Many years ago I heard an interesting theory. It said that women musicians generally tend to be bass players because they’re drawn to lower frequencies, which are more like a man’s voice. Meanwhile men like playing guitar because they like high frequencies: more like a woman’s voice. I can’t speak for everybody but it’s certainly true for me. I could not care less about guitarists and their annoying, self-indulgent “look at me!” wankery, but I LOVE to stand in front of a bass cab (with proper hearing protection, of course!), pants legs flapping in the wind, having my entire self rumbled. No type of music does this more effectively than Doom Metal.
If you’re not hip to the genre, let me try to ‘splain (if you’re already in the know, please bear with me). To grossly oversimplify, imagine Black Sabbath. Everyone knows Sabbath, right? Now take a Sabbath album and slow it down to half speed. No, slower. Don’t adjust for pitch, because you’re also tuning down. Like, way down. Most Doom bands play in low C or even B, which is 4 or 5 notes below the stuff you’re used to! The end result of this is a soothing bath of low frequencies, and strings flapping so loosely that's it’s nearly impossible to play fast even if you wanted to.
After *mumble* years of playing in punk and hardcore bands, I too, am now in a Doom band with the genius name of Druglord. Let me tell you, it’s a whole new discipline. Drummers especially have a tough time with Doom; they generally get really nervous anytime there’s empty space. Rare is the drummer who can show the necessary restraint to play every fourth beat. If you want to see a zen master of Doom drumming, you need look no further than Richmond's own kings of Doom, Cough. Joey Arcaro is absolutely not afraid of the slow.
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To my surprise, Joey wasn’t the original drummer. He used to play in another band that practiced next door to where bassist/singer Parker Chandler and guitarist/singer David Cisco were writing songs. “The whole time we’re playing, I can hear Parker playing bass. It’s so fucking loud. I’m like, ‘That sounds fucking badass.’ And it seemed louder than what we were doing in our space. I ran into Dave at a bar and said, ‘If your dude doesn’t work out, let me know.’” Eventually Joey took his rightful place behind the drum kit.
I visited Cough at their practice room in haunted Shockoe Bottom on a classic Richmond summer night: at 11:00 PM it was still 95 degrees, and stepping outside felt like wading through a giant bowl of hot, faintly rancid soup. We sat on the fire escape and gazed at the skyline, the eerie silence broken only by the occasional pop of beer can tops. “We saw boobs over there one time,” said a band member wistfully, indicating a window across the way. “Now we have to look every time.”
I first saw Cough when they were a trio. They had been around awhile already, and were well on the way to being masters of the genre. Later on they added Brandon Marcey on second guitar. At the time, I thought, “Brandon's way too HAPPY to be in that band!” “We’re working on that,” says Parker, poker-faced, when I tell him this. Still later I saw them at a house show at the Charlie Mansion, where paint chips drifted gently from the ceiling like lead-based snowflakes. It was the kind of scene that would have Community Assisted Public Safety (CAPS--basically, the Richmond anti-fun police) frothing at the mouth, and exactly the kind of thing that makes life in RVA worth the ennui, the backwards thinking, and the frustration.
Cough just finished their first tour of Europe, which turned out to be an odyssey that could most charitably be called a learning experience. But before getting to that, I wanted to know how they got where they are as a band.
“What was the impetus for starting this particular band?” I asked them. “Had you all been in bands before?” Refusing to go into detail, they very reluctantly cop to having been in “...some bands.” “Yeah, I guess we all had, but we wanted to do something depressing,” offers Parker. “It was an excuse to buy a whole lot of really expensive gear,” adds David. At the time they were listening to a lot of Cavity, Goatsnake, EyeHateGod, and the Melvins, as well as seminal doom pioneers Electric Wizard.
It didn’t take them long to write and record the first EP, Kingdom (2006), followed by their debut full-length, Sigillum Luciferi (2008), on Richmond’s Forcefield label. That album, along with their seven (!) tours of the US, got them the attention of Relapse Records. Now, with the release of Ritual Abuse (2010), they are one album into their three-album agreement with the famed metal label. In spite of having hit the big time, though, they have only kind words for Tim Harwich, the guy behind Forcefield. Joey reminisces, “He was the dude that took care of us when no one else would. A double LP from a band that doesn't have shit out? No one else was going to put that [album] out. THANK YOU, Tim!”
Many tours of the US later, they have a few favorite places, like New Orleans and Chicago (where they recorded the first record with the famous Sanford Parker). NYC has treated them OK for the most part, Philly can be hit or miss, but “Baltimore and Athens always suck.” Last time they played Tampa, it was crazy. “They were CROWDSURFING. They were up on the stage doing this headbanging, crowdsurfing shit...” To your 30-beats-a-minute stuff? “Yeah!” says Joey. “And this was all like three feet away from me, so I had to stop looking at the crowd, ‘cuz it was so intense, I was laughing at myself. They were losing their SHIT.”
What about Richmond? “It's the fuckin’ best place,” says Joey without hesitation. “As soon as you leave, you wanna come back. But then when you get here, you wanna go back on tour.”
Did you ever consider relocating as a band? “Yeah, we thought about maybe Portland for a while,” says Dave. “Then we started touring, and we realized we just wanna come home. If you’re touring a lot, you kinda scratch that itch to pick up and be somewhere else.”
