A Careful Tyranny

When Nails pulled up to their hotel in Helsinki, Finland, for last year’s appearance at the Tuska Open Air Metal Festival, they walked through the front doors, groggy and tired from the long international flight. That’s when vocalist/guitarist Todd Jones immediately spotted Bill Steer, the British guitarist for Carcass and Napalm Death, sitting right there in the lobby. He had to do a double-take. “We lost our minds,” Jones said in a moment of brief fanboy appreciation.

When the shock wore off, they went upstairs to rest before they had to start gearing up for their show. That night, Nails played a wicked set and after they finished, Jones went upstairs to sleep. He woke up a couple hours later to 20 text messages on his phone. “GET DOWN HERE,” his band members pleaded. “We’re hanging out with Phil Anselmo and the Illegals!” Anselmo (Pantera, Down) urged the band to wake up Jones and get him down there. “Where’s your singer?” Anselmo asked. “I want to meet my goofy cousin.”

The point is Anselmo, a goddamned metal legend, is into Nails, which is sort of a testament to the fact that the band—despite being heavy, dark, scary and alienating to most normal people—has something interesting to say outside of their local Southern California sphere. Let’s get it straight: Nails is not a great band because of a popular sound or crisp production or fancy guitar riffs—they’re great because every instance in every song is deliberate. For example, by starting “Depths” (from the album Unsilent Death), with a squeal and then a heavy chug of the guitars, the listener is placed in a desolate room, a dungeon, where the anticipation of what’s to come is frightening. And what actually arrives is scarier than anything we could have imagined. Jones’ vocals—powerful and desperate—are at once growling and high-pitched, and he conjures a dreary picture of the hateful world with dramatic screams worthy of a Tony award. The band can evoke the entire misery of the universe in one 14-minute album. Yes, that’s 10 songs in 14 minutes: Fuuuuuck.

Restrained Brutality

Jones, who is surprisingly soft spoken on the phone, uses his voice exactly how his band uses music: to pinpoint what needs to be said and to say it powerfully and economically, as not to waste time. “Restraint is a big part of our sound,” he says. “We have these ideas of what we want the band to sound like. We want Nails to be a very specific thing. If we make something that doesn’t fit into that, we’re just not going to use it. How often do we make a riff that we’re going to use? It’s very minimal. It takes us three years to make a record.”

Just think about that: Three years to make a record that will not last more than 20 minutes from start to finish. That’s a lot of thinking and planning and editing for such a short album. It’s beautiful how much thought goes into a Nails record, the end result being something like their latest album Abandon All Life, a tight collection of blistering hardcore and grindcore metal tracks that transport the listener to a very dark and frightening place. The band can be so scary that it’s hard to imagine the man I’m talking with on the phone goes to a day job and interacts with coworkers in a regular fashion. In fact, Jones, an IT guy during the day, doesn’t even tell his coworkers about his band at all. “I don’t talk to anyone about my band. They wouldn’t understand it. They would think I was some sort of freak or something,” he says. “Normal people don’t understand grindcore, death metal or hardcore.”

It’s true. Not many people get dark music, but those who do love Nails for their unique take on brutality, a sound that all comes down to Jones being a huge fan of music and his keen sense of not wanting to let anyone down, especially himself. “I don’t want to disappoint our fans,” he says. “Punk rock and hardcore could be simply bursts of energy. But I think my favorite bands, typically, have structure and restraint and it’s a very focused sound. I just want to be in a band that I like.”

“General Interest Poseur”

With Nails’ rising popularity comes a host of opportunities that were previously unheard of for bands who make heavy music—a brief partnership with the vehicle company Scion, for instance.

“They did a lot of good for us … when Scion was paying all these hardcore bands or metal bands to play shows for them. They treated people extremely well. Was it weird? Fuck yeah it was weird,” Jones says.

And, of course, when an underground band appears to have taken money from a sponsor, the message boards light up with purists claiming “sellout” and worse. After all, the enemy of heavy music is often thought to be corporations, or The Man, if you will. But Jones, a sensible man in his 30s, doesn’t really give a shit. The band’s strange partnerships and interesting opportunities (like a collaboration with Converse and Decibel Magazine) have allowed Nails to travel and/or expose their music to new people, which is all that really matters in the end. “I’m pretty much open to anything,” he says. “As long as it makes sense for us and we benefit and it doesn’t hurt us or our audience.”

