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Atomizer.
 Embarking
upon their first European tour later on in the year (and hoping
to do a show in Canada on the way back), Melbourne black/thrash
metal band Atomizer continue to spread their trademark messages
of blasphemy and misanthropy back home with their recently-released
third studio album 'The Only Weapon Of Choice,' a collection
of tracks summed up as '13 Odes To Power, Decimation And Conquest'.
According to bassist, vocalist, lyricist and founding member
Jason Healey, there wasn't really much of a story behind the
new album; it was just something that the band felt they needed
to do in order to stop themselves from slipping into a creative
rut.
"The way we work," he explains, "is that when we finish one project, we start another. The new album was intensely planned, but we had no real motivation for doing it other than the fact that, as people who play in a band, that's what we do. I'm really not a fan of stagnating or getting bored. If you don't take your work as seriously as all that then I don't really understand the point of playing in a band. For me, you've just got to keep moving; you've got to constantly have goals to work towards."
When I ask if he considers there to be any notable differences between the new album and the band's previous one, 'Death-Mutation-Disease-Annihilation', he responds strongly in the affirmative.
"Yeah, absolutely," he insists. "I think 'The Only Weapon Of Choice' is a more sophisticated album. The arrangements are a little more focused, and it's very direct and song-oriented. There're faster songs, slower songs and more melody, and I also think that the playing is generally improved. Every time you do something, you need to learn from that, so the next time you go and do it - whatever it is - you do it better. There's no point going to the studio and making the same mistakes over and over. Every band makes mistakes in the studio; if you're smart, you learn from them."
One thing certainly different about the new album is that it
contains a few spoken word pieces (sections of the tracks When
I Die, I Wanna Die Violently, and For Blackness Absolute,
and the entire final track, The Fog Of War).
"It's something I've always wanted to do, and this album presented
a few opportunities. Originally we recorded When I Die... for
a compilation album - we just did a demo version of it - and
it had this sort of mechanical, Hellraiser kind of effect over
it, but I didn't really like that. The idea is definitely more
prevalent on For Blackness Absolute - towards the end
of that one - and The Fog Of War, which is just straight-out
narration. That one was never intended to be a song per se -
I suppose it is what it is - but the way that the album sort
of winds out at the end was planned; we really tried to set
it out like an album, not just a bunch of songs that start and
end with no apparent reason, goal or rationale. Everything was
planned right to detail."
One song on the new album that I found particularly interesting
was a track entitled One Man's Failure, which considers
how differently the last two thousand years might have turned
out had Herod's efforts to have the infant Jesus killed succeeded.
"It's like any number of things," Healey says when I ask him
to elaborate on that one. "For example, what if Hitler had been
beaten up while he'd been living hand-to-mouth on the streets
of Austria? Any number of incidents could have completely changed
the world as we know it. It's about that. I thought it was quite
novel myself. It's really open to interpretation."
From that song and some that have appeared on the band's previous works, I gather that Atomizer aren't the world's biggest fans of Christianity. "Well, it's not really like I'm a fan of it or not," he says. "I just think it's important to point out what I at least believe is fundamentally wrong with the way that this particular collective of people live their lives. Perhaps someone will read those lyrics and think, 'Well, what is it? Why do I do this? Why do I live for a deity I have no actual, realistic perception of?' You ask people who believe in anything, 'Why do you believe it?', and they'll often say, 'Oh because I can, because I have faith.' But what is tangible about that? There's nothing that you can actually hang your hat on, so to speak. It's really just something that people have either been brought up to believe in, or turn to as a way of finding acceptance. Those sorts of organisations try to invite people in; they're always trying to make greater their numbers. It's a crusade that people are on: some lead and some follow. You get the same sort of thing in any organisation, group or whatever. That interests me; I've got a voice about it, and I like to express it."
James Brazel
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'The Only Weapon Of Choice' is out now through Animosity International.
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