Any metal fan with a sense of humor is certainly aware of Dethklok by now.  Animation and musical genius Brendon Small wanted to switch gears after the brilliant but low-key Home Movies and set about creating Metalocalypse, the Cartoon Network show that brought Dethklok to the world.  Wanting to take it a step further, he has enlisted the esteemed talent of drummer Gene Hoglan and recorded two full albums now under the Dethklok guise and even put together a touring band.  As Dethalbum II arrived in stores and Metalocalypse was about to start its third season, I had a chance to chat with both Brendon and Gene…

Do you think Dethklok might ever pull a ‘Cold Lake’ on us?
Brendon Small:  Ultimately, even if I’m trying to keep things fresh for myself, I still think I understand in my mind what Dethklok is and what it sounds like.  I don’t think I’ll ever go too far off that, because I don’t have to.  I can go create a different fake band or something if I need to, but Dethklok will still have those double-kicks and harmonized guitars, the keyboards and some kind of screaming or guttural-sounding vocals.

One of the first and coolest guest voices you worked with was King Diamond.  What was that like?
Brendon:  He is one of the most gentlemanly, nice people in the world that I’ve encountered.  I only talked to him on the phone and I gave him directions for the different voices that he recorded for the show and he got it immediately.  That was the first thing I thought of when me and Tommy were coming up with the show, like, “What if we cast some heroes of ours?”  And didn’t have them play themselves, but had them play these kind of obscure, weird characters.  And then showed them in the credits but didn’t put a big fucking flag up, just let the people who thought it was cool figure it out and the people who didn’t know anything, no big deal.  It’s for the people who know.  We thought that would be pretty badass but even more badass would be to get King Diamond to come and do voices - how do we make that happen?  So he was the first guy and I almost felt like, “We blew it, why did we do it so early?  How are we going to beat that?”  There’s a bunch of other cool people here, too, but King Diamond… how do we get him back?  I talked to him on the phone and he was telling me about his record that was about to come out, which was Give Me Your Soul…Please.  He was describing the artwork to me and he was enthusiastic, just excited and you could tell he loves his job and he has one of the coolest jobs ever.  And he is also a guy who gets the theatrics of what I love about rock.  He’s a sharp guy, too.  He’s kind of a combination of a pitch-man, a carnival barker - he knows what he’s doing, he knows how to get people in the seats.  We were talking about something and he was describing the blood splattered on the wall in the back of this painting of the album cover.  I’m like, “Oh, a lot of blood, eh?”  And he’s like, “Yeah, a lot of blood.  Seems to be what the kids want.”  (laughs)  Like a network exec.

Any notable guests you have in the works or that you’d like to have?
Brendon:  Yeah.  We’re in the middle of it now but through this absurd thing that I’ve been doing, I have gotten to meet a lot of my guitar heroes that really got me playing guitar and got me excited about it.  So on the first few episodes, we have Steve Vai and Joe Satriani and Slash.  Scott Ian did some stuff, the band Enslaved did some stuff, Mastodon did some stuff, and we’re not finished yet.  We’re doing a shorter run of episodes but they are a half hour this time.

Any aspirations for a Dethklok movie?
Brendon:  Yeah, I’d love to do it.  It’s funny because I sit here with a TV network and now a label side of the thing and each one wants me to do just the thing that they are in charge of.  So the TV people get pissed off when the record starts doing well because all they care about is TV, that’s their job.  But they fuel each other, they certainly don’t hurt the other’s success.  But TV’s like, “I’m pissed off that this tour is doing so well.  I want you back here writing more episodes, I want you finishing this shit and getting on to the 4^th season and 5^th season, just keep on going.  All this other stuff is just keeping you from giving me shows.”  And the record side is battling against the TV side.  The TV side says, ‘Okay, we’ve tried a movie [I assume he is referring to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie here. - ed.] and it didn’t work out great, so if you’re going to do a movie, you can’t half-ass it, you have to only do the movie, but I want TV shows out of you - where are you going to get time to do a movie and TV shows when I’m also saying you can’t do both at the same time?”  So that’s the dilemma.  Also, if I am going to do a movie, I don’t want to do a cheap, shitty movie.  I want to do a movie that looks beautiful and is the best possible script and is given millions of dollars for its budget.  If I don’t get that, I won’t do it.  We stretch the dollar pretty far on the show because our budgets are not huge if you compare them to a show like The Simpsons or whatever.  Our budgets are fractional but the people work eight times as hard and none of us have taken a weekend off all year.  But I’d love to do it if the circumstances are right.

