Coathanger Abortion

6.08 V1.1

Trends come and go but Coathanger Abortion's old-school death metal onslaught continues. Delivering the uncompromising aural destruction we've come to expect from them. But there's more to these maniacal musicians than death and dismemberment. I caught up with them at their practice space.

Scott McMasters (drums)
Robby Wooten (vocals)
Jay Perry (guitar)
Steve Pitts (guitar)
Scot "One-T" Dunlap (bass)

RBN: How would you describe your sound?

Robby: I use death/grind.

Steve: When I first came around and started jamming with them I heard them say death/grind a lot as if it was it's own entity.

RBN: Are there any specific bands that have influenced you a lot?

Robby: Old Cannibal Corpse, Suffocation...

Steve: Thousands.

Jay: Speaking of Suffocation they were the ones who kinda established the style that we're playing. They were the first ones that come out with the blending of the heavy, doomy, death sound mixing with a lot of blasting style. But what we're mostly influenced by is early 90's death metal.

RBN: Let's talk about the history of the band a bit. How did it come about?

Jay: I met Scott at a House of Horrors in East Ridge in 1993. Me and the original bass player had been jamming on some Metallica songs and stuff. It just got to the point to where we were starting to play Obituary sounding stuff, met Scott and it went from there. We played one show at the old 20 Below.

Scott: That wasn't Coathanger Abortion. Jay and I had been jamming together, it wasn't the same band...

Robby: It turned into it pretty much.

Jay: When we played, the name of the band was Execration which is now a Comatose label band. That was the name we used the time we played with Abbadon and Necropolis. We had a few member changes after that. It dissolved and it was just me and him (Scott). The singer we had at the time was in a real bad car wreck and now he's permanently in a wheelchair. We've had a few downtimes where Scott sold his set. I've had my amp stole by an ex-member.

"He stole the amp I was working flipping burgers for and took me a long time to get."

Scott: This band started when I decided to get a drum kit again. I had asked Jay if he wanted to start jamming again and he had never gotten rid of his equipment. Then we started practicing and that's when we got Billy Lynn in the band. We played with just guitar, bass and drums for about a year and then we got Adam, the old singer. That version of Coathanger Abortion was together for about three and a half years. We disbanded for personal reasons. For awhile Robby had wanted to sing, he was in Izopn at the time and we thought he didn't want to do both or we would have told him "yeah, come on."

RBN: What bands were you in before Robby?

Robby: Well, I played with my first band, Gridlock, with Eric Cobb. After that I was in The Shmucks, a punk band, which had Jeremy Brogdon, Eric, me and Seth Raines for about a year. Left out of that and went right into Izopn. I was in Izopn for about five years. Left out of that, came into Coathanger and been here ever since.

Jay: Billy left for personal reasons. Steven was in Platonic Disease, they had disbanded and we asked if he wanted to jam with us. He learned our songs and did a few shows.

RBN: What's your musical background Steve?

Steve: I had a couple bands in high school. One of them played Slayer songs in a church. I had Platonic Disease as an idea at that time and signed up Matt and Michael. Six years of that and that band broke up. I had a side project called Jesus and the Angels. I ran into Scott at Ziggy's and got him to play. It was me and Scott and Russ Cannon. Originally we had Zane from People of the Squares.

Jay: Scott and Steve were already jamming in that side project when we asked Steve to come jam with us.

RBN: You've gotten a lot of flack for the band name. Why do you think people are offended by it and what would you say to them?

Steve: I don't know many people that are offended by the name like in a way that they would get righteous on me. The people in the paper don't care, they're like, "that's ugly, we'll leave it out."

Scott: It's a moral issue or whatever, it's too touchy of a subject. People take it too literal.

Jay: It's not something we're taking seriously because all of us have children.

"We're not gonna be taking coathangers and hanging baby parts off them on our album covers of anything. Between all the band members we got six kids."

We deal with that on a local level more than an out-of-town level because when we go out of town we're playing with like-minded bands, other types of extreme metal. They're all like, "it's real," and they love it. But on the local level, they won't play us on Rock 105 and they yank our stickers down when they see them.

