ENTOMBED

Serpent Swedes
by Mike Baronas

Two decades in, Entombed has released one of their best albums ever in Serpent Saints, a 10 song behemoth that is sure to unite old and new fans alike. Now the lone guitarist for the Swedish quartet, founder Alex Hellid chats up the band’s rejuvenation and reflects on their travels down that Left Hand Path...

GASP: Serpent Saints is the album that has a lot of people, including myself, stating that Entombed is back and better than ever.

Alex Hellid: It certainly feels like it too, so it’s great when you hear reactions like that. It’s good to know that we weren’t off when we felt that we were spending the extra time and trying to get it right and focused and to not have an album that goes in too many directions. So it feels good just to hear that people that have been into the band for a long time and maybe felt that a couple of the later albums were a bit too all over the place, that those people are with us this time and that means a lot.

GASP: You mentioned that it took a while to get it right. Now wasn’t this full album supposed to be released on 06/06/06?

AH: Yeah, it was just too good a date to not do anything on. When we started talking about doing an album, it felt like it was way in the future and it was not going to be a problem. Then recording-wise it went good and writing-wise it was no problem. Just when it was obvious Peter [Stjärnvind – former drummer] couldn’t be in the band anymore due to his family situation, we were standing there with an album recorded that we didn’t want to put out exactly the way it was because we wanted the new drummer to be on the album as well.

So the idea was to do an EP before the album. Kind of going back a little bit to what we did on the Wolverine Blues album. We did the Hollowman EP before and that felt like a good way to introduce what direction we were going. And it wasn’t until January of this year that we had enough time set aside and told our agent not book any more shows until we had finished the album. We felt that we couldn’t push it any longer and we really wanted to go in and record some more songs instead of just taking what we had recorded with Peter. So it wasn’t a case of us like staying in the studio and getting the perfect snare sound for two months. It was a little more spread out and just getting the schedule to fit with the shows and stuff.

GASP: You mentioned the Hollowman EP and personally I think Serpent Saints is probably the angriest sounding record since then.

AH: Yeah, you’re probably right too. We wanted it to be an album that you could get those kind of feelings from.

GASP: So it was a conscious decision by the band to kind of go back to your aggressive roots?

AH: Yes. I wanted it to be very in-tune and at the same time very uncompromising. What I wanted was to try and get a feeling of a band that’s making their first album. Especially when it’s album number nine, when bands get too comfortable in a studio or you think you know everything. That’s when it starts sounding boring a lot of times. So that’s why with every album we try and twist it a little bit and this time we went in and without having rehearsed anything before we booked studio time. We rented a house where there was a recording studio in it and we could be in that place for two months and just write and record at the same time and try and get the energy of recording stuff that’s really, really fresh. Like Slayer’s Show No Mercy. I wanted it as raw as that. These days any band can add two hundred guitars if they want to. Everyone’s got the same computer programs and you can do it as heavy and as clean as what not but…

GASP: …but, if the songwriting’s not there what good is it anyway, right?

AH: Yeah, exactly. We didn’t just want to do it the way we did it on the last couple of albums. You go write for a month or two then whatever you have, that’s the album. This time we ended up writing and recording at the same time, but at the end of that first writing period we stepped back, we took a couple songs and made an EP, and then we went back and recorded some more songs. We wanted to make an album that listens straight through and hopefully remember some of the song titles. I felt like a couple of the later albums we did didn’t quite click. There are songs that we never do live and there are some that I can’t even name all the titles of and I didn’t want that. I wanted it to be like ten songs you can remember. Hopefully you’ll be able to remember these song titles because we will do most of them live. The way I judge the album is how many songs we do in the live set. When we started rehearsing these songs now – we’ve done a few shows now – it felt so good to rehearse them, because we never really rehearsed them when we wrote them or recorded them. So, some of the songs were played like two times ever and it felt so good. It was so much fun to rehearse them and it feels really good to play them live. So we can’t wait to rehearse the rest of them. Right now we’re doing like four of the ten songs and they fit in really good with the older songs.

We did this “Masters Of Death” tour with Dismember, Grave, and Unleashed in Europe and we started playing some songs from Clandestine, the second album, that we hadn’t played in a long time and there’s so much going on in those songs. I had forgotten how much fun it was to play. These new songs kind of have a little more going on in them and that’s a little what I felt was missing, you know? You go in and kind of make it maybe a little too easy for yourself and you don’t push it as much as you did on earlier albums. Now when I go back and listen it’s like, ‘What the fuck were these kids doing?’ So we do less of the stuff after Wolverine… now.

GASP: You’re going back to your roots...

AH: The earlier stuff.

GASP: I can’t wait. Any plans for a U.S. tour yet?

AH: Hopefully. We do festivals all over the place now and in the Fall we’ll start doing a lot of European dates. I would love to come back as soon as possible. I don’t know how many festivals and stuff there would be for us to do over there, but it would be great to do anything we can like early next year.

GASP: I’ll be great to see you again. It’s been too long.

AH: Yeah, definitely.

GASP: I noticed on the new album that, with regards to the writing process, you had a lot of fun with this album too. I mean, a lot of the tongue-in-cheek lyrics and like.

AH: Yeah, we wanted to, even though we recorded quickly, we still wanted it to be thoroughly worked through. Like try and make it work as long as we had good lyrics and try and make it tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time we wanted people to get a feeling from the album, a vibe. Like kind of watching The Omen or something. Where you kind of...you know it’s a movie, but at the same time like maybe there’s something there that you can’t explain.

GASP: Satan, as usual, makes an appearance on your album, of course.