I know you are a black metal fan as well - what do you think about them doing the Lords of Chaos movie?
Brendon:  Years ago, I met the guys who wrote the movie and they were looking to have me consult on it.  I got busy with my show and they got busy with their things but I keep in touch with those guys.  From what I understand, the way they are going to do it, it’s going to be something that is non-exploitive, but who knows, it could be.  I mean, I haven’t seen it and I’m not responsible for their shit.  But I think what they are trying to do is a character pic, trying to understand this guy.  And I think a movie has to be about that because if you’re just trying to walk people through a movie like, ‘Here’s some cool music that happened,” I don’t think you really have a movie.  If you have a cool character and really interesting backdrop, then I think you might have a movie.  I think these guys are also very careful, from what I remember - again, this could all be wrong - but their hearts were in the right place and they wanted to protect…  A lot of these people are still alive, it didn’t happen all that long ago, so a lot of care has to go into a project like that.  I read their script and it’s a very interesting struggle between two characters, between Euronymous and Dead [I assume he means Varg, but maybe not? - ed.]  I’m a fan of movies and a fan of the black metal world.  It’s a world that I don’t think Americans think of except for the fans who read the books and all that stuff, but I think it could be a fascinating movie.  It does cast a negative shadow on the world of metal, but it was just this one instance that happened, this one group of people.  But that’s always been rock ‘n’ roll, whether it’s Altamont or whatever, it’s always been related to danger, however much danger is available will fuel that thing into being more popular.  It’s really strange, the same thing with hip-hop and gangsta stuff.  Like, “Oh, those guys have guns - I’m going to listen to what they have to say.  Oh, these guys burned down churches - I’m going to see what they have to say.”

It’s kind of that whole celebrity thing, too, which Metalocalypse is based on.
Brendon:  Yeah.  These celebrities get away with murder.  Except Phil Specter I guess.  He’s in jail now.

Gene, how much input do you give when working in the studio?
Gene Hoglan:  Contrary to what anybody thinks, I write most of the stuff and then I show Brendon how to play the leads and then I do all the other stuff and the production for Ulrich.  So don’t let anybody fool you!  (laughs)  No, Brendon comes to the table with pretty much the same songs that are used in the episodes.  So if a song in the episode is 45 seconds, I have 45 seconds worth of music.  That’s how it was on the first album.  On the second album, the songs were a little more fleshed out, but usually Brendon goes home…  I usually learn the songs that afternoon when I get to the studio and by the evening, I’ve tracked a couple of the songs that we’ve paid attention to that day and then that night Brendon goes home and works out the rest of the arrangements for the other couple of songs that we’re going to be doing the next day.  So every now and then, he’ll come up with a riff and be like, “Damn, I don’t really have anything in mind for this riff,” and I’ll be like, “Give m e a second with that” and I’ll come up with a beat or something for him.  But [overall], very very little to do with the writing.

You did a lot of writing in the Dark Angel days but not so much in bands that followed.  Is that something you miss?
Gene:  Every band I’ve been in, I’ve written tons for and I like to morph myself into the songwriter that the band needs.  So for bands like Punchdrunk and Just Cause and all these other crazy bands that I’m in, I write music for - even Strapping, I wrote some music for that.  Lyrics, however, I just stopped writing them.  I think for me, back in Dark Angel, it was like, well, somebody has to do it.  Once I didn’t have to do it anymore, fine, cool.  Now, I couldn’t even tell what kind of lyricist I am.  I write the odd lyrics for any of the bands I’m in, but as for taking on the entire lyrics-writing process, I don’t mind not doing it.  With one of my bands, Meldrum, I’ve written tons of the new material for that, I’m just always writing stuff.  The next project I have with the Meldrum girls, I’m going to be writing tons of that material, too, which is going to be way more extreme than Meldrum.  We’re going to keep the core band together but go in a way more extreme direction, something we’re all more comfortable with.  Way more shredding, way more double-bass oriented, way more blastbeats and stuff like that.  Psychotic, next-level psycho metal, fronted by hot chicks. (laughs)  Just laying it down super-mean, super-heavy and really classy.  So I’m writing tons for that.  I’ve got a million songs written for any sort of style.  I don’t know, the whole publishing thing kind of went right past me and I didn’t realize how much dough you could make by writing songs all over the place.

