Killer Be Killed guitarist and vocalist Max Cavalera recently sat down with Dead Rhetoric to talk about the band's history, the writing process and all the other stuff you've ever wanted to know about the awesome supergroup! Just in case you weren't aware, the band consists of Cavalera, Dillinger Escape Plan frontman Greg Puciato on vocals and guitar, Mastodon's bassist Troy Sanders on bass and vocals and former The Mars Volta drummer Dave Elitch on drums. Cavalera covers how the band started:
"I wasn’t interested at first because I already had Soulfly and Cavalera Conspiracy and I was really busy. I was like, 'Nah, I’m really busy, I don’t know if I can do this.' And he was like, 'You gotta do this man! It’s going to be like Nailbomb, remember? You had fun with that shit!' He convinced me. I said to him, 'Come over to Phoenix and hang out. It’s gotta be like Nailbomb – you have to come over here.' He came for a whole week. We wrote riffs, sang on a bunch shit, wrote the first two songs which was 'Illuminati' and 'Chloroform.' None of them made it to the record; they’re pretty punk rock and dirty and more raw-sounding, but it had a start.
Then Greg said he knew this great drummer, who was Dave Elitch who used be in The Mars Volta and he sent me a link. I watched him play and I was blown away – this guy is fucking amazing. I came to LA to jam with them and Greg was playing guitar at the time, which he doesn’t do in Dillinger, which is killer. He’s a pretty good guitar player. Lots of cool riffs came out of him. At the beginning, it was two guitars, me and Greg singing, and Dave on drums, but we needed one more guy, and we thought the best guy would be Troy because he can play bass and sing, and that’s when this became a supergroup. When Troy joined the band, we kicked to a whole new level. It became super-cool and super-serious. I realized when Troy joined the band that this is moving away from Nailbomb and become something different."
How the band wrote with spontaneity:
"A lot of the record was done in the studio when we recording, like Greg’s stuff like 'Marrows' and the first song, – which came out of nowhere – 'Wings of Feather and Wax.' We didn’t know that would be the first song, it was a regular song we had and I had a very Max opening riff. I did the second riff that reminded me of U2 'Sunday Bloody Sunday,' very poppy, not normally the shit I write.
We were going all off, I was writing weird melodic shit and was like, 'You guys can put your vocals on it.; I didn’t know it was going to be that cool. When Greg and Troy put their vocals on it, it blew me away. A lot of accidents like that happened in the making of this record. We all knew we were onto something special while in the studio. Between us and the producer, Josh Wilbur, we felt we were creating something quite special. I always believed in Killer Be Killed’s potential in aligning these musicians from established bands, putting them in a bag, shaking it, releasing it, and seeing what happens. Something weird would have to come out of it. There’s too much energy going somewhere and it came out the right way in the songs. What I like most about Killer Be Killed is that it doesn’t sound like our own bands."
And how Office Max helped 'em out. Kinda.
"If you listen to some songs, there’s a lot of thought that went into the construction of the songs and it takes a while to put the songs together. We decided for the process we’d use these huge papers that Dave bought from Office Max."
