Goatwhore Willing To Play Black Metal In Church

Black metal gets a bad rap. Contrary to popular opinion, some Lucifer-linked lyrics and a few blast beats doesn't mean that you're some crazed church combustor. In fact, despite being obviously unholy, Goatwhore will even play in God's house.

"We were supposed to start the tour [Jan. 4] in Philadelphia, but things got postponed," says singer Ben Falgoust. "It was in the basement of this church, and they were redoing stain glass window work, so it got postponed to the end of the tour."There are people that were actually pissed, some of our crazy fans, they were like, 'What are you guys doing playing a church?' We'll play wherever, whenever. It doesn't matter, as long as the people come out."

In a time when black metal means funny face paint, cheesy costumes and symphonic sounds, a la Cradle Of Filth or Dimmu Borgir, New Orleans' Goatwhore hearken back to black metal's beginnings when bands such as Venom, Celtic Frost and Sodom weren't confined to a black metal box and were able to incorporate any number of influences.

"You bring that idea up to new black metal people and they say, 'No, that's not how it works,' but that was a rudiment of it back then," says Falgoust. "A lot of things were crossing over.

"You had thrash metal crossing over into punk and hardcore. That's where we want to keep it, that kind of style, where it still has the elements of things we grew up on, like the punk edge and the old hardcore edge. And it even has a grindcore basis to it as well.

"The merging of punk and hardcore madness within Goatwhore's metallic mayhem makes for a diversely interesting sound. There's even diversity from album to album. Falgoust describes the new A Haunting Curse as a more "chaotic" affair than the "slower, dirtier" sound of 2003's Funeral Dirge For The Rotting Sun. With this healthy variety, Falgoust says the band are better able to tackle any crowd.

"We don't have to go into a show playing a whole set of chaotic stuff. We can throw in things from Funeral Dirge, and break up the set and give more to the audiences. Right now we're on tour with God Forbid, which is definitely a whole different audience than we've been playing for. It's cool to have the different aspects that we do internally in the band because it offers different angles for the different audiences we go up against."

It's doubtful, but you might even catch the Boss at a Goatwhore show. But we're talking Satan, metal's head honcho, not Bruce Springsteen.

"I'd like to hear his opinion of us," says Falgoust. "We'd get the honest approach finally, instead of some, you know, true black metal person who thinks we're doing the whole thing wrong.

"No, this is the word of the man. Maybe he hasn't shown up because we're doing it right. You know, 'It's cool, I'll just chill.'"

Here are Goatwhore's Canadian dates:
Jan. 9 Toronto, ON @ Opera House
Feb. 21 Montreal, QC @ Foufounes Electriques
Feb. 22 Montreal, QC @ L'Anti