Scott: The people that matter like the name. We could go with a more friendly name but who's gonna remember that?

Jay: That's one thing you could say about the name, you won't forget it.

RBN: Let's talk about the new album. When will it be out, what can you tell us about it?

Steve: There's nine songs, it will be out this year. The real shit.

RBN: Is there any departure from the old style?

Scott: There's not any departure from the style really. There's samples on it, movie clip samples.

RBN: What movies?

Jay: In the Mouth of Madness, it's one of the songs on there.

Robby: Dawn of the Dead.

Scott: There's one from Spiderman 2, and Brokeback Mountain. There's a lot of off-beat samples on there. There's a twenty second acoustic guitar part.

Steve: That's the official answer, Brokeback Mountain. We're really that brutal we'll take it to the Brokeback level. We'll challenge anybody in a black t-shirt. [laughter]

Jay: One thing I want to say about the album is I'm hoping the recorded tracks come across with the same energy as the live tracks. We'd like to think everyone will walk away from a song with at least one riff that sticks in their head.

Steve: Which you don't get in a lot of death metal. When we go to a show out of town and there's a distro there, what they have, a lot of those bands aren't memorable to me. Coathanger Abortion is very memorable.

RBN: Your big fans of horror films what other topics do your songs cover?

Robby: I personally am. We struggle on different stuff other than horror movies, anything from politics to religion. Scott has done a lot of the lyric writing on that end.

RBN: What is the song "Temporary Patriot" about?

Scott: It was not even a month after 9/11 happened and saw all these American flags, everyone had them, hanging off their cars and stuff. I was driving down the highway and saw two of them laying out in the middle of the road. I never thought of myself as a patriotic extremist but I have some patriotic pride and I thought the number one thing is you weren't supposed to do was let the flag hit the ground. If the flag hits the ground you pick it up. You'd see these flags that fell off people's cars just flapping around in the breeze and if you pick one up it says "Made in China" on it. So I wrote those ideas down.

Jay: One thing that goes back to the history of the band, as far as lyrical content. We've always wanted someone with the low guttural vocal style. The only stipulation we've ever had as far as content is we weren't looking for Satanic lyrics or just typical gore, dead bodies, necrophilia stuff. We have more respect for bands that have a little bit more to say than that.

Scott: There are some typical death metal lyrics, horror movies and gore type stuff and then there's songs about drug abuse, religion, not anti-christian but hypocritical commercialized organized religion.

Robby: A new one we wrote recently called "Down the Unknown," is about the experience I had the past two years working on the road, being away from home and family. Got another one called "Mall Monster" about a mall out in Nashville. I worked third shift there. During that time we wrote the song and for some reason it made me think of that mall.

RBN: Will the lyrics be included with the new album?

Robby: There's actually two new songs from the demo uploaded on myspace that have the lyrics and they're included with the CD as well.

RBN: Do you think death metal will ever be commercially accepted?

Steve: Yeah, it is right now. You watch Adult Swim, you see Metalocalypse, it's a death metal band.

"What we do with death metal I don't really see as commercial. There's a fine line there but you see a lot of elements of the style represented elsewhere in a commercial way."

I think right now metal is at an all-time high in popularity. I've watched enough VH1 to know.

Scott: I think it's gotten about as mainstream as it ever will. I remember back in '89, Jim Carrey being on the Arsenio Hall Show and talking about Napalm Death on there or '92 with Cannibal Corpse being in Ace Ventura. There's all the hardcore, metalcore or alternative bands that borrow some of the elements from death metal. It's just like anything else, they'll take a part of it and use it to benefit but not want to go all out. They'll stay mainstream enough to where they're still cool to a lot more people and try to have some of that edge.

RBN: Anything you want to add?

Steve: I want to brag about how we play out-of-town a lot. [laughs] I think it's cool, we're a regional force even though we're kinda shy about it at times. It doesn't really mean anything, we're just having a lot of fun with it, it's a hobby. We've played Georgia, Florida, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Illinois.

Merch available at:
Compact Discovery
5611 Ringgold Rd.
East Ridge, TN
37412
(423) 485-9183

myspace.com/coathangerabortion

Share

Comments