Did they ever see being in a band as a way to make a living? The question elicits mostly rueful chuckling. “We’re more successful now than ever [Ritual Abuse is in its third pressing!] and now we have more debt than ever... more people to pay. [It’s] a marginal amount, really reasonable, but it all adds up. The European tour really topped it off.”
That tour, their first one of Europe, was extremely hard on them. On the upside, “We met a lot of good people, we played a lot of great shows..The fans were great, They're really honest. One girl was like, ‘I liked your first record a lot better.’ ‘I saw you guys the other day and I saw you guys today. And I didn’t like it.’”
Joey: “Czech Republic was incredible. A dude came to the show on a HORSE.” This memory sets the guys off on a free-association of memories, everyone talking at once. People showering outdoors with buckets. Dirt roads. “The most incredible bacon I've ever had.” “They grow weed in their gardens.” The club in Hamburg was so small “Dave was onstage and getting beers from the bar.” Everyone laughs.
It wasn’t all yuks and excellent beer, however. Brandon remembers, “The first show we played, the amp that I rented caught on fire. And I got blamed for it.” Joey: “The whole first week, all of our sets got cut short, ‘cuz we were too loud, or every band played so long we only had 20 minutes. By the end of the first week I was pretty sure that’s how the rest of the tour was going to be. ‘I guess we play two songs and fuck off.’” Dave relates a moment when a giant PA speaker rattled from its perch and fell right onto his pedal board, rendering it banana-shaped but still functional.
Parker recalls, “We got the cops called at least once a week, and we’re playing on rental gear that’s like half the size of our normal equipment, turned up to one, you can’t feed back...” “We went there for too long for a first time,” opines Brandon. “It didn’t suck, it was just that ...the people that we needed to rely on for information and support were the wrong people. They gave us a bad rental company, a shitty tour route that caused a lot of backtracking, and a lot of our money down the drain. We went through Birmingham, England five times in one week and never played there.”
The tour, 50 shows in 54 days, was absolutely grueling. Everybody, band AND promoter, lost money. “I think we broke up three times on that tour,” says Parker. To make matters worse, the band and their driver, to put it mildly, did not have a meeting of the minds. “:At one point we asked him how far the airport was and if he would take us there.” Brandon’s passport got stolen from the “so-called backstage” at the club in Christiania, Copenhagen. He had to go to the embassy in Berlin to replace it. “It was cool. I took a shit on American soil.” He laughs. “It was a blueprint of what not to do,” says Joey. “But next time, we’ll have a better grasp.”
They did play some amazing gigs and have some classic rock ‘n’ roll moments. Like when they went to the sleeping quarters at the end of one night, only to find the door blocked by an unidentified member of Voivod, who was (ahem) “getting acquainted with” a young lady from the area. They played 4 or 5 gigs with Voivod, saw some amazing bands like Leech Feast and Caronte, and actually got to meet Electric Wizard! And they have only good things to say about the one-person enterprise that is the European branch of Relapse. “Dude totally hooked us up. He gave us a place to stay, a phone, took us to a coffeeshop...”
They see being on Relapse as being a net gain so far. “We're really happy with all the people, yeah.” “And we’re able to play a lot of larger festivals now, which is cool.” In fact, they have just been confirmed for the 2012 Maryland Death Fest, which is a giant, huge, hairy deal if you are into the metal scene at all. By the time you read this, they'll have gone to NYC to play the premiere of the metal documentary Slow Southern Steel, and played at the famous Stoner Hands of Doom festival in Maryland.
Currently, they are in the process of writing for a new record. Lyrically, it'll continue to be dark. Some of the lyrics on the existing records are taken right from their personal experiences, like the “Year in Suffering” they experienced living at their unheated, unairconditioned practice space, a warehouse on a desolate stretch of Hull St. “It tried us pretty hard,” says Joey. The Relapse artist page for Cough states: “Ritual Abuse is the result of all the shit and suffering we put ourselves through to continue to write this music. Hopefully you all feel as miserable listening to it as we did creating it.”
What's your favorite thing about Richmond? “Our friends.” (Stage whisper: “Inter Arma!”) “Beer, metal and fire.” Joey: “I like that we get all the seasons. I like that there’s a thriving metal scene. I like that if you’re into metal, and I don’t know you, I know someone that knows you. Everyone seems to be on the same page. And even with all the drama and whatever, there seems to be a huge lack of bullshit here, and that’s badass.”
It's now after midnight and everyone is rambling. We get started talking about the late lamented Nara Sushi, which leads to lots of funny stories (which I'll save for a Nara Sushi article). We deconstruct the Rammstein “Pussy” video, and talk about Melvins lyrics--is Buzz really saying “Heavy metal beachball”? And the band tells a few stories of characters they've met and played with, including Brian Patton of Soilent Green and EyeHateGod. “Dude was givin’ us a hard time and he was like, [deep Southern drawl] ‘Man, I can see it now. I can see y’all 15 years from now, like me, bein’ like, why the FUCK am I doin’ this?’” Everyone laughs. “He basically told us we were fuckin’ up. ‘You’re not qualified to do anything else in life.’ I love that discussion.”