Following such a landmark album as 2007’s The Blackening was a tall order, but Oakland ragers Machine Head had no such problems with 2011’s Unto The Locust. As Metal Hammer joined them on the road in the US on that year’s Rock Star Mayhem tour, we found mainman Robb Flynn in defiant mood.
“Out here right now we’re opening the main stage on the Mayhem tour and playing to 10 to 15,000 people every night. It starts slow and people are still getting into the theatre when we come on, but by the third song it’s 15,000 or 20,000 people and it’s fucking awesome. And when we play the new song, people are losing their fucking minds!”
It is summer 2011 and Machine Head are back on the road. Over four years have passed since the Bay Area quartet released The Blackening, the album that would not only prove to be the most successful of their career to date but that would also turn out to be so popular that their feet hardly touched the ground for three-and-a-half years.
Never a band to shy away from hard slog, Machine Head have long had a fearsome reputation as a live band and as Hammer speaks with Robb Flynn and drummer Dave McClain it is more than apparent that both are very happy to be brutalising audiences again, this time as part of the Rockstar Mayhem tour that also features Megadeth, Disturbed, Godsmack, Trivium and In Flames among many others.
This is a very exciting time for Machine Head, as they prepare to unveil Unto The Locust, the long-awaited follow-up to The Blackening, safe in the knowledge that their audience on both sides of the Atlantic has never been bigger. Of course, it’s in the UK that Robb and co continue to land the biggest punches, as their forthcoming arena tour that takes in a debut date at the hallowed Wembley Arena clearly testifies, but the recognition and success that they’ve long deserved at home is beginning to manifest too. For the people’s metal band, these are great days indeed.
“It’s been slowly growing in the US, for sure,” says Robb. “The UK really embraced Machine Head right off the bat with Burn My Eyes and America didn’t. We were playing to 100 to 150 people on the tour after Burn My Eyes. On The More Things Change and The Burning Red and even Supercharger, those were good tours that helped to build up the fanbase in the States, but then when Through The Ashes and The Blackening hit, it really rocked that up and shit started happening for us over here. It’s been a slow process, building that foundation, but we’re doing great over here now. They’re getting it, at last! Ha ha!”
It’d be fascinating to step back in time and return to the days leading up to the release of The Blackening in March 2007, if only to get a real sense of what everyone’s hopes and expectations were at that time. Machine Head have always been a significant force in metal, ever since their Burn My Eyes debut helped to redefine the way heavy music sounded back in 1994, but the band’s career has been an eventful one with peaks and troughs in plentiful supply.
The common perception is that Machine Head were circling the plughole by the time they released the ill-fated Supercharger in 2001 (“But even our so-called bomb sold 250,000 copies!” laughs Robb. “We sold out Brixton Academy on that tour, so it wasn’t that fuckin’ bad!”) and that they came close to calling it a day. Famously, they turned things heroically around with 2003’s thunderous Through The Ashes Of Empires, which restored their reputation as purveyors of heartfelt brutal metal and sparked a major reversal of fortunes.
The Blackening, however, was something else entirely; a monstrous record that seemed to take everyone, its creators included, by surprise. It garnered ecstatic reviews across the board and swiftly became the biggest record Machine Head had ever produced, but above and beyond record sales and reviews, there was a real sense that this band that have connected so powerfully with metal fans in the UK and elsewhere were finally getting their just rewards.
The Blackening transformed Machine Head’s career and soon turned what would have inevitably been a fairly intensive touring schedule anyway into a seemingly never-ending trek around the globe that eventually lasted for well over three years, taking in countless headlining shows alongside high-profile support slots with Metallica and Slipknot.
