INTERVIEW: Reversed

From one of the best debut EPs to their scorching LP of wildly possessed Death Metal, Canada’s REVERSED is one of the strongest forces in the murk of the underground. Below is my conversation with them…

1. Hey maniacs! Let’s do the (un)pleasantries. Please introduce yourselves to the readers and make first impact!

REGARDS! And thank you for offering us this paperback pulpit to proselytize to our putrid punditry. This is A. Restless Grave, speaking on behalf of the infernal REVERSED army. We play wildly possessed metal of death! For those about to rot.

2. Being a Canadian band, you have a lot of history behind you. Exciter, Razor, Blasphemy, Sacrilege, Witches Hammer, Conqueror, Gorguts. The list is long. Who are some of your favourites and do you draw inspiration from your domestic metallic ghouls?

Well you just named many of our Canadian favourites. I would add INFERNAL MAJESTY, especially the None Shall Defy album as a big inspiration for us. That is the kind of lethal death metal based in speed, thrash, and black metal that we worship. Same goes for VOIVOD. Their first two albums in particular, for their absolute maniacal craziness and savagery. Canadian metal is defined by very unique legendary bands that have carved their own paths and sound like no one else, whether it is Conqueror, Tales of Medusa, Sacramentary Abolishment, etc.

3. Okay, back in time still, 2018 saw your debut to the world. The superb “Widow Recluse” EP which left many smitten by truly evil sounding Death Metal carnage. How did this EP come to fruition? What inspired the start of this new project (seeing as you all have prior bands) and carved the wound that made the first incision?

All of us in Reversed have been friends for a long time and always shared a mutual love of frenzied and insane sounding bands like Vomitor, Nifelheim, Bestial Warlust, and stuff like old German and South American death/thrash. Primitive, barbaric bands who are still playing memorable songs with dynamics and riffs. Anyway, we had all been playing in other bands – bands that sometimes maybe did a lot of thinking and pondering, and after many late nights hanging out drinking to the aforementioned bands we just decided we needed to start a new band and just play the most animalistic and caustic shit we could come up with in our burning brains. Fuck a lot of pondering, we’ve got more coal in the engine than any train could need, so lets let it out of the station and see if it stays on the rails. And that is basically how the demo/EP came together. Except that it wasn’t a train and Wretched Intrancer – our bassist/ Filth Sounds of Hades recorded it in our rehearsal space. 

4. Speaking of, also previous to the debut (we are getting to that soon), you released a promo tape with two of the tracks. This took four years to materialise. What happened in those four years? Were you simply writing / rehearsing / refining the new material or was there some other nefarious activities at play?

A lot of things happened in those 4 years – both mundane and nefarious. We weren’t working on it continuously during that time, we never tried to rush anything. We would work on songs and then get busy with our other bands and other life stuff and not work on them for months or years at a time. But it was always percolating in our minds. We’re just not too worried about timelines – whatever is happening in the world of metal now or in the future doesn’t impact our work with Reversed. Whether death metal is popular or not right now, we’re still going to do the same thing we’re doing – pounding our rotten fists against the coffin lid!

5. Now we are at the present, two years later. Your debut album just came out on the superb Invictus Productions. How did yourselves at Darragh join forces?

Well, it was really our good friend Annick (who released our demo on her label Temple of Mystery Records, who made the introduction to Darragh! Darragh’s old school ethos and practices built on quality, trust and honour have forged a formidable beast that we’ve followed since the early days of Invictus, and it is our honour to be a part of that legacy. Invictus is the perfect label for REVERSED and to release our album – as Darragh, like us, is truly WILDLY POSSESSED!!!

6. Your label has some killer fellow acts, who are your favourites on there?

We like basically everything that comes out on Invictus, but recently one of my favourites has been Malokarpatan – go listen to all their albums NOW and hurl yourself from a horse drawn cart into a fermented ditch!  Another favourite that comes to mind is Negative Plane. We’ve been listening to Invictus releases since the early days of the label, there are so many classics in his high calibre and highly varied catalogue: Vomitor, Gospel of the Horns, Tribulation, Bolzer, Solstice, Reveal!, it goes on and on.

