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Leon Del Muerte and Sean Mc Grain take aim at your good taste. Flushed and Colonic Impaled Drags Heavy Metal Back Into the Gutter By Traci Vogel After a series of awkward emails, I've finally scheduled an interview with Oakland's self-styled "heathen viral shit-stained" metal band, Impaled. The day of the interview, I look at the directions I've been given. The practice space is beneath a highway overpass? Through a chain-link fence with razor wire? "Davina," I say to my unsuspecting co-worker, "Do you want to come along with me to this interview? And could you bring your cell phone?" It isn't the band's obviously tongue-in-cheek description that makes my stomach queasy, or even the fact that Impaled sing songs with titles like, "The Immaculate Defecation," "With Shit I Am Adorned," and "From Here to Colostomy" -- no, it's the band's album covers. In the heavy metal world, Impaled is famous for producing first, a cover featuring a toilet into which someone has literally puked his guts out; and second, a just-birthed baby about to be hacked apart by a disgruntled man. This last album, "Choice Cuts," which came out in March, disgusted even jaded heavy metal music distributors, many of whom refused to carry it, and some of whom even said the image made them "ashamed to be in the heavy metal business." Quite a feat for four young guys who, in real life, behind the razor wire, turn out to be remarkably unscary -- even wholesome looking, despite the requisite long hair and beer-bottle-littered practice space. Lead singer Leon del Muerte, articulate and soft-spoken, modestly dismisses the outrage over the cover. "It was so obviously fake and hokey looking, I don't see how anyone could have taken it seriously," he says. "I mean, you could see the joints in the baby's arms and everything." Guitarist Sean McGrath, in a red "Fear The Mullet" t-shirt and wire-framed glasses, interjects, "We didn't intend to put it out to cause an uproar. It's just that we're into gory stuff and we make gory music, so it seemed like we should have a gory cover. Other bands have done worse stuff -- there's a band from Mexico, called Disgorge, that featured a real dead baby on their cover, and I don't think they got as much flack about it." The industry of heavy metal rests on a proud history of shock value, of course, and since Impaled counts bands like Dismember, Carcass, and old Swedish death metal among their early influences their idea of what's shocking may be in a whole other artistic realm than most folks' -- even their fans' (one of whom confessed on the band's website comments page that, "Your band has great stuff musicly [sic], but your covers are so sick I almost pucked [sic, again] when looking at [them]!"). Leon del Muerte laughs when I ask him if he worries about alienating his fans, saying, "A lot of that -- I don't wanna say 'shock value' type of stuff -- but that stuff was funny. We were cracking up when we were taking the toilet photo; it sort of fit the general theme." "Also," he says, after some consideration, "Humor is just a way to get yourself going, when you're writing lyrics. On that album, we weren't very experienced at writing lyrics, so we just did a lot of joking around. And shit jokes is what we ended up with." "I don't think we've ever gotten over toilet training," Sean adds. Which makes me ask, what do their parents think of their material? Leon says his parents (Mr. and Mrs. Del Muerte?) "think it's funny," but Sean is not so sure. "I think my mom is worried," he says, slouching a little beneath Hannibal and South Park posters hanging on the wall of the practice room. "I think somewhere in the back of her mind she thinks something is very wrong." Something is wrong, if only that Impaled goes against the parental dictum that you should care about maintaining a positive public image. Leon and Sean describe their live performance style, for example, as "screaming, just going crazy." "We're not very skilled performers, so we just whip our hair around a lot," Leon jokes, and Sean adds, "Lots of shows end up with us wrestling on the stage." Then just to ham up the whole thing a little more, he ads: "We're like school in the summertime ... no class." Sean is eager to emphasize that Impaled's next album will not be based on shock value. Instead, it's built around something he reluctantly calls "a concept." "I wouldn't say these are serious songs," Sean says, "but it's a semi-serious album. Not a whole lotta room for poop." Every song on this new album is being written around episodes, things that happen to a cast of characters. The narrative will be something "sorta like Frankenstein," Sean says. "A doctor who wants to reanimate dead bodies." Dead bodies? Sounds like another great cover is in the works. And for those listeners who worry about losing the whole "heathen viral shit-stained" aspect of the music, don't worry: Impaled's drummer has started a Spanish-language metal band, called Morbosidad. Their first album features a song very promisingly entitled, "Cagada de Christo." [ East Bay | Metroactive | Archives ]