On May 21st, German Thrash band Vulture delivers their next full-length album via Metal Blade, and this time it’s a return to classic forms and vibes drawing on the Thrash Metal that has always inspired them and the classic horror imagery that originally galvanized their desire to create their band. With 2019’s Ghastly Waves and Battered Graves, they stretched themselves musically, but subsequently decided that they had created songs that were too complex to really enjoy playing, and this time around, they hit the “reset” button and produced a very well-defined album with plenty of retro flair in Dealin’ Death.
One of their key points of reference for the album was Edgar Allen Poe’s famous story, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, which you’ll hear more about in the title track, and see evoked on the album cover, but actually, the album takes on a wide array of horror from folklore, mythology, and history in an almost anthology-like approach. For instance, we also encounter Medusa in “Gorgon” and Caligula in “The Court of Caligula”. This suggests the freedom that Vulture are feeling at the moment to explore what intrigues them, both musically and thematically, and Vulture guitarist Stefan Castevet joined me to talk about those foundational elements and why they are proving so energizing for the band right now.
Hannah Means-Shannon: Does everyone in the band have the same musical background in terms of interests? Was everyone always into Thrash Metal and wanted to perform Thrash?
Stefan Castevet: Mostly, yes. We all kind of come from the same musical background. We do have a huge variety in our musical tastes. I might be the most stubborn one by listening to Classic Heavy, and Thrash, and Speed most of the time. Leo, our singer, is into every kind of music, I think. Every time we meet him in the car and he’s in charge of the aux cable, first it’s Rush, then it’s Cannibal Corpse, then it’s something else strange… It’s a huge load of variety, but we do have the same background. Maybe Gereon [Deceiver], our drummer, is a little different because he comes from a AOR background in terms of taste, but we all agree on the same sound and the same key elements that define Vulture, so we’re perfectly fine with that.
HMS: How did you become aware of Thrash tradition? I imagine you had to encounter it after it’s heyday.
SC: I would’ve been glad to start in the 90s, but I was born in 1991. When I turned 9 years old, I got my first stereo, and with that, I got Deep Purple’s Made in Japan. That was my first gateway to guitar music. When I turned 12 or 13, my older sister’s boyfriend played in a local Heavy Metal band and he really impressed me a lot. A few weeks later, he got me some Heavy Metal CDs and one was Destruction’s Eternal Devastation. I got so hooked on that. I can’t really explain why. There is a pitch effect in the vocals on one of the tracks that got me really excited and I went to my classmates and said, “Listen to how evil this sounds!” but nobody felt it. I noticed things were changing in my life because of that, and I got deep into Thrash. But Andreas and I went to the same school, and in music class, we were asked to pick our favorite track and show the class. I picked a Demolition Hammer track and not even Andreas liked it back then! I was pretty alone in my tastes.
HMS: That’s a great story. There’s something special about making a unique discovery like that, like there’s a secret that you have.
SC: That’s definitely how it felt.
HMS: In terms of forming the identity of the band Vulture, when did the horror elements start? Does that go back to other Thrash bands, or did it just come up among you as friends?
SC: That was when we started the band, even before we started doing tracks and music together. Because we had all played in a load of other bands and didn’t want to repeat the same mistakes over and over. We felt they had just recorded tracks and released them, then the same again. We wanted to do everything right from the start, and that included getting a lyrical concept together. We knew that we didn’t want to do the typical German thing, the Satan side of Thrash Metal. There are a lot of bands that were doing it about six years ago in Germany, and they are all great, but we wanted to do our own thing. Of course, it’s not the newest thing ever to sing about horror movies, but it felt very natural and fresh for us since we hadn’t done that before ourselves. We wanted to avoid political stuff and Satan stuff, but focus on good movies and good stories for good Thrash.
HMS: Well, millions of people agree with you that horror is very compelling, and even fun. In photos of the band, and in live performance footage, the band members seem to be really having a lot of fun. Is your approach to horror focused on being excessive and entertaining rather than being more about existential dread?