“We were ready to wrap up and then Slipknot were like ‘Hey, come out with us!’ and then Metallica said ‘Hey, come out with us!’ and so we just kept on going,” recalls Robb. “We just rode this crazy rollercoaster, holding on for dear life and at some point we just said ‘Fuck it!’ and stuck our hands up in the air and started screaming ‘Fuck yeah!’ We went through the loop-the-loop and everything, dude. It was real dream-come-true shit. I don’t take any of it lightly, all of those opportunities. We were so fortunate for all that to happen. Some bands will never have any of that. We’re know we’re lucky.”
“It was a weird situation, because we could’ve just kept going,” Dave McClain tells Hammer. “We were getting offered more tour dates and more stuff and it was like ‘Man, we’ve really got to start writing a record!’ We finally made the decision that we’ve got to take time off but I would’ve loved to have kept going, you know? I understood what we needed to do, but it was a great feeling, having people wanting more tours from us for that record. It’s something that doesn’t come around too often for bands. A lot of bands are just chasing their tails, but we had this record that just had this magic thing to it. So coming off the road was bittersweet.”
The Blackening took Machine Head around the world and to an unprecedented level of success and acclaim, but it also forced the band to endure some well-publicised trials and tribulations. These ranged from the passing away of guitarist Phil Demmel’s father while the band were on the road and the guitarist’s ongoing health problems, to conflicts between Robb and bassist Adam Duce that erupted in February 2009, as they began their tour with Slipknot in Paris.
“Adam and I have been going to therapy,” Robb announced in a statement at the time. “After 17 years of being in a band together, touring together for a large majority of that time, we’ve accumulated a lot of shit between the two of us that’s either been put off or swept under the rug, and frankly it all reached a boiling point. We both bring a lot of baggage to the table, as, frankly, we’re both pretty fucked up… but we’re working at it. We don’t want to lose this, and after all we’ve been through, to lose this band, our friendship, now, would seem like the hugest of failures.”
As a result of their problems, Robb and Adam attended joint therapy sessions; a surefire sign that these very private men had no intention of letting personal obstacles get in their way of their shared dreams. And thus, Machine Head have emerged from their grand world tour experiences with sanity and confidence intact. And now they return to action with an album that a bigger audience than ever before are gagging to hear. Understandably, given the unexpected highs and testing lows the band have experienced over the last few years, Robb is hungrier than ever and fiercely determined to ride this wave for as long as fortune will allow, while putting all the lessons learned over the last few extraordinary years into practice.
“Do I want more success? Fuck yeah!” he barks. “I still feel unfulfilled, like there’s so much more we can accomplish. One of the greatest things about the Blackening cycle, and one of the hugest moments for us, was playing with Metallica. We’re from the Bay Area – they were our idols. In some ways it’s hard being from the Bay Area and being in the shadow of Metallica! You do interviews with global press and they’re like ‘Well, you never made it as big as Metallica!’ and I’m like ‘Who has?’ Ha ha! You might as well say we’ve never made it as big as The Beatles if that’s your barometer of success! But going on tour with them and just seeing how much bigger it can get was huge for us.”
So what were the most important things the band learned from being on that tour?
“Man, they are fucking huge everywhere on planet Earth!” Robb splutters. “They could have treated us like dogshit and I would’ve been like ‘Cool, man! Whatever! This is a great opportunity and I’m just gonna eat shit for six months’ because it’s fuckin’ Metallica. But they went out of their way to make us feel welcome. They’re super organised. It’s like a friggin’ army travelling across the world, they’ve got so many people working for them. But I saw that you can be that big and still be on the same planet and not just crawl up your own ass. Having been able to experience that was incredible. That’s how it can be done, that’s what you can do, that’s how big it can become, so dream bigger!”
And headlining at Wembley Arena in December is a pretty good indication of how big your dreams have become?
“We’re stoked beyond belief. It’s fucking amazing,” says Robb. “I saw the date and I was like ‘Fucking Wembley Arena, you’re kidding me!’ It’s gonna fucking rule. It’s a huge moment for us, man, but we’re ready for it. We’re ready for anything. We’ll tour for three years again if that’s how things work out. I don’t know anything else, dude. I’ve been on tour since I was 18. This is the life I’ve known for over half my life now. This is it.”