You recently joined Fear Factory - was that a difficult choice at all, with all the legal stuff that’s been going on with them?
Gene:  It was a difficult choice in the fact that I have a ton of respect for Raymond’s playing.  I was like, this project is going to take a whole lot of energy to even play like that constantly.  As I’ve gotten a bit older, I like to sprinkle the psychosis around a little bit and whatnot.  Like with Strapping - a couple songs super-manic, a bunch of other songs really tasty and for me, Fear Factory is such a… ‘you play double-bass and that’s it’ sort of project.  It was going to take a lot of energy to want to do that sort of thing.  Not that I’m old or anything, but I’m getting up there in my career and, if you’re going to play this stuff live, are you going to want to be in a cover band?  Because playing Raymond’s stuff is probably akin to playing Neal Peart’s stuff, where the fans want to hear it note for note perfect.  You’re going to have a bunch of dudes in the back with their arms crossed, going, ‘Well, you better play it exactly like [him],’ you know?  I get it, I understand.  Do I want to put that energy into it?  So I’m like, let’s focus on the record.  Let’s try to make the coolest record that we can and I definitely think we’ve done that.  It’s absolutely the band’s most aggressive album, I think.  The BPMs are way up there and Dino is playing psychotic riffs and I’m playing psychotic double-bass and it’s just a whole lot faster and more focused than anything they’ve done in the past.  That’s a total outsider speaking, but they are definitely roaring back with a vengeance, I can definitely guarantee that.  There are no ballads are hip-hoppy type anything, nothing close to that.  No even mid-tempo songs.  We were getting close to recording the record and I was like, hey, where are the mid-tempo songs?  (laughs)  Some people might go, aw, it’s way too extreme, but you can’t please everyone so fuck ‘em.

Are you still based in L.A.?
Gene:  I have returned to L.A.  I was based in Vancouver, Canada from ’97 through the end of 2008. 

How has the scene changed there since the 80s and 90s?
Gene:  Well, the underground death metal is still pumping along.  That’s really about the only scene I had much of an affinity with.  Back after all the hair bands thankfully died, some of the nu-metal stuff started coming out of there…  It’s like anything: one band comes along with a pretty decent idea and a million bands jump on that idea.  That’s the way Seattle was.  The first few bands from Seattle were really bad-ass and then you had bands like Candlebox.

What’s next for you?
Gene:  I go directly from this to the Fear Factory South American ten-day stint.  Then I get back from that and head up to the Bay Area to record an album with my band called The Kehoe Nation - not my band, but a guy named Brian Kehoe’s band and I love playing drums for those guys.  It’s a very non-metal band but it’s heavy as fuck, kind of a crazy psychobilly like Hot Rod Lincoln meets Slayer or something.  Then directly from that I go to Japan with Meldrum and I think my first day off is January 10^th.  So that’s that and everybody else has a ton of projects.  I know Brendon is working on the show, out here even [on tour] - he’s constantly at his laptop.  That’s one thing that is fun when they are putting the shows together, we get to see the shows before anybody else does.  They work on those shows… they air on Sundays and they work on those things up until like Thursday, changing stuff.  I always thought these things sat in the can for a month or two, but man, you are getting the freshest Dethklok imaginable.  So right now we’re getting to see the soundtrack with storyboards, like stick figures of Murderface and Pickles, so that’s pretty neat, seeing it come together.  The new season sounds fucking hilarious, sound-wise anyway. (laughs)

[for the rest of this interview, read  issue #52 of Outburn Magazine in Jan. 2010]

http://www.myspace.com/dethklok