AH: Of course, I mean, we’re not on the other side. It’s like a metaphor. We try to not write political or anything, but for me [lyrics] are just the way of saying what I see around me and commenting on it. But not using the usual revolution type political stuff. We don’t want to be, but at the same time as long as you’re, because we’re not, like when we say Satan and Lucifer stuff, it’s more how when something new comes along and they always make what used to be what people believed in or they make that the devil. So this is kind of the way of saying we’re not on the… it’s hard to explain.

GASP: Satan’s just cool to sing about.

AH: That too (laughs)!

GASP: Well, Slayer’s made a career at it for how many years now?

AH: Yeah, it always works. It just appeals to us.

GASP: I wanted to ask about Uffe [Cederlund – former guitarist]. How difficult was the songwriting process without Uffe?

AH: Very easy. We wrote the lyrics for this album – he actually started writing lyrics for this album like earlier in 2005 – and everybody was kind of terrified. It felt like he wanted to push it as far from metal as he could. It felt like he was tired of playing metal. It was inevitable, you know, but then we started writing for the album and everything was just great. Everyone was aiming for the same thing again. We don’t have problems making the song metal if that’s what the song is. In that respect, it was not a problem at all. At the same time, he’s a great guitar player and a great songwriter, but you can’t fool yourself either.

It felt like it was a long time coming too. For a long time Entombed has always been about different people coming together and kind of doing what we did. I think what happened was probably best for the band, because the feeling that we have now we haven’t had for a long time. Everybody’s happy about being in the band and doing the best Entombed music that we can and hopefully that shows.

GASP: You handling all the guitar work now, correct?

AH: Yes. It’s a lot of work. I’ve always been in a band with two guitar players. I never thought I’d be in a band without two guitar players. I’m still not used to it and still learning and figuring out things. I mean, you always try to add new things to a band to make it interesting and this was like adding something by taking something away. It wasn’t the way we thought it would happen. It happened right after a show and then like a week later we went to the next show as a four piece and never really thought about it and haven’t really had time to stop and think about it. We’ve just gone on working stuff out as we go along and sharing. We added a few more amps to our rider, that’s about it. The bass now goes through a guitar head as well to get a distorted sound. We’ve been doing it for so long now it kind of in a way feels like a totally new band. And all the songs feel totally new because we had to re-think them. Mostly in some of the Clandestine songs. There are some things that we haven’t figured out yet how to do, but from the reviews that I’ve seen, most people seem to think that it sounds really good. I hate when things get sloppy because you get comfortable. You have two guitar players and you always have that little faith and sometimes it feels like it can get a little blurry, and now there’s nowhere to hide. Like no safety net and you have to be on your toes. I certainly have a lot more to do and it takes a little getting used to. I’ve really started appreciating bands with one guitarist (laughs). When it sounds good, it sounds really cool. It certainly makes it exciting for us.

GASP: And keeps things fresh for you.

AH: Yeah, definitely. What we’re going to do is start taping some shows just to actually get to know for ourselves what it sounds like and what we need to work on. But if the right guy comes along we might add a second guitar again, nothing definite. The way it feels in the band now is so perfect. It feels really good and everybody’s having a good time.

GASP: That’s great news. Tell me, looking back, did you ever think that Entombed would be around 20 years later?

AH: Never. I still remember very clearly – it must have been `88 or `89 when we were going to make the first album – I was trying to figure out how many albums we’d have to sell to maybe be able to do a second one. I remember like walking through a train station going to rehearsal or something trying to figure out, ‘maybe if we sell a thousand albums then maybe we’ll do another one.’ Because when we started, it was the tape trading days. We were sending stuff to record companies. It was all about trading demos. I’m 34 now and I remember when I was 23 I was wondering, ‘What will I be doing at 25? It probably won’t be this.’ But now I’m really happy with the way things are working out with the band and what we are doing. We are trying to control everything around the band.

GASP: With Threeman [the band’s own record company]?

AH: Yeah, like building a little something, and that feels good too. I kind of panicked a bit around that time, at 23, because we had so many ups and downs with the band at some points. I remember back in `95 fighting to try to get out of the deal we were in. It felt like we were getting nowhere and going to lose. It felt like we had it all and if we worked on it we could go as far as we wanted to, and then it came to a halt and nothing happened for over a year. We didn’t even record or anything. So we felt that it was all going to go away. I remember feeling that feeling of you’ve worked for all this and now you’re going to have no control over anything. Somebody else will control it and decide what is going to happen with all the time you’ve put into it. So it feels good to know that no matter how long we go on for, we can still work on everything as long as we want to. I mean they’re still pressing the first three albums and people seem to get into the music all the time. I know I want the music to be available to whom ever. For example, the album we did after Wolverine Blues should be out there if people want it. I want to be able to put it out there, but the company we did it with has been bought and sold so many times that the rights are just lingering out there somewhere. We know that those rights are going to revert to us so we can re-do it the way we want to. Hopefully like next year or something.

So, just knowing all this makes it all worthwhile to put in the extra work. It’s something that we still do because we really, really want to do it. It’s too much work to do if you don’t love it and I’m really happy about that. It’s unbelievable to start something when you’re 13 and still be into it at 34.

And seeing bands like Slayer – people you grew up listening to and didn’t think that you would play with one day – I mean, when you’re 20 you think life ends at 25 and after a certain point you realize there are people twice your age and they do it because they like it. You don’t have to stop doing something if you don’t want to, especially if what you want to do is the same thing.

                                         Entombed, from left to right: Drummer Olle Dahlstedt, Vocalist LG Petrov

                                              Guitarist and interviewee Alex Hellid, and bassist Nico Elgstrand.