As any band worth a shiny shit will tell you, you are only as good as your last record. Fortunately for Machine Head, their last record was a stone cold classic, embraced with great alacrity by a vast number of rabid fans, old and new. So what of the pressure to come up with a worthy follow-up that, at the very least, equals its predecessor?
At the time of writing, Robb is putting the finishing touches to the final mixes of their seventh album, Unto The Locust. It was initially recorded in collaboration with renowned metal producer Colin Richardson, but he’s since bowed out for personal reasons, leaving Robb to complete the job. This has involved flying home to Oakland in between Mayhem tour dates and, as deadline approaches, hitting the studio with trusted engineer Juan Urteaga to ensure that everything is as it should be prior to the record’s release in September.
Rather generously, Robb has given Hammer a sneak preview of Unto The Locust, furnishing us with rough mixes and demo versions of the seven songs that make up this most monumental of 2011 metal releases. And we are happy to confirm that not only have they equalled The Blackening, but they’ve somehow managed to surpass it.
Unto The Locust is an absolutely fucking astonishing metal album: 50 minutes of blistering brutality, gargantuan melodies and moments of spinetingling atmosphere, it brims with everything that has made this band such a joy to follow over the years while taking them firmly and frequently into uncharted territory, with everything from the four musicians’ technical abilities through to Robb’s extraordinary lyrics audibly hitting new heights of excellence along the way.
Put simply, Unto The Locust is another masterpiece and Machine Head fans are going to shit themselves inside out when they hear it. Intriguingly, as Robb explains, much of the inspiration behind the bold moves and artistic bravado that make the new album such a triumph came from the band’s fondness for Canada’s greatest prog rock band.
“Every interview I did at the end of the Blackening cycle was like ‘How are you gonna top The Blackening?’ or ‘You’re never gonna be able to top The Blackening! What are you gonna do?’ and at that point I was like ‘I don’t know!’” laughs Robb. “We’d talked about it as a band, like what kind of record did we want to write? What would be the thing we wanted to do? Rush’s Moving Pictures kept coming back to us in the conversation. It was their eighth album; they’d somehow crystallised everything they were about, their technicality, the progressiveness, the complex song arrangements, yet somehow infused it with this new thing. They were influenced by The Police, a little bit by punk and new wave, and they added this fresh shit and wrapped everything in these amazing lyrics and these amazing hooks. Within all that complexity there were great songs and great song structure. Not that I’m saying that that was how we were trying to write, but that was the ideal – to take everything we’ve done, all the musical landscapes we’ve traversed, and combine them into something fresh and new.”
One of the key factors that made The Blackening such a creatively liberating record for the band was that they wholly rejected the notion that songs needed to conform to a radio-friendly length and discovered that allowing themselves a bit of self-indulgence was actually the smartest move they ever made. Ten-minute epics like Clenching The Fists Of Dissent and A Farewell To Arms suited them down to the ground and that compositional freedom has been carried over to the new album. With only the comparatively succinct Be Still And Know falling short of the six-minute mark, and towering opener I Am Hell cheerfully drifting past eight minutes, this is an album that revels in its own grandeur, further defining Machine Head’s sound and ethos along the way.
“We only have seven songs on this record, and for us that was kind of scary,” notes Robb. “It’s still a long record, though. It’s a 50-minute record and we write fucking long songs, man. Jesus Christ! We just narrowed it down to the cream of the crop. We had a few other songs hanging around that were cool but they were a little bit different or just not as good as the others. If I’m having sex, I can get right into sex, like ‘OK, let’s go!’ or I can get tantalised along the way in foreplay and I’m way more into that. You can get it quick and it’s good, or you can get it slow and it’s awesome! Ha ha! So it was that kind of vibe.”