Another strange aspect to the band’s rising popularity is reviews from music media outlets, such Pitchfork, which is often thought of as the hipster Holy Grail for pretentious indie reviews, a publication that runs off equal parts snark and hipster fumes to make (and mostly break) music careers. A hardcore band like Nails doesn’t exactly expect to get a rave review from such a publication.

“I was not expecting, but I am very grateful for it. More importantly, [writer Brandon Stosuy] understood our record. It feels good to be understood,” Jones says.

However, interestingly enough, not all good reviews are equal. For example, Anthony Fantano from The Needle Drop—the self-described “Internet’s busiest music nerd”—enjoyed both Nails albums, but Jones is not nearly as enthusiastic about his review, simply for the fact that Fantano obviously doesn’t understand the band at all.

“He’s the kind of person that listens to anything and can kind of find the good in it. At the end of the day I don’t think we’re a band that those people can really jive with. I think our band is too extreme,” he says. “So if someone’s going to hit me up and say ‘What do you think of Anthony Fantano’s review?’ I think it’s cool, but I think he’s a general interest poseur.”

California Torture

While Jones won’t reveal the name of Nails’ new album, he says it’s just about done and, more importantly, that it’s going to be brutal as fuck.

“If you took our first album, Unsilent Death, and held it up against Abandon All Life, it’s basically a progression in the same direction—a little bit more metal, a little bit more technical, but also in some ways it’s a lot more Neanderthal. All I can say is it’s through-and-through a Nails record. We are taking the same caution and restraint and carefulness with writing this record that we did with Unsilent Death and Abandon All Life,” Jones says. “If you’re willing to go a bit more extreme with us, then this one might be your favorite.”

To be honest, it’s sort of horrifying to imagine an album more extreme than Unsilent Death and Abandon All Life. But for fans of heavy music, and for people who know exactly what Nails is capable of, the idea of Nails magnified is thrilling. We can only hope that the band will unleash a few of the new songs when they stop in Sacramento, where they last played several years ago to a nearly empty room.

“There wasn’t very many people and nobody really knew who we were,” Jones says about the house show they played back in 2010.

But it’s 2015. The world still sucks. We’re all broke. Cops are killing everyone. California is dry and everything is lighting on fire. Which is a perfect atmosphere for Nails’ disparate melancholy and unadulterated rage. When they come, Sacramento will never be the same. It will be worse. And you’ll probably want to be there for the mayhem.

See Nails live at Midtown Barfly in Sacramento on Aug. 22, 2015. Pins of Light and Human Nature will also perform. This 18-and-over show has a $12 admission and gets underway at 6 p.m. Midtown Barfly is located at 1119 21st Street, Sacramento. Get tickets in advance at Shufflesix.queueapp.com

Nightmare in the Twilight to celebrate their debut LP at Hella Metal Fest

One fateful day, Michael Alvarez went to McDonald’s and came home with more than a value meal. He ended up with a band.

“My friend was too lazy to get McDonald’s, so he sent me out to get McDonald’s,” Alvarez explains. “On my way there, I ran into an old friend from high school, and he wanted me to join a band with him, and that’s how I ended up meeting Shorty [Ruben Trejo].”

Trejo and Alvarez started jamming together around late 2008, by Alvarez’s account, but it wasn’t until the summer of 2009 that their current project, Nightmare in the Twilight, came to be.

“My guitarist at the time was a little more into partying and doing other shit, so it turned into me and Mike jamming out and working on some songs,” Trejo tells Submerge over the phone. “Playing whatever came to mind.”

Just two years later, the band, which features Alvarez on guitar, Trejo on drums, Zaryn Mankins on bass and Trejo’s little brother Santana Estrada on vocals, is ready to release their eponymous debut LP on Oct. 1, the same day they will take the stage as part of the Hella Metal Fest at the Crest Theatre. Though it hasn’t taken a long time for the Sacramento-based death metal band to get to this point, Nightmare in the Twilight’s road toward maturity certainly hasn’t been traveled without some growing pains along the way.