SC: Definitely. There is no bigger meaning behind our lyrics. We’re also not much into slasher stuff. If we’re talking about influences music-wise, it’s more 1960s and 1970s stuff, like old Vincent Price movies and classics like Rosemary’s Baby and The Wicker Man. We dig movies and stories that capture that feeling that we also have when we play music. It’s an energetic and theatrical thing, to some extent. For us, that’s so much more exciting than blood or gore all the time. But that moment before it gets gory, that’s the exciting stuff for us.
HMS: That tension before a turn?
SC: Yes, the tension.
HMS: I can see that aesthetic for B-movie horror, as well as classic horror, in the album artwork and t-shirts for the band so far. There’s a self-aware melodrama to it.
SC: Yes, if you take the cover designs and the layouts, it might be a little trashy here and there, but it’s the Italian giallo theme, like the Dario Argento movies, such as Suspiria, and all the bright colors and flashing lights. But it’s also more like a theatrical play than some movies, like all those old movies with Vincent Price, or Peter Cushing, with some ancient castle with tapestries on the wall. It’s that atmosphere, too, and those two things combined. It’s also got some gothic elements.
HMS: I know you like Edgar Allen Poe, too, from the title and title track for this album, and the cover art is really cool. I know it’s inspired by the story, “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Can you tell me about the artist who painted the cover?
SC: His name is Velio Josto. He’s from Italy, and he’s done everything for us so far, even in the bands that we had before. He’s very capable of getting the ideas in our heads onto canvas. He’s also capable of getting that mood that we just talked about and likes the same stories with the same energy. He’s a perfect match.
HMS: He really likes to paint blades!
SC: I think if we ask him one more time to either paint that gloved hand, or our logo, he’s going to kill us. He’s done the logo and gloves at least ten times.
HMS: I know that for your previous album, you wrote it pretty quickly and you now feel that you made it overly complex.
SC: Exactly.
HMS: I, personally, wouldn’t be so hard on it. I think it’s a really interesting album and shows a lot of possibilities. But I understand, as a Metal fan, why getting down to basics can help get your message across.
SC: I think in some ways we had to write the Ghastly Waves record to get to the point where we are now as musicians and songwriters. It was written in a very short time despite the fact that it’s the most complex stuff we’ve done so far. But the goal was to write a catchy record, and we thought we did it, and even after recording, we thought so. But we played some shows and we thought, “We didn’t. We just wrote some complex tracks.”
Especially when we were on tour for the first time, playing those same songs every fucking night, I noticed “Okay, there are tracks that we play, mostly from Ghastly, where I can’t take my eyes off the fretboard for a single second.” We wanted to spread that out this time. We said, “Let’s write an album that we’d like as fans as well as as musicians.” So we listened to music that we liked again. We said, “We don’t need to show off so much. We just need to do things that we’re good and that we like, especially.” Now, it’s feeling much more natural for us. That’s what Dealin’ Death is.
HMS: That’s a great discovery. It shows a lot of growth for the band. I was going to ask you if the songs on Ghastly were hard to play, and you answered that for me!
SC: Yes, the title track and “Beyond the Blade” are pure horror for me. I’m speaking for myself [as guitarist], maybe it’s easier for the other guys. “Beyond the Blade” has five solos. It’s too much. [Laughs]
HMS: I saw a reference online to the fact that the album Dealin’ Death has some sound similarities to your first EP, Victim to the Blade. Could you comment on that relationship?
SC: The whole vibe of the record has a lot that goes back to the EP for us because we got that energy back from just doing what we like. Sound-wise, I think it’s the best we’ve ever sounded due to Marco [Brinkmann]. Everything is very natural and laid-back on one hand, but on the other hand, it’s very tight and in your face. It’s the perfect mixture of everything we’d like to sound like.