One aspect of Unto The Locust that may take fans by surprise is how utterly ferocious much of it is. From the turbo-thrash insanity of the incredibly dark I Am Hell through to the neo-classical intro and subsequent breakneck lift-off of This Is The End and on to the none-more-metal gallop ’n’ rumble of the closing Who We Are, this is not an album that offers much in the way of compromise or entry points for those with more mainstream tastes.
It is interesting, therefore, that Machine Head have unleashed the album’s (sort of) title track, Locust, as the fans’ first taste of the new material. Predominantly mid-paced, strongly melodic and perhaps the closest thing the new album has to a typical Machine Head song, Locust simply delivers without spoiling any surprises.
“Whenever we launch a record, we always put out its fastest, thrashiest tune,” says Robb. “But this time we said ‘Let’s mix it up; let’s put out something that’s more grooving and more in the centre of it all’. It sums up all the different things on the record. It’s got a little bit of the classical vibe, it’s got the Machine Head groove, the patented Machine Head harmonics, it’s heavy, it’s got beautiful melodies here and there and it just seemed logical that we’d be playing it on the Mayhem tour. Everybody seems to be really digging it.”
“Locust is a good example of where we’re heading,” says Dave. “It’s one of the most different-sounding songs we’ve written in a long time. It’s like our Enter Sandman or something. It’s more of a rock song than anything else on the record. Then you have a song like Darkness Within that’s completely different for us. It’s not a ballad like Descend The Shades Of Night, but it’s moody and dark and it’s mellow at times and it’s heavy too. But then when people hear I Am Hell they’re gonna just fuckin’ shit! It’s easily the fastest drumming stuff that we’ve ever had. Eight years ago I would’ve said that there’s no way I could play bass drum parts that fast, but over the years I’ve been getting there gradually. This record is brutal, man. You’re not gonna be thrown for a loop, because it’s obviously Machine Head, but for us it feels like the right successor to The Blackening.”
The aforementioned Darkness Within looks certain to be Unto The Locust’s biggest talking point. A partly acoustic and lyrically poetic song that details Robb’s feelings about his life as a touring musician and the immense importance that music has had throughout his life, it comes across as an intensely personal statement and, as fans have come to expect from Robb, one that reaffirms his humanity, vulnerability and down-to-earth worldview.
As he states in one of the studio reports that Machine Head posted on their website during the record process, the new album is partly a study of “music as religion” but, with typical humility, Robb is eager to state that he is not in the business of denigrating anyone else’s beliefs or trying to recruit converts to some anti-religious philosophy of his own design.
“It’s just my personal view; I don’t think that everybody should feel that way,” he says. “That’s just how I feel about music. I wasn’t raised in a religious household and in some ways I’m thankful for that. It allowed me to see things in a different way and not to have it coloured by this whole other thing. The thing that has carried me through in my life has been music. There’s been a soundtrack to my life, and I don’t mean my music, I mean other people’s music and my favourite bands that mean something to me. I got a lot of hope from those things.
“There’s nothing like music, in my opinion. When you see an amazing live show or you hear an amazing album or an amazing song, there’s nothing like it, the way that it makes you feel inside, it’s unbeatable. I’ve been to concerts before that have been like a religious experience for me. When I wrote Darkness Within, that’s just what came out of me. I was kinda surprised where it came from, but it was in there and it poured out of me and after reading it back I was like ‘Wow, that’s kinda how I feel, huh?’”
“The first time Robb brought Darkness Within to us, me and Phil were in the practice room and he came in and said ‘Check this out, I’ve got this idea…’” Dave recalls. “He was singing it and playing it on his acoustic guitar, and I wish we would’ve filmed it because it was so fucking heavy. It was real mellow, but he was just feeling the lyrics and at the end of the song he looked up and he had tears in his eyes. I truly wish we’d recorded it. It wasn’t the greatest version ever but it was so fucking heartfelt. This whole writing process has been so killer, seeing him so excited about what he was writing. It was fuckin’ heavy duty!”