One such pitfall along the band’s path was finding a vocalist. Alvarez says that Nightmare in the Twilight’s original vocalist “wasn’t too into the band.”

“He’d wander off on his own,” Alvarez elaborates during our phone interview. “He’d have random guys hop up with him while he was performing, and they weren’t really any good at all. We realized we needed somebody serious.”

As it turns out, family ties would create the strong bond the band needed from its vocalist. Enter Estrada, who needed some convincing from his big brother before he decided to give it a go.

“He’d always been into vocals,” Trejo says. “It was the main thing he’d heard in metal, the first thing he’d notice in any band were the highs, lows and the mids. One day I heard him in his room practicing, and I was like, ‘He’s getting pretty good.’ We did a show without a vocalist and had a couple of guys come up and do vocals, which really didn’t turn out the way we thought it was going to. We had another show coming up, and we wanted to be more legit about it. I hit him [Estrada] up and said, ‘You’ve got to try it. You’ve got to come do these vocals.’”

With their frontman situation taken care of, the band didn’t waste much time getting into the studio. Nightmare in the Twilight released their first EP in August 2009, The Big Sexy EP, which was engineered by Martyrdom’s Phil Waters.

“He wasn’t the coolest guy, but he recorded us and did a decent job,” Alvarez says. While the situation may not have been ideal, both he and Trejo agree that it was a good learning experience for the band.

“We did learn about recording,” Alvarez says. “We started learning about how to fix our tone better, how to keep timing, what we should and shouldn’t do in the recording studio, not waste time. It was a good attempt at a demo for a band that started that year.”

“The main thing that it taught me to never try to do a split demo with a band that’s not really sure what they’re going to be doing,” Trejo adds. “We tried to do a split demo with one of our friend’s bands, and it just totally fell through, took too long in recording. So that definitely taught me to be well-rehearsed before you come into the studio, because time is money.”

Nightmare in the Twilight took this past experience into the studio this time around to create what is a more polished product. The band’s self-titled LP was recorded with Bob Swanson at Mayhemeness Recording Studios in Sacramento. Trejo says that focused preparation was a big part of their approach heading into the studio this time around.

“The main thing was we went in there well-rehearsed,” he explains. “We knew what we wanted and when we wanted it. Some songs had little changes, but it was never ‘how are we going to pull this off?’

“Last time in the studio was more jamming, and this time, we found an exact tempo of what we were going by,” Trejo, who was really looking to push the tempo of each song on the LP, continues. “We were very well structured about how fast we were going to be and where everything was going to be placed.”

Alvarez believes that the more structured approach also arose from multi-tracking the guitars this time around.

“Our demo was just two guitars, and it didn’t sound that great in certain parts when one guitar would cut out and wait for the other one to do the riff,” he says. “We did more layering of the guitar work so it sounds more full. It’s entirely together instead of parts coming off and on.”

The album contains songs that also appear on The Big Sexy EP, but have undergone major overhauls. For example, “The Young and the Restless” (which is a tad sluggish on the EP with an ill-fated jazzy breakdown toward the end of the track) explodes on Nightmare in the Twilight; even the jazzy bit pops with the crisp snap of Trejo’s drums behind palpitating guitars before erupting into the death metal fury that is the band’s signature.

“Our old EP was pretty decent, but we were still new at the time,” Alvarez says. “A lot of off-timing on the guitars, a lot of errors. We’ve changed up so much since we recorded those back in 2009. When we came into the studio this year, it was more like, let’s finalize these and make a perfect version.” Alvarez also adds that the songs on the LP that have been salvaged from the eight-track EP feature rewritten lyrics.

The band’s lyrics, though they may be difficult to discern to the casual listener, stem from a variety of places and are a true collaboration between the band members. Nightmares–hence the band’s name–play into many of the lyrics Alvarez wrote, along with those by the band’s old guitar player Joey Garnica. Alavarez says that he also examines death and dying in the words that he writes, as well as tackling existential questions like what comes after death. Songs such as these could probably be considered consistent with the band’s genre; however, then there are songs like “Chicken Sauce,” which tells the tale of a man who’s driven crazy after eating sauce from McDonald’s.