7. “Wildly Possessed” could not be a more appropriate name for the record. This feels like those olden times in the late 80s where Death Metal still had plenty of Thrash, Speed, Heavy and Black Metal coming into the fold. Which archaic legends lent their inspirations to you and why is it important that this supreme style cannot be killed?

I think it’s true for any genre of metal that it is the broadest, most varied, and most open to inspiration at its earliest inception. Generally it only becomes narrower and more defined and less creative as time goes on.

We always go back further. If there’s a record I worship, I want to know what the people making it were listening to. I think this is what a lot of current bands seem to miss. They want to make a band that sounds like “X album of Z band” and just try to ape its most basic elements like the logo, guitar sound and production, riff style etc. The result is usually a pale shadow of what they are trying to emulate because the bag of influences is basically empty compared to their predecessors.

To us, Death Metal has more to do with the subject matter and intention of the music than just being the sum of aesthetic elements (ie: tuned low, blast beats, gutteral vocals etc). We will use any instrument and tool at our disposal to concoct the right atmosphere for our music, as long as it invokes a feeling of being flung full throttle into an endless abyss of eternal night and unrelenting wickedness and violence. Sometimes that requires thrashing riffs, speed, black, heavy, doom. Whatever it takes.

8. Punching in at little over half an hour, there is a tasteful mix of immediate lacerations and more creepy, malicious opuses. What goes into writing a Reversed song and what is essential to make it to the record in terms of quality and so forth?

There is absolutely no formula for writing a Reversed song. A few of the riffs I recorded in 2006, there are many sections we wrote on the spot in the rehearsal room, and there are also parts that we spent a lot of time working out independently from one another. Myself and Rusted Blade generally put together the riffs and sections, and then we work it out in the rehearsal room by bashing away at it until our ears are ringing. It’s all pretty intuitive, we know what we like to hear and we don’t sit around discussing a lot of “let’s write a song like this or that” type stuff. We just turn up real loud and fire off our nastiest riffs. The best stuff has just come out with little to no thought but lots of spirit and inspiration.

9. Some truly unusual, and killer, artwork adorns your LP. Who made this masterpiece and what is this ghastly creature depicted? Can you give us some abhorrent insights to this foreboding visual element?

The cover image is a raw ink monotype by the incredible American artist and printmaker Grady Gordon (@joaquindead). He works exclusively in this medium and does truly magical and evocative art. We felt that his aesthetic would lend itself perfectly to Reversed, so we asked him to create a phantasmal and hallucinatory vision of the 7 headed Beast from the Book of Revelations, as it is represented in our lyrics. This is a unifying theme throughout the album. The original black and white image was made into the album cover that you see by our friend and co-conspirator Annick Giroux, who also did the design for Widow Recluse.  

10. There is an undeniably old school feel to the production of the record and tones used. Can you explain a little how such a crushing old school sound was achieved in this modern age?

We don’t care about current trends or “industry standards”. We didn’t want it to sound like a new band grasping at old school production, either. We just wanted a recording that accurately reflects how we sound in the rehearsal room and has the same frenzied energy and intensity. We didn’t try to make anything perfect, and we didn’t overproduce or overthink anything. We recorded at Fiasco Bros Studios, where Blasphemy recorded FAOD and many other underground Canadian classics were recorded. This studio is like a time-capsule, nothing new anywhere in sight. 

11. Finally, I hope to see you live and hear more music, obviously. What can we expect from Reversed next?

REVERSED will be making our first European appearance at Chaos Descends fest this July in Germany. We’ll only strike once, but it will be lethal! More live dates descending in the near future, and new even MORE possessed music to come soon.

12. Any final last words of warning are yours…

Thanks for the interview and REMEMBER TO DIE!