HMS: I know you’ve worked with Marco before, but can you tell us a little bit about working with him and with Alex Stocker for recording and production? What kind of ethos did they bring to things?
SC: I’ve known Marco personally for twelve years. In the very early stages of being musicians, we were in a band together, then he picked the successful side of music by being a sound engineer. [Laughs] But we continued doing music and in the last five years or so, he’s developed the perfect ear to sound approaches. He’s so capable of doing what we have in mind.
I keep telling this story, but I never get tired of it: before we went into the studio, we were looking for sound examples of the approach we wanted. We said, “’Eternal Nightmare’ by Vio-lence. Let’s somehow get that approach.” Marco went on the internet and checked who recorded it back then in the 80s. He somehow found out who did it, found an ancient e-mail address, and e-mailed him. He actually got an answer and was therefore able to reproduce the guitar sound. From that approach on, we were able to find our own sound based on that. We went down to the very core of the sound there.
He does thing in a modern, digital way, but he’s so capable of getting that retro energy that we need also. This time he wasn’t able, time-wise, to do all the recordings, so he recommended Alex [Stocker]. Alex came over to Dortmund for us, and since we hadn’t worked together before, we were nervous. Recording is a very private thing, it reveals all your mistakes. But Alex is a very patient and humble guy who was perfectly able to capture all that we needed to capture. Then the files got into Marco’s hand and he did the magic.
HMS: Your single and video for “Malicious Souls” has been released, and the video is so much fun. I love it. I mentioned earlier that your horror is so much fun, but I didn’t mean to imply that your songs aren’t frightening. They certainly are. And part of that is when things aren’t fully explained, like with “Malicious Souls”.
There’s a sense that there’s an invasion of entities against the “you” of the song, but you don’t know why or where they are coming from. The video also has an old-school feel. Kind of like a VHS tape, right?
SC: Yes, it’s intentionally like a well-used VHS effect on top of things.
HMS: I noticed that even though there are black and white horror clips versus the color live-play footage, the lighting and shadow effect matches, giving a shadowy background to things. And the colors that are included in live play, are very much your giallo colors we were talking about.
SC: That’s nice to hear, thanks. That’s exactly those two elements combined.
HMS: I wanted to ask you about the track “Star-Crossed City”, which also has a video coming soon. We were talking about Edgar Allen Poe. Even he had some mythology about these cursed cities, like the “City in the Sea”. You get a sense of a disturbing place. What were some of the song’s points of reference?
SC: Andreas [Axetinctor] wrote this one, and I think his approach was, on one side to create an eerie feeling of a town, as in your example. A place where something is wrong, but you don’t know what’s going on. On the other hand, he wanted to combine that with the idea of going out alone with friends at night, through city streets, and feeling a little bit like the kings of the town. I think he wanted to combine those two approaches.
HMS: What about “Court of Caligula”? It’s obvious who it’s about it, but what I found interesting is that there’s a fair amount of psychology and explanation of how he acts or how people like him think or act. Any thoughts on why that one made it onto the album?
SC: It made it onto the album, particularly, because we watched that movie from the late 1970s, the two-and-a-half hour film. That was the idea we wanted to capture. The lyrics are full of quotes from Caligula from this movie. It’s about the last days of his reign, and him going mad, feeling like he’s more than a person, but kind of a god. And thinking that if he’s a god, people have to obey him. It all gets out of hand and in the end, he’s killed. But there’s a twist in the end, because on every full album we’ve done so far, the last four lines belong to us, as a band. On Cry for Death, it’s in the last song “Guillotine”. It has the Vultures coming to pick the bones. On Ghastly Waves, it’s in “Murderous Militia”, and the Vulture kills. On this one, Caligula is getting killed, and you can see the camera turning around, lyrically, and the Vulture blade killed Caligula somehow. Vulture is killing Caligula on our album.
HMS: It’s a band cameo! I’m glad I asked about that one. That definitely builds the mythology of the band.