Something that is frequently overlooked about Machine Head is the incredible connection that seems to exist between the band and their loyal fans, and Robb is clearly the key to that relationship. Although he has great confidence in his own abilities and in those of his bandmates, you’d struggle to find a more humble and sincere frontman operating in the metal scene today, and that unpretentious charm comes across with great power in his increasingly elegant and precise lyrics. Machine Head is very much the sum of its four highly talented parts, but as Dave cheerfully states, there is something special about Robb that inspires remarkable levels of devotion among the faithful.
“Totally. The stuff that Robb sings about is so personal,” says the drummer. “Obviously something like I Am Hell isn’t about him, but the stuff he writes about himself, it’s real and it just connects with people, whatever they have gone through or whether they’re going through the same thing. He’s putting himself out there for everybody. He’s not hiding anything. Then the way he is live, the kind of frontman he is, he can make everyone in that building feel like he’s singing for them, right in front of them. He has that charisma. I can’t really explain it! It’s amazing to watch. People go to a Machine Head show and sometimes the rest of us are just scenery, because kids are focusing in on him singing the lyrics and there’s this wild connection.”
Of all the thrilling moments on Unto The Locust, the closing track looks certain to be the one that incites the most raucous singalongs at future Machine Head shows. Who We Are begins with the voices of Robb, Phil Demmel and engineer Juan Urteaga’s children singing the song’s chorus: ‘This is who we are/This is what I am/We have nowhere else to go/Divided we will stand.’ In normal circumstances, the idea of cute kids singing on a metal record would be rightly greeted with snorts of derision, but here it works beautifully; the sheer, natural joy in their voices coupled with the disarming simplicity of Robb’s lyrics turns a potential schmaltz-fest into a spine-tingling album highlight. And the song that follows is an absolute face-ripper of epic proportions, and one that Robb is plainly very proud to have written.
“I’d been on this big Bruce Springsteen kick,” Robb states. “It was actually Frank from Hatebreed who got me into Springsteen! I loved the way that he incorporates Americana into his lyrics, these very vivid images, but he has this ability to write something like Born In The USA, which up to a few years ago I thought was some cheerleading, I love America, rah-rah-rah shit, but really it’s a protest song. I liked that idea, of taking poetry and wrapping it in this imagery and subtly incorporating this protest into there.
“Anyway, I toured for three and a half years and I barely watched TV and it was really hard to keep up with the news, but I get home and I’m watching American TV and it’s like ‘Wow, man… what the fuck is this? This isn’t my America. I don’t know what America this is, but it isn’t the America I know. I’m part of this other America…’ That’s where this song came from. Even applying it to the music scene here. I just feel like we’re so in our own world. There’s all these different genres, but we’ve just carved this niche and we’re riding it and we’re oblivious to everything else that’s going on around.”
And it works brilliantly as an anthem for metal fans too.
“That’s also true. The inspiration came from that too. My son goes to school and his dad’s a heavy metal maniac, and there’s a charm to that for some people and then some people judge him and judge me because of it. Part of the song is saying ‘This is who I am and fuck you if you don’t like it!’ This is who we are, man.”
As America succumbs to their charms, the UK elevates them to arena-bothering status and a simply magnificent new album promises to maintain the momentum that the band have worked so hard to generate, this most deserving and dedicated of metal bands are flying high, fizzing with creative energy and armed and ready for whatever the future holds. This victory march is a long way from over. Right now, Machine Fucking Head are unstoppable.
“We’re firing on all cylinders,” concludes Robb. “There’s much more we can accomplish and so much more we can learn along the way. It’s about the journey. It’s about making music go up and down and not giving a shit about the radio or worrying about how the fans are gonna react. It’s about writing from a selfish standpoint and it’s all about whether or not the four of us get goose- bumps. That’s a pretty true place to write from and I feel like we were able to accomplish that more than ever before on this record. It certainly doesn’t suck to be in Machine Head right now, man. It fucking rules.”
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 222, August 2011