“We don’t try to come off as a comedy band, but we have a little comedic side to us,” Alvarez says. “We’re not like this uptight, big badass metal band or something like that. We like to show people that we’re not crazy.”

Nightmare in the Twilight is still in the dawn of its young career, and for the moment, though they take their music seriously, it would seem from our conversation that the band is first and foremost looking to have fun and make music they enjoy. And unlike the menu items available at the fast food chain that inadvertently sparked their formation, Nightmare in the Twilight is hoping to make music that isn’t so plastic in its sameness.

“There are a lot of bands in the Sacramento area, I’m not naming names, but they don’t try to write music for themselves,” Alvarez says. “They try to write music for a crowd, and usually the songs sound the same every time. We usually try to write music we really enjoy. I believe all of us are influenced by a lot of different styles, so the way it comes out not every song is the same.”

Hella Metal Fest will hit the Crest Theatre, 12 bands strong, on Oct. 1. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door, and can be purchased through Tickets.com. Go to Hellametalfest.com for full lineup information and to find links to buy tickets. Nightmare in the Twilight’s self-titled full-length debut will be available starting Oct. 1. The band’s The Big Sexy EP is available for free download at Nightmareinthetwilight.bandcamp.com.

Remember when heavy metal was the devil’s music? Before Korn and Limp Bizkit got jocks involved, even before Poison and Guns N’ Roses started getting chicks hooked on screaming riffs, metal was solely the domain of misanthropic losers who had a boner for Satan. Now, with the rise of the Guitar Hero / Rock Band phenomenon, the once lonely dark forests of the metal realm are now erupting in five-alarm bonfires. I mean, even Christians like the dudes in Underoath have joined the party in greater numbers. Christians! As a lifelong metal fan (I like other forms of music too, obviously, but I’ve been into metal for as long as I remember), I see this as a mixed blessing: While I miss the rebelliousness of metal’s past, I’m happy I no longer have to face public scrutiny if I’m driving around and wailing along to Iron Maiden’s “Fear of the Dark” with the windows down.

This wasn’t always the case. If you were alive in the ’80s, you may recall that every news source / church group / parent / what-have-you were railing against the evils of heavy metal. On Oct. 16, 1984, a 19-year-old by the name of John McCollum shot himself while listening to Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution.” In January 2006, McCollum’s parents took Osbourne to court, claiming that his song was to blame. The claim was dismissed, but the bug was planted. Bands like AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and even poseurs like Mötley Crüe came under fire for corrupting young minds and coercing with the Dark Lord. I even came under fire in my own family, while I was just in fourth grade, as a cousin berated me for my love of metal. She told me it was the music of the devil and if I kept listening to it, I’d rot in the festering pools of hell (something like that); and I think it made me cry like a bitch.

It’s not like that any more. Metal—though forced to sit at the weird relatives table—has become an accepted member of the musical family. No longer is it harmful to your body, mind or soul. It was simply misunderstood… OR WAS IT?

A recent study led by Dr. Michael Miller, from the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, concluded that listening to “joyful” music is healthy for a person’s heart. Meanwhile, listening to “heavy metal” causes anxiety.

According to an article on Telegraph.co.uk., results of tests performed on 10 healthy, nonsmoking volunteers showed “Stressful or disturbing music “¦ narrows the arteries and may be bad for the heart.” Joyful music—like John Denver—caused subjects’ arteries to open 26 percent wider, while music that made them “anxious” caused their arteries to narrow by 6 percent.

This may very well be true. The music I love may be killing me. But then again, so are the beer, whiskey, red meat and pollution. I’m pretty sure the dudes in Gorgoroth couldn’t care less about my health anyway, and I’m glad they couldn’t. Unhealthy things are just more fun. My arteries are just going to have to get tougher, because I don’t think John Denver is going to work his way onto my Shuffle anytime soon.

By James Barone