucking bands. There’s this one band called Earth Rot, from Australia, and they were fucking amazing, you know. But it’s funny because a lot of people never hear from a lot bands and you do. And you tour and you run across these band and they’re fucking awesome. Like in Seattle there was this band called Brain Scraper that opened up for us and they were, kinda like, really it was grind but it had a little more element to it and it was fucking really good. And this other band called O.S.S, they were in Seattle and the opened a show. So you do, you run across bands while your touring and you’re like wow these fucking dudes are really good. There’s definitely a lot of great talent out there. There’s no doubt about it, you know. It’s not just like, you know when people ask, a lot of bands might think that a lot of quote unquote local support is just like meh, but do you ever stop and go stand in a venue and watch and listen to them and actually see “Oh well wow these fucking guys are really good”. So really there’s a lot of good talent in general music-wise. Like people who can play instruments and all that. So you definitely can’t just brush it off. Every band you see out there, even like huge shit like Lamb of God and Slipknot, they were local bands at one point. Everyone starts at that fucking level. You know, so it’s like why dust something off that can be some serious talent. There are some serious fucking awesome bands out there.
MWMC: What is the most memorable moment you guys have had on the road?
BF: That’s split because you can really say playing something like Ozzfest, that we did in what was it October, with Black Sabbath and all out in California, is something. But you could have a really small show in a place that is completely insane and that’s equally fucking impacting as doing the thing with Black Sabbath and you know their last presentation at Ozzfest with us in California. It’s two different experiences but at the same time they can still have that same lineage of the impact of how they made you feel. You know, like you can play this show at this little fucking rat hole in somewhere and say this shit was fucking amazing and then you do that and then you’re like wow this shit was amazing too. But they were both equally amazing because one was a huge platform with all these people and you’re playing with all these bands that have been like the godfathers of fucking metal. But then you play this other show and it’s like two hundred kids jammed into a space that can fit maybe a hundred kids and everybody was going fucking completely crazy and that was equally as fucking amazing. I mean there’s a lot of variance in it.
MWMC: What is your favorite kind of venue to play?
BF: The shit like this. Like smaller, in your face, more intimate. I mean I don’t mind the big shit but I just like the impact of people being more there, in front of you. I think that bands especially like extreme metal bands operate better when the crowd and them interact even more, they’re closer together. When you separate them a lot it takes away from the whole performance, the whole live essence of things.
MWMC: Is there anywhere you haven’t played that you’ve always wanted to?
BF: Oh yah, there’s tons of fuckin places, like places overseas places in the U.S., even little nooks and crannies. I mean we’ve played a lot of fucking places but at the same time we haven’t played a lot places too, like South America a lot more. That would be fuckin awesome you know. Japan, China shit like that. We’ve been to Australia like 3 times and it’s always awesome to do that. And New Zealand that’s fuckin great, Europe is really good. It took a while, like we really had to work hard to build to Europe. And it’s kinda starting to, you know it’s kinda like us touring in the states. It took a lot of time touring and building and building. I think we need to do that process in Europe and other places as well. So everything takes a little building. There’s definitely a bunch of different things that we need to do in places that we’ve been that we need to go back again.
MWMC: What or who has influenced your sound the most?
BF: Well when we first started the main thing that definitely drove this band was the element of Celtic Frost, Venom, Bathory things like that. Like early old school black metal shit. I think as time went on other old influences that we grew up on like old thrash metal , heavy metal things we listen to, you know anything from like Exodus to Judas Priest to Black Sabbath. They kind of intertwine in that essence too. Especially as you move along as a band your influences shift every month every year every few months. Because you change your cycle of what you’re listening to and I think as you go through and new little way of how you see things. How you perceive things when you’re working on music. But I think as a band too, you start and you’re influenced by these things but as you go you evolve and you start falling into place of your own self. You know, you start creating your own identity and all those influences they’re still there but they’re not so dominate as they were when you first started. Because back then you’re like, “Yah I wanna sound like Celtic Frost. I want to be like Celtic Frost”. And so as those things they kind of take front but as you go along you start to come into your own self and those elements that you’re influenced by sit further back so they’re not as noticeable as they were when you first started.
MWMC: Any advice for the local bands out there trying to make it?
BF: Just it’s not easy. The thing is don’t get frustrated with it, just fuckin, if this is what you wanted to do then just go after it and have a good time. It could evolve into something it might not evolve into anything. But I don’t think you should get your head caught up with like this idea of what you think it is, “Oh I’m gonna be this star.” I’m gonna play this, I’m gonna do this and there’s gonna be money. It’s not always like that. Especially if you’re doing extreme music, all that’s just bullshit. Let me tell you now, so. It’s like you either want to do it or you don’t wanna fucking do it. And sometimes people don’t realize it and they get out on tour and they’re not into it and that’s understandable too. Some people can’t deal with touring but they didn’t know that going into the cycle of it. You know, so everybody is different on how they perceive it and how they want to do it is different. And everything will unfold differently. Some bands, I mean, we have our quarrels and shit internally in a band but I think that is something natural. It’s like 4 different fuckin individuals and you have different ideas on the way things are and so you’re gonna clash sometimes but I think that’s what makes a band unique and makes a band like a family because you kind of suss through all these ups and downs and make things fucking go and persevere and move forward with things. I mean if you’re going to just give up right off the bat then what’s the point. You wanted to do it so just go after it and do it. To me it’s like, just do it and have a good time. I think there is like an idea of trying to keep things in a sense organized and making things work. But I think you can’t run away with that too much. But sometimes you just have to step back and let the cards fall where they may. And if it turns out cool and it does. You know, nobody’s here to like discriminate against you or anything like that because you failed. There’s not failure in this kind of situation it’s just going after something you enjoy. And at the end of it if you had a good time and you enjoy what you did then that’s the whole resolution of it. It doesn’t matter what came out of it. If you made money from it, great, if you did this from it, great. But at the end result, if you were happy with doing it at that one point and now you’re at this point in your life and you have a regular job and you’re doing what y do and you can look back and go, damn that was a fuckin awesome experience, that was a moment that me and these dudes created. And we all went out and we had a good time and that was it.
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I would like to thank Ben for taking the time to give me the opportunity to get such a fantastic interview and again to Bryan Coffey for making this interview happen for us.
Until next time ladies and gentlemen,
WE’LL BE KEEPING IT FUCKIN METAL!!
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