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| The Berserker | |||
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With their
first album proclaimed by Earache Records founder Digby Pearson to be
the most extreme album that label has ever released, The Berserker
certainly had their work cut out for them to create a follow-up album
that exceeded the limits already stretched by the first. So, with
'Dissimulate', The Berserker attempt to break another record - this time
the speed record for fastest human drumming. Currently being tested for
the Guinness Book of Records, The Berserker are set to join fellow metal
heads Napalm Death and Brutal Truth, who hold the records for the
shortest record and shortest video clip respectively. As the unnamed
singer of The Berserker explains, "The current record stands at
1106 single strokes in a minute and our drummer has unofficially
performed 1148 single strokes in a minute," he says. "To break
it down, it's 19 hits per second, and you've got to keep that speed
going for a minute. What we've got to do is film the attempt and get it
through to Extreme Sport Drumming, the organisation in the US, and
they're hooked up with the Guinness Book of Records, and go through the
process of making it official."
Created as a solo project in 1995, The Berserker have had several releases on independent labels before the singer's remixes of Morbid Angel tracks Day of Suffering, Abominations and The Ancient Ones scored a deal with Earache for 2000's self-titled album. Basically a compilation of the singer's solo material written between 1995 and 1998, 'The Berserker' was a shockingly abrasive and chaotic album of industrially driven, amphetamine-paced hyper metal wizardry. The music on 'Dissimulate', like its artwork, is the fleshed-out, three-dimensional version of 'The Berserker'. 'Dissimulate' is no less brutal than its predecessor, but it is a markedly more cohesive and coherent album. It also includes a bonus cover of the Carcass classic Corporeal Jigsore Quandary. "The thing is, we got to play a lot of the tracks live before we went into the studio; we made sure that they do work live and that they do blend together," the singer explains. "As the first album was more of a compilation, it was kind of hard to make the track-listing flow." The Australian tour in support of 'Dissimulate' follows a 27-date tour of the US last year with Gorguts, Dying Fetus and Skinless. Later this year, The Berserker will head back to the States to tour with Immolation, Vader and Origin, and then onto the UK and Europe with Brat and Incision. "It was a bit of a wake-up call for us," the singer says of the first US tour. "We did 27 shows in 30 days. You don't get to do that kind of thing in Australia. It was really good, learned a hell of a lot, made a lot of contacts, and it was good to go over and see how other bands do it." The band members of The Berserker are careful to maintain their anonymity. Their names are not used, and elaborate masks are worn on stage to obscure their identities. By removing the signifiers of humanness in their live show, they visually represent the hatred of humanity that is expressed in the lyrics. "Basically, we've stripped away the human image because it is complacent, it's too mundane, it's too every day," the singer explains. "The image that we've chosen fits the sound of the music a lot better than just four guys getting up, long hair, black pants, black long sleeve things, black whatever. Look, it's been done for 20 years and we prefer people just to be engrossed in the whole experience of the band. Rather than just get up and listen to it, just watch some guys stand there and play it, we really want to make it entertaining and put on a show instead of just getting up and running through the paces." The anonymity is also a protest against an image-driven music industry, a way to prevent audiences from becoming distracted by personalities or fashions. But besides maybe being banned (and The Berserker have also had a taste of this, with their film clip for Reality being banned by the Independent Television Commission and MTV due to excessive strobe lighting and horrific imagery), nothing is more marketable in metal at the moment than bands who are anti-image - especially when they wear masks to convey their message. The singer crossly refutes any suggestion that there is any gimmick appeal in The Berserker's act. "There is no message, there's no names, there's no faces," he says, clearly irritated. "It's just about the pure enjoyment of the entertainment of music. It's done to strip away all the crap of the bands that like to have the clothing sponsorships and that kind of thing. A lot of people miss the point a bit and tend to get caught up with other things, and we've done it purely so people can focus on the music instead of focusing on everything else." Michelle Phillipov
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